Hard Magic

by Laura Anne Gilman

Nifty moved past us, too, nowhere near as smoothly or gently as Sharon, and that made me think maybe we should get out of the way—or at least stop standing in the doorway before someone decided to go through us, one way or the other. I didn’t really want to get closer to the body, but the only other alternative was to go back into the waiting room, and I didn’t think that would look good.

  Why I cared what looked good in front of people I’d just met and wasn’t sure I liked and was probably going to be competing for a job against was left unanswered.

  “There’s no blood,” Pietr said, and I jumped. Despite thinking he was the first one behind me, I hadn’t seen him until he spoke. He’d somehow faded into the blah-colored walls of the office like some kind of two-legged chameleon. How a good-looking guy can disappear from my awareness… I guess it showed how freaked-out I was.

  “Wha?” My voice came back with a croak, and I cleared my throat and tried again. “What?”

  “On the carpet. There’s no blood.”

  I forced myself to ignore the fact that the body was a body, and looked again, starting with the torso—I didn’t want to look at the face, not yet—and moving over the probable track he’d taken to land there. Pietr was right. No blood, no signs of violence, spilled drink or food on the desk—no sign whatsoever of what had happened.

  By now, all of us had moved through the doorway and into the room, although Nick and I were still hanging back. I felt I should be doing something, but I didn’t know what, so I just stood there and watched.

  Sharon and Nifty were turning the body over, gently, like it was going to matter to the guy now. I kept cataloging details, focusing on that so I didn’t have to really see what they were doing, in case blood suddenly spurted or something. Clothing. The guy had on a nice suit, gray pinstripe, that looked more expensive than the office would suggest. He was also missing his shoes, gray dress socks visible as they turned him. That was weird. A head of dark hair, thick and curly, and I couldn’t tell in this light if he was going gray or not. I looked, finally, but couldn’t see much of his face, because Nifty was blocking the view. I was kind of relieved, actually. A face would make it—him—real. A real dead body.

  “Should we be moving the body?” I asked. “Aren’t the cops going to want it to be left alone, for investigation?”

  “You going to call the cops?” Pietr sounded horrified by the idea. I stopped. Wasn’t I? Weren’t we? Wasn’t that what you were supposed to do if you found a guy dead? I had no idea what the protocol was for this kind of thing. J would know. I reached out, instinctively, to ping him and then stopped. He’d hear “dead body” and freak, and yank me home, and that wouldn’t solve anything.

  “I…”

  “Not me,” Pietr said firmly. “Natural-born non involver, that’s me. I say we back out and pretend we never saw anything.” He talked scared, but he didn’t move, and his gaze was sweeping the room to make sure he didn’t miss something. He might not like cops, but he wasn’t scared. Far from it.

  “I guess we should call someone,” Sharon said, but she sounded weirdly reluctant. Not scared or even unnerved, but reluctant, like a dog that didn’t want to give up a bone. “The guy’s definitely dead. No visible wounds, no spilled blood, but there’s no pulse, no lung movement.” She sounded as if she’d memorized a medical handbook on how to tell someone was dead. For all I knew, she had.

  Nifty had a small mirror in his hand, holding it over the DB’s face. He flipped it shut, like a compact, and put it back in his jacket pocket. Wow. I hadn’t known anyone actually did that anymore, checking for breath. Did it really work? The thought distracted me for a moment, then I came slamming back. How had the guy died? How long had he been dead? Had it been while we were sitting there, and if so, oh shit, could we have done anything to save him?

  That thought made me feel vaguely ill.

  “I think he had a heart attack,” Sharon said, although her voice was, for the first time, lacking what I’d already assumed was a customary take-charge sharpness. “Totally natural, probably instantaneous. No sign of any kind of external violence.”

  My throat closed up at her words, and I had to force myself to breathe normally, shards of my dream coming back like an acid flashback. External violence. Murder? I hadn’t even thought…

  Nifty looked as confused as I felt. “We just found him here like this. Natural reaction would be to call the paramedics first, even if he is dead, and let them deal with the cops. Right? So why not call the cops, too? What if they have questions for us?”

  Sharon looked at him as though he’d just suggested she take up pole dancing. “You think the five of us, here in an unmarked office, with no reason to be here except a mysterious phone message, and a dead body just happens to be in the other office, aren’t going to become the immediate persons of interest to the cops, no matter how he died? You think they’re going to believe how we all ended up here on the basis of some strange phone message from god knows who, for an unspecified interview for an unnamed, unknown company none of us sent a résumé to? I don’t know about you, but I don’t need that shit in my life.”

  Nifty blinked, processed, and nodded reluctantly. Nick let out a sigh, and even Pietr seemed to agree with her logic. I obviously had a different take on the police than my companions. Then again, I’d never actually ever had any dealings with the police. So what if they asked me a few questions? I didn’t have anything to hide. Then it hit me. “You guys…all lonejacks?”

  They nodded.

  “You’re not?” Pietr moved away from me, as though I’d just admitted to having cooties. I shrugged. “Dad was lonejack. My mentor’s Council. I never really thought about it.” Wasn’t quite true, but explaining would take too much time and energy.

  The Cosa Nostradamus wasn’t exactly one big happy family. Or we were, but there were two distinct branches of the family tree. Council was organized, focused, and monied, mostly. Not more or less law-abiding than any given lonejack, but less likely to take heat for it, I suppose. Council policed themselves: that was the point of Council. Lonejacks were on their own, and liked it that way. If my dad had been any indication, they really didn’t appreciate official-type people asking questions about their private lives, even if they hadn’t done anything wrong.

  J and I, we ran in our own little world, I guess. He’d never pushed me to go Council, or kept me from having lonejack friends, but mostly I sort of floated between the two worlds, and never felt I belonged particularly in either one. I’d always thought of myself as child-of-a-lonejack, but would probably identify as Council if pushed. I’m not sure they’d acknowledge me, though. It hadn’t ever been an issue before, but now I felt it like an ache: where would I go, if they had to take me in?

  “Don’t let your guard down just yet, if you were smart enough to raise it in the first place,” Pietr said, breaking into my thoughts. “It wasn’t a heart attack, not the way you meant, anyway.” He’d somehow gone from standing against the wall to standing next to the body, and the way the others reacted I don’t think they saw him move, either.

  “You can tell, just by looking at him?” Sharon’s voice got real cold. “You have a doctoral degree you forgot to mention?”

  “Idiots.” He sounded totally disgusted with the lot of us. “Can’t you feel it?”

  The moment he mentioned it, I understood. There was a hum in the room, something faint but unmistakable. The sound of current, simmering in the wires, normal in any modern building, yeah—except the humming was in the body, too.

  Everyone carries electrical current in them: it’s how our bodies work. Muscles moving, heart pumping, neurons firing, etc. Once the body dies, the electricity does, too. If you’re Talent, you’ve got current in there, too, not just in your core-supply, but everywhere, filling your entire body. But it flits even faster than electricity when the person dies and control’s released. Everyone knows that.

  If current was still in the body, and the body was dead, then it meant that the current
we were sensing was from an external source—and still keeping a grip on the body.

  That…probably wasn’t good.

  “You think current killed him?” Nifty sounded less surprised or horrified than fascinated.

  It happened sometimes, when a Talent overloaded, took too much current on, either by accident or ego, and it shorted out their system. Mostly it just made you nuts, frying the brain cells, but it could kill, too. Sometimes it killed everyone in the area, too, just for the sin of being too close. I was suddenly really glad I hadn’t gotten close, and from the look on Nifty’s face, he was wishing he were another ten feet or more away. Sharon didn’t seem to be bothered at all, still kneeling by the body, her skirt folded neatly under her knees.

  “But overrush shouldn’t still be lingering,” she said. “It should fade once the final flare-out happens, not hold on to him.”

  A damned good point. I didn’t think I wanted to hear Pietr’s response.

  “I think someone used current to kill him,” he said anyway, and that stopped everything cold. Even Sharon blanched.

  I knew I didn’t want to hear it.

  “You think one of us did it?” Nifty asked, his deep voice a little tight and rising. “But we were all there, together—hell, Sharon and I arrived at the same time, first, and the rest of you…”

  Nick started to babble. “We don’t know anything about each other. This could be a setup—”

  “Stop it!” Sharon’s voice cut through Nick’s stream of denial like forged steel, cold and hard. “None of us did anything.”

  “And you know that how?”

  “I know.”

  “How?” Pietr was like a damn terrier with a bit of meat; he wasn’t going to let go, even standing over a dead body.

  “I just do, all right?” Our cool blonde was pissed, and not in the mood for being questioned. I got the feeling she was like that a lot. “I could tell if any of you were lying, or trying to keep something from us. It’s what I do. So just shut up with the paranoia. None of us killed this guy.”

  “Venec.”

  “What?” That distracted her from her pissiness, at least a little.

  Nifty had gotten up and gone around to the desk. “His name’s Venec, Ben Venec. Or at least, he’s reading a newspaper that was mailed to a Mister Benjamin Venec at this address.” Nifty pointed a finger down at the New York Times folded on the desk, but didn’t touch it. “There’s nothing else here. This guy wasn’t using the desk.” He took a piece of tissue out of his pocket and used it to pull open the drawer. “Nothing in here, either. Definitely not using the desk. That’s weird. People usually dump stuff into the desk drawers first off, even before they bring in plants or photos.”

  By now, Sharon had gotten up and moved away from the body, smoothing her skirt and looking like she was about to start issuing orders again. Something got me walking across the carpet the three feet it took to take her place.

  “What are you doing?” Nick asked, watching me.

  I put my palm over the guy’s chest, still not looking at his face—this was easier if I didn’t think about him as a person.

  “Asking the current,” I said, already sinking into my core and not really aware of anything else, other than the idea that this wasn’t a very good idea. I’d done this sort of scrying before, but only with people I knew, or things that belonged to them. The last time I’d done it, in fact, had been with tools that belonged to my dad, just after he’d been killed, which was why I’d thought of it. Death just seemed to call out for a final scrying.

  Tell me something, I whispered to the hum of current wrapped around this guy’s chest. Tell me something about why you’re there. Tell me why I dreamed of death, again.

  That last bit slipped in, but I let it go rather than worrying. Sometimes I’d get something, maybe detailed, maybe vague. More often I wouldn’t get anything. In light of the past twenty-four hours, what I got this time really shouldn’t have surprised me.

  I got tossed on my ass, back into the side of the desk.

  “Motherf— Ow!” I don’t swear much, but it felt warranted. That hurt.

  “You all right?”

  “What happened?

  “Holy hell, girl, what did you do?”

  The voices broke out over my head, surprised and concerned, in varying registers. “I didn’t do a damn thing,” I said, as soon as the birds stopped tweeting in circles around my head. It took a second, and then something slammed into my head, like the tail end of an aftershock. “Damn. Whatever’s wrapped itself around that guy, I’ve felt it before.”

  “What? When?”

  I had to think for a second, then the memory connected with something else, and I had it. “Last night. I tried to scry, get some detail on this interview, and got kicked back, hard.”

  Nifty knelt beside me, not touching me. “Is it the same signature?”

  I had to think about that, too. Signature’s the specific feel/taste/sound of current. Wild current’s like springwater—fresh and pretty much signatureless. Canned current, the stuff that comes out of electrical wiring, has a specific and easily recognizable signature. Core-current? J’s I could recognize a mile and a millimeter away. Some unknown guy? Tougher. Maybe impossible. But if it was the same, it meant that the killer had been in my brain before I even got here. It meant the killer knew me.

  I went cold, locking down everything except the question at hand.

  “Nothing I could recognize,” I said, finally. “It was sharp, like a lightning bolt, but if it was wild, it was a while ago.” There was a flavor to it, or more like a lack of flavor, like flavor had been stripped out of it. But I didn’t know how to say that without sounding like a crackpot, or that the hit to my head had been worse than it looked.

  Nifty was working his jaw like he had a hard thought between his molars, and my gaze, untethered from anything my brain was doing, watched it in fascination.

  “Someone…one of us did this?” Sharon sounded as though it was something unthinkable, something…obscene. As though somehow being Talent made you immune from the urge to kill.

  I wished that were true. I knew all too well that it wasn’t.

  “It came from through here,” Nick said. He was looking up at the ventilation system, holding a hand up like he was trying to coax something out of it. Which he was, actually. The arm moved, tracing a path down through the wall. “There’s wiring here that’s not normal. You’d expect to see it in a modern high-rise, not this place. Too jazzed, too much power. Like laying in a midnight snack of current.” He saw us all staring at him, and shrugged those skinny shoulders with a sort of rueful embarrassment. “I spent a summer working as a runner at a construction copyshop. I stared at a lot of blueprints, got a feel for wiring.”

  “So whoever it was, they had to have planned this.” My brain was totally focused now, no hesitations or freaked-out gibbering. For the first time in months, I felt that I had, if not a direction, then at least a path underfoot. “Or at least knew that the wiring was there. Question is, was this guy the actual target? Or was someone just trying out the available power, and he was in the wrong place at the right time?”

  “No.” Pietr’s voice was coming from the door, this time. How the hell did he do that? “The question is—why the hell are we still here, poking around trying to figure out who and why? What the hell does it have to do with us, other than we’ve now put our fingerprints all over the room for the cops to find?”

  That was a damn good question.

  “I’m not in the system,” Nick said, shrugging.

  “I am,” Sharon said. “Standard security profile for some of the clients my firm works with. And having my profile flagged for a suspicious death would not be good for my career, since it looks like this job’s not going to pan out to anything.”

  “So why are you still here?” Nifty asked, not quite getting up in her face, but close to it: he was challenging her to leave, to abandon us. And when the hell, I wondered, did we become
“us”?

  “Because…” Sharon let the sentence trail off, obviously trying to put her thoughts into some kind of order before speaking them.

  “Because we’re curious,” I said, jumping in. “We don’t give a damn about this guy, particularly. We don’t know who he is, and we’ve got every reason to be pissed off and scared. But we want to know why, more.”

  “That’s insane.” Nifty sounded like I’d just insulted his mother.

  “Sure, but you got another reason for standing there with a dead guy’s day planner in your hand?”

  Nifty looked down, and put the book back on the desk as though it was about to bite him. I’d made my point, though, and I could practically see his hackles go down.

  “So what now, genius,” Sharon asked, but not pissed-sounding, more like she really did wonder what I was going to suggest.

  So did I.

  “Now you congratulate yourselves on a successful job interview.”

  Sharon shrieked. So did Nifty, in a deeper but no less shrieky voice. Nick jumped back a full foot, and sparks of current appeared in his hands, deep blue and arcing all over his fingers. And Pietr, I swear to god, I was looking right at him and I saw him fade out of sight this time.

  They all seemed like reasonable things to do, when a dead body sits up and starts talking to you.

  “Stand down, people.” A door none of us noticed before slid open and another guy walked in. He was tall, taller even than Nifty, if half his mass, with orange-red hair tied back in a ponytail. The color looked natural, and a guy wearing four-hundred-dollar boots probably isn’t the sort to do Day-Glo dye jobs anyway. Flame-head walked past where Pietr had just been and offered a hand to our dead body. The DB took it, hauling himself to his feet.

  They didn’t look a thing alike: flame-head was tall and skinny, and DB was squared-off and dark, but they stood together like bookends, totally unconscious of how they mirrored each other. My fifth-grade dance teacher used to try to hammer that kind of unconscious grace into us, mostly with abject failure.