Burning Bridges

by Laura Anne Gilman

  When Wren nodded, not pausing in either her monosyllabic responses to her mother or her pencil-twirling, he put her bag and keys on the counter and hung her coat up alongside his in the closet, then disappeared down the hallway.

  Either the bathroom, or her office, she guessed. Sergei had been away from the office all day, and while he was getting better at letting his assistant, that kiss-ass weasel Lowell, handle things, he still liked to have a hand on the spoon if things were actively cooking. Which was a terrible metaphor, but she was distracted, damn it.

  “Wait a minute, he did what?” Wren put her pen down, to-do list half-made, and listened more carefully to her mother’s story. Family politics were as intricate as Cosa politics, but far more entertaining….

  Down the hall, Sergei sat down at Wren’s computer and booted it up. Her voice carried down the hallway, and the sound of laughter lightened his own dark mood considerably.

  There had been very little laughter in this apartment, lately. Too much tragedy, tension, trauma, and all sorts of words beginning with T. Very little laughter in their lives, overall, actually. Since…Since Lee died, probably. Before then, even when things were making them crazy, even when Wren was injured and he was losing his mind over keeping her safe, and they didn’t know when—or if—the next job would come in, there had still been laughter. Strained, sometimes; but laughter. When had it gone wrong?

  Sergei knew when: the moment he had negotiated that deal with his former employers, abandoning ten years of hard-won independence on his part in order to make sure Wren was protected from the Council. And for what? The Silence had their own issues, and that agreement put him—and Wren—smack-dab in the middle of those issues, exactly where they couldn’t afford to be.

  He had put them there; it was his responsibility to get them out. But it was as delicate a process as the original deal had been, and small steps that took forever. He didn’t tell Wren everything; she didn’t need to know. But she knew he wasn’t telling her everything, and that was adding to the tension between them.

  He had begun to wonder if he’d imagined the flashing brightness of her smile, or the liquid sound of her giggle, it had been so long since he’d encountered either.

  Then a peal of delighted laughter came down the hallway, and he smiled. No, he hadn’t imagined it.

  The computer’s Talent-proof, safety-rigged-seven-ways-from-Sunday system finally powered up and he logged on, surfed to the gallery’s site and checked his e-mail, humming softly under his breath as he did so.

  It wasn’t a lot, that one surge of laughter. It was barely anything.

  To him, it was everything.

  And he would do whatever it took to keep things that way.

  To: a_felhim@shhhh.info

  We need to settle this. Call me.

  —S.

  He hit Send, and waited.

  Across and far uptown, there was considerably less humor. The building could have been deserted, for all the noise that filtered down into the lower levels, where a coded key was needed to call the elevator, and a simultaneous retinal scan and biometric scan were needed to choose a floor destination. The technology used was on par, or in some cases excelled anything the government had, mainly because this organization could afford to pay for it—and had no need to justify to anyone where the money went.

  Two figures emerged from the elevator doors, walking with an unconscious unison of movement down the hallway, so much so that it was difficult to see who was mirroring whom. Both wore wool slacks, button-down shirts of lightly starched white cotton, and expensive shoes. An educated consumer might note that the younger man was more fashionably dressed, but the older man’s shoes were the more expensive, and better maintained.

  A female figure with a dark blue lab coat over her street clothes moved past them in the other direction, barely acknowledging them with a preoccupied nod.

  “Denise Vargha. One of our better people. She’s in charge of the seventh team.” The speaker—the younger man—was clearly aware that he wasn’t telling his companion anything that his superior didn’t already know, but felt the need to say something to fill the space.

  “Indeed.” The older man’s voice was modulated for extreme politeness, bordering on boredom, with just a hint of “don’t annoy me.” As director, he signed off on all of the forms for R&D; he knew all the players, down to the laboratory’s off-hour sanitation crew.

  The subordinate took the hint, and went back to silence for the rest of their walk, until they came to the end of the hallway and went through another set of security measures to gain entrance to the rooms beyond that doorway.

  “Director.” The human element of the security partition didn’t quite salute, but his spine did straighten noticeably. The guard nodded to the other man. “Dr. Hackins.”

  “You’ve made some improvements since I was here last,” the older man said, looking around at the cold-tiled walls and cement floor with drains set at two-foot intervals. This time, a hint of approval colored his words; a carefully calculated effect, negated by his adding, “No more fire starters?”

  “No, sir.” The reprimand stung, but Hackins—as manager of the project—had already taken responsibility for that incident; it was over and there was no need to apologize. Apologies were a weakness worse than the original mistake.

  The two men were passed through the security buffer and into the main lab, the reason for the entire building. Two more doors, each one a simple steel slab which could be opened only by a triple-checked thumbprint of a verified team member, or the director’s personal override.

  The room they were in now, after the second door, was capital-C clean; white walls, tiled floor, and stainless fixtures. A man in a white lab coat over his shirtsleeves was seated in front of a glass window, while the subject he was working with rested in an elongated, dentist-type chair on the other side. The chair might have been comfortable if it weren’t for the leads affixed to her scalp and pulse points, and the leather restraints around her ankles, wrists, and neck. She was a slender, freckle-faced blonde, who looked as though she should have been running through a meadow with Disney-style animals leaping at her heels, not tied down inside an underground laboratory.

  “Bethany. One of our more valued resources. I will admit to resisting putting her to this use; however, it does seem—”

  “Gareth. To the point.”

  “Ah. Yes.” Gareth Hackins didn’t do anything as clichéd as tug nervously at his collar, but had he been less well trained he would have wanted to. “This is the third team’s pet project, as was detailed in the yearly report.”

  He paused, and when there was no response, he continued as though given an enthusiastic go-ahead.

  “It is a variant of conditioning response we have been working on for the past few years. Ideally, we will create a reaction against using magic except under direct command. Specifically, our command. Past attempts to accomplish this have used more traditional brainwashing procedures, with variable results. The effects would not last long enough for the subject to remain useful, and most of the projects, as you saw in the report, had to be terminated. A waste, really. With this approach, we are using their own abilities to create a loop, so that the more they use their magic, the more they tie themselves to the structure we create, emotionally.”

  “And how is that coming along?”

  Hackins gave a faint, almost unobservable shrug. “Putting their magic under restraint is simple enough. They are already predisposed to take orders from the basic training all of our operatives go through. However, the next step has proven to be slightly more…problematic. Seven of the subjects have responded by shutting down all access to what is commonly referred to as ‘current,’ in effect lobotomizing themselves. One other—subject nine—accepts commands, but only of the most passive sort. Bethany, subject eight, seems to have the most potential to work on an active level. However, she has been resisting the final breakdown.”

  The director leaned in to
look at the subject. “Touch her again.”

  The technician tapped a key, and the girl in the padded chair convulsed once, and then lay still. Her brown eyes were open wide, staring at the pale cream-tiled ceiling, and sweat trickled down the side of her face, dripping into her tangled hair and onto the padding of the couch.

  “Response?”

  “None.”

  “Move it up.”

  The tech used his thumb to slide the lever up, and then went to tap the key again. A slight hesitation, a glimpse backward at his boss, and he touched the key.

  “Fffffuck you,” the girl managed around her clenched jaw. Her gaze flickered off to the side, taking in the two newcomers, then went back to her direct tormenter.

  “Interesting,” Hackins said. “Most of them have broken by now. She’s, yes, most interesting. The higher level of Talent seems to indicate a higher level of stubbornness, as well.” He turned to the tech and checked the readouts the man was monitoring. “There’s been no push back along the leads?”

  “We had to replace the first two sets,” the tech replied, “but once she realized that we’d insulated the main boards, she stopped wasting her time. Bethy’s a smart one, she is.”

  “Yes. Very smart.” Hackins looked through the glass at the subject, thoughtfully. “Interesting.”

  “This insulation allows you to stop their magic?” the director asked the technician.

  “Sir. Not exactly, sir. It merely routes it through several layers, slowing it down with each turn. If she really wanted to do damage, she could, but we suspect that it would burn her out to generate that much energy.”

  “You suspect?” The man’s face went still, and the tech and Dr. Hackins both felt the temperature of the room drop significantly with his disapproval.

  “Despite our resources, there is still a great deal about these Talent that we do not understand,” Hackins said. “That is why the work is progressing more slowly than anticipated. A wrong step, a push too hard, and we burn them out before the desired result is accomplished. But if this new procedure works, we should be ready for the next level quite quickly.”

  “She will not balk at commands?”

  “She would be incapable of distinguishing between our wishes and her own,” Hackins assured him.

  “Excellent. On with your work, then. Gareth, you said that you had the remains of the other subjects on storage? I would like to see the results of the autopsies.”

  “Of course. This way, please.”

  The two men exited out the door at the other end of the control room, abandoning tech and subject without a backward glance.

  Left alone with his work, the tech’s shoulders sagged slightly in relief. He was very good at his job, but the ratio of failures in this project had been higher than anticipated, and the Boss was not a man you wanted to disappoint. Ever. Especially not when you were in his direct line of sight. The head of R&D was a fair man, nobody ever said he wasn’t, and a good man to work for, if you pleased him, but he had no tolerance for anything he considered sub-par effort.

  A tapping noise drew his attention to the other side of the glass. “Loosah,” the girl managed, her face stretching into something that might have been a snicker, as though she had read his mind. “Sssssuckbutt.”

  Snarling in response, the tech tapped the button again, and electricity surged through the electrodes attached to her skin, rocketing through the nerve endings—and the extra channels that made her a Talent, overloading her core into painful quivers that wasn’t quite what her kind called overrush, when the core exploded into the rest of the body, but close enough to give her a taste of what it might feel like.

  Her body arched off the padded chair, her upper torso shaking in a scream that didn’t escape her throat. Muscles in her arms corded against the restraints, trying to break free, and the monitors in front of him red-flagged as her current reached out, trying to find him, destroy him.

  “Don’t struggle so much, Bethy,” the tech advised in a mock-sympathetic voice, watching as the monitors subsided out of red into yellow. “Like we’ve been telling you all along, it doesn’t hurt if you don’t resist it.” He paused, then pushed a lever up a notch. “Unless of course I make it hurt.”

  The girl shuddered again, but the monitors stayed within the yellow range. Her lips pulled back again, this time clearly in a grimace, but she refused to give him the satisfaction he craved. She could clearly feel the things they were doing to her brain, was aware of the insinuations, the subtle suggestions they were whispering to her, feeding into her through every pulse of current around her. But Bethany was more than stubborn. She might have taken employment, against her mentor’s advice, with the men who had betrayed her, strapped her into this chair and tried to use her for their own purposes. But she was Talent. She was Cosa. She would not break.

  She would not betray her family.

  four

  Wren stared up at the ceiling and wondered what idiot had first decided that sheep were a soothing image. Sheep did not, in her mind, equal sleep.

  The dark paint on the walls and the heavy curtains on the window were usually comforting, making her bedroom a restful hideaway, conducive to sleep, sleep, and more sleep. Tonight, the combination made the room feel like a coffin. Wren stared at the ceiling where dark shadows rested and tried to understand why.

  It was too quiet, she finally concluded. That sounded like a cliché but it was true: Wren was so used to the constant rumble of traffic coming down the avenues, the hum of news copters and Coasties off the river, the thud-boom of construction, and the ever-present counterpoint of horns…even at night, there was enough motion to justify the city’s claim to never sleep. But the recent snowfall was also muffling the usual nighttime sounds. And without it, she couldn’t sleep.

  Unfortunately, her other option: wake Sergei up and make him suffer with her, would require actually waking him up. And that, she was discovering, had been easier when it involved a phone call rather than rolling over and poking him. Not because he would be annoyed with her, but because he was just so damn cute when he slept. The stern features that worked so well in his Business-guy persona relaxed and softened, and his ruthlessly groomed hair fell into his face, rising and falling with the exhalation of his breath.

  She watched him for a few moments, as best she could in the dim light. It was rare to see him this relaxed: the past few months had both of them all tied up in knots, between the Council’s power games, the vigilantes, and the threat of some shadowy power behind that bigoted organization, directing and arming them….

  And now, the added stress of the three-way negotiation between lonejacks, fatae, and Council was making her stomach ache, and putting new lines between Sergei’s eyes.

  The next round of that particular joyride was this afternoon, and she needed to be well rested, on the top of her game, not exhausted and fretful. And staring at the ceiling, listening to Sergei snore, wasn’t going to get her there.

  Wren slid out of bed, shivering as her feet hit the carpeting, and grabbed her robe, wrapping it around herself before turning back to tuck the quilt around her partner’s still-sleeping form.

  When in doubt, act. When outnumbered, run. When insomniac, obsess. It was a simple creed, but one that worked for her. Without turning on any lights despite the 2:00 a.m. darkness, she padded down the hallway to the kitchen, pulled out a can of diet Sprite and a half-eaten package of Oreos cookies, and padded back down the hallway to her office. Once the door was closed behind her, she flicked the overhead light on, blinking at the sudden illumination. “Ow.” Another flick, and the hum of her computer started up. Sitting in the chair, the soda placed carefully away from the mess of wires and electronics, she reached in and grabbed a cookie, crunching down with gastronomic satisfaction. There was nothing better than the gritty-and-creamy combination of crisp cookie and sludge filling.

  Her computer came alive, running through screens until the familiar icons appeared. She pulled up the tabbed fi
les for Old Sally, and started reading through the last known sightings, both verified and alleged, for the bad-news-bearing bansidhe. There hadn’t been anything to add to the file in almost three months, but it was entirely possible that her sleep-deprived state would see something, or make some connection she hadn’t before.

  It would be nice if her job was all adrenaline and action, but, regrettably, more and more it seemed to be all about the paperwork. Wren didn’t know if it was because Sergei was giving her more to do on that side, or she was just getting jobs that required more than a blueprint and a prayer—or if it was the fact that she was so frustrated all the time that was making her feel like the job wasn’t fun anymore.

  “Probably the last,” she said out loud. There had always been workups and research. She just used to enjoy it more.

  “Oh, screw this.” She closed the file, and stared at the screen, then reached over and made a few keystrokes. It had been a while since she’d had the time or energy to just sit and chat. The moment she logged into her IM account, however, she was pounced on—

  Hey figgie!

  Figgie, short for “figment of your imagination.” Wren found herself smiling as she typed a response.

  hey. de-figged.

  Been worried. How goes?

  Wren had no idea who was behind the screen name, other than the fact that she was a member of the Cosa, female, and lived in the Southern Hemisphere. And, based on their last conversation, was a member of the Council down there. Wren had asked her—delicately, as it wasn’t really a topic for casual conversation—about Wren’s then-fear that the Council had been involved in the attacks on the fatae, as well as trying to intimidate the lonejacks into coming under their protection. The Australian Talent had denied the possibility of both actions—denied it so strongly that she had fried the system with her current-powered outrage.