Laura Gilman - Dragon Justice

One of the first things I’d checked. Talent kids tend to wander down slightly different rabbit holes, when they go missing. “Yeah.”

It might not mean anything, all these facts. Sometimes, even the most suspicious of circumstances turned out to be flutterby, unrelated and unconnected. But there was a thick, heavy feeling in my core and a tingling of my kenning, the sense that sometimes, often unpredictably, hinted at the future, that told me otherwise. A full eighty percent of this job was listening to the facts and sorting the evidence, and then fitting them together. Sometimes it took logic; sometimes it took a wild leap. More often, it took both.

“If it’s not the usual suspects, but the gossip points there…” I didn’t want to say the word, but I had to. “You think it’s the Silence, come back?”

For years, an organization called, ironically, the Silence had been spreading enough lies and rumors around the city, enough to nearly destroy the Cosa Nostradamus. We’d taken to the streets to fight them, one snowy night last year, and they’d finally disappeared from the scene a few months ago, their office building still sitting vacant. Wren Valere had been elbows-deep in what was going on, then. If they’d come back, Wren would have known. She would have told me, us. Right?

“If they were back, the Dynamic Duo would have let us know,” Danny said, echoing my thoughts. “Right?”

“Right.”

I sounded convinced, but there was a low note of doubt in my stomach to go with everything else. Wren Valere was my friend. A genuine hero, although she’d scoff at the thought. She was also a Retriever, and like Danny, she took discretion to an art form when needed. Discretion that, to me, could translate as withholding evidence. How far could we trust her to share information? Yeah, hero, friend, etc., but…

I couldn’t afford to be distracted by a maybewhatif. Useless dithering, Torres. Focus on the facts. “I’ll have Venec put a few feelers out, just in case.” Ben had friends in seriously low places, even for the Cosa, and if the Silence were back, those friends would be scurrying for their lives. “But for now, we focus on the girls and work our way out to their captors, not the other way around.”

“Right. Here.” He pulled a handful of sheets from the folders and shuffled them together. “Copies of all the known facts on my girls. Okay to copy yours?”

“Yeah, go ahead.” We’d hired Danny for side work before; Stosser and Venec trusted him. Besides, I’d already spilled the part I wasn’t supposed to say; wasn’t like his having hardcopy would change anything.

The copier machine was a tiny little thing, off in the corner of the room. Danny fed the sheets in, one at a time, while I grabbed one of the client chairs and draped myself into it.

Better to fess up now than get caught out later. But indirectly…

*boss?*

There was a slight lag in his response. Nothing that would have been noticeable with anyone else, but I’d become accustomed to Venec being just next to my thoughts at all times. Distance was a factor in pings; maybe it mattered here, too? If so, he wasn’t in the city anymore. Huh.

*what?*

*twist in the job Stosser gave me. taking Danny on. he has a case that might match it*

A sense of acknowledgment, acceptance, and being busy somewhere else. Ben was leaving the city. Yeah, moving… I concentrated a little. Southward.

*?*

*do your job, torres*

And then he was gone. Okay, fine. There was absolutely no reason for me to feel like I’d been punched in the stomach, right? He was the boss, and I was the pup, and we’d agreed that was where we were and he had no obligation to tell me where he was going, any more than I checked in with him, off-hours.

I’d never been jealous before in my entire life. Not even when J, my mentor, went out to visit his first student, now a lawyer out in California, and didn’t invite me to come along. I’d understood I shared J, and was okay with that. Not when lovers had moved on, or when a potential lover had chosen someone else. It just… I had never understood how you could resent someone spending time somewhere else, like only you had a claim on their life.

But I did now. And I didn’t like how tightly I hugged that feeling, as though it should give me comfort instead of pain.

“Okay, here.” Danny came back and handed over the originals. “You want to work this together or split up?”

Having something concrete to work on would keep Venec and his mysterious errand out of my mind. “Split up.” Plausible deniability was key: Danny could be pretty bullheaded, and Stosser had told me to go gentle. “We can work more contacts that way. If you find something…” I paused. Danny couldn’t ping me, and I didn’t carry a cell phone, for obvious reasons. I’d gotten really spoiled, working only with Talent.

Luckily, Danny was used to it. “If I find anything, I’ll call the office and they can ping you.”

“Yeah.” I paused, looking over the paperwork. My throat tightened at the black-and-white reproductions of those faces. Three girls, one of them only a few years younger than me, one of them still a baby. Missing for weeks now. “Danny.”

“I have to believe they’re alive,” he said, somehow knowing what I didn’t want to ask. “I couldn’t do this job otherwise. You do the same, Bonnie. Believe.”

I carried that with me, the belief in his voice, all the way back down to the street and the next stop along the gossip network. It didn’t help shake the feeling of an onrushing train that had started prickling up and down my arms the moment I picked up all three files, though.

Kenning. It wasn’t quite foresight or even precognition, nothing that precise or useful. But the weird shimmer of current let me know there was something building. Something that involved me. And it was rarely good.

* * *

On the train heading toward Philadelphia, Ben Venec felt a twinge of unease. Bonnie, he identified, and then frowned. No, not Bonnie. She was worried. The Merge and his own abilities told him that through their brief contact, but she was focused on the chase, whatever Ian had set her on earlier. It was something else prickling at him.

He touched the briefcase on the seat next to him, his unease making him need to confirm, physically, that it was there and safe. He didn’t have even a touch of precog, or Bonnie’s kenning, but his instincts were good, and something felt wrong, off. He just couldn’t figure out what.

He ran down the mental list of possibilities. Ian? No, he was accounted for. It wasn’t the pups themselves; when he’d left, the office was humming along at a mad but steady pace, and if anything had gone wrong, he would have heard the yelps. The job he was heading for? Unlikely. It was bog-standard, more a distraction than a challenge.

“All right. Apprehension noted and filed,” he said out loud, as though that would make whatever it was shut up. Much to his surprise, it did, a palpable sense of the unease backing off, like a cat settling back on its haunches to watch, rather than leap.

Interesting. Possibly it was his own nerves, reacting to…something. There were a limited number of things—and beings—that could cause that reaction. He considered the idea of another trickster imp in town, and dismissed it. This was more personal, more…direct.

“Aden, what are you up to?”

Ian’s little sister, Aden, had made it her personal mandate to shut PUPI down, to keep her precious Council from being held accountable for their actions. She had been banned from approaching them directly, after her earliest attempt got an innocent Null killed, but she hadn’t given up. Not by a long shot.

Not too long ago they—he and Ian—had been the focus of a Push, a current-driven emotion, intended to doubt themselves into making mistakes. With a touch of the Push himself, Ben had recognized it easily enough, but not before it had done some damage they couldn’t afford. Aden had been behind that, and while Ian said he had dealt with her…