Free Fall

There were three different ways you could enter a building you weren’t supposed to be in. You could sneak in through a nontraditional entrance: window, sewer, skylight, loading dock. Wren had once had herself rolled in via a beer delivery. You could walk right in through the front door, brazen it out and hope nobody thought to challenge you. Or, you could find a commonly used entrance, and slide in with a crowd.

If you were a Retriever, you had a fourth option. You went invisible.

She had tried to explain it to Sergei once as being just the next step up from pretending that you weren’t there. Everyone did that; praying the cop would pull over the guy next to you even though you were the one speeding, that the gym teacher would pick on someone else, that the bum on the subway would sit at the other end of the car and leave you alone. The difference was, when you had current and skill to back you up, your chances for success went up.

Way up, if you were Wren Valere. And if there were days that she wished every head would turn when she walked in the door, it was nonetheless a skill that made it possible for her to call the tune of her own life.

“Impose this

upon their eyesight:

blindness falls.”

Two young men walked past her, and as the last word of her cantrip hit the air, the one nearest to her stumbled and went down to his knees, crying out in shock and not a little fear.

“Charlie?” His friend went to him, shifting his coffee to his off hand as he tried to help his companion up.

“Jesus! Everything went black!”

Wren winced, but didn’t hesitate as she moved past them, opening the heavy metal doors of the theater and slipping inside to the lobby. She hadn’t meant it to be quite so literal! Hopefully it was only temporary.

Tone it down. You’re too full, too charged. This isn’t a fight. It’s a job. Finesse, not fury. Don’t let it control you, you control it.

Right. She took a moment to stand still, settling the current down into her more securely. Too much was as bad as too little. Worse, sometimes. All it took was one instant for the core to escape control…Mirroring the neon outside, the current glowed around her bones, slithering like snakes, always restless at the hint of action.

Control, control. Only the small amount I need, and the rest of you, sleep…

According to the emerging theory her neighbor and fellow Talent Bonnie had told her about, there was a weird mucous lining on their cells that allowed their bodies to channel current. That didn’t fit well with her visual of the core as being a dry pit filled with muscled neon snakes, but it made a lot of sense, otherwise. It was also, in a word, disgusting. She preferred to think of it as willpower and self-control.

Control. Yes.

The tension in her skin eased for a second, and she felt almost normal.

Confident now that she would pull only the current she needed, Wren started moving again.

The job literally was a grab. No cursed objects, no semisentient entities, no high-magic or low-tech security systems. Not even any half-awake, geriatric guards to work around. Just the cast and crew of a Broadway play, the normal preperformance nerves shimmering in the air, and a silver hip flask engraved with a Fleur de Lys that if Wren was really lucky, would have something potent inside, and she didn’t mean spellwise.

Wren didn’t understand why the client felt he needed a Retriever for this, but the truth was that she had become somewhat of a status symbol. Anyone could have something stolen. You had to pay a lot to get The Wren to Retrieve it for you.

Morons. But so long as the check cleared, the client got to be Mr. Moron.

The lobby in front of her was everything the façade had promised: red velvet, gilding, soaring ceilings, and the faint but unmistakably tangy scent of an overworked air circulation system. Nice, if you were into old buildings.

Her blueprint of the theater showed a series of tunnels running under the stage itself. She supposed they had been used to move sets and actors around, since there wasn’t much actual “backstage” to be found. What she wanted was—allegedly—hidden there.

If Sergei…

Sergei wasn’t.

But if he was, you’d know for certain. He would have pulled something from one of his contacts….

Contacts that, more often than not, came from the Silence.

Her voice fell silent, unable to argue the point.

It’s not the Silence….

Jesus wept, shut up.

The voice shut up again. But that didn’t make the truth of what she didn’t let it say any less. It wasn’t his connection to the Silence that kept her from returning his phone calls, weeks ago when he still left messages for her. Everyone else might think that, but she knew better. So did he.

Sergei was an addict. He was addicted to the feel of her current; mostly when they made love, but any time he could get it. Current took the signature, the feel of the person using it, once it was in the core for a little while. Sergei wanted that, wanted the rush of it—of her—in his system.

Only problem was, he wasn’t a Talent. He was Null. And current damaged Nulls.

It killed them.

Sergei knew that. And he still craved it. Asked her to give it to him.

And she, damn her, did. Because she couldn’t refuse him anything he needed that badly, especially when it was all tied up in how much he felt for her.

So she denied him. Everything. Her. Kept him safe by giving him up.

Because she could forgive him anything—anything—except using her to kill himself.

“Who left the damn door open?” A very tall man clad entirely in black, with a long ponytail of red hair reaching between his shoulder blades breezed into the lobby, and shut the door Wren had entered with a resounding slam. “Idiots think that just because it’s springtime we don’t heat this place no more? Actors. Only thing worse than actors are musicians, and the only thing worse than musicians’re the crew…”

He breezed out again, muttering under his breath about the useless bags of meat he was sent to work with.

“The director, I presume,” Wren said, amused. She had never been a theater person, but one of her friends in college was, and between Suzy and Sergei’s own dealings with the artists he showed in the gallery, or met on the circuit, she’d heard countless stories about the “temperament” of the artistic types.

Her only real friend in the arts had been Tree-taller, and the sculptor had been as calm and measured as one of his sculptures. But that came from being an artist with Talent—working metal with current made you cautious, or it got you dead.

She winced. He had gotten himself dead anyway, hadn’t he? So many dead…

Focus. A different voice this time, sharp and unforgiving. The voice she heard too often in her dreams, now. An unfamiliar, unforgiving voice, refusing to let her rest. A combination of all the dead: the Talented and Fatae dead of this city, trying to drive her forward into things, places, she didn’t want.

Bite me, she said to it now, and followed the director down into the theater. The set was dark; if the rest of the cast had arrived for the matinee already, they were elsewhere in the building.

The blueprint said that there was an entrance to the main tunnel to the left of the stage, just behind the pillar. Wren looked around to make sure that nobody was lurking, then vaulted to the stage, careful as she landed not to make so much noise that anything echoed. They might not be able to see her, but they’d still be able to hear her.

“Okay, door. Where’s a door? What looks like a door?”

To someone used to the stage, it was no doubt obvious. Wren, in the dark in more than one way, had only her natural sense of sneaky to guide her.

Well, that and a little extra fillip of Talent.

“The way down