Staying Dead

by Laura Anne Gilman

  She sat down at the desk and turned on the computer. While it hummed to life, she reached over to the phone, dialing a number from memory while she hooked the wireless headset up, pulling her hair clear where it tangled with the mouthpiece with a mutter of disgust. She hated using the thing, but the phone—like her computer—had been rigged with so many surge protectors to make it safe for her to use on a regular basis that you couldn’t move the damn thing without creating disaster.

  One ring, and then a crisp, efficient “Yes?”

  “It’s me.”

  Sergei’s raspy tenor voice changed, so subtly it would have taken someone paying close attention to recognize the new, softer tone for affection.

  “You looked at the job site?”

  “Yeah, for whatever that was worth.” Wren leaned back and swung her feet up on the desk. Her loafers needed polishing. “External was clean, but there was one possible smudge-marker up on the ceiling inside. Although, in retrospect, it could’ve been there since Adam went figless. Anyway, ruled out anything else. Distance grab, no doubts. A pro.”

  “But it was definitely a magic-user?”

  Sergei was, like so much of the human population, in that nether area between Null and Talent, but after so many years as her partner he was well-versed enough in the uses of it to make certain assumptions. Besides, realistically, what else could it have been?

  “Yeah.” She refrained from sarcasm. Barely. “Whoever it was used the building’s wiring to convey the spell. Probably had every person in the building so hocused, they couldn’t have told you what color their socks were.”

  “And then got the cornerstone out—how?”

  Wren’s mouth twisted in frustration, making her look for a moment like a five-year-old given brussels sprouts. “Okay, that part I haven’t quite figured out yet. Translocation, probably.”

  Translocation of an inanimate or inert object wasn’t a difficult spell for someone with any kind of mojo and open channels, but the actual performance took a lot out of the caster. Especially if he wasn’t present on-site, preferably within eyesight of the object. That was impossible in this case, since the object to be retrieved wasn’t accessible without the breaking and entering of a kind that hadn’t happened. So. A distance grab of that magnitude would make the hire-price prohibitively expensive, and the cost would increase the further the object was moved. Or it should, anyway. Even the best Talent had to eat and pay the rent, and a Transloc like that would wipe you for anything else for a week. “Might have intended to replace the stone with something else, to maintain volume consistency—” the hobgoblin of all translocations “—but the alarms going off must have wigged him.”

  “Alarms?” Sergei sounded a little alarmed himself. Wren reached out and sorted the pile of papers on her desk with one finger. Blueprints of the Frants building, cut into twelve-by-twelve squares for easy shuffling, covered with red ink—Sergei’s handwriting—and her pencil smudges. “Yeah, alarms. I could feel the echoes when I went into the basement. Nice little mage-triggers. Someone is a smidge nervous down there. I wonder if the perp knew about them before he went down, or if he was expecting a simple grab-and-run, so to speak. And before you panic, no, I didn’t set it off again. The parameters were set way too high for little old me.”

  Actually, that was a lie. She had sensed the threads of magic and slipped under and between them. While she wasn’t ever going to be called to serve on the Council—even assuming they lobotomized her long enough for her to agree to sign on—that was more a matter of attitude than Talent. Where she was strong she was very strong, and distracting attention from herself, be it magical or physical, was as natural as breathing to her. Her mentor had called it Disassociation, which was basically a fancy way of saying that she could make people—or things, specifically things like an alarm system—believe that she wasn’t there.

  The problem, as far as anyone had been able to explain to her, was that for all her undeniable talent she was just a little too dense, magically speaking. The current channeled fine—she had the skill, no doubts there—but it sometimes channeled in weird ways, denying her access to a lot of the major skills like levitation and translocation. Pity, as they would have been damned useful in her career.

  “You think maybe the thief meant to use it for blackmail? Or maybe ransom? Hey, got your protection spell here, what do you want to give me for it?”

  “Or possibly to open up the door just enough for a direct attack by someone else?” Sergei sounded like he’d given this some serious thought while she was out doing the hard work.

  “Maybe. I know, I know, not our problem. I’d prefer blackmail, though. Easier to find someone if they’re going to be so obliging as to send back a calling card.” If she were a better conductor…ah, well.

  On the plus side of that density, the risk of her wizzing out—losing her mind to the magic flow—was probably lower than anyone else at her comparable Talent level. There were always going to be portions of her brain the current couldn’t get into.

  “They also serve those who hum in choir,” she muttered.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Look, whoever this was, he’s a subtle guy, definitely strong, but not too bright. He squelched the elementals but forgot to sedate them.”

  “Which, in English, means what?” Sergei did exasperated like a guy with years of practice.

  Wren grinned, forgetting he couldn’t see her. Tweaking Sergei was always so much fun. He did the staid businessman thing so well, sometimes he forgot to take it off. “It means exactly that, which if you would ever remember anything I’ve told you about elementals you’d, well, remember.” He had the weirdest mental block about certain aspects of current—she’d almost given up trying to figure it out. Then again, non-Talents should be uneasy around current. She shouldn’t blame him if even knowing things wigged him out enough to not want to think about it. “I tapped into the wiring, and there was a horde of elementals there. Quiet, but jazzed, like something’d shoved a massive current up their tails, but told them to lay low about it.

  “But when I stirred them up, they came shooting out, like they were hoping whatever it was had come back.”

  And once they had come to her hand, she had been able to stroke them into giving up the residue from that burst of magic. That was another one of her stronger skills—reading magic like some people could read Braille, or maps, or any other code. It made her useless in a really powerful thunderstorm, stoned like kitty on catnip from the overload of power, but the rest of the time it was part of her stock-in-trade. Where one magic-user had gone, she could go, recreating their trail with remarkable accuracy. Well, mostly. Unlike her other skills, which had names and entries in the skillbooks her mentor had shown her, this one seemed to be particular to her and the way her brain worked. Or if other Talents had it, they were keeping just as quiet about it as she was. The end result either way was that she had no real idea how it worked, or why, or how to control it.

  Then again, she didn’t understand any of that about her computer either, and it still worked fine. Most of the time.

  “I skimmed off a decent enough emotional memory of the thief to recognize him or her again. Pretty sure of it, anyway.”

  Sergei made an unhappy-sounding noise in the back of his throat. She didn’t think he was aware he did it—she couldn’t imagine him making it during negotiations with clients, or the highbrow, hoity-toity art collectors who made his gallery so obnoxiously successful, which meant it was a Wren-specific complaint. The thought made her grin again. “Even if you were sure, that doesn’t help us unless you actually run into him—”

  “Or her.”

  “Or her, in the near future. Wren…” A sigh, and she knew he was fiddling with one of the slender brown cigarettes he carried with him everywhere and never smoked.

  “Yeah, I know. Doesn’t help worth diddly, realistically. But what, you expected this guy to leave a calling card? It happens, sure, but not real often. Which is good,
otherwise we’d both be out of work.”

  Sergei made a noncommittal noise that might have been agreement, amusement or a growl.

  “Look, all I need is a reasonably-sized list of people with something to gain by the client losing his big block o’ protection, and I can backtrack from there. We do a little digging, to see who has the skills, or the money to hire a mage of that power, and then I can retrieve the cornerstone, which you know I can do in my sleep. Easy money. So no worries.”

  “So, who’s worried?” Sergei asked, sounding worried.

  Wren hit the disconnect button, not bothering to say goodbye. Swinging her legs back down to the floor, she winced a little at their stiffness. Time to hit the gym—she had gotten a little too out of shape over the winter again. Too many of their recent cases had been deskwork, not action.

  She filed the thought under “when I have a spare hour,” pulled out the keyboard drawer and went to work composing and sending out e-mails to contacts, some human, and some not quite so, looking for any chatter happening in the Cosa Nostradamus.

  The one advantage to being part of a community that the majority of the world didn’t even know existed was that you didn’t have anywhere else to talk about what was going on. So the gossip network was tight, fast, and frighteningly efficient. She’d lay decent odds with her own money that she’d have a lead by lunchtime.

  Speaking of which…Wheels set in motion, she sat back and dialed the phone again.

  “Hi, yeah, it’s Valere in 5J. Medium sausage, and a liter of diet ginger ale. Just slap it on the tab.” She listened for a moment, laughed. “Yeah, you too. Thanks.” Taking off the headset, she draped it on its stand, running fingers through her hair to fluff it up again.

  Her mother’s photo managed to emit waves of disapproval despite the smile still fixed to her lips. “Ah, come on, Mom. Breakfast of champions, right? What’s the point of having a 24-hour pizza place on the corner if you don’t take advantage of it?”

  Besides, it was either that or leftover Thai from the back of the fridge, and she’d mentally tagged that for lunch.

  She had about half an hour before Unray’s buzzed with her pizza. Might as well make it a billable half hour. Pulling the ’corder out of her jacket pocket, she put it on the desk and swung the keyboard into position. With a quick, silent prayer that her moderate use of current while the ’corder was in her pocket hadn’t totally futzed the batteries, she hit Play and began to transcribe her notes, wincing a little at the static that had crept into the tape just because it was near her body.

  “Come on, brain cells,” she muttered as her fingers hit the keys. “Give me something I can use. Momma wants to wrap this up fast and have the weekend free, for once!”

  three

  The room was remarkable for being completely unremarkable. The walls were painted a soft matte white, the floor made from wide planks of fine-grained wood. The lighting came from discreet spots that directed attention rather than illuminated.

  There was one door. No windows. The overall impression was of endless space somehow made cozy. An architect had labored over the lines and arches of this space, a designer had meditated on the perfect shade of white for the walls and ceiling, a feng shui specialist had dictated the ordering of the floor’s wooden planks, the exact placement of the three objects which resided therein in relation to the door.

  It was for those three objects that the room existed.

  In one corner, reaching from floor to ceiling, was a simple green marble pillar, three feet around and seven feet high. Etched onto its surface were crude symbols that hadn’t seen the light of day for over three thousand years.

  In the opposite corner, an ebony wood pedestal was lit from above, highlighting a chunk of clear, unfaceted crystal that looked as though it had just been pulled from the ground, hosed down, and dropped onto that base.

  And in the farthest corner, two men maneuvered a low wooden tray set on wheels into position. It was a mover’s trolley, its bed covered with a quilted pad similar to the kind used for fine furniture and grand pianos. Another pad wrapped up over a four-foot by six-foot square, and was sealed with heavy gray tape. The hard rubber wheels moved soundlessly on the floor, despite the weight they bore.

  The two men were burly, but not brutish looking. One was perhaps forty, with graying hair cut short. The other was ten years younger, and completely bald. They wore simple white coveralls that had only one pocket in the left sleeve, too small to carry anything larger than a cigarette lighter. There were no names sewn over the chest: no logos, cute or otherwise on their backs.

  They finished adjusting the trolley, and the younger man knelt by its side, producing a slender but sharp-looking pocket knife from his sleeve pocket, carefully cutting through the tape, peeling it away from the pad and unfolding the pad from its enclosed prize. About the length of a small bench, the marble’s silvery-gray surface was marked and pitted, making the once-glossy surface look dull and battered. A smaller rectangle on the top surface looked as though it had been carved out and then filled in with concrete.

  “All this, for that?”

  The older man sounded disgusted. No one else was in the room, but his partner cast a worried look over his shoulder, as though expecting someone to appear there and overhear the criticism.

  “If the owner says it’s art, it’s art,” he told his older companion firmly. “Let’s just get it settled, and get out of here.” Personally, the object gave him the creeps. Hell, the entire place gave him the creeps. But he was a professional, damn it. He was going to act like one.

  A low matte black platform, installed when the room itself was built and unused until now, waited to receive its burden. The two men took wide canvas slings that had been hung on the trolley’s handle, and fitted them around two corners of the marble block. The younger man’s hand brushed the surface of the stone where the cement plug was, and he shuddered involuntarily, stopping to look down at his hand as though expecting to see a spider, or something else less pleasant on top of it.

  “Will you stop that?” the other man snapped. “Concentrate on the job. I don’t need you getting sloppy and dumping it all on me.”

  Stung, his co-worker glared at him, shook his hand out unobtrusively, as though to get feeling back into a sleeping limb, and counted to three under his breath, just barely loud enough to hear. On three, they heaved, and with a seemingly effortless movement and a pair of grunts that destroyed that illusion, the stone settled into its new home.

  “That’s strange. Wonder if it’s been hollowed out? I thought marble that size would be heavier.”

  “Don’t complain, man, don’t complain! And for God’s sake, don’t ask,” the younger man begged, his eye closed against the sweat that was rolling off his forehead. “We on the mark?”

  The stone was square on its base, with a full three feet between it and the walls on two sides; room enough for a person to walk around it, should they so desire.

  “Yep,” the other workman replied. “Perfect, as always.” It was as close to a compliment as they would get from anyone. They were hired via the company’s Web site, informed of the details by e-mail, paid by wire transfer, and never knew what any of it was all about. And they liked it that way. Some folk you just didn’t want to know any more about than you had to.

  Their work completed, the two rolled up the quilted pad and tossed it onto the trolley, pushing it out ahead of them as they left. They didn’t look again at the object they had delivered, nor did they pause to consider the other two objects already in place.

  No one waited at the door to show them out; they had been given their instructions before arrival, when they were assigned the job. They would walk down the bland, security-camera-lined hallway they had entered through, down a flight of stairs, and follow a row of lights through a basement maze that would deposit them through a four-inch-thick metal door in a ten-foot-high wall that ran along an unpaved country road. A livery car with darkly-tinted windows waited there
to take them back to the city, where they would be dropped off without once having seen another person.

  Their employer wanted his privacy. They were paid well enough not to wonder why. And the legalities of what they had done never entered their minds at all.

  When the last echoes of the workmen’s feet had faded into silence once again, silence reclaimed the building. In another wing, a door opened, and footsteps sounded, walking calmly, with no apparent haste or urgency, the owner of all within those walls. Occasionally the walker would pause to admire a painting, or caress a sculpture, but for the most part the priceless objects were accorded no more attention than the carpet underfoot, or the ceilings above.

  Eventually, the door into the white room was pushed open, and the owner of the house entered, walking with those same unhurried strides to the corner holding the newly-installed fixture. He paused in front of it, cataloguing every detail and comparing it to his expectations.

  “You’re not much to look at, are you?”

  The slab of stone didn’t respond to the voice.

  “But they do say, you can’t judge something by its looks. It’s not what’s on the outside that counts, after all, but the inside. Isn’t that right?”

  The figure knelt by the cornerstone, trailing one well-manicured finger along its rough surface, shivering pleasurably at the sensation. “But no matter. No matter. I know what you are, what you were. And all that really counts is that you’re mine, now.”

  four