“I’ll worry about Ian,” Venec said, his voice more of a growl than usual, reminding me why we called him Big Dog, other than the obvious PUPI pun. “You focus on what we pay you for. Two jobs. First’s a break-in, up in Fieldston. Sharon, you and Nick take that one.” He slid a plain brown folder across the table, and Sharon took it.
Ah, paperwork. Magic – current, in the modern parlance – runs in every human, but only a very small percentage of humans can actually manipulate it. They – we – are called Talent, and the ones who can’t use it are, rather condescendingly, called Nulls. Magic makes a lot of things easier, yeah. One of the prices we pay for Talent, though, is that we don’t interact well with things that run on current’s kissing cousin, electricity. You find a Talent who carries a cell phone or a PDA, and doesn’t have to replace it every other month, and I’ll show you a Talent who can’t use current worth a damn.
Okay, unfair. But even those of us who don’t use current every day found anything more sophisticated than a debit card got fritzed pretty fast. I hadn’t been able to carry an MP3 player since I was fourteen.
I’ve spent most of my life in openly Talented society, but some days I watch people using netbooks or smartphones, while we have to juggle paper and pen and memory, and I wonder if we really got the better part of the deal, after all.
“Where the hell is Fieldston?” Sharon asked, scanning the paperwork. “I swear, if we have to lug out to Long Island again... ”
“End of the 1 line, up in the Bronx,” Nifty told her, capping the one-upmanship for the moment.
“Oh. Okay.” She wasn’t happy about heading all the way out there, but apparently so long as it didn’t involve having to leave the city, she could deal with it. Shar was our only born-and-bred New Yorker – I didn’t count, having spent most of my teens in Boston – and sometimes that just shone through.
“Client’s a Null, he owns a house up there, it got tossed last night and he thinks it was a Retriever. No idea why he thinks that, but if it is... ”
I couldn’t stop myself from interrupting. “Venec, when was the last time someone actually pinned anything on an active Retriever?”
Retrievers were the cat burglars of the Cosa Nostradamus, Talent who naturally went invisible, like Pietr, only they controlled it, used it to get away with everything short of murder. If this guy’d been burgled by a Retriever, odds were that even if we could prove it, nobody would ever get the stuff back.
Those dark, irritated eyes glared at me, but I didn’t feel any actual irritation coming off him, just annoyance. “If the client thinks it was a Retriever, then that’s his call. You will determine the facts and find out who is responsible. And, if possible, get back the stolen items. Yeah,” he said when Sharon would have protested, “I know, you’re not the lost-and-found. If this guy did get hit by a Retriever, think about the egoboo, to hit back.”
There was that.
“Bonnie, you and Pietr get a floater on the East Side, off 14th.”
“Oh, maaaaaaan,” Pietr said, in an uncanny imitation of Nick, while I took the file with a grimace. Yeah, Venec was still pissed about the blue hair-dye job.
Lou and Nifty, for a change, looked relieved to be stuck in the office. Nobody wanted a floater. Ever.
Everyone else filtered out, but I stayed in my chair, looking at the folder.
“You guys make it look so easy.”
I twisted in my chair and looked at Lou, who had left, and then come back, standing in the doorway. “What?”
“Easy.” She made a gesture with one hand at some vague thing in front of her. “I know it’s not – god, how I know – but you never seem to hesitate. Stosser gives you an assignment, you absorb it, and head out. You call on your current, and you just assume that the current will do what you want. And it does.”
“If you’re still worrying about the incident with the piskies, they do that to everyone, first case... ” I started to say, but she waved me off. That wasn’t it.
I waited. That was the first thing Venec had taught us: if you wait quietly long enough, people will tell you what you need to know.
“You’re what, twenty-four?” She made it sound like a disease.
“Yeah.” Twenty-three and a half, actually, but I didn’t think correcting her was going to make things better.
Lou stared at the apple in her other hand like she couldn’t remember picking it up, then shook her head and looked back at me. She had a serious face to start, and the look in her eyes now, a sort of despairing resignation, just deepened that impression. “I’m a decade older than you. I had solid training, good training. I’m high-res enough to hold my own. And I’m smart enough to understand how everything works, break it down, and make it better.”
All of that was true, and she knew it and she knew I knew it, so I just kept my mouth shut and waited for her to get to her point. But she didn’t. She just stood there, that apple in her hand, one bite taken out of it like Snow White’s last dinner.
I twisted back and stared at the paperwork in front of me, wanting nothing more than to pack up and head out to the floater, get it over with, if Lou wasn’t going to say anything more. But she stood there, and the silence drew out and got uncomfortable until the weight of social responsibility as hammered into me by J was like a third person in the room.
“You wouldn’t be on the team if you weren’t good,” I said, hoping that would be enough.
“I know that.”
“And you’ll learn the control needed to – ”
Her snort interrupted me, and I was thankful. I could lie reasonably well, but I hated doing it. Honestly, though, I had no idea what she wanted me to say, or why she hadn’t gone to Sharon, instead. They were closer in age, had more in common... Why me?
“I’m never going to get it. Not out there, during an open case, with all that pressure. It’s just... like saying Pietr’s suddenly going to stop ghosting.”
She was probably right. Pietr hated the fact that he couldn’t control the way he faded from sight under stress, even though it was probably going to save his life some day.
“I just... I keep wondering why I can’t do it, what’s wrong with me... and then I wonder what else is wrong with me, what am I missing, and what happens if we discover that thing during a case? What happens if we screw up because I can’t handle something in the field, or one of you gets hurt, or... ” She stopped, and took a bite out of the apple, teeth crunching into the flesh with maybe a little too much violence.
I was flailing, trying to figure out what she needed to hear. “That’s why we work together. So if one of us misses something, the other’s there as backup. We all make mistakes. Venec will be happy to remind you of that fact, if you’d like.”
Another snort. “You never doubt yourself, do you, Bonnie? Never once wonder if you’re not good enough, worry that you’ll do something so wrong there’s no recovering from it?”
“Of course I do. But everything short of death can be recovered from, and death kinda takes the worry out of the situation.” I hoped.
“Nice. I don’t think I was ever that cocky. Maybe that’s the problem.”
She didn’t mean to be cruel, but the words stung. I had a flash of J, years ago, sitting in his favorite chair in the library. The reading lamp was on, and Rupert, who had just been a brown-and-white mop of a puppy then, was sleeping at his feet. He had been gone for a few days, and I’d been happy to have him home, but he didn’t talk much and I’d come in to see what was up, if he maybe wanted dinner, or a drink. And in the light of the lamp, a pale umber glow against his skin, I’d seen the damp track of tears on his cheek.
Whatever he’d been doing, it hadn’t gone well.
“J?” I could have closed the door and left; he’d known I was there but he hadn’t acknowledged me, and so we could both pretend I hadn’t seen anything. But that wasn’t how our household worked.
“Not now, Bonnie,” my mentor had said, his voice a flat, gentle tone. “Right now I am not able to deal with anything beyond my own inabilities.”