Hard Magic. Laura Anne Gilman
and yet he kept up with me pretty well. I wonder sometimes what crimes he committed as a young’un, that he was the one to be landed with me.
Far as I could tell, his only mistake had involved being in the wrong place at the right time. Zaki had enough sense to know he wasn’t a strong enough Talent, and didn’t have enough patience to mentor me, but his first choice was a disaster waiting to happen, and even as a kid I knew that the moment he introduced us. The guy was … well, he wouldn’t have sold me to pay off his gambling debts, but I wouldn’t have learned a whole lot, either.
The moment was still crystal-sharp in my memory: Zaki’s worried presence, hovering; Billy’s pleasure at being asked to mentor someone for the first time in his life; the smell of a freshly washed carpet that didn’t hide the years of wear and tear …
With an amazing lack of tact that still dogs me, I’d used my untrained, just-developing current to yelp for help. That had attracted the attention of a passerby on the street below, who—despite having already done his time as a mentor, and being way out of our league—came up the stairs, took one look, and took on the job.
Zaki had been lonejack, part of the officially unofficial, intentionally unorganized population of Talent. J was Council—the epitome of structural organization. Despite that, they both got along pretty well, I guess because of me. I wasn’t the only lonejack kid mentored by a Council member, but I was the only one we knew of who stayed at least nominally a lonejack.
“Maybe if you’d crossed the river, you’d have had a job offer waiting for you when you graduated,” I grumbled. “Why do you insist on thinking that nepotism’s a dirty word?”
Truth was, I didn’t think of myself as either one group or the other, and maybe that was part of the problem. Born to one magical community, raised in another, Latina by birth and European by training, female imprinted on a—oh god, use the word—metrosexual male … Issues? I probably should have subscriptions at this point.
My hair’s short enough that it doesn’t take long to wash, and by the time I got out of the bathroom, toweled off, and wrapped in one of the complimentary bathrobes, the strands were almost dry. I’m a natural honey-blonde, thanks to my unknown and long-gone mother, but it hasn’t been that shade since I was fourteen—I was currently sporting a dark red dye job that I had thought would look more office-appropriate. So much for that thought doing me any good. Maybe I’d go back to purple, and the hell with it.
Contemplating an interviewer’s reaction to that, I walked to the bedroom, and saw that the light on the phone was blinking. Right, the call I’d missed. Whoever called, they’d left me a message.
My heart did a little scatter-jump, and my inner current flared in anticipation, making me instinctively take a step away from the phone, rather than toward it. Normally, like I said, my current’s cold and calm, especially compared to most of my peers, but I’d been out of sorts recently, and wasn’t quite sure what might happen. Bad form to short out your only means of communicating with potential employers. Plus, the hotel would be pissed, and complain to J.
Once I felt my current settle back down, I let myself look at the blinking light again. You could call first thing in the morning with bad news. Okay. You didn’t call and leave a message with bad news, did you? I didn’t know. Maybe. Just because everyone seemed eager to tell me no to my face didn’t mean that was the only way to do it.
All right, this was me, keeping calm. Hitting the replay button. Stepping back, out of—hopefully—accidental current-splash range …
“This message is for Bonita Torres. Two o’clock tomorrow afternoon.” The speaker gave an address that I didn’t recognize, not that I knew damn-all about New York City, once you get past the basic tourist spots. “Take the 1 train to 125. Be on time.”
No name, no indication of where they got my name or number, just that message, in a deep male voice.
An interesting voice, that. Not radio-announcer smooth, but … interesting.
Someone smart would have deleted the message. Someone with actual prospects would have laughed and said no way.
I’ve always been a sucker for interesting.
two
One of the first things J taught me was, before I decided on anything with repercussions, to step back and consider that decision from every possible angle. It only took a few minutes of thought, and sanity reasserted itself. The voice-mail message was weird, but intriguing. Or maybe it was intriguing because it was weird. Did that make it a good idea? No. In fact, it probably made it a very bad idea.
J said I should consider, and think sanely. He didn’t say anything about listening to that sane voice, and very bad ideas were often a lot of fun.
The guy hadn’t left a phone number for me to call back and say I’d be there, though. Oh god, and if this was from one of the résumés I’d sent out, I’d look a proper idiot calling now to follow up, if I’d already gotten an interview.
I picked up the phone and was about to dial the callback code when I realized that, idiot, the call had to have come through the hotel switchboard. So I dialed 0 for the front desk, instead.
“Hi. This is room 328? I just had a call come in, and they didn’t leave a name or number to reach them at, I don’t suppose …?”
No, the woman at the front desk told me regretfully, they couldn’t. I didn’t know if it was a technological thing or a legal thing, and I didn’t bother to ask. The reason didn’t make a difference. I hung up the phone, still clueless, and stared at the paper with the details written on it, on top of the list of names and places I was supposed to call back. Handwriting was supposed to tell you about a person, right? My handwriting’s like J’s—squared and solid, and easy to read. I’d have made a crappy doctor.
Maybe it was one of these places I’d already submitted my résumé to. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was through a contact of J’s who had thought my mentor would tell me to expect the call. That didn’t sound right—-J would never forget to tell me something like that—but it was a possibility. Maybe it was a joke, a prank, or a weird cold-call solicitation. I had no idea, and no way of finding out—except for showing up.
Tomorrow afternoon. All right. That gave me the rest of the day to follow up on my other résumés, and still get out and wander around the city before dinner with J. And then tomorrow … would bring whatever tomorrow would bring. Maybe J would have some idea what all this was about. I was pretty sure he’d have an opinion, at least.
The carrot of playtime in Manhattan dangling in front of me, I made short work of the remaining names on my list. Not that it took much; two résumés were still “under consideration”; two were thanks-no-thanks; at one place the HR person was out and would get back to me at some point before the next millennium, maybe; and one place, hurrah, they wanted to see me again on Friday!
The fact that this was Monday didn’t fill me with huge levels of optimism, since if I was a hot prospect they’d get me in quick, right? But it was the best offer I’d gotten so far, so I thanked the nice guy on the phone, confirmed the time and place, and hung up the phone not quite as terminally depressed as I’d been earlier. Also, I’d determined that the mysterious phone call hadn’t come from any of these places, so that option was dealt with.
Was I going to show up tomorrow? I honestly didn’t know.
But for now, I had the afternoon to myself. I threw on a pair of black pants and a hot-pink T-shirt and my boots, left my stress at the door, and made my escape.
Johnny, the twenty-seven-year-old engineering student from Tehran, was doorman today. He wished me a nice day and held the large glass door open, and I hit the sidewalk like a greyhound sighting a rabbit.
I grew up in Boston, went to school outside the city, had been to Rome and Paris and London and Dubai and Tokyo and a dozen other major cities with J dragging me around. All that travel gave me a reasonable sense of sophistication, but drop me