Читать книгу Burning Bridges - Laura Anne Gilman - Страница 11

The minor adrenaline rush of her training run had worn off completely by the time lunch came around, and Wren was struggling with the desire to chew her leg off, if it would give her a way to escape.

She had once joked with Sergei about the terrifying prospect of an organized Cosa. Sitting in the now overly familiar meeting room, she had proof to back up her own incredulous laughter at the joke; a week of discussions and negotiations and yelling at each other, and maybe an hour’s worth of progress had been made. If that.

She looked around now, taking in the room the way she might a Retrieval site, half out of boredom, half just to keep in the habit. The remains of a platter of sandwiches and flaccid pickles, the notepads and pens, paper coffee cups and soda cans littering the table. The scene could have been any conference room anywhere, in any office. Or maybe, she thought, the better analogy was a teacher’s staff room. Less tech, more opinions.

And a considerably wider range of species than in your average boardroom or school.

The Truce Board—a boring but practical name someone had come up with—now officially met in an empty apartment of a building belonging to one of the Council members. Wren had scoped the place out when she came in, the never-ending habit of a renter in Manhattan, and decided that—even with the upgraded facilities and parquet flooring, she’d rather keep her own place. But the apartment had a large main room that, when filled with a long table and a bunch of faux leather padded folding chairs, could hold everyone who was required to be there. And the kitchen had not one but two coffee machines running. She approved.

Turning her head slightly to the left, she let her gaze touch on the players: the four lonejack representatives, Jordan and another Council member she didn’t know, and four fatae: Beyl the griffin, a piskie named Einnie, a solid, square-faced trauco with the unlikely name of Reynaldi, and a strange, frail, lovely young woman dressed in veils, whose back was hollow like a dead tree. She wasn’t introduced, and nobody seemed to pay much heed to her, which made Wren pay careful attention to everything she did.

Between the delegates and the advisors each of them had brought along, like reluctant seconds to a mob-scene duel, it was controlled chaos. The voices were loud, but involved, not angry, and there were more arms waving in emphasis than she’d thought could be attached to the number of bodies in the room. Everyone had an opinion about how to implement the Patrols, and enforce the Truce, and nobody wanted to hear anyone else’s points or rebuttals, and at least once the trauco threatened one of the older Council gentlemen with bodily harm for the crime of being—direct quote—a dweeb.

Bored. Yes. She was very, very bored. And there wasn’t anything worth stealing here, even for the practice value. The owner had made damn sure of that before offering it up.

Wren leaned back in her chair, feeling it creak dangerously as she balanced on two legs. “Looks like everything’s under control, here.”

The gnome sitting next to her—Beyl’s assistant—snorted, sounding enough like P.B. that Wren did a double take at it. Demon were a created breed: was it possible that there were gnome bloodlines involved? The height was close…

And when she started contemplating the genetic makeup of the fatae breeds, it was time and past for her to get the hell out of there. Three hours of waiting around for someone to say something she could contribute to, and all she’d gotten was a bad case of numb-butt. Her time was worth more than this.

Wren put the chair back on all fours and got up, moving through the bodies until she got to the one she needed to speak to.

“And if you think that we’re going to allow—”

“Bart.”

“I’m busy here, Valere.” The NYC representative was brusque even when he was in a good mood, which he decidedly was not, right now.

“Yeah, I can see that. I can also see you guys have got everything under control, and I hate fiddling my thumbs. When you need me, call.”

“Or you’ll wipe yourself out of my line of sight anyway?” he asked.

Ooops. Nailed.

“Go,” he said in dismissal, and went back into his argument without missing a beat. He hadn’t even turned his head to look at her.

Wren slipped out of the room without anyone noting her pass by, without having to actively invoke her no-see-me. Boredom apparently brought it forward naturally. That explained why she’d never gotten caught when she cut English class, back in junior high. Odd, that she’d never made the connection before. Then again, she wasn’t often bored, either. She—and Sergei—spent much of their waking time ensuring that.

The kitchen was busy—someone was refilling one coffee machine, so there was a line at the other. Wren didn’t even bother to queue up, but grabbed her coat and hat from the indecently large hall closet, and went down the elevator and out of the building into the cold morning air.

She found a working pay phone on the corner, and—after asking someone passing on the street what time it was—placed a quick call.

You’ve reached my cell. Try to speak clearly and repeat your number twice.

“Me. It’s a little before two, and I’m fleeing the scene of the crime for some window shopping. If you can get away, I’ll meet you at Rock Center, at the rink.”

She hung up the phone, and checked how much cash she had in her wallet.

“’Tis the season to overindulge and splurge,” she said with satisfaction, and stepped off the curb to catch a cab discharging a fare.

Forty minutes and two stores later, she found her partner leaning against the window of one of the high-end stores that flanked the skating rink at Rockefeller Center. Sergei was watching the crowds of warmly dressed tourists milling about, splitting their attention between the garishly lit tree and the skaters frolicking on the rink directly below.

She tucked the small shopping bag into her shoulder bag, and came up alongside him.

“Hey. Been here long?”

He turned to smile down at her. “Not much, no. I picked up your message and escaped as quickly as I could. Gallery’s been a madhouse this morning. Everyone’s doing their usual ‘oh dear god it’s the holiday I must buy something that shows I spent a lot’ dash.”

“You are a bad and cynical man.”

“I am not. I’m observant. The people who love art, the ones who are buying for someone who loves art, they did their shopping months ago, most of them. It’s already been bought and paid for, and is waiting on delivery. These people…” He shook his head.

She flushed, guiltily, at her own last-minute purchase. “Are they at least buying?”

“Enough to pay to stay open,” he said. “And it’s good training for Lowell. It makes him happy to help them load up their credit cards with debt. So why did you want to meet here? I thought you hated crowds. No, I know you hate crowds.”

She brushed away his comments with an air wave of her hand. “This is different. It’s the Tree! Plus, it’s too cold to stay out here for long. Just enough to soak it in, and then we can go get hot chocolate.”

Sergei didn’t understand the appeal of standing in the cold and staring up at a garishly lit, oversized tree that definitely had looked better standing in its original field, covered with bird shit and squirrel nests, but then, he didn’t have much holiday spirit at the best of times. Or so he’d been told. Christmas was midnight mass, and presents exchanged in the morning, and then you went back to work. But Wren’s childhood, as far as he’d been able to determine, had been about scrimping and saving and making festive with whatever they had. He’d rather get frostbite than cut into her enjoyment of the season, as much as she let herself indulge in. Especially this year.

“I wonder how many volts it takes to run those lights,” she said now, her eyes dangerously dreamy. “Do you think Christmas lights have a different flavor than regular lights?”

“What, you never shorted out your own Christmas tree, as a teenager?”

“My mother would have killed me,” she said. “Anyway, we usually had one of those tabletop dealies. Night-lights used more voltage than those.”

She stared up at the tree, and he could almost see the moment she went away from him, sliding into what she called the fugue state, where she could draw most easily on the core of current within her. As best he could understand, it was a little like meditation, and a little like orgasm, and the smile on her face made him more than a little nervous.

“Wren, I really don’t want to be trapped inside a crowd of thousands of pissed-off tourists a week before Christmas, when you put the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree out of commission.”

“Spoilsport.” But she shook the fugue off, and came back to him. “Come on. Buy me a massive hot chocolate. No, a peppermint mocha. Two shots. With extra whipped cream, and one of those cookie straws.”

“Because a sugar high combined with a caffeine rush is just so what you need right now,” he grumbled, but slid his arm into hers, and escorted her away from the crowd, down the stairs into the lower level of Rock Center.

It was a maze down there, filled with hallways and stores and subway entrances, but they both knew where they were headed: there was a food court off to one side, with a Starbucks. The line was as long as expected, so Wren went to find them a table while Sergei stood to place their order. One tall tea, one grande peppermint mocha with extra whipped cream. They weren’t serving those crunchy cookie-straws here, so he grabbed her a chocolate-dipped biscotti instead. It wasn’t the same, but it was the thought that counted. Plus the chocolate-dipped part.

“Ooo, Santa,” she joked when he sat down at the little table next to her, and handed her the drink and the biscuit. “I guess I’ve been very, very good this year, huh?”

He merely smiled, thinking of the gift already wrapped and hidden in her apartment—she might search his place, but never think to look in her own space. He hoped. They’d agreed, early-on in their partnership, that one gift each for Christmas was a reasonable limit. But this year he’d gone on a little splurge, as she would say. This year was special: being partners as well as partners required something…more. Difficult as it was to buy presents for a woman who didn’t wear much jewelry, couldn’t use personal electronics, and had a deep-set habit of stealing whatever she liked, he thought he’d done well.

“I take it that the meeting this morning did not require your taking minutes?”

“Hah.” She sipped at the mocha, making a happy little contented noise as it hit her taste buds. “They’re going along gangbusters, yowling and screaming and waving arms and generally accomplishing absolutely nothing.”

Sergei’s experience with meetings was more along the lines of small groups being told what to do; he almost wished that he had been able to sit in on this one, simply to see how the Cosa did it. Then again, considering the Cosa members he already knew, he suspected that her description was, if anything, underplaying the chaos.

“In the end, though…?”

“Oh, in the end, they’ll hammer the details out. Bart and Beyl won’t let anyone out of the door until they do. But they didn’t need me there to get to that point. And, honestly? Being in the room with that many people was starting to make me itch. Nobody had a damn thing worth lifting except Ayexi’s wallet, and if I asked him he’d just hand it over to me. What’s the fun in that?”

Sergei drank his tea rather than answer. While he understood and appreciated his partner’s need to keep her hand in, as it were, he sometimes understood her mentor’s reported exasperation with her light-fingered tendencies. For Wren, Retrieval wasn’t just something she did—it was what she was. And if she wasn’t either working on a job, or recovering from a job, she was wondering where the next job was going to be. Time to find something for her to do.

“At the risk of being rude, I gotta go pee.” She grinned at the expression on his face. “Sorry—I have to use the facilities to relieve my dainty female form, how’s that?”

“Worse,” he said.

“Don’t drink the last of my mocha,” she warned, and grabbed the last chunk of the biscotti to nibble on as she walked, as though not willing to trust him with it while she was gone. It was amazing, the calories she managed to put away. Current burned a lot of energy, even in passive mode, but she used to at least moderate her intake. The past few months…

The past few months she’s been using current almost continuously, between the Cosa and the jobs, and the general chaos…and you. She didn’t touch him with current every time they had sex, but often enough that he was starting to feel the cumulative effect internally—and he knew that it had to be draining her, too. He tried not to ask for a jolt, but it was like putting a chocoholic into a fudge factory and handing them one of those little plastic knives; you were just asking for something to snap.

Thankfully, Wren was well trained; he had never met Neezer, but even by the time Wren was a teenager, she had some of the best emotional and physical control he had ever seen, and her mental control—as befitted an almost-Pure Talent—was even more developed. As she often said, current was power, and skill was all about controlling that power.

And yes, he admitted, he got off on that, too. Like a high-level sports car, knowing that there was so much horsepower under the attractive frame. You didn’t have to be in the driver’s seat to appreciate the surge of speed.

He thought about getting her another biscotti, but to do so he’d have to get up and stand in line, and then they’d lose the table to one of the groups cruising the food court, looking for an empty space. He watched a few of them; people-watching was something he didn’t do very often, but it was always interesting. His gaze moved past the gaggle of teenaged girls exclaiming over something one of them had bought, paused on two overbulked teenage males long enough to rate them not a threat, then lingered for an enjoyable moment on an attractive woman with skin the color of Wren’s mocha, wearing a bright red shirt and skirt. She was moving with the long stride of someone who only had so long to do something before she had to be back upstairs in her office, and he felt a moment’s smug superiority before something else snagged his attention.

A single bright green sheet, tucked under a plate on the now-empty table next to him. He didn’t know why it attracted his attention, but he knew better than to ignore that kind of mental hijacking. As nonchalantly as he could, Sergei leaned forward and snagged it from the abandoned tray.

Tired of coming home to unwanted visitations? Concerned about the infestation of your building? Your neighborhood? Call us. We can clean things up for you.

The company was Midtown Pest Control Services, and there were two phone numbers and a Web site listed at the bottom of the page. A plain sheet, black type against the green paper: impossible not to read, once your eye found it.

Scanning the food court, aware now, Sergei could see half a dozen of the lime-green sheets and a packet more of them on one counter, in a plastic dispenser. Son of a…

He crumpled the sheet in his fist, and tossed it into the nearest trash can, taking grim satisfaction at making the shot. Could he grab all the sheets and the dispenser, too, before Wren got back? Or would she come back and see him, and see the ads, and make everything worse?

He decided to risk it. If this was an innocent bug-disposal company, he’d feel guilty later. But the wording they used was exactly the same as the ads Wren had gotten, the ads the vigilantes used to spread their “services” back when this all began. And that was a coincidence he wasn’t willing to ignore. Not if they were advertising again, soliciting “business.” Recruiting new bigots to the cause. Building their troops against the coming confrontation. Or even just spreading their own brand of intolerance and filth into a city that already had enough, thanks.

Sergei wasn’t unaware of the irony; he had once been deeply uncomfortable in the presence of any fatae, even before he knew how many were out there, passing as human. Even now, the thought of them occasionally made his skin crawl in a way he didn’t care to investigate. But these people…They were targeting not only the fatae, but anything magical.

And that included Wren.

Keeping one eye on their table, with the coats draped over chairs to indicate it was still in use, Sergei snagged four of the sheets and shredded them methodically into strips before dumping them in the trash can. He moved back to the table just in time to prevent three office workers from sitting down, despite the coats, and glared at them until they backed away.

There probably wasn’t any way to get the pile of flyers off that counter, without attracting someone’s—

“Sergei. What a surprise.”

All thoughts of the flyers got tucked away for later, as he turned to face the speaker.

Andre Felhim, dapper as ever in a charcoal-gray suit and a burgundy tie that emphasized the dark mahogany of his skin. He was followed a step behind by a taller blond-haired, pale-skinned man: Poul Jorgenmunder, his second-in-command.

Sergei used to stand just that way, at Andre’s elbow. For about two years, before they started to disagree on almost everything. He didn’t envy Poul his spot, although Poul was clearly jealous of Sergei’s history with Andre.

Relationships were the most confusing of all human inventions. That was a quote from somewhere, but Sergei couldn’t remember who had said it.

“Andre.” He didn’t acknowledge the other man. It was petty, but satisfying.

The two men had laminated ID tags around their necks, with Visitor stamped on them in large red letters. That explained what they were doing here, then, although Sergei wondered what company in this complex had cause to call on the Silence. He hoped it wasn’t NBC, although their fall lineup had certainly been a crime of inhuman proportions….

“Here alone? How…unusual for you, these days.” Poul looked around, obviously looking for something. “No, no obvious freaks here, unless they’re hiding.”

Lonejacks weren’t the only ones who knew how to control their emotions. Poul’s baiting was too obvious; what was he really trying to get at?

“I received your letter. And your e-mail,” Andre said quietly, ignoring Jorgenmunder.

“And filed them appropriately, since you declined to respond?”

His former boss spread tapered, manicured fingers in an openhanded gesture. “I wish that you would reconsider…”

“You know I can’t. And won’t.” They had been over this ground in previous meetings, before he sent the letter.

That letter had merely been a formal breaking of their contract, the devil’s bargain that had tied Wren to the Silence, in return for a monthly retainer. Effective next month, January 1, the deal was null and void. If he could get Andre to sign off on it.

Sergei went on, quoting the letter almost verbatim. “The situation has changed on both sides, making the agreement impossible. If you try to fight it—”

“The Silence will not contest your right to end the agreement,” Andre said. He looked older, more tired than even the last time Sergei had seen him. The difference between this man and the man who had recruited him out of college, trained him, was striking; far more than could be accounted for simply by the passing of years. “I made the offer in good faith and yet, as you rightly pointed out, we have not followed suit.”

The weight of guilt settled again on Sergei’s shoulders. It wasn’t Andre’s fault, entirely. He, Sergei, should never have gotten Wren tied up with them, no matter how much they thought they had needed the Silence’s help.

Once he had called himself an Operative with pride. Even when he left, it was burnout from the cost of the job, not dissatisfaction with what they did. Now…Now, he was afraid that the Silence was the greater threat than the Council; their motives less clear, their end purposes more shadowed. The organization he had once sworn his life to no longer existed; he was unsure what stood in its place, now.

He did know that he would mortgage the gallery rather than allow Wren to take any more of their money, and risk her life for their ends.

“I really don’t have anything more to say to you,” he said to the older man. “Andre, I’m sorry, I have to go.”

“Afraid someone will see you talking to us?” Poul asked, still looking for a place to push the verbal needle.

“No,” Sergei said, turning to look at him full-on for the first time. “You merely bore me.”

Sergei picked up the coats off the chair, snagged Wren’s mocha in his free hand, and walked away. With perfect timing, he intercepted Wren at the hallway leading from the food court to the bathrooms.

“Hey,” she said, surprised. “Sorry, there was a line like you wouldn’t believe…You have to get back to the gallery?”

He grabbed at the excuse, which had the virtue of not being a lie. “Yes, I’m sorry. If I’d time I’d take you out for lunch, but…”

“S’okay, I’m not hungry, anyway. I’ve got some more errands to run, as long as I’m in midtown. And then I suppose I should go back and see if our fearless leaders have a new assignment for me, or if they’re still wrangling over how to arrange the patrols.” She rolled her eyes, and he chuckled: he had more faith in the Cosa than most of the Cosa did.

“Maybe I’ll get you a new job.”

“That would be nice. Something—”

“Without hellhounds. Yes, I remember.”

She laughed. “Catch you later tonight?”

“Absolutely. I’ll pick up dinner on my way home.”

He helped her into her coat, gave her the mocha and kissed her, lingering a little more than he usually did, in public.

“Stay safe, Zhenchenka.”

“They won’t even see me going,” she replied, and he smiled; it was what she used to say, when he sent her off on a job, back in their early days.

When had she stopped saying that? He didn’t remember. Probably around the time he stopped sending her off personally, every job. He thought he might start doing that, again.

“Stay safe,” he said again. But she had disappeared into the crowd, and even he couldn’t find her.

Wren hadn’t actually gone anywhere, using the crowd to backtrack to the food court. From there, she watched two men sitting at a table, one of them drinking a coffee, the other flicking an unlit cigarillo between elegant dark-skinned fingers. She had seen that restless motion before; Sergei, with his thin-rolled cigarettes. She had never seen him actually light one, never known him to inhale anything other than the aroma of a good wine. But he would roll a cigarette between his fingers like a magician with a coin, whenever he was deep in thought. Or nervous.

Now she knew where he had learned it.

“Idiot man.” If she’d come back and surprised the three of them together, she would have known by Sergei’s reaction what was up, end of story. He could pull the poker face only so far on her, these days. She thought, anyway. But the way he rushed her off…

It didn’t matter. Much. Keeping her and his Excellency Andre Felhim far apart was an excellent idea, no matter the circumstances. Someday she really was going to forget what manners Neezer had taught her, and give that arrogant, supercilious know-little a good shocking-to.

So. Sergei probably had the very best of intentions. Let it go, Valere. She really did have errands to run, of a sort, and this was as good a place as any to do them.

She found a quiet place to sit, on the edge of an indoor planter, with weird frondy things that almost hid her from sight. Closing her eyes and letting the clatter around her fade into white noise, she grounded and centered, reached inside and stroked one thin snake of current inside her. Prepared, she sent out a flurry of pings, directed mental knocks, to half a dozen Talent that she knew worked or lived in the immediate area.

Then she sat back to wait. It took exactly six and a half minutes for the first response to come in.

Wren lifted the lid of her gingerbread latte and inhaled the aroma as though it were oxygen, and she hyperventilating.

“Are you going to drink that, or have sex with it?”

“I can’t do both?”

There were three of them around the small, round table: Wren, in jeans and sweater dressed for warmth and comfort, an older man with a smooth-shaven head and dark blue eyes, wearing a white shirt over dark cords, and a woman with a thick black ponytail setting off her red sweaterdress. She looked like a college student compared to their crisp professionalism.

The man watched while she took a deep sip, tracking the liquid as it slid down her throat.

“You must be a hell of a co—”

“Michael!” The woman in the dress slapped his arm before he could finish the thought.

Michael’s eyes twinkled innocently, and Wren managed to swallow before laughing.

“Seriously,” he went on. “You called. We’re here. What do you want from us?”

Wren put her drink down on the table, needing to take a moment to collect her thoughts. The last time she had tried to canvass for information, half the Cosa had crossed the street rather than talk to her, and the ones who couldn’t get away balked at every question. Now, all she had to do was ping a Talent, and they showed up. And paid for the coffee. All it took was a rumor that you were responsible for lifting the darkness of the summer heat wave, even if nobody was quite sure what the darkness had been or how it ended; of being the lonejack who faced down the Council; of being…all things she wished she’d never become. But today, it was useful. So she’d use it.

“Is this about the meetings they’ve been having?”

“What have you heard about it?” Michael was a lonejack and Seta was Council, but neither of them worked with their Talent: he was a lawyer, she taught history at a charter school in midtown. They were about as close as you could get to the Cosa’s middle class, if such a thing existed.

“Not much.” Michael took a sip of his coffee. “That there were meetings going on, high-level stuff, the Council coming down among the unwashed masses, more fatae seen in town than anyone can remember…Is it true, that someone’s hunting them?”

Seta sighed. “You are so painfully out of touch…. Didn’t you hear about the Moot Massacre?”

Wren blinked. All right, she had missed that particular nickname for the attack….

“I figured it had been exaggerated, or something.” Michael didn’t seem too abashed.

“Lonejacks,” Wren said with a long-suffering sigh. “They just don’t care.”

“Damn straight,” Michael agreed.

“Well, you have to care, now,” she said, suddenly serious. “Because it’s true, all of it. True and serious and in your face, right here, right now.”

Wren suddenly felt a tingle on the back of her neck, as though someone was staring at her. But when she glanced casually around the Starbucks, everyone seemed intent on their own business. She looked out the glass window, thinking it might have come from out there. For once, there was no snow actively falling, but the streets were slushy, and the curbs and sidewalks were still coated with a dingy gray-white mix of slush and ice that caused pedestrians to walk with particular care or risk going down on their backsides. Preoccupied with staying upright, none of them were looking in at her.

Wren shook her head, telling herself that it was probably just someone’s fur coat against the gray of sky and street that had flickered in the corner of her eye.

Whatever it was, it was gone now.

“Yo, you with us?” Michael asked, peering at her intently. “You zoned for a moment.”

“Did you…” She shook her head, dropping the unasked question. “Yeah. I’m here. So, now you know the deal. My question is—would you join a patrol if they were organized, all three groups together? Keep an eye on things, report back, be willing to be part of a multipronged, organized approach to what’s going down?”

Michael nodded once, firmly, without having to consider the question very long.

Wren added, because she had to know: “Even if the Council voted against it?”

Seta looked like she’d just felt the rough brick of a wall come up against her back, hard. “Voted…” She sighed, and stared down into her cup. “Look, if the Council says no, we—Council members—jump no. You know that. But if they don’t say anything specifically that is shaped like a no and sounds like a no and smells like a no…”

“Then it’s not actually a no.”

“Not actually, no.”

Wren nodded. It wasn’t good enough, but it was the best she was going to get. And there were others she needed to meet with before she could call it a day. No rest for the weary…