Everything went wrong more than a decade ago, but it had hit a fever pitch that year.
Sure, the seeds of the ‘darkest timeline’ were sown well before, but the world took a nosedive in the few months leading up to the Summer Olympics eleven years prior and never really recovered. The writing had been on the wall for a long time and what had once been behind-the-curtain plots to inoculate Americans to the idea of popular rebellion instead stepped proudly into the light. Hardly anyone understood that’s what was going on, of course, but those who could do the math ended up with horrifying answers at the end of their grim calculations.
Most people could point to the absurd border wall and its companion inhumane detention camps as one of the figures in that horrific calculus, but ‘smaller’ steps were just as poignant; the International Olympic Committee’s shifting stance on sex-testing rippled outward away from the brief outrage it’d sparked at the time, forming the basis for ‘scientific’ objections to modern understanding of gender identity, and everything proceeded neatly from there ⸻ not that throwing a minority under the bus was a new concept in American politics, of course, but after the persecution of immigrants had lost its lustre the focus had shifted back to transgender people as the prominent acceptable target. The States were always United in their hatred if nothing else: the citizenry was encouraged to loath, despise, and mistrust anyone who didn’t fit neatly into their in-group and it didn’t particularly matter whether the sticking point was gender, religion, race, or even something as pointless as one’s zipcode or choice of social media platform.
For Catherine, however, the desire to believe in the ‘weasel timeline’ was impossible to ignore. The idea that an incidental scientific accident had dragged the world sideways into the darkest possible version of existence was infinitely easier to stomach than the reality that ‘human nature’ necessarily created an unconscionable amount of suffering. Perhaps, daydreaming about a parallel universe where conditions were vastly more-tolerable was a simple inevitability of trying to cope with everyday life. Certainly she often imagined a timeline where she’d possessed a body that better-reflected her ‘true self’ and all the uses she could put it towards, but in reality she would’ve been ecstatic with even a minor improvement to her living situation.
“C’mon, sweetheart,” she sighed, poking at the steel bowl she’d set out on the floor with her foot. “It’s good dinner, I promise.”
Fixing her with a flat look of unimpressed disbelief, her furry companion politely communicated her opinion on the matter.
“It’s not like I’m saving the nice stuff for myself!” she shot back, pleading with her canid roommate; tilting her own porcelain bowl forward, she displayed its contents for approval. “See? I’m eating the same food you are.”
Though still skeptical, the large canine at least agreed that there was no trickery afoot, though likely the assessment was spurred by her growing hunger. Eyeing her human pointedly, she dipped her snoot into the dish and grumbled her way through the evening meal of plain white rice.
Naturally, Catherine would’ve preferred to feed her fussy princess something a little more interesting (and balanced) than a pile of bland carbohydrates, but the big bag of glutinous short-grain was all she could afford until the month rolled-over and her stipend came through. Perhaps if she could find some time to pick up a shift or two in the student union building then she could spring for a few cans of wet food as a treat, but her own diet would have to consist of rice and coffee and little else. Maybe it had been a stupid idea to take on the gracefully-aging Husky as a quadrupedal dependent when she couldn’t even properly take care of herself, but her conscience prevented her from dumping the poor creature in the same way that her ex-girlfriend had.
Xena (as Catherine had chosen to call her) had begun her life as the live mascot for the university’s football team. Her tenure had stretched for a little over a decade until she could pass the mantle on to her successor, but that had already been a few years back; the alumni family who previously owned her had decided that caring for an elderly, high-maintenance breed was simply too much work once their partnership with the school had ended, and so Xena had been pawned-off to Catherine’s former fling. For her own part, Catherine had never meant to end up with a furry tagalong, but her ex had dumped the fussy princess off at a shelter the same day she’d dumped Catherine, moving on with her life without any of her prior ‘baggage’.
It was hard not to take that personally, of course, but ultimately she felt more wounded for Xena’s sake than her own. Rescuing her from the pound had been a very near thing, and Catherine didn’t regret her choice so much as she did her total lack of finances; being a TA wasn’t all that glamorous to begin with and rent was already dicey before she had taken on another mouth to feed.
At least it’s a cute mouth, she sighed to herself before scraping the second half of her ‘dinner’ into Xena’s bowl, the gesture rewarding her with a delighted wag of her companion’s tail. Obviously she should’ve just finished the rice herself, but her stomach acid was already churning in anxious apprehension; her department had called an all-hands meeting for her graduate cohort and she didn’t expect that they would have anything pleasant to tell her, not after the last attempt to unionise went so poorly ⸻ and Catherine was still trying to recover from those two weeks of lost pay almost a year later.
Compounding her problem was her massive pile of student loan debt. Sure, it was all in some degree of forbearance or deferment while she was still enrolled, but it was hard not to think about the weight she was sitting underneath; her first attempt at undergrad hadn’t gone particularly well, and afterwards her late shift into ‘following her dreams’ in a more artistic career had similarly bombed and those failures had stacked up a huge wall of monthly payments. Crawling her way back to Seattle over a decade after her original start had been manageable academically, but even with her TA stipend and a mountain of grants and emergency financing she was still barely getting by at the School of International Studies, plus it had taken her a year of begging, pleading, and fighting for her life to even be accepted into the graduate courses. At thirty-four years of age she wasn’t exactly the kind of student they had been looking for, and the enrollment selection process had proved that.
Still, she clung to the stubborn hope that all of her problems would eventually fade away; with her connections on campus she’d be all but assured a government job, and then the loans would simply take care of themselves after a couple diplomatic tours and some well-earned debt forgiveness. Finally ‘starting’ her life deep in her forties wasn’t really something she looked forward to in and of itself, but the alternative was a life of poverty scraping the bottom of the barrel in two to three full-time jobs of whoever would hire her, and she had no desire to ever go back to working as a short-order cook ⸻ and she wouldn’t have to, not so long as she kept her grades up, smiled politely, and didn’t rock the boat. If she kept her head down it would only be a year and a half before she could graduate and finally start taking her life back into her own hands. She occupied herself with imagining the fanciful details of how it all might play out as she left Xena in her tiny flat, taking the evening bus back out to the campus.
Those dreams shattered the moment she stepped off the elevator into the East-Asian Languages floor; her faculty advisor was already waiting to meet her, hands clasped around a short stack of documents and a guilty look on her face.
“I’m sorry, Cat,” Saja began quietly, at least having the decency to make eye contact while she destroyed the other woman’s life. “I did everything I could, but it wasn’t up to me in the end.”
“What wasn’t up to you?”
“The university slashed our budget after the grants fell through,” she explained, detailing the fallout of the current US President’s administration ‘shifting focus away’ from education. “We had to cut several TA positions along with it.”
The soft statement hit Catherine like a ton of bricks. Her own finances had suffered under rising tuition costs and steadily-climbing rent, and her stipend was the last frayed thread holding everything together. Without employment at the university proper, her working grant would have to be dismissed, eliminating tens of thousands of dollars from her yearly income.
“You know I can’t make it without the TA job,” she snapped back, perhaps a little more aggressively than she’d intended given the way the five-foot-one woman backed away from her six-foot-two frame. “We literally just talked about this last week!”
“I remember,” Saja nodded, lifting up her hands in a placative gesture to ward off the other woman’s growing distress. “I’m not unsympathetic, but there’s nothing more I can offer you. The department believed that it was worth investing in our ⸻ and I’m sorry to say this ⸻ younger candidates, and there wasn’t anything else I could do once they made up their minds.”
“So how am I supposed to make up the difference?” she growled, her hands clenching into angry fists.
“Perhaps you could try living more frugally?” Saja tried with the air of someone who had long-left the poverty line behind and could no longer remember what it truly felt-like to be ground beneath it. “Cut any unwarranted spending and try to find what you can do without.”
Catherine’s brows furrowed as her glare hardened. “And what the fuck am I supposed to cut?” she hissed, her irritation breaking apart her otherwise-pleasant demeanor. “I’m already taking all my showers here at the gym ⸻ you want me to skip out on my power bill too?” Advancing on the shorter woman, she couldn’t stop glowering as she turned her ire on someone who probably didn’t deserve it ⸻ but there was nowhere else for it to go. “Should I stop eating? Stop taking my meds? It’s a hundred fucking dollars for estrogen, Saja, that’s barely anything.”
“But it’s a start, isn’t it?” she smiled hopefully, as though it were a suggestion that Catherine would even remotely consider. “That hundred dollars can go into your food budget instead.”
She wanted to scream, or break something, or defenestrate every single item in Saja’s office, but none of that would help. There was no way to direct her anger towards the people who truly deserved it, and burning what few bridges she had left would be counter-productive; her academic career had already ended, and all she could do now was pick up the pieces of whatever was left of her life.
“It’s been fun working with you,” she managed before she turned abruptly on her heel, giving a curt wave as she made for the stairwell; at the very least, she wasn’t going to let Saja see her cry.
Twenty minutes later she was standing in front of the vending machines out on the red brick of the central plaza, trying to figure out what to blow the last of her credit on; she still had a few dollars in her Student ID account, which wouldn’t be enough to get her an entire meal but would at least serve to get her a handful of something. Deciding to make the most of the calories-to-dollar ratio, she punched the number for the foil wrap of cheap pastries, fuming in the deepening twilight as she tried to hold herself together.
Grinding in protest, the machine spun the metal spiral forward, stopping just shy of actually dropping the prepackaged treat down into the accessible bin.
“Come on!” she roared as she slammed a fist against the transparent window, hoping the vibration would stake it loose; as the package stayed stubbornly out-of-reach, she gripped the machine by its sides, rattling it in anger. “Fucking drop already, you little shit!”
Bolted-down as it was to the concrete beneath, there was little her tantrum achieved other than to draw a concerned look from one of the last stragglers on their way to leave the campus. Truth be told, Catherine should’ve marked the snack off as a loss and followed them to make sure she didn’t miss the last bus, but she wasn’t going to lose to a thing of pop-tarts, goddamnit.
Spinning around, she looked for anything she might be able to smash the plastic front with, or at least encourage the machine to drop its paid-for hostage. Spying what looked like someone’s discarded stainless-steel water-bottle, she snatched it up before winding her arm back; snarling, she took one long step forward, whipping her arm around in a fastball pitch ⸻
⸻ … and then stopped, less than an inch away from having slammed the fancy-seeming bottle straight through the ‘glass’. While it was true that her temper could sometimes get the best of her, spiking to levels high enough that it made her want to commit unspeakable violence, she never actually stooped to the punching-a-hole-in-the-wall threshold that her abusive father had. As furious as she might be, whoever would have to come by and clean her mess didn’t deserve the extra work, and killing a vending machine wouldn’t make any of her problems go away. Still gripping the bottle tightly, she wrung it in between nervous hands as though she were throttling whoever was responsible for ruining her life.
Sighing loudly, she set her back against the careless metal, crumpling down into a sitting position.
“That was a remarkable show of restraint,” came a feminine voice from nearby.
“Thanks,” she grumbled, glancing around to find the stranger who’d called out to her.
Her eyes locked onto the bright-green orbs of a rather intimidating-looking woman. While she was clearly a few inches shorter than Catherine herself, she was easily just as fit and probably a slight degree more muscular as well; the mass sat beautifully on her frame, and her curves hid her strength in much the same way as a tiger’s coat softened-out the apex predator lurking beneath.
“That’s going a little far, don’t you think?” the woman said as she crouched down to Catherine’s eye-level.
“It’s not like I was really going to try to break it,” she huffed, covering for her attempted destruction of property.
“I meant your unearned compliment,” the dark-haired beauty explained in a rather posh, decidedly not-American accent. “I’ve been compared to a great number of animals before, some predatory and some not, but ‘tiger’ is a new one ⸻ though I suppose ‘lioness’ comes up often-enough that maybe it counts.”
“Sorry,” she mumbled, blushing underneath the woman’s rather-intense stare. “I didn’t mean to say it aloud.”
“Oh don’t worry, sweet, you didn’t,” she replied, flashing Catherine a muted smile. “I’m a djinn, you see, and I’ve found the wish-granting process goes much more smoothly when I take a look-in on my mistress’s thoughts rather than trying to extrapolate everything from poorly-worded statements.”
“Mistress?” Catherine echoed, bemused.
“That would be you,” the alleged djinn informed her, indicating the cylindrical object she was still clutching with a sharp nod, “on account of the fact that you’re the one holding my bottle.”
“Sure,” Catherine smiled back pleasantly, as well-acquainted with campus grifters as she was. “And I suppose this is the point where you pretend to offer me three wishes.”
“There’s no pretending, and it’s only three wishes if they’re somewhat smallish,” the dark-haired woman clarified. “I can do three medium wishes, one medium and a large, or one grander wish if that’s what you’d prefer.”
“That sounds great and all,” she returned dismissively as she stood up, “but you can just go ahead and pass it on to the next mark.”
“Pardon?” the ‘djinn’ asked as Catherine thrust the water-bottle-or-whatever back at her.
“You heard me,” she insisted, stubbornly returning the cylinder to its owner. “Double it and give it to the next guy.”
Leaving it at that, she turned away in the direction of the closest bus stop, stomping off while still in something of a poor mood. Her unceremonious dismissal from her position was demeaning enough, and she didn’t need some snake-oil salesmen trying to take her for a ride on top of it.
“I assure you that I’m the real deal,” the woman said, this time more-forcefully as she easily matched Catherine’s long stride. “And I would prefer it if you didn’t try to lose my bottle, or at least not until we’re a little closer to the next person who’ll need it.”
“And did I ‘need’ it?” she snapped back, jamming her hands into her pockets as she increased her stride, trying to shake the stubborn woman.
“Absolutely,” she nodded, keeping pace. “In fact, up until about thirty minutes ago, you specifically were who I was hoping to meet.”
Stopping suddenly, Catherine turned to fix her with a suspicious glower. How did she know what happened thirty minutes ago?
“I didn’t have anything to do with your unfortunate news,” the djinn began, preemptively obviating her question. “Ideally you would’ve found me just a little bit earlier, and then we wouldn’t have to use some of your wish magic to undo the circumstances.”
“You sure seem to know a lot about me for someone who wasn’t involved,” she accused.
“On account of the mind-reading and some other things, yes,” she shrugged, waving away the other woman’s poor attitude. “I would prefer if we didn’t spend so much time retreading old ground; it’s not good for you to be seen with me, so I would rather we get to the wish-granting as soon as possible.”
“Okay, then say I believe you,” Catherine started, still obviously dismissive of the djinn’s claims of veracity, “why would you want to grant my wishes? Why not somebody else?”
“It would’ve been nice to have another hand in range of important people ⸻ and I mean that in the context of governments, not the actual importance of human beings.”
“So then walk back to the Johnson building,” she scoffed, rolling her eyes. “There’s a half-dozen kids in my cohort, all of whom want to end up on the same career track. I’m sure they’d be happy swapping favours with a djinn.”
“Genie,” the woman corrected her.
“I know how ‘djinn’ is pronounced,” Catherine whinged. “I’m a fucking linguistics major, alright?”
“No, ‘Genie’ is what I go by when I'm working,” she said, holding out a hand. “And you majored in art history originally.”
Glaring her down, Catherine pointedly ignored both the offered handshake and the surprisingly-correct assertion.
“Of course I already know all the ‘kids’ in your cohort,” Genie explained, “but they don’t have quite the same heart that you do, nor the same degree of very-solvable problems ⸻ solvable with magic, I mean.”
“The only ‘magic’ capable of solving my problems is a fuckton of cash,” Catherine sighed, her steadily-cooling anger still trying to find an outlet.
“Is that your wish, then?” Genie asked. “Riches is a very solid choice, if a bit overplayed, though I have to warn you that the magic will need to find some good excuse as to where your sudden windfall comes from.”
“No, it’s not my wish,” she shot back irritatedly, regretting the lingering bite on her tongue just as soon as the words had left her mouth. Still, she felt like she had cause to be so standoffish; she’d seen a million get-rich-quick schemes in her time, even if claiming to be a wish-granting djinn was something of a novelty, and she was certain that whether magic or mundane there would be a lingering clause to her windfall that would somehow fuck her in the end. “I wasn’t born a sucker, alright? I told you I’m not buying anything you’re selling, so why are you still hounding me?”
“Because you’re still carrying my bottle,” Genie answered, pointing to Catherine’s hand.
As she followed the other woman’s eyeline, Catherine was stunned to find that her grip wasn’t empty as she had assumed; despite having returned the strange bottle to the djinn before shoving her hands into her pockets and leaving, she was very clearly still clutching the assumed-absent bottle in her right hand.
“The fuck …?” she gasped, staring at the offending object in disbelief.
“It’s not particularly difficult magic for me to stick close to you,” Genie was saying, “but you shouldn’t go tossing my bottle about so carelessly. If you’re stubborn-enough then you really might lose it after all; if that happens you’ll forfeit your wishes and I could be stuck with a master I don’t particularly want to help, and so we’ll both have our boots wet.”
Repeating her earlier return, Catherine rudely thrust the offending object out to the other woman in an attempt to rid herself of it, but it was no use. No matter how many times she shoved the bottle back into Genie’s arms, it still ended up in whichever of her own hands she wasn’t looking at; stubbornly keeping her eyes on both at the same time, she was dismayed to glance down and find the offending object sticking out of the pocket of her hoodie.
“Ugh, fine,” she relented, giving in to the idea that either the other woman was an incredibly-skilled pick-pocket or somehow actually what she claimed to be. “I’ll agree you're a ‘djinn’, but I'm not really in the market for wishes.”
As much as she would like to snap her fingers and clear up her current problems, a minor change in state would really only be a sort of lateral move. She had no desire to be any kind of millionaire, and the entire reason she'd bothered going back to school in the first place was to take a second shot at a career that would matter somehow ⸻ well, and ideally pull down a respectable salary on top of it, but she wasn't greedy.
Cosmically-speaking, it seemed … ⸻ unfair, if she were allowed to drag herself out of the fire in a completely unearned power-bargain. There were at least a hundred other trans women who needed the hand-up more than she did, though perhaps she might be willing to get on-board if her wishes could somehow help her fellow T-girls in the process.
“I understand the hesitation,” the dark-haired woman began, seeing through to her private waffling, “but I'm sorry to say that your wishes are limited to you and only you. You can't make requests on the behalf of others.”
“Then what's the point?” Catherine chuckled darkly. “A get-out-of-jail-free card is nice or whatever, but what does it matter if I can't use it to help anyone else?”
“Well,” the djinn rejoined, “it's not like my line of wish-granting ends with you, either. Once I've helped you out I can move on to the next person, and so on.”
A reasonable response, it still stuck in Catherine’s craw anyway.
“Nah, I'm good,” she muttered, unwilling to seize hold of undeserved gains.
She knew enough to know that poisoned apples always looked delicious, and she'd lost too many gambles too many times to believe that fortune could ever turn back her way. With her luck, the moment Genie granted her third wish she'd probably be struck by lightning and expire on the spot; she didn't need to tempt fate like that. Better to skip the question entirely and let someone else ⸻ someone better than her ⸻ receive their just rewards.
“I’m not trying to be rude,” Catherine started hesitantly, “but I’m just not into what you’re offering, so I’ll be blunt: how can I get rid of you?”
“You’re quite the ox, aren’t you?” Genie sighed, shrugging her shoulders as Catherine fixed her with yet another tired look. “The simplest way would be to make your wishes, and then I’d happily let you set my bottle down on any train heading south.”
“You want me to put you on a train?” Catherine repeated, not understanding.
“Or a plane or taxi or some other similar transportation,” Genie agreed. “The important thing is that I be moving towards California so that I can reach the next sort of needy soul I have my eye on.”
“Great!” the other woman exclaimed with a broad grin, once again beginning to walk away, this time heading downhill past the enormous fountain out in front of one of the libraries. “I know just the place, then, and you can get on with making someone else ‘happy’ or whatever.”
“You can’t pitch me onto the light rail and call it good,” Genie huffed, clearly growing annoyed with her new mistress as she stifled her plan. “I’ll just pop the bottle into your backpack or something back at your flat.”
“Is that a threat?” Catherine challenged.
“Do you need it to be?” she shot back. “Honestly, I don’t understand why you’re so wish-adverse; other people would gladly do whatever it took to get access to wish-granting power.”
“And I’m not one of those people,” she growled, her fur rankled by even the slight association with that brand of grasping glutton.
“Clearly,” Genie sighed. “That’s part of why I thought you might be a good mistress, but between your mistrust and my timing I’m starting to second-guess my choices.” Pinching the bridge of her nose as if to ward off a headache, she tried another tack. “Why don’t you want me to use my magic for your benefit?”
“Can you time-travel?” Catherine answered by way of a non-sequitorial question.
“Only in the one direction, same as everyone else.”
“Can you create new people that didn’t already exist?”
“Again, only in the same ways that other people can.”
“Then you can’t grant any of my wishes,” Catherine shrugged as though that neatly summarized the entire endeavor. “At least, not any of the meaningful ones.”
“Surely your schooling was meaningful, even if not to the same degree,” Genie tried.
“I don’t want you to magic my career back, alright?” she huffed, feeling just as annoyed as the other woman had to be. “I don’t know if you ‘saw’ what went on up there, but Saja didn’t give me the axe because I’m ‘too old’ or whatever, she did it because as far as former-DEI hires go I’m far-more undesirable than some other girl, especially inside this administration.”
“I’ll grant you that much,” the other woman agreed, offering a conciliatory look meant to soothe the growing expression of frustration on Catherine’s face. “And no, I wasn’t going to blithely offer to make you cis ⸻ though of course that is on the table, if that’s what you wish.”
“If you can see that far into my thoughts,” Catherine continued, “then you know why magic isn’t going to work.”
As much as she would’ve liked to be a different person on a surface level, she didn’t want to give up her hold on the identity she’d worked so hard to carve out for herself. It wasn’t as simple as just editing a handful of facts, either; she was the person she was because of her lived experiences, and wishing away her transness invalidated a key piece of her identity regardless of the complicated relationship she had with it. As under-fire as transgender rights had been lately, she hated the idea of trying to abandon the umbrella that other trans people would still need to suffer beneath.
Without being able to turn back the clock to give her another shot at correcting the mistakes of her youth and the violence of the past, or somehow providing her with a newer, nicer set of parents who didn’t hate her down to the core of her being and so indulge in some generational stability, there was nothing Genie could promise her that would change her life in the ways that she wanted most.
“Surely a few cosmetic alterations wouldn’t go amiss?” the djinn offered, sticking to her mission. “And perhaps some pocket change to go with them.”
“I’m being serious,” Catherine countered. “If I picked up your bottle because I’m a ‘good person’ or whatever, then surely the next one on your list is equally-good, right?”
“I suppose that’s one way of putting it ⸻”
“Then I want you to take my wishes and transfer it all to them,” she stated firmly, crossing her arms. “You gave the game away a little too early. Even if you grant my wishes I'm still not moving up in the world, so you'd never get that ‘arm’ you want in reach of anyone important.”
“Parts of that could be handled by the right request,” Genie insisted. “True, what I can accomplish can only go so far without some work on your end, but I can at least undo a couple of the road bumps you've struck.”
“I'm not buying it,” Catherine said, shaking her head. “If you're trying to help people out so they can pay it forward afterwards, then I want to go ahead and skip the formality: give my wishes to the next deserving ‘soul’ you meet.”
“That’s not really how this is supposed to go,” Genie replied. “It's not meant to work like that.”
“Not meant to?” Catherine asked, seizing on the particular verbiage. “That's not the same as not being allowed to.”
There was a long pause as the djinn considered her words, her brows furrowing as she mulled something over.
“... Yes,” Genie admitted, reluctant to answer and yet unable to lie to her mistress. “I know of a few ways to manage what you're asking, but the point is that I chose to help you, not double-up on the next in line.”
“But my request doesn’t break any rules, correct?”
“Well, no ⸻”
“Then that’s what I want,” she repeated. “Look, I'm not that well-off, sure, but taking a bunch of wishes I could leave for someone more-deserving is incredibly selfish. I'd rather you save it for someone who really needs it.”
“And you need it,” the djinn insisted.
“I don't agree,” Catherine replied somberly. “I’m not the kind of person that deserves more second-chances that I’ll inevitably fuck up, and so I defer your gifts to the next guy in line.”
“Gal, actually,” Genie grumbled, starting to relent.
“Even better,” Catherine smiled.
“Fine,” the annoyed djinn said, rolling her eyes at her mistress’s ridiculous contention. “I’ll ‘double it and give it to the next girl,’ but in return I want you to hand-deliver my bottle.”
“What for?” she asked, sensing some kind of hidden catch.
“So that I can be sure it ends up with the correct person, or at least the right type of girl,” the dark-haired woman explained. “If you toss me onto a boat with things as they are now, it’s much-more likely that I end up with a particularly undeserving client and I would hate to give them twice as many chances to make the world a worse place.”
“I suppose I can see the wisdom in that,” Catherine agreed. “And it’s not like I have anything better to be doing, anyway,” she added bitterly.
“Then we have a contract,” Genie stated authoritatively, extending her hand. “Take me to California, and I’ll give you what you want.”
“Deal,” she smiled, accepting the offered handshake.