The Work of Hunters

by Laura Anne Gilman

  But it wasn’t going to be enough. She was only human, only flesh, and this thing was impossibly pure current. They’d underestimated everything. If help didn’t get here soon….

  Then it pivoted, its attention directed away from her for a second, and she saw in the corner of her eye that Danny had rolled onto his side, was reaching — had pulled out his gun and was aiming it at the thing.

  Her ferocity turned to panic. What did he think he was doing? Bullets wouldn’t touch it, but it would make it think he was a threat, too!

  oOo

  I might not be Talent but I was still half-fatae, and there was no way not to feel the change in the air when the thing arrived. Every short hair on my body lifted away from my skin like I’d been hit by lightning, and the slap of Ellen’s current against my legs was a comforting cuddle, by comparison.

  I hit the ground, but not hard. I had no idea how she’d kept my face from scraping pavement but I’d remember to thank her later. Right now I was more concerned in getting up to see what the hell was happening.

  Then I felt the roll of current overhead, and thought it might be wiser to stay down, just now. I’d have called for help, but I knew from experience that my cell phone was now probably a chunk of expensively fused plastic and electrodes. But my gun was low tech, intentionally, and it would work….

  A little voice in my head, ever-practical, pointed out that shooting something made of current was about as smart as pissing into the wind, but I had to do something. I was as useless as teats on a bull. Worse, I was a liability, not even —

  Of all the bad ideas that my mother ever despaired of me having, this one might have been the worst. Or the best. Probably both, wrapped up in one suicidal bow. But even as it hit me, I was pulling the pistol from my holster, rolling onto my side and up on my hip and elbow, and aiming the muzzle directly into what looked like the ‘chest’ of the current-figure, not because I thought it would do any damage there but because it was the widest target.

  My senses are nowhere near sharp enough to actually see the bullet’s trajectory, but my imagination fills in the gap in the instant between pressure on the trigger and when the current—thing realizes something’s passed through it.

  I’m pretty sure that the bullet was destroyed the moment it hit, not going all the way through and out to endanger any possible rubberneckers, sure enough that I don’t waste time in guilt, but pull the trigger again. I had four bullets in the chamber, so two more to get it riled enough —

  But only two were needed.

  “Fuck me.” Never mind that I’d wanted this result, now that I had it I really didn’t want it. Too late, now. I felt the current wrapped around me shiver in reaction, as the killer sent a lash of electric yellow straight to my chest. And I was pretty damn sure it knew that a bolt to the heart would do damage there. Ellen’s protections held — but that wasn’t what I needed. So I scrambled to my knees, still staying low, and shot again.

  This time, the neon-yellow bolt hit me in the shoulder, knocking me flat on my back, all the air in my lungs vaporized.

  “Boss!”

  I wanted to raise a hand, tell her I was okay, but I wasn’t and I couldn’t. Damn, that’d hurt. But I managed to lift my head enough and open my eyes to see the blurry shape that was Ellen, backlit by the fizzy sparking shape beyond her. She was trying to look at me and it at the same time, and I wondered how badly I’d mangled her fight training, that she was doing that.

  Being unable to move didn’t stop my brain from working. Current. Not a someone, a something. If I’d the strength to do it, I would have smacked myself in the face. In my defense, that’s what I keep people like Pietr and Bonnie around for, to tell me what current can or can’t do, and Pietr had missed it entirely, too. Only Ellen, connected to it, had figured it out. But that was no excuse.

  Current, wild current. It hadn’t been taken from the graveyard, it had formed there. Too many Talent buried there, maybe dead from violence, or unjust means? I’d leave the how to the PUPs, that was their area, I just needed to know the why, because the why was the solution, it always was. Motivation made motive. What fucking motivation could a ball of current have?

  What connection did it have to the first murder?

  The poem I’d been thinking of earlier came back to me, my mother’s voice reciting it from memory, decades past. I hadn’t understood the poem back then, but the images had always stuck with me, the idea of a wall being built up and taken down, the idea of a wall as a natural thing, a good thing, the kind of walls we saw as we drive up the throughway, low stone walls covered in moss, aging slowly, marking off land and territory: mine here, yours there.

  If you took stones out, the way the hunters did, to chase after your prey, you weakened the wall, took down the barriers between those neighbors. There was a wall between the division between life and death, too. If something picked at it, scraped at it, dislodged a few stones….

  It might not have been what Frost meant, but I grabbed at that, and ran with it. Figuratively speaking, since I was still flat on the ground and not planning on getting up any time soon.

  There was another clash of sparks, bright enough that I squinched my eyes shut again and dropped my face back to the ground — or the weirdly-soft pillow of current that was keeping me off the ground, anyway. The gun was under my fingers, and I closed my hand around it, even though I knew it wouldn’t do any good — or worse, I might hit Ellen.

  Guns were tools of violence, designed to kill. Taking out the trash, the gang kids used to say, when they took out an interloper, dumped him back on his own turf. Current took the impression of its holder, after long enough in the core, I knew that much. That was how Talent used it, were able to command it. If we could replace the violence… repair the wall?

  “Boss!” Ellen’s voice, tight and worried. “I can’t hold it much longer.”

  Of course not. She was only one girl, even high-res. How could she hold out against the combined energy of rage, hate, fear? It would dismantle her, piece by piece, in its determination to take out what it saw as the trash, its natural prey.

  “Rebuild it,” I told her.

  “What?”

  “Rebuild it. The wall. Put the pieces back, bits of you.”

  It seemed perfectly reasonable to me, if I could just get her to understand….

  And then the black slipped around my eyeballs, and took me back under.

  oOo

  Ellen had no idea what Danny meant, but she could feel the snap and sizzle of the thing’s current coming closer each time, and once her defenses broke, it would reach her — and it would reach Danny, too, who had slumped boneless on the ground. She could tell he was still breathing but not how badly he’d been hurt. She needed to protect him, get him out of this. Idiot, he could have stayed safe, the thing only saw her as a threat, first, it —

  It clicked, then. Not a chain of therefore-thus, but knowing Danny Hendrickson, working with him, listening to him think out loud, and she understood why he’d shot at the current-shape, even knowing damn well it wouldn’t hurt it. To draw it away from her, protect her.

  It picked things out of their heads, read their intent. Had read her, even as she read it, connected by the wild current. And then she thought, maybe, maybe, she understood what Danny’d meant, about rebuilding a wall….

  Or, she had no idea what he meant, but the image was clear in her head anyway, a shimmering wall of bricks, carefully placed and cemented, two bricks thick and insulated between. Not the current battering at her, wild and angry, but her own: controlled, protective. She Saw the wall, shaping it and building it piece by piece like Danny’d said, blocking the current-thing away from them with her own bricks, turning around it, blocking its escape, turning again, walling it into a corner, and then closing the corner, the wall rising higher, over her head, the shimmer of the bricks fading as the insulation took hold, turning solid dark red, like a schoolhouse, or a prison.

  But a prison could be broken out of
, walls could be shattered, if you left too much power inside.

  The thought of touching it directly, of allowing that glee to touch her again, made Ellen sick. But she bit her cheek hard enough to bleed and reached inside the last open section, latching onto it with current-shaped claws even as it struggled to slide through, pushing it back at the same time she reached for a jugular, pulsing with power, and dug her claws in.

  So much power. So. Much. She was blinded by it, the shock-sparks dancing under her skin, diving for her own core, wanting in, in. The temptation overwhelmed her, how strong she would be, how easy it would be to destroy the creature then, to….

  Overrush. The single word, Wren’s voice in her head, was enough to dampen the urge. Too much current, too fast, flooding your core, and you overrushed. Death would be the best part of that, Wren said. If you were unlucky, you went mad, first. Wren’s mentor had died that way.

  And she didn’t want that current inside her, angry and vile as it was.

  Her claws dug in deeper, siphoning off the current, but instead of drawing it into her own core she let it slide out, using her arms as a straw, in at the fingers, out at the elbow where it jutted just outside the second wall.

  Releasing this much current, shaped to such rage, into the city was the equivalent of letting toxic fumes hit a schoolyard, but she didn’t know what else to do, not with the current-shape struggling under her claws, trying to get hold of her, to draw her own current down to feed itself, to tear open her face and obliterate her fingerprints, to wipe every trace of her from the world.

  “I’m not a bad person!” she yelled at it, willing it to stand down, stop attacking her. “I’m not!”

  It didn’t believe her. It didn’t have the ability to; it wasn’t human, it didn’t have rational thought, only sense and memory. If she was lucky, once torn from the consciousness it did have, the current would disperse enough to just cause some bad moods or crankiness in whomever it hit. If she was unlucky….

  Another burst of current seized up her arm, bypassing the exit at the elbow, aiming directly for her brain, and she fought it back, cold sweat slicking her body. An entire war waged between her elbow and shoulder, the pain incandescent, the only thing keeping her from dropping to her knees and howling was the knowledge that the moment she did that, she was dead.

  And after her, Danny. Dragged and dumped like trash, a warning nobody else knew how to read.

  “I won’t. Let. You hurt him,” she gritted out between clenched teeth, her tongue stinging where she’d bitten it, the sweat dripping into her eyes and burning like tears. They protected people from things like this, that’s what they did. People were oblivious, they didn’t know, didn’t want to know, or even if they did know they couldn’t do anything. She could. That was why she’d seen this. Not because it shoved into her brain, that wasn’t how it worked. She Saw it so she could stop it.

  With her free hand, she shaped the final bricks, slotting them into place, slipping her arm out and slapping the final piece in.

  Her arm still stung like an entire nest of yellowjackets had munched on it, but the pressure was gone, the malign-shaped current swirling away, what wasn’t locked behind the wall. There was another swirl of current behind her, and she twisted, her heart racing at the thought that it had escaped, or there was something else, another one, her current rising again, sluggish and sore, to face this new threat.

  “Whoa, down,” a voice said, even as a familiar reassurance pinged against her awareness. Pietr, and the broad-shouldered shadow of Nifty behind him, translocating in from somewhere else, the taser-like weapons they wouldn’t let her try in their hands and their eyes alert for a threat.

  “In there,” she said, waving a hand vaguely behind her, not sure and not caring if they could see the wall she’d built. From the way their eyes widened, they could.

  “Good going, kid,” Nifty said, stepping forward, an oversized metal briefcase in one hand. “We got it from here.”

  Normally she would be offended at being dismissed; here she had other things to worry about.

  “Boss?” She dropped to her knees, her undamaged hand going to Danny’s shoulder, the current that had been protecting him sliding back under her skin, coiling down in muted tones of blue and green to her depleted core, like a cool drink of water after too much sun. “Danny?”

  “U’ky shhhh” he said, and blinked up at her. “Ow.”

  She collapsed all the way onto the ground next to him, relief making her eyes water. “Yeah. Ow.”

  oOo

  “Ow.”

  Ellen’s face collapsed into a soft, happy-but-going-to-cry-anyway expression. “Yeah, ow.” She’d flopped down onto the ground next to me like someone’d cut her leg-strings, and I wanted to pat her on the shoulder, tell her she’d done good, but my arms didn’t want to move just yet.

  We’d done it. I wasn’t quite sure what we’d done, because it had mainly been El who’d done it, but we’d done it. I squinted, and identified Pietr and Nifty doing the cleanup work, while Ellen starting patting gently at my side, I guess making sure I was still there and all in one piece.

  Everything hurt. That’s usually the result of being current-whipped — like being hit by lightning, but with more malice — and thrown into the pavement. Fortunately, there was no need to move. It wasn’t like either of us were in any shape to deal with mass transit, and my credit cards were a useless slag of plastic in my wallet, after being exposed to that much current. The PUPs would have to pack us into a cab when they were done, in repayment for getting here after all the fun was over.

  Once she determined that I wasn’t about to die or bleed out anything I needed, she disappeared for a bit, coming back with soda from a grease cart that had either missed the entire foofah, or — more likely — had come back once it was clear that nobody was going to get killed. The ginger ale felt good against my throat, and the can was cool against my forehead, where a headache was threatening to erupt.

  It took a while before the guys were certain that the entity had been secured, and they’d figured out, more or less, what Ellen had done to contain it. That was what I was guessing from the way they’d gone from circling an empty space to opening their kits and doing something to the empty space. Ellen could probably see whatever it was they were working on, but I didn’t bother asking her for a play-by-play.

  “I didn’t know current could do that,” she said softly, drinking her own soda. “Be…directed like that.”

  I hadn’t known either. Maybe nobody had. “You people are a work in progress,” I said. “You think those guys,” and I lifted my chin in the direction of the PUPs — “had any clue what they were doing when they started? But we know now.”

  “Yeah.” Not quite a sigh, but not quite an agreement, either. It took a while, and a couple of false starts, with Ellen chewing her lip and fiddling her fingers, before she finally asked the question that I knew’d been burning a hole in her gut.

  “The current-shape… it came from dead Talent? All their anger, their fear, it siphoned off their current, mixed with the natural current around the graveyard….”

  “Sounds logical.” Logic was all we had to go on, here: it wasn’t as though we could question it. I shuddered at the thought. Maybe Venec and his band of crazies would try that. Not me, and not Ellen. Our job was done.

  “And it just happened to pick up the memory of that particular killing, out of all the ones ever to fixate on?”

  “Digital scanning.” It was the only thing I could think of. “Remember, I said, they were transferring all the old cold cases to digital? I checked; they had to put it on hold a few days ago because of a power outage, blew all their scanners.”

  Current played merry hob with electronics. An upset semi-sentient current?

  She considered that theory, her entire face shadowed. “Why now? All that anger, outrage, why did it take form now?”

  I’d laugh, except I was pretty sure it would hurt like hell. “Ask them,” and I
nodded toward the PUPs. “Cosmic alignment? A particularly bad storm in the upper atmosphere? Bad fucking luck? Could be anything, all of them, nothing at all. That’s how shit goes down, all at once, seemingly out of nowhere. But it never is, El. Nothing comes out of nowhere.”

  The more you try to press things down, the harder they come back up.

  “And that’s why we’re here.” She was watching the PUPs now, frowning as they stood quietly, their hands up like particularly inept mimes, and I could imagine the faint prickly feel of current being worked, but that’s all it was, my imagination. A couple walked by and didn’t even blink at them, which was either typical New York whatever in action, or they were using so much current they were effectively invisible to Nulls.

  “Do you think this is the first time it’s happened?”

  I shrugged, and yeah, fuck, that hurt. “How long have there been vigilantes? How long has there been current? This isn’t on you, Ellen. If anything, it’s on me.”