Laura Anne Gilman - PUPI 03 - Tricks of the Trade

by Laura Anne Gilman - [PUPI 03]

  Still in mage-sight, I watched him prowl around the room, lifting sheets and poking under furniture without a clue where he was stepping or how many delicate tangles of remnant signature he might have been wrecking with the unmoderated swirl of his own core, and shuddered. No. Even now, with the scene already processed, without any trace to pick up, he was doing damage. The thought of him actually trying to work a hot scene...

  I squinted, my thoughts interrupted by the glint or glimmer of something. “Boss? Freeze.”

  Stosser hesitated, his hand halfway to the cloth covering a sofa, and started to turn back toward me.

  “Freeze!” I said, far more sharply. “Tamp down your core.”

  It was newbie instruction, the kind of thing you’d tell a first-year mentoree, and I could see the expressions on his face range from shock to frustration to acceptance. Even as he gained control over his core, the continual sparks and static we had gotten used to around him smoothing into a quieter pool of energy.

  “What?”

  I ignored him, now that he was no longer interfering with my ability to follow the spike of current.

  Tracking trace was a delicate thing. You have to look and not-look at the same time, as though you were trying to spot the picture-within-a-picture, but do it with your mage-sight, which meant that you were open to every other spike of current within range, even the stuff you couldn’t see directly. Like patting your head and rubbing your stomach, while roller-skating. Backward.

  “There’s something in the room. Something we missed.” “We” meaning Sharon and Nick, anyway. “Hang on, I’m trying to get a read on it... there.” I moved past him, going to the far wall, where the French doors had been boarded up.

  “Signature?”

  “No. Wait. I don’t know.” It was current, yes; shaped, which meant that someone had been carrying it around for a while, the way you did when you took it into your core, but it didn’t feel like a signature. This was... smudgy, for lack of a better term. Current was hot neon, sharp and sparkly, not smudged. It reminded me, a little, of the dark current we’d found by the memorial sites during the ki-rin case; current that had been touched by the darkest kind of hatred, that verged on madness, but even that darkness had been sharp and neon-bright. This was smooth and... not so much dark as totally without light.

  “I don’t know what this is,” I said, almost to myself. Almost, but not quite. Without thinking, without planning, I reached out with a tendril of current, not toward the smudge, but away, toward my sense of Venec...

  And found myself met by a different kind of smudginess: he was unconscious, still drugged into a motionless sleep by the painkillers.

  “Damn.”

  “Torres?”

  Stosser was standing where I’d left him, his core still quiet, but his expression did not bode well for that lasting much longer. Big Dog was not the patient sort, unless he was the one with the plan.

  “I need to try to glean this,” I told him. “And then I’m going to need you to get me back to the office without disturbing it. Okay?”

  We’d been practicing flinging – the skill of throwing magical evidence from one person to another – but it wasn’t easy or precise, and with this, something I didn’t know, didn’t understand... better to keep it under wraps, if I could. Who the hell knew what flinging it could wake up.

  The fact that I was thinking about current-trace like a live thing was disturbing. I blamed it on being surprised by the elementals a few minutes ago. That didn’t change my feeling that I was taking a risk in gleaning this to begin with. No need to mention that, though. Stosser cared about results, not risks, and Venec...

  Ben was out of commission. He could yell at me later.

  “Ready when you give the word, boss,” Stosser said, and for once there was neither arrogance nor irony in his voice. Unfortunately, I was too focused on what I was about to do to really enjoy the moment.

  Normally, gleaning a scrap of current is the magical equivalent of removing a splinter from your own thumb – you need to be careful, but it’s not particularly difficult. This was like trying to do that in the dark, with a splinter that had a tendency to shimmer and wiggle out of your grip the moment you thought you had it. Like a splinter made of Jell-O.

  “Relax.” Stosser’s voice, but there was an echo of Venec in it, too. “Whatever you’re trying to do, you’re focusing too hard. Let go of your control a little.”

  “What?” That made no sense. Control was what let us –

  “Trust me. Let go a little, relax, and try again.”

  Ian Stosser didn’t know crap about fieldwork, or the details of forensic magic, but he knew more about the elevated theoretical applications of current than I’d ever understand even if I lived to a hundred. I took a shallow breath and, on the exhale, let my control ease just a fraction.

  The fragment of current slowed, as though it were trapped in molasses. I unrolled several strands of my own current, stretching them wide and ruffling them so that they were static-sticky, then rolled the fragment up inside them, containing it best I could.

  “Now,” I told Stosser, keeping my entire awareness on that fragment, maintaining the isolation between it and me so intently, I was barely aware when Stosser’s current rolled over me the same way I’d rolled the fragment, and took us home.

  Our arrival made a bit of a flutter in the office, and the rest of the team trailed after us, not asking questions – quelled by Stosser’s glare, or my own tense aura, I don’t know – but lining up against the wall quietly, watching while I did the hard work.

  Scraping the trace out of my holding-space was easier than lifting it, interestingly. It was almost as though it didn’t want to stay within the container-of-me. I would have been insulted, if I hadn’t been so relieved.

  “Y’know, I’ve scraped up a lot of trace in the past year,” I said. “I’ve poked into a lot of weird places, and talked to a lot of crazy people.”

  There was a muffled almost-laugh from the wall-hangers. Nick, I thought.

  “And?” Stosser was standing behind me, lurking like a bored teacher making sure nobody used the wrong pencil, only a lot more intent.

  “And that’s weird shit.”

  Stosser had guided me into the smallest conference room, which also happened to be the one without windows, and the one with the best warding on it. Normally we used wardings to make sure that gleanings and signatures remained uncontaminated, like putting something between glass slides. Here, with this? I was thinking that the warding was to keep the trace from getting out. I finished what I was doing, and stepped back, shaking my arms out, trying to release the tension that had crept in.

  “Although I would normally resist that sort of vague description,” Stosser said, stepping forward to put his seal on the current-jar, overlaying my own closure in a notable mark of paranoia, “in this instance, I think it’s appropriate.”

  The seal on the current-jar shimmered, then went dormant, but I could still feel it, holding steady. I could also feel the scrapings contained inside, dark and still but not inert, not by a long shot. Stosser looked at it, then shook his head. “I don’t think we should linger here. Everyone, out.”

  I was all too glad to leave the room, and Lou and Nifty were moving even faster than me, but I noted that Sharon and Nick were both more reluctant. Figured. Sharon was more stubborn than the rest of us put together, and Nick had absolutely no sense of self-preservation whatsoever. Nicky was a current-hacker, one of the rarest of all skill sets, and I was beginning to think they were rare not because the skill was unusual, but because they got themselves overrushed or crispy-killed at a faster-than-normal rate.

  Instead of going into the larger room next door, Stosser herded us down to the break room, as far away as you could get without actually leaving the office. Nobody questioned it, if they even realized what he was doing. We settled in as though it was totally normal for Stosser to hold a meeting here, Nifty taking his usual armchair, me and Nick a
nd Sharon on one sofa, Lou and Pietr pulling up the ottoman and perching on that, and Stosser pacing between. The absence of Venec was like a real, palpable hole in the room. For me, anyway. I didn’t know if anyone else felt it. Nobody had mentioned him; either they’d gotten an update already, or they were afraid to ask.

  I checked, unable to stop myself. Still in morphine-land.

  We all watched Stosser pace back and forth a few times, then I rested my head against the back of the sofa, and closed my eyes. Now that I’d actually stopped, or at least paused, I was so very, very tired. And my feet hurt. But I was too tired to bend down and take off my boots.

  “Hey, Nick,” I said.

  “No.”

  “C’mon, Nick... ”

  “Why don’t you wear something you can just slip off, like normal people?”

  Because J never let me wear sneakers except when I was going to the gym, and I wasn’t a dress-pump kind of girl, normally. But it was too much effort to say all that, so I just whined a little.

  Nick ignored me.

  “So, whatever Bonnie found and brought back. What is it?” A year ago, Sharon would have been all bristling and annoyed that I’d found something she’d missed. Now, she just sounded curious.

  I could hear Stosser pause in his pacing, off to my left. “Easier to say what it isn’t.”

  “Okay.” Lou took the straight role willingly. “What isn’t it?”

  “It’s not human,” Sharon said flatly. “We’re all agreed on that?”

  Quick nods around the room. Everyone had gotten a chance to feel what I’d been unloading. We all were agreed.

  “Fatae, then. We suspected that already, from the amount of damage that was done, and the claw marks. This had to come from that, right?” Sharon continued.

  There was a silence, the kind that comes when everyone’s waiting for someone else to say something first, and nobody does.

  “Right?” Nick said, hesitantly.

  “It has to be,” Nifty agreed.

  “There are a lot of different fatae breeds that have claws that could manage the damage done,” Lou said. “I’ve barely been able to start a file on the known ones, here in the city. There are a whole bunch who are singular, or isolated, but it has to be a fatae.”

  “It has to be fatae,” I agreed, sealing it superstitiously with my thirding, or fourthing, or whatever we were up to. It had to be. Because if it wasn’t...

  Then it was something else.

  There was a little quiet, after all that, and then the arguing began. We were all determined that it wasn’t human, and therefore it had to be fatae, but nobody could come up with a suggestion as to what breed, even with Lou’s beautifully indexed database, and Stosser’s additional knowledge.

  “What about a... ” Nifty squinted at the name on the page, then shifted the paper so we could all see. “One of those? Serious claws.”

  “They’re arctic-based?”

  “Oh.” Nifty scowled and turned the page.

  “You think it could have been a demon?” I’d only ever seen one, that I knew about – the courier known as PB – but its claws had been scary-looking, even if the demon itself was too short to do this kind of damage. They came in all sizes, though... .

  “I would have known if it were demon,” Stosser said, and that was that.

  The discussion went on. And on. And if we were working so hard to keep from worrying about Venec, then nobody said anything.

  Or maybe it was just me.

  Thanks to Stosser leading us, and not Venec, we worked right through dinner, and probably would have gone all night if Stosser hadn’t gotten pinged by someone, and told us all to take a break until morning.

  “And Ben’s still out cold,” he added, carefully not looking at me, “so stop worrying.”

  What, us, worry? But, yeah, there was no point checking in; they’d let us know if anything changed, even if I somehow missed it.

  At that point, I was running on fumes and muscle memory. By the time I got home it was nearly 10:00 p.m. and I was wiped out, physically, emotionally, and magically. Even the thought of climbing the stairs to my apartment was enough to make me cry, but there was no way in hell I had the energy to Translocate. If I’d been halfway thinking, I would have had someone Transloc me from the office to my bed. God, the commute would be so much easier if we could do that. Why didn’t we do that?

  Proof that I was exhausted: I knew damn well why we didn’t. And it had nothing to do with wasted current or overextending ourselves, of becoming too dependent on magic, or any of the other reasons our mentors hammered into us from the time of our first lesson. It wasn’t even because Translocation was damned difficult to do properly. It was because, of all the things that Talent could do, all the things that set us apart, Translocation was one of the few that Nulls couldn’t dismiss as a trick of their eye, or a misunderstanding, or some other rational non-magical explanation. And it hadn’t been that long ago, by anyone’s measure, that the cry of “witch” was more than a Halloween greeting.

  Talent wasn’t a genetic thing, exactly, but it did gallop in some families, and there wasn’t an American Talent who hadn’t gotten stories of the Burning Times hammered into their head about the same time they started to get stupid with what they’d learned. Salem was the most publicized, but it wasn’t close to the worst.

  I sighed, and resigned myself to having to sludge up the stairs like a regular Jane, when there was a commotion, and I looked up to see lights flickering brightly from...

  Hey. My apartment. What the hell?

  I had the front door opened, the inner security door opened, and was up the stairs to my landing before I was aware I’d taken my keys out of my coat pocket. It might even have been faster than Translocating.

  However fast I was, though, the super was faster. He was standing outside my door, glaring at me like it was all my fault. Clearly he had been waiting for me.

  “What the hell’s been going on?” he greeted me. “All day, all night, noises and thumps, and now you’re leaving untended flames when you’re out? And locking the door so I can’t get in? I was about to call the fire department, have them bust down the door.”

  I stared at him, totally lost. “I haven’t been home all day,” I said. “I’ve been at work.”

  “This has been going on too long,” he said. “I’m tired of hearing the complaints about your parties which were bad enough, but this... ”

  I moved past him, putting my keys into the lock, in tent on proving him wrong, that I hadn’t left any flames burning, tended or otherwise. At the same time, the memory of the flickering lights in my window taunted me. What the hell?

  I opened the door – and it opened easily, with the standard key he had, too – into a reassuring darkness. Reaching out to flip the light switch, so I could see the super’s face when I told him off, was a mistake, though. The entire apartment was a disaster, furniture shoved utterly out of place, the mattress down on the floor, the sheets piled up in the center of the room like a giant nest.

  And my mosaic, my beautiful, delicate, shimmering rainbow glass mosaic, was in a hundred thousand pieces on the floor.

  It was too much, on top of the worry about Venec, and the sheer exhaustion of everything else. I almost cried.

  “Enough,” the super said, not seeming to care that whatever flames we’d both seen were not only gone, but were never there. “You seemed like a nice kid, but this is enough. There are too many complaints already, this is just the last straw. Building management’s got cause to cancel your lease, for this.”

  I heard him, but it barely registered, staring at the disaster of my once-beautiful apartment. The utter chaos...

  Chaos. Causing trouble.

  My eyes narrowed, even as my brain started to work again. The Roblin. It had to be. Damn it, what did I ever do to that damned imp?

  * * *

  ten

  I suppose I should have, as per orders, reported in immediately. The thought, though,
of facing everyone, of dealing with more questions and what-ifs... it was too much. It was all just too much and I needed the quiet to just not-think, for once.

  Also, if The Roblin was following me, targeting me, I wanted to be somewhere well-warded to even discuss it.

  So instead I spent the rest of the night cleaning up the shards of the mosaic, and putting things back to order, best I could. Current was surprisingly crap at moving physical objects – you needed more energy than it took to move it physically – and I didn’t want to risk even more pissed-off complaints from my neighbors, so mostly I left the heavy stuff where it was for now, and focused on getting my mattress and sheets back up onto the loft platform where they were supposed to be. I’d hoped that the activity would wear me out enough so that I’d be able to fall asleep and not think or dream about either Venec or the weird trace we’d found or The Roblin, sniffing at my heels.

  No such luck. The adrenaline rush finally wore off, but my brain was way too revved up to shut down enough to sleep. Unfortunately, it was also too exhausted to do any real thinking. So I ended up sitting on the off-skew sofa, wrapped in a blanket and clutching a mug of cocoa heavily dosed with peppermint schnapps, trying very very hard not to reach out to the sense of Benjamin Venec, in a hospital bed several miles to the north. My trying not to do something, though, apparently had the exact opposite effect, because there was a sliver into my awareness, as though responding to a ping I hadn’t sent.

  *sleep?*

  *yes, baby* I responded without thinking. *sleep*

  Benjamin Venec, drugged to the gills, had a soft, almost little boy feel to his thoughts, and I wasn’t strong enough to resist the urge to brush against it, the emotional equivalent to patting someone’s hair until they settled down again. I needed the comfort, and he wasn’t going to remember anything, come morning and sobriety.

  I hoped.

  *something wrong*

  Damn. He was more alert than I thought. There was an instant when I was going to lie to him, and the instant passed. Drugged or not, this was Venec, and this was me. We’d never lied to each other, not before, not in all the crap that we’d already been through, and sure as hell not now.