Pack of Lies. Laura Anne Gilman
but I didn’t like using it. It wasn’t fear, or guilt, exactly. None of us used it anymore, unless Stosser herded us into it, like he had this morning. There were bad vibes in that shaft. And the exercise was good for me, anyway. Current burned calories, but it didn’t build muscles.
“Anyone home?”
The office was quiet, and the coffeemaker was turned off; two signs that I was the first back. Where the hell was Venec? It was almost lunchtime; maybe he had run out to get a sandwich? If so, I hoped he brought back extras: I suddenly realized that I was starving. There was a bodega on the corner that made a fabulous meatball grinder, if he hadn’t brought in food….
I dumped my coat in the front closet, and ran my fingers through my hair, trying to fluff it up. It was cut short again, curling around my ears, and was my normal wheat-blond color, for now. I had been contemplating going back to bright red, but the almost translucent whiteness of the ki-rin’s mane stuck in my head, and I started to wonder if it was time to bleach it all out again….
“And spend half a year waiting for your hair to recover? Maybe not.” I used to change my hair color the way Nick changed his socks—once every week or so—but bleaching wasn’t one of my favorite pastimes.
Even as I was debating styles with myself, I was moving down the carpeted hallway, the weight of my gleanings a solid, unwelcome presence in my brain. Food, hair, everything my brain was churning over was just a distraction. I didn’t want the gleanings in there any longer … but I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the unloading, either. I loved my job, but I hated this part.
The room next to Ian’s office was the best-warded one; the walls had been painted a soothing shade of off-white, and the pale green carpet everywhere else had been pulled up and bamboo flooring put down. There was a single wooden table and a single wooden chair in the room, and nothing else. I closed the door behind me, and leaned against it, trying to let my center settle itself.
“Seal and protect,” I said, triggering the wards we had set up to keep things inside the room inside the room. Once I felt the wards click into place, I pulled out the chair and sat down at the table.
Wood. Everything in our office was wood or plastic; no metal if it could be avoided. Wood didn’t conduct current the way metal did, which meant we didn’t have to be quite so careful all the damned time. I placed my hands down on the surface, my palms sweaty against the varnish, and exhaled.
“All right,” I said to the packet inside me, reaching down with a gentle mental urge. “Come on out and show me what we’ve got.”
We’d originally tried to create a virtual lockroom for things we pulled from scenes, both magical trace and physical debris. It worked great on the deposit, but got corrupted whenever someone tried to access it. We still hadn’t licked that problem. This dump-and-display was something that Stosser and I had invented out of old spells and new needs. Some of the stuff the team came up with worked, and some didn’t. We had to be flexible, adapt. Find better ways to fail, and then find a way not to fail.
Visuals were the easiest to process and share. Anyone could do it, theoretically. In practice, not so much. Nick and Sharon both made a total hash out of every try on their own, Pietr was around sixty-five percent, and even Nifty only got about eighty percent of each gleaning back in one piece.
I had a consistent ninety-three percent return rate on visuals, and a decent eighty-two percent on the other senses. That was why, no matter what happened in practice, it was me in the barrel, every time, and the hell with everyone taking turns.
Basically, the cantrip used current to create a permanent, three-dimensional display of the visual record I had garnered, sort of like what a computer would generate using pixels, only it was running off the electrical and magical impulses of my brain. The only problem was that, although the image would be here, in the room, I’d still be the one hosting it. The echo would still be in my brain until we dumped the gleaning entirely and I could detox, which generally required a full dose of current, a pitcher of margaritas, and a very hot shower.
I wasn’t all that thrilled with my gray matter being used in that way, but Stosser swore it wasn’t doing any permanent damage, and so far it seemed to be working. Whatever worked, we used.
It wasn’t something I was going to tell my mentor about, though. J had let me hunt for the truth about my dad’s murder when I was a teenager, had seen how much the simple fact of knowing what had happened to Zaki set me free. He was coming to terms with what I did, the physical and magical risks, but that didn’t mean he liked it, and he’d like this bit of current-risk even less. J’s always—some part of him—going to see me as the kid he took under his wing, someone he needs to protect. So, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t telling him everything.
I sat back, relaxed as much as I could, and closed my eyes. The current-camera rolled, the virtual film unreeled, and the figures took form in front of me, one-third of the size but every bit as real. The shiver I’d had at the scene intensified, until it racked my entire body, a seemingly endless rolling wave of cold rippling along my skin. I’d known it was going to happen, it happened every time, even in training, which was why I was doing this alone. Unloading sucked.
The problem was, you couldn’t disengage from what you gleaned, not after you took it inside. Visuals, sound, magical trace, it all carried emotional residue—a thousand tiny fishhooks that caught at you. We’d learned that the hard way, going in to gather trace on murder victims during our first case. Then, we’d gotten caught up in the last moments of the victims’ lives, almost been swamped by the experience. We’d refined the process since then, so it was an external view only that kept the hooks to a minimum. What we missed in information we avoided in agony and near-death. I was all about that.
Freaky shivers, I could live with.
The image flickered with the current I infused into it, and came to life. Girl, check, dressed in cute clubbing clothes totally unsuited for the weather, her coat open to the air. She was bubbly, bouncing. I could almost feel her adrenaline rush in the way she moved. I knew that rush, had been caught up in it myself over the years, when you’re so tired and so energized you don’t think you could sleep even if you were dead. Your brain’s going a hundred miles an hour, and you know you’re not making sense anymore, and you just don’t care, because you feel so damn good.
I forced myself to look away from her. Where was … there was the ki-rin. For something so pale, it blended really well with the predawn shadows. She skipped ahead, and it fell back a couple of paces … and that was when it happened.
I made it about halfway through before I threw up, but my concentration stayed steady on the job, even while I was heaving the remains of coffee and bagels onto the floor.
three
When I unsealed the wards and opened the door, Venec was standing there in the hallway. You know how some guys just make you feel better by looking at them? Not comforting or daddylike, just …”all right, you’re here, the ground is solid” kind of way? Venec was like that. Well, sometimes, anyway. When he wasn’t making you feel like an idiot.
He handed me a mug, and I took it automatically, my hand shaking more than I wanted. Venec took note, his gaze sharp, but he didn’t say anything. Tea, not coffee. Not Pietr’s green tea: herbal. My face screwed up in distaste even as I was drinking it. Heavy on the sugar, and I could feel my energy level starting to pick up again. Burning too many calories, using up too much current. I had to remember to watch that.
“You done in there?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
Venec stood there and watched me drinking, his gaze on my face like a nanny—or a dark-feathered falcon, watching a rabbit to see which way it was going to hop. He didn’t touch me, or try to offer any kind of comfort, which was good, because I didn’t want any. I needed the rawness, the bitter taste in my mouth that not even sweet tea could erase, the acid burning in my gut. I needed to remember every detail of what I had seen, what I had felt. It wasn’t even close to what any of the actual