“So, Carol, are you human?” Tom asked. He had decided to spend his day off interrogating Carol, maybe figure out more about what set her off. In this case, knowing exactly what made her hulk out could save his life.

She cocked a brow. “Of course.”

“So you can lie.” Tom made a note. Lots of figures in folklore couldn’t lie, but it seemed Outsiders were not in that category.

“I take offense to you insinuating that I’m both lying and not human. I celebrate my hatching day the same as everyone else,” Carol said, feeding Ellie with a bottle.

“You’ve got sarcasm too, apparently,” Tom said, making another note. He didn’t get to take the notepad with him, but physically writing something down often let him remember it better. Tom had a more action-oriented memory.

“I’m not sure where you’re going with this, but I must say, it’s very imaginative,” Carol said, smiling with her lips peeled away from her canines.

“Right, right,” Tom said, scratching his head with the pen. “When you call me ‘breeding stock’, what do you mean by that?”

“I’ve never called you breeding stock,” she snapped.

“Out loud,” Tom corrected. “I’m pretty sure you think it.”

Carol’s eyes narrowed. “It seems as though you really have manifested your bloodline. That’s troublesome,” she said with a scowl.

“Care to explain what that is?” Tom asked.

“Nope.”

Tom sighed, making a note and underlining it. Bloodline -breeding stock, parentage? How did Lily/Carol know? Parents famous? Magical? Superheroes? Villains? Need more info.

“Let’s switch gears and do some hypothetical questions.”

Carol watched him with guarded interest.

“Let’s say this book—” Tom said, holding up The Unified Theory of Soul Magic. “—and that baby—” He pointed at Ellie. “—were tied to separate train tracks across town, and you could only—”

“I would use my cellular device to contact you, then promise to kill everyone you love if you did not rescue the book. I would then proceed to save Ellie personally, because she’s a little sweety!”

Carol blew a raspberry on Ellie’s tummy, making the baby burst into shrieks of laughter before she turned her dead eyes on Tom again. “Hypothetically.”

Tom’s phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket and recognized Manager Dan’s phone number. Nothing like a little petty revenge. Sure, Tom wouldn’t hurt anybody in his dreams, but that only went so far.

“Where the hell are you?” Dan’s voice came across needy on the tiny speakers of his phone. “If you’re not here in the next thirty fuckin’ seconds, you can kiss this job goodbye.”

“Dan, something really important came up. I’m really, really sorry, but I’m gonna need you to take a deep breath, get down on your knees, and put some slob on my knob.”

Tom hung up and turned the phone to silent before tossing it in the trash.

“So Ellie has a higher priority to you than the book? Does that reflect your personal position, or Lily’s last orders?”

“You’re clever for a half-wit.”

“Thank you,” Tom muttered, making a note before glancing back up at her.

“What is an En’Hol?”

“Nothing you need to worry about.”

“Why would you call me one?”

“I never did.”

Tom paused. Right, this was the same day he’d assembled the smelter. Something that hadn’t happened yet in the dream.

“So I’m going to make some guesses,” Tom said.

“You called me breeding stock, and En’hol, multiple times in potential realities, so I would guess that the two are somewhat linked. Is En’hol a family or does the word represent a specific kind of ability? Both?”

“Can’t say,” Carol said with a smirk. “Oh, but potential realities, huh? Tell me all about it.”

“It’s nothing you need to worry about,” Tom threw the words back in her face.

“Brave, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Not really.”

After he hit Carol with the ‘potential realities’ bombshell, she became increasingly difficult to pry information out of, so Tom decided to wait until tomorrow, after she forgot about the interrogation night.

Honestly, his biggest haul was semi-confirming that Carol had priorities, and placed Lily’s daughter over the book. It made sense to Tom, though.

What kind of mom would knowingly prioritize her own child below a book of secret, powerful, magical knowledge? Especially when the aforementioned child could easily open it by accident before they could even read?

I suppose a few bad ones might, Tom thought, rubbing his forehead. It kind of hurt that he wasn’t more important than Lily’s book, though. That stung.

Then again, she probably wasn’t planning on being dead at this point….

One more question.

“Can soul magic bring back the dead?” he asked.

“Nope,” Carol said, bouncing Ellie on her lap.

“I’m gonna go get something from the store. Be back soon,” Tom said, climbing to his feet and stretching his legs before heading out the door.

Outside, he dialed up Jacob.

“Hey Jacob, you wanna skip out on work today and do a road trip to Omaha?”

“Fuck yeah, I’m in,” Jacob said before hanging up.

***AWAKE***

If Tom put off opening the book for three hours instead of one, Carol was unable to catch up to him before he woke, allowing him to study the text at his leisure.

After he got off work, Tom got right to putting together the soul engine. His cast from the night before was beginning to crumble, so he needed to make a new one, and…

It’s kind of crap, isn’t it? he thought, comparing the cast he’d designed while completely sleep-deprived to the one he’d seen in the book. In order to maximize exposure, he needed a sort of helix shape carved out of the gold itself.

Hmm… Tom fixed that issue by creating a papercraft helix about the width of a pinkie, then filling it with tightly-packed casting sand, holding the entire thing suspended in the middle of the empty space of the cast with gold spikes he’d cut off the gold coins with a pair of pliers.

Once that was done, Tom cleaned up the cast, cut out some channels for air to flow back out as it was replaced by gold, then carefully lowered the other half of the cast down, securing either side of the helix in place.

Here goes nothing, Tom thought, pouring the molten gold into the cast.

The glowing orange metal spilled into the cast, sending plumes of smoke up as the casting sand was scorched into a solid.

“Agh, I forgot the vent,” Tom muttered, waving the smoke away from his face and stumbling over to the switch at the bottom of the stairs, causing the rumbling hum of the vent to come alive above him, sucking all the nasty smoke away.

Tom frowned at that for a moment. Something about the vent nagged at the corner of his mind.

After a moment not being able to figure it out, he shook it off and headed upstairs, fixing himself a sandwich as he waited to make sure the gold was completely solidified.

When he came back, he was thrilled to find the fist-sized chunk of gold without any obvious defects. The helix didn’t seem to have touched against any of the walls, and the gold spikes holding it in place had melted to join the liquid gold.

Tom couldn’t have asked for a better result. He pried the gold out of the singed casting sand, clipped off the sprues and sanded them down until he was left with just the cast.

It was an ugly hunk of lustrous gold in the shape of a cylinder, with a tight spiral going through it as thick as his pinky.

I mean, I’m no artist, but damn. I’m almost proud of myself.

He cleaned the sand out of the helix, and got everything nice and shiny before he went to bed.

It’s my weekend starting tomorrow. I should be able to finish up making an engine, then give Carol’s bosses a call before I have to go to work the next day. Of course, to finish, I’ve got to… Eh, I’ll deal with it tomorrow.

Tom spent the night studying the section on Soul engines and the math behind it.

The resistance of a properly-cured…ugh…umbilical cord was one point eight, and the total surface area was as close to full as Tom could get it. Meaning, the maximum amount of soul pulses he could expect was…

(1.8)^2 (~1) (1) = ~3.24 soul pulses per soul.

Of course, Tom didn’t expect his design to be perfect. He was more likely to get far less, but it was good to have a ballpark number.

Establishing the phone call only took one soul pulse, so he should be okay.

Making the gold cylinder turned out to be the easy part. The hard part was prepping the umbilical cord.

Well, you wanna be a soulmonger, you gotta get your hands a little dirty, Tom thought, struggling to keep his lunch down as the smell of cured umbilical cord washed over him.

The method for preparing the cord was first, to hollow it out completely and preserve the flesh chemically, toughening it for use. Lily must have done that part already.

The second part was to take butterfly wings and crush them into a fine powder, then spread that powder on the inside of the cord using frog slime.

Why? Fuck off, that’s why. According to the book, butterfly wing dust, when applied in the proper manner, made a conduit one-way, so that the Call would drag the soul through the engine, rather than back out the path of least resistance.

I think it has something to do with the scales. From what Tom had osmosed through biology lessons and babysitter Discovery Channel, butterfly wings were covered in tiny scales that contributed to their iridescent nature. These scales were incredibly delicate and fell off easily.

I’ll bet the advice to apply them in the same direction every time is to make sure the scales are all aligned the same way, he thought as he pushed the soft, scale-covered bristles of the pipe cleaner through the umbilical cord, again and again.

Please let this be over.

Only it wasn’t over.

Next he had to coat the outside of the cord in nacre dust, then feed it through the helix without tearing it, then tattoo a magic spell on the base of the fragile material to draw in souls.

The project he thought would only take the weekend kept him busy until the week after.

Through that time, Tom committed more and more of the book to memory, taking his nightly road trip to Omaha with Jacob, who was, to an extraordinary degree, up for anything at all times.

Maybe that’s the coke, or maybe the coke is a symptom of being down for anything.

By the next weekend, Tom had a theoretically functional Soul Engine. It wasn’t much to look at, but it should do what he needed it to do.

All right, now I just need to kill somebody…

Hmm…

“Hey, Grampa?” Tom asked at dinner/breakfast.

Grampa grunted between mouthfuls of peas.

“Where’s a place where a lot of people die, but isn’t dangerous to go?”

“Nursing home,” Grampa said without pause. “They drop like flies in there. Their family just drops ‘em off like it’s garbage day, and they waste away in a couple years.”

Hmm…

“You couldn’t force me to go to a nursing home. I’d rather drown myself with a catheter.”

Tom blinked that imagery out of his mind, then refocused on the old man, noting the sunken appearance, the slight tremor in his hand.

“Hey Grampa, I need an excuse to go to a nursing home. Let’s pretend you’re senile.”

“You dreaming, kid?”

“Nope. I gotta hide a lump of gold somewhere people die a lot.”

“I’m gonna have to take a hard pass on that plan. Whatever you’re doing, I don’t wanna be a part of it, and I forbid you from getting caught and ending up in jail.”

Tom scowled and finished breakfast. At least he had an idea for a target, if not an easy pass inside.

So Tom spent the next couple nights practicing breaking into the biggest nursing home in Chicago. By all accounts, them having the most old people should mean the most dead people over time, right?

All Tom needed was a single soul-pulse to complete the ritual. Then he would be able to call up Outsider Customer Service and get the lowdown on how to get Carol to not attempt to murder him or his family should they accidentally open the book or put Ellie at risk.

He should only need to leave the soul engine on the roof for a couple weeks before someone should have statistically died within the engine’s radius.

At first, Tom got caught on the way down the ladder every time, before he figured out that the nursing home had security cameras, and they saw him every time. The only way to approach the place unseen was a narrow path the old people walked to get some fresh air that ran close to the side of the building before dipping into a miniature park with big elm trees that shaded the area…and made security cameras useless.

Once he dropped off the package on the nursing home’s roof without a hitch three times while he was asleep, Tom was ready to do it for real, and get his ethically sourced soul pulses.

Tom’s heart was racing as he broke into the nursing home ‘For Real’, hunched over with a quiet, loping gait, his face covered by a ski mask. He climbed up the ladder silently, avoiding the midnight duty by about five minutes, then placed the soul engine on the roof, secure in its steel box meant to look like a nondescript attachment to the vents.

He was halfway down the ladder when the wall in front of him blinked red and blue.

WOONK. A siren blip made him freeze in place, turning his head, muscles creaking.