Authors: Laura Anne Gilman
She forgot, sometimes, that Manhattan was an island, that Long Island was an island, that they were all just a bunch of little islands connected by bridges and tunnels and cable wires. Wire and tunnels. Blood and bone. Blood and stone. A living city.
Either you’re getting deep, or you’re getting stupid,
she told herself, and went inside.
The gallery was empty. Literally: all the artwork from the previous installation had either gone on to new homes or back to the artist, and the new show hadn’t been brought in yet, so there were empty pedestals and cardboard boxes throughout the space, and a sense of echoing emptiness, otherwise. No customers, browsing or otherwise. The second-level catwalk still had a display of watercolors by a group of artists from New Mexico that Wren rather liked, but nobody was up there right now. She kept meaning to talk to Sergei about buying one of the smaller paintings but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. She needed him to be with her when she chose, not because she didn’t trust her taste, but
because she was afraid to go up the narrow steps in case she accidentally came down with all of them in her bag.
She didn’t just Retrieve; she
was
a Retriever. It went beyond training and into bone-deep instinct. When she was a teenager, she sometimes came home with things she honestly had no memory of taking. That hadn’t happened in years, but she remembered how mortifying the realization could be—especially after Neezer and her mom made her return a few of the items they knew about.
No, better not to even go up there, at least not alone.
Lowell was leaning against the dark wood of the front desk, perfect as always in dark blue trousers and a paler blue shirt that set off his frat boy blondness. He looked as though he was surgically attached to the phone headset, arguing with someone about a delivery date. He looked up when she came in, prepared to deal with a would-be customer, but then just waved her toward the back office. No sneer, no scornful up-and-down dismissal that he usually gave, even when Sergei was standing there. The walk across town had mellowed her enough that she merely nodded in acknowledgement and went past him without comment of her own. Between this, and not snarking at each other earlier…maybe they were both finally growing up?
Perish the thought, she decided. It was just a temporary truce while they were both busy. She’d get back to him later.
“Morrie came through, as expected,” Wren announced as she went through the door and saw that Sergei was alone, and not on the phone or otherwise occupied with uninterruptible things. The door closed
behind her before she continued. “Our friends are from the right area, anyway. One is a naturalized American, born in Canada of Dutch parents. The other’s a German national, travels a lot on business, is frequently in Amsterdam for gatherings he refers to as family reunions.”
“Actual family members?” He was sitting on the edge of the desk and shuffling papers as he spoke, sorting them into two piles. One went back into his inbox, a hideous burlwood thing with carved gargoyle legs he had picked up somewhere, and the other pile was tossed onto the desk behind him.
“If so, it’s a rather extended family. And it includes our Canadian-born friend. The last meeting was over six months ago. Yes, I know that’s over our time frame. But—” when Sergei looked up, Wren held up a finger to forestall anything he might say “—just last week our Canadian-born friend, Rogier, got a phone call from one of those members. The very next day he was traveling down here. The woman who called him, a—” and she had to check her notes for this one “—a Sophia Roos, had met the day before with two other members of this ‘family’—” and she used air quotes when she said the word, in case he missed her irony “—in Amsterdam.”
“It’s not enough to convict, but it would be enough for a warrant,” Sergei said, putting the remaining papers away, and Wren thought that yes, he had been spending too much time with Danny the ex-cop, to think that way. The
Cosa
didn’t have warrants. All right, the
Cosa
didn’t have much by way of law enforcement, period; that was why the PUPIs were so useful, and so controversial.
She stuck to the business at hand. “Morrie also informed me that they have informed the hotel that
their stay will be ending this week. Checking out in three days, specifically.”
Sergei looked distinctly unhappy to hear that. “So whatever they came here to do, they’ve either run out of time…”
“Or they’re confident that they’ve accomplished it, despite the thief having failed to actually get hold of the papers,” she said, having already gone through the possibilities on her way home. “These guys came here with a plan, Sergei. They’re not about to just crawl home with their tails between their legs.” Not if these people were who P.B. suspected they were—offspring of the original creator, or some variant of heirs thereof. Talent bordered on arrogant even in the best-case scenarios. Talent, or near-Talent, who had actual crazy mad scientists in their family trees? Going to be arrogant like nobody’s business.
“They haven’t gotten their hands on the papers yet. And won’t, not for at least a day or two, no matter how good their plans might be.” Sergei sounded certain, which was reassuring. He’d been working, and thinking, while she was gone, clearly. “We still have the advantage. They’re not local, and they seem to be working without much of an infrastructure in place in this city. It’s tough to move fast when you have to do everything yourself.”
Wren nodded, feeling the twitch come back into her core.
Soon,
she told it. “They’ll want to keep it to themselves, too. I don’t know how many of them are viable Talent themselves, but we’ll have to assume at least a percentage, if they’re true heirs of the original mages. Lonejacks could get away with roaming, but
if they’re European Council, they have to keep it on the quiet, otherwise not going through channels will earn them a load of hurt.” Lonejacks could and did move around freely, and poaching was considered tacky, but not offensive. Council had rules and regs in exchange for membership benefits, and working in another Council’s territory without permission…well, the punishment was a bit harsher than a slap on the wrist. And if they’d gotten permission, one of their contacts would have heard about it by now, and let them know.
“If this were Null-world,” Sergei said thoughtfully, “I’d say they were neither. A small, obsessive group, bonded by an almost cultlike focus on something? They wouldn’t fit with either lonejack or Council culture.”
That thought stopped Wren cold for an instant. She tried to imagine being outside both of the two circles that made up human
Cosa Nostradamus
culture, and failed utterly. That didn’t mean Sergei was wrong, though. In fact, he was probably right, and it explained a hell of a lot.
It didn’t change anything, though.
“Their first—or first we know of, anyway—theft attempt failed, the objects were taken back by the museum, and our bad boys killed the thief, or had him killed. They also seem confident that they will have the objects in their possession soon. That means they either had someone as backup, which would be expensive and unlikely, or they have to hire someone new, fast. If the latter, and word gets out that’s how they treat the hired help…” He paused, thinking hard, doubtless of how best to spread that word. Bad news might not make
every decent thief shy away from the job, but it would jack the price way up.
“I don’t suppose there’s any way that you could get them to hire me?” It was a long shot, but man, it would make her life easier….
He looked at her, as if he was sizing her up as a stranger. “If they’re desperate enough to trust a Talent outside of their group, risking discovery of what’s at stake, maybe. If we had a little more time and you were a little less known, probably. Or a high probability, anyway. You want to risk it?”
If it were just her, she’d say yes—the fastest and most satisfying way to get a Retrieval done was to steal it by using someone else’s heist, everyone knew that. Plus: getting paid by these bastards, even only the upfront half of the fee,
really
appealed to her. But what Sergei was really asking was if she wanted to bring these people even that half step closer to P.B. And the answer was an unequivocal no.
P.B. He hadn’t been in touch, not by ping or phone, not since she saw him at the gym. And she didn’t dare stop by his place or initiate a ping, not now that they knew for certain—near-certain, anyway—that these people were connected with his past. For now, P.B. was safe. Relatively speaking, anyway. After learning about his shadow, she’d asked Danny and a few of his friends to keep an eye on him—she didn’t dare ask another Talent; right now, he needed to be associated only with Fatae, not Talent. If these lunatics discovered that P.B. had formed a connection, that he was one of the viable ones…
She refused to even contemplate the thought.
So they had to get to Herr Doktor’s legacy before the
others did, on their own, and leave no trace behind. Make it disappear, and hope that these modern-day Frankensteins didn’t have a taste for reverse-engineering from an unwilling demon subject.
Thou shalt not kill.
She didn’t want to. Not ever again. But she could. She
would,
to protect the people she loved. That knowledge left a bitter, metallic taste in her mouth.
Thankfully, they had—she hoped—a bit of information the others lacked, that would keep things from getting that far.
“How did your hunt go?” she asked her partner, crossing her fingers in anticipation.
In response, he reached down to the other side of his desk, and handed her a sheet of letterhead, with the museum’s masthead at the top.
She took it, and skimmed the terse, typewritten note.
Dear Dr. Allenby,
Thank you for your inquiry, and your offer of assistance. I am sorry to hear that your museum was also targeted by these thieves, and hope that it is not the beginning of another wave of antiquity black marketing. However, I am pleased to inform you that nothing was taken, and the thief in this case was caught. We have moved the items in question to another secure position, and will begin examining them soon to determine why they were targeted specifically. It may be that there is value here we had not previously been aware of. As soon as we have answers, I will, of course,
pass our findings along, so that you may protect and enhance your displays as well.
Sincerely,
Wren shook her head not in denial but admiration. “You are amazing, incredible, astonishing, and a master of the shmooze. Do I want to know whose ass you had to kiss to get this, and if there really is an Allenby, doctor or otherwise?”
He just buffed his nails, and looked smug. And to think that some people thought that
she
was the sneaky one!
“It’s all about ego,” he said. “They don’t want to admit that they almost got robbed, but
almost
isn’t the same as actually having anything taken, and discovering something of potential value, especially if they didn’t pay a lot for it, and it turns out to be one of a kind—they won’t be able to not brag on it.”
“You think that they know the thief’s dead?” She would have said dead and gone, once, except she knew better now. Dead almost always meant gone, but not
always
always. The thought made her move her fingers slightly, as though to ward away the possibility. The last damn thing they needed right now was another pissed-off spirit trying for revenge. Although now that she knew how to redirect them where she wanted…
The idea was evil enough to consider, then she put it away as complicating things needlessly.
“They probably don’t care.” Sergei stopped buffing and got up, only to sit down behind his desk, shoving the chair back slightly to stretch his legs in front of him and rest his elbows on the chair’s arms, lacing his fingers across his stomach. “Ego, remember. When dealing
with obsessive people, always play to the ego. Their only area of concern is what concerns them, which is good for us. So we know they’re holding on to the papers, and bringing them front and center rather than hiding them in a deeper hole. That means they’re going to be in the museum proper, not some off-site holding facility.” He looked up at her, a question in his expression. “Does that make it easier for you, or harder?”
Wren shrugged, taking her usual position on the sofa now that they were settling in for the long-haul discussions. “Depends. Won’t know until I try for ’em. I’m more worried about what our European friends may or may not be planning.” She looked at Sergei, and for the first time in her life, without any conscious effort, raised a single eyebrow at him. “Morrie can only do so much, in the time we gave him. I need to know what’s going to happen, not just what already has.”
“Right,” he said without missing a beat, reaching for the phone. “I’ll call Agent Chang.”
Agent Chang wasn’t in the office, so Sergei left a message, carefully not specifying what he was calling about while giving enough information that he didn’t sound like a crackpot who should be investigated.
“She gave us the office number, not her cell phone,” he said, hanging up the phone. “Strange.”
“Maybe she doesn’t have a cell phone.”
Sergei looked at his partner as though she had taken off her arm and handed it to him. “Everyone has a cell phone.”
“I don’t.”
“You would if you could.”
There wasn’t much she could say in response to that, since it was true. Cell phones were far more sensitive to current than landlines, although both tended to go to static and die if used too long. “Maybe she keeps that for personal stuff?”
“I can’t imagine field agents not having a cell. I wonder if she was worried about the line being compromised.”
“So a line into a government office would be safer than a cell phone?” Wren sounded surprised, and Sergei grinned tightly, his eyes unamused.
“Landlines are always safer. Landlines that go right under Big Brother’s nose are safest of all, because who’s more paranoid than the paranoid in power?”
Wren tugged at her hair and blinked. “Oh.”
“Go back to work, Wren. Let me worry about the tech, or you’re going to start frying my entire damn office from just thinking about it.”
She grinned at that, and did as he suggested.
Around five-thirty that afternoon, Lowell buzzed the inner office, asking if they wanted him to order in dinner, since he was starving. The sound of the buzzer broke Sergei out of his focused concentration, and he looked up across the office. His partner had been so quiet, he half suspected that she had fallen asleep. Instead, she was nose-deep in a small dark green notebook—reading, not writing in it.
“You hungry?” he asked softly.
“What?” Her head came up, and he realized that she had been so intent, she hadn’t even heard the buzzer, or Lowell’s voice.
“It’s almost dinnertime. You hungry?”
He saw her expression change as she took an internal inventory. Talent burned calories at an insane rate, even when they weren’t technically working; he would be very surprised if she didn’t need to fuel the engine. He had never understood how she could be so unconcerned with food, when she needed so much of it. Or maybe it
was just having food in the kitchen, as though if she had anything in the fridge, she might have to cook it…
“Yeah,” she said finally, breaking into his musings on the eating habits of captive Talent. “Is the gallery too successful these days to allow Reggie’s through the door?”
He winced, and she saw it. “All right, we can order from somewhere else.”
Reggie’s was a local pizza place, best known for being cheap, fast, and insanely heavy on the grease. He never understood why Wren loved it so much.
“No, it’s okay.” The last thing he wanted to do was stop her from eating when she needed it. “How about Raina’s?” he offered as a compromise. If she wanted pizza, he was on board with that, but preferably without the heartburn. He wasn’t as young as he used to be, and neither was his digestion. Neither was hers, for that matter, but it didn’t seem to bother her. Too much time spent with P.B., probably.
“I can live with that,” she agreed, fast enough that he got the feeling that he had just been hustled. “Mushroom and green pepper, please, with a Diet Sprite and a side of fried mozzarella.”
She really, really, should weigh two hundred pounds. Sergei felt a sudden kinship with all the women he had known over the years who complained about the male metabolism and dieting.
“You want garlic bread, too?” He was being ironic, but she didn’t seem to notice, already back in the notebook, wiggling her fingers in a way that he took to mean “yes, please.” He gave the order to Lowell, plus his own request for a green side salad and a Coke, and went back to the floor plans he had been studying. If
P.B. wasn’t going to be paying for this job, as seemed likely, the gallery had better pick up the bill-paying slack, which meant this new installation had to go flawlessly. So far, Lowell had been managing everything exactly as he, Sergei, would have. Unsurprising, since he trained the younger man, but reassuring nonetheless. He had trained people to shoot, to lie to officials, and to kill in the name of justice, but running a gallery was another level of complexity entirely.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, seemingly out of the blue.
“About what?” He looked back at her, but her gaze was still focused on the pages of the notebook.
“Moving.”
Fair enough. He saw the quicksand under his feet, and moved carefully. “And where are those thoughts taking you?”
“Mostly around in circles,” she admitted ruefully, closing the notebook over one finger and looking at him. “The condo conversion…it’s sort of scary. Okay, it’s very scary. Owning my own place? I’m not sure I’m ready for that.” A strange expression passed over her face, barely a flicker and it was gone. “I don’t want to leave my apartment…and then three seconds later I want to get out of the city, period.”
“That’s normal,” he said, relaxing a little. They weren’t back to That Discussion just yet. “You’re being presented, not-quite-unexpectedly, with a decision, and that’s opened up a whole round of choices you weren’t letting in before.”
“Sergei.” Her mouth twisted as if she’d sucked on a lemon. “Don’t psychoanalyze me. I took psych 101, at
your instigation I might add, and I’ve read the self-help books.” He was willing to bet that she had stolen them from the bookstore, actually, but figured that qualified as self-help, too, her helping herself to books. “I know
why
I’m doing it. I just don’t know what to
do
about it.”
“At the risk of sounding like an analyst, what do you
want
to do about it?”
She started to say one thing, then the words jumbled in her mouth, and all that came out was silence. She looked surprised. He wasn’t.
“In a perfect world, we’d have options,” he said, trying really hard not to sound like a patronizing bastard, aware that he was probably failing. He had been spending too much time in Doherty’s office getting his own head shrunk. “We don’t, always. Have options, that is. There’s not enough money to do everything, not enough time. And unless you’ve decided that you do want to go into counterfeiting, or someone’s finally figured out a way to use current to rig the lottery—” it had been tried, more than once, and always failed “—then we still have to work. So. You need a place to live, and you need to have somewhere you can work. I can’t see you being happy living out in the country—” and he had to laugh when she made a quick sign to avert such a fate “—and cities are expensive no matter where you go….”
“Might as well stay here, where all of our contacts are?” Her voice wasn’t bitter, but resigned, and that hurt almost as much to hear.
“I didn’t say that. And we have contacts other places. We just haven’t been using them much.”
True. Wren chewed on that thought for a while. She had friends out in California, and in the Midwest, and
hell, she even had contacts Down Under, although she wasn’t sure that she knew her IM buddy OhSoBloody-Talented well enough to presume on that friendship. And hell, Sergei probably knew people in every city with a population of over 50,000.
But the thought of leaving Manhattan was like a tug in her gut, and not the pleasant, anticipatory kind. She’d grown up across the river, thinking Manhattan was the center of the universe. She’d never been the sort to get hit with wanderlust, had never had the desire to see what was over the next hill just because the hill hid the view. So why now?
Because you’re running. Or thinking about running. You can’t shove things into little boxes anymore, and your thinking space is getting too crowded, with everything out in the open.
She hadn’t been lying when she said she had taken psych 101. She could self-analyze like a pro. She just never enjoyed the results. Or the process, for that matter. God, she hoped Sergei wasn’t turning into a therapy junkie.
“I’m not moving in with you,” she said, and was almost insulted at how relieved he looked.
The phone on his desk made a soft beeping noise before he could respond; not the office line, then. She leaned forward as he picked it up on the second ring. “Didier.”
He listened to the response, then nodded once at her, indicating that it was nothing she had to worry about but that he had to deal with it now. She relaxed back into the sofa, picking up her notebook again. It had been sitting on her desk ever since she found it, buried under the mail she tossed there but never quite hidden,
the green like a flash in the corner of her eye every time she went into the office, until finally, in annoyed desperation, she threw it into her bag, meaning to skim through it when she was stuck on a bus or something.
Once she opened the first page, she was trapped.
I saw her again yesterday. Tiny thing, and if you aren’t paying attention you’ll miss her entirely. I haven’t yet determined if she is doing that intentionally, or if it’s a natural defense mechanism. Either way, I need to find a way to approach her. She can’t be left to drift, alone. Too much could go wrong, and so badly.
Neat, precise handwriting, familiar to her from a year of tests and homework assignments with comments printed on the back. He had handwriting like a woman’s, each curl and line carefully placed. He did what he said and he meant what he wrote, and his handwriting showed the planning behind it all.
John Ebeneezer had been a planner. He did nothing without thinking it through, seeing all the possible outcomes and pitfalls, collecting data and details.
The notebook was like a gift, the past and present colluding to present it to her, years after she had gotten it and, sick with pain and loss, shoved it into a box, but it was a gift that she wasn’t sure she wanted. Reading about yourself, seeing yourself observed and judged…. How much of that could a person take? How much was healthy, and where did it become masochism?
How much history could you ingest, even your own?
Still, she kept turning pages, and his voice came back to her, line after line.
I think she’s using current to shoplift. That will have to stop, now.
The date on that page—two days before he had intercepted her in the Five and Dime. Two days before he had interrupted and changed her life completely, forever.
His voice, fading for so long, had come back to her, in full force. Damn that job, for putting her on an unexpected collision course with her past, all in one loosely wrapped package.
There were no coincidences. Didn’t mean the Universe didn’t have a nasty sense of humor.
Wren put down the notebook, using one of Sergei’s business cards to mark her place. Suddenly, she didn’t feel like reading any more.
The blueprints neatly folded on the floor next to the sofa were the obvious next step. She should already have memorized them, really. It wasn’t any different from any other job…except it was. And she couldn’t pin down why.
They had done jobs for other friends before. Most of them had turned out fine. Almost all, in fact. She went in, Retrieved, made client happy. The competition factor, of someone else trying for the same prize? Pffft. Yeah, she was worried about getting there first, but she also had the home ground advantage. Plus, Talent. Unlike Null thieves, she had that in her tool kit. If her competition tried to hire another Talent to do it? Unlikely, but if they did, unlike most other Retrievers she had met or read about, she had a full complement of traditional
skills—lock-picking, gymnastics training—to round out her more esoteric skill sets. Best of both worlds made her the best in both, that was her theory.
So what was her trauma?
The stakes, came the answer, gut-deep and undeniable. This wasn’t for money, or ego, or even reputation. It wasn’t to save the world, or even to save a city. All those things were real and valid, but they were either petty enough to be tucked inside, or huge enough that you couldn’t think about them.
This was for a friend. For a friend’s life. For his freedom.
For P.B.’s freedom.
Wren reached over and picked up the prints, feeling their weight in her palm.
No time like right now to get things done.
Sitting upright and cross-legged on the sofa, she opened the plans and got to work memorizing the pertinent, the potentially pertinent, and the probably-never-pertinent-but-can’t-hurt details.
This time, the sound of the buzzer did break her concentration, and only then did she realize that the smell of something hot, greasy, and good was drifting into the office.
“Our dinner’s here,” Sergei said, somewhat unnecessarily. She folded the blueprints back into their square, and uncurled herself from the sofa, feeling the stiffness in her hips and knees. She wasn’t twenty-five anymore, that was for sure.
They left the quiet cocoon of the office, and joined Lowell, who had spread the pizza boxes and sodas on the counter, and was already opening up a container of what looked like fried squid. Wren bit her tongue and didn’t say anything as she reached for her own eight-
inch pizza. Lowell cast his own disparaging glance at her food, but was likewise restrained.
Sergei looked from one to the other as though suspecting a trick, but was wise enough to just enjoy the truce for as long as it lasted.
Wren passed him a slice of garlic bread and then, almost as an afterthought, slid the container across the counter to Lowell, too.
Burp.
The sound echoed throughout the office, followed by the faint aroma of cheese and anchovies. Both individuals looked surprised, as though it had appeared out of thin air, and not the depths of Wren’s stomach, as though the meal of an hour before had been two days earlier, instead.
“Thank you, P.B.,” Sergei said, going back to his paperwork.
Wren chuckled, not at all abashed by her bodily functions. “Nah, his have more—what’s the word? Resonance. His tummy’s a little echo chamber or something.”
“Nice. Thank you for sharing.”