Free Fall. Laura Anne Gilman
and buttoning the fly. Her leather jacket had vomit stains on it, and she absently made plans to drop it off for dry-cleaning. Current could clean it up but…
No current. Not right now.
She had murdered three people.
Thou shalt not kill.
She could have held them off without killing them. She had done it before. Even three on one. She had held off hellhounds. Talked down revenge-driven ghosts. Captured malicious, evil sentient boogums and ancient bansidhes.
These were just three Nulls. Three humans. She could have stopped them some other way. There had to have been some other way.
Tears soaked her cheeks, but inside, inside she was sere and dry. Inside, without thought, something hardened within her.
It’s not human. Kill it.
The memory of bodies strewn over the length of the Brooklyn Bridge.
A small winged Fatae, torn to pieces by a dog while its owner urged it on.
Michaela, her gypsy colors muted, lying still and motionless in a bed, white sheets pulled up around her. “She’s gone too deep. She won’t ever wake up again. She doesn’t want to wake up again.”
Death. All around her, death and hurt, and it was too much. She didn’t have anywhere to put it any more.
Wren closed her eyes and counted to ten. When she opened them again, nothing had changed. “No more. No more.” She wasn’t sure if she was asking the universe, or telling it. She was pretty sure, either way, that it wasn’t listening.
Fine. Whatever.
She turned and looked at the debris, and flicked the fingers of her left hand at it, almost negligently. The dead man’s skin sizzled and dissolved, the bones aged into dust, the blood dried to an antique stain. All gone, bye-bye.
The flask. Now get the flask. Always finish the job. Sergei’s mantra. Her mantra.
Something cold and wet, like fog, settled over her, filling in the dry desert places inside her. It was cold, but it kept her warm, replaced what had been taken. “No. Screw that. There’s another job I have to finish, first.”
P.B. was exhausted. There was no reason for it; he’d just been puttering around the apartment, playing with color swatches of paint and fabric, wondering what Wren’s reaction would be if she came home and found her apartment-white walls painted Victorian Mint, or Honeybear Brown. A terrifying thought, but hardly an exhausting one. And yet, all he wanted to do right now was crawl onto his cot in the office, and take a nap.
He resisted, standing in the hallway and doing stretches, feeling his thick muscles creak and complain while he worked them. His body was not designed for yoga, but it seemed to do the trick: he was still tired, but it wasn’t quite so overwhelming.
The delicate, hand-painted fabric on the wall in front of him—a gift from their friend Shig, a Japanese businessbeing—stood out like a sore thumb. Or, more accurately, it stood out like a perfectly formed thumb on a gnarled, battered hand. P.B. had asked Wren once why she never actually bothered to do anything about her apartment, and she had simply shrugged. How a woman partnered to an art dealer could be so blasé about home decoration P.B. did not understand, and had threatened more than once to call an intervention on her design sense.
Their most recent discussion—too much to call it an argument—had been two nights before, and she had finally told him to do what he wanted, so long as he left her alone on the subject already. He had barely waited until she was out of the apartment this morning before pulling out the paint and fabric swatches. But he hadn’t gotten beyond her office when the exhaustion hit.
Once he felt confident that he wasn’t going to collapse in a pile, P.B. went back into the kitchen and pulled a soda out of the fridge. Diet, of course—didn’t Valere know those things were going to kill her?—and downed it in one long gulp. Only after he had crushed the now-empty can in his paw did he realize that it was caffeine-free.
“Christ, woman, what’s the point?”
He paused, feeling something shift, even as he spoke her name.
“Valere? Wren?”
Silence, not unexpected, answered him.
If he really needed to, he could reach her; they had shared enough of a connection the times she had grounded in him that he could find her, anywhere, if need be. He considered it, then shook his head. Probably his imagination, that shift. She should be well into the job by now, whatever it was. She’d only spent a day preparing for it, so it wasn’t a big deal. There was no need to be concerned. And if she ran into any real trouble outside that, she could handle herself. There was no need for him to worry.
That decided and put to rest, there was no reason at all for the sound of a high-pitched buzzer blasting through the apartment to send him a foot straight into the air.
“What the hell?”
The intercom. That’s all it was. Sergei had gotten it fixed, but they never used it: if anyone wanted in, they could ping, or climb up the fire escape, the way he did.
Except Wren wasn’t here, and Bonnie’d gone to work, so nobody was around to hear a ping, you idiot, he told himself, going to the door. Which meant that whoever was out there knew it was just him in the apartment, and didn’t feel like climbing the fire escape to gain access.
“All right, all right, hold your horses, I’m coming,” he grumbled, trying to remember where the intercom controls were.
“Right. There you are.” Right by the front door, which made sense. Two buttons to talk and listen, and one to unlock the building’s front door.
Not thinking, he hit the buzzer to let them in.
It took Wren another ten minutes to work up the energy to get back up the stairs from the tunnel. The stage was still empty when she emerged through the door, but a spotlight was fixed on the sofa that made up the main of the set, and there were sounds to indicate that the crew was hard at work behind the scenes. Wren hunched her shoulders and slid into the shadows.
The lobby was now humming with soft instrumental music, and there were several someones now moving around in the box office. Wren left by the same door she had come in, without notice. She didn’t even have to think about not being seen: she wasn’t. It was all automatic. From her breathing to her thoughts, the entire system was running without conscious direction.
Out on the street, in the daylight, the wreck of her leather jacket was more apparent. Wren considered, briefly, braving mass transit and the chances of something jostling her, or making a comment, and decided not to risk it. Her nerve endings were twitching, and she wasn’t sure what might happen if someone got in her face.
Walking though the crowds back to Eighth Avenue, she was just another New Yorker not making eye contact. A cab came along when she stepped into the street and raised her hand, with a driver who didn’t even notice the smell and didn’t want to talk. You took the miracles where and when you got them.
She had just enough cash on her to pay the driver off, and staggered up the steps to her apartment. She made it to the third landing, and had to stop out of sheer exhaustion.
“Wren?”
“Bonnie.” Wren rested her head against the wall. The sense of being an automaton was starting to wear off, and she waited for the pain to come back, but it didn’t. She still felt numb, blank.
Shocky, part of her mind diagnosed. Get upstairs, eat something. Take a hot shower. You’ll feel better.
The other lonejack in the building had come out of her apartment—based on the white plastic bag in her hand, to make a garbage drop—and was regarding her with concern. She was wearing a black short-sleeved T-shirt with a pink kitten on it, and black cargo pants with heavy black boots underneath, and had a new haircut, something cutely pixielike that made the newly white-blond strands curl around her chin