Laura Gilman - Blood from Stone

“You’re sure? Of course you’re sure. Never mind. Damn. I’d hoped he was dead already.”

There was no love lost between her partner and Max. In fact, they pretty much loathed each other.

“He was acting pretty weird,” she continued, ignoring Sergei’s last comment.

There was a telling silence at the other end of the phone line, and Wren leaned against the open booth and grinned despite herself. “Weird even for wizzed,” she clarified.

“I don’t like this,” Sergei was saying, back in his office in the city. She pictured him, sitting behind his huge wooden desk, the one he wouldn’t let them have sex on, even though he got a glint in his eye every time she brought it up, surrounded by paperwork and expensive artwork, and the lovely hum of the city outside the gallery’s door.

“You and me both, partner,” she responded. “But I finished the job, and as soon as I drop off the package, I’ll be on my way home, away from whatever it was Max was so wound up about. Which should make him happy, for whatever values of happy he understands. I’m keeping low-profile until then.” She paused, wondering if she should ask, then plunged in. “How are you doing?”

There was a faint hesitation on the other end of the line. “I’m fine.”

Like hell he was. They had been partners too long for her not to pick up the signs. There was tension in his voice that had been there even before she dropped her little Max-shaped bombshell, and she could practically feel how tight he was holding the phone from her end of it. Something was up. Something had gotten him seriously wound. She made herself drop it, leave it alone, for now. Anything that made him that tense would probably make her unhappy, and getting a Talent upset while using the phone usually resulted in bad things for the phone. Current and electricity traveled along the same paths, and current trumped electricity every time.

“All right.” She started to say something else, feeling the urge again to dig a little around the topic, then shut her mouth with a snap. If there was anything seriously wrong, he would tell her. Or not. Wasn’t as though she could do anything about whatever it was from here, anyway. “I’ll see you tonight.”

She hung up the phone, but despite their mutual reassurances of all-rightitude, Wren still felt uneasy. It had to be Sergei affecting her. Job was almost done. Money was in the bank. She should feel calm and satisfied, not wound like a damned spring. Please let it be Sergei’s mood affecting me…

“Hey.”

The kid looked up from his seat on the curb, his entire face covered with chocolate ice cream, those blue eyes still totally wide and innocent. “You’re a mess. Go over to that water fountain and wash your face.”

“I don’t have a towel,” he protested.

“Use your sleeve.”

The thought seemed to astonish him. Or maybe it was the fact that an adult was giving him permission to do it. Wren didn’t know and honestly didn’t care. The hair on the back of her neck was flat, but she still had the sense of something hinky in the air, even now. This was where they were supposed to be, when they were supposed to be there—early, even. Everything should have been fine, and yet…

She trusted her instincts. She just didn’t know what to do with them, in this case.

Obeying her order, the kid walked across the street to the park, where there was a stone structure with three water fountains—one adult-sized, one kid-sized, and one down so low to the ground that Wren stared at it for a moment before realizing that it was for animals, operated by a paw-pedal on the ground.

Kid went to the kid-sized one, and seemed to be trying to puzzle it out, as though he had never used one before. Wren frowned. Okay, he was a little kid, and maybe not all that bright, but there was something seriously off about him. Almost as though he’d lived his entire life, if not in isolation then damn near close. Trusting a total stranger enough to come with her? Not knowing how to use a water fountain?

“Drop him off and walk away,” she told herself sternly. “Wondering about shit, getting involved, is never a good idea. You should have learned that, if nothing else, by now.”

Getting involved led to things like politics, and betrayals, and pitched battles where people—friends—died. Enough already. She had done enough. Back to the lonejack creed: self first, second and third, and the devil take the hindmost.

“Hey kid, get a move on!” she shouted. He turned his blond head, and as he did so a Frisbee came soaring out of the park, arching on a downward motion that, Wren realized, was going to collide directly with the kid’s head.

Oh hell. Visions of a concussion, a hospital trip, questions about parental authority and authorization…. Without thinking, she used just a thread of current to knock the projectile off course, but by the time her touch got there, the Frisbee had already been knocked down out of the air, landing at the kid’s feet.

Wren tensed. Someone else had used current on the disk to knock it away, she could feel it. Fuck. It might have been a Good Samaritan, looking out for a toddler. Or it could have been someone letting her know that she was under observation, for a range of possible reasons, only some of them positive. Until the kid was handed over, she was still on the job; she couldn’t afford to relax, or make any dangerous assumptions.

Wren looked around as inconspicuously as she could, trying to catch anyone who might be paying the kid—or her—unwanted attention. Mothers playing with their kids, a couple of teenagers shoving each other on the sidewalk, the kids who threw the Frisbee in the first place, coming to get their toy, an old man—or maybe a woman—sitting on a bench a block away. None of them gave off any kind of vibe, good or bad. She felt hamstrung, frustrated, blind in both eyes without current to inform her other senses. Damn Max and damn caution. She opened up, just a sliver of a slice of access.

The kid reached down to pick up the Frisbee, and as he did so the skin on her arms prickled, reacting to current still in the air, crackling around the rim of the toy.

The kid had done it. The kid was Talent.

Damn it, this sort of shit was supposed to be in the briefing!

Wren didn’t normally curse—much—but in her head she was running through every single rude and offensive word she knew, in three different languages, English, Spanish and Russian.

Goddamn briefing. Khrenoten briefing.

The briefing Sergei gave her before every job was based on a combination of the client’s own details and—assuming that the client either lied, was an idiot, or withheld “didn’t think it was important” information, all things that had proven true in the past—all the Intel Sergei himself had been able to dig up. Before Wren ever looked at a single blueprint or plotted a basic approach, she knew what she was dealing with.

So much for no damn magic in this job.

A target who was also a Talent—even if just a kid—should have been in the damn dossier. Not because it would have made the job more difficult, but because it would have made the entire damned thing that much easier! Talent generally meant a certain understanding of things, up to and including—as she had just seen—the ability to defend yourself when attacked. That was how most Talent discovered themselves at first, reacting in a way that they or their parents or their friends know wasn’t possible, and trying to do it again. It also created a bond among Talent—at least until they got to know one another.

Jesus wept, if I’d known he was a Talent, I could have called the damn kid from the edge of the yard, lured him out that way! Although if he had panicked, things could have gotten ugly. Four was too young—by about eight years—to have started any kind of real training, even if it was obvious that the kid did have enough ability to protect himself….