Burning Bridges

by Laura Anne Gilman

  There would be an entire city filled with problems for them to face tomorrow, with the dawn of a New Year. For tonight, this morning, it was just them, and a warm bed, and the sweat of fabulous sex drying on their bodies.

  He couldn’t think of anything more he might want.

  Wren felt her partner’s breathing even out, his heartbeat slow into the deep patterns that meant he was totally, absolutely relaxed. She liked to believe that she was the only one to ever see him like this, that no one else who had ever shared his bed was privileged to be so trusted.

  Trust.

  Such a simple word. Such a harsh sticking point. She loved him, she trusted him…but she wasn’t as sure as he was that all the ties had been cut with the Silence. Not after his bum’s rush at Rock Center. She knew him, knew the deep pockets and hidden doors of his personality, even if she wasn’t entirely sure what lurked behind them. She knew him, maybe even better than he was willing to know himself. But how do you accuse the man you love of keeping secrets in his brain, even from himself? Especially since she already worried about the damage she was doing to him, simply by being close to him.

  She could control herself during sex. She had to. Because she no longer trusted him to be able to say stop, if there was overrush.

  Overrush. When current overflowed, overrode the ability of a Talent to control it. In small doses over long periods of time, it drove Talents to wizzing, madness. Fast, furious…It killed.

  And it would kill a Null even faster, leaving nothing behind.

  It was a long time before Wren was able to sleep.

  Dawn was breaking across the glass-and-brick buildings when the last stragglers left the bar, less drunk than punchy with exhaustion. And one figure wasn’t drunk at all, although the stagger and sway was picture-perfect, blending in with the others without hesitation.

  As soon as they turned the block and separated for different subway lines, that one figure held back, ostentatiously looking up and down the street for something.

  “You wanna join us?” one of her companions offered. “Gonna grab breakfast at J.P’s.”

  The petite redhead shook her head. “Nah, gotta find a working pay phone, check in with the boss, make sure there’s no emergency he needed me to sit on.”

  “Hell of a way to start the New Year.”

  “Yeah, well, work waits for no hangover.” The others laughed, and went on their way. A phone booth spotted, she jogged across the street, hoping against hope that the phone would actually be intact and working.

  Luck was with her; unlike most of the pay phones in Manhattan, this one was still being serviced on a regular enough basis to be working, not vandalized. Feeding coins and punching ten numbers in, she waited until the phone rang three times, then hung up.

  A minute later, the phone rang, and she picked it up.

  “One hundred seven people, estimated ninety-four lonejack. No Council. No fatae that I was able to discern, although some might have been passing, in the crowd. Limited use of current, save for an end-of-year blessing and at least one observed instance of water being turned into cheap wine…No, sir, that is not a joke. Well, it is a joke, a sort of parlor trick. It makes a mediocre white zinfandel-like wine, that’s all…No, sir. Not amusing at all, sir.”

  She actually thought it was funny as hell. Would be more impressive if they could turn it into bourbon, though.

  “Was solicited four times for my opinion on the situation, lectured twice on the evils of the Double-Quad’s plans and saw one argument over the situation break into physical conflict, which was ended by the waitress dumping a beer down the back of one participant. Overall, the mood is tense, but anticipatory. Estimated eighty-three percent think that they have a fighting chance to run the vigilantes out of town. Seventy-four percent are willing to settle for a truce. Somewhere between twenty-five and forty percent still think that the vigilantes aren’t the real problem, but a smoke screen, and that the Council is what needs to be addressed, first.”

  She listened to the voice on the other end of the phone, and dipped her head in acceptance, even though the speaker couldn’t see her.

  “Yes, sir. I have noted the names…. Yes, sir…No, sir, I did not…Yes, sir.”

  Her hand trembled on the receiver, and she, noting it, stilled it through sheer force of will. The current whispered in her brain, reassuring her. There was no cause for fear. There was no cause for concern. She worked for the greater good, for the betterment of all, and her master would not allow her to come to harm in the commission of these duties.

  The fluttering protest died, smothered under her conditioning, and she hung up the receiver, suddenly exhausted and wanting only to go home, and go to bed.

  eight

  On the first business day of the New Year, Sergei stood outside his baby, looking at it with the eyes of a proud, if somewhat still-astonished, parent.

  He’d found it almost by accident, walking home one evening, thirteen years and seven months before. Then, the street had teetered on the border between seedy and smart. He’d paid too much money for what it was, cheap for what it would become.

  The neighborhood was originally cheek-by-jowl warehouses, solid sturdy buildings of redbrick; classic New Amsterdam architecture. Over the decades gentrification had crept in, updating old spaces into trendy boutiques and sidewalk cafés with overpriced wine lists. Bad for rents, good for luring high-ticket browsers.

  He had replaced the original clear glass front with a stained glass design. The deep blues, reds and greens looked like abstract art from a distance, but if you came closer, they gave the effect of an underseascape. He had commissioned the piece from one of the first artists he had showcased, a young man who had gone on to larger showings. It cut down on his ability to display works, but gave him the advantage of individuality.

  Between the window and metal double doors left over from the building’s original purpose, a small bronze plaque announced that this was the home of The Didier Gallery.

  It had been his dream, during his last year with the Silence, the thing that kept him going, made him save his pennies and make his contacts, putting a longtime love of art and a passion for negotiating into a career that had nothing to do with blood, or pain, or danger….

  With a sigh that was equal parts disgust and amusement at the complications that comprised his life, Sergei unlocked the metal door, and turned off the security system. Even now, with all the tsuris his life contained, the simple act of walking in the door soothed his ragged nerves.

  Twelve years to the day, after major renovations and agita, he had turned the sign in the door over to Open.

  “Happy birthday, baby,” he said into the cool dark space.

  The space was split into three portions: the gallery, which included a galley space connected to the main floor by a spiraling metal staircase, a back office, including his own private space, and the storage and delivery spaces below, connected by an old freight elevator that Wren refused to get into. There were crates in the storage area he needed to go through and double-check against inventory lists, before anything was brought upstairs. Not that he didn’t trust his assistant, Lowell, to have done it properly, but…

  It was his name on the door. His name on the authorizations. Most important, his name on the bill of sale.

  This was what he loved: not the paperwork but the handling of artwork, finding the perfect place to display it in order to bring the right piece together with the right buyer. Getting the right price to support the artist and encourage him or her to create more, and starting the process all over again. It was a part of him nobody else shared, not his immigrant, politically minded parents or his aesthetically pragmatic partner.

  The closest he had ever come to a soul mate in this had been Lee, the lonejack artist whose work he had exhibited twice before the man’s unfortunate death during the Nescanni situation. The man’s death hadn’t hit him as hard as it had his partner—he hadn’t known Lee nearly as well, and hadn’t felt the
misplaced guilt that still rode Wren’s shoulders over it—but he did miss their conversations. Even before Lee held his first exhibit at the gallery, the lanky lonejack Wren called “Tree-taller” would stop by, and they would spend an hour or so talking about light, shadow, texture, and viewer interpretation of the artistic intent.

  Wren, bless her, would have fallen asleep midsentence, even if she’d wanted to be included.

  “You need to mingle more,” he told himself. And it was true; he used to go to all the openings, have drinks with the agents, the scene-makers….

  “As soon as everything’s settled,” he told the gleaming aluminum sculpture that was showcased in the current installation. “As soon as I know there’s going to be an art scene to worry about.”

  Survival before soul.

  Security lights made the rest of the installation into indistinct shadows, blue and red. The front lights would stay off until Lowell showed up at nine. Going through the sliding panel door that led to his private office, Sergei touched the small metal bird perched on a narrow pedestal right inside the door. Lee’s work—the lonejack had said it was an emu, but Sergei just knew that the quizzical look on the avian face made him smile, even on very bad days.

  The gallery itself was designed to showcase the wildly varied types of artwork he sponsored: clean lines and subdued cream walls. His office, on the other hand, was designed around him; his preferences, his indulgences. The desk was huge, a wide flat surface that held both a flat-screen monitor, and enough room to open a paper file and work without bumping elbows into anything. His chair was a tall leather swivel, and there was a matching leather sofa against the far wall, under a striking black-and-white photograph of Manhattan in the 1940s. Everything else was the work of an artist he had promoted, from Lee’s metal bird to a handblown glass sphere that swirled dozens of colors from the same woman who made his front window, to a tall pearlescent raku vase that arched like the neck of a swan, or a lily petal.

  He sat down at the desk, feeling the chair creak familiarly under him, and touched the base of the desk lamp, bringing a faint yellow illumination to the office. He had a folder of invoices that needed signing off on, and the layout of a new installation to approve, and a host of other details that only he could deal with. But the light on the “other” answering machine was blinking, and everything Sergei had planned to do got pushed back a bit. Like the bat signal, messages left at that phone number, which went to no phone at all, were given priority.

  An hour later, Sergei put down the phone a final time, pulled a sheet out of the fax machine behind him, and put it into the third of three piles, then pushed back in his chair, steepled his fingers, and stared over them, contemplating air.

  Three piles: three possibilities. One of them would be their first job of the year, and he tried to begin as he meant them to go on. So. One would pay obscenely well. Really, really, obscenely well. The other two were at the normal going rates, but might be of more interest to Wren, more of a challenge. And right now, keeping her interested and involved—all right, distracted—might be more useful than cash, even hard untraceable get-out-of-town-fast kind of cash.

  Not that Wren would be willing to leave town. Her, and P.B., both of them turning into Cosa activists under his disbelieving eye.

  And where Wren stayed, he stayed. No matter how doomed he thought it all was, facing down an enemy they could only see iceberg-glimpses of. Not that he would ever tell her that. Not either one of them; not that he would stay, although they knew that, and not that their entire mad, well-meaning alliance was doomed. Although he suspected that they knew that, as well.

  Not that they couldn’t win; he rather thought that they could. Bigotry couldn’t be erased—that was human nature, to fear what was outside your understanding, and to hate what you feared. But you could stop those who acted on their bigotry, and make others consider the cost too high to act on their hatred. And, if you did that often enough, with enough force, it became habit, and habit often became a stand-in for understanding, which would reduce the fear, which in turn would reduce the hate.

  Sometimes.

  Sergei had been in enough battles to know that you couldn’t fight what they were fighting, couldn’t fight that kind of all-out war, and then go back to where and what you were, before.

  He shook off those thoughts as useless: life was change. The only stillness was in dying, and none of them were ready to be still.

  And if they were going to live, then pragmatism and practicality had to be served. The maintenance fees in Wren’s apartment building had just hiked up, probably a result of the blast from this summer, or maybe just the general age of the building. Plus, he’d been thinking about expanding his business, maybe using his contact with Shig, the Japanese Retriever-fatae they had met over the summer, to establish the gallery’s name in an overseas market….

  He sighed, pulled himself back to his desk, and touched pile number one, almost a caress, before pushing the well-paying bid away. His hand then hovered over the remaining two sheets, coming down gently on the one to the left, purely out of instinct.

  Was this how Wren took that job, the one she took without him, without involving him? They had never actually talked about that, whatever it was that had driven her to meet with a potential client herself rather than pass it along to him, the way they had been doing for the entire length of their partnership, since the very first job. He was the one who researched, who interviewed, who…decidedly did not pick jobs on whim, or turn down better-paying jobs because they seemed boring or…

  Sergei bit back another sigh and drew the chosen slip closer toward him, to read it again, just in case there was something in there that he, maybe, might have missed.

  “Hello, sailors!”

  Sergei’s head lifted at the sound of his partner’s voice coming over the intercom that connected his office to the main desk. They left it in the on position as a safety measure; if someone were to come in and try to rob the gallery, Sergei would be able to call the police without being seen. Normally he could tune out the quiet conversations of customers, and the occasional phones ringing, but Wren’s voice caught his attention every time.

  “He’s in the office.”

  Lowell, who in every other way was the ultimate of professionalism, hated Wren the way only one cat could hate another, with delicate hissing and slitting of eyes. Wren returned the dislike, fighting back with a breezy obnoxiousness that was designed to irritate him even more.

  Sergei fluctuated between being amused, and feeling like a chew toy. He’d let Lowell know, as carefully as he could, that in an out-and-out battle he would side with his partner, not his employee, no matter how valued, and told Wren flat-out that she was not to force the issue, that if Lowell quit, it would make their lives—and their jobs—more difficult. And he monitored their interactions carefully, especially when he wasn’t there to quell them in person.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Sergei called, wanted me to meet him here.”

  “He’s in back,” was all Lowell said, but his tone clearly conveyed the message “go away, don’t break anything, don’t scare any of the well-heeled customers, don’t touch anything, leave me alone.”

  Sergei looked at his watch, and winced. No wonder his back ached; he had been hunched over these invoices for three hours.

  He had just put the folder off to the side, and tossed the white take-out container holding the remains of his lunch into the trash, when she breezed in through the sliding door.

  “It’s snowing again,” she announced, as though the white flakes melting on the wool of her ski cap and the shoulders of her black coat didn’t offer enough evidence. Her grin was manic; Sergei could relate. At this point, they’d already gotten twice last year’s snowfall, and it was only January: there were two more months of winter yet to go. He’d grown up in the Midwest’s Snowbelt, son of a Russian parent, and he was beginning to think that the weather was a bit overdone, this year.

/>   “I’ve got the means to take us somewhere warm,” was all he said.

  “A job?” She wasn’t as hyped as usual, although her face made all the right expressions of attentive interest.

  That was the problem; he had seen her becoming more and more obsessed with the situation with the Cosa, more involved with the plight of the fatae, even as she protested that she wasn’t a joiner, that she didn’t play well with others. He had been there once, himself, when he worked for the Silence. Even when you realize that you can’t change the world, once you get caught up in trying, a part of you had to go that last inch of that last mile, just in case that was the bit that made the difference.

  He had gotten burned out: the Silence had taken him in, chewed him up, and would have digested him whole if he hadn’t escaped. She knew that, although not the entire story, and reminding her of it wouldn’t do anything except start a fight neither of them wanted. Instead, he merely waved the folder of the job he’d decided she should take under her nose, as though wafting perfume.

  She took it, flipping through his carefully annotated information with her usual casual eye, trusting him to have done all the detail work. Her foray into soliciting jobs had shown that she could do the prep work as well as he did—she just chose not to.

  “So, it’s what, snatch-and-grab?” she said, closing the file and looking up at him. She’d absorb what he said faster and more completely than she would from reading what he’d written.

  “Basically. Private citizen this time. Well, semiprivate. A local councilperson has had materials taken from his home safe that he wants returned.”

  “Ooo. Blackmail worthy?” He could almost see the wheels in her head turning, as though her forehead was made of glass, sorting and discarding what it would take to make her actually use such material, rather than Retrieve and return it. Then, as he knew she would, she sighed and let those fantasies go.