Burning Bridges

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Hey, I watched the Million Metrosexual Man March on TV!”

  Wren moved on, not wanting to hear where that particular discussion went.

  It really shouldn’t have surprised her; the piskies were historical troublemakers, and had the ability to prod other people into action. Of course, usually that action involved swatting piskies, not following them. But here it was, oh-fuck-early on a cold but thankfully dry Sunday morning, and there had to be over fifty lonejacks and fatae of various species gathered around the Christopher Street subway station.

  The irony of this particular event starting a hop, skip, and wing beat from Stonewall amused the hell out of Wren, historically speaking. She wasn’t sure anyone else would be so amused.

  She wasn’t even sure she was all that amused, actually. It might just have been sleep deprivation making her feel so particularly flaked out right now. Or the fact that, with so many Talent trying to pull as much energy into their cores as possible before the event, current was stretched thin and sparse across the city now, so nobody was able to work feeling completely full. Lonejack brownout was not something she ever wanted to experience.

  Rumor had it that every Council member who could, had gotten the hell out of Dodge, the moment they felt the drawdown begin. It hadn’t been an official evacuation order, but KimAnn hadn’t been heard to say yea or nay, so that was as good as a kick out of town.

  Wren reached down and touched her own core, a reflexive twitch of nerves. She wasn’t full-up, either, but her core was used to being asked for the impossible on a semimonthly basis, and she had confidence she was up for whatever was going to come. A tendril of current coiled up her spine, green and blue static, and stroked the inside of her skull until she could practically feel her hair curl under the black wool watch cap she was wearing.

  It had taken three days to get everything as organized as it was going to get organized, and she still wasn’t confident that this was going to work. But nobody, God help them all, had come up with a better idea.

  And there was a certain sort of nasty logic to it. Well, what other kind of logic did piskies have?

  Wren found a bench to sit on, and sipped at the steaming grande coffee she had picked up along the way. The heat seeped through her gloves, making her fingertips feel slightly less numb. It was brass monkey cold out here, predawn, and didn’t look to warm up all that much.

  “Lovely weather for it,” she muttered.

  “If it were happening in the summer, it would be ninety degrees and humid.” P.B. sat next to her, the ice-cold wood of the bench seemingly not bothering his furry posterior at all. “Only luck we’re catching these days is bad. Give me some of that coffee.”

  “No.” Beside the fact that this was one thing she didn’t let anyone mooch off of her, demon did not do well on too much caffeine. It was like giving a Yorkie amphetamines. It might be funny, but it was wrong.

  “You think this is going to work?”

  “The flutter-brains are right, it’s too nasty not to.” P.B. shrugged. “If you were the Silence, could you resist it?”

  “Not a chance in hell.”

  “All right, people!” A figure wrapped in a full-length down coat was shouting into the crowd. Gender and species were muffled beyond recognition, but the voice had an authority to it that the crowd responded to, turning to face the figure and listening up. “If you don’t have your assignment yet, see a Quad leader. If you know where you’re going, go there! Let’s move it, move it, move it!”

  Slowly, the figures began to head downtown, some descending down into the subway, others walking. It was, Wren surmised, too cold to fly.

  A jogger, braving the cold, went down the street, a huge black dog keeping pace alongside. The jogger didn’t even stop to look, tugging at the leash when the dog paused to sniff at all these strange beings milling about.

  “You got your assignment?”

  “Yeah.” P.B.’s face wasn’t really designed for scowling—an evil grin, his muzzle could handle, and snarls and open-jawed astonishment, but not scowling—but he did the best he could. “I get to direct traffic.”

  “Poor baby,” Wren sympathized, but was quietly glad that her friend wasn’t going to be in the thick of things. They had no idea how this was all going to fall out. She had come home once to find him bleeding in a corner; she never wanted to go through that again.

  Of course, she didn’t want herself to get conked on the head or otherwise bloody, either!

  “All right. Time to get this show rolling, then.”

  “See you downtown.”

  “No, you won’t,” Wren said, and disappeared. P.B. snorted in amusement, and took the coffee cup from the bench where she had left it, chugging back the last few drops before getting up to join the exodus.

  There was something going on. Sergei wasn’t sure how he knew, but he knew. The air in the apartment was warm and comfortably moist. There was no reason for him to get out of bed at five in the morning, get dressed in warm, comfortable clothing and heavy-soled work boots, and go to his safe to retrieve his gun. There was no reason at all for him to do any of that, and then catch a cab downtown, telling the cabbie to keep driving until he said to stop.

  No reason at all for him to rap once on the bulletproof divider and tell the cabbie to let him out on the corner of Elk and Chambers. None at all.

  He stood on the corner, looking around. Narrow streets, quiet and still on a weekend morning, the small storefronts and restaurants closed up, the offices silent and still. He wasn’t familiar with this part of town; he never had business down here, except maybe once every couple of years. Most of his dealings with city government were done on the phone, or online these days, and he was more often at Parsons than down at Pace University’s city campus.

  But something brought him down here…. Where? Where did the lure lead him to? Ground Zero? The Seaport? City Hall? Maybe.

  He turned that way, looking at the old, still-impressive government buildings, thinking. What had woken him up, dragged him out here? What was he feeling? Up until now he had been operating on a purely instinctive manner, following a call. But now it was time to stop, study, evaluate.

  He wasn’t nervous. He should have been nervous, if only because he had no damned clue what was going on. But instead the annoyance of being awake and out in the cold was offset by a certain unnerving calmness, as though everything were going exactly according to plan. Not a front thought, but something stroking the back of his brain, almost like…

  The way Wren described the urge she had to make tea, when he showed up. He had never understood what she was talking about, until now. Less a feeling, or a thinking, than a knowing.

  Something was going down. Something that involved Wren.

  Trusting that knowing, he started to walk, a long easy stride that carried him down the street and toward the pale stone bulk of City Hall.

  “Hell no, we won’t go?” Wren shook her head, not sure if she should be horrified or amused.

  “I like the History Only Repeats if You’re Not Listening one, myself.”

  She and Bart were standing in the plaza in front of City Hall, watching the lonejacks choosing and trading their signs, milling about while others were trying to get organized. Some of the signs were old-fashioned placards on plywood sticks, while others were long cloth banners that took three or more to hold them upright and readable. The Christopher Street crew had been matched by at least as many coming in from the boroughs, about seventy percent human, thirty percent fatae. The fatae who had actual hands were also carrying signs, but they seemed to be content with whatever they were handed.

  In the summer, the area in front of them was green, filled with rosebushes and daffodils, grass and people lounging in the sunlight; walking, in-line skating and cycling across the span of the bridge that stretched between the lower part of Manhattan and the borough of Brooklyn across the river. Right now, it was bleak and dreary, the putty-colored government buildings around them managing by
some magic of their own to be both ornate, and depressingly bland. The wind was cold, coming off the river and being funneled down the narrow maze of streets that made up the financial district.

  Wren had warmed up on the subway downtown, but the wind was cutting enough to make her shiver, standing still. But neither of them made any move to get into shelter; things were going to get worse, not better, once the protest got underway, and being warm at the beginning simply meant that you would feel more miserable later.

  “Who thought that a march past the police station would be a good idea?” she asked, already knowing the answer.

  “We’re not exactly marching past it. More like down the side street away from it. Anyway, we have a permit.”

  That surprised her. She would have paid decent money to see what the request form had said. “How did you—”

  “We’re a tolerance march.”

  Wren snickered. Well, it was true. Except they planned to enforce that tolerance in a particularly intolerant manner….

  Wren watched a teenager test his sign, swinging it like a flag, then swatting his neighbor on the ass with it. “Equal Rights for All Genders? How old are these things? What, we raid Central Casting?”

  “Pretty much.” Bart shoved his hands deeper into his pockets, and hunched his shoulders until he looked like a blue-coated penguin, huddling over a chick. “Go get a sign, Valere.”

  Wren looked at him askance. “I don’t think so.”

  “Valere…”

  “Bart. I have to work hard just to not get stepped on in an empty room. Carrying a sign and singing protest songs isn’t going to change that.”

  “So you can hit anyone who steps on you with your sign.”

  “If you try to make me march, I’m going to sing. ‘Alice’s Restaurant.’ All the verses.”

  They matched stares, and he blinked first. “You’re not that bad a singer, I’m sure I’d survive. But fine, go. What are you going to do?”

  “Don’t worry. I think I can cause some trouble here and there along the way…”

  He just chuckled, and went back to watching his charges mingle and fuss.

  She hated when people laughed at her, even though she knew it was mostly stress-release; the same reason she was flickering in and out like a lightning bug. Also, being invisible gave her a sense of security. If she’d had her new slicks already…But the order had only just been placed; she was going to have to wait at least another month for them to be made.

  The light was beginning to change, in the eastern sky. Not yet sunrise, but false dawn, turning the dark blue sky into slate-gray to match the paving stones under her feet. The streetlights were going out, leaving the piles of dirty snow in shadows, the once icy whiteness now mixed with grime and soot.

  “Up and at ’em! If you’re ground patrol, get to your places! Air patrol, be ready! The rest of you, up and at ’em! We start in ten!” A human wearing a bright yellow snow bib and black boots stomped past, calling in a current-amplified voice. Why he didn’t just carry a megaphone, Wren didn’t understand. Sometimes, people got so dependent on their Talent, they forgot there were other, easier, less costly ways to do things.

  But however he was doing it, he was getting heard.

  The protest got started like a camel getting to its feet; slow, sluggish, and laughable. But once the banners caught the morning breeze, and the signs started waving, Wren had to admit that they looked almost impressive. Even more so was the sight of four griffins leading the horde, their eagletine heads raised above the rest of the crowd, wings tightly furled but still unmistakable. Almost any other fatae could and typically was overlooked; griffins got noticed.

  People believed in them.

  And nobody believes in you?

  Smirking, she ran lightly beside the mass of pseudo protesters, until she was even with the griffins, then past them.

  The plan was to circle City Hall once, make a reasonable if unnerving statement, and then start across the bridge into Brooklyn. At that point, fatae and lonejacks would combine to make a display that couldn’t fail to attract the attention of anyone who already had a mad-on for anything non-human or Talented. A hundred-strong moving target—moving slowly, in plain sight.

  It wasn’t as risky as it sounded. That many bodies, anyone nastily inclined would have to risk a full-out riot to do significant damage. And the lonejacks were on alert, this time.

  The griffins peeled off at the entrance to the bridge, posing like sentries—which, in point of fact, they were. The humans continued on, waving banners and signs and generally acting like they were Boy Scouts out for an early-morning jamboree.

  That was one thing you could count on, with lonejacks; someone somewhere in there had a flask of some warming liquid that smelled nothing at all like coffee, and they were willing to share.

  As the protesters rounded the front of City Hall, staying clear of the tall wrought-iron fence and the police boxes at each entrance, someone in the mass started a singsong chant:

  “Ain’t your city

  only, it’s

  Our city, too.

  You want your piece of us, well

  We got a piece of you!”

  Slowly, other voices picked it up, deep human voices only, surging with the rhythm of their marching. Ain’t— stomp—your city only—stomp—it’s—stomp—our city, too—stomp—You want—stomp—a piece of us—stomp—we got—stomp—a piece of you!

  It sounded like a particularly weak protest song, much less impressive than the one Wren had threatened to sing, but it was far more than that; under the words, current surged from every lonejack present, formed by the words into a weapon. If you knew how to look, it was there, surging and roiling at shoulder level like low-lying fog, or a summer’s thunderhead, dark red like molten lava, and faster moving.

  You didn’t need words to focus magic, not if you knew what you were doing, and were ready for it. But it helped. And when you were trying to pull a pranking that involved so many people, most of whom didn’t know each other beyond a vague hi-howya-doin, it helped a lot.

  Because that’s what this was. The largest, nastiest, bloodiest pranking any lonejack had ever helped pull.

  They were coming back around now, having picked up a single news van, rolling camera on the off-chance that it was a slow news day and they needed filler. Wren hoped that the van didn’t get too much closer, as the current-cloud would turn all of their very expensive, very sensitive technology into a quivering pile of wires and blown fuses. Bad enough what they were going to do to the bridge—which was why the march was scheduled for this early on a Sunday morning. Later, or on a weekday or Saturday, and there would be too many people wanting to use the bridge. Here, they were probably just going to inconvenience a bunch of joggers, and a lot of public workers, who could at least then pull down overtime pay.

  Not that Wren had thought of any of that; she wasn’t a big-picture person.

  She moved away from the crowd, scanning the surroundings. Up there in City Hall, a few window shades moved; probably cleaning people, as she didn’t think any of the public servants would be in the building at that hour. Curtains were being twitched aside in apartments above the storefronts, but it seemed unlikely anyone would come out to watch; they simply weren’t interesting enough to move anyone out of their heated apartments. Maybe two or three students, or someone still dressed from being out the night before, but it was unlikely enough that Wren didn’t worry about them.

  There…She paused, and then jumped onto the nearest lamppost, shimmying up the metal structure to get a better view.

  Yes. Two cars had pulled up: dark sedans with New York plates. There were at least three people: two in the front, one in back, in each car. Probably more. And then two more cars purred down the narrow street behind her, cruising like sharks coming up on something tasty to eat, or lions readying to rush an interloper pack of jackals….

  “Ain’t your city

  only, it’s

  Our city, too
.

  You want your piece of us, well

  We got a piece of you!”

  A higher-pitched chorus met them as they came around and up toward the bridge. The ground patrol—fatae set in place under the concrete and brick arches—and the air patrol, clinging to the cables and struts of the bridge itself. They were supposed to keep themselves in reserve, as the second wave, but the cantrip was apparently mindlessly catchy enough for them not to be able to resist.

  Sometimes, all the humancentric stories about fairy simplicity and gullibility were truer than the fatae wanted to admit. But it shouldn’t matter; the trap had been set, the bait about to be snatched up.

  And then they stepped onto the bridge itself, and all hell came loose.

  “God save us from fools and bigots….” Sergei had been in mob scenes before. He’d been part of the group of Operatives and Handlers who had to clean up the kraken disaster of Nantucket back in ’93. He’d even attended one Democratic/Libertarian joint fund-raiser, working security control for the extra money. He had never, in his entire life, seen the potential for disaster that was waiting in front of him.

  There were at least thirty humans grouped in front of him. Dressed in heavy jackets and work boots, they clearly weren’t out for a Sunday-morning stroll with the kiddies. From his position over a hundred yards away and behind a bakery delivery van, Sergei couldn’t tell if any of them had handguns, but there were a number of wooden bats and metal staves in evidence, and the physical ease with which they were carried suggested that every one of them knew how to land blows.

  More disturbing to him was the dark sedan parked in front of the men, and the two figures speaking earnestly with one of the thugs. He knew those figures. Knew them, one well, and the other not quite so well, but enough that he had no hesitation, no having to wonder.

  Although he did wonder who else was in the car, waiting out of the cold, with them.

  Taking his time, aware that nothing had happened as yet, Sergei surveyed the group in front of him once again, this time picking up details. Between the ages of twenty and fifty; mostly white, although there were at least two blacks, and a slighter build that might have indicated Asian or Indian ancestry, if he were able to see the man’s face to confirm. Not that it mattered, except to highlight the fact that bigotry needed only one target; the old sci-fi movies of the fifties had it right: give us an alien to shoot at—or a pointy-eared elf—and all men really were brothers under the skin.