Laura Gilman - Bring It On

Normally Wren didn’t give a damn about the target of a Retrieval, so long as she knew ahead of time anything they might counterpunch with. Null or Talent, museum or private citizen, government or nonprofit. The situation outside of the Retrieval, though, was anything other than normal, and the last thing she needed was more reason for the Council (the Hoffa version) to start spreading rumors that she was targeting Council (union joe version) members.

“All right. Stop a minute, think this through. Client, Null. Target, Talent.” She got up to pace as she talked, feeling her knees pop and crackle as she stretched. It was still easier for her to be in action than it was to sit still.

As much as she loved her apartment, as good as the vibes were, it had one major drawback: the rooms were too small to pace in. The T-shaped hallway leading from the bedrooms to the front door, however, was perfect.

“Client is a Null. Stepmomma is Council. What about dearly departed Daddy?” Nothing in her research had said, one way or another. It was easy enough to keep secret, if you didn’t make a fuss about it, but Talent tended to marry Talent. Which would mean that Momma had also been a Talent?

The jury was still out on the influence of genetics in Talent, but it did seem to cluster in families more often than not. So odds were that one of the birth parents was Null, too. Based on Rosen’s attitude…yeah, odds were it was Momma of blessed memory. So there might be some bias involved to go with the estate-squabbling. Did it matter? Maybe.

What bothered Wren more was stepmomma’s affiliation.

“Council has made my life miserable for the past year, because they think I’m some sort of threat. Threat to what? Unknown. Council may or may not be—probably is—behind the recent disappearances of lonejacks of a specific age and ability. Mainly older ones, strong ones, who haven’t wizzed or otherwise gotten anti-social. Rumor is: Council is up to something.”

Seven, eight, nine steps, reach the door, pivot. Walk back to T. Go right, three steps. Pivot. Three, and another two, always forgetting that the top of the T hallway was off balance, and pivot again. Two steps, turn right again, walk down to the front door. There should have been grooves worn in the floor, after all the times either she or Sergei had done this, working through the details of a job.

“So. Assuming a suitable level of paranoia…is this also something they’re up to? Or did I just get caught in a relentlessly normal family squabble?”

Worth-Rosen might be exactly what she looked like—a Talent who got greedy on the wrong Null. Or she might be a dupe of the Council, if not actually one of their catspaws. And if so…Sometimes, as her partner was fond of saying, paranoia was the only thing between you and the sharks.

So. A change in plans.

A phone call started things rolling, but it would take several hours before she would know the results. In the meanwhile, she still had to get the description from Rosen and talk to Aldo, then get her hands on the layout of the mark and…

And somewhere in there she needed to do some food shopping. She had tried ordering online, but after the sixth or seventh time she crashed the system because she got frustrated at not finding what she needed, Wren had decided that the old-fashioned way worked better for her.

Stopping in the bedroom-office, Wren grabbed the client info sheet off the floor. On her next pass down the hallway, Wren snagged the phone off the wall and dialed the number penciled at the top of the sheet.

“Anna Rosen? Yes, I’m calling about the discussion we had yesterday.” Was it really only yesterday? Almost exactly yesterday, in fact. Twenty-four hours and all the chaos of the psi-bomb seemed to fade into happened-last-month. “I’m going to need a description of the item in question…you have a photo? No. All right, then.” And she grabbed a pencil and a scrap of paper out of the junk drawer, leaning on the counter to write more easily. “Could you describe it for me, please? As completely as you can.”

Rosen clearly had studied the necklace at length—she was able to describe it quite well. A silver mask of a woman’s face, eyes closed and a slight smile—a smirk, Rosen said, but not an unkind one—surrounded by a silver-beaded headdress/cowl with tendrils off to one side, like a showgirl’s headdress. A small silver skull was set on a chain hanging from the headdress, over her forehead.

All in all, Wren thought it sounded like a horribly gaudy bit of junk, the kind that Great-Aunt Hortense bequeathed to you and you sold at the rummage fair the week after, but the client clearly loved it enough to hire her to steal it back, so she wasn’t about to judge. Everyone had different levels of emotional attachment, God knew. Maybe it was a Null thing.

Hanging up the phone, Wren looked at her notes, making sure everything was legible enough to read back to Aldo. She should have gotten all this from the client yesterday, during their meeting. Sergei would have. Sergei would have gotten the description, and the address of the target, and all the little things that yes, Wren could track down now but would have made life so much easier to have already.

“And you decided to do this one on your own, why again?” The answer wasn’t as clear as it had been when the first nibble came in. The nightmare still jangled on her nerves, and the normally comforting vibes of her apartment, the thing that had made her decide the first time she walked in behind the Realtor that this place was hers, was just making her feel jumpy and twitchy now.

She really, really wanted to feel the urge to brew tea that meant Sergei was walking up the stairs. Which, considering she had run from him—and the entire sense of being too-much-togetherness—this morning, meant that she was probably losing her mind.

Speaking of minds, and details, and the slacking off on them, she should check in with Danny, see if he’d found out anything about that psych-bomb. If it was Council work, that was another thing to consider. The timing was odd…Jesus wept, if it were tied into the Rosen case, and not the general intimidation shit they kept trying to pull…

“It would mean what, exactly?”

The voice was hers, but the logic was Sergei’s.

“Would it change what you’ve already decided to do?”

“No,” she answered herself. “In which case, stop worrying, and get back to working.”

She picked up the phone again and dialed a number, this time from memory.

“Joey. It’s Jenny. I know you’re there, Joey, pick up. You really don’t want me getting annoyed with you while I’m on the phone.”

All Joey Tagliente knew about Jenny Valere was that his electronics had a way of going bad when she was around, which was why she was restricted to call-ins and e-mail. And why she always got fast service.

“Babe. So good to hear your voice. Tell me what you want and I’ll tell you what it costs.” He oozed, but it was a mostly harmless ooze.

“The address for a Melanie Worth-Rosen.” She spelled the name out, just to be sure. “The real address, not a mailing drop or her bodyguards, or whatever well-to-do people are doing these days.”

“You want the phone numbers, too?”

“Sure. Why not.” The cost would all be added to Rosen’s invoice at the end of the job, anyway. What wasn’t covered by the retainer already sitting pretty in Wren’s account. And, since she brokered the deal herself, did she have to give the usual cut to Sergei? God, she hadn’t even thought about that.

“Anything else?”

“You got blueprints for that address, too?” Of course he did. Or he would, for the right money. He was an efficient little snoop, Joey was.

“Maybe yes, maybe no. Two for the first, another five if I can come through on the second.”