Laura Gilman - Staying Dead

“You shouldn’t have come.”

“Max. I want to help you.” The Wren-self in the memory was years younger, her hair longer, tied into a braid halfway down her back. Sergei in the distance. Too far away. Far enough away to be safe.

“I’m already damned, girl. Didn’t you learn anything?”

His eyes had still been sane, then. Thirty seconds later, he had tried to kill her.

Wren stopped just shy of the border of grass, and sighed again. Then sneezed, her sinuses reacting to the overabundance of green growing things.

“Great. He couldn’t have holed up in a concrete warehouse somewhere? Max!”

Approach protocol thus satisfied, she waited, shifting her weight from one sneaker to the other, wiping her palms on denim-clad thighs.

“Max, you shit, I just want to talk to you!”

There was no answer. She hadn’t been expecting any, but it would have been nice to get a surprise. Wren was tempted to reach out, to try and feel for the currents she knew were floating around the house, but she didn’t. Bad manners, and dumb besides. This was her last stop of the day, and she was tired, short-tempered, and really not looking forward to this at all.

“Max!” A pause. “You mangy bastard, it’s Wren!”

A harsh bark of laughter right in her ear startled her, but she schooled her body, refusing to let it jump. Sound waves were easy to manipulate. A cheap trick.

“Come in then, you brat. Before I forget you’re out there.”

That had been easier than she expected. Suspicious, she stepped onto the grass, watching as the blades bent out of her way, creating a path directly to the porch steps.

Far too easy. She had a bad feeling about this.

The inside of the house was actually quite comfortable, if you liked extreme lo-tech living. The front door opened onto a large room, encompassing the entire front of the house. A fireplace took up all of the far wall, and bookshelves covered much of the other three walls. No television, no computer, no phone in sight. Just books and the occasional piece of what might have been artwork. Not that she had anything against books, but there was only so long you could live in someone else’s head. Wren didn’t trust anyone who didn’t get out and do for themselves.

Not that she trusted The Alchemist worth a damn to begin with. Not anymore. She learned slow, but she did learn. But this wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you could do over the phone. Assuming he had access somewhere, somehow, to one. And that it didn’t go snap-crackle-pop the moment he touched it. Wizzarts were even more prone to short-circuiting electronics than your average Talent, because they didn’t think to be careful.

Some would say that they didn’t think at all.

There was no sound at all in the house, not even the hum-and-whir of appliances somewhere, or the clink-clink of water draining through pipes. It made Wren nervous, that absence of sound. So what if she’d grown up in the ’burbs, back when you might still see deer or fox or occasionally a bear in your backyard; she was too much a city girl now to feel comfortable without the endless background accompaniment of screeching brakes, sirens and horns.

Even the damn crickets outside had been better than this. Silence wasn’t a thing; it was the absence of a thing, of noise. And her mind always wanted to know what had swallowed the noise, how, and when was it coming for her.

To distract herself from that thought, she looked around again. Two overstuffed sofas and a leather reclining chair were matched with sturdy wooden tables, obviously handmade. The plaid upholstery was worn and comfortable-looking, and the floor was wood, scarred with years of use, and covered with colorful cloth rugs scattered with more concern for warmth than style. A large dog of dubious parentage lay on one of the sofas. It lifted its head when she came in, and contemplated her with brown eyes that didn’t look as though they had been surprised by anything in the past decade, or excited about anything in twice that time.

“Hi there,” she said. The narrow tail thumped once and then lay still, as though that much effort had exhausted it. “Let me guess—Dog, right?”

“Don’t see any reason to change a perfectly workable name,” the voice said from off to her left. “I’m the man, he’s the dog, and we both know our places.”

“And his, obviously, is on the sofa.”

Max let out a snort as he came completely into her line of sight. He was wearing an old, worn blue cotton sweater and khaki safari-style shorts that showed off knobby knees, red-banded tube socks sagging around his ankles. “That one’s his, this one’s mine. We stay out of each other’s way. Which is more than I can say for you. Didn’t my throwing you off a cliff teach you anything? Why you bothering me again?”

Wren hadn’t seen Max in almost five years. But for a wizzart, that was crowding.

“Your name came up in very uncasual conversation,” she said, sitting down in the chair, but not relaxing into it. Max seemed reasonably rational right now, but that didn’t mean a damn thing. She actually had learned a great deal from going off that cliff, most of which involved the fact that she couldn’t fly. She wasn’t eager to relearn that particular lesson.

“Whoever it was, they deserved killing.” He sat down on his sofa and put his feet up on a battered wooden table. His socks were filthy, dirt and grass stains worn into the weave of the fabric, but they somehow managed not to stink.

“No killing,” she said. “Not yet, anyway.”

“You bring any chewing gum? I could use a spot of chewing gum. So if they’re not dead, what’s the hassle? And if they are dead, what’s the hassle anyway?” He held his hands out in front of him, as though about to clasp them in prayer, and spread his fingers as wide as they could go, staring intently at the space between his palms. The pressure in the room increased, fed by the energies the old man was bouncing throughout his system like some kind of invisible pinball game.

Wren swallowed a third, much heavier sigh. Wizzarts.

“Max. Focus.”

“I’m listening,” he said, cranky as an old bear with arthritis. “Get on with it before I decide you might make good fertilizer for the grass.”

He was making an effort for her. That was nice to see. Wren organized her thoughts quickly, compiling and discarding arguments and appeals. Finally, feeling the pressure of his current-games pushing at her eardrums, almost to the point of pain, she went for broke.

“Why did you threaten to kill Oliver Frants?”

The moment the words were out of her mouth, she knew that she had made a mistake. The question was too vague, too loosely-worded. He could answer her without telling a damn thing, whatever obligation or guilt or connection he felt satisfied, and she’d be out on her ear before she got another chance.

“Man’s a waste of piss.”

And that was it, the sum and total of his elaboration. Typical, she thought in disgust. A wizzart didn’t need to have a reason to do something. They thought it, they did it. For that quirk alone Wren could have written Max off the suspect list—this kind of indirect assault on the client required planning, thought—some kind of long-term intent behind it. And nobody in their right mind would have hired a wizzart to do a job like this—there was too much risk that the wizzart would get bored, and deposit the stone in the middle of the local police chief’s bedroom, just because.

The problem was, a wizzart simply didn’t have anything left over after the magic. Their entire existence was dedicated towards channeling the energies, feeling them as completely as possible, every cell turned towards the goal of becoming the perfect conductor. And that included their brain cells.