Laura Gilman - Soul of Fire

She flipped open the cover and thumbed through a few pages as she walked: it was an agenda of the meeting, complete with index and footnotes. Jan wasn’t sure if she should laugh or cry. Who knew partisan movements had perfect-bound agendas?

Elsa, she decided. Elsa was probably someone’s P.A., when she wasn’t trying to save the world. Someone who didn’t care that she looked like a rock, only that she rocked on the details.

Carrying the notebook, Jan made a quick pit stop in the bathroom—like at a concert, you went when you saw it empty in a place this crowded—and then paused in the middle of the main room, not sure what she was going to do now. Maybe go back to her desk and stare at the report, doodle useless notes on it. Or go over the notes her own team had made about how the preter court could be connecting to the internet from their realm, land, world, whatever. Maybe she could remember something else from going through the portal, not once but twice. That was the key to figuring out how the portals were being opened, and they just didn’t have enough information.

Martin had given them everything he could, but Tyler...Tyler’s memory of the portal, going through not twice but six times, was too jumbled to be useful, too tied up in his need for and his fears of Stjerne, the preter bitch who had taken him, screwed with him.

So that left her as the useful human viewpoint, trying to connect the magic with the science; only, she didn’t know how.

Jan looked at AJ’s report again and closed her eyes, rubbing the bridge of her nose. The headache was back with a vengeance.

Science and magic. That was why Laurie had joined their group. Kit and Glory were programmers, and good ones, but Laurie had a background in science, although it was chemistry, not physics. And that was what it had to be: some kind of weird physics thing, because the one thing that Jan knew, without a doubt beyond the fact that shape-shifters and elves and gnomes and everything else were real, was that the place they had been, the preter’s realm, was nowhere in this universe.

Every time she lay down, in the instant before sleep claimed her, she could see the massive trees bearing an even more massive serpent, the troll-bridge trying to kill them, the bright, sunless sky overhead, and she knew.

“Jan.” A soft voice called to her. Jan opened her eyes and turned, heading not for her desk but the small square of hassocks set in front of the fireplace at the far end of the main room. For once, there was only one person seated there, tech diagrams fanned out under one hand and a red marker in the other. The jiniri raised a hand without the marker and curled her fingers to indicate that, yes, she did want the human to join her.

Galilia was part of her team, not well-versed in tech or science but the only one who kept up with actual developments, who had friends in the scientific world. More, she was able to make intuitive leaps that made them feel maybe they were getting somewhere. Plus, she had a wicked sense of humor, Jan had discovered, and no hesitation about including a human in the conversation. Nobody here had been rude to her—they wouldn’t dare—but Gali was one of the few Jan could consider an actual friend.

“Look what I found,” the jiniri said, indicating the wide-mouthed bowl on the hassock next to her.

“Found? No, I don’t even want to know where,” Jan said, sinking onto the upholstered stool and reaching over with a sigh. Not even the world’s most amazing handcrafted truffles could make things right, could stop the pressing of time, but M&M’s never hurt.

“You were in AJ’s meeting?” the super asked, going back to studying her work, but her head tilted in such a way as to indicate that she was still listening.

“Called in for the news, yeah. Not that it helps any, really. Knowing where she was doesn’t tell us where she is. And unless one of you suddenly manifests some ability to track...?”

Gali looked up, smirking. “With some of the oversize shnozzes around here, you’d think someone could, right? But no. And if there was ever magic that could do it, we lost it long ago.” She took another handful of M&M’s and sorted through them with a double-jointed thumb, dropping the brown ones back into the bowl.

“We’ve lost a lot of magic over time. Maybe we can still do it and we just don’t know how, or...I wonder if that’s part of the problem, that we dropped a barrier, some kind of protective shield, and they’re coming in because of that.”

“Huh.” Jan considered that, the report resting on her lap while she took another handful of M&M’s as well, crunching them between her teeth more for the satisfaction of hearing things crunch than for the sugar rush. “Any way to know?”

“No. Not unless the Huntsman or someone who’s been around forever knows, and if they did, they’d have said something already, right?”

“I guess.” She’d heard about the Huntsman from Martin, one of the stories he’d told while they were hunting for Tyler. He was a human who had gotten tangled in supernatural affairs so long ago he was practically one of them now.

She wondered briefly if she’d end up like that, she and Tyler. Probably not. She hoped not.

“So, I’ve been wondering. If they’re the Unseelie over there, does this make the one here the Seelie Court, then? Or are they both Unseelie and we’re the Seelie? You, I mean, not me.”

Gali put down her marker and gave her an arch look. “Defaulting to Celtic mythology, are you? Tsk. Lazy human.”

“All right, then, tell me what to call them, and I will. We’re in the middle of deepest, whitest Connecticut with, what, twenty different species, including my own, fighting off one invader, and you’re worried about me being politically incorrect?” Jan normally tried to be more sensitive to cultural appropriation and assumptions, but there was a time and a place, and four days before all hell broke through was not the time or the place, in her opinion.

Gali acknowledged the point, her delicate face scrunching in mock hard thought. “Exiled? Except that usually implies involuntary, and this crazy came here on purpose.... Immigrant Court? The Melting Pot? I have no idea. Crazy Court.” The jiniri quickly bored of the topic, once she’d yanked Jan’s chain. “Since it has no bearing at all on what we’re doing, can we—”

“Queen’s Court,” Jan decided. “Because it’s all about her.”

“Great. Glad that’s decided.” The jiniri put her pen down again and stared at the human, long enough that Jan started to get slightly...not nervous, exactly, but apprehensive. Supers were like cats: if they were staring at you, they were either going to attack or piss on your pillow. Whatever Gali was about to say, this was the reason—not candy—she had called Jan over.

“What?”

“Jan, listen to me. You know we think the world of you—” Jan snorted at that, knowing full well that most supers had a dismal opinion of humans, herself not excepted, but Galilia talked right over her. “All right, I do. I consider you a teammate, and a good one. But it’s obvious to everyone here that you’re wasted, stuck babysitting us. Gloriana and the others are who we need, and you brought them to us, and now you should—”

“Go away?” Jan tried not to be bitter. For all that Martin had impossible faith in her cleverness, she knew as well as anyone—better, probably—that she was outclassed by the brains on her team, her skills barely keeping up with what was needed to figure out how the preters were accessing the internet, despite her own experiences on the other side. She had been Quality Assurance, mostly, on her job. She could test the hell out of things and fix what she broke, but the intuitive leaps that Glory and Galilia and Beth were making, the technical know-how that Kit and Laurie brought... She didn’t need someone else telling her she was useless.