Hard Magic

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “It’ll be tricky. And maybe ugly. But…yeah. I think I can do it. You going to foot the bill?”

  “So long as you’re on the clock, we’re covering the costs. You know that.”

  “Yah.”

  Whatever it was that he was going to do, Nick didn’t seem too happy about it.

  “All right, later—”

  “Now.”

  Nick looked like he was going to balk. Funny, he was still the skinny geek I’d met that first day, but something was different. Something I couldn’t quite see, but knew was there. We were all changing, I guess. I wondered what they saw in me now.

  “Come on, Shune. You’re going to have to trust them with it sooner or later. Might as well be now.”

  Nick swallowed, then nodded. “They might be useful at that, anyway. Bonny Bonnie, you’ve got some solid grounding in you. Would you be willing to loan me some of that?”

  “Sure.” I didn’t even have to think about it. “But what for?”

  “I’m going to go surfing.”

  “You weren’t shitting me. Wow.” The computer system wasn’t brand-new or, as far as I could tell, particularly powerful. But it was a computer, and that meant it was to be treated with caution. A computer, kept in an office filled with Talent under significant stress? I was amazed it hadn’t been reduced to a plastic shell of smoking and melted metals by now, especially considering the bad case of gremlins we’d had.

  “It’s grounded and warded. There are ways to make it reasonably safe to use.”

  The pile of cables behind the desk were thicker than normal, and plugged into a surge protector strip that looked as though it came straight from NASA. “Reasonably safe can still cost you significantly in repairs. That’s something Old Ben and the Founders never foresaw.”

  “Old Ben was a genius diplomat and inventor, not a genius prognosticator.” Nick got down on his hands and knees and fiddled with the cables, making sure everything was set to his satisfaction. He was muttering something under his breath; I assume to reinforce whatever protections he’d put on them in the first place. Stosser had deposited us in this room and muttered something about getting everyone out of the office for lunch. Part of me wanted to be with them. The other part was totally fascinated about what I thought we were about to do.

  He paused in his fiddling, and I took the opportunity. “You’re a hacker, aren’t you?”

  He nodded, not looking up at me.

  Rare. Oh my god rare, like flawless-diamond rare. No wonder he was quiet about it. No wonder why the Guys wanted him. Most Talent could, carefully, use technology. Some could even use spell-tech, a specific cantrip designed to interact with tech, not conflict. A Talent-hacker? That was someone who could slip inside that most delicate of technology, the computer, and use free-form current to make it…do things. A Talent-hacker could ferret his or her way into the virtual world and make it dance to their tune, not crash….

  The most famous Talent in the Cosa Nostradamus was McCunney, who had used current to siphon seven million dollars from a military contractor’s account, and then disappear so well that even ten years later nobody knew where he was. He was alive, though, because every year on the date of the heist, that company got a postcard, mailed from a different location, addressed to the current CEO. Sort of our version of D. B. Cooper, I guess, except that we knew McCunney was alive and well and having a blast.

  Ferret-boy hadn’t been kidding, back in Chicago, about having his choice of job offers.

  “What do you need me to do?”

  “How are you set for current?”

  I reached inside to check my core. It was cool and settled, surprisingly—I guess whatever Sharon had done hadn’t touched it. Good to know. The threads coiled neatly, shading from dark to light and then back again, pulsing gently, like the purring of a sleeping cat. “I don’t actually run full-up….”

  “You should start. We all should. The building’s still screwed from the hit we took, but—”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah.” No, but I could fake it. J taught me never to be unprepared, no matter what the situation. I always had cash, condoms, and a backup source of current, if needed. My core might not be overflowing, but I had enough to get by. Reaching out, I felt the shimmery charge of the subway, rumbling under the street, ready and waiting like a patient dog, if I called it.

  “Yeah. I’m set. You?”

  Nick nodded. “Never unprepared. Talent Scouts motto.”

  “No such thing.” There should be, though. Maybe it was us. The thought—and the resulting image of Nick in a Scout’s outfit, knobby knees and all—made me laugh.

  “Just sit there, and sink yourself down as much as you can. If I need you, I’ll need you fast and probably won’t have time to ask nice first. Okay?”

  “Gotcha. Lightning Rod Torres, that’s me.”

  Current ran with electricity, in most things. It also grounded like electricity. One of the first things you learn in mentorship is how to ground so that current can pass right through you. Useful if you get caught up in shit you can’t handle, psi-bombed, or just pull too much down. Or someone near you overrushes, and grabs at you in their panic.

  Grounding’s easy, for the most part. You just let your awareness sink down, through your core and past it, down through your soles, making yourself heavy and solid until you come to something that’s even more heavy and solid. On the East Coast it doesn’t take too long—the geologic history that gave us the Appalachian Mountains also left a solid rock mass with lots of toeholds for twitchy Talent. I connected with the bedrock, settled myself to match its gravitas, and went from anticipatory to stone-calm in the breadth of a breath. Wired and ready, but calm.

  Nick sat in front of the computer, and started typing. It looked as though he was hitting the keys randomly, and the screen remained blank, so I looked down—and the surge protector was unplugged.

  Um. Okay.

  Even as I thought that, a bolt of dark red current jumped from the plug to the socket, and the screen lit up with a pale green glow.

  I think my eyebrows actually hit my hairline. Wow. Demon in the box, for sure.

  I’m not a total e-loser. I have a computer, stored in J’s apartment, and an e-mail address, and when I was in school I even had an instant-message account, to keep in touch with everyone. I just never got into tech, because what was the point? A cell phone, carried next to a Talent’s body, would crackle and die within three months, just by sheer proximity to the core. I once managed to keep a really simple portable CD player working an entire year, using it every day, but I killed a professor’s PDA dead just by sitting in the front row during a stressful semester.

  I still felt bad about that.

  Nick probably didn’t have any more luck with casual electronics than any of us. But when he focused…

  “Come on, let me in, let me in, let me in.”

  As spells go, it was pretty stripped down. Seemed to work, though, because the screen went from a dizzying shade of swirly pale green to darker blue, and then suddenly it resolved into a vortex that made me want to throw up.

  I looked away, focusing on the reassuring solidity of the earth beneath my physical and metaphorical feet. Okay. Right.

  Normally, you could tell when someone was working current nearby. Even if you weren’t paying attention there was a thickness to the air, like a storm front was moving in. As open and waiting as I was, the sense of whatever Nick was doing should have been practically visible. Instead, it was as if I was in the room all by my lonesome. I couldn’t even get a vibe off the computer, unless I looked at it, and I really didn’t want to do that again. He was totally locked down, tight like a tick.

  Then a sudden spike hit the room, a jolt of clear current that hit me dead center in the chest. Normally, it would have raced down into my core, sparking my own current into action and causing some potentially nasty chaos. Because I was grounded and prepared, instead it slid th
rough my bones, leaving me a quivering, sweaty mess but otherwise untouched when it exited out and dispersed along the tendrils of my grounding.

  “Whoa.”

  Nick cackled like a mad scientist. “Sorry about that. Did warn ya.”

  “Yeah. Right.” I checked my grounding, reformed my calm, and only then went into my core to make sure everything was working okay. I felt a little scorched around the edges, but intact.

  Nick was already moving on. I could hear the computer whir and hum, and then he was clicking keys again. “Gotcha. Hello, Unca. What do you have for me today?”

  Unca? Oh, he hadn’t. Had he?

  I risked looking long enough to confirm that Nick had, yeah, current-hacked his way into the IRS database, and was pulling up our suspect’s files.

  “That’s like, how many years in prison?”

  “Only if they catch us.”

  “Us? What us, ferret-boy? I’m throwing you totally to the wolves, anyone comes knocking.”

  “Shhh. I’m trying to figure this stuff out.” He waved his left hand—the right busy moving over the keyboard—and a printer I hadn’t noticed before hummed to life and started printing out pages.

  Curious, I got up and, carefully, approached the printer. When it didn’t implode or otherwise melt down, I swiped the top sheets and started to read. The forms were unfamiliar, but I had worked with J on his investments enough to be able to pick up the basics.

  “He was still doing business with them, when they died.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “He said he—” I stopped and thought. “He said he wasn’t going into any more deals, that he wanted them to buy him out. He never said they had. He never said he didn’t still have money with them when they died.” A distinction and a difference, that. Question was, had he meant to obscure the answer, or was it just an accident, him not thinking his words all the way through?

  Nick finished whatever he was doing, and started backing out of the system. Now that I’d been tagged by his current, I could feel something happening, but it was so tightly focused, it felt farther away and less impressive than I knew it was.

  “So if the suspect and his silent partner were still in business with the Reybeorns when they died, and were on good terms, despite their argument… Why didn’t they just sell his real estate, and give him his money?”

  There was a click and a thump and the sense of something flattening in the air pressure, and Nick pushed away from the computer with the air of a man who’d just tightrope walked, successfully, between mountaintops.

  “Because it was still unrenovated,” he said. “The location was in a prime area for urban renewal, though—the estimated value had gone up more than forty percent even before they started anything. Looks like they had a buyer ready to take it off their hands immediately. But from what your report said, the Reybeorns wanted to finish the job, and the way the deal was structured, nobody could pull out without losing their initial investment. Smart, to keep everyone honest.”

  I shook my head. “Not so smart, to give them a motive for murder.”

  eighteen

  My words echoed between the two of us. In trying to narrow the field, we’d opened it back up again. Damn.

  I handed Nick his printouts, then excused myself and took five minutes to hit the bathroom. I had to pee, yeah, but I also had sweat running down my back and arms, and I wanted a few quality minutes with cold water and paper towels. We so had to get a shower installed in here. Seriously. The way things were going, cold sweat was probably going to be much in my future, and I’d lay cash money that I wasn’t going to be the only one.

  It wasn’t the current that made you sweat. It was the holy-shit-what-am-I-doing rush you got, after. We were making this shit up as we went along, and the odds were high that someday something was not only not going to work, but it would make a kaboom in our faces. And every day, the odds on that got higher and higher.

  The thought probably should have unnerved me more than it did. God knows J would be having the proverbial cow, and then some, if he knew the details. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a healthy sense of self-preservation. My brain was just chewing over something else, instead.

  Will might be guilty.

  Splashing water on my face, I bent forward and sucked up some water to rinse my mouth. The water tasted metallic and flat, but that pretty much fit my mood. If everything we’d learned was right, and I had no reason to believe otherwise, then I’d been played for a fool. It wasn’t the first time, and it probably wouldn’t be the last, but it was the first in a professional capacity, and even though there was no way I could have known, I was still pissed. And I still felt stupid.

  I was not used to feeling stupid. I didn’t like it. At all.

  By the time I forced myself out of the bathroom, Nick had already gone to the guys with what we’d discovered. I followed the sound of voices.

  “If this guy needed money to buy property, he would have wanted to get his investment back. All of his investments. If they wouldn’t sell…”

  “That would be motive for him, I agree.” They were in the small conference room, Stosser leaning against the edge of the desk, Venec seated behind it. The Guys. By now the sight was not only familiar, but comforting. Our Guys.

  Stosser had the floor, as usual. “But Arcazy has an alibi, and his signature’s nowhere in the car. Plus, the physical evidence suggests that a woman was in the car with them, and we have Torres’s personal testimony that he is indeed male.”

  Bastard. At some point someone else was going to screw up, and they were going to have to leave me alone already, or I was going to shave his head some night while he slept. If he ever did sleep.

  Since my name had already been abused, I felt no hesitation walking in without knocking. “And his silent partner, being Null, couldn’t manage the killing the way it went down…so who did?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?” Venec sounded tired and wound up all at once. “I think we need another look at our sole piece of evidence.”

  While Stosser was off doing whatever schmoozing he had to do in order to get us access to the car from its new owners, Venec herded us all into the secondary workroom and sealed it from the inside. Whatever it was that he wanted us to try, he thought it was going to get messy. Or at least noisy.

  He stood facing us, and once again I was struck by how tired he looked, around the eyes and mouth. The urge to smooth those lines away came over me, mingling with the usual desire to tangle my fingers in his hair, in no way, shape, or form the way I petted Pietr’s softer strands. “All right, puppies. We’ve already gleaned this car as well as can be expected, and the new owner will have contaminated it thoroughly by now. So what can we hope to pick up?”

  There was silence.

  “Come on, people. Use the brains I know are in there somewhere.”

  “Emotions.” Pietr sounded tentative at first, but when Venec didn’t growl at him, he went on, gaining confidence as he sounded out the idea. “We’ve been looking for the physical stuff, even with current. Trace evidence. Stuff. But we’re forgetting that people died in that car, and that someone killed them. That’s got to be a lot of emotion built up, right?”

  He didn’t wait for anyone’s response, but plowed on. “We’ve been focusing on the controlled side of current. That’s how we’re trained—control, control, and always control. That’s what creates the signature in the first place, that control, imprinting on fresh current, personalizing it. But when someone dies, or is driven enough to murder…there has to be a lot of emotion in that, enough to overpower control. If current was used to commit the murder, then that emotion’s got to leave its own kind of imprint in it, even if the killer used totally fresh, wild-sourced current. Right? And even if the new owners are totally giddy over their new toy, that’s not going to be strong enough to wipe out that kind of signature. So maybe we can use that, to…I don’t know, trace it back? Or something.”

  He ran out of stea
m, and almost collapsed in on himself, slumping in his chair and looking around for a response.

  “Good idea, but how the hell do you pick up something like that? We know how to identify current-signature, or pick up bits of physical debris. Emotions?” Sharon wasn’t tearing him down, though; she was asking.

  Pietr shrugged. He’d done his bit, now it was someone else’s turn to step up.

  “Same thing we do every night,” Nifty said matter-of-factly, his eyes wide with an inner glee that really, really disturbed me. “We make it up, and we make it work.”

  Oh man. More improvised current. J was definitely going to have a cow if he ever heard about the risks we were taking….

  “First to find, then to tap, and then to follow back,” I said, sorting through what I knew. “The finding’s going to be the hardest part. Emotions are slippery, they’re changeable. Current is a science. Emotions…emotions are slippery,” I said again, uselessly.

  “What’s the base spell?” Nick asked, leaning forward and putting his elbows on the table. “We don’t have any empathy-based spells that I know of. Anyone?”

  Heads shook, and even Venec looked blank. Current was a hard science, not like old magic. Emotions weren’t supposed to get involved. Except Pietr was right: this was murder. Emotions were involved. We had to get down and dirty with that. Standing back and being analytical about it wasn’t going to get the job done.

  “Maybe a basic healing pattern?” Nick looked as though he almost had something in mind, but couldn’t quite get it. “When we’re sick, or hurting, we’re really all about the emotion. So…maybe a pain-management spell?”

  “That might do it,” Sharon said. She was our de facto medic, which meant that she was the only one with real first-aid training beyond CPR and how to apply a Band-Aid. There really weren’t many true healing spells. Healing with current was tricky, because the entire body runs on electricity and too much could—and had, in some spectacular cases that still get told—blow out the very thing the Talent was trying to repair. Mostly we kept spellwork to superficial damages: broken bones, scarring, sinus congestion, that sort of thing, and hoped nothing major went wrong. A Talent in an emergency room, if he was awake and in pain, could melt down an entire hospital.