Inhuman Resources

by Jes Battis

  But according to my mother, none of that was true. I had power. So much power that two gifted mages had to put a block on it, so that I wouldn’t burn like a crazy flare for my father to see. I’d been muzzled.

  I had so many questions for her. Was the block gone now? Would I catch up to the other superstars, or would I always be in the remedial class? Was I going to go through some kind of second magical puberty? At twenty-six, the prospect seemed both terrifying and slightly attractive.

  Maybe that was why I’d recognized the latent power so early in Mia. Her magic had been suppressed as well, in order to transform her into a kind of weapon. Maybe we were both bullets in the same gun.

  I crossed Drake and approached Lucian’s apartment. I could hear jazz and laughter coming from Aqua, the up-scale restaurant on the corner that celebrities favored when they were filming in Vancouver. Neon made the asphalt look gold, like an ominous version of the Yellow Brick Road. Suddenly, I wished that I could sync up my whole life to Dark Side of the Moon. The last time I’d tried it, I’d been in no real condition to operate a turntable. But maybe it would work now. It must have worked for someone, right?

  The key fit perfectly. I exhaled. Now or never.

  I opened the door, and cool air washed over me. My boots clicked against the polished concrete floor. I could smell detergent, and something else. Maybe a hint of bachelor suppers past. The man loved Thai food.

  I walked upstairs to his loft bedroom. The bed was made neatly. It didn’t look as if it had been slept in for a few days, but Lucian was also very adept at tucking in hospital corners. For all I knew, he’d made it just a few hours ago. I wanted to think that I’d be able to sense his presence, but it didn’t work quite so easily. Necroid materia didn’t resonate on the same frequency as the elemental materias that mages worked with. Trying to detect it was like fiddling with an unfamiliar radio in the hopes of landing on a coherent station.

  All I felt was anxiety. If Lucian had a detectable essence, I couldn’t distinguish it from the ambient sounds and smells of the apartment.

  I opened up the top drawer in his dresser. Socks in various shades. Assorted underwear, including the plaid boxers that he’d worn a year ago when we first had sex. I smiled when I saw them.

  What was I looking for? I didn’t really know. But all signs pointed to the fact that he was hiding something from me. Duessa hadn’t called him out specifically, but she didn’t trust the necromancers, and neither did I. Ordeño had been one of their own, and it was in their best interest to protect his secrets. Lucian may have been ostensibly cooperating with our investigation, but he was also holding something back. If he had something to hide, it was going to be here.

  I opened every drawer. No false bottoms. No secret compartments. But he did have several pairs of neatly folded jeans, eight black collared shirts, and a collection of cuff links that I’d never seen before.

  I took out my athame. The concrete floors were dampening my senses, but I could still detect a few pockets of air and liquid materia. I remembered the stairs to the loft, which he’d only recently built. They were made of clean, unvarnished pine, smooth to the touch. I drew energy from the wood and let it flow into the athame. The handle warmed to my touch.

  I flicked the athame, and a cone of infrared light shone from its tip. Not as powerful as an IR camera with treated film, but it could still penetrate through most substrates. I scanned the walls and floor, going over every inch. Nothing but a few scuff marks and one badly installed piece of drywall.

  The bed looked so comfortable. I was suddenly aware of my aching muscles and latent headache, which was about to blossom. I thought about the Vicodin in my purse. It would be so nice to pop a few pills and fall asleep in Lucian’s bed. Maybe I’d wake up next to him in the morning, and he wouldn’t even ask how I got there. He’d just kiss me and ask what I wanted for breakfast.

  Right. That always happened.

  I went downstairs. The coffee table had a few scattered magazines—Discovery, Popular Mechanics, and the Walrus . The couch was tidy, and the remote control had been placed neatly on one arm. Ours was usually buried underneath the cushions, and you had to practically go spelunking just to find it every night.

  I walked down the hallway. Some people hid things in their bathroom, but Lucian didn’t strike me as the type. Besides, I’d looked through his medicine cabinet the last time I was here, and he didn’t even have so much as an aspirin bottle. Just Q-tips, nail clippers, and rubbing alcohol.

  His laptop was humming quietly in the office. As I crossed the threshold of the doorway, I felt the first pang of real guilt. Up until this moment, I could have pretended that I was just a neurotic girlfriend. Now I was actually invading his workplace. There were locked filing cabinets in here, and removable hard drives, and all sorts of digital caches of treasure. Things meant for his eyes only.

  The desk had an accordion file on it. I looked through it briefly, but didn’t find anything but tax receipts and old bank statements. I didn’t look at the balance. But for some reason, I was surprised that he used a credit union.

  Twenty minutes later, I found myself staring at the two locked filing cabinets. I didn’t sense any materia coming from them. If I really wanted to, I could probably pick the locks with a bobby pin.

  Christ.

  What was happening to me?

  “This is stupid,” I said. “If he’s hiding something, you’re not going to find it. The guy spends half of his time in a hidden city.”

  I wasn’t about to get a bus ticket to Trinovantum. Nobody in the CORE knew where it was, or how to get there. All we understood was that, sometimes, stillborn infants were brought to the hidden city by nurses who weren’t what they seemed. The babies were swaddled and cared for and—somehow—brought back to life. Or brought into unlife. We didn’t understand how it worked. Lucian had told me only bits and pieces about his past, and when I pushed for more information, he just shut down.

  I flicked on the light switch. I was going to leave him a nice note: Miss you, watered your plants, hope all is well, besos.

  That was when I noticed the picture for the first time.

  It was hanging above the desk. I didn’t remember seeing it before, but I’d never really spent a lot of time in Lucian’s office. Maybe it had been there all along. Or maybe he’d just put it up recently. It was definitely a Picasso. The lines and shadows were all askew, but the room in the painting seemed eerily familiar. I stared at it. There was what looked like a figure standing in an open doorway. Another figure was kneeling, and above its head was a swirl of white, like a flashbulb.

  It wasn’t the figures themselves, but rather their positioning, that made me realize what I was looking at. Las Meninas.

  Only, it wasn’t. It was Picasso’s version of Las Meninas . The Infanta Margarita was a perplexity of geometric shapes, her head a large octagon, her torso a narrow rectangle. Her dress was still spread out on the floor, but now it looked more like a fat scalene triangle. The man standing in the open doorway resembled a tall lamp, or possibly a distended umbrella. Velázquez the painter was a cluster of forms draped loosely over the Cross of Santiago, which in Picasso’s version resembled a coatrack with body parts hanging from it. Vaguely threatening triangles and half shapes floated around Margarita’s head in shades of vivid blue, yellow, and red.

  Come to think if it, I’d read somewhere Picasso had made abstract copies of Las Meninas. He’d been nearly obsessed with the original.

  But why did Lucian have a copy of this particular painting? It seemed like too much of a coincidence. Two necromancers. Two versions of the same painting. And Ordeño had been Lucian’s mentor.

  What knowledge had he passed on to his pupil? Was Lucian working to ensure that his secrets would remain hidden?

  It made sense. Necromancers were marginalized, misunderstood, cryptic. They kept to themselves, protected one another. But Lucian’s sense of loyalty was now squarely in the way of my investigation.

&
nbsp; I used my cell to snap a picture of the Picasso. Then I turned the light off and returned to the living room. Everything looked exactly as it had when I’d first opened the door. I closed my eyes, grounded myself, and concentrated.

  The earth materia responded to me, even from beneath the concrete floor. I thought about white things: snow; the fur on the underbelly of my childhood cat, whom I’d named Opal for reasons known only to my six-year-old self; clean foolscap; freshly washed sheets; primed walls; and polished bone. It was an old trick that Meredith Silver had taught me for erasing one’s presence.

  The materia settled itself into a neutral field, which then sank into the walls and floor. It was like metaphysical air freshener. Unless Lucian could smell me, he’d probably sense nothing untoward when he returned home.

  I closed and locked the door. I was already dialing as I crossed the street.

  “Hey. I’m fine. What can you tell me about Picasso?”

  12

  My father the demon was painting me.

  Like Velázquez, he wore a black surcoat, but instead of the Cross of Santiago it was embroidered with three drops of blood. As I watched them, the drops danced, forming first a triangle and then a slowly spinning circle. Sometimes the blood looked real, and sometimes it was just thread.

  He was tall. Maybe six-two or six-three even. His hands and face were nearly translucent, the same color as glazed porcelain. Veins flared underneath the surface of his flesh, and the blood that coursed through them was multicolored. Looking at them reminded me of the abalone that coated the inside of shells. Was his blood really different colors, or was it just a trick of the light streaming through the windows?

  “Tess. You should really hold still. He can’t capture you otherwise.”

  I turned at the sound of the familiar voice. Mia was standing to my right, wearing a voluminous yellow gown and holding a silver chalice. As I stared at her dress, the flowers on it moved before my eyes. I thought of the glasses that our data technician, Esther, always wore, with their shifting reflections. The flowers bloomed and then shriveled as I watched them, crumbling to red and yellow powder.

  Two young girls knelt beside Mia, fussing with her dress and shoes. The girl on her right was Eve, my childhood best friend, who’d perished in a fire. Seeing her again was like a blow to the stomach. Years ago, she’d run away from me, terrified when I channeled a bit of fire materia to make my hands glow. She was supposed to think it was pretty, but she fled from me instead, like I was a monster.

  She died that same day. I’d crawled through the smoke and the flames, searching for her, but all I’d found was a blackened body, flaking away even as I stared at it.

  In my dream, she was whole and beautiful. The last time I’d seen her like this was when Marcus Tremblay tried to kill Mia. I’d tapped into Mia’s reserve of power, and for a brief moment, my connection to the elemental planes where materia came from—the secret chambers of the visible universe—allowed me to see Eve one last time. She’d forgiven me, even if I couldn’t forgive myself.

  Now she smiled at me. “¿Qué pasa, amiga?”

  “What are you doing in my dreams again?”

  “What are you doing in our dreams?” The girl on Mia’s left spoke to me. I’d never seen her before. She was dark-skinned and had beautiful green eyes. She couldn’t have been more than twelve—the same age as Eve.

  “I don’t know you,” I said.

  She smiled. “That’s not really the point.”

  A dog slept at Mia’s feet, and I realized that it was Baron, who belonged to Miles. He opened one eye and stared lazily at me.

  I looked past him, and saw both Derrick and Miles standing behind the girls. Derrick was wearing a beautiful black suit with a white silk tie, and Miles wore a pristine white suit with a black tie. A white hand-shape had been sewn into his tie, and I recognized it as the ASL sign for reverse.

  Reverse of what?

  Miles leaned close to Derrick, whispering something in his ear. Derrick grinned. He signed something rapidly to Miles, but the only word I recognized was tell.

  Then they kissed. It was a slow, deliberate kiss. Miles laid his hand on the back of Derrick’s neck. Derrick pulled him in closer, still smiling. He opened his eyes, then bit Miles gently on the bottom lip. Miles chuckled.

  “A kiss to build a dream on,” he said.

  But it was my father’s voice that I heard. A growl lingered just below its surface. A drop of blood appeared on Miles’s lip, hovering, tensile.

  “Oh. Hold still. I can get that.” Mia left her meninas.

  Both looked disappointed, but neither said a word. Mia was nearly as tall as Miles, so she didn’t have to strain to reach him. She dabbed at his mouth with the sleeve of her dress. The blood soaked through the fabric, spreading across it, until the gown was entirely red.

  “I think it looks better this way,” Mia said.

  I gestured to her cup. “What are you drinking?”

  “Memories, mostly.” She smiled. “And some ginger ale, for my stomach. Derrick made it for me. It’s called a desmemória.”

  “It comes in pill form, too,” Derrick said, holding out his hand. Three Vicodin tablets lay in his palm.

  I heard a knocking. My father let out an exasperated sigh, still holding his paintbrush. It was dripping on the floor.

  “Somebody’s come late. Please let them in, Tessa.”

  I looked at the open entrance. The necromancer from the park was standing there. His steel mask was broken in places, revealing patches of skin crusted with dried blood. He no longer had the Vorpal gauntlet. His eyes were fixed on me.

  “Take your mask off,” I said.

  He passed a hand over his face. The mask disappeared.

  It was Lucian. He stared at me impassively.

  “No,” I said. “It wasn’t you. Those weren’t your eyes.” I shook my head. “I would have recognized you. This is wrong.”

  But was it? Would I really have recognized him in the heat of the moment? What had I ever really known about him?

  “Was it you?” I asked.

  He looked bemused. “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

  “In the park. Was it you, Lucian?”

  He put a hand over his heart. “Tu eres mi espejo, preciosa.”

  I glared at him. “I’m your mirror? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Tessa! Come see it!” My father was gesturing maniacally with his paintbrush. “It’s nearly done!”

  I walked over to where he was standing. He turned the canvas. He’d painted Luiz Ordeño, dead, his neck lacerated and covered in blood.

  “It looks just like you,” he said.

  I woke up with that image fresh in my mind.

  It was hot in my bedroom. The digital clock on the nightstand read 6:35. No time for a shower. Fantastic.

  My subconscious is either trying to kill me or get me fired. Maybe both.

  I walked unsteadily into the en-suite bathroom. There was a dirty towel on the floor, and I could smell a patina of styling products, their various scents mingling into something nebulous and sweet. I washed my hair in the sink. The blow-dryer was so hot that it burned, but I kept it on the highest setting. Pain meant that I was awake.

  I pulled on a pair of jeans that were only slightly wrinkled. I needed to wash my bra, but that wasn’t about to happen in the next five minutes. Selena probably had twenty bras, all fitted and always freshly laundered. I felt like a barbarian.

  Fifteen minutes of indecision later I emerged from the bedroom, still groggy, but now at least wearing a sharp tan sweater. Mostly its purpose was to hide the semi-clean blouse underneath. I’d been planning to do a load of laundry last night, but my detour to Lucian’s apartment had changed things. Instead of washing whites, I’d ended up talking to Derrick about Picasso and Velázquez until three in the morning. He had the day off, but I wasn’t so lucky.

  I walked past his bedroom and saw that the door was partially open. The room was i
mmaculate, as always. His OSI textbooks were lined up on shelves, along with other novels and works of criticism. Derrick had always been a voracious reader. His DVDs were stacked neatly by the small television set. Probably alphabetized. Sometimes I had no idea why Derrick and Lucian weren’t good friends. They definitely shared a love for organizing.

  I didn’t mean to look at the bed, but it was sort of impossible not to. Miles and Derrick lay in each other’s arms, only partially covered by the blanket. Derrick’s legs were wrapped around Miles’s, their feet touching. They both snored in unison.

  I thought of how they’d appeared in my dream, wearing polarized suits. I almost wanted to look and see if Miles had blood on his mouth. But I didn’t dare.

  My life would be a lot simpler if I could sleep like that.

  I closed Derrick’s door lightly. Then I made my way into the kitchen. Mia was sitting at the table, studying. I couldn’t tell if it was the same textbook or not, but sometimes all of her textbooks looked the same to me, with their bright colors and strange geometric designs. Kind of like Picasso’s Las Meninas.

  She didn’t look up. “There’s fresh coffee in the thing.”

  “And by ‘thing,’ you mean coffeemaker?”

  “Well, it’s not really a coffeemaker, is it? I’m the one that makes the coffee.”

  “I see your point.”

  She underlined something in her notebook. “Derrick came home last night with the half-and-half, but I told him that you only liked the real coffee cream. So he had to go back.” She sipped from her mug. “He didn’t even argue.”

  For a second, all I could do was stare at her. When I first saw Mia, she was short and skinny, with unruly brown hair and eyes that never missed a beat. She favored oversized painter jeans and etnies.