The snake-like voice cut through whatever darkness I’d been drifting in, and I recoiled before I was even fully conscious.
“Letssss try thissss again…”
I tried to move. Couldn’t. My hands were zip-tied behind the chair, wrists already raw from previous attempts. The chair was metal. Cold against my back through a thin T-shirt. The room smelled like a gym locker crossed with a reptile house.
Circling me was a creature that I can best describe as half-snake, half-man. He had arms and legs, sure, but they were long and lean and wrong in a way that made my brain itch. He moved fluidly, eerily smooth, each step a glide. His yellow eyes caught the overhead fluorescent and threw the light back in a way human eyes don’t. Sharp fangs lined a mouth that was too wide by half.
For the first time since I’d put it on, I was grateful for the bag. He couldn’t see my face. Couldn’t see the terror.
“I told you, I’m just looking for my Dad. Someone told me the Syndicate had him. Someone told me—”
“SSSSOMEONE? SSSSOMEONE?!” The snake-man lunged at me, stopping an inch from the bag. Close enough that I could smell him. Formaldehyde and something acrid. Something that burned the inside of my nostrils. “Sssssomeone issssn’t here!”
I turned my head inside the bag. From the outside, it stayed perfectly still. Fixed ahead. Calm. That was the bag’s gift. No matter how hard I flinched, no matter how badly I wanted to scream, the bag showed nothing.
“Is… is my Dad?” I tried to muster confidence. It came out as a wheeze.
The snake-man rolled his eyes with the theatrical disgust of a drama teacher at a particularly bad audition.
“You Brownbagssss are all the ssssame…” He threw up his arms like the front man for a hair metal band working a dead crowd. “Brave and ssstupid and brave and sssstupid until I have to teach you otherwise.”
I squinted through my eye holes. “So you do know my Dad, then?”
He nodded. “I know your father. I know your ssssissssterssss—”
“Hey, fella, you leave them al—”
The right hook connected with my jaw through the paper before I even saw his fist leave his side. The man—the thing—moved like his bones were made of rubber. My head snapped sideways. Copper blood flooded my mouth.
“I will do whatever it issss that I want to do!” He was in my face now. Fangs dripping with green liquid. My bowels did something I will never describe to another human being for as long as I live.
“You’re not gonna hurt Bailey or Baby, you snake… thing!” I’d hoped it would sound action-hero. It came out distinctly “verge-of-shitting-my-pants.”
The snake-man recoiled in mock surprise. “Oh? I’m not?” He did that slithering sashay toward me, a cat toying with a mouse who had already lost the fight and was just too stupid to lie down.
“Because I’m not gonna let it happen, that’s why. I’ll cut off your head with a shovel if I have to, but God as my witness, I will stop you!”
“Issssss that right?” The smile that crept over his face was the worst thing I’d ever seen. I was instantly sure I’d made a terrible mistake.
“Damn straight!” I doubled down. Foolishly.
The snake-man reached for his belt. He produced an ominous-looking vial of purple liquid. It bubbled. It smoked. It was the color of a bruise that had been given its own bruise.
“Letssss sssssee just how ‘big and bad’ you are onccccce I feed you thisssss…”
My eyes went wide inside the bag. “What’s that?”
“Jussssst a little sssomething I cooked up. Let’ssss just sssay it will give you a very sssselective memory for the next few dayssss.”
“I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ll try almost anything once, but—”
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
Before I could finish, the snake-man grabbed the bag, lifted it just enough to expose my mouth, popped the cork, forced my jaw down, and poured the bubbling purple liquid inside.
“Sssswallow! Sssswallow it!” He held my jaw shut with one hand and my lips closed with the other.
The stuff tasted like electricity and copper and something that shouldn’t exist in liquid form. My gag reflex fired. I heaved. But after the gag, I swallowed on pure instinct.
The room started to spin immediately. Everything tilted. My mouth went bone-dry. I gasped as the chair tipped sideways and crashed to the floor with me still strapped to it.
“Now that’ssssss more like it!” The snake-man turned to leave.
I thrashed against the zip-ties. My body spasmed once, twice. My vision collapsed inward, like an old TV shutting off, the room shrinking to a point of light that blinked out.
The poison had won.
“Kid? KID! You still with us?”
Sal’s voice yanked me back. The deli. The back room. Cured meats and soda water and two enormous men with meat cleavers staring at me like I’d just had a seizure at their dinner table.
I was gripping the edge of a folding table. My knuckles were white. The bag was damp with fresh sweat.
╔══════════════════════════════════════╗
║ MEMORY FRAGMENT UNLOCKED (2/?) ║
║ ║
║ Subject: Silas (The Snake) ║
║ Event: Interrogation + Poisoning ║
║ ║
║ Memory Integrity: 67% ║
║ Additional fragments still ║
║ corrupted by toxin ║
║ ║
║ KEY INTELLIGENCE RECOVERED: ║
║ ? Silas knows your father ║
║ ? Silas knows your sisters ║
║ ? The purple liquid = memory ║
║ suppressant ║
║ ? You were interrogated before ║
║ being dumped ║
║ ║
║ XP Gained: 25 (Memory Recovery) ║
║ LEVEL 1: 100/200 XP ║
║ ████████???????? 50% ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════╝
“Yeah,” I muttered. “Sorry. Just… remembering something.”
Sal exchanged a look with Shep. The kind of look that contained an entire conversation.
“So you’ve had a run-in with them too, huh?” Sal said, his voice careful now. “With old snake-face himself?”
I nodded slowly. “Silas.”
The room went quiet.
Not regular quiet. The kind of quiet that happens when you say a name that nobody in the room wants to hear. Tony’s cleaver stopped spinning mid-twirl. Vito’s hand drifted to his holster.
“Shit,” Tony whispered.
“And you’re still walking around?” Vito added. Genuine awe.
“He must really like you,” Sal said. But his expression said the opposite. Being “liked” by Silas was apparently worse than the alternative.
I sat up straighter. The memory was still echoing through me, adrenaline-sharp, but I had my bearings now. I knew something I hadn’t known thirty seconds ago.
I knew why I was here.
“Look,” I said. “I need work, and I’m good with numbers. Better than good. But I also need information.”
“About what?” Sal asked. Though his expression said he already knew.
I reached into my hoodie pocket and pulled out the deck of cards.
The room changed when I set it on the table. Not physically. But the energy shifted, like the barometric pressure had dropped three points. Sal’s eyes locked on the deck like a man seeing a ghost.
I turned the top card over. The crude drawing of the snake-man stared up at all of us.
“About him,” I said. “About the Syndicate. And about where I can find my family.”
Sal looked at the card. Then at me. Then back at the card.
“Where did you get that?”
“My father made it. Along with the rest of this deck. It’s some kind of code, I think. A message.”
“Your father.” Sal’s voice had changed. The smooth operator was gone. Something rawer had replaced it. Something that looked a lot like grief. “And his name was?”
I hesitated. I’d known these people for less than twelve hours. Shep, maybe I trusted. Sal and his cleaver twins? That was a bigger bet.
But I was out of options. Out of money, out of memories, and out of places to go. Sometimes you have to play the hand you’re dealt, even when the hand is a two and a seven off-suit.
“Robert Brownbag,” I said. “My father’s name is Robert Brownbag.”
The twins gasped. In unison. Like they’d rehearsed it.
Sal crossed himself. An instinctive gesture. A reflex from somewhere deep in his Italian-American bones. His eyes never left the card.
“The Robert Brownbag?” he whispered. “The greatest Shark who ever lived?”
“The what?” I asked.
Sal looked at Shep, who shrugged. “Kid doesn’t know,” Shep said. “That’s why I brought him to you.”
Sal took a deep breath. His eyes never left the card. When he finally looked up at me, his expression held something I wasn’t expecting.
Not suspicion. Not calculation.
Hope.
“Kid,” Sal said quietly, “I think it’s time you learned what you really are. And what your father was before you.”
He turned to the twins. “Tony, go get the Fade God down here. Vito, bring Lady Luck. Tell her to bring her demonstration deck.”
As the twins hustled off, Sal gestured to a door at the back of the room.
“Come on, Billy Brownbag.” He stood, and for a moment, the tracksuit and the gold chain and the chest hair didn’t matter. He looked like a man who’d been waiting for something for a very long time, and had finally heard it knock. “Time for you to learn about Sharks.”
╔══════════════════════════════════════╗
║ MAIN QUEST UPDATED ║
║ ║
║ "The Brownbag Legacy" ║
║ ║
║ NEW OBJECTIVE: Learn about Sharks ║
║ and your father's past ║
║ ║
║ POTENTIAL REWARDS: ║
║ ? Hidden ability unlock ║
║ ? Information about family ║
║ ? New allies ║
║ ? Answers (partial) ║
║ ║
║ WARNING: The deeper you go, the ║
║ more dangerous this becomes. ║
║ ║
║ But you already knew that. ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════╝
Welcome to Fanhattan. If you’re wondering about the Districts, the Syndicate, or why a kid in a paper bag can see probability percentages floating over basketball games: good. Keep reading.
Next time: Billy meets Lady Luck, learns what a Shark really is, and discovers that his father’s deck of cards might be the most dangerous object in the city.
The card system will be explored in depth in Chapter 5. For the numbers nerds in the audience: yes, the stats are trackable. Yes, they matter. And yes, Billy is going to fail a lot of skill checks before this is over.