Hard Magic

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Nobody asked if the landlord had actually done it or not.

  On the plus side, reporting my fine-tuning of the tracer cantrip during our morning meeting got me praise from Stosser, a snort from Venec that was almost like praise, and a glare from Nifty, who’d apparently been fiddling with an alternate refinement that hadn’t worked so well.

  “Lawrence is good on the power stuff,” Pietr said, when I brought the topic up. We’d escaped Nifty’s glower to hit the little Indian place on the corner, just the two of us. Nick had brought in his own lunch, and Sharon had declined, as always. I couldn’t tell if she was being antisocial, or just saving money. “Full-on power, and quick planning, stuff he used on the field, probably. That’s how his brain is trained. I’d want him on my side in a fight, for damn sure. But I don’t think he’s very good with finicky details. You, that’s what you’re really good at.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  My coworker waved a piece of naan at me, scolding. “That was a compliment, Bonnie. Finicky details are what make things work. Like…like needing an engineer to make a building safe, while the construction workers are making it solid.”

  I thought about it, and decided to let him live after all. Especially since he’d offered to pay for lunch. And it was a pretty good lunch, too. Not haute cuisine by any stretch of the imagination, but the place was clean, the bread fresh, and the food spicy. And it was reasonably priced. Another plus to being here rather than in midtown.

  But the topic at hand interested me more than food. “Venec says that they hired us because our skills complemented each other.”

  Pietr narrowed those gray eyes and tapped his fork against the side of his plate in a quick, almost syncopated rhythm. “Makes sense. Only…” And he caught the same thing I had. “How did they know, that quick?”

  I had my theory about that. But I’d have to check it against other people’s experiences, and I wasn’t quite ready to share the particulars of my history with anyone just yet, so I couldn’t bring it up.

  “Same way they knew to call us, I guess,” was all I said for now, and the conversation moved on to the ever-popular “Nifty versus Sharon” sweepstakes. Right now, Sharon was ahead on sheer skill, but Nifty was a favorite for style.

  We went back smelling of cardamom and cinnamon, and were once more under the hammer: my attention to finicky detail might be my strength, but apparently Venec thought I should be able to lift steel and tote cable, too.

  “Is that all you’ve got? I could snap you in two and not even raise a sweat!”

  Bastard. That was my new nickname for Benjamin Venec. Much more appropriate than DB, although there were times I wanted him to be that, too…. Right now the most amazing eyes and gorgeous forearms meant a lot less to me than the fact that he was a sadistic sonofabitch.

  The pressure in the room was unbearable, and I didn’t mean that in a metaphorical way. Venec had lowered the ceiling on us, magically, and I thought my spine was about to snap. Nick, across the room from me, was bent double, too, a look of frustrated agony on his face.

  We knew Venec wasn’t actually going to crush us. Probably. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going for the maximum hurt, to make his point.

  “All you have to do is push, children. Push! Shove it back at me!”

  I wanted to shove it, all right. All the way down his damned throat until he choked. But the more current I pulled into forcing the downward pressure away from me, the more the pressure seemed to increase. This wasn’t getting us anywhere. I just didn’t have the brute force, and neither did Nick. We’d tried combining forces about ten minutes into this exercise, and all that did was double the pressure in response. I didn’t see any way other than going totally flat and letting it…

  Wait a minute. Just…wait…

  Oh hell. If I thought about it any longer, I’d never have the nerve to try it. Without warning Nick, I dropped to my stomach on the floor, pulled all my current from the upward push, and reconfigured it in my head from a solid form to a ball of lightning that rumbled across the carpeted floor, picking up more and more static charge as it went, until, instants later, it slammed into Venec’s ankles and sparked against his own current-use.

  The thump as he hit the floor was, I purely and gleefully admit, seriously satisfying.

  “Oh. That was sneaky,” Nick said, dropping to the floor in exhaustion as the pressure suddenly disappeared. “Wish I’d thought of it.”

  I acknowledged the praise with a weary grin. My body hurt too much to do anything more.

  “What were you doing?” Venec asked him. The bastard had already recovered and was sitting up, cross-legged on the floor like he’d planned to do that all along. I was pleased—hell, gratified—to see that the neckline of his off-white shirt was gray and damp with sweat.

  “Working on a way to negate the friction and slide out of range,” Nick said, rolling over on his back and speaking to the ceiling, now back up on the ceiling where it belonged. “Elementals do it, right?” Elementals were microentities, not fatae exactly, but some weird offshoot of current that lived in and off the flow of electricity itself. Jury was still out on how intelligent they were. J said they were only borderline aware and in his opinion about as smart as your average goldfish. “So I’d reverse the static charge, make it slippery instead, and force an escape route that way.”

  “Huh. An interesting solution, and it might have worked. Keep trying, and once you’ve got it, see if you can find a way to speed it up.”

  Nick rolled his eyes. That was Venec’s response to almost anything: assume it can be done, and then find a way to make it work faster. The fact that he was right—if we needed something like that we’d need it to hand immediately—didn’t make the instructions any the less annoying.

  Without saying anything more, Venec got up and walked out of the room, leaving us still lying there. That was how lessons ended—we’d gotten the point, now we had to follow up on the assignment. At some point, one or the other of the Guys would find us, and give us some other impossible task.

  “I bet Nifty just shoved the ceiling and it got the hell out of his way,” I said, too tired to really be cranky.

  “And Sharon glared at it, and it whimpered and retreated into a corner,” Nick said, not disagreeing.

  “And Pietr convinced it that he wasn’t there to be crushed.”

  Nick snorted. It was funny ’cause it was probably true.

  “You were pretty sneaky there yourself, too,” he said. “So much for your straight-shooter persona. I’m onto you now, Torres.”

  Straight shooter? Me? I guess that was funny ’cause it was true, too.

  And then we got up, and went back to work.

  That was how the days passed, working and sniping and working some more, and then it was Friday again, and after a month, the weeks developed a recognizable pattern: get up five days out of seven, get hammered all day by one or the other or both of the Guys, stagger out too exhausted to do anything but go back to the hotel, order room service, and fall asleep, then take a day off to recover, and spend Sunday unsuccessfully apartment-hunting.

  I felt bad, not having any time to spare for J, but he told me he understood, and I’d see him as soon as things got settled. I could hear the hurt in his voice, though, and I hung up the phone feeling worse, not better.

  I also took the time to strip out the last of the red dye from my hair, and was reacquainting myself with my natural hair color, a shade and texture that inspired Nick and Pietr to try and come up with appropriate nicknames for me. I responded by dubbing them, respectively, “Ferret-boy” and “Fade.” Nifty was still Nifty. Sharon seemed to defy nicknaming.

  Between coffee and a seemingly unending supply of junk food and pizza, we managed to survive the workload, and even learn some new things without passing out or killing each other. The gremlins kept up their work, too, but we—almost—got used to it.

  By the end of the second month on the job, everyone seemed to have gotten a seco
nd wind. The work was still killing us, and I thought my brain was going to explode from the sheer volume of information we were being given to read and hear and hands-on learn, but there was more life in everyone, come quitting time, than there had been before.

  Knowing the Guys, that just meant next week was going to ramp up a notch and hammer us all over again. But for now, the moment was good. It was Thursday, which was almost Friday, and I had a line on an apartment that I thought might work, overpriced and undersized, but in a good location, and an appointment to see it tomorrow morning before work. It would be nice to have that settled, at least. I was on first-name basis with all of the staff at the hotel now, and didn’t want to think about what it was costing, even if J had gotten a long-term deal.

  “Hey. You want to grab a drink?”

  I was sitting in the break room, trying to get my eyes to refocus after Sharon flubbed—rather impressively—a basic illumination spell. Even Nifty’d been quiet after that disaster, mainly because he hadn’t been able to do much better. We were trying to rework it to illuminate specific things—blood splatter, fingerprints, random body parts—on order, but so far, all it would do was act like a dimmer switch set on spastic. I’d been up half the night before, trying to break down the components of the spell to see where we were going wrong, but hadn’t been able to come up with anything yet.

  “What?” My train of thought broken, I looked blankly up at my coworker.

  Nick clarified his offer with exaggerated patience. “Drink. Alcoholic. Bar. After work. Any of this sounding familiar? Nifty found this absolutely horrible place downtown. Gives dives a bad name, but excellent brews on tap.”

  “We having a team-building exercise?”

  Nick smirked. “Call it whatever you want, the hangover’s still the same.”

  Hard to argue with that kind of logic. The thought of a little social interaction sounded good. I was starting to go stir-crazy, even through my exhaustion, and the staff of the hotel, while nice, were being professionally friendly, not real friendly. My dating life was stagnant. Although Nick had indicated once or twice that he wouldn’t be adverse to a little after-hours research, I liked him but not in that way. Sharon was clearly not into girls, and Nifty wasn’t my type—too self-important. Pietr, while undeniably cute, and a good guy…unnerved me a little. Not in a bad way—I didn’t think he was crazy-stalker type or anything, just…unnerving. I was going to have to go looking, eventually, but when did we have time? Another reason to get an apartment; maybe I’d meet someone in the building…. For now, though, just not being in the office was a good start.

  “Yeah, sounds good,” I decided. “Did you ask Sharon?”

  An expressive roll of the eyes was answer enough. Nick worked well with her, but I don’t think they were buddies outside of the office. He was right. Sharon probably wouldn’t be caught dead in the kind of dives he and Nifty seemed to enjoy. Although we might be doing her a disservice, now that I thought about it. Just because someone carries off classy doesn’t mean they always are. I should know that, having lived with J for more than a decade. “Ask, anyway. It’s polite.”

  “All right. I—”

  The sound of the buzzer made both of us jump, and Pietr appeared in the doorway, looking as startled as I felt.

  “The door,” he said. “Someone’s at the door.”

  Christ. Two months we’ve been here, and I didn’t even know we had a doorbell.

  Stosser came out, the black jeans and unfortunate yellow pullover he’d been wearing earlier in the day now changed out for dress slacks and a pressed, button-down shirt just the right shade of white to make his hair seem muted. Damn it, I’d just seen him five minutes ago, when he told us to take a break! If he was hiding a changing room and closet in this place, I wanted to know about it. Especially if there was a shower in there.

  “Look competent, children,” was all he said, almost offhand, and then it was like a nuclear blast went off under his redheaded scalp, the charm practically oozing like honey out of him as he opened the door and ushered the newcomer into our office.

  “Ah, Ms. Reybeorn, welcome. Please, come into my office, and we can discuss your situation in more comfortable surroundings. May I fetch you coffee? Some tea?”

  The honey filled the entire room, and for an instant Nick and I went from being exhausted twenty-somethings to alert, intense investigators; professionally going about our business and yet aware of the newcomer, in a nonintrusive way. I could feel Stosser’s current gilding over me as he walked what had to be our first potential client into the back office, but be damned if I knew how he did it.

  Our Ms. Reybeorn was around fifty or so and carrying it off well; short brunette hair styled carefully to play up her cheekbones and downplay her chins, minimal makeup applied well enough to look like no makeup. She was wearing black, but so did three quarters of this city, so that didn’t mean anything. Her shoes were screamingly expensive pumps in a demure two-inch heel, and the glint on her fingers when Stosser took her arm in his said diamonds, plural. Real diamonds, too, not fakes. Talent could tell, don’t ask me how.

  Huh. Maybe I’d be able to put a security deposit down on a decent apartment, after all.

  They went out of the break room and into the main office. The door closed behind them, and the glamour dropped, much to my relief. It was great that Stosser could make clients see us that way, but it was damned uncomfortable to see it yourself and know how far from the truth it was.

  Nick collapsed in the nearest chair, craning his neck to look back at the door. “You think we’re supposed to hang around and find out what’s going on?”

  I shrugged. “Probably.” And even if we weren’t, I sure as hell wasn’t going anywhere now, not even if Venec dismissed us early for the day and personally kicked us out the door. My mind was racing too hard with possibilities to think about anything else; beer and social chitchat just couldn’t compete.

  Where would the boss have taken her? Probably the chat room, which was the smallest of our spaces, down at the far end of the office, and the only one that didn’t look as though it was braced for impact. The other three rooms, while they had chairs and tables, also doubled as work spaces, and had suffered at least one explosion, implosion, or unfortunate incident in the past month, in the course of our on-the-job education and the occasional gremlins. Oh, please don’t let anything happen while she was in there….

  “The alley’s probably clear by now,” Nick said, swinging his body out of the chair and standing up. “Let’s go find the others.”

  The alley was the hallway that connected the two parts of the office. A couple of weeks ago, someone had painted a dark green line down the lower third of the far wall, so it was no longer quite so sterile looking, but you’d never mistake it for anything other than a way to get from point A to point B, and nobody lingered there.

  With Stosser and the mysterious maybe client safely tucked away, we stuck our noses into the nearest workroom and found Sharon, her chin in her hand, still sulking.

  “I think I know where it went wrong,” she said when we came in, not even looking up to see who it was.

  “Yeah? Okay, no, don’t distract me,” Nick said impatiently. “We’ve got news.”

  We might all be different, personality-wise, and maybe we didn’t always have a lovefest going on, but the Guys had it dead-on about us being curious. Sharon dropped whatever she’d been mulling over and turned in her chair to face us, those wide blue eyes alert.

  “What?”

  Nick got there before I could. “Stosser’s in with a maybe-client.”

  “Seriously?” She looked to me for confirmation—that’s me, detail girl—and I imitated Nick’s usual half-arm shrug, clumsily, sitting in the sole armchair in the room, the one that Stosser usually claimed.

  “Female, well dressed, looking stressed and more than a little worried. Fifty-something. Money, if not filthy rich. Maybe more important, Stosser was expecting her, since he knew her name and
must have buzzed her in through the lobby—” we still hadn’t figured out how they did that, damn it “—and he was wearing meet-and-greet duds.”

  Sharon picked up on that immediately. “He wasn’t before. He had on that awful shirt, so he had to have changed, and fast.”

  “Yeah.” Nick was pacing, door to window, and then back again. As usual, the shade—an expensive double-baffled one—was drawn, so that you couldn’t see out…or in. Wasn’t much of a view, anyway.

  “So what do you think is up?” Sharon asked. “We have a job?”

  I raised my hands, palm up, to show my total ignorance. “Maybe. Hope so. Haven’t a damned clue, nor where to find one. But I figure we’ll get told, if anything actually happens.”

  Pietr appeared out of nowhere, already in the room. “Hey, did you guys hear—?”

  “There’s a maybe-client in-office. Yeah,” Sharon said, as though she’d known about it for hours. By now, we were used to Pietr’s disappearing-reappearing act. He swore he didn’t do it on purpose, but nobody except maybe Pietr believed that.

  “God, I’d love to actually have something to do,” he said, sitting on the floor next to my chair and resting his head against my knee in a way that was becoming habit with us. I petted his hair absently, the way you might a puppy’s head. Silky hair. So unfair, when guys get great eyelashes and great hair, and, hell, Pietr had pretty much great everything.

  “Are you crazy, or just out of your mind?”

  The three of us looked at Nick like he’d just displayed wings or something over his polo-shirted shoulders.

  “You don’t?” Sharon asked. “Then why the hell are you here, for the fun times of getting your head handed to you by our esteemed taskmasters?”