Unread Terms Be Careful What You Wish For chapter 4 by witeja9199

Kirsten has precisely one second in which to be sensible, and she has never been any good at it.

She shoulders the cupboard door open, catching Gareth's knuckles on the way, and steps out into the strip lighting holding the lamp in both hands, like a child offering a cake to a dog.

"Here," she says. "Take it."

On the carpet, her own face looks up at her with her own mouth hanging open. "What are you doing?" says Mazzaroth, in her voice.

Gareth looks at the lamp. He looks at the Kirsten on the floor, then the Kirsten in front of him. His brain, a small clean engine that runs entirely on advantage, declines to process the difference.

"Twins," he says. "You've got a twin. Why does nobody tell me anything?" He takes the lamp. "See? Reasonable. I'll tell Brenda it was a communication gap."

"That's very kind."

"I'm a kind person." He is already buffing the brass on his sleeve, composing the eBay listing.

On the floor, the genie finds his voice, which is still Kirsten's and has gone up an octave. "You have just handed him your three wishes!"

"I haven't used any of them."

"They're not a savings account!"

"No, they're a contract, and Gareth has never read one. He signed for a company car without checking it came with an engine." Kirsten keeps her smile fixed. "He'll burn all three by midnight. Then the lamp is spent."

"And then?"

"And then," says Kirsten, who has not got this far, "we'll see."

Mazzaroth closes his eyes. "That is the worst plan I have heard in four thousand years, and I attended the Trojan Horse planning meeting. I said it would be noticed."

Gareth gives the brass a final, enthusiastic rub, and the genie goes up like a struck match. Pop. Seven feet of indigo, waistcoat, disappointment.

Gareth screams. It is a lovely high scream with real range. Across the room, the photocopier prints a sheet that reads YES.

"Master of the lamp," intones Mazzaroth wearily. "Three wishes. No more wishes, no dead, no love. You may now..."

"Anything?" says Gareth. He has already recovered. Men like Gareth recover from the supernatural the way they recover from a bad Q3, by not looking at it.

"Within reason."

"Whose reason?"

"Mine. I'm very reasonable. I've ended three wars."

"Right." Gareth cracks his knuckles, a sound he learned from a film. "First wish. I want to be taken seriously. I'm sick of being talked over in meetings. When I speak, I want everyone to shut up and listen, like they do for..." He glances at the lift and lowers his voice. "Brenda."

Mazzaroth looks at Kirsten. Kirsten, arms folded, performs a shrug the size of a thumbnail.

"Is that your wish?"

"That's my wish! I wish it! Obviously!"

"Granted," says the genie, with the look of a man filling in a form for the four-hundredth time. "Though I did consult the data. In the entire history of Grimshaw & Thripp, there has only ever been one person nobody interrupts."

"Brenda," says Kirsten faintly.

"And her authority isn't transferable. It's structural. I'm afraid I've had to go to source."

Pop.

Gareth's shoulders narrow. The Italian suit he bought with a quarter's bonus gives up in two places and swells in two others. His jaw goes from regional sales to coroner's inquest. His hair turns the colour of a filing cabinet and sharpens into a bob you could cut paper with. When the smoke clears, there stands a woman of fifty-odd who has never once been asked if she's got a minute.

"Oh," says Gareth, in a voice that could silence a canteen. He looks down. "Oh, what the fuck. What the fuck has happened to my..." His hands fly to his chest. "Oh, Jesus, they're warm. Why are they warm? Why is there so much of..."

"Do stop that," says Mazzaroth. "It's rude."

"Put me back!"

"Yes, of course," says Kirsten.

"Naturally," says the genie, and winces. "Oh, that's unpleasant. I've been obeyed by my own reflex. Nobody's managed that since Nebuchadnezzar."

Even the ficus has straightened up. Gareth stares around at the three of them: at Kirsten, who is standing with her heels together like a girl at assembly, and at the photocopier, which has gone silent with something very like awe. When he speaks again, it is quieter and much, much worse.

"They listen," he says.

"That's what you wished for," says Mazzaroth.

"They've never listened before." He turns his new hands over, and there is a dreadful, tender hunger on his new face. "Do you know what this is like? To say a sentence and have it just land?"

"Yes," says Kirsten. "Right now."

"I've got two wishes left," says Gareth, in Brenda's voice, "and I'm going to use them very carefully."

Behind them, the lift goes ding.

Brenda steps out in her coat, carrying a folder marked PELL, K. — TRANSITION. She stops. She looks at Kirsten, at a seven-foot indigo man in a waistcoat, at a brass lamp, and finally at a woman with her own face, wearing a suit three sizes too small.

"Which of you," says Brenda, in precisely the voice Gareth is now using, "is going to explain why I am standing in my own office?"

The photocopier whirs. A single sheet slides into the tray, and Kirsten can read it from where she stands. It says, in smeared toner: HELLO, BRENDA. IT'S BEEN A WHILE.