Pack of Lies (26 page)

“Huh.”

We all looked at Nick.

“What?” Sharon asked.

“Nothing. No. I don't know.” I could practically see his own pieces slotting together behind his eyes, and wondered if he had something I was missing. “Gimme a minute.” He got up and left the room before anyone could ask him another question, like he was afraid one more word would ruin whatever he was building.

“Right.” Sharon took point. “Recap.” She stared at the chalkboard wall, where the colored lines mocked us, refusing to explain themselves at all. “All the physical evidence is inconclusive or unavailable, the eyewitness reports contradict, and we're running out of time before somebody does something stupid, according to Ben.”

That sounded, depressingly, about right.

“Nifty, you're thinking everyone's got something to hide?” Sharon asked.

“Professional cynic, that's me. Yeah. I've never met anyone who wasn't hedging their bets, somehow. But you're pretty sure the people you talked to aren't lying?”

“Ninety percent sure. Maybe even ninety-five.” She hummed a little in frustration, trying to explain it to us. “There's a feeling people have around them when they're telling the truth, this rock-steady grounding, but it's rare. Damned rare. Most people, if they were even slightly unsure of their truth, waver a little. Human self-doubt.”

“So you think this certainty's unnatural?” Venec asked.

“I interviewed a pure-P psychotic once as part of a deposition, and he had that same grounding no matter what crap he was spouting. It's usually a warning sign.”

“You could have made a fortune as a professional witness evaluator,” I said in awe.

“I don't make money off my skills,” Sharon said, all Miss Prim again suddenly, and then realized what she'd said, and laughed. “You know what I mean. Not that way. That would have been…unethical.”

Straight shooter: that was our Sharon.

Nick came back in, carrying a case about the size of a notebook, and put it on the table at the far end from the rest of us.

“Are you sure that's smart?” Venec asked him, worried.

“Yeah, I'll be fine. We rigged this one special. The battery's warded seven ways from Sunday, and up and down, too.”

“Holy shit, that's a computer?” I was distracted by the shiny, I admit it. Laptops fascinated me. Desktops you could ground and protect easier, but every Talent I'd heard of who used a laptop singed it within a week. Knowing I couldn't use one without killing it the first time I forgot and pulled current nearby didn't keep me from wanting one, though. It was so cute!

“Jesus, man,” Nifty said. “I have paperbacks larger than that thing.”

“Talent are always way behind the tech curve,” Nick said, flipping the lid up and waiting for it to power up. “They're called netbooks, people. Cheaper, lower powered, fewer bits and pieces to get whacked by current, but just as useful as a larger machine. They're pretty damn durable, but try not to have a spike for the next half hour, okay, everyone?”

I could see why Venec was worried: mixing current and tech was, well, risky, even for someone like Nick. But if he wanted to work in here, with the risks… I guess I wouldn't have wanted to miss the brainstorming, either.

“All right, back to work,” Venec said, herding us into a tighter group at the near end of the table. “Ignore Boy Wonder over there and focus on the problem. I think we're on the right track, what Sharon and Bonnie were saying. There was a lot of powerful belief on the site, enough to influence the bystanders. What depends on being believed to be true? Religion and politics…I think we can rule those out. Love seems to be an impasse right now. So we're back to money?”

“How? Seriously—unless you're going to claim that someone took out a sexual hit on Mercy, or hired Mercy to entrap
those guys…” My voice trailed off. I couldn't imagine reasons to support either scenario, and from the expressions on the rest of the pack, neither could they.

“I still think hate's a pretty good reason. I mean, the two guys knew each other, maybe…” Nifty's voice trailed off the same way mine had. “But they didn't know each other more than a few weeks, and the survivor was, by all his friends' accounts, fascinated with his new badboy buddy.”

“What if the wildest theory's right,” I said, slowly. “What if it was all part of the antifatae group, I mean, from the start? And they jumped her for associating with a ki-rin, the way white girls used to get attacked for dating black guys?”

“They did?” Pietr looked bewildered.

Nifty nodded, although I wasn't sure if he was responding to my comment, or the question. “Yeah. Yeah, maybe. That could work. Damn. I hope not, because there won't be a chance of keeping a lid on this, then.”

I had the passing thought that we could bury it, but no, Nifty was right. That wasn't what we did, and anyway, once you dug something up, it tended to stay up.

Sharon picked up the thread. “Bonnie, do you think that could account for the blackness you felt? Hatred? Something so nasty it can't be burned clear even by current?”

I thought about it, trying to remember the icky, sticky feel of what I'd sensed.

“No. Hatred's clearer than that, not sticky and…greasy. Grimy.”

“Madness,” Venec said, maybe catching one of the tendrils of my memories, because he shuddered a little, so slightly I was probably the only one to notice. “You felt madness.”

“Yeah.” The bits clicked into place once I had the word to identify them. “Yeah. Rage and fear and scared and funny, all at the same time. Ugh.” I was the one to shudder then, and Venec's hand reached out to touch mine, almost like he wasn't aware of what he was doing. Flesh-to-flesh, and the shudder left me. Just like that: I was grounded and steady again.

His hand pulled back like I'd burned him, and my skin felt cold where he'd touched, and I wanted him to cover me again. Bad. Very bad. We really needed to do something about that. But not right now, not here. I curled my hands in my lap and tried not to look at him.

“Crazy-mad. Rabid-dog crazy. That would tie in to it being part of the antifatae crowd, right?”

“But the trace was on the sites after the fact,” Nifty pointed out. “We didn't feel it immediately after, when we were at the site. Did you?”

The gleaning was starting to go fuzzy around the edges in my head, thankfully, but that much I knew without having to consider it. “No. We didn't pick up any current on the scene.” I stopped, and considered that. “Think about it, guys. We couldn't find any current from any of them. Not enough to carry emotion, not anything.”

“We didn't test…” Pietr looked sideways at Venec, our screwup out of the bag.

“We shouldn't have
had
to. Three Talent, a violent confrontation, and no current residue even a few hours later? Not from them and not from her—it was a purely physical defense. Any current they used, it was weak as hell—or it was wrapped tight around their core.” The way it would
be if, for example, they had a spell cast over them: to make them believe something.

Stosser had cast a similar spell to make us believe that Venec was dead, during our job interview. We'd felt the magic around
him,
not on the scene.

“Maybe Mercy learned, after the attack? She wasn't very good at it, clumsy as hell,” Sharon said, playing devil's advocate. “But yeah—it would be instinctive to
try
. Unless she was so used to the ki-rin protecting her all the time…”

“Maybe.” That had the depressing ring of truth to it. “And she was tiny, they wouldn't have felt the need to use current to subdue Mercy, especially once she was down on the ground. But it's still odd that the guys wouldn't use any to protect themselves, once the ki-rin showed up.”

I'd barely gotten the last word out of my mouth when the table suddenly jumped straight up into the air, almost knocking us in the face. Five blasts of current hit the table, shoving it back down again and locking it into place even as hands slammed down to control it, physically.

“Damn it!” Nick said, more annoyed at the current-spike than the table actually moving, and a burst of chatter came from the rest of my coworkers as they tried to figure out what the hell had just happened, but I knew.

“That doesn't prove anything,” I said to Ben. “You've trained us to react, to defend ourselves. She didn't have that advantage. Not sure the perps would, either.” Like I'd said earlier, not everyone got trained by the Big Dogs.

Venec nodded an apology at Nick, then turned back to me. “You would have reacted differently, before?”

“I wouldn't have thought to lock it down,” Pietr said. “But I would have shoved, instinctively.”

“Yeah, me, too,” I admitted, and Nifty nodded. Only Sharon didn't chime in, but sat there with an odd look on her face. Nick, at the other end of the table, had already gone back to working over the netbook. There were strange spirals of current circling around it, and I was suddenly very glad I couldn't actually see the screen. The one time I'd helped Nick with his tech-magic, even in a very secondary role, it had given me a serious headache.

“I wouldn't have done anything,” Sharon said finally, in response to Venec's question. “Or, I might have, but I would have tried to pull it back in, immediately. My mentor was part of the Reasonable Limits school, and I guess I absorbed a lot of that. I tried to pass. As a Null, I mean.”

“The what school?” Nifty asked, before I could.

“Reasonable Limits. It's…what it sounds like, I guess. That current isn't something to use instinctively, but only after deliberate thought and only if nothing else is appropriate to the task. It grew out of the Old Magic, during the burning years, when even the hint of magic could get you killed, and merged with emerging environmentalist philosophies in the 1900s, and…” Her voice trailed off, trying to explain it to us.

“That's insane.” Nifty sounded horrified. “Not using current isn't the answer to people being scared of us.”

“Different ways of approaching the problem,” Venec said calmly, cutting off what might have become another argument. “The fear was real, generations of it, and I know you
all have enough education to know how quickly suspicion can turn to fear can turn to violence.

“But I think we can agree that even if the girl had Sharon's kind of training during mentorship, some sort of instinctive current-use would have been a normal reaction to violent physical threat, if there were any. And we sure as hell would have found trace of a violent emotion in the original site, especially if she then pulled it back into herself, rather than letting it disperse naturally. I'm assuming that someone checked on that, at least?”

Bastard. “Someone” meaning me, since I was the gleaner of record. “Yeah, I did. I didn't find anything that could be identified as from Mercy, who had the most reason to feel emotion. Never met the dead guy, or the other perp, so had no basis. But everything was pretty much overlaid by the black goop by then. I'm not good enough to strip that away without destroying the scene. Maybe you or Ian?”

Back in your lap,
boss,
I thought with justifiable viciousness, still not meeting his gaze. I was pretty sure he heard that, too.

“By the time I got there, too many people had been on-site,” he said. “And Ian…”

Ian Stosser was many things, including brilliant, persuasive, and charming, but he left the hands-on gruntwork to us.

“So what little we have, the fact that she didn't feel a strong emotion, and didn't use current to defend herself, that points to the guy's claim being true, that they weren't threatening her?” Pietr asked.

“No,” Venec said, and I could hear the frustration in his voice, no weird linky-link needed.

I felt my brain fold over on itself, trying to figure out where he was going with that. “Why not?”

There was a hissing, staticky noise from the other end of the table. I forced myself not to look, and could tell everyone else was doing the same. The skin on my arms and neck was all goose-bumped, though. Nick was doing something at a level none of us could match; not better, not lesser, just using skills that we didn't have, and personally I didn't want. Hackers could and did overrush faster and harder than anyone else, and when they did, every network in the region went, to use the technical term, blooey.

Venec went on with the discussion, pretending there was nothing at all happening down there, nope, nothing at all. “Because they didn't use current to defend themselves, either. A Talent being attacked by another human, maybe they'll keep it on the down-low, try not to escalate things, especially if they don't know the others' power level.”

Kids played at that, games like snap-dragon and push-tag, to see who was stronger. Adults played different games, more subtle, but we played them.

“Being attacked by a fatae? An obvious fatae?” Venec drummed his hand against the table, a gesture I hadn't seen him use before. Irritation? Anger? Frustration? Maybe all of the above. It made my fingers itch in sympathy, and I refolded them carefully in my lap. There was a time to mirror the boss, and a time not to. This was a not-time.

“Being attacked by a ki-rin, those toughs should have
been shitting themselves, and hauling out the hard power. They didn't. Is that damning enough, though?” I asked.

“They may not have had time to,” Nifty said. “I saw the autopsy reports.” He and Pietr got that job, mainly because I puked all over myself the first and only time they had me read medical stuff, and Sharon and Nick just out-and-out refused. “It was over so fast, I bet the guy never realized what was happening.”

Pietr shook his head. “The first guy, maybe. But the other guy did. He saw the first attack happen, was far enough away that he had time to know what was happening, which, Bonnie's right, would have made me shit myself, no matter how much a hard-ass I was.”