I joined The Ministry in 2009. Before that, I worked in grocery stores, pawn shops, and liquor stores. It was shift work, shit work, all of it minimum wage. I lived in Jasper, in East Texas, and I took what I could get. My husband was a mechanic. We met when we were young, when we were in school, and we married shortly after. We had a daughter, a house we were paying off, and a couple of dogs. Things weren’t easy, but they were mostly good. At least, they were until our daughter disappeared. She was fifteen. She went to a party and never came home. She disappeared on a narrow dirt road, a shortcut that ran across a field of dry yellow grass to our house. It was around two in the morning.

Later, the police chief told me that half a million children go missing a year in this country. He was trying to comfort me, but my first thought was why hadn’t anyone said anything while I was pregnant. I could’ve saved myself from this pain. I was in one of Jasper’s cells when he said that to me. I was hungover. It was about four or five months after my daughter’s disappearance. I was drinking badly by then. I would get into fights in bars and anywhere else. I’d walk through the field they found my daughter’s phone in at night and call out Emily! Emily! Emily! but there was never any answer. At home, I would hurt myself. My husband was already gone. He’d taken the dogs.

Then, a couple of days after I got out of the cell, a man sat down beside me. I was sitting out the back of my house, drinking, smoking, doing nothing of substance, really. The man had a heavy black beard and tattoos on his neck. The tattoos didn’t run up his face, but I thought they covered the rest of his body. He had a Russian accent. He said his name was Ilias. He told me that no one had found my daughter, not her body, or her, and that nobody would. She could be out there still, he said, could be anywhere. I thought he knew her and was telling me that she’d run away, but he didn’t know her. He’d come to offer me a job. He worked for a company called The Ministry of Saturn. They specialised in the unexplained, the occult, he said. The job he offered me was driving around the country, buying things, but not things I’d seen before. Strange things, he said. Books, relics, artifacts, medallions.

I took the job. My sister was worried about me, then angry with me. She thought I had to stay. My soon-to-be ex-husband wouldn’t speak to me after I told him I was leaving. The pair of them didn’t understand why I had to leave. I couldn’t explain it to them. I left town with Ilias and he took me to another trader, to an old Spanish woman named Mer who taught me the trade. She taught me what books to read to know what I was buying, to know if a piece was real or not. She taught me how to navigate the world outside The Ministry and the world within it.

I spent the next nine years living in small hotels and rundown motels, living in no place permanent, no place anyone could find me in. I drove along roads that were unpaved, or made from dirt, or were nothing more than tracks. Sometimes I went to cities, but not often. The Ministry had other people for that. I was for the small places, the lost towns, the empty stretches of road. I was to talk to the people who lived neither here nor there and buy what they had. Sometimes I’d ask about my daughter, or I’d hear about other girls who’d gone missing, or been killed, and I’d look into it, but nothing came of it. Sometimes I’d get frustrated, but mostly it was enough to be looking, no matter how unlikely it was that I’d find Emily or anything linked to her.

My last job was in North Dakota, in a cold piece of nowhere called Gilby. I drove out to a motel called The House of the Dead, to see the owner, a man by the name of Obnizov. He had a medallion I was interested in, one worn by the last Nazari assassin, Talat. I drove out to the motel alone. I’d never had a partner. I didn’t need one. I didn’t hunt. I didn’t capture. I didn’t kill. I spent most of my time in bars with benign figures of one kind of underworld or another. Sometimes, for variety, we’d meet in a Golden Corral. I met a gorgon at one a month earlier, a regular of mine. The snakes on her head were hidden beneath a green bandanna, the fabric moving and shifting like a bad ocean. She loved the buffet at Golden Corral. I bought cursed Tarot decks off her while we sat at the cheap tables and ate fried chicken and chocolate fondue. A week later I met with a cyclops in a bar. He talked about his lost wives. He sold me their rings. I mention these two because they’re examples of how I work. There’s lots of stories about how traders work, but they’re mostly bullshit because they’re about breaking into things and threatening others. I don’t do that. I keep everything safe. I keep my options open. I’m friendly with just about everyone.

Until I met Obnizov.

(Transcript provided by interviewee)

Briggs: This is a surprise, Ilias.

Obnizov: I do not use that name anymore.

I go by Obnizov now.

Briggs: Family name?

Obnizov: No. I told you years ago that it was best if you had more than one name in this business. This is a new name.

This, all of this around me, is the life I made to go with this name. Is it not glorious?

Briggs: It’s a little rundown motel in the cold. It’s not my idea of glorious, I’m afraid.

Obnizov: It is bigger than you think.

Briggs: I’m sure it is.

Does The Ministry know you have it?

Obnizov: No.

I would prefer if it stayed that way.

Briggs: Because?

Obnizov: Because The Ministry and I left on bad terms.

Briggs: I didn’t know.

Obnizov: It was a few years after I recruited you.

Briggs: And this here, this meeting between you and me, this is just chance?

Obnizov: Is anything truly by chance?

Briggs: Then?

Obnizov: I want to make amends.

Briggs: You could’ve called.

Obnizov: I could have, but it would not have been the same. To truly apologise, you must sit across from the person you wronged.

You see, my job in The Ministry was to recruit people. The Ministry was losing people all over the world and I was told to find people like you, people who had lost someone, or who were having trouble because they’d been touched by this world that you and I live in, by these monsters and magics that are around us. I was told to recruit the desperate.

The Ministry likes to say that we are at war. You have probably heard them say it. Other worlds are seeping into ours. We are being invaded. If we do not stop it, we’ll be consumed.

Briggs: I’ve heard it.

Obnizov: That was their reason for this recruitment push. They thought something big was coming. They wanted people who would fight, but in reality—

Briggs: Any warm body would do?

Obnizov: Yes.

Briggs: I don’t see what you have to apologise to me for. None of this is new to me. You hear things, and it’s my job to hear things.

Obnizov: And do you know that the war is a lie also?

Briggs: I don’t even think The Ministry believes it. They have no soldiers, no front lines, nothing like that. These days I think they’re mostly just trying to police what cannot be policed, like drugs, or who people fuck.

Obnizov: That is a good comparison. Magic is like sex, after all.

Briggs: I’ve never had the talent.

Obnizov: I do. I was, I still am, mostly a druid. My father taught me when I was a boy. He taught me how to live on land, how to talk to it, how to be part of it. It is how I have made my life.

When I worked at The Ministry, The Ministry paid me to listen to the sorrows of the land. That is how I recruited people, how I found you. I asked about people who were on the edge of the unknown and who were desperate for answers. One time when I asked the land this it showed me you. But more than that, it showed me the night your daughter disappeared, your Emily, and it asked me to help you. The land asked, you understand. It felt for you. It wanted to help you, but I did not, because The Ministry convinced me not to.

That is what I have come to apologise for.

Obnizov had a room at the back of The House of the Dead. He took me there, guided me there from his small, cramped office, led me through narrow hallways that turned again and again in an impossible fashion until we arrived at the room. It was large, almost as large as the whole motel looked to be from the outside, and it was full of paintings. They were mostly small, but all of them were framed and draped in cloth. The room looked a little like an old advent calendar.

Before I could ask about the paintings Obnizov began to tell me how he’d painted them. He’d taught himself how to paint, he said. He hadn’t started to do it until he was an adult. He needed a way to get things out of his head, the things that the land showed him when he closed his eyes, or went to sleep. He painted, he said, to forget.

He stopped in front of one of the paintings, one that was about halfway through the room. It was covered with a black cloth like the others. It was one of the smaller pieces. Obnizov reached out with a tattooed hand and gently removed the cloth. The scene underneath was of a field of dry yellow grass. On the right edge was a road, a narrow, bent piece of dirt.

A girl was walking on the road.

She was fifteen. I didn’t have to ask. She was wearing jeans she’d bought the week before. They were more expensive than anything she owned. She’d saved for them, saved while she worked in a cafe in town. She was wearing a pair of boots she had borrowed from her mother. They weren’t very expensive, not like the jeans, but the girl thought they had style. Maybe they did, especially with the blouse she was wearing. It was maybe a little old for her, but what could her mother say? Her daughter was growing up. She was a pretty girl. She would be a beautiful woman.

I stood there for a while before I realised I couldn’t move. I knew I was standing in the gallery, but at the same time I wasn’t. I was displaced. I was beyond the gallery, beyond the motel, beyond what I knew to be myself. I wanted to speak, but I couldn’t because I had no voice, no body, no limbs. Still, I had consciousness, and with that came the realisation that while I was still me, while I was still standing in the gallery, I was also at the site of the painting, that I was Jasper itself, and that I could hear a young woman singing to herself.

Emily was a terrible singer. She’d always been a terrible singer. She couldn’t remember the words of a song, or the beat. On the dirt road she repeated a line about fire, about sleeping in it, and then laughed because she knew she had mangled it. Despite myself, I smiled. Emily wasn’t in any great hurry. She was safe. The land she was walking on knew this. She’d walked over it before, walked it so much that she didn’t need a light to show her the way, just the stars.

Three motorbikes appeared on the trail as she walked, coming from behind. I’m not surprised because as Jasper I knew they were coming, but because I’m also not Jasper I am surprised. Emily was surprised. Still, she knew the boys on the bikes. They were older boys, eighteen, nineteen, just out of school. One of them was the police chief’s son. Lawrence was his name. I cannot hear what he said to Emily after he stopped next to her. The engine covered his voice. Emily climbed on the back of the bike. As she did, her phone fell out of her pocket unnoticed by everyone but me. I watched her get on the bike with a growing sense of horror. I could hear the police chief from a decade earlier outside my cell telling me that children disappear all the time in this country. Over half a million, he says.

I watched Lawrence ride away with Emily, watched him leave the trail and take my daughter somewhere else, somewhere quiet, somewhere she wasn’t sure she wanted to go, and where no one would be able to hear what happened.

But I hear it, just like the land heard it all those years before.

Obnizov: I told them. I told The Ministry what I saw, what the land saw. I said, I could help this woman.

Briggs: You said that?

Obnizov: Yeah.

Briggs: But you didn’t.

Obnizov: No, I did not. I let The Ministry convince me that I should offer you a job, that I should bring you into our world.

Briggs: You could’ve told me where she was.

Obnizov: She is still there. She has not been moved from where the boy and his father buried her.

Briggs: But you didn’t.

You didn’t say—

Obnizov: I am sorry.

Briggs: You didn’t say shit.

Obnizov: I live with my guilt. I live with what I have done to you, and to others like you. The only thing I can say to you is that I do not do that anymore. I am not part of The Ministry. I do not recruit. I do not lie for them.

Briggs: You think that—

You know what’s going to happen when I tell them who you are? Where you are?

Obnizov: You have a right to be angry.

Briggs: Yeah, I’ve got a right. You know what else I’ve got a right to be angry about? That boy who killed my daughter is still living his life.

Obnizov: I can help you with that.

Briggs: I don’t need your fucking help.

Obnizov: You are no killer.

I know killers. I am a killer. Back home, back in Novosibirsk, back when my father was alive, I killed people. I did it because he asked me to do it. My father was a bad man. Much worse than any man you have ever met.

I will make a deal with you. I will kill this man for you. I owe you that. I have done you wrong. I can make that right, and then we can go on our way. All I ask is that you do not tell The Ministry about me.

Briggs: I don’t give a shit about you.

Obnizov: The Ministry—

Briggs: And I don’t give a shit about The Ministry.

Obnizov: You do not want me as an enemy.

Briggs: Do you know what I’ve done for the last decade? I’ve gone around to every little dark corner that exists and I’ve sat and I’ve made deals with the people who sit in them. I don’t care who is in them. Some of the people are like you and me, some aren’t.

Obnizov: They will not help you.

Briggs: You’re not listening.

Obnizov: It’s you who is not listening.

Briggs: You see this ring I’m wearing? The one with the black band?

I bought this off a cyclops who had lost his family. It doesn’t stop a blow, but it returns whatever has been done back to the original source. It’s called The Ring of Jir’qrk. The woman who wore it originally was shot by an assassin. I don’t know if that assassin was from The Ministry or not, but the bullet that killed her was found in his head because what is done to one is done to another.

I keep a lot of what I buy.

Obnizov: . . .

Briggs: Mer told me I should do it. Your job can be dangerous, she said. Always look out for yourself.

I’ve never had a real problem. All my problems I could solve. But still, I kept things, things like this ring. Sometimes I told myself I kept them in case I came across who’d taken my daughter, or someone who knew where she was. I don’t know that I thought that would ever happen, but here I am.

And here you are.

There’s not a thing you can do to me, or for me. You’re just a bit of nothing hiding in the cold, hiding from The Ministry and whatever other guilt you got, and I’m not here to make you feel better about it. You can eat your shit, as far as I’m concerned, because to stand there and do nothing when you knew what had happened . . .

You ain’t nothing to me.

After I’d left Obnizov I stood outside The House of the Dead in the early hours of the morning and called a friend. The motel sat before me, a pair of rectangle boxes on the edge of Gilby. It was the kind of building where all the sorrow of the world could take place anonymously. While I talked, the snow turned to sleet. It was like the land was trying to smother the motel, like it was an unwanted baby in the crib. I was the only truck in the lot and when I was gone, there was no one.

Obnizov might still be there. I doubt it. He surely calmed the land, took his gallery and his guilt and left, but you’ll have to look to be sure. You do that if you want. You’ll probably decide to come look for me as well, but I wouldn’t bother. I’ve already been to Jasper. An old Police Chief and his son are already lost. If you ask around, you’ll hear about two women who came through weeks before, one an old resident, and one, people will say, who wore bandannas and dark glasses and was frighteningly beautiful. When you hear that, that’ll be your cue to close your eyes and look away, because nothing you can do will change what has happened.