Burning Bridges

by Laura Anne Gilman

Despite herself, she had to grin. Nice message. She had one in return.

  “Andre. It’s Valere. Time to pay the debt. I need an answer from you.”

  It was a simple enough question. She only hoped he was willing to answer it.

  She could have called Sergei, had him get the answer for her. Even with him not in the city, it would have been easier. Faster. Probably smarter. But something made her shy away from the idea, and instead deal directly with the devil himself.

  Hanging up the phone, she touched her core again, just for reassurance. Losing control of that tendril had shaken her; she hadn’t done that since she was a kid, not without a lot more cause.

  It was all getting to be too much. Too much effort. Too much responsibility. But there wasn’t any way out; not now, not then, not ever since this had all started. Wren had always refused Fate, denied karma, but…But she had the particular skills and—in this case—contacts the Cosa needed, and no matter how dirty it made her feel, it had been the right thing to do.

  She envisioned the current stored and renewed within her as snakes, coiling and slithering around each other in the warmth of her core, the dry papery sound of scales their endless song. It soothed her. She wondered, briefly, how Bart saw his current.

  Gah. She needed more coffee.

  By the time she got back to the main room, P.B. had already left. She was somewhat taken aback that the fur pile hadn’t said goodbye, but considering how often they’d been seeing each other recently, and how soon they’d probably be in the same room again, it did feel a little silly. He’d never been much on goodbyes, anyway.

  “I have a call in to someone who might be willing to help us,” she said, sitting down on the sofa again.

  Bart made a “go on” gesture, but Wren shook her head. She was uncomfortable enough calling on Andre, without letting people know she was calling on him. Or, more specifically: the resources of the Silence, which had, after all, failed her rather spectacularly before.

  So why are you trusting him now?

  Because we’re out of options, she told herself.

  Bart got a look on his face that indicated a game of mental tag in process, probably with the other members of the Quad. Wren waited. They conferred, came to a conclusion: “I don’t suppose you want to go back with me to do some more damage control?”

  Wren didn’t. At all. But that was exactly what she had signed up for: guiding them through the nasty little dance steps of working with the fatae and the Council, and all the other players that most lonejacks had the basic common sense to stay away from. The Truce was broken, but the talks were still going on. So long as that was true, Lee’s legacy was on hold, and her guilt alone would keep her at the table.

  So she sighed, and grabbed her coat from the brown leather armchair it had been tossed over. “Let’s go.”

  “You don’t need your coat,” he said, and Wren only had time to feel her gut seize up before the Translocation hit.

  I fuckin’ hate this, she thought, even as her stomach twisted on itself and she reappeared in the Truce headquarters, trying very hard—and failing—not to throw up.

  “Next time,” she heard a voice say in disgust as she was falling to her knees, “we let her take the subway, okay?”

  There was a hard knock at the Quad-commandeered apartment’s door, breaking into the irregular rhythm of the ongoing arguments.

  “Is she here?” a voice demanded from outside.

  “Yeah.” The person on door-duty didn’t seem inclined to let the first speaker in, despite the affirmative answer, and at Beyl’s signal her gnome-assistant, who still hadn’t been introduced by name, was sent off to expedite matters.

  Sergei came into the dining room/meeting area, shedding his coat and looking like a two-legged thunderbolt. The seven humans at the table variously braced themselves, and Beyl’s top feathers fluttered as though catching a faint breeze. The only one looking unruffled was the folletto, a tall, almost translucent fatae who was currently serving as lieutenant-reporter to the Patrol sectors.

  Wren braced herself. “What couldn’t wait?” Her tone was cool, meant to remind him that he was allowed in here only on sufferance. That he was a Null, and not a part of these deliberations. He walked away. He wouldn’t take your concerns seriously. If he won’t protect himself, then you have to do it for him. But it was hard. God, it hurt.

  “I got a phone call that was of probable interest.” He looked at her, directly, without any emotion showing at all. For the first time in years, she couldn’t read him.

  “A call from…” Colleen prompted.

  “A mutual friend,” Sergei replied, still staring at Wren.

  Andre. The rat bastard had gone to Sergei, instead of getting back to her directly. Bastard. Cowardly little… Ignoring the fact that she had told him off in a significant fashion the last time he had tried to come to her with anything.

  “Did he have anything useful to share?”

  “Not particularly, no.” But the carefully controlled look on his face suggested otherwise; she could tell that much, still. “But the things he did have to say were…interesting. The situation with the missing operatives is possibly deeper than we knew.” He brought himself up hard, then gave in, a little. Not an apology, but a sidestep: this was, like her calling Andre in the first place, too important to let their personal emotions interfere. “He’s being stonewalled, even beyond previous miscommunications and delays, and that’s made him curious. He’s going to put his best people on following up on your suggestion. His best person, actually. If it’s knowable, Darcy either knows it, knows someone who doesn’t know they know it and knows how to get it out of them, or can put together pieces and be the first person who knows it.”

  Wren actually followed that sentence. “And she’ll bring it to our mutual friend?”

  “Without doubt.”

  “All right.” She turned back to listening in on the conversation they had been having when Sergei came in, semi-absently pushing an empty chair next to her out for him to take. Not quite the “welcome home” she’d like to give him, if things were different, but it would have to do for now.

  “Even with that—” Beyl tried to pick up where the argument had been interrupted “—we still need to establish some sort of public face….”

  They didn’t say anything to each other the rest of the meeting, sitting side by side with the distance growing between them with every word they didn’t say. Finally, as the afternoon wore into evening, she felt a touch on the back of her hand, under the table. She didn’t look at him, didn’t react, but slowly turned her hand over, so that his fingers rested across her palm. And there it rested, until Bart finally decided that further discussions were just going to send them shrieking into corners, at this point. “Get some sleep, we’ll come back tomorrow.”

  Wren wasn’t going back tomorrow. At this point, they didn’t need her, they needed Henry Kissinger. On steroids.

  They picked up their coats from the sofa where they had been piled, and left the building together, still not speaking to each other directly. Colleen had offered to Translocate them home, but they both had declined, not particularly gracefully. Wren threw up no matter who was doing the Transloc, never a pleasant experience, and once a day was once more than she really wanted to subject herself to. She’d rather brave the weather, the mass transit, and the inevitable damage both were going to do to her shoes.

  Finally, after a few minutes of walking through the slushy streets, Sergei broke the silence. “For those of us who came in late, how go the desperate measures, really?” His words were flippant, but his tone wasn’t. “Because I got the feeling that the conversation was way too polite, once I got there.”

  “Badly,” she said, not denying his observation. “The Council’s still at the table, you saw that, they’re taking part in the Truce, technically…but they’re not listening. It’s totally for show, although I can’t convince Rick or Susan of that.”

  “Bart, on the other hand,
is convinced everyone’s lying to him,” Sergei said wryly.

  “You know our boy. And Beyl and Michaela are both trying to hold on to hope, outwardly, but it’s uphill both ways in the snow. Literally. Is it ever going to stop snowing?”

  Sergei had his arm around her, less for support, although the streets were difficult to walk on, and more as though to reassure himself that she was there, that she wasn’t about to slip away into the soft curtain of white around them. If she was smart, she’d do just that.

  She didn’t.

  The subway was a block away, but a bus was coming up to the corner as they approached, and Sergei tugged her into line, coming up with a metro card before she had a chance to reach into her pockets. And he said that she was the magician?

  The bus was crowded, so he found a handhold to grab on to, and she stayed next to him, this time actually needing the support.

  “So what did Andre really have to say?” The question had to be broached, even though she was leery of going anywhere near anything even remotely personal, and this took a whopping big step there.

  “When we get home.” And that was all he said. She took her cue, leaning against his side as they rode the bus, halting and jerking into motion again with each stop, the snow coating the windows outside and the moisture from people’s breath gathering on the windows inside, until it seemed as though they were riding through blackness with no landmarks to tell them when or where.

  But the gift of a regular bus rider—something Wren was, if not her partner—was an inner knowledge of when your stop was coming up. So two streets before, she came alert, and began easing their way through the crowd of evening rush hour commuters to get to the rear exit in time.

  They were still two blocks from her apartment, but the snow was light enough now to see through, and the streetlights had come on. For a moment Wren could forget how thoroughly tired she was of winter, and look at the white-and-black shadows without seeing, like an afterimage, the ghastly splash of angel’s blood dripping onto it.

  The apartment was quiet, except for the hum of the heat rising through the ancient radiators. There was no traffic on the street below, and the sounds from the avenue a block over were muffled. Wren walked in the door and, for the first time in months, felt the once-familiar soothing presence of her home drape itself over her.

  “It worked,” she said in tired satisfaction.

  “Huh?” Sergei stopped midway through unwinding the dark blue scarf from his neck, and looked at her.

  “Last night, I remembered a cantrip Neezer used to do, before exams. He’d cast it over the classroom, so everyone would come in and stop stressing so much and just remember the stuff they’d been studying.”

  “Isn’t that cheating?” He had never met her mentor, but the man’s innate honesty was one of the few things that had stood between a perfect student-mentor relationship, according to Wren.

  “Nah. If they had cast it, or if it had actually done anything to their memory, or heightened their smarts…all it did was relax them, like incense only without the smell or smoke.”

  “And you did that here.”

  “A version of it, yeah. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier.”

  Pointing out that she’d been under a considerable amount of stress lately, which was inevitably screwing with her logical thought processes, was probably not the wisest thing he could say, so Sergei didn’t say anything. Love didn’t have to make you stupid, although you apparently couldn’t prove it by either of them.

  “Wren.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I love you.”

  She blinked at him, and exhaled. “I know.” It might have been the cantrip she cast, that made the muscles between his shoulder blades suddenly relax, but he didn’t think so. She took her coat off, and held out a hand for his. “You hungry?”

  “Sure.” She put both coats away in the closet, and he leaned against the hallway wall, watching her. “You back on the Noodles kick now?”

  She gave him a grin that suddenly made him nervous. “I got food in the fridge.”

  He mimed falling over dead from the shock, and she laughed. “Yeah, I know. P.B. got fed up and did an online grocery store order thing for me. So now I have no excuse—and he gets to pick out what he thinks I should eat.”

  “God save us all.”

  “Yeah. But there’s chicken in there, and fresh vegetables, and Christ knows what else…”

  That was all the excuse he needed. Shoving her gently into the chair, Sergei opened the fridge in her tiny kitchen and set to work.

  “So. Andre,” she prompted.

  “Called me.”

  “I got that part.”

  Sergei rinsed the chicken breasts and patted them dry with paper towels, aware that he was using delaying tactics. He was also aware that he had no reason to be annoyed: Wren had, in his absence, gone directly to a potentially useful source. She hadn’t bypassed him, merely not waited. Except she had gone to a source that she had made—delete that. That he had chosen to give up, to show his allegiance and support for her, for her side of things, her safety and well-being.

  And to maintain that well-being, of her and her side of things, she used Andre. Isn’t that what you’ve always done? All to support and protect and maintain her, and the partnership? So why are you so bent out of shape?

  Because he had been the one to walk away from her. And she let him come back…because he came with information. If he hadn’t…would that door have been opened as easily?

  He had always assumed that he would be the senior partner, the one with the contacts, the information, the upper hand, even with her skill set. Even once their partnership evened out, he felt, somehow, that she would always look to him, always need him.

  Instead, she was growing away from him. Refusing him. And that stung. Ego, and emotions, and everything in between.

  He set the chicken breasts on the cutting board, still not answering her. He wasn’t delaying, he was processing. Logic, for him, was the great mellower. He couldn’t stay angry, even at himself, once the flaws in his logic had been driven home and dealt with.

  “Andre says, as I reported, that he has no information about the attack. And that he will put Darcy on the job.” He paused, taking down a knife from the board and testing the sharpness against the chicken flesh. Satisfied, he started to slice the breast into pan-ready fillets. “Darcy’s his researcher, which is sort of like saying you’re a decent housebreaker. If there’s any information anywhere in the Silence about the angel’s death, and who might have had a hand in it, she’ll find out.”

  He could see Wren processing that, and could almost see the connection being made between the existence of Darcy and his seemingly inexhaustible storehouse of knowledge. He regretted, in a small, petty way, giving up that secret, but only for an instant. She still didn’t know all his magic tricks.

  “Do you think…”

  “That the Silence had anything to do with it? That they were the ones who broke the Truce?” He didn’t stop with the knife work. “It’s possible. You followed the same logic trail: who knew about the Cosa? Thanks to me—” and his bitterness seeped through the words, despite his best effort “—they do. Would they profit from the Cosa being fractured?” He shook his head. “I can’t see how, or why. It would make no sense. Even with the infighting that’s going on now, they’re the good guys, Zhenchenka. High-handed, yeah, and arrogant and know-it-all beyond belief, but the entire reason for their existence is to protect the innocent, the helpless. To fix wrongs, not create them.” He had spent almost as long with them as working with her. He spoke with solid authority on that aspect.

  “And you don’t think an organization like that can be…what’s the word I’m looking for? Subsomething-or-other.”

  “Subverted?”

  “Yeah.”

  He’d had cause to wonder, in his last days, when the burnout and exhaustion almost killed him. “I think it would be highly unlikely. It’s easy t
o corrupt one man, one individual. It’s almost as easy—maybe easier—to corrupt a small governing board, like the Council. A bureaucracy? Not impossible. But damned difficult. And a bureaucracy with as much power in different levels, as many checks and balances as the Silence tends to have, with each department operating on their own?”

  “Uh-huh.” Wren had that Tone in her voice, the one he suspected her mother had used on her a lot. “The words are good ones. But you’re not resounding with the ring of certainty there, partner.”

  She was right, and he hated it.

  “There’s only one way it could happen. If Duncan made it happen.”

  “Duncan?”

  He had never mentioned Duncan to her? Of course not. You didn’t even mention Duncan to yourself. “The Power That Be, near the top of the food chain. And I mean the very, very top. This is a guy who makes the Council’s Madame Howe look like a schoolgirl.”

  Sergei wasn’t kidding. He wasn’t even exaggerating in the slightest. Duncan was legend in the Silence, in a community that didn’t believe in legends or myths or anything else that couldn’t be dealt with by a practical application of know-how, elbow grease, cash, and weaponry as needed.

  The steel weight of the knife in his hand felt solid and flimsy at the same time, compared to the reassuring mass of a pistol, and he could almost hear his palm ask for the blued steel weight against it. A knife would be enough, with his training. But it didn’t have the distance, didn’t have the range of his pistol, tucked into the safe in his apartment, halfway across town.

  I would die to protect you, he told her silently as he sliced the chicken. But I’m no use to you if you won’t let me in. If you don’t trust me.

  Honesty forced him to add: And I’m no use to you after I’m dead, either. And if Duncan is involved…I will be dead. The moment he determines that it’s needful.

  He couldn’t linger on that. Any one of them, all of them, might be dead tomorrow, anyway. All he said out loud was “Did P.B. happen to order any fresh garlic?”

  sixteen