LITMIR.BIZ

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Chang. I think it was something like an order. As in, right now she wants to see us.”

      “I’ll be there in a minute.” Chang said, reaching for another pretzel rod, then being distracted midthought by a new possibility.

      “Christ. You are trying to get yourself fired, aren’t you?”

      “She won’t fire me. I work too cheap.”

      “Nothing’s cheap enough for this place,” the second agent said with mordant humor, then shook his head, coming into the office and looking at the papers on the desk. “Are you still working that lead? Give it up, already. I think someone’s pulling your leg. All you’re doing is wasting Bureau time, and you know how they feel about that.”

      The only response he got was the wave of one arm, middle finger extended in universal sign language. He shrugged. “Your funeral. I’ll see you upstairs. Now, Chang. Seriously. The Old Lady is not in a good mood today.”

      The figure pushed the chair back with a squeak of wheels and a muttered curse, reaching with the right hand for one of the less-chewed pretzels, the left hand being preoccupied with writing something down. Numbers, possibly, or some sort of intricate code. The muttering was cut off as teeth slid across the length of the pretzel, harvesting the salt with the heedless competence of a beaver stripping bark.

      The photographs were joined by several pencil sketches of another figure, this one much shorter and, at first glance, wearing some sort of furry costume under a trenchcoat. The only color in those sketches was the dark red used to indicate the eyes, and the comments written in navy-blue ink along the margins. Having recovered them from the pile, Chang was sorting through those now, shuffling them like some sort of static cartoon book as though hoping to see it suddenly start to move.

      A phone rang, this time in the office.

      “Agent Chang.”

      A familiar voice was on the other line; the same voice that had originally brought in the lead a year ago, off her half-joking comment about a seemingly impossible, almost supernatural event that had occurred on her watch.

      He was an old friend, a trusted source, and a general pain in the ass. Chang half suspected that the other agent was right, and he was playing this out for his own twisted amusement, to see how far she’d buy into his claims of something powerful and weird just out of reach.

      The thought that it might be true, that there might be a source of power—of information—out there that she might be able to tap into, to use, was the only reason she hadn’t told him to take a flying leap, and his wild stories with him. But maybe it was time. There were other ways to climb the ladder, other sources she could cultivate, if she spent the time and energy…

      “Either give me something useful or go the hell away,” Chang said now, and this time she meant it.

      Surprisingly, her source came through. “I can get you a meeting.”

      “Why now?” The timing seemed suspect; why now, just when she was about to give up? How had he known?

      Her contact, surprisingly, answered that, too. “He wouldn’t talk to you before, would have shut you down, hard. But things have changed. If you can convince him you’re useful to them.” A pause, and then, in a thoughtful voice that made her believe him, “I really think you two should talk. And soon.”

      Chang agreed to let him arrange it—as if she was going to argue?—and hung up the phone. Was it more of his game? Or was the situation, as he suggested, really reaching a point where the contact—one of these alleged supernaturals—might welcome a Federal ally?

      Suddenly recalling the Old Lady’s summons, Chang swore, then grabbed a thick file out of the in-box perched precariously on the edge of the desk and headed out the door, forgetting to turn off either the desk or overhead lights before heading upstairs. Despite her coworker’s jokes, she wasn’t obsessed enough to forget to handle the current caseload before going off on a wild-goose chase, no matter how interesting the goose might look.

      six

      Given her druthers, Wren Valere would prefer to spend her Saturday morning lazing around on the sofa with hot, quality coffee and fresh bagels, a New York Times, and absolutely nothing to do and nowhere to go except maybe the gym, if she felt like being good and dutiful.

      Wren Valere did not want to spend her morning getting dressed up and going across the river to New Jersey. Wren rarely wanted to go to Jersey, except to meet with her mother, who still lived there in the town Wren had grown up in, although not—thanks to Wren’s urgings—in the same crappy place Wren had grown up in. One of the benefits of being reasonably successful was that she had convinced her mother to move to a much nicer condo several years before.

      “Over there. That building.” She pointed, and they stepped off the curb in almost perfect physical accord.

      Given her druthers, Wren would definitely never have spent her morning getting dressed up and going anywhere near a Tri-Com meeting, in Jersey or anywhere else for that matter. But Sergei had suggested it, reluctantly bringing up the possibility during the postjob rundown that recent events were something that the Tri-Com should know about. Despite her initial, immediate, rather strong response, he was right. Damn it.

      No, she absolutely did not want to be walking across the street, heading toward the second-to-last-people in the world she ever wanted to talk to again. But she would do it. Because she had stuff that needed dealing with, and that’s what the Tri-Com was all about—taking care of loose ends and undealt-with problems.

      Despite a long history of not playing well with each other, the humans and Fatae of the Cosa Nostradamus in the New York area had finally gotten their act together during the recent Troubles. Out of that had come the Truce Board, a joint program of street guards and organized information-sharing, a way to protect themselves from the Silence-funded human vigilantes who wanted them out of the city—on cold slabs, if possible.

      The vigilantes had lost. So had Wren. Lost friends, lost faith, lost her way…and then gotten it all back, if shattered into a pile of bits and pieces. When the dust and blood had been cleared away, all she had wanted was to enjoy life again, work and love and figure out how all the pieces fit back together. She knew everything was stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster, but she didn’t know how well those stitches would hold, if she put too much weight on them. She didn’t want to find out the hard way, either. So, walking delicate and not getting heavy in deed or thought, if she could help it. Not yet.

      Meanwhile, the Truce Board had also collapsed in the messy, finger-pointing aftermath, and the re-cobbled-together remains dissolved soon after she’d Retrieved the Lost from the Silence’s distinctly unpaternal hold. But when life came back to what passed for normal, some of the lessons they learned in the process sank in, and enough lonejacks remembered the benefits of hanging together to try and keep those lessons alive.

      Tri-Com—the Trilaterial Communications Group—was the result, created to facilitate the flow of communications between the Fatae breeds, the human Talent, and the human Null community. Direct quote. A neat trick, that, considering that most Nulls didn’t know that either the Fatae or Talent existed. But considering the rather high-profile and public—and messy—events during the Troubles, enough people who did know had started to get nervous. “Head small problems off now, and we have fewer nasty problems later,” Bart, one of the leaders of the Truce Board had said, when he told her what they were planning, and he was entirely correct. After Burning Bridge, the entire Cosa had nothing but distrust for any and all Nulls, even ones they had known for years, even members of their own flesh-and-blood families. Even Sergei, who had done more for them than most.

      That might have become a fatal rift, doing the work of the Silence after the fact—except that during the last of the Trouble, the night now just referred to as Blackout, Nulls had gathered to protect the Talent within their ranks, most notably the firefighters at the Plank Street station. The smoke-eaters there had not only defended their Talent coworker, they had become a rallying point for the counterstrike, giving everything they had—and it

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