Free Fall. Laura Anne Gilman
thought it would get that far?
“For God’s sake, I’ll buy you a whore. I’ll buy you two.” The third man, again. “Just kill it already. Once it’s dead, its familiar will be unprotected, and we can finish the job.”
P.B.? Her thoughts fluttered. P.B.!
The demon could protect itself. That wasn’t the point. She hadn’t been thorough enough vetting this job, hadn’t been careful enough, and now they thought, these pitiful, rubber-suited Nulls thought they would clear the board, with their flick-knives, their dicks, and their self-righteous bigotry?
They thought they were better than her, because they could not feel the current in everything around them?
The smell of shit and tear gas filled her nostrils again, and she breathed it in, deep. Her attention off of it for that split second, the black thread in her core rounded in on itself, and no longer tar but black lava, struck upward, straight into her spine.
Wren almost laughed as the full impact of her core surged through her, crackling and snarling. No longer snakes, not serpents, but dragons now, full-winged and fire-breathing and deadly to behold.
They erupted from her, soaring free and high. Black opal-bodied, all the colors of the universe contained within, the hot sludge of their blood thrumming like a bass drum. Thunderheads formed around them, great anvils of Thor, and their wings smashed them, drank them in, filled their roars with the sound of thunder and the cold buffeting rain. Tangled and soaked, Wren opened her throat and screamed with them, her arms thrown into the air. The current jumping from them to her and then back again until welts formed on her skin, creating a pattern of diamond scales.
Somewhere, in some small corner that was still Wren, she was screaming for a different reason. But it was a small, thin voice, and impossible to hear. Possible to ignore, in the orgasmic fury of the storm, that one whisper of dissent: of denial, of fear. Of sanity.
Then a sudden downward spiral, shooting back toward earth, not so much picking up speed as becoming speed, a lightning bolt of a thousand dragons of unheavenly ire. The hit was better than speed, was better than sex, was better than anything she had ever felt before, and her body convulsed around the sensation, throwing her heels over head into a blast of colorless current that cut off her breath and dropped her into unconsciousness.
three
*Wren?*
It was quiet where she was, quiet and comfortable, and she resented the voice for disturbing her. “G’way,” she told it, batting a mental hand at the sound, like a pesky moth fluttering in her face.
*Wren?* The moth was more urgent now, refusing to be batted.
She murmured something rude, feeling lazy and sluggish. Also fried. So fried she was pretty sure her hair would crackle if she touched it. As though the thought forced the movement, her fingers twitched slightly.
They were wet.
No, they were holding something wet.
*Wren!*
That woke her up, the near-frantic shout into her brain. Not a moth any more but a hornet’s sting.
She identified the voice, uncertainly, as not being her own. A ping, from not so very far away. Why were they yelling?
*Yeah,* she responded, just trying to get the voice to stop shouting.
*We heard you! Are you okay? I’m on my way!* The nonverbal words carried a sense of urgency, of fear, of forces being marshaled and ready to break down the door, wherever the door might be.
*Wha?* Confusion, then memory, coming back to her, a trickle at a time. She had been on a job. Attacked, taken out by three vigilante goons. Idiots. They were going to rape her, rape and kill her, and then—
She sat up, and looked down at her hand.
Ten minutes later, she was huddled against the stairs, her gut empty and her throat aching from the continuous dry retching. The wide tunnel floor in front of her was strewn with flesh and bones, scorched to black with current. The remains of three humans, obliterated.
Her hand, still clenching the sticky strands of something she didn’t want to identify, and couldn’t bring herself to wipe off.
*Wren!* That voice, screaming now inside her, an entire nest of hornets.
There was barely enough control left in her to grab onto that scream, send it back on a quieter note. *It’s over. I’m…okay.*
*You sure?* Whoever this Talent was, he didn’t sound convinced.
No. She wasn’t okay. She wasn’t ever going to be okay. The stickiness itched, and she finally wiped her hand against the wall, trying to scrape it off her skin.
*Yeah. I’m good. Thanks.*
She cut the connection, and sat there in blessed silence. Until the silence started to talk back.
You did what you had to do. A seductive whisper of justification, of reassurance. She was one of the good guys, relatively speaking. They had tried to hurt her, and she had struck back. Nobody could blame her. Nobody would.
Thou shalt not kill. Wren had never been much for religion, not even the remarkably mild and mellow Protestant God she had been raised with, but certain things hit hard when you were a kid, and stuck. Thou shalt not steal was right out, and she coveted and blasphemed on a regular basis, without any guilt whatsoever. Ancient commandments should not haunt her, not now.
She wasn’t to blame. It had been a setup. She didn’t know why she was so certain of it, but she was. She had walked into a trap. No matter if the job was real or not, nobody had been here, nobody had come when she—had she made any noise? How long had it taken? No way of knowing. Nobody came. They, whoever they were, had targeted her, maybe seen her as a weak spot in the defense—
Thou shalt not kill.
Wren’s fingers closed into fists, her close-cut nails digging into the flesh of her palms. She had killed before. Had used current…
Chrome and blood. Exhaustion, pain: the aftermath of their first, disastrous face-off with the vigilantes. Plastic cups and white plates, and blood and gore and…
She shut the memory down, locking it back in its box. Stephanie. The lonejack turncoat, who had sold them out to KimAnn Howe and the local Council. Wren had been part of the group that stopped her…stopped her with deadly force. But she had been part of a whole, then. A consensus, if hastily and wordlessly achieved. Her hand had been on the current that eradicated the woman, but other hands had been laid upon hers, the decision to use force spread out among many minds…
This time, she had no one else to turn to, no one to share responsibility. Wren shook her head, and again scraped her palm against the wall, focusing on the cool texture underneath her skin.
But the coldness in her gut wouldn’t go away, nor would the fact that worse, far worse and far more damning, this time, she hadn’t used current. Current had used her. Her fear, her rage, her exhaustion. She had failed, every inch of all of her training, and she had failed. It had escaped the core, escaped control, and thrown her up into it.
Thrown her into…She had…oh God.
Her hand fisted against the wall, and her face squeezed together in a pained grimace.
What she had done, what she had almost become, clogged her brain and stopped her heart for a godforsaken moment. Hysteria threatened, the waves becoming a tsunami that threatened to drag her under.
Don’t go there. Don’t think about it. Don’t…
Mental doors slammed, control reasserted itself, walling off even the faintest trace of the awful glory. And a chant from her brain to every single cell of her body: Don’t ever think about it, don’t ever remember it, don’t ever linger on it, or you will go insane.
Again.
Her fist opened, her face relaxed, and