Laura Gilman - Hard Magic

Leaving the hotel, the daytime doorman—an older Asian guy named Walter—wished me good luck, making him third after the two chambermaids in the hallway on my floor. I thanked him, too, not sure if I should feel good that they bothered, or depressed that everyone in the hotel seemed to know I was job-hunting. Still, the entire staff had been really nice to me, and it wasn’t like I was in a position to turn down good wishes.

The smart thing probably would have been to take a cab once I got cross-town, but the racket-clack of the subway was like a siren’s lure. They’re noisy, and usually overcrowded, but I could get a pretty current-buzz off the third rail without trying, and you see way more interesting people on mass transit. I’m all about the people-watching. Unfortunately, Tuesday at 1:30 p.m., heading uptown, seemed to be the dead time on the 1 train, and it was just me and an old guy reading a day-old newspaper, and two teenage girls in Catholic-school uniforms, whispering and giggling to themselves.

It took about twenty minutes to get uptown, with me obsessively checking the subway route map on the wall behind my seat at every station. Damn, I was going to be late …. I got off at what I hoped was the right stop, and left the guy to his paper, and the girls to their giggles. Places to go, people to impress!

The office—or whatever it was—didn’t exactly inspire confidence. The address was a mostly kept-up building off Amsterdam Avenue, seven stories high and nine windows across. Brick and gray stone: that looked like the norm in this neighborhood. We weren’t running with a high-income crowd, here. Still, I had seen and smelled worse, and the neighborhood looked pretty friendly—lots of bodegas and coffee shops, and the kids hanging around looked as if they’d stopped there to hang on the way home from school, not been there all day waiting for their parole officer to roll by.

And only one of them, a short kid with Day-Glo green hair, shouted out a comment to me, and yeah it was rude, but it wasn’t insulting, so I gave him a grin and told him to call me as soon as he could grow some facial hair, too. His friends hooted and shoved him hard enough to knock him off the stoop. Normal stuff.

I could work around here, yeah. Assuming this wasn’t just some recruiter’s office, or … Nerves surfaced again, and got shoved down. Come on, I chided myself, hoisting my bag more firmly over my shoulder, you faced off against a cave dragon when you were nineteen … how much more difficult could this be?

I wasn’t sure I wanted an answer to that, actually.

Pushing the appropriate intercom button in the foyer got me buzzed in through the lobby doors. There was no camera lens visible, so either they were really trusting, or they were using current to watch the door. I couldn’t sense anything, but that could just mean that it was subtle—meaning well-done. The office was on the top floor, just to the right as I came out of the elevator. From the hallway, it looked as though there were two office suites on each side. I went to the correct door, marked by a brass 7-C, and turned the handle.

Walking into the office itself was reassuring; the space was clean, well lit, and surprisingly large. It was also filled with people.

All right, four other people. Three guys and another woman, seated on what looked like almost-comfortable upholstered chairs. None of the usual waiting-room coffee tables filled with out-of-date magazines, thank god. In fact, no coffee table at all, although there was a coffee machine and a bunch of mugs on a counter against the far wall, along with what looked like a working sink and a mini fridge. Nobody else was drinking coffee, although one of the guys had an oversize travel mug with him.

I let a flutter of current rise, and it got one, two, three, four equally polite touches back in response. Everyone here was a Talent, nobody was masking, and nobody was going to make a fuss about it. The fact that there were other people there was both worrying—competition for the job—and comforting—it probably wasn’t a setup or sideways attack on J after all. But that left the question: what the hell was it? I had no idea what the percentage of Talent was to the entire human population, but even in New York it had to be single digits. This was either deliberate selection, or a massive coincidence.

Based on the backlash last night, I wasn’t counting on coincidence.

I lifted my hand in greeting. “Hi.”

“Hello.” The woman responded first, giving me a once-over that reminded me eerily of my old junior-high math teacher. Not that this woman was old or stern or anything, just … assessing, that was the word. Tall, blond, and cool, with curves that could probably stop a truck. I let my eyes linger, I admit it. “I’m Sharon. That’s Nick.” She pointed to the one with the travel mug, a dark-skinned moose of a guy who barely fit into his armchair. He nodded, his expression not changing from one of resigned boredom. If he hadn’t played football at some point, maybe even college level, I’d tear up my people-watching skills and eat them without sauce. So, was he muscle, or was there something in the brainpan, too?

“That’s Pietr.” She pointed that finger at the second guy in line, a slender guy in khakis and pale blue button-down shirt matched to a screamingly expensive tie, and with a profile that would make a classical sculpture cry in envy. He was almost pretty, with skin as pale as mine, but something about the way he held himself kept the impression in check; like a serpent—shiny, but not cuddly. He met my gaze evenly, his pale gray eyes possibly the sweetest things I’d seen in weeks, and a smile flickered and was gone. Oh, he was trouble, you could tell it right away. And not all good trouble, either.

“And that’s Nick, too.”

No problem telling them apart—if NickOne was a jock, then NickTwo was a nerd. Short and scrawny, brown hair and brown eyes, and totally unimpressive in the same kind of khakis Pietr was wearing, but a less expensive-looking shirt and tie. NickTwo was the kind of guy you’d either ignore … or pick first for your team. I didn’t know which yet, but I was suspecting the latter. That probably meant that NickOne had brains, too, because whatever this gig was, I was starting to get a feeling they weren’t hiring for sheer meat-power.

They were all dressed more formally than I was, but only Sharon looked like she actually belonged in an office, with her tailored blue skirt and suit jacket, and stylish, low-heeled pumps. She wasn’t wearing much makeup, or it was applied so well you couldn’t tell, and with simple gold jewelry on her fingers and in her ears, she could have just come from a meeting where she wasn’t serving the coffee. She was also, I guessed, older than the rest of us, by anywhere from five to ten years, so make her maybe thirty.

“I’m Bonnie. You guys all summoned by a nameless message on your answering machine?”

Four nods; obviously they’d exchanged more than names before I got there.

“Anyone know what this is all about?”

Four headshakes.

“Great.” Talkative bunch. “Anyone want some coffee?”

Nobody did. “All they have is skim milk,” NickTwo warned me, and I nodded. Fine by me, so long as it wasn’t powdered nondairy crap. I went to the counter and pulled out a mug, pouring a dose of black tarry stuff I wouldn’t feed a rat, and adding as much sugar and milk to it as I could, to try to make it palatable. Didn’t really help, but it was something to do.

Sharon went back to her newspaper, and NickOne stared into space, as if he was having some in-depth conversation with space aliens. That left NickTwo and Pietr as possible conversationalists. I sat on the only remaining chair, balanced my mug of coffee on my knee, and waited. Time passed. Finally, bored out of my skull, I turned to Pietr on my left. “So why are you here?”