Bring It On

by Laura Anne Gilman

  The old man had asked to see both of them, actually, in his last phone message. Sergei was not going to tell his partner that. She would probably have agreed, and then one way or another Sergei would have blood on his hands. Better to keep the two of them on opposite ends of the city, for as long as he can. Hopefully a very nice, long time, like forever. Wren was many things, but forgiving had never been on the list.

  It was indicative of the way things were going that Andre had not asked him to meet in the downtown office, or even in any of the usual, known meeting areas scattered around. Not that you could keep anything secret from the Silence—Duncan was a bastard, but he was the most efficient bastard in the Western hemisphere—but meeting in an off-site, off-route location was a good way of letting people know that you didn’t want to be obviously eavesdropped on, and would in fact take measures to prevent it, so nobody’s nose should get put out of joint if they couldn’t join the party.

  Still, the choice of Bryant Park was a surprise. From a run-down and dingy embarrassment to the city, the space behind the Public Library’s main building had been turned into a lovely spot for office workers to brown-bag their lunches in the summer, listening to music and soaking up sunlight reflected off high-rise office buildings. There was even a small carousel, and a Starbucks’ booth.

  Sergei bought himself a chai tea, and walked slowly down a side path until he saw Andre, sitting on one of the wrought-iron benches.

  Darcy was with the old man. That was also a surprise. Even more of a surprise was that Jorgunmunder was nowhere to be seen.

  Off in the distance somewhere with a high-powered rifle? Sergei wondered. All right, now you’re just crazy-paranoid. Stop it. Just because Andre’s desperate enough to go for yet another end-run at us….

  “I won’t waste your time,” his former mentor said, the moment Sergei sat down beside them. Darcy looked completely out of place out here; he couldn’t remember ever actually seeing her outdoors, and her pale, soft, screamingly white skin attested to that fact. “Will you work with us, to root out whomever, whatever is keeping us—” and by “us” Andre meant “me,” and the people I use to achieve my goals “—from the information we need?”

  Will you come back to heel, Sergei mentally translated. Will you be my dog, once again, my faithful, well-rewarded hunting dog?

  He braced himself. “No.”

  “No?” Andre was having trouble accepting the word, and Darcy reacted as though she had been slapped across the face.

  “No.” Sergei held firm…for about thirty seconds. “Damn it, I can’t, Andre. Not now. Hell’s breaking loose elsewhere in the city, closer to home, and I have to deal with that, first. Your agenda’s going to have to wait.”

  “My ag—Do you really think that any of these so-called agendas stand separately, boy? Do you really think that your problems with the Council—yes, I know about the disappearances, my lines of information may be blocked, but they’re not dead yet—do you really think that they’re not all connected?”

  The Silence employed Talented operatives, but only on a small, weak level. No matter how many they might have on payroll now, they didn’t have their hooks into the powerhouses—except Wren. And that was his fault. His, for negotiating that devil’s bargain, and Andre’s, for not being able to let go, ever, of anything he thought was his.

  “If they are, Andre, if the Silence has anything whatsoever to do with what’s going on, if your problems are even remotely connected, then it’s because you and yours helped to create the situations in the first place, spewing your bigotry and your hate into the ears of everyone around you, playing Holier Than Thou while playing with people’s lives like rubber-soled gods, immune to current because you willed it so.

  “Think about that, boss, while you’re up to your ass in alligators and you’ve alienated the only folk who could have drained the swamp.”

  Rising from the bench in a smooth, elegant move, Sergei crumpled his now empty cup in one hand and shot it into a nearby trash can. Like his past, like everything except what mattered now. A flutter in the trees overhead caught his attention: a piskie, an adult, watching them. Small, uncute, and mostly harmless, piskies had been the first-hit by the vigilantes, the worst-hit. Sergei gave a quiet nod to the fatae, who watched him a moment with its ugly, large-eyed face, like a human-lemur cross, and then nodded back, equal to equal.

  A small moment. It probably meant nothing. But, under the current—bad pun, Didier—political conditions, Sergei felt, somehow, that he had won a far more important victory than the one he’d just scored in saying no to Andre.

  17

  The main room had become a control center, of sorts. Wren had dragged the corkboard out of her office and leaned it against the far wall, stripping all her old materials from it and leaving it bare so that Shig could stick the names of clans up as they responded, either affirmative or negative. So far, the largest column was still “no response.”

  P.B. was still making his calls in her office—he tried coming out once, and the cell had immediately dropped the call with a hiss of static. Trying to use the landline was even worse—Wren was too agitated to even have the stereo on, at this point, and that was usually pretty stable. He had threatened to go up onto the roof and take his chances there, if she didn’t lock it down.

  Shig had offered her one of his Valium, hoarded for the trip home, but she wasn’t a big fan of drugs, over the counter or otherwise. Control was better than loss of control, no matter the situation.

  No matter what Sergei might think, sometimes.

  Thoughts of her partner brought mixed emotions. She needed him here, damn it. Not that he could do anything, but the lack of his physical presence was a space in the apartment that nothing else could fill, and she resented that. Resented needing that. Resented that he was elsewhere when she needed him, and why wasn’t he back yet, already? She kept waiting for the urge to brew tea to kick in, indicating that he was on the way home.

  Although she hadn’t felt that urge lately, had she? After a decade of knowing when he was coming up the stairs, the lack of that warning was disturbing, and if she had any brain at all left to fret over it, she would.

  “All right, we need a place to hold this dance party,” she said. “Make like a wedding and assume everyone will come, especially the ones you wish wouldn’t, and how many is that?”

  “Couple—three hundred,” P.B. said, coming out to hand Shig another slip of paper to thumbtack to the board, this one in the yes column. “So far you were right—not a single Council drudge has bothered to RSVP, much less accept. Gossip says they’re being sat on, hard.”

  “Fine. It will be easier to keep things calm and productive without them, anyway. Three hundred bodies means four hundred opinions, to begin with.”

  “At least,” P.B. agreed. “But you know an All-Moot without all involved isn’t going to be binding…”

  “It will be binding,” Wren said, grimly. “And it will bind the way it needs to.” She had no idea how she was going to manage that, considering she couldn’t even get her four-wheeled troika in line on a plan, but it was, by God, going to happen.

  “So many people, Noodles as a gathering place is not possible, then?” Shig asked.

  “Hah,” P.B. crowed. “Another convert!”

  “The food was very good,” the other fatae agreed calmly, his webbed paws handling the small tacks with a small amount of difficulty. He had refused her two earlier offers of help; they all felt the need to do something, however small, to keep involved.

  Hers was pacing. And thinking out loud.

  “There’s a place around the corner, doubles as a recording studio, might be large enough, but would cost the earth, and…”

  “And bring a bunch of Talents into a recording studio?” P.B. looked at her as though she had just spouted multicolored feathers and a tutu, and done the Dance of the Dying Phoenix to a reggae tune.

  “Right. Not one of my brighter ideas, huh?” P.B. just shook his he
ad and went back into the office.

  A sudden sharp noise made them all jump, and look at each other in confusion. It was repeated again, somehow more urgent, and Wren blinked in realization.

  “Oh. It’s the intercom.”

  “You have an intercom?” P.B. shook his head. “And someone uses it?”

  “Sergei had it fixed. And not everyone comes in via the kitchen window.”

  P.B. stuck his tongue out at her, and crossed dark red eyes, making his normally amusing face look like an actual demon’s face. “Grow up, Polar Bear.”

  He stalked off down the hallway, grumbling, while she went to the control panel and hit Speak. “Yes?”

  “Miss Valere?”

  For an instant Wren had flashbacks to Andre—the only person she had ever told to always but always refer to her as “Ms. Valere,” even in his thoughts—but then common sense sunk in. This voice was female.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Anna Rosen?”

  She sounded like she wasn’t quite sure if she was or not. A far cry from the self-composed little rich girl who had come here that first day.

  “Now is not a good time, Miss Rosen.”

  “I need to have an update, Miss Valere. I need to know what you’re up to!”

  Wren was tempted to tell her to go away and leave things to the adults. But the last thing she needed right now was some hysterical girl making a scene outside on the street. So she hit the door button, and buzzed her in.

  Rosen looked like hell. Her long blond hair was only pulled back into a sleek ponytail today, and her pale green eyes were red-rimmed and smudged with charcoal-colored half-circles underneath.

  “You didn’t get it. She still has it. What went wrong?”

  Those were the girl’s first words in the door, and Wren had to fight down the urge to backhand her right back out onto the landing.

  “You hired me to do a job. Let me do it.”

  Interesting, that the girl knew about the failed attempt, but not the successful one. Did Melanie dearest know that she’d been robbed? She must, by now. But how did Anna know? Wren couldn’t imagine Melanie telling her…which meant that the client had her own sources.

  Shig had made himself scarce as well; she suspected that both fatae were down the hallway in the office, safely out of sight. Just because Rosen knew about Talent didn’t mean she knew piss-all about fatae. Or needed to know that two of them were hanging around in The Wren’s apartment.

  “I hired you. That means you report to me. So, report.”

  She must have learned that stance from Daddy, before he died. Or watching too many episodes of The Apprentice. On her, it wasn’t very scary.

  “You hired me to do it my way. My way doesn’t involve reports, memos, or any kind of daily metrics. Get over it, or fire me.”

  Firing would be good. Firing would be a way out of this bind, once and for all. Firing would also be very very bad. She’d never walked away from a job, and she’d never, ever been fired.

  “I need that necklace!”

  “Why?” Wren didn’t care why, actually. It was enough that she had been hired; justifications, like legality, was a thing she worried about on her own time, not the clients’.

  “Because, I…”

  The change in Rosen’s voice alerted Wren to snap out of her own internal musing and pay attention. Damn it, Sergei was the schmoozer. Sergei knew from getting people to talk about themselves, spill more than they meant to, and give away the entire candy store.

  “Anna? Why do you need the necklace? Want, I can understand, it was your mother’s. But you told me yourself that it was a trinket, and your stepmother confirmed it. So why is everyone so intent on keeping it for themselves?”

  She knew why Melanie wanted it, obviously. And she knew why she had it trapped in a lockbox. But why did Anna, lovely Anna the self-proclaimed Null, want it? This was more than personal. This was borderline terrified.

  “I…someone approached me. They want to buy it. Mel won’t sell. She won’t let me sell, either. And that’s not fair! It’s mine, it was my mother’s and now it’s mine, and I should be able to sell if it I want!”

  Never enough money in the damn world, to satisfy some people, Wren thought, not without some compassion. She wasn’t sure there would ever be enough money in the world for her, either. But nobody was lining up to let her find out, worse luck.

  But this was a woman who was willing to sell a treasured trinket of her mother’s, a seemingly worthless item, for cold hard cash. And to people who scared her enough to do anything in order to make that sale.

  A drop of foreboding tickled along Wren’s scalp. Who was that scary? Who wanted this necklace so much, to intimidate a young woman into stealing from her own family? And how had they heard about it in the first place? All that suggested Talent…more, Council. Which, to Wren, specifically spelled out K-I-M-A-N-N.

  Not that it mattered much, since Wren had already determined KimAnn wasn’t getting her manicured talons on it, but…

  “Come into the kitchen, sit down, let me make you some tea,” she said, taking Rosen’s arm. The client let herself be walked into the small kitchen and seated on one of the stools, waiting like a rag doll while Wren was setting the kettle to boil, picking out the tea bags, and pouring the water, all the while keeping up a line of gentle cocktail party chatter that would have impressed her grandmother, snob that she had been.

  “I need to know—” Anna broke in, and Wren nodded soothingly.

  “Of course.”

  Wren almost felt guilty as she gathered up the current from her core, stroking it until it stretched, sleek and dark purple, like a vein up out of her core, up her arm, into the hand that offered Anna her mug of steaming hot tea. As she did so, Wren touched the skin of Anna’s hand, the fleshy part between thumb and forefinger, and with scalpel precision, Pushed the thin line of current slid from her into the Null space that was Anna Rosen.

  The Push was a skill Wren hated using—and seemed to be using more and more often. It made her feel like she needed to take a shower.

  Reaching into Anna’s brain, into the space in her hypothalamus where the memory and awareness was stored, Wren’s current flowed in over Anna’s questions, quieting them with a gentle murmur of its own, replacing questions with contentment, queries with complacency, and a sense of all things being well and well-explained.

  It was delicate work, and the temptation was great to go in a little deeper, and burn away every memory of the necklace, as well—or, if she had the time, to craft a new memory, one of having sold it, and spent the money on a new pair of shoes.

  It wouldn’t be a bad thing. It might even, in the greater scheme of events, be a Good Thing. Certainly, it would ease Anna’s life considerably, to remove her from the path of self-destruction she seemed determined to pursue, because while a Talent might mold an Artifact, the stories said, Artifacts almost always molded Nulls, and almost always in really bad and fatal ways.

  Even if whoever wanted to buy it took it from her, and paid her, and let her live, she would still be effected by the magic stored within.

  Stepmomma was trying to protect Anna, as well as the Artifact. Pity nobody thought to explain it to the girl. And now it was too late: thanks to whoever had tampered with her, she would never believe it wasn’t just another ploy to keep the poor, pitiful Null from what was rightfully hers.

  Yes, using the Push to make her “forget” about the necklace would make life easier for everyone—but it was in the end, all each Talent had was an internal meter of how far they were willing to step into the gray areas, and Wren’s was already pinging the red line.

  Taking the mug out of Rosen’s now unresisting hand, Wren stood and led the client like a rag doll back out to the front door.

  “We’re all set then, Miss Rosen?”

  “Yes. All set. Thank you for being so patient with me. I simply want what belongs to me, you understand?”

  “Totally,” Wren assured her.
Offering the client a handshake on it, Wren made one last Retrieval, taking back the awareness of Wren’s home address and contact info, excising it neatly, without any space left behind.

  No guilt, there; self-preservation trumped all other concerns. When the replacement was made, Wren would send it to the client in the usual manner—through a blind drop that Sergei would arrange. She was over the incredibly stupid urge to do everything on her own. She thought. Probably.

  Down on the street, there was no sign of the driver or his big bad car. Anna must have braved the subway, poor little rich girl. Wren watched out the window while Anna walked down the block, a normal-looking vigor in her stride, increasing as she got farther and farther away; the walk of a woman who had gotten exactly what she wanted.

  “Life would be easier if I were a nicely amoral, cold-hearted bitch, intent on only my own agenda, like a proper lonejack.”

  She was about to call Shig and P.B. back for another round of find-a-Moot-location when she realized that she had gone back into the kitchen and set the kettle to boil again, for a fresh pot of water. The front door opened just as she started to laugh, and Sergei came in, looking like he really needed that tea.

  The look on his face triggered a memory in her own brain, of an old Math teacher of hers stressed beyond belief by the willful ignorance of her charges, and she blurted out, “The old high school!”

  18

  Technically speaking, Wren thought, watching the bodies mill about in the space below her, P.B. was right, and this wasn’t an All-Moot. But with lonejacks and fatae both represented, it was the closest anyone could remember ever occurring. Redcaps and an odd-looking feathered creature sat quietly against one wall, watching intently while three or four piskies flitted in the air, piskies being one of the few winged species who could still actually fly. A Nassunii, or water serpent, was by the door, talking to one of the feathered serpent-types, and two troll were arguing with a basilisk—thankfully an immature male, or the argument could have gotten ugly, fast.