LITMIR.BIZ

      “Nope. Not a thing. Guess they don’t think I’m important enough.”

      “Oh, give me a break.” Wren downed the last of her coffee and made a grimace. That was her fourth cup of the afternoon, it having taken this long to get her companion around to the topic of interest. She should probably switch to decaf at some point. It wouldn’t taste any better, but she’d feel a little less spring-wound.

      “Seriously, Wren.” Bill leaned across the Formica table, his black eyes intent on her face. “Last I heard of any of this, you had shot all the battle-mongers down at the Moot. Things quieted down after that. I thought that was the end of it.”

      She’d thought that was the end of it, too. The Moot had been a meeting between the local lonejacks that had taken place over the summer, to discuss what to do about the apparent aggression the Council was showing against lonejacks, in general and in particular. She’d pointed out then, rather dramatically, how piss-poor of an idea trying to fight the Council was. No lonejack knew a damn thing about organizing, or, more importantly, was any good at it. Lonejacks were all about individual action, individual concerns. The Council was where all the joiners landed. The followers, the order-takers. No less selfish…just differently oriented with it.

      For lonejacks to form some kind of Talented militia, that was just asking to get stomped on by the big kid on the block, especially when the big kid’s already got stomping boots on. She’d believed—she still believed—that their best chance to survive the Council’s newfound aggression was to stay true to who they were, and not make big honking red-shirted targets of themselves. The Council would burn off whatever insanity was infecting them, and everything would go back to normal.

      But when the joiners start looking cross-eyed at the individuals, even the most anti-organizational types can get nervous. Especially when violence—even unproven—gets added to the picture. And nervous made for snap decisions. But sometimes, she was starting to think, that was what the job needed.

      There was no proof that the Council was behind anything that had and was happening. If you wait around for proof, sometimes you get it—and sometimes you got dead.

      “Would you have signed it?” she asked him now, after the fact.

      Bill relaxed back into the hard-stuffed bench of their booth, and shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe. Probably. What’s been going down, it’s some scary shit. Making a scary noise back might not do anything, but sitting around waiting for them to come for me? Lost most of my family, that way.”

      Bill looked Generic WASP, down to the Top-Siders on his feet and the natural blond of his hair, but his genetics included a long line of steppe-riding wildmen and witches, only some of whom had made it to America on the last Cosa express out of Germany in 1939. He was also the best damn Translocator in the city, which had earned him the much-hated nickname of “Scotty.” One of the few who could—or would—create spell-sticks for Talents like Wren, for whom Translocating was, at best, a chancy operation.

      If she were part of a group looking to garner support among the lonejacks, Bill would have been at the top of her list. The fact that he hadn’t been approached meant—what? That they had no interest in this letter being circulated among lonejacks. That they had no intention of building a consensus, or circulating it further. That the people putting it together—otherwise intelligent, if hotheaded Talents—had an agenda that probably did not include getting the Council to back down, but rather force their hand.

      She hoped to hell the Council didn’t take the bait, but suspected they rather would. And that that had been the plan all along.

      And you fell for it. You went along and blithely jotted your initials on the damned thing without thinking it through, giving them your fingerprints over the damn thing, which could be just what’s needed to make the Council move overtly—and therefore make a lonejack coalition needful. Brilliant, Valere. Fucking brilliant. You got played.

      She downed the last of her coffee, and waved the waitress over for a refill, already mentally composing the “stop the press” response she was going to scorch into their hides, via demon express. She’d do it herself, if she thought they’d left themselves open to any kind of directed attack. But they were smart, these bastards. Almost smart enough to pull it off, worse luck.