Hard Magic

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Never underestimate the power of a pair of good, stompy engineer boots.

  Leaving the hotel, the daytime doorman—an older Asian guy named Walter—wished me good luck, making him third after the two chambermaids in the hallway on my floor. I thanked him, too, not sure if I should feel good that they bothered, or depressed that everyone in the hotel seemed to know I was job-hunting. Still, the entire staff had been really nice to me, and it wasn’t like I was in a position to turn down good wishes.

  The smart thing probably would have been to take a cab once I got cross-town, but the racket-clack of the subway was like a siren’s lure. They’re noisy, and usually overcrowded, but I could get a pretty current-buzz off the third rail without trying, and you see way more interesting people on mass transit. I’m all about the people-watching. Unfortunately, Tuesday at 1:30 p.m., heading uptown, seemed to be the dead time on the 1 train, and it was just me and an old guy reading a day-old newspaper, and two teenage girls in Catholic-school uniforms, whispering and giggling to themselves.

  It took about twenty minutes to get uptown, with me obsessively checking the subway route map on the wall behind my seat at every station. Damn, I was going to be late…. I got off at what I hoped was the right stop, and left the guy to his paper, and the girls to their giggles. Places to go, people to impress!

  The office—or whatever it was—didn’t exactly inspire confidence. The address was a mostly kept-up building off Amsterdam Avenue, seven stories high and nine windows across. Brick and gray stone: that looked like the norm in this neighborhood. We weren’t running with a high-income crowd, here. Still, I had seen and smelled worse, and the neighborhood looked pretty friendly—lots of bodegas and coffee shops, and the kids hanging around looked as if they’d stopped there to hang on the way home from school, not been there all day waiting for their parole officer to roll by.

  And only one of them, a short kid with Day-Glo green hair, shouted out a comment to me, and yeah it was rude, but it wasn’t insulting, so I gave him a grin and told him to call me as soon as he could grow some facial hair, too. His friends hooted and shoved him hard enough to knock him off the stoop. Normal stuff.

  I could work around here, yeah. Assuming this wasn’t just some recruiter’s office, or… Nerves surfaced again, and got shoved down. Come on, I chided myself, hoisting my bag more firmly over my shoulder, you faced off against a cave dragon when you were nineteen…how much more difficult could this be?

  I wasn’t sure I wanted an answer to that, actually.

  Pushing the appropriate intercom button in the foyer got me buzzed in through the lobby doors. There was no camera lens visible, so either they were really trusting, or they were using current to watch the door. I couldn’t sense anything, but that could just mean that it was subtle—meaning well-done. The office was on the top floor, just to the right as I came out of the elevator. From the hallway, it looked as though there were two office suites on each side. I went to the correct door, marked by a brass 7-C, and turned the handle.

  Walking into the office itself was reassuring; the space was clean, well lit, and surprisingly large. It was also filled with people.

  All right, four other people. Three guys and another woman, seated on what looked like almost-comfortable upholstered chairs. None of the usual waiting-room coffee tables filled with out-of-date magazines, thank god. In fact, no coffee table at all, although there was a coffee machine and a bunch of mugs on a counter against the far wall, along with what looked like a working sink and a mini fridge. Nobody else was drinking coffee, although one of the guys had an oversize travel mug with him.

  I let a flutter of current rise, and it got one, two, three, four equally polite touches back in response. Everyone here was a Talent, nobody was masking, and nobody was going to make a fuss about it. The fact that there were other people there was both worrying—competition for the job—and comforting—it probably wasn’t a setup or sideways attack on J after all. But that left the question: what the hell was it? I had no idea what the percentage of Talent was to the entire human population, but even in New York it had to be single digits. This was either deliberate selection, or a massive coincidence.

  Based on the backlash last night, I wasn’t counting on coincidence.

  I lifted my hand in greeting. “Hi.”

  “Hello.” The woman responded first, giving me a once-over that reminded me eerily of my old junior-high math teacher. Not that this woman was old or stern or anything, just…assessing, that was the word. Tall, blond, and cool, with curves that could probably stop a truck. I let my eyes linger, I admit it. “I’m Sharon. That’s Nick.” She pointed to the one with the travel mug, a dark-skinned moose of a guy who barely fit into his armchair. He nodded, his expression not changing from one of resigned boredom. If he hadn’t played football at some point, maybe even college level, I’d tear up my people-watching skills and eat them without sauce. So, was he muscle, or was there something in the brainpan, too?

  “That’s Pietr.” She pointed that finger at the second guy in line, a slender guy in khakis and pale blue button-down shirt matched to a screamingly expensive tie, and with a profile that would make a classical sculpture cry in envy. He was almost pretty, with skin as pale as mine, but something about the way he held himself kept the impression in check; like a serpent—shiny, but not cuddly. He met my gaze evenly, his pale gray eyes possibly the sweetest things I’d seen in weeks, and a smile flickered and was gone. Oh, he was trouble, you could tell it right away. And not all good trouble, either.

  “And that’s Nick, too.”

  No problem telling them apart—if NickOne was a jock, then NickTwo was a nerd. Short and scrawny, brown hair and brown eyes, and totally unimpressive in the same kind of khakis Pietr was wearing, but a less expensive-looking shirt and tie. NickTwo was the kind of guy you’d either ignore…or pick first for your team. I didn’t know which yet, but I was suspecting the latter. That probably meant that NickOne had brains, too, because whatever this gig was, I was starting to get a feeling they weren’t hiring for sheer meat-power.

  They were all dressed more formally than I was, but only Sharon looked like she actually belonged in an office, with her tailored blue skirt and suit jacket, and stylish, low-heeled pumps. She wasn’t wearing much makeup, or it was applied so well you couldn’t tell, and with simple gold jewelry on her fingers and in her ears, she could have just come from a meeting where she wasn’t serving the coffee. She was also, I guessed, older than the rest of us, by anywhere from five to ten years, so make her maybe thirty.

  “I’m Bonnie. You guys all summoned by a nameless message on your answering machine?”

  Four nods; obviously they’d exchanged more than names before I got there.

  “Anyone know what this is all about?”

  Four headshakes.

  “Great.” Talkative bunch. “Anyone want some coffee?”

  Nobody did. “All they have is skim milk,” NickTwo warned me, and I nodded. Fine by me, so long as it wasn’t powdered nondairy crap. I went to the counter and pulled out a mug, pouring a dose of black tarry stuff I wouldn’t feed a rat, and adding as much sugar and milk to it as I could, to try to make it palatable. Didn’t really help, but it was something to do.

  Sharon went back to her newspaper, and NickOne stared into space, as if he was having some in-depth conversation with space aliens. That left NickTwo and Pietr as possible conversationalists. I sat on the only remaining chair, balanced my mug of coffee on my knee, and waited. Time passed. Finally, bored out of my skull, I turned to Pietr on my left. “So why are you here?”

  “My parole officer said I needed to prove I’d gone on a job interview, to keep from going back to jail.”

  NickTwo blinked—I guess they hadn’t gotten around to that topic of conversation yet—but Pietr looked dead serious, so he was either dead serious, or a better joker than I could ever manage. Or, possibly, both.

  “Seriously?” NickTwo asked, his brown eyes going wide and
kidlike in awe.

  “For serious, yes.” Then he cracked a smile, and shook his head. “Nah. But it was strongly suggested to me by persons of importance that I get a job to keep me out of trouble. So when this call came I figured, what the hell.”

  “I think they’d need a lot more than a job to keep you out of trouble,” NickTwo said, leaning back in his chair with a vaguely disgruntled look. Looked as though I wasn’t the only one to have pegged Pietr straightaway.

  He didn’t take offense—just the opposite, actually. “You’re probably right. What’s your excuse for being here?”

  NickTwo shrugged, his skinny arms rising in a very Gallic shrug. “I graduated, got a part-time job that pays pretty well, doesn’t eat my life…and it’s boring the hell out of me. The message I got said I’d find this of interest. So…. I’m waiting for them to interest me.”

  “Same here,” Sharon said, raising her head from the newspaper without even pretending that she hadn’t been eavesdropping. “I’m a paralegal. Good money, no future, boring as hell. My message told me that, if I wanted to stop wasting my life, to show up here, at this time.” She folded the newspaper and put it on the floor next to her chair. “How ’bout you, big guy?”

  NickOne blinked and came back to us. “Nifty.”

  “What?”

  “My teammates call me Nifty.”

  I mentally patted myself on the back. Teammates, yep. Point to me. And ohmahgawd and holy shit. “You’re Nifty Lawrence.” I didn’t mean for my voice to squeak, but it did anyway. I’d dated a guy in college who was totally into football, not the pros but the college games, and Nifty Lawrence was supposed to be hot enough for the first round of the draft when he graduated, which would have been last year. “Hands like a god, could catch anything on the field, including low-flying seagulls,” my ex had claimed. So why the hell was he here, instead of sweating out the coaching appraisals and counting his cash?

  “I am.” He looked sort of embarrassed by that fact, and tugged at the sleeve of his navy jacket as though he’d just realized he was wearing it and wondered how that happened. “And before you ask, I looked around, and decided that maybe just being good enough to go pro wasn’t reason to do it. I mean, I’m good but I didn’t love it. Getting my MBA and finding a corner office somewhere seemed smarter than spending five or ten years getting my head knocked to the turf. Only it takes money to pay for grad school, even with loans. So, I need a job, too.”

  My opinion of his brains went up, considerably.

  “So what about you?” he asked me. “Boredom, or desperation, or something else entirely?”

  “All of the above, I think. A whim? I was curious to see what the deal was.” I looked around, suddenly struck by a thought. “You guys all had messages—did they all say 2 p.m.?”

  “Yeah,” Nick said, and Nifty nodded. Sharon frowned, obviously thinking the same thing I was, but Pietr was the one who said it. “Who schedules five interviews all at the same time?”

  “More than that,” Nick said, pulling out a battered old-fashioned windup pocket watch and looking at it. “It’s almost 2:20, and we’re the only ones here.”

  Four heads swiveled as though we were pulled on a string, to look at the closed door behind us, leading into the rest—I presumed—of the office.

  The door remained closed.

  “Anyone know the protocol of how long you wait before you assume you’ve been blown off?” I asked, and like we’d rehearsed it or something, the four of us looked at Sharon, who was the only one who seemed as if she might have a clue.

  “What, I’m mother hen now?”

  “Cluck, cluck,” Nick said, unabashed when she glared at him. Nifty laughed, and she split the glare between the two of them. Oh, Miss Blonde did not like being mocked, even gently.

  I’m not much as peacemaker—I never got the hang of being soothing, and while I can dance around the truth I’m crap at lying—but it looked as if it was gonna be my job anyway, just to keep things nonviolent. “Look, I’m straight out of college, don’t know a damned thing, and I know Nifty’s the same, considering he’s only a year older than I am. I don’t know what Pietr’s background is, but getting anything straightforward out of him is impossible. I know that already, after ten minutes.” He made a seated, ironic bow in response. “You and Nick, on the other hand, already have jobs, so you must’ve gone through this successfully before, and I’d trust your opinion over Nick’s on something like this.”

  “Hey!” Nick sounded like he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to take offense or not. I did say peacemaking wasn’t my thing, right? But it seemed to work, because I could practically see the hackles under Sharon’s chignon subside, and she gave a grudging nod.

  “By now, I would expect someone to at least check on us, see who was here, maybe call one of us in,” she said. “Unless they have this room on closed-circuit camera…”

  “They don’t. I checked.” Nick sounded quite certain of that. “And anyway, the bunch of us in one small room, nervous or anticipating, and a seeing-eye camera? Would last about ten minutes.”

  “Speak for yourself,” I told him. “Some of us have actual control.”

  “I don’t,” Nifty admitted. “Local stations stopped interviewing me before a game, after their cameras kept fritzing.”

  Probably another reason why he decided against a career in pro football. He wasn’t going to make it as a sportscaster, either, with that handicap. Corporate America was definitely a better bet.

  “So by now,” I said, “someone should have come out to count noses?”

  Sharon nodded. That’s what I had thought. My nerves were starting to hum again. Was anyone even back there, behind the closed door I’d been assuming was the main office? If not, then who had let us in? “And nobody’s had the slightest urge to get up and walk out, despite the fact that we don’t know crap-all, and this mysterious voice has kept us waiting almost half an hour already without any explanation?”

  “I thought about it,” Sharon admitted. “I’m still thinking about it. But…”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But.” But we were all there, anyway.

  The five of us sat there in silence, uncomfortable now, for another ten minutes. The time ticked by in my head, each tick louder than the last, and finally I’d had enough.

  Stubborn, I am, yes. Also curious enough to kill a dozen cats, and not really good with the patience thing. When I think about something, I have to follow it all the way through to the end.

  “Hell with this.” I put my mug of coffee—still undrunk, because it really was disgusting—on the floor and stood up. “I want to know what the deal is.”

  “What, you’re just going to barge in there?” Nick looked somewhat taken aback, but Pietr had a gleam in those eyes that made me think he’d been about three seconds behind me. He liked trouble, yeah. Being in, or causing, or both, I didn’t know. I had a tiny tremor of precog that I was going to find out, though.

  “Yep,” I said in response to Nick’s question, and I marched my boots over to the door, knocked once soundly, and waited.

  No answer. Not even the sound of someone shuffling around on the other side. That wasn’t good.

  I knocked again, and then tried the door handle, fully expecting it to be locked.

  It wasn’t.

  My current swirled once, deep inside me, then went still. I could Translocate out of here now, if I wanted to. I could yelp for J, ask his opinion. I could…

  I pushed the door open and stepped inside, hearing at least one person get up and move behind me. Nice to know someone had my back. I was betting on it being Pietr.

  The door opened up into a larger room, done up like your basic office—beige carpeting and walls painted to match—and furnished with a large wooden desk with a leather chair behind it, two upholstered visitors’ chairs, a bunch of framed inspirational-looking prints on the walls, and basic white blinds on the windows, two of them, on the far wall. There was one sickly looking plant I imm
ediately wanted to rescue, and a couple of photos on the desk, facing away from us, but not much personality otherwise.

  The body sprawled facedown on the floor next to the desk didn’t contribute much to the room’s decor, either.

  four

  “Holy shit.” The words came from my throat the moment they hit my brain. Maybe not the most articulate of reactions, and I don’t have much of a filter, sometimes, but…hello? Dead body. A little freaked-out. I think I could be forgiven.

  Sharon looked over my shoulder to see what I was reacting to, and then slid past me while I was still standing there, trying to take it all in. She knelt by the guy with careful precision and lifted his wrist, I guess to try for a pulse. I almost snorted. Not much point; even from the doorway I could tell he was dead. You didn’t lie facedown that way if you were just sleeping, not even if you’d passed out. Trust me, I’ve seen a lot of people passed out.

  “Holy shit,” I said again.

  There was a dead body in the office. We’d been sitting there, just talking, drinking coffee, and there had been a dead body in there all that time.

  “I guess the interviews are canceled?” a voice said in my ear, and I dug an elbow into Nick’s side. Not that it wasn’t funny, in a sick way, but it didn’t really seem…respectful. Or something, I don’t know.

  Did I mention the freaked-out part? Dead body. There. My current was very still, deep inside me, and I stirred it just to reassure myself that it hadn’t suddenly disappeared. I didn’t carry a lot of mojo around with me—why would I?—but touching it was like having a blankie or a stuffed bear; the need for comfort was a natural human instinct. I’d place even odds everyone else in the room was doing exactly the same thing. Like checking for your wallet after someone else’s been robbed: maybe stupid, but almost impossible to stop yourself.