Burning Bridges

by Laura Anne Gilman

  KimAnn pursed her delicately colored lips thoughtfully, following a thought that occurred to her. “This organization, the Silence. They have the Retriever Valere on their payroll, as well as other Talents?”

  “Yes.” Heather had all that information at the ready, as KimAnn knew she would.

  “Who speaks for them?”

  “Madame…we don’t know.”

  “I beg your pardon?” One silvered eyebrow rose.

  Heather held her ground, nervously. “We know through Colleen’s reports of them, and of the Double Quad’s concerns that they are somehow set against the Cosa. Members who work for them have been…they have drifted from their families, or disappeared entirely. In fact, some of those who went missing were laid at our doorstep.”

  “We had nothing to do with those?”

  “No, Madame.”

  “An oversight. Find the head of their organization. I want to meet with him or her, immediately.” She wasn’t sure what she might say to this individual, but anyone who was a power in this town—anyone who had any influence whatsoever over the Cosa, as they clearly did—was someone she needed to know, to judge. To use, if possible, and placate if dangerous.

  “It may be that they are the key we need. First to prove we are not the—what is the phrase the children use these days? The Big Bad? And second, to create a more terrifying danger.” KimAnn laughed, a noise that managed to be both delicate and robust at the same time. “And to think that we were creating a straw tiger, when all the while not one but two already lurked in the bushes!”

  Heather did not protest further, and the meeting was adjourned without further comment. Only then did the fourth person in the room stir from her silence.

  “You go too far, Kimmie.”

  If there was anyone else in the world that KimAnn Howe would accept that nickname from, it was a deeply buried secret. Perhaps her husband; if so, he had never taken that liberty in front of witnesses.

  “You’ve been manipulated, the same way you’ve manipulated others for years. I’d say turnabout was fair play, but none of this has been about fairness.”

  “Make your point, Elizabeth.”

  The speaker was a tiny little woman, barely four feet and totally engulfed by the chair she sat in. Wizened and worn, she looked like she might have been a dryad from a particularly ancient tree, but she was completely human, if very very old; old enough to remember when KimAnn had been a promising, brash young Talent.

  “My point has already been made. You go too far in your fear.”

  “I am not afraid!” That stung, badly.

  “Only fear makes a woman into a tyrant. And that is what you have become.”

  “Now, you argue my tactics? You, who taught me how to marshal power, to control others with their own needs?”

  “Power makes a dictator, and dictators may be benevolent, even in their most extreme control. A tyrant is nothing but abuse in action.” Her short, age-spotted fingers moved restlessly over the blanket on her lap, the small needles she was using to knit up the edge stuck into the ball of yarn by her side.

  “I am as I was made,” KimAnn said. “Powerful.” Her voice softened, as it only did when speaking with her husband, and her mentor. “I’m doing what’s best for the Talent—all Talent. You agreed with me, once.”

  “I still agree with you,” Elizabeth responded, sharp-voiced. “The lonejacks were always a mistake; I have maintained that since before you were born. I am merely cautioning you against hubris. You go too far, messing with those outside the Cosa. It will not end well, not for any of us.”

  Wren adjusted the collar of her blazer, twitching the strands of hair out of the way. Every summer she was glad for the length, for the ease of getting it up off her neck, but in the winter it was always an itchy, uncomfortable mess under her hat and collar. Someday she was going to break down and chop it all off to her ears. Or maybe a buzz cut.

  Her slicks were still unusable, but this job wasn’t anything she needed them for. The target was a private citizen, one without the property or reputation to require major security, and the papers she had been hired to Retrieve were being kept in his personal home.

  Piece a cake. Or it would be, if Wren believed any such thing existed. She had seen too many easy jobs turn to shit in the execution, and jobs that should have taxed even her skills slide like silk.

  You planned as much as you could, then you tap-danced like mad.

  She squared her shoulders, set her jaw, and walked briskly up the stairs, her blazer and short pleated skirt almost crackling with starch, the white cotton turtleneck underneath making her want to scream. In deference to the weather, she was wearing a stylish but not too eye-catching down jacket that went to her knees, and ankle-high snow boots instead of the shoes that normally would finish off the schoolgirl look.

  She was a decade past the usual age for this outfit, but her Retrievers’ no-see-me worked as usual—people looking at her saw only the outfit and thought she was the daughter of the house, home a little early but not unusually so.

  Up the steps and to the door. The alarm system wasn’t on; it would be turned on at night, probably. They were careless, in daylight. A slim leather case held in her left hand opened, and she withdrew a small metal hook pick with her right hand. It took the average cat burglar less than fifteen seconds to open the average household door, if they were so inclined. Wren wasn’t average; it took her closer to ten. If anyone were to look closely, though, it would seem that she was merely having trouble turning her key in the lock.

  The lock was high quality, an SFIC cylinder, and Wren finally resorted to sending a tendril of current down the tool, melting it to fit the pin stacks. It was humbling, and annoying: Wren was very proud of her lock-picking skills. But you did what was needed to get the job done.

  The entry hall was gorgeous, and about the size of her entire apartment. Politics must pay better than crime.

  “Upstairs. In the master suite’s office,” she reminded herself, forcing her attention away from the sleek statue of a dancing girl stretching one leg above her head, and up the gleaming hardwood staircase.

  “One maid, one cook. Maid’s running errands, cook is deaf and tends not to leave her domain.” She was reminding herself of stuff she had already memorized, which wasn’t like her.

  But it beat the hell out of letting her mind wander, which was what it kept wanting to do. Wondering what was happening with the Quad. Wondering where Sergei was. Wondering how she was going to deal with all the things she had to deal with.

  Focus. It’s all about the focus.

  She went up the stairs, remembering to run up it like a teenager might, carelessly, and with way more energy than she had in her, naturally.

  She felt the focus slip, and grabbed at it with mental hands, shoving it back into place. The way her luck was running, she’d crash headfirst into the cook, or worse yet, the target, home unexpectedly.

  But she made it upstairs and down the hallway without incident. Bypassing the suite, she went directly for the bathroom where the wall safe was. She should be in and gone within the twenty-nine-minute window that she had set up for herself. Go her—“Oh. Oh, oh, oh.”

  She lifted her feet gently over the ankle-height laser alarm, tsking under her breath. “Tricky, my children, very tricky. I approve.”

  The alarm was a minor inconvenience, but it was also one that could be set up by the home owner, and therefore did not appear on any of the reports Sergei had collected and collated. Like those window alarms that they sold in all the houseware stores, it flew under the radar.

  The safe was time-sealed: it could only be opened once a day. Wren grinned, a distinctly feral grin. The only thing they’d overlooked was the fact that the sealing was dependent on an internal mechanism that was—oooo, shiny!—run on electric batteries. She had no problem whatsoever using current, here. She whispered,

  “Ticktock. Pretty lock.

  Time of day, come ’round again;

&nb
sp; Let me in the door.”

  The safe’s lock, convinced that it was the right time of day, was amenable to Wren spinning the code. Seven tries, the little clock in the back of her head ticking off the seconds, and she had it. Most people, even the smart ones, used a secure code that they could remember. Not a kid’s birthday, no—even the idiots knew better than that, mostly—but if you knew something about their life, you could probably guess their security codes. In this case, the target used the same five numbers and two letters he used for pretty much everything, according to the files she had assembled, only scrambled differently. It was a good thing she wasn’t after his bank accounts.

  Wren gave thanks to the god of laziness, slipped the safe open, and reached inside—

  And jerked her hand back as though she had picked up a live wire.

  “The hell?”

  She looked inside, and swore under her breath. There were the papers she had been sent to get, just like advertised. And on top of the packet there was a short branch tied in on itself in a circle, festive with bright white flowers and red berries. Freeze-dried, at the moment of absolute potency. Rowan. Witch-bane.

  Old Magic: a warding spell, specifically to keep witches away. Witches—or Talents. Rowan was said to keep lightning from striking. Lightning…or current.

  “They’re getting smarter,” she muttered to herself, glaring at the wreath. “Life was easier when people scoffed at stories about witches and mages and magic.”

  The thing about Old Magic was that it was unpredictable as hell. Current was a science, in a lot of ways: you did A, and B followed. Assuming, that was, you could channel the current in the first place.

  Old Magic was more random, and a lot sluttier. Anyone who wasn’t a total Null could train themselves to sense the power, no matter what you called it, and there were a lot of shortcuts—like rowan, or bribing elementals—that allowed humans to fuck around with that power. But they were dipping their wands into stuff they had no understanding of, trusting to gods or luck or charms to protect them.

  It was a wonder any Talents had survived long enough to figure out what was what, much less develop into the Cosa.

  But the hedge-witches and alchemists and sorcerers weren’t entirely wrong, either. Rowan would keep her from using current on the safe.

  However, it wouldn’t keep her from reaching in, purely physical, nothing magical, and taking the papers by hand. It stung, but she was prepared for it this time, and the faint burn she could feel starting on the backs of her fingers where they had brushed the rowan’s leaves were nothing that would hold up as evidence in the court of law.

  The temptation to look at the papers passed through her, but she merely tucked them into the inner pocket of her blazer and—after placing a small feather on top of the remaining papers—closed the safe. The lock cycled shut, the time lock kicking in again. Nobody would even know the insides had been disturbed until 7:27 p.m. rolled around and the first person to check would find a wren’s pinfeather where the purloined materials had been.

  That sucker had been surprisingly hard to find. She hoped it would be effective. Maybe he’d know what had happened. Maybe he wouldn’t. But either way, he’d known he’d been blown. And maybe he’d behave himself from now on.

  An honest politician would be a wonderful thing.

  Going downstairs, Wren detoured through the kitchen, risking the cook’s appearance long enough to grab an apple from the bowl on the table. Walking out into the sunny, snow-white day, she crunched down into the white flesh, and felt pretty damn good about herself.

  nineteen

  Bren was never late for work. Ever. She had things to do, people to do for, and getting in before any of them was a matter both of pride and practicality. So when she realized that she was almost seven minutes off schedule, she lengthened her already impressive stride, and be damned any black ice foolish enough to get under her feet. The building that housed the Silence had no signs over its door, no indication that it was anything other than a nondescript office building on a nondescript side street; except for the fact that it was so very, intentionally, obviously nondescript. For years she had thought, to herself, that they would be better served putting a sign of some sort up there, merely to distract from its obvious anonymity, but nobody asked office managers about such things.

  The usual cart at the corner of the street was missing. She wasn’t going to take time to get a coffee this morning, anyway, but it was enough to make her frown. Micha was always there. Foul weather or blazing heat, through garbage strikes and Blue Flu, the jockey-sized Israeli was always pouring coffee and slathering bagels with more cream cheese than any one being could consume, always with brusque but friendly efficiency that Bren appreciated.

  The cart was missing.

  Under the full-length cashmere overcoat, underneath the silk knit sweater and the wool trousers, Bren shivered from what another, more superstitious person might have said was someone walking over her grave.

  “Call the police! Someone, call the police!”

  She had her cell phone out of her bag and was dialing before she’d gotten close enough to see what the cry was about.

  Her steps faltered, and strong, capable fingers almost crushed the phone before she was able to answer the voice at the other end of the line.

  “There are…two bodies. Murdered.”

  She gave the address, and hung up while the dispatcher was still speaking. Afraid to look, she moved closer. One body lay facedown on the stairs; the other was sprawled faceup. Both had thick lengths of what looked like wire wrapped round their necks, like grotesque scarves.

  She didn’t know either one of them.

  By the time the police and the ambulances came, Bren had gone inside. Bodies or no bodies, there was still work to be done. She went through the security dance, rode the elevator up to her floor, and settled into her cubicle, slipping off her sneakers in exchange for a pair of comfortable shoes. With her height, heels were fun but not practical when dealing with men who might or might not decide to take offense at being towered over. And her legs looked good in flats, too.

  She booted up her computer and started scanning the e-mail that had accumulated in her in-box overnight, putting the bodies out of her mind. There was nothing more she could do for them; let the professionals handle it.

  “So…” a voice behind her said, quietly, and thoughtfully.

  And Darcy would let her know what there was to know, as soon as there was anything to know. She didn’t bother to turn around, confident that the tiny Researcher was making herself comfortable on one of the filing cabinets, perched like a hummingbird, and just as filled with energy. She didn’t like the other woman, but she didn’t dislike her, either. And she did respect her, possibly more than anyone else within the organization: it took cojones of steel to say no to the head of R & D, which Darcy reportedly had, to continue working in Ops with their mutual boss, Andre Felhim.

  The two women weren’t friends, no, but they had worked together long enough to forge bonds that neither of them questioned. And that included keeping each other alert to things that might impact them—or Andre.

  “The bodies? They were human.”

  In any other context that statement would have seemed ridiculous, but both women knew about the fatae, and how many of the species could and did “pass” on a regular basis.

  “Ours?” Bren had finished with her e-mail, and was now typing up the week’s agenda for the managers she dealt with; each of them had a master schedule and individual sidebars, and they all had to be completed and double-checked against each other before going out.

  “Not that anyone’s claiming.” That meant nothing. They could have been R & D; Duncan’s people answered to no one save Duncan, and even Darcy couldn’t always get the low-down on what was happening up on the seventh floor. She wasn’t even sure that she knew all the inhabitants of the offices, they kept things that closely buttoned.

  “There was a note.”

&nb
sp; “On one of the bodies?”

  “On both of them. Half on one, half on the other.” She paused, less for effect than to ensure she had the details absolutely correct. “In their skin. Someone had branded it across their stomachs.”

  Bren didn’t flinch, but she did hesitate for a longer second than usual before hitting the enter key when she came to the end of the paragraph she was typing. She didn’t ask what the note said: Darcy would tell her if it was something she was free to share. And if it wasn’t, then Bren didn’t need to know.

  “‘Blood is paid in blood; different flesh this time for the burning.’ Burning was capitalized, like it was an event.”

  “You don’t know what it’s referring to?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “But I will.”

  Bren believed her.

  “Ladies.”

  This time, Bren did tense up, but she didn’t stop typing.

  “Poul.” She liked the Operative—he was smart, sharp and efficient, and didn’t waste time on bullshit, the way so many of the street players did when they got into the office. But unlike Darcy’s quiet ways, he always gave the impression of trying too hard to sneak up on you, so when he managed it, it was as though you’d lost points in a game you didn’t even know that you were playing.

  “Is Himself in yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Not like him, being late. Especially with all the excitement outside.”

  “I wouldn’t call that exciting,” Darcy said, and Bren paused her proofreading of the schedules long enough to slide a look at the other woman. Darcy’s face was still set in its usual serene lines; like the pocket-sized know-it-all she was. But her eyes, rather than sparkling from newly acquired knowledge, were flat and hard when she looked at Poul.

  Interesting. Bren didn’t know what that meant, and she might not have Darcy’s way with ferreting out details, but she knew when something was important.