Bring It On

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “You want the phone numbers, too?”

  “Sure. Why not.” The cost would all be added to Rosen’s invoice at the end of the job, anyway. What wasn’t covered by the retainer already sitting pretty in Wren’s account. And, since she brokered the deal herself, did she have to give the usual cut to Sergei? God, she hadn’t even thought about that.

  “Anything else?”

  “You got blueprints for that address, too?” Of course he did. Or he would, for the right money. He was an efficient little snoop, Joey was.

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. Two for the first, another five if I can come through on the second.”

  She could have haggled him down to four hundred, probably, but Sergei had taught her that it was better to overpay a little to the valuable people. Make them think of you fondly, not with a curse. You saved the haggling for the really detailed, expensive jobs, where a percentage point or two made a difference, and they were padding the bill, anyway.

  “How fast can you come through?” There was a sense of urgency riding her shoulders that Wren didn’t think had anything to do with the job itself; the storm clouds were building, and her core was pricking in response. But life went on, bills came in, jobs needed to be done…

  “The lady in question has two addresses. One in Martha’s Vineyard, the other in Manhattan. She is currently in residence in your fair city.” He gave her the addresses, plus the lady’s mobile phone number. Her main number, surprisingly, was publicly listed. Wren, used to folk who guarded their privacy, hadn’t even thought to look first. Trusting lady, Ms. Worth-Rosen. Or one with reason to let people contact her without prior arrangement. Wren not only wasn’t publicly listed, but she paid extra money every month to have her phone number “dropped” from the phone company’s system.

  The fact that this meant that the phone company had no record of her having a phone, and therefore never billing her, was a nice plus to the privacy, of course.

  “As always a pleasure doing business. I’ll drop payment later today.” For a guy who lived for his tech, Joey wasn’t much for banking, electronic or otherwise. Cash in a post office box, thanks much, and good manners got you twenty-four hours credit, like now. Her first year dealing with him, she had to pay in advance. That had given Sergei minor conniptions until Joey proved he was solid on delivery.

  Leaving the notes on the kitchen counter, Wren went around the corner into the bathroom and turned the water on in the shower, shedding clothing as steam filled the tiled room. Her shoulder-length hair was unbearably tangled and she brushed it out, wincing as she hit knots, until the water had reached the perfect temperature. Shampoo, soap, loofa, and all the while she was mentally rearranging her brain. Identifying herself to Tagliente as “Jenny” had solidified the vague thoughts about approaching Worth-Rosen. Risky, on several fronts, but it had a strange sort of appeal, too. Being someone other than Wren Valere—a nice thought: shedding the responsibilities to friends and Cosa, if only for a little while.

  Proving to Sergei that he wasn’t the only one who could change personas was part of it, too; she was willing to admit that as she rinsed the last of the conditioner from her hair. He was so damn good at what he did, it was a challenge to try it, too. Being able to say, “Look, I can do this, too” would…well, she had no idea what it would do. Probably nothing. But what was done was done, now.

  Not that you can tell him about it until you tell him that you took on a client without his knowledge…which you’re going to have to fess up to, you know. He’ll want to know where you are, what you’re doing. Where the money you’re going to deposit in his checking account came from.

  “Nag nag nag,” she muttered at the voice, turning off the water and reaching for a towel.

  The clicking of her heels on the pavement was, in a word, unnerving. Wren kept thinking that someone was following her, until she recalled that she was wearing actual dress shoes, not her usual sneakers or soft-soled loafers. Charlie was sweeping the leaves and dust off the pavement in front of Jackson’s E-Z Shopper; he waved, and she nodded in acknowledgment, but didn’t stop to talk.

  Hey!

  At first, Wren thought it was just a random thought of her own, the nagging voice come back uncalled-for, until the nudge came back with a firmer swipe.

  Hey!

  She reached in and grabbed the mental touch, tagging it in return, a sort of delivery receipt to let the person pinging her know she was paying attention now.

  Tagging was a game younger Talents played, fine-tuning their controls, typically as the setup for a practical joke. Or, with adults, as a way of challenging another Talent, letting them know that they were moving into territory that was already claimed.

  This didn’t feel like either.

  She stroked a filament-thin strand of current, coaxing it up out of her core until it coiled down her arm, into her left index finger, ready for the next tag.

  Valere. A sense of parlay, of truce, like a mental white handkerchief floating in the breeze. Nobody she knew, at least not well enough to recognize the taste of their mind, but the really good taggers could disguise that.

  Lee had been one of the really good ones. The thought sent a spasm of loss through her, and she shoved it down ruthlessly. Not while she was working, damn it. A flick of her finger, and the current went out into the ether, following the swiftly fading trail the last tag had left.

  Who?

  She continued walking down the street; her only external acknowledgment of anything happening was a change of direction the moment the first tag landed. The subway was faster and cheaper, but a cab was more secure, if someone was trying to screw with her. Besides, she rationalized, the persona she was playing would take a cab, not the subway. Small, concrete details made the illusion complete.

  Sarah.

  The name carried with it no sense of recognition.

  Need to talk to you. Soon.

  Wren wasn’t naturally suspicious of other Talents, but nothing in her life was normal these days, and just accepting any tagger’s invitation to a sit-down was potential suicide.

  Who? she asked again, even as she came to the corner of Hudson Street and raised her hand for a cab.

  Sarah. This time the name came with a sense of self: tall, ebony-skinned, teeth that should flash in an exuberant laugh now hidden behind a grim line of lips, eyes almond-shaped and shadowed like an Egyptian queen’s. A scent of good, dark beer, and stale cigarette smoke, and Wren placed her in the jumble of memories. Council-raised, only she crossed the stream two, no three years ago, now. That’s when Wren met her, at the party a friend of Lee’s had thrown to welcome her to the lonejack fold.

  Wren hadn’t stayed long; coming down off a job that had sucked all the sleep out of her, the last thing she wanted to do was stand in a crowded bar and down overpriced beer until she stank like last call. But one thing about the evening had stood out, even three years later, and made her interest in this unexpected tagging spike sharply.

  Sarah was a Proggie. A Prognosticator.

  A Seer.

  Oh, shit.

  A cab slowed, and Wren opened the door and got in before it had fully stopped, still immersed in the inner conversation.

  “Where to?” The driver pulled into traffic without waiting for an answer, flicking the meter on as he did so. The heat was on, and the windows were rolled down all the way. Crazy.

  “Central Park West and Sixty-eighth. Thanks.” With luck, Eighth Avenue would be clear enough that they’d only pick up traffic going crosstown, so the meter wouldn’t ratchet up too much.

  Hello? A reminder that she had left Sarah hanging.

  Another tug of current from her core, and Wren sent a final tag. Tonight. Red Light? A bar that had perfect acoustics for conversation—pick the right table, and while you could hear every word said, someone standing a foot away wouldn’t be able to make out anything—and dark enough to make lip reading problematic.

  Electronic eavesdropping wasn’t really a problem, not with
two Talents at one table. And, the way Wren was feeling, pity the bastard who tried to plant current-bugs on her again. She’d fry them, and him, and any unrelated electronics in the path between.

  Will be there. A sense of the table Sarah was thinking of, the same one Wren had in mind.

  You read my mind, Wren sent, and signed off just as the snort of psychic amusement reached her.

  The sound of swearing in some foreign language made her look up just in time to see the cabbie slap the small black box set into the dashboard with the palm of his hand. The impact did nothing to reset the electric meter, which had gone from clicking off the quarter-miles to flashing “00.00.”

  Ooops.

  And then the cab was turning the corner, gliding through clogged sidestreets to her destination. When he pulled to the curb, she handed the guy a twenty. Probably twice what the fare would have been, but she felt bad about wrecking his meter. Cabbies, like lonejacks, got shafted enough without her adding to it.

  Taking a deep breath, Wren shut down the part of her that was awareness of her own life, letting the current rise and reach into every square inch of her body, tampering with her self-image.

  Exiting the car, Wren gave herself over to the current entirely. She could feel her legs getting longer, the slim skirt and button-down blouse she had put on giving her the impression of height, while the professional-looking black leather pumps added a reassuring nudge of respectability. Her hair was coiled in a soft bun at the back of her neck, and the gentle smudges of eyeliner and lipstick gave the overall feeling of overworked competence. She based the look on the women she saw on their lunch breaks, not the ones rushing back and forth, but the ones who stopped, walked slowly, their faces up to the sunlight, taking time to remember to be thankful they were out of the office even for a few moments. That was who she needed to be: a woman who cared about the small moments, the shared intimacies. Who could coax the same out of another woman.

  “I’m here to see Mrs. Worth-Rosen.”

  Even with her Talent-enhanced appearance, the doorman still would have turned her away without an appointment. He was that kind of employee, the sort who took the well-being of “his” building more seriously than the residents did themselves. But the woman had a listed phone number, which meant that she wasn’t as peon-phobic as others in her position, and as a competent, well-tuned doorman, he had to be aware of that as well.

  Scooping some of the current sizzling just under her skin, Wren gave the uniformed gatekeeper a shy, diffident smile, and Pushed a sense of her total innocence and usefulness toward him. Of all the skill sets Talents had at their use, the Push was the most useful—and the most open to abuse. The fact that she still worried about that, according to Sergei, was proof she wasn’t about to run amok with it. Wren still worried.

  “I’m Jenny Wreowski? The mediator from Darsen, Darsen and Kelvin?” Assume complicity, and most people will rise to the occasion. The doorman was no different; he knew that Mrs. Worth-Rosen was going through a tough time, and a legal mediator in the form of this soft-spoken, delicate-looking, Southern-sounding woman was surely harmless, if not proven helpful. He went to get the appointment book, already expecting to see her name listed there.

  If you can get someone to that point, of anticipating, it almost doesn’t take much Talent to convince them to see what you want them to see. In a matter of minutes she was in the tastefully ornate elevator, being shuttled up to the fifteenth floor where “Miss Melanie” resided.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman who opened the door said. “I don’t know why Jordan let you up here, but I don’t see anyone without an appointment and I’m sure…”

  “No, you didn’t make the appointment, Mrs. Worth-Rosen. Another party hired me, to use my skills to prevent a small problem from becoming larger.”

  The target looked Wren up and down, puzzled, then the light of comprehension cleared the confusion from her eyes. “Anna. Anna hired you to talk to me.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Half-truth qualified as whole truth, under the circumstances. This was the decision point. Either Melanie let her in, or she shut the door in Wren’s face. No safe ground between the two…

  “All right. Come in.”

  Tea and biscuits were served out by a young Filipina girl with large dark eyes and delicate hands, in a sitting room filled with light and pastel watercolors hanging in too-close profusion on the walls. Working with the owner of an art gallery might not have changed Wren’s tastes much, but she had learned to recognize good presentation, and that wasn’t it.

  “I still don’t understand quite how things went wrong.” The target shook her head, the soft waves falling just so around her face, so carefully made-up her features appeared completely natural in the muted sunlight filtering through sheer curtains. The room itself was larger than Wren’s entire apartment. “It’s as though Anna overnight became a different person. The sweet, loving girl I knew became shrill, coarse, accusing me of trying to cut her out, of stealing…. Anything of her mother’s was hers, of course. That had been established long ago, before her father even fell ill.”

  Fell ill, Wren noted. Not died, or Anna’s blunt “was murdered.”

  Melanie continued, holding her teacup in her hand and staring down into the oolong-scented liquid as though her script was printed there. “But the necklace was a gift, from her father to me. Anna refused to accept that.”

  Melanie’s confusion over her stepdaughter’s attitude seemed real. But Wren knew that the Push could be used on Talents, too, and if the older woman were better at it than she, Wren wouldn’t be able to tell. That was always the risk; you could use your skills on a fellow Talent, and maybe they wouldn’t realize it…and maybe they would. Wren preferred to fly under the radar, depending on defensive skills rather than offensive ones. The current keeping her appearance intact was subtle, so subtle almost as to not register, according to Neezer, back when he was first teaching her, and she’d only gotten better at it in the decade-plus since then. But Melanie was older, had been practicing longer, and so Wren couldn’t take any emotional response at face value.

  “She seemed so certain,” Wren said, picking out a flaky-delicate butter cookie and biting into it with relish, wishing for a mug of coffee to dunk it into. That would probably give the maid a heart attack, if not Melanie. “May I ask…why not just give it to her, if it’s so important? Forgive me if I intrude, but it seemed not a particularly valuable piece…”

  Melanie’s face twisted for just an instant, those lovely well-bred features showing an unpleasant cast before returning to their socially acceptable sweetness. Something Wren had just said struck home, hard. “Valuable? Not in the way most would think of it, no. But it has certain…properties that make it better to remain in my possession.”

  Mmm. Wren hadn’t even blinked when the target’s expression changed, but she had filed the moment down for later contemplation. Properties, huh? There was something going on there, something more than just sentimental—or even financial—value. Wren suspected suddenly that she was being played. She hated being played.

  “I see,” she replied, in a voice that said clearly that she was merely being polite. There were a handful of pointed questions Wren would have loved to have asked, but from the tone in Melanie’s voice when she said the last, the Retriever didn’t think she was going to get anything more out of her, no matter what the “legal mediator” might have to say.

  “Well, still, this has been useful, indeed. Knowing where you’re coming from? Helps me help my client understand, too. And maybe we can all get out of this without too much more upset?”

  “That would be lovely,” Melanie said with evident relief. “I miss my stepdaughter, Jenny. I truly do.”

  Wren believed her. But she also believed that the woman was not going to give up the necklace, not to Anna, not to anyone. There was something going on that was not sitting well with the sweetness and light and perfectly blended family pose she was giving off.

  So. Back
to plan the first. Retrieval, the old-fashioned way.

  “Miss Melanie?” The maid was back, her serene expression broken by a frown. “Miss Anna. She’s…here.”

  Damn it. Wren thought, struggling to not be thrown totally out of character by this new and extremely unwelcome news. Thankfully Miss Melanie seemed almost as disturbed, and for a moment Wren hoped the older woman would simply refuse to allow the girl access. But that, apparently, wasn’t stepmomma’s way.

  “Mel, you bitch! I can’t believe you changed the—” Anna stormed in, then stopped, taken aback to see Wren sitting there.

  “Anna, honey.” Wren stood, hoping that by taking the lead she could get them both out of there without further incident. “If you were going to hire me to talk to your stepmomma, you’ve got to let me talk to your stepmomma, no?”

  Anna was upset, not stupid. “I hired you before I knew what she was doing. This is my home, too, you old witch, and you can’t keep me out!”

  She turned to Wren, her lovely eyes glittering with tears. Wren couldn’t tell if they were of sadness, rage, or something in-between.

  “She used her magic on the doors! The one thing Daddy would never ever let her do, and the moment he’s gone…”

  “Anna!” Melanie appeared flustered beyond measure, and for a moment Wren couldn’t understand why. Oh. Right. Me not knowing. The last thing Wren wanted was to be outed as a Talent, so she headed that one off at the pass, as best she could.

  “Anna, sweetheart, I think you’re a little overemotional.” She placed one hand on the girl’s elbow, just below where her lacy little sleeve ended, expecting to be shaken off, but Anna let the hand remain there long enough for Wren to exert a very specific Push to make Anna trust her. God, she hated doing that. It made her feel dirty. “Why don’t we just go sit down together, and Melanie and I can—”

  Damn. Too much Push.

  Because Anna turned on her then, irate as a betrayed lover. “You and Mel, huh? Since when has it been you and Mel? Take my money, say you’ll help me, and suddenly she’s got your ear and it’s all ‘cozy on the sofa’?” The anger pouring off her was so palpable, Wren and Melanie both took a step back. Anna might be a Null, but by God, she could project!