Free Fall. Laura Anne Gilman
and the sculptor had been as calm and measured as one of his sculptures. But that came from being an artist with Talent—working metal with current made you cautious, or it got you dead.
She winced. He had gotten himself dead anyway, hadn’t he? So many dead…
Focus. A different voice this time, sharp and unforgiving. The voice she heard too often in her dreams, now. An unfamiliar, unforgiving voice, refusing to let her rest. A combination of all the dead: the Talented and Fatae dead of this city, trying to drive her forward into things, places, she didn’t want.
Bite me, she said to it now, and followed the director down into the theater. The set was dark; if the rest of the cast had arrived for the matinee already, they were elsewhere in the building.
The blueprint said that there was an entrance to the main tunnel to the left of the stage, just behind the pillar. Wren looked around to make sure that nobody was lurking, then vaulted to the stage, careful as she landed not to make so much noise that anything echoed. They might not be able to see her, but they’d still be able to hear her.
“Okay, door. Where’s a door? What looks like a door?”
To someone used to the stage, it was no doubt obvious. Wren, in the dark in more than one way, had only her natural sense of sneaky to guide her.
Well, that and a little extra fillip of Talent.
“The way down
is the way to go.
Lead me there.”
Thankfully cantrips didn’t have to be any kind of great poetry. So long as the words helped you focus, they were effective. A faint blue shimmer of light flickered off her fingertips, tiny cousins to the neon flickering outside, and floated off as though they had all the time in the world.
“A little speed, willya?” she urged it in a whisper. In response, the lights brightened a little, then moved en masse to a spot just to the left of the pillar. Wren followed, noting as she moved that she was now out of sight of anyone in the audience.
The blue lights spread over the wall and thinned into a bare thread, outlining a narrow door.
The tunnel.
She held up her hand and the blue current sped back to her. You didn’t leave evidence behind on a job. She might have been careless before, not thinking that it mattered, but having Bonnie living in the building with her had been an eye-opener as to what the PUPIs—Private Unaffiliated Paranormal Investigators—could do with even a scrap of signed current. And she had been holding this in her core long enough for it to “taste” like her to anyone who bothered to test it.
She eyed the door, trying to get a feel for any alarms or other wiring securing it shut. Nothing. As far as her abilities could tell, it was just a fitted wooden door. Which led to the next choice: fast or slow? You could open it slowly, and risk one of those soul-killing creaking noises. Open it fast, and who knew what might happen. Either way, there was a chance of alerting people to an intruder.
“Screw it,” Wren said, and opened the door normally.
It slid open without a sound. A black light went on overhead, lighting the steps down. She frowned at it before realizing that the black light was probably so that nobody onstage or in the audience might see a distracting glow when a performance was running. Nice. She was going to have to experiment, when she got home, and see if she could create the equivalent with current. A handy thing, if she could make it work. Handy, yes, and possibly profitable? If she could bottle it somehow, the way some Talent made prepared Translocation spells—they overcharged so much, she only used them when there was no other choice, and they had to be individually set and had a limited lifespan, but a current-powered blacklight…hell, a prepared current-light, period…
Worry about it later. Just because this is a cakewalk, no reason to get sloppy. Bad things always seem to happen when you get cocky.
The stairs were surprisingly comfortable to walk down, even keeping her back to the far wall. There was some sort of rubber padding tacked to the steps, which had the advantage of both muffling footsteps and keeping her footing secure when the stairs turned sharply.
At the bottom, the tunnel was much larger than she had expected; rather than a narrow walkway, it was a broad and arched hall with a track of modern lighting running along the ceiling. The air was cool and dry, not musty or stale, indicating that they had at least a basic air filtering system in place.
Nice. With a little work, you could probably turn this into the trendy new living space, and make a fortune.
All right, enough with the money-making plans, Valere. Get the job done.
She set her back against the wall, feeling the cool stone even through her leather jacket, and tried to orient herself. She had come down here, and she was facing there, so…It might be cheating, triangulating via the pulse of Times Square, but you used what you had. Confident now that she knew where she was going, Wren pulled her lockpick tools out of its tummy sheath, and stepped forward confidently.
There was no warning. One moment she was moving forward, the next she was pinned against the wall again, only this time there was a heavy forearm against her throat, and the smell of hot breath on her face. A white cloth mask was pulled over his face, showing only narrowed brown eyes above the fabric.
Wren reacted the way she had been trained: fast and hard, but not lethally. Her mentor, John Ebeneezer, had been a huge fan of not killing people, and even years of Sergei’s “survival at all costs” attitude and P.B.’s casual disregard for bloodshed had not been able to quite eradicate that early influence.
She didn’t even try to shove back physically—she was in shape, but her strength was not in meat and muscle. A hard pull down on her core, and thick-bodied snakes of sizzling red and gold came to her, coiling up her arm faster than she could visualize them. There was enough power there to jolt any assailant back on his ass and crisp the ends of his short-and-curlies.
The guy jerked and grunted when she hit him, but didn’t let go. And he absolutely didn’t fly back onto his posterior the way he was supposed to. Instead he slapped her across the face, hard enough that her vision swam and her face burned.
“Bitch sparked me,” he told someone else over his shoulder.
“Stupid cunt.”
He relaxed his grip slightly, but before she could take advantage of it, another set of hands pulled her off the wall, shoving her down to her knees on the floor. From that position, she could see that they were wearing thick-soled work boots, and dark green carpenter’s pants.
Two of them. Then another set of boots came into view, and she upped the count to three. At least. Damn, and also, damn. Two she might have been able to take in an unfair fight. And they had expected her to use current. They had warded themselves somehow…. Rubber. The soles of their boots, probably fibers in their clothing, at least enough to absorb a nonlethal blow. They weren’t warded, magically; just basic physical forensics and a trip to the Army-Navy store. They knew about Talent. And they didn’t seem to be friendly.
A shove in the small of her back, and she went facedown on the stone.
Nope, not friendlies at all. Stay calm, Valere. Stay calm. Damn it, I should have brought the hot-stick.
A thin, thin filament of current stretched out from deep within her core, imbued with as much of her personal signature as possible. She sent it out, searching for anyone on the street above who would be able to hear her. There were people she could specifically tag, reaching out to their mental signature across the city, but by the time they understood what was going on, it might be too late to be of any use.
The filament didn’t find anyone other than Nulls on the streets above. No Fatae, no Talent.
Looks like you’re on your own. Figures. So much for the Patrol still hanging around.
Who were these assholes, anyway? Random goons who got lucky? The fact that they were prepared shot that idea down. They weren’t Council, and she doubted