Hard Magic - Laura Anne Gilman

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five, as usual, I was deep in my own core, the current I carried with me all the time. You could source current from outside, either tame—man-made wiring, power plants, stuff like that—or wild. Wild was ley lines, electrical storms, that sort of thing. Nature’s own energy. There were pluses and minuses to both, which was why you always wanted to maintain your own power, filtered, tamed, and tuned to your own quirks. Core-current was safer to use, faster to call up, and no surprises lurking in the power stream.

      I put the fragment down, and placed my hand on the globe, palm curved over the top. The stone was cool at first, and then my fingers began to prickle. I opened my eyes and looked down. Sparks were flicking inside the globe, running from my fingertip down to the imperfection, where they fractured and bounced back to the surface. They were mostly red, which wasn’t what I wanted. I focused, turning one strand this way, another that, and the hues faded to a more useful blue. Like cooking, you could do a lot with basic ingredients and a few pots, but it was easier when you had everything properly prepped.

      “All right, baby, show me what you got. What’s waiting at tomorrow’s interview for me?”

      That was about the level of specifics I hung at. There might be a way to get actual details out of the future, but I’d never known anyone who could do it consistently—and then there was the problem of interpreting those details. What seems perfectly obvious in a precog has a tendency to go another way entirely when it’s all happening.

      But vague? Vague I could do.

      The crystal was filled with blue sparks now, and I lifted my hand slowly, not wanting to startle anything. “Whatcha got for me? What’s waiting for me?”

      The sparks began to settle, and I opened myself up to whatever visual might come.

      Letters. Black against pale blue, hard and spiky letters, like someone writing fast and angry.

       No Cheating.

      And then the crystal—my damned expensive quartz globe—cracked like overheated safety glass, shards and chunks scattering all over the bed.

      I stared down at the mess, feeling the sting on my skin where tiny fragments must have nicked me.

      “Sheeesh.” I pulled a shard out of my hair, and dropped it into the largest pile of debris. “All right, fine. I can take a damned hint.”

      At least I knew one thing for certain. Whoever had called, whoever was setting this up? Way stronger Talent than me. And there was something else to seriously consider: that blast could have hurt me. Any of those shards might easily have done damage—but didn’t.

      I got up, yanked the cover off the bed and wrapped up the useless corpse of my crystal in it, and dropped it to the side of the room, where Housekeeping could deal with it later, then put a Do Not Disturb sign on the door.

      Big day tomorrow. I needed my sleep.

      three

      My interview—or whatever that mysterious summons actually ended up being—wasn’t until 2:00 p.m. So, of course, I slept through the wake-up call, and the usual breakfast knock, and even the construction work being done on the street outside, courtesy of ConEd, finally waking up a little before noon. This wasn’t as unusual as it should be; I was born a night owl, and J never really trained it out of me. The one single 8:00-a.m. class I had in college, I dealt with by staying up all night and going to sleep afterward.

      The sight of the crumpled-up bedspread in the corner was a sobering thing to wake up to, though. Last night I was tired and well fed and probably more than a little inebriated—we had knocked off that bottle of wine, and then another during dinner—and the real hit hadn’t settled into my brain. This morning, it was all cold hard facts. I was going into an unknown situation that was clearly run—or at least guarded by—someone with way more mojo than I had. Someone alert to, and unhappy about, anyone scrying what they had planned. Suddenly, J’s concerns weren’t quite so dismissible.

      I was still going—pit-bull stubborn, that’s me—but with caution, damn it. And, I decided suddenly, without pretending to be anyone I wasn’t. Screw that—it hadn’t gotten me anywhere so far, and whoever this was, they were the ones who came calling, not the other way around. Let them get what I got.

      Out went the demure, if very nice, navy blue interview suit, and the sleeked-down, styled hair. My own, comfortable clothing, and my own comfortable look, thank you much. When I got out of the shower I applied my makeup and then ran my fingers through my hair and ruffled it madly. The image that stared at me from the full-length mirror was a hell of a lot more familiar now: my hair, still dark red but the short strands now fluffed around my face like a bloody dandelion puff, my eyes lined with a discreet amount of black kohl and mascara, and three basic gold studs in my left ear, while my right ear displayed a single sapphire stud, a fourteenth-birthday present from J.

      I’d been tempted to finish it off with buckled cargo pants and a mesh T-shirt, all in black, but common sense won out. I was going for me-hireable, not Goth club-kid. So a bright red silk shirt; sleeveless, like a fitted vest, went over my favorite skirt, a long black linen circle with enough pockets and loops to carry everything you might need in a daily routine, up to and including a carpenter’s hammer. J might be hoity-toity lawyer-man, but Zaki’d been a craftsman, and I learned early on about always having room for your tools.

      I didn’t like the way using the pockets interfered with the swing of the skirt, though, so everything—date book, newspaper, wallet, sunglasses—got tossed into my carryall. It was a graduation present from J—soft black leather, and probably the most expensive thing I owned—so I didn’t think I’d lose presentation points for using it instead of a briefcase.

      There was a moment’s hesitation at the shoes, but I squashed J’s voice in my head and went for my stompy boots instead of the more interview-acceptable, sensible heels. Shoving my feet into them felt like coming home, and when I stood up again, I felt ready to take on the whole damn world.

      Never underestimate the power of a pair of good, stompy engineer boots.

      Leaving the hotel, the daytime doorman—an older Asian guy named Walter—wished me good luck, making him third after the two chambermaids in the hallway on my floor. I thanked him, too, not sure if I should feel good that they bothered, or depressed that everyone in the hotel seemed to know I was job-hunting. Still, the entire staff had been really nice to me, and it wasn’t like I was in a position to turn down good wishes.

      The smart thing probably would have been to take a cab once I got cross-town, but the racket-clack of the subway was like a siren’s lure. They’re noisy, and usually overcrowded, but I could get a pretty current-buzz off the third rail without trying, and you see way more interesting people on mass transit. I’m all about the people-watching. Unfortunately, Tuesday at 1:30 p.m., heading uptown, seemed to be the dead time on the 1 train, and it was just me and an old guy reading a day-old newspaper, and two teenage girls in Catholic-school uniforms, whispering and giggling to themselves.

      It took about twenty minutes to get uptown, with me obsessively checking the subway route map on the wall behind my seat at every station. Damn, I was going to be late …. I got off at what I hoped was the right stop, and left the guy to his paper, and the girls to their giggles. Places to go, people to impress!

      The office—or whatever it was—didn’t exactly inspire confidence. The address was a mostly kept-up building off Amsterdam Avenue, seven stories high and nine windows across. Brick and gray stone: that looked like the norm in this neighborhood. We weren’t running with a high-income crowd, here. Still, I had seen and smelled worse, and the neighborhood looked pretty friendly—lots of bodegas and coffee shops, and the kids hanging around looked as if they’d stopped there to hang on the way home from school, not been there all day waiting for their parole officer to roll by.

      And only one of them, a short kid with Day-Glo green hair, shouted out a comment to me, and yeah it was rude, but it wasn’t insulting, so I gave him a grin and told him to call me as soon as he could grow some facial hair, too. His friends hooted and shoved him hard enough to knock

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