Burning Bridges

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “May have,” someone snorted; from the wetness of the snort it was probably one of the muzzle-bearing fatae. “Because the angeli were so known for letting humans near them.”

  Wren, remembering the angeli youth she had seen being threatened on the subway, might have argued that point, but she had learned her lesson the hard way: her job wasn’t to get into things, but to observe, sift, and report back to the Quad.

  At this point, though, she wasn’t sure what she’d be able to tell them that they hadn’t figured out for themselves. Some of the Cosa were willing to listen. Too many had already decided, one way or another, who the guilty ones were, and what should be done about it. The room broke up into clamor again, some of it involving dangerous-looking hand-waving and jawflapping.

  Wren had only the faintest whiff of precog, too whiffy to be useful, but she could feel, deep in her core, things begin to crack and fail. Burning bridges. Cracking and falling into the river. Was that what the Seer meant? How did you cook a meal on something like this?

  “Lonejack maybe not, but the Council’s always been johnnie-come-reluctant. They’ve never made any bones about thinking we’re less than they are, barely Cosa at all. And they were behind the disappearances of lonejacks, too, last year, weren’t they? If there’s current involved, I say look at them!”

  Wren stiffened, trying to spot who that shout had come from. She didn’t believe it. She wouldn’t believe it, not without some reason, some proof. But it was possible, and—given the history—plausible. And for someone to voice all that, in this crowd…match to kindling, and kindling someone had presoaked in lighter fluid, at that.

  Beyl and Jordan exchanged glances across the length of the table, but said nothing. Bart looked as though he wanted to step forward, but didn’t. The tension built until Wren was ready to scream, just to push it into breaking. And then, creating an almost physical wave of shock, Rick slammed an open palm down on the table, causing everyone to shut up and stare.

  Rick looked like every suburban matron’s worst nightmare of a biker dude, down to his wildman hair and leather gear, but the South Jersey-Philly-area lonejack representative was the one member of the Quad Wren was honestly fond of. And the fact that he’d let her ride his bike once had nothing to do with that.

  “Once, we were threatened, and we turned on each other. We pointed fingers, and deflected official attention from us onto others, and be damned the cost. History has a name for that time, they call it the Salem Witch Hunts. Do we remember what the Cosa calls it? Does anyone here remember?”

  He didn’t wait for anyone to actually answer.

  “It’s called The Shame. Shame on them for doing such a thing. Shame on us for allowing it to happen. Shame enough to go around and cover us all with the stink of it. Shame that lingers to this day, and turns us into cowards the moment we again feel threatened.

  “Nulls can kill fatae. Fatae can kill humans—if we have our own Shame, they have generations of history of that, as well. The myths and legends came from a justified fear of things that went bump in the night. These so-called vigilantes act not from nothing—they have the same racial memory we humans all hold, of children dead in the dusk, of loved ones gone missing in the bogs, of spirits unquiet in the night. We all hold within us the destruction of the other, and all that keeps us from it is one thing, and one thing alone.

  “Trust.”

  His gaze felt like boiling water on Wren’s skin as it passed over her, and from the silent shifting of the crowd, she suspected she wasn’t alone in the sensation.

  “Can you turn to the person next to you, and trust them? Just one step further? Trust that they want what you want—to live, to love, to pursue happiness, without fear?”

  And he was doing it all, Wren realized suddenly, without resorting to current at all. Just sheer personal willpower. Dark green jealousy rose in her throat, and she let it, then let it go.

  Rick shook himself, like a shaggy dog shaking off water, and the hold he had on the group was broken.

  Jordan came forward then, the jacket of his seven-hundred-dollar suit off and his custom-made shirt open at the collar under his tie. Wren thought it looked like he was getting ready for a presidential photo-op.

  “All right, folk, we’ve got the PUPs on the scene, and they’ll give the Board a report and we’ll pass it along as soon as it’s in. Other than that, all we can do is stay calm and keep ourselves alert. Go home, now.”

  It was deeply anticlimactic after Rick’s speech, but it did the trick. The meeting didn’t so much break up as it siphoned off, dabs of people moving off into smaller groups, with a steady stream heading outside into the cold in order to have a cigarette. Some, but very few, of the fatae present lingered to speak to a few humans Wren recognized as fellow lonejacks, but the moment a Council member approached, the conversation ended. Rick might call for trust and tolerance, but the fatae had made up their mind: the Council was not to be trusted.

  Wren could certainly empathize. But the look on Ayexi’s face: a sad, worn-down hound look, tore grooves into her heart, and she found herself by his side, reaching out to take him in a consoling and totally unexpected hug, without being aware that she was moving at all.

  He returned the embrace, briefly, then they both stepped back, and he walked away, joining the other Council representatives huddled in a heated, isolated conversation.

  “Goodbye, Ayexi,” she said softly. Feeling suddenly and totally useless, Wren got gone; if anything came up, the Quad knew damn well where to find her. The sky had stopped cranking out the snow, and she paused for a moment to take a deep lungful of the air, sharply crackling in her mouth and throat and sparking her mind into new wakefulness.

  The busses were running, but she didn’t feel like sharing space with anyone right now. It would be a long walk, but a pretty one. And she hadn’t been to the gym in too long, anyway.

  Pulling a warm wool watch cap down over her head, and wrapping the matching scarf around her neck, Wren set off down the street, her gaze firmly on the icy sidewalk, but all other senses scanning the area around her. The unreliable sense Sergei had dubbed “Magedar” was in full flare, making her hypersensitive to any Talent or fatae who passed by. From the glances she received in turn, everyone else was on the same kind of high alert.

  But they’re not who the danger’s coming from. Are they?

  Where once there had been certainty, now was doubt. What if the whisperers were right? What if the danger, the funding for the vigilante attacks, had not been from some distant, unknown, surprisingly observant human bigots, but from within the Cosa? Wren believed the Council, as much as she could, when they’d said that they were not officially behind the attacks. Harassing lonejacks, yes, but it made no sense to murder fatae. State the obvious: If there was one thing about the Council that was consistent and countable-on, it was that there was an end to every means they went through, and the ends always profited them.

  This brought them no profit, no end-result plus. Maintaining the Truce benefited them, too. Specifically, it benefited Madame Howe, at the moment. Breaking it…

  The walk took longer than expected, in part because she stopped at a Starbucks to pick up a grande mocha, but by the time she got to her street, Wren had determined to her own satisfaction that the Council was no more scummy than historically established.

  This didn’t mean that the bad guys weren’t family. Because yeah, once a sufficient number of Nulls might be able to take down an angel. But twice was unlikely. Forewarned was pissy and dangerous, two things the angeli excelled at. While alone the angel she had seen threatened had been vulnerable, the moment he was able to call on his brothers, the two human toughs had been toast.

  A Talent, though…or another fatae, who could get in close because the angeli would never expect an attack from one of the “underling” nonhumans—that was a distinct and unlovely possibility. It might even be a probability.

  She got to her building, and could practically feel some of
the tension slip off her shoulders. Home wasn’t where the heart was, or where you hung your hat, or even where they had to take you in. Home was where you wanted to be, at the end of a lousy day. Or even midday in what was shaping up as a doozy of a lousy day.

  “Valere.”

  Bonnie sidled in the entry door just behind her, her usual redheaded Goth princess look muted by the royal blue down coat covering her from chin to knee.

  “Hey.” Wren was too tired to muster a more polite greeting. “You come from the dog-and-pony show?”

  “Nah, I’m too junior to merit that.” Bonnie had been the first PUPI Wren had ever met, on assignment to track down the men who had assaulted P.B. in her apartment. That attack had been ordered by Madame Howe, and been swept under the rug of the Truce. P.B. didn’t seem to hold a grudge, but Wren did. Even if she was able to work with them, she didn’t forget, and she didn’t let go of people hurting people she cared about.

  Bonnie, on the other hand, seemed to work on the “discover the facts, move on” mode—she had never once referenced the case once her input had been filed, even once she and Wren became building-mates and, slowly, friends.

  Then again, that was the whole point of the PUPs—to not let it become personal. Rick had mentioned the Shame, but that hadn’t been the only time that Talents had turned on each other. Even the most functional of families had bad decades: even the inter-Cosa relations in Italy had been strained for generations after WWI, for all that they spoke well of each other in public; fatae had little to do with humans, and Council made pronouncements and the unaffiliateds ignored them as best they could.

  PUPs were impartial; they didn’t take the side of anything excerpt the determined and verified facts. But they were still new, and not everyone believed impartiality was possible.

  “I’m starved. You want some lunch?”

  Wren had already learned not to pass up Bonnie’s home-cooking; her Talents were matched by her talent with a skillet and whatever odds and ends were in her fridge. How P.B. hadn’t glommed onto her as a mooch-source, Wren didn’t know.

  “Anyway, no, not part of the show, but I did come straight from the autopsy.” Bonnie unlocked her second-floor apartment door, shed her coat, and dropped it; the coat disappeared before it hit the floor. Probably Transloc’d right into the closet. Show-off.

  “The angeli allowed an autopsy?”

  Wren’s own coat had to be hung up the old-fashioned way, by opening the closet door and taking out a hanger. Sure enough, there was Bonnie’s down jacket, neatly stored.

  “We didn’t ask them.”

  PUPs were also becoming known for their arrogance. Justified arrogance was still arrogance, to Wren. But Bonnie managed to make it look cute.

  That must have been a pretty after-the-fact confrontation. Wren was glad she hadn’t been around for it. “And?”

  “And the angel died from exsanguination.”

  Wren put her hands, fisted, on her hips, and stared at the PUPI, an exasperated puff of breath making the tendrils of hair along her face rise and settle like Beyl’s wings. “We already knew that.”

  Bonnie shrugged, a helpless-looking move rather than one of indifference. “You didn’t know that the vic was incapacitated before being cut—by a rather massive dose of current.”

  Wren’s blood temperature dropped ten degrees, easy, despite the heat blasting through the radiators.

  “Current?”

  “Of one kind or another—we’re not certain, yet. Which is why that bit of information is not for widespread release. In fact, the boss is telling the Double Quad, and that’s it.”

  “And you’re telling me.”

  She blinked. “Am I? Ooops.” Cute and innocent-looking. Bonnie was dangerous.

  “Wait a minute.” Wren’s mind was already chewing on this new information. “Of one kind or another? You can’t tell?”

  Current, in Cosa parlance, was magic; Talent was the inner ability in some humans to channel it through their body and turn it into something useful. Current was also, in more common terms, electricity.

  “Nope.” Bonnie went into the kitchen, which was twice the size of Wren’s. The apartment only had one bedroom, though; Bonnie didn’t work out of her home and so didn’t need the space. She pulled down the Skillet of Doom, a huge cast-iron monstrosity that was at least as old as she was and almost the same weight, and thunked it down on the stovetop.

  Wren didn’t move, thinking over what Bonnie had said. Mage-current was madly individual, practically a living entity in and of itself. The fact that Current ran alongside electrical current, using it as the path of least resistance, was merely a fluke of nature and design…wasn’t it? But then, elementals lived in electricity as happily as current; maybe they couldn’t tell the difference, either? Or they didn’t care?

  Wren’s brain was beginning to hurt. She had never cared about the whys and hows of her skills, only the practical application of it.

  “Savory or sweet?” Bonnie called from the kitchen.

  “Savory,” Wren replied, following the redhead into the kitchen and perching herself on the opposite counter to watch the show.

  “In fact,” Bonnie went on, grabbing a head of garlic and tossing it to Wren for peeling, “realistically speaking, you can’t absolutely determine that there’s a real difference between current and, oh, a nasty lightning strike as a cause of death. In both cases, there’s a red mark, sort of like a leaf pattern, where current hits or exits. Ditto for lightning. Most people don’t die from the hit, or related burns, you know that? It’s the heart that kills them. Shock stops it, bam, just like that. Like the opposite of a jumper cable, or defibrillator. Current does the same thing. The stuff that’s in us allows us to channel it. Kills everyone else, ’cause their cells just collapse under the rise in internal energy.”

  Wren had just slammed the garlic on the counter to loosen the skin when what Bonnie said filtered through her already-hurting brain. “You’re saying that Talent is just insulation?”

  That stopped Bonnie for an instant, and made her laugh. “Yeah, I guess so, aren’t I?”

  She rinsed her hands at the sink, then went to the fridge and pulled out a packet of salmon, a couple of stalks of celery, and a head of something dark green and leafy, but too small to be lettuce. Taking it all to the counter, she dumped it into a small pile, then started slicing the salmon into strips. “Anyway, that’s all academic, because that’s not what I was talking about.”

  Wren stopped peeling garlic, totally confused. “What wasn’t?”

  “Lightning. This wasn’t lightning. Or man-made power. It was current. But we don’t know whose.” Fish dealt with, she shoved it to one side of the cutting board, and went to the sink to rinse her hands again, then started in on the vegetables.

  “No signature?” That was Wren’s greatest concern about PUPs, and why she tended to keep her usage low to nil around Bonnie: the fear that the girl would, even accidentally, someday be in a position to match a current signature to a Retrieval investigation, assuming anyone ever called a PUP in for something like that, and recognize Wren’s particular “fingerprint.”

  “Oh, if we had a database or something, if the user was in the database, we could match it, sure. But it wouldn’t be even close to bona fide evidence—current isn’t DNA, it’s more like, oh, a mug shot. More important to the situation, you can’t tell anything about the user, in a vacuum. Like, oh…Council or lonejack. There’s no damn difference between the current itself.” She turned the heat on under the skillet and then paused. “Well, actually, there is, but it’s totally subjective. It feels different, but there’s no way to point to something objective. Which isn’t a problem normally, because we know what we know. Except…”

  “Except you can’t use what you know to change the mind of someone who’s convinced otherwise.” Not that there was a court of law, as such, in the Cosa Nostradamus, but you still had to be able to argue the evidence to get a majority view to…what? To convict? T
o sentence? Wren had never thought that far ahead. She didn’t have to; that was the Quad’s job. Like the technical details of current, it just didn’t interest her.

  All the lectures and rants she’d ever been subjected to about being a good citizen and taking part in the system started to flutter in the back of her memory. This wasn’t American Civics 101—she didn’t have time to get into philosophical discussions with herself about the privileges and demands of society. She focused instead on what Bonnie was saying.

  The PUP had finished with the prep, and was going to the fridge in order to pull out something in an opaque Tupperware container. “Exactly. So we’re effectively useless at saying who actually committed the attack.”

  “Except they were Talent.” Was an inside job, in other words.

  “Or were able to mock it up, yeah. And before you ask, no I don’t know of anyone who can imitate current…but I don’t know that they can’t, either.”

  In short, the more they learned, the less they were able to narrow it down. The fatae was killed by basic, brutal vigilante-style methods…but he was incapacitated by Cosa-specific means. The implications of that were ugly: not only was the angel killed in a brutal manner, and staged to make a maximum, can’t-hush-it-up scene, but that it could have been done by a Cosa member specifically to break the Truce and scatter whatever solidarity the Cosa had managed to build.

  Wren should have totally lost her appetite by this time. But when Bonnie made a gesture indicating that it was time to hand over the garlic, she discovered she was, mordantly enough, starving.

  Crisis, like everything else, burned calories. Replace ’em, or fall over.

  Wren was damned if she was going to fall over.

  She finished the jobs—they didn’t finish her.

  twelve

  It was almost midnight when Wren made it up the stairs to her apartment, replete with excellent food, new information about the nature of current, and a surprisingly entertaining amount of gossip. Bonnie had perfected the art of scandal without cruelty, mainly because she so clearly loved knowing to know, not to use that information in any way. Wren supposed that was what made her so good at her job, that sense of information as an end within itself. Let others put what she knew to whatever use they wanted; it was enough that Bonnie got there first.