Bring It On

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Morgan…”

  “Get up. Or I’ll walk over there and kick you into splinters.”

  The fatae rolled over onto its side, staring at the man named Morgan with oversized, bottle-green eyes. Its wood-dark skin and wings contrasted oddly with the gym shorts, knobby knees, and the Nikes on its delicate feet, making the creature look like a cross between a Rackham fairy and an unfortunate Phys Ed student.

  “I mean it,” Morgan warned, sounding as though he were about to commence the kicking. The fatae closed dark lids over those eyes, and let out a long, long-suffering sigh, but bent its knees at a painful-looking angle and managed to get up onto its equally odd-jointed elbows.

  This human was cruel, its body language shouted. Cruel, and unkind and evil-minded.

  “Well, that was…progress. Of a sort,” Morgan went on in a slightly milder, quieter tone to the individual standing beside him. “Took the landing better this time, anyway.” He shook his head in rueful dismay at the words. They had been working at this one move all morning, and the progress he mentioned was that the student had finally managed to land without splattering bits of blood from an orifice.

  “We’re not fighters.” The fatae speaking, like the one on the ground, had a narrow build, with four elongated limbs—each with knobby double-joints—and a double set of gossamer-thin wings on each side of its body. The head was humanoid, if too narrow for any idea of human attractiveness, but the sound of the wings beating created a hum that was almost music.

  Their teacher made a sound that might have been amusement. “You’re not even arguers. And you’re going to be corpses, if you don’t get a clue, fast.”

  The vigilantes had been targeting the exotics mainly, he had been told. Morgan supposed it was because they were easier to spot than the nonhuman who blended into the general population, but he had quickly observed that the winged tribes had no sense of self-defense. Or much sense of any other sort, either, as far as he’d been able to determine. Attractive nuisances, he’d call them; except for the fact that they bled and died same as any, when those racist bastards caught up with them.

  “A pity your race got large—those wings would have been useful in maneuvering, if they could support your weight.”

  The fatae fluttered its wings in agitation, watching the other figure pick itself up off the ground. “We are not dragons, to fly on hollow bones and hydrogen. Our wings are for display, to attract mates and keep—Morgan, this throwing and hitting and falling seems so…brutal.”

  Morgan nodded, unmoved. “It is.”

  The dragonfly fatae had a darker shade of green to its eyes, and the same expression of incomprehension. “And your people do this? For fun?”

  Despite the seriousness of the situation, and the hours they had already put in, Morgan laughed at the incredulity in the creature’s voice. “Some folk do. It’s exercise, in addition to the defensive aspect of it. An art form, when you reach a certain level. Physical art…something you create with motion.”

  The fatae looked away. “I do not understand that.”

  Morgan shrugged, clearly tiring of the conversation. “You don’t have to understand it. You’re never going to be that good—you’re just not built for it. You’re probably not built to understand the enjoyment part of it, either. But you will know what to do when you’re attacked. That’s why you people hired me, isn’t it? To teach you how to fight. To survive. Because I’m the best at what I do.” The last was said without too much ego, merely a statement of fact.

  “That. And…” The fatae hesitated. “And because you call us people.”

  The human stopped speaking, and looked up at the early dawn sky. He wasn’t anyone. Just a martial artist wasting his gifts teaching overweight suburban kids how to break bricks with their heads, driving a truck for a moving company to make ends meet. There were masters out there who could dance around him and not raise a sweat, masters who could explain to him why, when these strange creatures had appeared one morning and asked for his help, he hadn’t merely swatted them away and gone back to sleep.

  He was just a guy, doing a job. That was all. No big deal.

  “Get back into formation, featherweight,” he barked to the figure who had finally gotten to his feet again. “You, too,” he said to the fatae next to him. “And this time I want to see some power behind that defense! Ain’t nobody going to take pity on you ’cause you’re so pretty!”

  The two fatae shuffled into position, their bare toes shussshing through the dew-wet grass until they faced the human, enough room between them so that their wings had room to move. Morgan sighed. He would have to do something about that, eventually. Teach them how to fight even when they felt enclosed. But for now, he just needed to teach them how to fall without breaking anything, and how to get up after they fell. Survival tactics. That’s why the fatae had hired him. If he could teach these two, and they could explain it to their people, and then he could teach another pair from another clan, adapt his knowledge to their body types…of all the damned fatae there allegedly were in the city, why were there so few who knew how to fight?

  He watched them confer with each other, the smaller one looking over its shoulder at Morgan, those oversized eyes doing the slow-blink thing that meant it was nervous.

  “Stop chatting, ladies. Here I come. Defense, damn it!”

  He rushed them in an intentionally clumsy attack maneuver, the stick in his hand rising as an improvised club.

  This time, rather than trying to duck out of his way, the larger of the two stood as though to block the blow. Morgan took him out easily, dropping him to the ground in a clumsy pile. Disgusted, Morgan raised the stick again. By now, the second fatae had presented his back to the human, wings fluttering in a confused clutter of sound and noise and wind. Startled—they had never done this before—Morgan hesitated. Only a second, a fraction of a second, but it was enough for the fatae on the ground to roll over and get to its knees, then back up onto its feet.

  “Good!” They had surprised him. That was excellent.

  The stick whirled, and knocked the first fatae behind the knees, sending him back down to the ground, face-forward.

  It just wasn’t going to be enough to keep them alive.

  It wasn’t a Fatal Friday, the traditional post-debriefing drink fest, but there were still a decent number of Handlers—the Silence employees who dealt with Operatives in the field—in town. You simply needed to know where to look for them. Sergei didn’t—but he still knew who to call to ask.

  Adam was oddly reticent, considering that the man had been one of the few still-friendly faces when Sergei came back to the Silence under Andre’s arm-twisting, but he eventually coughed up the name of a few of the more popular hangouts.

  Down three narrow, stone steps, turn left, through the metal door. “Into the last smoke-filled room in Manhattan,” he said, shaking his head as he tried to see through the haze. Cigars were the inhalant of choice, everything from dainty cigarillos to the thick, pungent monsters he remembered his great-uncles smoking over their drinks, late into the night. Sergei hadn’t thought of them in years, not since the last one of them died, reed-thin and cranky in a nursing home bed.

  “Michael.”

  “Didier.” Michael gave him a wary glance, then looked back down into his drink. The old man was sitting alone, in a bar where every single table was crowded. Sergei wasn’t sure if that made Michael a good prospect, or a bad one, but it certainly made him a vulnerable one.

  “You got time to talk to an old friend?”

  They had been friends, once. Michael was already old when Sergei was a fresh-eyed recruit, but the two had hit it off over discussions of old blues and older wines.

  “I got no friends. Least of all no old ones.”

  “So I see.” Knowing Michael’s penchant for speaking his mind, it was a wonder he still had a job, in this changed environment. Still, he always had a way of resolving Situations with a minimum of news or fuss, and that was the end goal,
no matter how much everything else changed. Hall of Fame quality, was Michael, if the Silence were ever to indulge in anything that gauche. They didn’t even have a Founder’s Wall of portraits.

  “We could make like we don’t know each other, then. Just two outsiders, sharing a table.”

  “Look. I can’t….” For the first time in the years he had known the old man, Michael actually looked old. “Please, don’t ask me to do this.”

  For Wren, to get what he needed, Sergei could have driven Michael into the ground. He would have felt bad about it, even while he was doing it, but the training was deep in him, and the need would have driven him.

  “Well. Look who the wind blew in.”

  “Jordana.” He turned away from Michael with relief on both their parts, looking to the left where the voice had come from. Black hair. Black eyes. Sunless-pale skin contrasted by a bright red mouth. Deadly aim with a crossbow. He didn’t know why that bit of information had lodged in his brain, when he couldn’t even remember her last name anymore.

  The woman waved a genial arm over, indicating that Sergei should join her table. There were two other women and a man sitting with her already, all with the same narrow-eyed expression and an erect, ready-to-move pose, even seated, that was the stamp of an active Handler.

  Michael had been sitting slumped over, as though protecting his drink. Protecting his despair.

  Sergei had worked hard to not remember his last Operative. Blond and ruddy-skinned, like some joke of a Swedish farmboy. More muscle-strength than current, for all that he tried to be the Perfect Soldier for Good. By the end, Sergei had wanted to lock him in a closet for his own good. You tried not to care about them, not too much. A good Handler didn’t. A great Handler had to.

  Jordana patted the seat next to her. “Saw you during the last Dump—” the reason for Fatal Friday, when all active Handlers reported on their current—no pun intended—and ongoing caseloads “—but you looked a little wiped out, so I figured you weren’t in the mood to beer-trawl after.”

  Sergei took the offered seat, shaking his head and loosening the tie that was beginning to choke him, after fitting perfectly all day. He had gotten out of a wheelchair to report in, the day Jordana was talking about. A cab had taken him from the Dump, not to his apartment for much-needed sleep, but to Wren’s, for a memorial service for Lee, the artist-Talent who had died during that job. That Situation, one the Silence had sent them on, with flawed and faulty information.

  Not that Lee’s death was the Silence’s fault. Not directly. He knew that, even if Wren hadn’t managed to accept it, yet. The blame for that death was square on the fatae, the small group of them who were blaming all humans, no matter what group they belonged to, for the attacks. Lee had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “Wasn’t much in the mood for socializing,” was all he said now.

  “So what brings you out here now?” She wasn’t being particularly rude, but she wasn’t as friendly as she’d first appeared, either. It was a subtle thing, and Sergei had a sudden fear that he’d gotten too paranoid, too personally involved, to judge the situation cleanly.

  “Information,” he said to her, leaning his elbows on the table, letting his body language suggest the hint of intimacy, of letting, all unknown, secrets slip. Odds were she wasn’t going to buy it; she knew him too well. But one of the others might.

  Jordana leaned back in her chair in direct response. “Getting, or disseminating?” A fair enough question, one Silence to another. And one he had no intention of answering. He wasn’t Silence anymore.

  “Depends on how much you already know. Or how much you know that you don’t know.”

  Jordana looked blank at that, and the two other women looked away, but the man with her blinked. Sergei zeroed in on him.

  “I’m looking for dirt. On R&D.”

  Silence met his statement, a combination of stunned disbelief and incipient laughter. R&D was the über of all departments. The domain of puppet masters. They didn’t have dirt, they dished it.

  “You’re insane.” That was the first woman, a sharp-featured strawberry-blonde with horn-rimmed glasses too trendy to be really needed and darkly mascaraed lashes underneath.

  “Of course he is,” Jordana said, bored. “He’s Didier.” His craziness was a given—the Handler who walked out on the Silence. The Handler who had been allowed to walk out on the Silence. And then brought back in. He had been the material of gossip, before. If he and Wren survived whatever was going around, he suspected a generation or two would make him into whispered legend, and, after that, if the Silence survived, into myth. It was a strange feeling, being able to look down the years of a probable path and see how his life would be twisted in the retelling.

  “You think I’d know anything they didn’t want me to know?” the man said, ignoring Jordana’s comment.

  “I think that you have a brain, and eyes, and the ability to do your job without a direct tube from Duncan’s brain.” Actually Sergei didn’t think that about most of the people in the bar—even before he had burned out and walked, the quality of Handlers was sinking, mainly because the leashes were being held too tight. A good Handler needed room to run his or her Operative properly, room to evaluate and adapt, not blindly follow directives. Duncan, the head of Research & Dissemination, was a control freak, yes, but he also demanded competence from his people. Even the people who didn’t report directly to him. R&D had that much power. It had never really worried Sergei before: he had never really bothered to think about it before.

  Clearly Andre had.

  “Sometimes, it’s wiser to take the tube.” The man stood up, picked up his glass, and walked a little too steadily to the bar, where he placed it on the counter with the precise action of a man who knows he’s more drunk than he feels, and gestured to the bartender for a refill.

  Sergei watched him out of the corner of his eye. “He can walk home from here, right?”

  “What do you care?” The blonde, her powder-blue eyes wide-set and her pink mouth pursed in disapproval, practically radiated bitterness. “You hang with magicals, not humans.”

  “Clare!” Jordana seemed taken aback by that, but the strawberry-blonde nodded.

  “He does. You know it. Only time he comes back to us is when he wants something. Something for them.”

  “‘Them’ meaning your FocAs? Or do they not qualify for human status anymore?” It was a shot in the dark, one he didn’t want to hit, but he saw from the twitch in her eyes that it had.

  “Right. Excuse me then. I won’t waste any more of your time.” Everything he had eaten all day suddenly wanted to revolt in his gut, and he controlled it ruthlessly, rising from his chair with smooth economy.

  “Sergei—” Jordana said, as he stood and turned away. He looked back over one shoulder to see her still sitting there, her complexion pale green under the bar lights. “Be careful, Didier. For old times’ sake.”

  “Careful.” He almost laughed. “Right.”

  Careful was the only way to walk. Careful was the only way to survive.

  Wren was sitting cross-legged on the floor in her office, studying the blueprints, a mug of coffee in her hand. The building was so straightforward it was almost tearfully boring, and she was reminding herself, over and over again, that boring was good, when she heard a sound coming from the front of the apartment.

  Jesus. Had she locked the front door? She always locked the front door. Nobody had a key to the dead bolt, not even her mother. Only Sergei…Sergei and Jerry, who was, in his randomly used capacity, the super.

  There was a moment of panic, then a familiar voice.

  “You chalked?”

  Aldo didn’t even bother knocking, just opened the door, came in, and yelled down the hallway. Either he was the prototype for every clueless, socially oblivious geek-artist ever joked about, or he had absolutely no fear of getting shot, stabbed, or otherwise dealt with as an intruder. Although, knowing him, both those possibilities wer
e equally probable.

  “Yeah,” Wren said, as she came out of her office and closed the door behind her. Obviously, no, she hadn’t locked the door when she came home. For the first time in how many years? Sergei would be appalled. Her mother would have conniptions. She was never going to mention this little slip to either one of them. “Got a request.”

  Aldo was anywhere between fifty and seventy, his snow-pale skin pulled tight and dry across features sharp enough to shred paper, with intense dark eyes and a hitch in his step that came, according to various stories, either from being shoved into the trunk of a car by mistake during a Mob hit, getting bodyslammed during a Ramones concert, or being too violently cuffed during the WTO dustups in Seattle. “Can I tap dance to it?”

  “You can tap dance to anything, maestro.” She had pulled the description of the piece from the folder she had set up earlier that morning: color coded, the way all of her case folders were. This one was bloodred; the only other active folders in her file were the ones she had set up on the anti-fatae vigilantes (electric-blue) and the forever-ongoing case of Old Sally, the stuffed horse of doom (green). She had never actually made up a folder for the Nescanni job, just thrown her notes and receipts and newspaper clippings into a plain folder and shoved it into the filing cabinet. Someday. Maybe. When things settled out and she had time to do things like back-case filing and cleaning behind old dressers…

  “Here.” She handed the sheet of paper to him. “I need as good a representation of that as you can manage.”

  “Now, or yesterday.”

  “Now would be good.” She wanted this done with, but not urgently enough to owe favors.

  “Right. Can do. Making stir-fry tonight, if’n you want to join us.”

  “Thanks, but no.” Neither Aldo nor his partner were bad cooks, just always preoccupied with things outside the kitchen. It occasionally made for memorable meals, and never in the gastronomically pleasing way. Wren might not be any kind of gourmet cook herself, but she enjoyed food too much to see what they did to it.