An Interrupted Cry

by Laura Anne Gilman

  And he hadn’t called her, or Bonnie, and he hadn’t left a note. Ellen knew that the other woman was trying to be logical, the voice of calm reason, but she didn’t particularly want to be calm or logical. She needed to find her boss.

  “Ellen.” The fingers tightened around her arm, briefly, getting her attention. “We’re professionals. Act like it. Your vision. That we know is urgent, right?”

  Ellen nodded.

  “All right then. We lead with that. And it might lead us to him, anyway. If there is trouble around, and it involves kids, you know he’s going to be mixed up in it eventually.”

  That got a weak smile from Ellen, because it was true.

  “So. Two kids. Tell me more.” Bonnie wasn’t Danny, didn’t have the same measured, calm voice he got when he was walking her through a vision, but she was used to questioning witnesses, dealing with some of the more flighty and uncooperative members of the Cosa Nostradamus when she was investigating a crime, and the projection of a sense of patience, as though she was willing to wait forever if that’s what it took, was almost as soothing.

  “It was too quick. There wasn’t anything to work on.” Ellen leaned against the wall and studied the photograph hung opposite her. It was of some bridge somewhere, mist low over the arches, but she’d never left the New York City area, so she didn’t know where, or if it was some famous photo or the work of one of the PUPs, as they traveled on business—or, she supposed they did take vacations, at some point….

  “Ellen. Focus.”

  “Right.” She was exhausted: the translocation had drained her a little, and stress had done the rest, but she couldn’t give into it, or let it distract her. How long had it been since she’d had the vision? An hour, two? How long since Danny had gone missing? She didn’t know, couldn’t know. No watch, no clocks. Their building wasn’t wired for closed circuit security, so they couldn’t even check tapes.

  The vision. Right. Danny would kick her ass if she didn’t focus on this, he’d be pissed at her worrying about him when there were kids who needed help.

  “There wasn’t anything for me to focus on. Wherever they were, it was dark.”

  “Blackout dark?”

  “No…. No. Pitch dark. Like, can’t see your hand in front of your face, dark.” She scrunched her face as she tried to remember, as though that would job her memory. “Darker than it is now, even in blackout.”

  “But you could see them clearly. Interesting. But not relevant right now. What else could you see? What did you feel from them?”

  Ellen closed her eyes, concentrated. “They were scared, but I didn’t see what they were scared of. No, I couldn’t see what they were scared of. It was really hidden, or invisible?”

  She couldn’t think of anything that could actually make itself invisible, but she didn’t know everything yet. Bonnie might. Danny would.

  That wasn’t enough: Bonnie was waiting for more. “A boy and a girl, white, younger than me? But not young—late teens, maybe?” She wasn’t good at judging that even in person. “The stuff on their face…. It was just mud, or dirt. Nothing special about it.”

  She felt the urge to growl in frustration. As visions went, it had been one of the most useless ever.

  “Okay, hang on, keep breathing, okay?” Bonnie was using her Calm the Victim Voice now, but Ellen couldn’t work up the energy to be offended by that. “Let’s at least get a sketch of the kids’ faces, then, okay? And I can put out an APB on them, and see if the local cops have a missing report filed yet.”

  “You draw?” She hadn’t expected that, somehow.

  “We all draw, at some level,” Bonnie said, taking her elbow and leading her back into the conference room. “Job requirement. I’m more Picasso than Rembrandt, but I should be able to do a reasonable likeness. And once we’ve got that started, we can try and find our missing boy, all right?”

  No, it wasn’t all right. The need to find her boss was like walking on hot pavement, but her job was to focus on the vision. Save the kids, if she could. “Yeah. All right.”

  oOo

  Bonnie had been right; she wasn’t particularly brilliant as a sketch artist, but when Ellen decided that it was close enough to the faces she’d seen in her vision, the PUP laid down the pencils, and considered what she’d created. “Yeah, youngish, and scared.” There was something odd in Bonnie’s expression, a twist that Ellen couldn’t read, although that might just have been the lighting: it was dimmer than regular light, and Ellen wondered if the generator was starting to die, too.

  “Now what?”

  Whatever Bonnie had been thinking or feeling, she shook it off with Ellen’s question, and looked up and across the table with a glint of mischief on her face. “Now, for the cool part,” she said. “Go into mage-sight, and see if you can tell me what I did.”

  Unlike the movies and books, watching current being manipulated was, generally, a lot like watching ointment dry: only interesting when a fly got stuck in it. Ellen’s mentor had a more organic, whatever-works methodology, but she encouraged Ellen to learn everything she could, especially from the PUPs. So at Bonnie’s nod, Ellen let her eyes unfocus, and waited.

  Ellen had tried to describe using mage-sight to Danny once and given up in exasperation, because there was no way to explain it to someone who couldn’t do it. It wasn’t particularly magical, unless you were a science nerd. But for Talents Bonnie and Pietr, the science of what they did was fascinating, and they expected everyone else to be just as fascinated—and so Ellen had gotten a full lecture on it, of which she retained only the basics: that mage-sight bypassed the usual rods and cones in the eye, hitting the optic nerve directly, and from there straight into the occipital lobe.

  What it did there, Ellen didn’t know, and didn’t care. It was enough for her that it worked.

  Most people couldn’t sense current at all—to Nulls, and most of the fatae, it was at most a faint hum in their awareness. Talent could sense it, feel it, and manipulate it—but they couldn’t see it, unless they were using mage-sight. Then it was like watching a rainbow, if rainbows came in neon and each color demarcation twitched like guitar strings being played, or maybe like the way a piano sounded. Except nothing like any of that, really.

  Aware of the urgency, Ellen put aside her usual frustration at not being able to categorize the sensation, and watched.

  At first, she thought Bonnie was crafting a basic fixative, a cantrip the pups had adapted to keep evidence from getting washed away and the rest of the Cosa had adapted to a hundred less urgent purposes, the current flowing over the page, settling on the surface, blurring the image slightly before sharpening again. Then it was as though something in the rainbow twitched, and the sketch disappeared from the page, only to reappear again a split second later.

  Ellen resurfaced from mage-sight, blinking dumbly across the table at the PUP. “You made it go somewhere. You…popped it somewhere else.” She blinked again. “Oh my god, you recreated a fax machine.”

  Bonnie grinned, looking far too pleased with herself. The trouble with current was that it interfered—sometimes dramatically—with anything that used electricity, especially in an office like this, where current was not only in use all the time, but they were constantly playing with new ways to manipulate and use it. But a fax machine made of current….

  Ellen knew that she was powerful, but she also knew her power was a blunt hammer, and Wren’s only slightly less so. Bonnie and the rest of the PUPs were surgeons, in comparison.

  “So now it’s in various hands, paws, and tentacles around the city, and we’ll see what we’ll see, hopefully fast. If these kids are ours, someone will have noted that they’re missing. And if they’re not, we’ve got spoons in those pots too.”

  “I feel like I should be doing something more…”

  “What, running around in the middle of a blackout, trying to interrogate people who are all either sound asleep or shitfaced?”

  “I… yeah? Or on the night shift, maybe.
” There were humans and fatae who woke with sunset, and slept at dawn. Ellen was reasonably sure she knew how to find them without Danny. Reasonably.

  “Not a bad idea. Do you have any idea what you’d ask them?”

  “…No.” Ellen scowled down at the table, a sense of uselessness and hopelessness swamping her. “Danny always did that.”

  “You’re still in mentorship, Ellen.” Bonnie’s voice went from mocking to gentle. “You’re not expected to be able to take lead yet. So let my contacts do some of the work for us, while we—” She stopped, tilted her head and stared at Ellen. “You’ve got a tic. Did you have dinner? How’s your core?”

  “Yes, and not good,” Ellen had to admit, her hand coming up to cover the twitch that had just started in her cheek. “Wren had me doing some trial runs yesterday, and I—”

  Ellen stopped talking when she caught Bonnie’s sideways look, and made a face. “I know, I know. I’m supposed to draw down every night, just in case, but the blackout hit, and….”

  “If you actually need wiring to pull down, I’m going to be deeply disappointed in your training,” Bonnie said. “Come on. I could use a refill, too, before we do anything more. I think there’s a coat in the closet that’ll fit you, do you need a hat?”

  Twenty minutes later, draped in what Ellen suspected was Venec’s old leather jacket, since the shoulders were only a little loose around hers, they were standing on the northwestern edge of Central Park. Here, the lack of lights was eerie but not unnerving, the late night silence about normal. Neither of them wore watches, so Ellen had no way of telling what time it was, but the feel of the air suggested more time had gone by then she’d thought.

  She waited for panic to flood her, the urgency to find Danny push against her ribcage again, but instead she just felt empty—and itchy, now that she let herself feel it, deep in her core. Not wanting to admit that Bonnie had been right, she tilted her head back and studied the spray of stars overhead. “Wow.”

  “Yeah, that’s right, you’re a city girl. We need to get you up north some time, watch a meteor shower. It’s seriously awesome. But come on, get your ground on.”

  Bonnie had brought her to Central Park specifically for a reason, and that reason told Ellen that her mentor and the PUP had been exchanging notes about her training. Drawing down from a man-made source was a simple thing, once you understood what you were doing. Current than ran alongside man-made electricity was already thinned, tamed. Pulling current from an electrical storm— Wren Valere did that without hesitation, the wildness in the clouds suiting something in her. But Ellen’s main skillset came from wild current, storm-current, and every time she reached out into the heart of a storm, a part of her braced against a possible vision, closing herself off instinctively. She might have a natural connection to storm-current, but that didn’t mean she liked it, or wanted to encourage it.

  But ley lines, the deep reserves of natural current that crisscrossed the planet? Ley lines soothed her. They were steady, consistent. Safe. She could let herself drop into the stone, deep into the earth, and bathe herself in the ancient current that circled and circled and never felt the need to get anywhere in particular, letting just enough slide into her bones, deep into her core, a painless drip until she was full.

  And Central Park was home to one of those lines, not particularly powerful after all this time surrounded by Talent, but old and deep. Rumor had it, it had been what first attracted Madame to this place, back when it was all covered by woods, and no white had set foot on the beach yet, not even lost Vikings.

  Ellen reached out a tendril of her own current, pale blue in the darkness, and let it drift toward the key line, drawn by the greater strength there. There was a faint shudder, a soft click, and the earth-current recognized her, allowed her tendril to pass, join.

  Normally she would enjoy the sensation, like a cat enjoying a long stretch in a sunbeam. But if it was as late as Ellen now suspected, there was no time to take her time, no time to luxuriate. The clock had started ticking the moment she had the vision, and if she was going to be working without Danny, working at the level Bonnie operated at, she needed current, and she needed it quickly.

  Sorry, she told the ley line, as though it had feelings that might be hurt by her abruptness. Sorry and she yanked what she needed out of it, neon gravel sliding in her bones, scraping her raw before it was churned and smoothed and fitted into the swirl of current curled around her core.

  Core didn’t exist, not really, not in a physical sense that a doctor could find, she’d been told, but it was how they were taught to visualize it, and she could feel it, a furnace of current wrapped around her spine and belly, sparking and soothing all at once.

  Distantly, as she rose back to the surface, she could feel others tapping that same vein, deep and low, all across the city, spreading out into the suburbs, fading with distance. But they were slow compared to her, the skim of hummingbirds to her mosquito drinking deep.

  Her eyes opened, only then realizing that she’d closed them, and her fingers slowly unclenched. From off to the side came Bonnie’s voice, still that low, calm, soothing tone.

  “You good?”

  “Yeah.” She looked at Bonnie, and for an instant could see the sharp neon haze that surrounded her, limning her auburn curls in a brighter purple, then it was gone.

  “So.” Ellen breathed deeply, feeling her core snap and fizz in satisfaction, tamed current pushing against her, making her feel almost impossibly awake and alert. “Now what?”

  Bonnie hummed, staring up at the sky as though getting an answer from there. Whatever it was, though, it didn’t seem to satisfy her. “Lacking any other leads? Now, we go find your wayward boss.”

  oOo

  I couldn’t see.

  That was my first thought, that I couldn’t see, and for a heart-stopping second I was convinced that my eyes were gone, that I’d been blinded, because when you know that your eyes will adjust to even the faintest glimmer of starlight, pitch black isn’t a concept you can understand.

  But that’s what I was in: pitch, immutable, darkness.

  My second thought was that everything hurt. Not dying-pain, just aching sore hurt, like someone had taken a baseball bat to every inch of my skin. But not dying, that was good. Not dead was even better. Deal with one thing at a time, Hendrickson. Can’t see, so what can you do?

  My breathing was too fast, too harsh, and that was the first thing I dealt with. Calm it down, listen for other noises. Was I alone? Was I locked in a box, and if so, where was the air coming from?

  No, abort that thought, don’t think about there not being any air, don’t think about….

  Crap.

  I forced myself to take a deep breath through my mouth, then exhale, then again until my brain stopped acting like a coked-up hamster. Then I took another breath, this time through my nose, nostrils flaring. Air. Not fresh, not pleasant, but there was a definite flow of air coming from somewhere, circulating through the space I was in. And it wasn’t a small space, either, certainly not coffin—sized, which had been my first panic. I probably needed to stop watching horror movies.

  Get a fucking grip, Hendrickson.

  So I couldn’t see worth a damn, but there was enough air to breathe, at least for the moment. And, I discovered the moment I tried to move, my arms and legs were tied to something behind my back. Not a pole, I determined, and not shackles. A frame, I decided. Wood, from the feel of it under my palms, and old wood at that, worn down by….

  Well, probably by lots of people tied to it over the years, might as well be a pessimist. The other option was that someone had made their people-frame into a sanded and polished work of art, and honestly, that was even more disturbing.

  So. Last I had a script, I was in a stranger’s office in my own building, during a city—wide blackout, tracking an unknown but probably fatae-related glow, and had found an unknown but very dead body, probably but not confirmed human. And now I was in an unknown location, tied
up, probably beat-up, based on the aches, and unable to see for jack shit, all the above likely courtesy of someone who did not have my continued happiness and well-being at heart.

  This was why only idiots investigate without backup.

  Gun. My gun. Was it…?

  I couldn’t check my pockets, but there was no comforting weight there. So either my captors had taken it, or I’d dropped it when they dropped me. But I was pretty sure my pocket knife was still there.

  Not that I could reach it. Ditto my phone, if it was even still in my pocket. And if there was any signal wherever the hell I was. No idea where I was, or when it was, or how to get loose.

  All right, I knew what I didn’t know. What did I know? Put that allegedly trained professional brain to use, Hendrickson.

  I closed my eyes, so I wouldn’t be straining to see something where I couldn’t, and concentrated.

  Air, stale but circulating, check. What did it taste like? Cold. Cold but not wet, not briny… metallic? A little. Rotting wood? A little. Decaying flesh? Thankfully, no, and it was a sad fact of my life that I knew firsthand what that smelled like.

  Tunnels. Underground, probably deep underground for this kind of silence, although when the subways started up again I might be able to hear the vibrations. Tunnels where no light could reach, but obviously someone had access.

  How long had I been out? No way to tell. Was anyone around? Only one way to find out.

  “Hooooooo” I called out, just barely under my breath, and listened to the echoes. Tall ceiling, and a long space in front of me, less so at my back. I was in a cul-de-sac of some sort. And the walls were stone, not wood or metal.

  That last bit was less the echoes than my own gut instinct, but I felt pretty confident on that call.

  Yesterday I would have sworn that I knew the tunnels under the city as well as any human, but this was new. So: deep, dark tunnels of unknown source, and a boglight glow that appeared and disappeared, and a dead human, who seemed to have died of natural if embarrassing causes but I hadn’t had a chance to check the scene to say for sure. And someone or something possibly but not certainly related to the boglight, that cold-cocked me and left me tied up here. Had I gotten everything?