Laura Gilman - Hard Magic

I knocked again, and then tried the door handle, fully expecting it to be locked.

It wasn’t.

My current swirled once, deep inside me, then went still. I could Translocate out of here now, if I wanted to. I could yelp for J, ask his opinion. I could …

I pushed the door open and stepped inside, hearing at least one person get up and move behind me. Nice to know someone had my back. I was betting on it being Pietr.

The door opened up into a larger room, done up like your basic office—beige carpeting and walls painted to match—and furnished with a large wooden desk with a leather chair behind it, two upholstered visitors’ chairs, a bunch of framed inspirational-looking prints on the walls, and basic white blinds on the windows, two of them, on the far wall. There was one sickly looking plant I immediately wanted to rescue, and a couple of photos on the desk, facing away from us, but not much personality otherwise.

The body sprawled facedown on the floor next to the desk didn’t contribute much to the room’s decor, either.

“Holy shit.” The words came from my throat the moment they hit my brain. Maybe not the most articulate of reactions, and I don’t have much of a filter, sometimes, but … hello? Dead body. A little freaked-out. I think I could be forgiven.

Sharon looked over my shoulder to see what I was reacting to, and then slid past me while I was still standing there, trying to take it all in. She knelt by the guy with careful precision and lifted his wrist, I guess to try for a pulse. I almost snorted. Not much point; even from the doorway I could tell he was dead. You didn’t lie facedown that way if you were just sleeping, not even if you’d passed out. Trust me, I’ve seen a lot of people passed out.

“Holy shit,” I said again.

There was a dead body in the office. We’d been sitting there, just talking, drinking coffee, and there had been a dead body in there all that time.

“I guess the interviews are canceled?” a voice said in my ear, and I dug an elbow into Nick’s side. Not that it wasn’t funny, in a sick way, but it didn’t really seem … respectful. Or something, I don’t know.

Did I mention the freaked-out part? Dead body. There. My current was very still, deep inside me, and I stirred it just to reassure myself that it hadn’t suddenly disappeared. I didn’t carry a lot of mojo around with me—why would I?—but touching it was like having a blankie or a stuffed bear; the need for comfort was a natural human instinct. I’d place even odds everyone else in the room was doing exactly the same thing. Like checking for your wallet after someone else’s been robbed: maybe stupid, but almost impossible to stop yourself.

Nifty moved past us, too, nowhere near as smoothly or gently as Sharon, and that made me think maybe we should get out of the way—or at least stop standing in the doorway before someone decided to go through us, one way or the other. I didn’t really want to get closer to the body, but the only other alternative was to go back into the waiting room, and I didn’t think that would look good.

Why I cared what looked good in front of people I’d just met and wasn’t sure I liked and was probably going to be competing for a job against was left unanswered.

“There’s no blood,” Pietr said, and I jumped. Despite thinking he was the first one behind me, I hadn’t seen him until he spoke. He’d somehow faded into the blah-colored walls of the office like some kind of two-legged chameleon. How a good-looking guy can disappear from my awareness … I guess it showed how freaked-out I was.

“Wha?” My voice came back with a croak, and I cleared my throat and tried again. “What?”

“On the carpet. There’s no blood.”

I forced myself to ignore the fact that the body was a body, and looked again, starting with the torso—I didn’t want to look at the face, not yet—and moving over the probable track he’d taken to land there. Pietr was right. No blood, no signs of violence, spilled drink or food on the desk—no sign whatsoever of what had happened.

By now, all of us had moved through the doorway and into the room, although Nick and I were still hanging back. I felt I should be doing something, but I didn’t know what, so I just stood there and watched.

Sharon and Nifty were turning the body over, gently, like it was going to matter to the guy now. I kept cataloging details, focusing on that so I didn’t have to really see what they were doing, in case blood suddenly spurted or something. Clothing. The guy had on a nice suit, gray pinstripe, that looked more expensive than the office would suggest. He was also missing his shoes, gray dress socks visible as they turned him. That was weird. A head of dark hair, thick and curly, and I couldn’t tell in this light if he was going gray or not. I looked, finally, but couldn’t see much of his face, because Nifty was blocking the view. I was kind of relieved, actually. A face would make it—him—real. A real dead body.

“Should we be moving the body?” I asked. “Aren’t the cops going to want it to be left alone, for investigation?”

“You going to call the cops?” Pietr sounded horrified by the idea. I stopped. Wasn’t I? Weren’t we? Wasn’t that what you were supposed to do if you found a guy dead? I had no idea what the protocol was for this kind of thing. J would know. I reached out, instinctively, to ping him and then stopped. He’d hear “dead body” and freak, and yank me home, and that wouldn’t solve anything.

“I … “

“Not me,” Pietr said firmly. “Natural-born non involver, that’s me. I say we back out and pretend we never saw anything.” He talked scared, but he didn’t move, and his gaze was sweeping the room to make sure he didn’t miss something. He might not like cops, but he wasn’t scared. Far from it.

“I guess we should call someone,” Sharon said, but she sounded weirdly reluctant. Not scared or even unnerved, but reluctant, like a dog that didn’t want to give up a bone. “The guy’s definitely dead. No visible wounds, no spilled blood, but there’s no pulse, no lung movement.” She sounded as if she’d memorized a medical handbook on how to tell someone was dead. For all I knew, she had.

Nifty had a small mirror in his hand, holding it over the DB’s face. He flipped it shut, like a compact, and put it back in his jacket pocket. Wow. I hadn’t known anyone actually did that anymore, checking for breath. Did it really work? The thought distracted me for a moment, then I came slamming back. How had the guy died? How long had he been dead? Had it been while we were sitting there, and if so, oh shit, could we have done anything to save him?

That thought made me feel vaguely ill.

“I think he had a heart attack,” Sharon said, although her voice was, for the first time, lacking what I’d already assumed was a customary take-charge sharpness. “Totally natural, probably instantaneous. No sign of any kind of external violence.”

My throat closed up at her words, and I had to force myself to breathe normally, shards of my dream coming back like an acid flashback. External violence. Murder? I hadn’t even thought …

Nifty looked as confused as I felt. “We just found him here like this. Natural reaction would be to call the paramedics first, even if he is dead, and let them deal with the cops. Right? So why not call the cops, too? What if they have questions for us?”

Sharon looked at him as though he’d just suggested she take up pole dancing. “You think the five of us, here in an unmarked office, with no reason to be here except a mysterious phone message, and a dead body just happens to be in the other office, aren’t going to become the immediate persons of interest to the cops, no matter how he died? You think they’re going to believe how we all ended up here on the basis of some strange phone message from god knows who, for an unspecified interview for an unnamed, unknown company none of us sent a résumé to? I don’t know about you, but I don’t need that shit in my life.”