Bring It On

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Sergei’s fataephobia wasn’t something he was proud of, but P.B., being the fatae her partner saw the most of, was bound to have picked it up.

  “He’s always glad to meet a friend of mine,” Wren said. She hoped.

  “Great! I was thinking getting Shig’s opinion on Noodles.”

  “That’s Chinese, not Japanese. Honestly, P.B….”

  “Hey, it’s Asian. He’d know more than we would how decent it is. I know you love the place, Valere, but I swear, it gives me indigestion every single damn time.”

  “So don’t eat my leftovers,” she said tartly. “Anyway, I wasn’t planning on eating out tonight. No offense,” she said to the visitor.

  “Oh, no offense taken at all. And certainly I was not expecting you to change your plans for us,” Shigenoi said, protesting. “We would be intruding, at such short notice. You might have other plans…”

  Her only plans had involved stressing over what to do about the pendant. Wren blinked, then looked at both the fatae in a way that immediately made the demon nervous.

  “What?” P.B. said.

  “What, what?” she asked him.

  “There’s always a what when you get that look, human.”

  After the day she’d had, Wren felt it was probably inevitable that she’d break out into giggles at the aggrieved tone in P.B.’s voice. It was either that, or hit someone, hard. “Go get the drinks,” she commanded him. “I want to talk shop with my fellow Retriever.”

  Leaning across the table, she rested her chin on the palm of her hands, and asked, “So. Have you ever run into an Artifact?”

  Shigenoi sat sideways on the chair, and leaned forward in a mirror of her actions. His pop-set eyes seemed to glisten, and an inner eyelid dropped over them. “Myself? No. Have I heard others speak of them? Yes….”

  When P.B. came back, Wren had picked Shig’s brain as best their mutual exhaustion could allow for, and she had decided on a course of action. It wasn’t one she was happy about, but it was probably the best of bad choices.

  “You got your cell on you?” she asked P.B.

  “It’s turned off. I know better than to bring anything loaded near you. Either of you, for that matter.”

  “Turn it on. Call Sergei. Tell him to meet us at Noodles this afternoon.”

  “No takeout?” he asked, getting his mobile phone out of the courier bag he carried everywhere.

  “My apartment’s getting too many visitors these days, don’t you think? I’d rather not assume it’s leak-proof, as it were.”

  “Good point.” The demon rubbed his head as though it was still tender. “Real good point.” He dialed a number, his claws delicately picking out the keys, and held the phone to his mouth, having to tilt his head oddly to adjust for the nonhuman distance between his mouth and his ears.

  “Yo. Didier. I’m just carrying a message so don’t hang up on me. Dinner, tonight, Noodles. She doesn’t want to go home, I guess. Oh, man, she’s a woman, what the hell do I know from how her mind works?” He made an apologetic moue at her, and Wren rolled her eyes. “Yeah, and I’m bringing a friend, so mind your p’s and q’s. You’ll see.”

  It wasn’t unusual for someone to be burning the post-midnight oil in the midrise building that housed the Silence. To the rest of the neighborhood, the unmarked brownstone was merely one of the many not-for-profit organizations that dotted the Manhattan landscape, utilizing property bought cheaply, or left to them by prosperous donors. The people who went in and out were well-dressed, unflashy, and although not rude, not overly friendly, either. They patronized the local take-out deli, and the coffee shop down the street, and occasionally stopped in for lunch at the pizza place on the corner. They were good neighbors, was the most anyone would ever say of them. Never any trouble. Kept their sidewalk clean in winter, never left trash out front, never had any unruly incidents, and even the few employees who gathered outside for their daily cigarettes did so in a quiet and considerate fashion.

  Darcy Cross didn’t drink. She didn’t smoke. She hated pizza with a passion. But she knew everyone who indulged in all those things, and if she didn’t know them, she had eavesdropped on them, one way or another. Her job was information; the getting, the collating, the sorting and resolution of that information into useful reports.

  She should have been assigned to R&D. Only Andre Felhim’s intervention years ago had kept her out of Duncan’s clutches. Because once Duncan took something, he kept it. Or them.

  She’d have been paid more, working in R&D. But there were things more important than money. In R&D, the information would have been pulled from her before she was ready to share it. Andre, on the other hand, understood that she needed time to let it simmer through her brain; that she needed to understand it, before she could share it.

  And she didn’t understand what she was seeing.

  The Silence existed to correct things which had been put wrong by malign intent. That was the charter; that was the mission statement: that was the Cause, the reason for everything they did. Not so much to help the individual—that was a plus—or even to keep those with power from enforcing their desires on those without, but to keep the balance of the world even. To ensure that people were able to live their lives without interference.

  Someone was interfering. Someone was restricting the flow of information, the lifeblood of the Silence. Someone was manipulating events for a specific purpose.

  That didn’t bother Darcy; she had no illusions about the corruptibility of anything or anyone, least of all her co-workers, or the organization for which they worked. What bothered her was that she could not determine the purpose of the manipulation. The end event was hidden from her, no matter how she shifted the data, no matter how many times she ran scenarios or evaluated logic flows.

  It made her want to kick something. Throw something. Scream at the top of her lungs, until the empty hallways rang with her frustration.

  Instead she tapped her keyboard in irritation, closely trimmed nails making a dull clicking noise against the plastic, then went back to inputting raw data.

  “You really need to relax a little.”

  She had heard him coming down the hallway; while everyone asked for her on jobs, damned few of them came to visit her. She preferred it that way.

  “Are you relaxed?” She didn’t really care if he was or not, it was just habit with her, to mine out any available nugget, no matter how seemingly useless.

  “I never relax.”

  She shrugged then, as though to say, “Well, there you are.” He sat down behind her, on the stool she used in order to reach things her delicate four-foot, five-inch frame could not manage, and she gritted her teeth in irritation. Of all the rudeness…

  To return that rudeness, she kept working. But the space between her shoulder blades itched.

  “Why are you working so hard on this?”

  “Because Andre asked.” That was a no-brainer. Andre needed something, she provided it. End of story. Besides, it was a challenge. So little in life was a challenge, anymore.

  “Good answer. Loyal answer. But loyalty’s not the only driving force in life. Sometimes, you have to take care of yourself, too. Andre understands that.”

  Andre exemplified that. Andre took good care of himself. Taking good care of himself meant taking good care of Darcy. Her fingers didn’t pause, her eyes still scanning the screen-in-screen for new info, even as she was inputting what she already knew into the existing database, building and refining the available information.

  Into that database she added the following fact: Andre cannot rely on his second in command any longer.

  And then: knowing I would enter this, he came to me anyway. Which means…what?

  Another bit of the puzzle, to wriggle out.

  Darcy heard Jorgunmunder leave, but didn’t bother to acknowledge him. He had sounded her out. She had given her answer. They would both do what they needed to do.

  That was how the world worked.

  Noodl
es used to be a tiny little hole in the wall: one cook-owner, Jimmy, two interchangeable delivery people, and an ancient figure of unknown gender sitting in the back, writing the fortunes that were far too accurate for anyone’s comfort. If it weren’t for the fact that Noodles also had the undisputed best Chinese food in all of Manhattan—no small feat, that—Wren would refuse to have anything to do with the place. Or so she told herself.

  Over the summer, Noodles had moved into a larger space down the street, effectively doubling the kitchen space, and adding a dining area. It was strange to actually sit at a table, with chairs, to eat Jimmy’s food. The balance of the universe was set askew, somehow. But the space was clean, and the tables had paper tablecloths you could doodle on, and the waiter was actually reasonably unsurly, for all that he spoke not a word of English.

  And, more to the point, they were fatae-friendly. In fact, the waiter, without them having to ask, found and brought over a backless stool for Shigenoi to use comfortably.

  Sergei, for once in his entire life, was late.

  “You want to bet he went to the old spot?” P.B. said.

  “Sergei would never do something like that. Only major disasters make him late to anything.” Which was a terrible thing to hope for, but if he had forgotten about the move…Wren wasn’t sure her system could take another shock, today.

  They had just settled among themselves what they were going to order, and were starting on the bowl of fried noodles, when Sergei finally did walk in. His eyes bulged out almost as much as Shig’s when he saw the fatae sitting with them, but had remastered his cool by the time he crossed the dining room and sat down. Wren had to give him props; her partner might have been a bigot, but he was one who was trying really hard to change. So did that make him a bigot, actually? Or just misguided at an impressionable age?

  “Glad you could join us,” she said.

  “Sorry—Lowell had a question about the new database he absolutely needed answered before we went any further with the new installation, and…” He shrugged, indicating his helplessness in the face of his assistant’s determination.

  All right, it wasn’t a major disaster. But the idea of Lowell being a pain and a jerk kept her universe in balance anyway.

  “Hello. I am Seiichi Shigenoi.”

  Sergei, who had just sat down, stood up again when Shig did, then pressed his hands together, palms facing each other, and made a shallow bow. “Konbanwa, Seiichi-san.”

  I really do love this man, Wren thought, handing him a menu. He barely even looked at it, ordering kung pao chicken and a bottle of Tsing Tao.

  “So, how do you know these two?” he asked Shig, handing the menu to the hovering waiter and pouring himself a cup of tea.

  As P.B. had predicted, Sergei immediately glommed onto the fact that Shig was in the import/export field, and started pumping him for information on Japanese customs and import laws.

  “You thinking about expanding the gallery?” Wren asked, when the two of them finally paused for breath.

  “If I had an agent in Asia whose judgment I could trust?” Sergei shrugged, not indicating yes or no. “A smart businessman always keeps his ears and eyes and options open.”

  The waiter came then with their appetizers, which they fell on like nobody had been fed in a week. Since Wren knew what P.B. had stolen from her fridge the day before, she was less than sympathetic.

  “My metabolism is different,” he protested, when ribbed about how much food he had ordered. “I have to eat a lot. Look, not an inch of me is fat!” He offered his arm to be pinched, for proof. Sergei and Shig both declined, but Wren reached out and gave his arm a thick pinch-and-twist, until he yelped.

  “What was that for?”

  “I don’t know, but odds are you did something today that deserved it.”

  “They are related?” Shig asked Sergei, who almost choked on a bite of Wren’s shrimp-roll appetizer, which he had snitched off her plate. “Not that you could prove it,” he finally said, after washing down the offending bit with a sip of tea, “but I’ve often wondered.”

  “Bite me entirely,” P.B. said.

  “Hey. Where do you get off being offended at being related to me?” Wren asked, mock-offended.

  “Children. Eat.”

  Sergei’s voice was indulgent, amused, but when Wren looked closely at him, she noted lines over his hawk’s nose that hadn’t been there a few days ago, and a drawn cast to his face that was worrisome. Plus, beer. On a weeknight. She rethought her decision to bring him into the matter of the Artifact. It would only worry him more.

  And if—when—he finds out, after? If you’ve kept things from him not once, but twice?

  Shut up and stop being so practical, she told the voice that sounded suspiciously like her mother this time, watching the waiter hand around platters of deliciously steaming food. I’ll wait until he’s finished dinner. He’s always calmer while he’s digesting.

  “Gods above and below, this smells good. It never smells this good the day after in the fridge.”

  “Maybe if you ever bought any of it for yourself, instead of cadging off me like the endless stomach of a mooch you are, it would smell better?”

  P.B. actually considered that for a whole sixty seconds before shaking his head. “Nah….”

  Shig looked both fascinated and frightened, as though discovering some particular dangerous snake performing street theater. She supposed, in a way, he had.

  He’s such a little brat, she sent along a pulse of current, unsure if that means of Talent-to-Talent communication would work with a nonhuman. From the way he carefully busied himself with his chopsticks to hide one of those weird amphibian smiles, she figured it did.

  Most unique, your relationship, he sent back, his silent words flavored with a feeling of understatement, and the scent of damp moss. Interesting. Most humans smelled, psychically, of dryer things, like sand and red wine and fresh-mown grass.

  Oh yeah, he’s one of a kind, that demon.

  As are you.

  She bowed her head slightly in acknowledgment of the compliment, unsure of how far to take it without turning the brief exchange into an uncomfortable love-fest. To delay the decision, she scooped her chopsticks into the orange chicken for second helpings when P.B. changed the topic entirely, for the entire table.

  “So, Wren, what are you gonna tell your client about the Artifact, anyway?”

  “P.B., you little pissant piece of dead meat…”

  Sergei’s eyebrow went directly into his immaculately groomed and gelled hairline.

  “Client?”

  His voice was calm, only vaguely inquisitive, and if Wren hadn’t sworn it was impossible, P.B.’s fur turned an even paler shade of white at the sound of it.

  “Your timing sucks, old, soon-to-be-dead pal.”

  “Um. It’s a gift.” He swallowed, then got indignant, his tufted ears practically quivering with it. “Hey, how was I supposed to know—How the hell, no, why the hell are you taking on clients without Sergei’s knowing about it? That’s not how the universe works, damn it! You’re messing with my reality!”

  Despite the not-as-she-planned-it nature of his revelation, Wren hoped that she would be able to salvage something. So she was totally unprepared for the expression on Sergei’s face.

  The bastard was amused! Pissed, yeah, but she knew those cocoa-dust eyes. He was trying really, really hard not to laugh. Her, or at P.B., she didn’t know, but rather than being relieved, she felt herself getting angry. Why wasn’t he angry at being left out of the loop?

  “We’ll talk later,” was all he said, and went back to his kung pao, turning to discuss trans-Pacific shipping routes and import rates with a clearly relieved Shig.

  Wren kicked the demon under the table, her legs barely reaching underneath to his own shorter ones, and went back to her own meal.

  “Why am I always the one who gets kicked?” P.B. asked the universe at large, then waved down the waiter for more tea before anyone could explai
n it to him.

  After the day he’d had—fending off Lowell with one hand, and Andre with the other—Sergei had not wanted to go anywhere but home. Much to his surprise, the dinner had been an enjoyable interlude, and even P.B.’s revelation of what his partner had been up to hadn’t been enough to spoil the relaxed mood he was in.

  Besides, he had known that she was up to something. Wren was only ever that casual when she was trying to keep a secret.

  He was even feeling mellow enough to pick up the check. Not that there was much choice to it; P.B. was a mooch, Shig probably was on limited funds, and it was just habit for him to pick up Wren’s share, especially now.

  She let him only because it was easier than arguing about it. He appreciated that about her, that she could pick and choose the battles. He’d just put it against his commission from this unknown client.

  “You two be careful,” he said to the fatae as they parted outside Noodles. He didn’t think they’d have any trouble—the last time the vigilantes tried to go after P.B., it had ended badly for them, not the demon—but that had been months ago. Stupid people didn’t learn from examples.

  “Yessir,” P.B. said, only a little mockingly, and the humans watched while their companions made their way up the neon-lit street, weaving in and out of clumps of humans, clearly involved in some sort of lively discussion, from the way Shig’s hands were moving.

  He turned to his partner, gesturing for her to start walking alongside him. She did, silently, not leaning in towards him the way she usually did.

  Oh, hell, he thought. What now? He looked down, and saw that her face was back in the pensive, not-talking-to-you mode. He bit back a sigh.

  “What?” she asked, not looking at him.

  “What, what?” All right, that wasn’t quite fair. He knew exactly what she was whating about—she could hear a sigh, even internal, ten paces away.

  Wren walked a few more steps down the sidewalk. They had, without discussion, headed for the subway up to Sergei’s apartment. “You’re supposed to be pissed at me.”