Burning Bridges

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “And knowing is all that’s important?”

  “Knowing is power, boy. You know that.”

  Poul smiled, seemingly reassured by having both of his masters to heel behind, and continued quoting Sergei’s own words back to him: “‘This country has enough problems without having to worry about these…animals, in our midst, using our resources and not giving back anything in return.’”

  Sergei felt claws rip inside his rib cage, hearing his own youthful, stupid, ignorant—bigoted—words said back to him in Poul’s voice, carrying with them a ring of conviction even he, the original speaker, had never been able to manage. A True Believer, he’d thought once about Andre’s newest protégé. He hadn’t known how true it was.

  It was different now, for him. Those fatae had names, the species had characteristics and quirks attached to them. Piskies were prank-players. Griffins kept their young with them through young adulthood, and then sent them off to another herd to find mates. Nausunni could hiss even without sibilants. Demon were loyal. Rock dragons were not to be trifled with, for all that they were the size of Great Danes.

  Some of the fatae weren’t exactly brain surgeons. Some of them shouldn’t be allowed to handle anything more advanced than a spoon. And some of them…

  He thought of Shig, the Japanese fatae he had met over the summer. The lizardlike being was a shrewd businessman, with a wry sense of humor and excellent taste in artwork. He, and P.B. and Wren had spent an evening together during the summer, arguing about music, of all things, over dinner at Noodles. The little lizard had helped introduce Sergei to a number of influential dealers and artists in his native Japan, smoothing the way for an eventual business deal, down the road.

  Shig. P.B. Rorani the dryad. The unknown breed that had saved them, when the vigilantes attacked the All-Moot. Beyl the griffin, and her gnome assistant whose name Sergei still didn’t know. The piskies, flying pains in the posterior, but not animals, not if this…thing in front of him that looked and spoke like a man, was also not an animal.

  They justified their actions on words…his words.

  Sergei choked back the bile he felt rising, accepting the acidic burn in his chest as just payment for his once-ignorance.

  Yes. Knowledge was power.

  “You knew the truth once,” Duncan said. “I don’t expect you to fall into line now. There has been too much water under that bridge. But you need not destroy yourself trying to prevent what must be, what you yourself saw, so many years ago. Andre has kept you and your partner from falling into this morass. She is not with them out there on that bridge. You are not with them. Turn around and go home, let us clean this up. And all will be well for you both. My word on it.”

  “Don’t be an idiot!” And P.B. was there, snarling, the thick fur around his neck hackling like a dog’s as he glared at Poul and Duncan. Sergei felt dizzy, disconnected. How had the demon found him? Why wasn’t he out there, fighting with the rest of his kind? And where was Wren? Wren. That was his focus.

  “They’re using you as justification for what they wanted to do anyway,” P.B. said. “You’re not part of them, not anymore. And neither is Wren.”

  “No…” The demon was right, Sergei knew he was right, but that didn’t release him from his own guilt. Or his responsibility.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he said to the fatae, never taking his eyes off the three humans before him.

  “You looked like you needed help.” And the demon flexed his thick black claws to illustrate what he meant. “I can—”

  “No,” Sergei said again. Beyond them, the battle raged, and he couldn’t do anything about it. And Wren was there, he knew it. Could feel it, no matter what Duncan said. His spies and scans couldn’t see her, but Sergei could. He always could. But he couldn’t go to her, not with this weighing on his hands.

  “This is for me to deal with,” he told the demon. “You have your own job to do. Go. Protect her. With your last breath, your dying body…”

  P.B. looked hard at the human, his dark red eyes unblinking, then nodded once and slipped into the fire-lit dawn, leaving Sergei alone with the Silence members.

  “So,” Andre said. “What now?”

  “We finish the job,” Duncan said. “As we have always planned to do.”

  Maybe in the past, magic-users had fought glorious battles, throwing powerful thunderbolts around and laughing madly with a full accompaniment of flying monkeys or crazed warriors, or whatever it was they used to do.

  Or maybe that was all Hollywood. If so, Wren was going to be witness for the prosecution that Hollywood didn’t know shit.

  Her jeans were torn in a dozen places, and her hair had been singed so much that she was surprised her ears weren’t smoking. Blood and sweat kept running into her eyes, and her palms were abraded from falling down so often.

  Her only consolation was that, if she looked like the tail end of a bad knife fight, her opponent looked just as bad.

  No. It’s not a consolation at all.

  The woman facing her wasn’t all that powerful. No more so than Rick had been, before he’d been taken out by another of the…what did you call them? Enemy seemed too overblown, even if that’s what they were. Evil wizards? Unaffiliateds? That was what the Council used to call lonejacks; maybe it was time to pass the term on?

  This woman facing Wren wasn’t a match, on a basic power-level. None of them had been. But Wren had quickly learned that the empty expressions, the blank stares, were indicators that something—or someone—had driven these Talent to within a hairbreadth of wizzing, of overloading internally from current and going mad.

  Once that happened, the Talent no longer has the sense God gave a gnat, and doesn’t think to protect him or herself anymore. It created a passive death wish—but also allowed them to channel an obscene amount of current, because there was nothing there, not even the instinct to survive, to slow it down anymore.

  What it meant, on a practical level, was that even the weakest of Talent could do amazing things, channel awesome forces.

  It also meant, practically, that Wren was getting her ass kicked. The only reason that she was still standing was because—except for a few major blockages, like the one that kept her from being able to Translocate easily—she was almost as Pure as the woman facing her. And she’d had longer to learn how to use that much current.

  But she also wanted to live, and in this particular knife fight, that was a distinct disadvantage.

  Got to keep standing, she thought. So long as I keep standing…

  The line of current running along her spine, protecting her limbs from physical assault, hissed and snapped like a downed wire, and she forced herself to strengthen it. But there was so little left to call on: current had to be controlled, and in order to maintain control you had to be firmly grounded. Manhattan bedrock was usually responsive, but the ground under her feet had too many lines already running into it, and every time she tried to reach for better grounding, her reach kept getting tangled in theirs. Too damn much Talent in this city.

  And disturbing someone else’s grounding might mean dislodging the only thing that was keeping them alive, those bodies still and bloody around her.

  The ones who had been taken off by the police, the ones who had stayed on the bridge, were the lucky ones. They would live to see tomorrow. Whatever tomorrow brought, in a city where Talent had been turned against their own kind. But there was no such refuge for her; whether by external interference or random chance, the police hadn’t come to the side of the bridge, focusing only on the humans actively fighting in plain sight. This battle raged without interference.

  Overhead, too far overhead, a griffin wheeled. She wished it safe, and away.

  “Die, witch,” the woman hissed, and raised her arm to strike again. Current flashed from underneath her fingers, indigo and olive-green; muddy, ugly colors, but still damned powerful. Wren wasn’t able to block all of it, this time, and only the sudden hard weight knocking into her ribs, push
ing her aside, kept her from going down for the count.

  Ground in me.

  An intrusion into her brain, the voice unfamiliar and yet immediately recognizable, alien and a part of her she accepted, reached for instinctively.

  Where the hell have you been?

  Busy. Here now.

  Once before they had done this: in the basement of the Friesman Library, when faced with the forever-hungry maw of greed and vengeance given physical form. Then, Wren had hesitated. Now, she was grounded in the demon and on her feet before the other woman had time to react to the newcomer.

  The question rose to the front of her mind, as it did the first time they had done this. What are you, P.B.?

  Demon, he said, as though that answered everything. But she had no time to be frustrated; the battle was joined again. This time, with her core locked down and upheld by his unswerving support and dedication, buffered from outside blows by his love and affection, Wren was able to put the woman on the defensive, backing her up against the cold arch of the bridge and locking her in place with bars of current similar to the ones she had used to lock down the bansidhe, the one she had tested on the Nescanni Parchment, before that. Nothing was ever wasted, and nothing was learned in vain. If she survived this, what worse thing was this going to be training for?

  Stop thinking. You think too damn much.

  Agreed. Wren locked down anything extraneous, and focused back on her opponent.

  The woman had been pretty, was still pretty, if you looked past the eyes hard and flat like slate, and just as lifeless. Only the mouth still showed any kind of life, twisting and chewing on dry air. Trying to speak with them hadn’t worked before, but Wren felt obligated to try, one last time.

  “We’re Cosa, little sister. Family. Why are you so angry?”

  That red mouth chewed more, the jaw working as though trying to produce some result. “You consort with animals, cause pain in this world….”

  P.B.’s voice, not a tag but already inside her brain: Crazy. Wizzed. Way beyond wizzed.

  Little damned busy, here.

  Kill her.

  No! P.B. didn’t understand. Grounded in his emotional bedrock, she found herself surrounded by a firm, unyielding pragmatism: survival above all. Demon. It was what he was, how he had been created; as much a part of him as the ability to survive the lashes of her current into his system.

  But that wasn’t how the Cosa worked.

  You took care of the wizzed. You did not kill them.

  “Little sister, listen to me.” Wren said it with current as much as voice, focusing all of herself that was to spare into making herself heard. She dared not ping her opponent; the woman’s sense of what was true and real had clearly been so badly twisted that getting tangled in her current would damage Wren even more than anything physical the Silence operative might do.

  You took care of the wizzed. But you didn’t emulate them. You didn’t follow them. You kept your distance, as best you could, because they were crazy-strong in addition to being crazy-crazy. All the focus, all the will, and none of the self-preservation. That was why lonejacks were so selfish, why the Council was so cautious. Because if you didn’t protect yourself from yourself, you ended up like this….

  P.B. A sudden thought, communicated to him the same instant it occurred to her. Can you help her?

  She’d kill me the moment I tried. Or I’d kill her, in defense when she attacked. Or, both.

  Damn.

  “I can’t let you do that.”

  “You? Stop us?” Poul laughed. Neither Duncan nor Andre did. When Jorgenmunder realized that, he stopped, his gaze curious, but not worried.

  “It’s too late, Sergei,” Duncan said. “I understand—I appreciate the fact that you feel your loyalties have been given, but there is a reality here you cannot avoid. We will win. Humanity will prevail over these creatures. It is our right, and our duty to maintain our God-given place.”

  He sighed, seemingly saddened. “Had they only kept to their own place, in the shadows, in the darkness, perhaps none of this would have been needful.”

  Sergei doubted that. “There are more of them than you know. And the Silence, while strong, is finite. They will not go quietly.”

  “Oh, I have become quite aware of that. This city was our testing ground, a trial run. But we’re not finished, yet.

  “You say we are finite. True. But the outrage we can generate is not.”

  Sergei had no idea what the man was talking about. From the look on Andre’s face, neither did he.

  “Boss?”

  Andre turned, his carefully patrician face suddenly showing concern as a tall, well-built blonde walked around the corner. “Andre? I got your message, and don’t think it’s not going to cost you, because getting past the cops out there was…oh.”

  Bren took in the scenario with a quick glance, and recognized that something was wrong instantly.

  By then, Poul already had her in an iron grip.

  Duncan turned to Andre. “You understand? You will see that it is taken care of?”

  Andre nodded, his expression back to the cool façade he had perfected over his many decades with the Silence. Duncan nodded once in return, then walked to the car, getting into the backseat. The driver started the engine, and backed out of the alley, driving away into the cold winter morning.

  Suddenly, Sergei realized that his fingers were freezing, even through his Thinsulate gloves, and his knees were creaky and painful, as though he’d climbed a dozen flights of stairs.

  “Andre?” Bren was curious, a little nervous, but not frightened. Not even when Poul dragged a serrated blade across her throat, and her body dropped to the ground with a single gasp, did she display any fear.

  Jorgenmunder calmly set the blade to her skin in five or six places, each mark looking like a jagged wound, the kind that might be created by the sweep of a tiger’s claws.

  Or a demon’s.

  Sergei let out a low moan of realization, and lunged forward, hands reaching for Poul’s own throat, but Andre had a gun in his hand now, and it was pointed at Sergei.

  “I am sorry, my boy. I saw no way to prevent it.”

  Satisfied with his work, Poul took a vial out of an inside coat pocket. About the size of his thumb, it was filled with a thick, black liquid. He sprinkled a little on the ground, creating a careful splatter pattern, then smeared some of it onto Bren’s face and hands, as though she had fought her attacker off.

  “Fatae blood,” Sergei said, his voice dead.

  “Exactly.” Poul stepped back to consider his work, then added another smear to the palm of her left hand.

  “She was a team member. A coworker. A fellow Silence member. Is this what the Silence taught you?” Sergei asked, too many steps beyond disgusted to remember his way back.

  Poul didn’t hesitate in his response. “The Silence taught me to do the right thing. Protect the innocent. Protect the weak. That means humans. Real humans.”

  There was a soft noise, and the vial fell from Poul’s hands, the look of surprise and outrage on his face almost comical as he turned to stare at his mentor. “You…”

  Andre waited until Poul fell onto his knees, then dealt him a solid blow to the side of his head with the butt of his pistol, hard enough to crack his skull.

  Bending down, the old man took the blade out of Poul’s pocket, flicked it open, and placed it in his protégé’s hand, closing the cooling fingers around it firmly.

  “Is there any of that blood left?”

  Sergei picked the vial up, then shook his head. “No.”

  “Ah well. It will have to do. To all appearances, he killed her, and someone then killed him.”

  “Leaving out the important part, the part that the Silence has played in all of this.” It wasn’t a question: it was the only reason Andre would have been part of all this, to somehow, still, try to preserve the Silence.

  “Lies built on lies, to protect the truth. This world turns on chaos, and we all fa
ll into the fire.” Andre looked down into the conflagration, water aflame with current, bodies scattered on the ground. “We do what we must. And I…will go back to the source of it all. Duncan will not trust me, but then, he has never trusted me. And in that lack of trust, I am still useful to him.”

  “Until…”

  “Until this is over, one way or another. On the inside, I still have a chance to change things.”

  “You think you can survive long enough to oust him?” Sergei was aware of how macabre it all was, standing over the bodies of two former coworkers, two people Andre had chosen and trained, discussing what were, in effect, corporate politics.

  “I believe in the organization,” was all Andre would say. “I have to believe in it, or it’s all been for nothing. Duncan is the power, but he was not the creator, was not the source of our mission. I will find allies, and I will fight back.”

  He looked at Bren’s body, then Poul’s, and for the first time in all the years Sergei had known him, the old man looked old.

  “And you? What will you do?”

  “I don’t know,” Sergei said, looking down at the base of the bridge. A short white form was there, barely visible in the sunlight. And leaning on him, limping but alive, was another familiar form. Something that had gone cold inside him started to warm again. “Gather the bodies. Make my report. Do what’s required of me. Same as always.”

  Andre started to speak, then reconsidered. “Stay safe, boy.”

  “You, too.”

  His former boss, his mentor, walked away and didn’t look back.

  twenty-three

  Everything was a blur, even now. Sergei had met them at the bridge, stepping over bodies to reach them. He had hailed them a cab, bundled them inside and sent them home. That had been two weeks ago. She hadn’t seen him since then. P.B. had told her what he knew: the confrontation with the Silence, the dead bodies that were found in the aftermath. Wren had identified them both, Andre’s second-in-command, the woman who had warned them in the diner; one enemy, one reluctant ally. Something had gone down, and gone badly.