Bring It On

by Laura Anne Gilman

  That was what PUPs did—they were Tracers, only more narrowly focused. They didn’t worry about things, or people, or anything larger than a thumbnail. They specialized in current forensics, and were trained to extremely specific protocols.

  They were also totally independent—recruited from the Council and lonejack families evenly, based on skill-sets and inclinations, and trained to be impartial observers working not for glory, or even pay, but the sheer exhilaration of knowing whodunit, and how. The brainchild of a bunch of twenty-somethings too sharp and shiny for comfort, weaned on CSI and the Discovery Channel, set loose on an unsuspecting Talented populace.

  Too early yet to see how the impartial part would play out, but for now, Wren could use them to find out who had broken into her home, and know that they’d give her a straight and narrow answer supported by facts, not supposition or prejudice.

  Out of the toolbox came a series of fine-haired brushes, three vials of black and silver powders, several rolls of tape, a series of three-by-five cards, and a roll of unused film, plus a pair of somewhat disturbing-looking latex gloves in flesh-pink.

  The PUP snapped on the gloves, then looked up at Wren. “Do you mind…” Bonnie gestured, which Wren took to mean that she should wait outside the kitchen.

  “Right. I’ll be down the hall.”

  A pity—Wren would have liked to have seen what Bonnie did, specifically. For now, PUPs were too few to handle anything other than physical attacks. But eventually, some day, there would be enough of them trained to work other scenes. Like, oh, robberies. Fine so long as Wren stayed clear of Talented targets, but considering she was about to hit one…

  Time to worry about that when it became a problem. For now, she had to focus on the job at hand, and let Bonnie do her job.

  Going back to her office, she pulled the file she had started on Rosen and pulled the blueprints from it. Melanie hadn’t left the city yet, so the site was still live. A popular apartment building, in the middle of a thriving, upper-class, and well-policed neighborhood, housing a Talent who was aware that she owned something under contention and liable to be stolen.

  Wren could practically feel herself start to salivate over the extremely risky possibilities when she got a faint mental ping. Was it possible, she wondered irritably, to get an unlisted brainwave pattern?

  What? she asked, not bothering to mask her emotions.

  Then the message came through; from anyone else it would have been an order. Tailored to lonejack psyches, it was a strongly worded request. Wren sighed, and started packing up the files again. So much for getting this job squared away before the storm broke.

  “Yo.”

  Bonnie stood in the doorway, managing to look directly at Wren and still give every indication that she wasn’t seeing anything that Wren might or might not be doing.

  “You’ve got something?”

  “Yeah.”

  Oh. Good. That was fast. Wren waited, half-sorted files in her hand. When Bonnie seemed capable of standing in silence all night, she finally said, “Yes?”

  “So. Your visitors left definite trace…nice and clear, like they weren’t trying to hide anything at all.” The PUP paused a moment. “In fact, I’d say, if I didn’t know better, they knew you’d call us in and left their spoor behind like a calling card.”

  Day just kept getting better and better. “And the number on that calling card?”

  “Council. Right down to the overlay of Her Ladyship on their hands.”

  Neither Bonnie nor Wren managed to look particularly surprised, although Wren did wonder fleetingly if Her Ladyship—KimAnn Howe, the de facto leader of the local Council—had left actual trace of current on their actual physical hands, or if this was some weird PUPI lingo. And how they actually had samples to check against, if the former. She wasn’t about to look like an idiot and ask, but made a mental note to do some research later, if the world as they knew it didn’t crash to an end. A careful use of some slang, if not overdone, helped getting the best work out of specialists, she’d found.

  “You shouldn’t stay here,” Bonnie said, breaking her pose of cool PUPI-indifference. “Cool as this place is. Not if they’ve decided to take you off the board.” A nice way of not saying “kill you.” There wasn’t any incontrovertible proof the missing lonejacks were dead, of course. Merest hearsay and speculation on the part of panicked and fight-mongering radicals…

  Wren hadn’t even given the thought passing consideration, she was bemused to discover. It might not be the refuge it had once been, after so many others had tramped through it, but it was still her place. Hers.

  “This is my home. They’re not making me go anywhere.” She grinned, then, and it wasn’t a particularly friendly expression. “But I might just invite some friends to stay. For the duration.” Sergei would give them pause—he was affiliated, yes, but not Cosa.

  “Smart,” the PUP agreed, her job-mandated I Don’t Care expression back firmly on her face.

  In a matter of moments, Bonnie had packed up her materials and Transloced back to the office, leaving behind a sheen of powdery gray dust over the entire kitchen. Wren went back into the office and shut the door on the mess. Time enough to deal with housekeeping, later.

  Much later. She had other things—and people—to deal with, first.

  “Hey.”

  Wren paused on the landing when she heard Aldo’s voice. “Hey, yourself. You got something for me?”

  “Not for you, no, but if your manager ever wants to stop by…”

  “Manners, boy.” A voice came from inside the apartment, but it didn’t sound even slightly threatened. Aldo and Sean had been together forever and a year, and she didn’t think either one of them had seriously looked at another guy since then.

  “Sergei’s not your type,” she said anyway. “He’s way too serious.”

  “Yeah, but imagine the…exposure he could give me!” Aldo did his best Groucho Marx eyebrow-waggling impersonation, which wasn’t very good at all, and then handed Wren several sheets of three-by-five paper. “Best I could do. Hope it helps.”

  She glanced at the sketches, then tucked them into her bag, under the front cover of her notebook. No way to know how accurate they were, done third-hand, but it was more than she’d had before. And he’d given spatial references, too, which she would never have thought of, with notes on approximate weight and texture based on the materials used. A Retriever with support staff was a Retriever well-blessed. Especially when they worked for free.

  “You’re a doll face, doll,” she said.

  “I know, I know, it’s my curse.” He saw her glance down the hallway at the front door, and waved her on. “Go, flit, I won’t keep you from your busy schedule, I’m just an old man, nobody has time to visit anymore…I’ll just sit here. In the dark. Alone. With my love slave…”

  She was still laughing as she walked out the front door. The air was crisp and cool, with the faintest smell of what might have been wood burning but was probably just exhaust fumes. Or mulch. The debris of the psi-bomb was gone, except for the occasional glitter of broken glass near the curb, and to look up and down the street a person would think that nothing more exciting than a broken hydrant ever happened here.

  Wren liked that. She liked the combination of soothing and potency she got from the building, the “vibes” that Bonnie had mentioned.

  So why was she spending so much time out of her apartment? She’d sworn, once, that nothing short of a gurney could get her out of there, but she was spending as many nights at Sergei’s as she was here. All right, so his place was larger. And he always remembered to go food shopping, while she was lucky to have something non-green and non-peanut butter in her kitchen. And he had an elevator. Her sheets were of better quality—in her opinion—and the water pressure was just as good.

  “Valere.”

  “Hey, Charlie.” She had stepped into the E-Z as a reflex while her thoughts were on groceries, but now that she was here she realized that it
was more to mend fences than to actually pick anything up. Charlie wasn’t a reliable source, but he was a source, and they needed to be oiled and primed on a semiregular basis. Nothing much, just a touch. And she’d pretty much blown him off, earlier. Bad form.

  “Hear you’re being kept busy these days.” He was a lonejack, but even more on the outskirts than most. In fact, Wren wasn’t even sure his closest friends and family knew he was a Talent. Wren only knew because he’d used current to hold a would-be burglar in the store until the cops could respond to the silent alarm, back about three years ago. They’d never actually spoken about that day, but he knew that she knew, and that gave them something to talk about beyond the price of organic eggs and the quality of the apples available each fall.

  “Busy enough.” How much, exactly, had the Cosa drums spread? “You doin’ okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m good. Thinking about taking some vacation time, though. You got any ideas?”

  “Not a bad idea, getting out of the city. See if there are any weekend specials down in the Carolinas, maybe? Hurricane season was pretty mild this year, not too many motels boarded up.”

  “Maybe. Was thinking about going up to Vermont, do some leaf-peeping, maybe. More interested in bringing on fall than hanging on to summer, you know what I mean.”

  Wren paid for the bag of apples, and took one out of the bag, biting down into the white flesh underneath red skin.

  She chewed, swallowed around the sudden lump in her throat. “Yeah. I know exactly what you mean.”

  “Oh.” Charlie wouldn’t have known Lee. But he would have heard through the grapevine, even on the outskirts. If nothing else, the wake being held in Wren’s apartment would have made the rounds, with Talent and fatae mixing openly and semiamicably. His eyes went wide and he blinked at her like a nervous owl. “I didn’t—”

  “It’s okay, Charlie. It’s okay.”

  It wasn’t, no. But it would be. Someday.

  Despite distractions and delays, only three of the four-wheeled troika had arrived by the time Wren made it uptown to the meeting, held in a small, distressingly quiet restaurant on the West Side, near the Javits Center. The buildings to either side were gray brick tenements, the kind that development had promised to get rid of, and the restaurant itself didn’t look all that much better despite a newish green awning; without even going in, Wren knew she didn’t want to eat anything that came out of its kitchens—or, for that matter, drink any water that came from their pipes. Fortunately, after the apple, she didn’t have much of an appetite.

  Inside, it was—surprisingly—much nicer, with pale salmon-colored walls devoid of the usual kitschy posters of foreign lands, and an appealing aroma of garlic in the air. She still wasn’t hungry, but thought that maybe a side of garlic bread, or maybe an appetizer plate of mussels, wouldn’t hurt.

  It all depended on what happened once she sat down. This wasn’t a Moot, which at least had some vague historical precedent. This…Sergei had, snarkily, referred to it as a staff meeting. She’d had to cancel dinner with him for this, so he was entitled, she supposed, to some snark.

  Bart, Michaela, and Rich made noises of greeting when Wren walked over to the table.

  “Metro North’s screwed up again,” Michaela said on the heels of her “hello,” in the tone of voice that suggested she had said it several times before, already. “Steph will get here when she can.”

  “There should be bulletins put out when it’s not screwed up,” was Wren’s opinion as she looked up and down the table for a free chair to sit in. The representative from Connecticut could walk in anywhere from now to several hours from now, depending on the cause of the delay. They used to give specifics, up to and including “body on the tracks,” but now most delays were either “signal malfunctions” or the ever-popular “police activity.” In the subways you still occasionally got “sick passenger,” which could mean anything from a little kid tossing his cookies to a stiff in the seat next to you.

  Still beat the hell out of driving in Manhattan, though.

  The three leaders of the lonejack consortium who had made it in represented New York and Central New Jersey—Bart—South Jersey and northern Pennsylvania—Rich—and the gypsies, the lonejacks who didn’t really settle anywhere but roamed the tristate area—Michaela. There were apparently more of those than Wren had ever really thought about; the idea of not having a home-spot to go to wasn’t something she’d enjoy, but they seemed to thrive on it. Different strokes, she supposed. More power to ’em.

  Several other humans sat at the table as well, some of them leaning forward, anticipating some great words of wisdom and leadership, others just as plainly not wanting to be there at all. The troika had brought their own cheering squads, it looked like. Joy. The more people involved, the less likely they were going to accomplish anything.

  There were a number of water glasses on the table, and a pitcher of what looked to be either cola or iced tea, but no wine. That was good. Talents, overall, didn’t react well with alcohol, and the last thing this meeting needed was for someone to get plastered and unruly.

  She found an unoccupied chair, kicking someone’s feet off the rungs so she could pull it out, and sat down.

  “So, do we wait for Stephanie, or get started?” someone down the table asked

  “We start,” Michaela decided.

  At that, the three leaders and their cohorts stared at Wren, who stared back at them. Several of them blinked, looked uncomfortable, but nobody said anything, or looked away.

  “Oh, Jesus wept,” she said, finally, uncomfortable with being in direct and steady view for that long. “Look. I’m not here to tell you what to do, or when to do it. That’s not what we agreed on.” At least, she didn’t think it was. “I can listen and tell you when you’re being idiots. Judge plans. Give you my experience. But you’re the ones who speak for the lonejacks in your area.” She paused, a horrible thought striking her. “You did all manage to get some sort of feedback from your area before calling this meeting, didn’t you?”

  Bart and Michaela nodded their heads. Rich, leaning back in his chair, suddenly wasn’t so interested in looking at her anymore.

  “Oh, for…” Wren was tempted to just get up and walk out. But the reasons she had agreed to be here in the first place still stood. Maybe even more so. Talents were, well, Talented. Very few of them combined what they were with what they did the way she did. And while Sergei was the business guy, she was the one, technically, who ran the business. They needed her…oh, call it her practical knowledge.

  “We all know what needs to be done.” Bart was almost a cliché, as the representative for the NYC and central New Jersey area lonejacks. Where the other three reps had gotten their jobs because they had somehow managed to not piss anyone off, Bart got his position because he had pissed everyone off, at one time or another. If you asked someone from Omaha to pick the New Yorker out of the bunch, they’d pick Bart, every single time. It was just the vibe he gave off, somehow. “We need to find a way to present a united force against the Council, without—according to you—actually giving them anything that looks like a united force. Piece of cake.”

  Wren hadn’t forgotten how annoying Bart was. She had just forgotten how badly she wanted to slap him into the day after tomorrow. His heart-shaped face was topped by a mop of silvering blond curls that looked disgustingly natural, but an otherwise Ivory-soap appealing look was ruined by the sly smirk he habitually wore.

  Rick was about as opposite as could be arranged: short, dark and arm-wavingly Italian. His hair was pulled back into a braid that put hers to shame, reaching halfway down his spine and tied with a metal band. He rode the dark purple Harley that she had seen in the parking lot outside the restaurant: he had given her a ride home once, after a party. She didn’t remember much of the ride, other than the fact that it had reminded her of being drunk without actually being out of control. She supposed that was why he drove it, although she didn’t feel that she knew him well e
nough to ask something like that.

  Michaela, a tiny dandelion-puff with dark blue hair, was unknown to Wren, and vice versa. But the look of irritation on her face when Bart spoke boded well for their ability to work together, her and Wren.

  “The feeling among my people,” Rick said, learning forward earnestly, while the man beside him pulled a water glass out of harm’s way, “is that we need to find a weakness within the Council itself. A back door, something that, even if we never have to use it, can still make them nervous.”

  “They’re already nervous,” Michaela said, dismissing that idea. “If they weren’t, we’d either be left alone, or already all dead.”

  The gypsy was a bit harsh, Wren thought, but not altogether wrong. Something had made the Council uneasy enough to start picking on lonejacks in the first place. What was it?’

  She asked that question out loud, then again, for those who had managed—surprise—not to hear her the first time.

  “So why, after so many decades, are they nervous? Nervous enough to break the tradition of all those years of leaving us alone?”

  It wasn’t a new question to anyone at the table; it was the first thing anyone had asked, the first question in that failed letter they’d sent: why?

  “Something’s going on inside the Council,” Bart said. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. Something that made them feel like they had to show strength to the membership, to keep them in line.”

  “What?” he said, off everyone’s look of surprise. “I’m an ass, not an idiot.”

  Wren settled into her seat, planting her elbows firmly on the tablecloth, and claimed an untouched glass of water. “Maybe so,” she said in response to Bart’s comment—which one, she didn’t specify. “If the Council—pay attention, people!” as attention started to wander off her. “If the Council is having their own traumas, then we need to know what it is. That’s their weakness, maybe our back door, if we need it. So how do we uncover it?”

  Not everyone heard her, but the three or four who did started talking, and they all heard those voices. Wren took a sip of her water and sat back, sorting through what was being said, and who was saying it. This, she could do. Trigger a commotion. Let them fight it out amongst themselves, and she’d be able to give feedback to the troika, after.