Laura Gilman - Tricks of the Trade

“Oh, sure, give me the crap jobs.” I shook out my left hand, and mentally reached in to gather some current, selecting threads from the neat coil of multicolored, static-shivering magic inside my core, and drawing them up my rib cage, along my arm, and down into the fingers I’d just loosened.

Like so many of the cantrips and preset spells we’d been working on in the office the past year, this one hadn’t actually been tested in the field yet. It should work, but should and did weren’t always reading from the same page, and we’d had a few go rather spectacularly sour when tried under real-life conditions.

At least nobody was watching, or grading, this time.

I selected a specific thread, a glittery glinting dark blue that was almost purple, and directed it down away from me, into the corpse’s chest. The thread slipped through the flesh like a needle, and I could feel it tunneling down into the lungs. I don’t care who you are or what you did, the sensation of current moving like that at your command never got old.

Older spells, and modern traditionalists, used words to direct their current. Venec frowned on that: we weren’t here to entertain or impress—or intimidate—but to work. So I kept it simple. “Wet or dry?” I asked down the line of current, imbuing a sense of what I was looking for into the words, and waited. A scant second later, the current sent back its answer.

“Water in the lungs,” I said. “Our boy was tossed in still breathing. Cause of death probably drowning, unless there’s something funky about the Bippis physiology?”

“Not so far’s I know,” Pietr said. That meant absolutely nothing; there were more breeds within the Cosa Nostradamus than any human could ever encounter, or even read about, and most of ’em had at least a small community living here. New York City: melting pot of the world, and not all the ingredients were human.

“So, it was caught, tied up, and tossed in the water….” Pietr knelt again, opening his kit and taking out a brush and a small vial of something glittering. The brush was just a makeup brush, a very expensive one, and the glittery powder was fine-ground, electrically charged metal shavings. Metal conducted current the same way it did for electricity, allowing us to use the lightest possible touch and lowering the risk that we’d disturb evidence. He added a pinch of shavings to the brush, and swirled it over the top of the bindings, careful this time not to touch anything with his bare hands. His personal current could affect the shavings, even through the latex.

The dust settled, and Pietr cocked his head, studying the results. His current was so light, so subtle, I couldn’t even see a hint of it in the air over the bonds. Impressive, as always. I was good at gleaning, my memory capturing details I didn’t even notice I’d seen, but when it came to this kind of physical collection, Pietr had me beat.

I waited, shivering a little as the wind off the river reached through my jacket, while Pietr focused on the spell’s results. The shavings carried the spell into the dead body’s tissue, showing him the muscles that had last been used, and how much energy they had burned. “Yeah, it struggled. Another ten minutes, maybe, and the ropes would have given way.” They were thick twine, but definitely frayed, I had noticed that. On a human, they would have been enough to immobilize someone indefinitely. “But that kind of struggling would have used oxygen, and sped up the drowning. Whoever tossed it in knew what they were doing.”

I exhaled heavily, feeling the air leave my lungs, thinking about what was being said—and what wasn’t. “Which probably means Cosa, not just some scared humans looking to clean the world of a freak.” We’d been having trouble in the city—actually, we’d been having Troubles: humans—Talent and Null—bashing up against the fatae, and everyone coming out the worse for it. During the ki-rin “he said, she said” disaster, it had looked like the entire city was going to combust, but when we’d been able to prove that both humans and fatae had been involved, the flames died down to coals again.

Died down, but hadn’t gone out. I still had nightmares, sometimes, about the sound of the ki-rin’s voice when it admitted its guilt…regret and remorse that came too late, after four lives were ruined, one fatally.

I’d always been a sunny-side-up girl, but the world was a very gloomy place, some days.

“Maybe. Probably, yeah.”

“Joy.” And trying to get answers out of the fatae community was always such a pleasant experience. Even when they were human-friendly, they didn’t like to tell us anything. Except when they were telling us things we didn’t want to know, or trying to talk us into something to their benefit, of course.

“All in a day’s work,” Pietr said, putting away the dust and brush, and locking his case again. There were still things to be done, but you didn’t leave your kit open, ever.

“You gonna take the body, or not?” the cop asked, coming back from her wander of the perimeter to stand over my shoulder, getting way too close inside my personal space.

“You rush your lab techs this much?” I snapped, annoyed at being interrupted.

The cop showed a wide, toothy, happy-to-annoy-you grin. “Yep.”

“Great. Try to rush me again, and I’ll hotfoot you in ways that won’t wear off for a week.” She could try to match me, but we both knew she’d lose. I might not be a natural powerhouse the way some of my pack mates were, but you didn’t get to be a pup without picking up some serious skills, and I’d a year’s worth of training under my belt now.

She backed off.

I looked over at Pietr, who was still studying the body. “You want to do the gleaning?” It was normally my job, but there didn’t seem to be anything particularly difficult, and the Big Dogs like everyone to keep at least their pinkie in with that particular spell.

“Not really. But I will.”

Gleaning is our version of videography: we collect all the visual evidence, and replay it, back in the office, into a three-dimensional display. We tried, at first, to glean the emotional record, since current leaves trace, and a strong Talent can usually pick up strong emotions after the fact. Unfortunately, we learned the hard way that when you’re talking about the sort of violence we tend to uncover, that’s not always the smartest idea. We’d been caught up in it, and our first case had almost been our final one. So Venec laid down the law: physical evidence only.

While Pietr went into fugue-state to glean, I wandered down to the East River, or as close as I could get to it, standing on a man-made concrete pier. It looked like…water. Bluish-gray, little ebbs and currents swirling the surface, underneath… Who the hell knew what was underneath. The rivers, Hudson and East, were a hell of a lot cleaner than they had been once upon a time, but a tidal river could hide anything…at least until it pushed it to shore.

I stared out across the surface, anyway, looking. They’d pulled the body out here—I saw a little yellow flag fluttering in the breeze—but odds were it had gone into the river somewhere uptown and floated down. All the landing site would tell me was what size shoe the finders had worn, and how far they’d dragged him before he’d been wrapped up in official sailcloth and brought up here, in direct contradiction of every rule of Standard Operating Procedure the NYPD was supposed to follow. I looked, anyway. You never knew where or when or how something useful might turn up.

In this instance, though, I didn’t even find a candy wrapper that looked suspicious, just a lot of gunky mud I had to knock off my shoes when I got back up on the pier. I guess I understood why they’d moved the body, but it still pissed me off. I’d bet the NYPD hadn’t even bothered to do a basic sweep of the area before calling us in—something this obviously Cosa business, their protective filters snapped up and they didn’t see anything, didn’t know anything, didn’t have to write up anything.