Pack of Lies psi-2

by Laura Anne Gilman

  She pursed her lips, then her face twisted like she didn’t know what to say, and she looked away. “I don’t know. I… The humans are all so filled with emotion, so that confuses the issue. And fatae are tough to read. Their vibes aren’t the same, not to us, and not even to each other, so I can’t get a baseline. And some of them…their inherent magic just screws with me.”

  Fatae didn’t use magic, not the way we did. They were magic, living breathing current. For Sharon, it must have been like trying to ground and center in the middle of a lightning storm. Possible, but really damned difficult with all the distractions.

  I felt Venec come in, even with my back to the door, and I held up a hand to keep him from saying anything, not even thinking about how the boss might take it. “So what did you get from the humans, other than emotions?”

  The words came more easily this time, as though she’d been thinking about it, subconsciously, just waiting for the right question to be asked. “Everyone feels the same. I can’t… The eyewitness stories don’t add up, they contradict and cross each other, but they all feel the same. There’s none of the disruption I get when someone’s breaking from the truth. They’re all totally and absolutely convinced that they’re telling the truth, even when they can’t be. It’s making me uncomfortable.” She stopped, tapped her fingers on the counter, her polished nails clicking. “This…this whole case is making me uncomfortable, and I haven’t even had to talk to the victim,” she said thoughtfully.

  No, she hadn’t. Stosser should have brought her with him—but who knew that we’d have to question two different stories? The evidence we had should have been enough to settle what happened. Next time, we’d know better. Even if the Boss Dog insisted he would do it himself; he was the boss, but we were the investigators.

  “There’s too much belief,” Sharon went on, her expression changing slightly, like a shift of light. You only saw it if you were watching for it. “Too much certainty for it to be real.”

  I almost understood what she was saying. Almost. “Didn’t someone feel more certain, more…whatever truth feels like? I mean, everyone can’t be lying.”

  “No?” She sounded like she was up against the ropes, emotionally, and something Danny had said tickled something in my brain, about truth and subjectivity.

  “Sharon…can everyone be telling the truth?”

  Her head jerked up like I’d yanked a cord, and there was a sparkle back in those lovely eyes. “Oh. Huh. Okay, that’s trickier.”

  The thought was a wicked nasty one, and I was talking it through even as she processed the suggestion. “Is that even possible? I mean, if one person’s telling the truth, and the other has a story that contradicts it… I know truth is subjective but that’s… Someone has to be lying!”

  I listened to my words a second, and then added, “Or at least…they have to be not telling the truth. Right? I mean, even through a filter, there’s truth and then there’s not-truth. Right?”

  Oh, god, my head hurt. Behind me, I heard Venec start to say something, then check it. I wasn’t sure Sharon even noticed that he was there, as she sank into the sofa with a graceful movement that I envied madly. “There’s an old joke one of the partners used to tell,” she said, indirectly responding to my question. “I don’t remember the setup but the punch line was ‘the truth, the other truth, and the legal interpretation.’ I never worried about the legal side, because that’s not…it’s not truth so much as it is best-supported-belief. But what I’m getting now…maybe if two people believe something with equal ferocity, they’re both true? I mean, isn’t that all religion is, anyway—strongly held beliefs claimed as The Truth? And maybe if the perps, being Talent, believed it strongly enough, it affected people who were there, watching?”

  Venec made a louder noise that could have been either a cough or a laugh, and Sharon stopped, as though she suddenly realized he was there, but I ignored him. We were not going to get into another religious “discussion” like happened last week. Not without referees handy, anyway.

  “Yeah but…the difference between sexual assault and a girl coming on to you isn’t like arguing over whose burning branch or dust-devil spoke louder,” I asserted, not looking at Venec, even though I could feel him coming closer.

  Sharon focused on me again. “I don’t know about then, but now—the guy got beat up pretty bad, saw his buddy smashed into dead pulp in front of him. There could be brain injuries they haven’t found yet. Maybe he really does believe what he’s saying? Or maybe he can’t tell the difference anymore between what he did and how he justified it?”

  “Could you tell, if you spoke to him?” Venec asked, finally joining into our confab directly.

  Sharon considered the question, hard, humming under her breath. Finally she said, “I don’t know. I’ve taken depositions from people in injury cases before, but… Hell, Ben, it would be easier to talk to the ki-rin. I could get a baseline from it….”

  “Not possible,” Venec said, moving all the way into the office to stand between us. His dark curls were slicked down as usual, and he looked rested, but deeply annoyed. Not at us, though, I was pretty sure about that. “We have been informed that the ki-rin, overset by recent events and in mourning for the loss of its companion in such a brutal manner, has decided to return home, and will speak with no one while it undergoes a period of reflection and preparation prior to its travel. End quote.”

  Not unexpected, really, but the news still settled like doom on the two of us.

  “It’s ducking us,” I said. Ki-rin didn’t lie, so anything it said would be taken as a hundredweight of gold—like Sharon said, the baseline we could measure everyone else by—and the Council would accept it. Hell, everyone would accept words as gospel, from a ki-rin. So if the girl’s story was true, why wasn’t it talking?

  “Or, equally possible,” Venec said, “all of the above claim is also true. It is in mourning and reacting perfectly within character. So far, every player in this scene has acted exactly to character.”

  In character, telling contradicting truths… “You know what we need? We need a way to talk to the dead guy.”

  “Bonnie!” Sharon, for the first time since I’d known her, looked seriously horrified. “That’s…!”

  “A joke, Shar. Okay? A joke.”

  Mostly a joke. It was possible. Theoretically, technically possible. Current was akin to electricity, and electricity was what the body ran on, and for someone, as the saying goes, “only mostly dead” you could… But it wasn’t done. In fact it Wasn’t Done At All. Necromancy was one of the really old magics, the stuff that got left behind when Founder Ben—that’s Ben Franklin to Nulls—codified the rules of current, and moved us away from superstition and into rational usage.

  You might still find people practicing hedge magics; sympathetic magic, or charm-making, stuff like that. If you were Talent, they’d work, mostly. If you weren’t…well, you might believe that they worked.

  Messing with the not quite dead? No thanks. I’d let someone crazier and more high-res than me play in that minefield. Like the old ones, that was stuff best left uncalled. Venec just looked at us and didn’t say anything, which made me wonder, a little uneasily, what his stance on necromancy was.

  Nifty and Pietr showed up then, breaking the mood with a rather heated discussion about baseball that had obviously been going on for a while. While they were hanging up jackets, bitching to each other about stats of some incomprehensible function or another, Nick staggered in, and Venec kicked us into the main conference room.

  Just walking into the room and sitting down, I felt the last lingering shreds of doubt and mental fuzziness fade. The break room was more comfortable to hang out in, but the moment I sat down at the conference table, I felt…energized? Maybe. More confident, less distracted. I guess J was right, and your surroundings really do make a difference: sofas were for schmoozing; straight-back chairs were for strategizing.

  Or maybe it was just being surrounded by my pack
that made me ready to get back on the hunt. I wasn’t going to question it, right now.

  Once we were all settled, Stosser came in from whatever back corner he’d been hiding in, and joined the party. Unlike Venec, Stosser looked surprisingly unkempt, wearing the dress-down crunchy granola jeans and flannel that never quite looked right on his tall frame, like a CEO playing woodsman. His face was the normal deadpan, but there were shadows under his eyes that suggested that Sharon and I weren’t the only ones who didn’t sleep well last night.

  Venec was in the process of filling the others in on what Sharon and I had been discussing earlier, so I zoned a little, slipping almost without thought into a light fugue-state where I was almost hyperaware of my surroundings, and studied my coworkers.

  Sharon had already surprised me once today, but I knew that her Perfect Princess attitude was backed by a sharp mind, so even being surprised by her wasn’t all that much of a surprise. If we’d met in a bar somewhere I’d have been angling for her phone number by the second drink—and she would have shot me down with style and élan.

  I watched her for a minute, just for the pleasure of it, then turned my attention to the boys of our group.

  Boys. No, men. The tinge of unease that had been dogging me since the gleaning tried to stage a comeback, but I pushed it away. They were my coworkers. My friends, damn it. My pack.

  Nick was still the slightly built kid I’d first tagged him as, although the past few months he’d bulked up a little to slender rather than scrawny. You’d think there couldn’t be a strand of guile in that entire body…until you discovered that he was a current-hacker, one of the rarest of Talent who could actually interact with computers, using current to get what they needed. Every government organization willing to admit we existed had wanted their paws on him—and a few illegal organizations, as well. But PUPI had gotten him. He said it was because they’d promised nobody would shoot at him…but since in the past months we’d gotten shot at, psibombed, tied up, and threatened with loss of bodily organs, I think he might have made a mistake, myself. Why-ever, I was glad he was with us.

  Nifty…was still an enigma. On the surface, he seemed an obvious choice for the corporate world: college football superstar; middle-class black kid who made good, then took a look at his odds and decided not to go pro. He claimed that he was planning on going to grad school, and yet he ended up here, with us. Ambitious, aggressive, and loyal; I still had no idea how his brain worked, or what drove him. He was listening intently to Stosser, jotting comments in his spiral notebook without looking down, even though I was pretty sure he was memorizing it all, too, the way he used to memorize game plays.

  And Pietr, our ghost. By not looking for him, I could find him easily: in his usual spot at the corner of the table, chair tipped back slightly, gray eyes watching everyone the same way I was. Not a buddy, the way Nick was, but we worked really well together, quietly and without a fuss. He reminded me of J, which was funny because if there were two people more opposite than my upper-crust, high-profile mentor and Gypsy-bred, invisible-under-stress Pietr, I hadn’t met them.

  The PUPI team. My packmates. They were all good guys. Complicated, yeah. Moody, occasionally. Violent…maybe. If provoked. But not one of them would ever, ever hurt me. I knew that like I knew the layout of my apartment: 3:00 a.m. and pissed out of my mind, I could still walk it without bumping into anything. There was no reason that each and every one of them, today, sent a faint unease through my blood, like a distant alarm.

  Disturbed, I moved my attention to Stosser. At least with him, I knew to be uneasy. High-res, high-powered, high-energy, and would do whatever it took to achieve his goals, including moving us around a board of his own creating. J had warned me about Ian Stosser, but the threat was all up-front and obvious, and we’d accepted the risks when we took the job. He would use us…but for something we’d signed on for, and believed in. That made a difference, didn’t it?

  “I want results today, come hell or high water and I mean that literally. This guy’s going to be released from the hospital and if there’re no charges pressed he may just disappear, and then we are screwed.” Ian’s long, orange-red hair was moving as though a breeze was stirring it, a sign that he was seriously upset, even though his current-core was under tight control—there was no repeat of his heat-shimmer from earlier. “We are going to comb the damn site, yes, again. Somewhere there’s a piece of evidence that will tell us what really happened out there. Because if those bastards really did attack that girl, and destroy her innocence enough that the ki-rin had no choice but to repudiate her, then the survivor has to be punished. Otherwise, he’ll think he can get away with it again. And if he didn’t, if…something else happened, then a man is dead at the ki-rin’s hooves, and I want to know why.”

  There was a sort of collective sigh within the room, although nobody made a sound. This wasn’t about the Council’s mandate anymore. It wasn’t even about our reputation. This was about Ian Stosser’s rather overdeveloped and manic need for justice. Right now, I was good with that. I got the feeling everyone else was, too.

  Stosser leaned back, and Venec took over the briefing. “Sharon, what you were saying earlier about levels of truth? I want you to follow up on that. Do you think that you could create a spell that would sort out degrees of truth?”

  “Truthiness?” Pietr asked.

  “That’s not a word,” Nifty retorted.

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “Children, hush. Sharon, can you do it?”

  Sharon thought it over. A lot of what we did was using old spells in a new way, a very specific, repeatable, consistent way. Magic as science. That was part of why Council was so uneasy about us: they weren’t real big fans of innovation unless they controlled it, and you can’t control something that’s designed to give the same result no matter who uses it. Especially in the hands of someone using it to find answers, not prove a point.

  While Sharon was thinking, I turned my gaze on Venec, the only member of the team I hadn’t done a quick-check on, and at that exact instant he looked up from his notes and looked right at me. I mean, right at me, like he had mage-sight on in full force. There was an instant of disorientation, his familiar, exhaustion-lined face somehow becoming the mask of a stranger, and something hit me in the gut, stirring my core like a lightning bolt.

  Benjamin Venec. The first time I saw him he was playing a dead body, to test us—our job interview, to see if we had what it took to be pups. Even then, I’d been drawn to him, physically. But this…this was different. I surfaced out of my own fugue-state and back to normal space with a gasp, feeling like I’d gone two rounds with a zero-gravity roller coaster. What the hell was that?

  When I looked at him again, cautiously, his attention was back at his notes, like nothing had ever happened. My skin was sizzling, and he didn’t think anything had happened?

  I stared at him, and there was just the tiniest twitch in the muscle next to his eye, above his ear, and a drop of sweat at the hairline.

  It could have been from anything, but it wasn’t. He was as damned-full aware of what had just happened—whatever had happened—as I was. But he wasn’t going to acknowledge it. I knew that, the way I knew…

  Hell. I just knew. The spark during the training session, this… I couldn’t analyze it, not the way my nerves were singing at me, but this was new. This was…

  Was going to have to wait, whatever it was. I took a deep breath, found my core, and grounded and centered quickly, forcing myself to focus on the briefing, and only the briefing.

  “There are truth-scrying spells,” Sharon was saying. “But mostly they’re useless, the same way polygraph tests are. Once someone’s aware that you’re testing them, they can cheat the system. It would have to be indirect, something they couldn’t sense and respond to….”

  Sharon’s voice trailed off and she tilted her head back, and her “let me think, let me think” humming started again.

  “Right.” Stosser took o
ver the discussion when Venec didn’t say anything, still too busy studying his notes. “Lawrence, you work with her on that.”

  Sharon and Nifty were constantly warring for alpha spot, but they were also both really good at brainstorming. It made sense to put them both on it.

  “The rest of you—”

  “And Nick,” Sharon said, breaking off her humming to lay claim.

  Stosser looked surprised: we didn’t often interrupt him.

  “I think what I’m going to do…it’s going to need his specialization.”

  Nobody ever actually said “hacker” out loud. You didn’t even think about it too much. It was an amazing, rare skill…but it was also one of the ones that could go most spectacularly blooey, so it was like not mentioning certain breeds of the fatae—if you don’t name them, they won’t come by and screw things up.

  “All right. Shune, you get to stay inside. Torres, take Pietr back to the scene and don’t come back without something useful.”

  Well. That was nicely non-directed and open-ended. And completely unhelpful.

  *how the hell are we supposed to know if it’s useful or not?*

  Pings didn’t actually use words, but emotions and intents that our brains transcribed into something comprehensible. This one came on an arrow of frustration wrapped with a hint of amusement, shaded with Pietr’s unmistakable mental flavor, and I ducked my head to hide the smile I could feel rising. Ian Stosser thought we were all nearly as capable, competent, and borderline-brilliant as he was…and expected us to perform to those standards.

  We did our best, and our best was pretty damn good, but our brains weren’t Stosser-level.

  “I’ll follow up on that other matter,” Venec said. Stosser looked surprised, and I knew some ping went back and forth between them, but Ian just nodded and that was that. Whatever the other matter was, it was need-to-know, and we didn’t need to know.

  The others filed out, talking animatedly about ideas for a spell. Part of me really, really wanted to be going with them. I was good at crafting spells, and seeing where we could improvise—the Guys had said that I was their best tech, hands down. I should have been working with them.