Blood from Stone. Laura Anne Gilman

tired to hold it back: Wren splayed on the ground, her body too still, too cold; her eyes bloodshot and staring, drained of all the vitality that normally filled her body. She had gone in after the FocAs, the Talent who had been trained and turned against their own people. The Lost, they were called now. Lost, and then Retrieved.

      “But that wasn’t where it began. That wasn’t where the damage was done. All that came before, and then…She never told me what happened, but I know when…when they attacked her. Those men, those…”

      “Take a breath. Hold, and now let it out, easy, the way we talked about. She’s all right.”

      She is all right. Except she isn’t. His Wrenlet isn’t a killer. He is. He wants to be a killer again, even though they were long-dead already.

      At his Zhenchenka’s hands.

      “The men who attacked her, who pushed her up onto the razor’s edge. They deserved to die?” No condemnation, no offer of expiation, just the question.

      “Yes.” He has no doubt on that subject. “But her magic should never have been used to murder.”

      “You feel that you failed her.”

      “I did fail her. And—” The bitterness, here, and nowhere else “—she let me fail her.” He still doesn’t know how to deal with that.

      five

      On that same morning that Sergei was dragging his partner out to decompress with the ducks, miles south from Manhattan, in a surprisingly well-known high-security building outside of D.C., other people were ignoring the glorious autumnal weather outside, trapped within four walls by professional obligations and legally sanctioned if not officially approved obsessions.

      “Damn it, where was that file? Aha, there you are. Thought you could hide, did you?”

      The office was reasonably sized, but badly designed and dark, despite the fluorescent light overhead. An interior space, there were no windows to bring any natural light or air in; circulation was dependent upon the old-fashioned air ducts, and an almost-as-old desk fan perched on the seat of a battered metal stool. One wall appeared to be held up by the number of black metal filing cabinets marching along it, the line broken only by a doorway. The frosted-glass-paned door was ajar, with hinges that hung in such a way as to indicate the door was rarely all the way closed. The other three walls were painted a standardized white that had seen better decades. Each of those three walls supported a whiteboard, covered in various scrawls in several different ink colors and handwriting styles, and a corkboard, filled with newspaper clippings, handwritten notes, and printed reports following half a dozen different cases.

      It was an office built around and decorated by people who obsessed, and followed through, and then obsessed some more.

      There were three desks crammed into the space, one for each wall, but only one figure was currently in the room.

      That figure was sitting behind one of those desks, hunching forward in an expensive ergonomically correct chair, looking at the just-found file under the illumination of a battered office-issue desk lamp. In addition to the file, the lamp, a black in-box filled to the rim, and a matching plastic pen holder, the desk was covered with more reports, sheets of scrawled notes, a dozen red and black pens, and half a dozen pretzel sticks with the salt gnawed off and the remains abandoned in a pile.

      A box with still-salted pretzel rods had been pushed to the side, as though the gnawer were aware of the addiction, and trying only half heartedly to break it.

      The agent date-stamped a report, signed it, and filed it, then picked up a new pretzel stick and flipped through the remaining paperwork still awaiting closure.

      Dismissing the pending cases, the agent got up and, current pretzel in hand, strode over to look at the nearest corkboard. The boards had the look of items tacked up in a hurry and riffled through frequently; the edges of the papers were tattered and some of the articles were faded, although the older ones had been laminated at some time in the past. But the pinholes were fresh, and the impression was of an overcrowded in-box rather than a layered archaeological dig. Things changed, progress was made, items were taken down and replaced by new ones. The newspaper clippings in the upper right corner were all from New York City papers, mostly covering crimes committed during the previous winter and spring, with the more violent and unsolved ones circled in red marker. A few of the more colorful tear sheets were from lurid magazines, proclaiming the coming of the Lord as evidenced by the glow coming down from the sky and landing in, of all places, Brooklyn, N.Y.

      The tear sheets dated back to the 1970s, and some of the reports went all the way back to World War II, but the majority of them were less than two years old. It was these that the agent focused on, one well-groomed hand lifting the most recent to look below it at the one before then, silently comparing facts and observations.

      A long strip of the remaining salt was taken off the pretzel rod, as buffed nails tapped the sheets in thought.

      An observer would note that the reports were of a similar nature, following a track of murders and assaults, gang-related crimes and break-ins. A blue-and-red graph charted the rise—and the sudden decline—in those crimes over a two-year period. The chart ended on a flat line near zero, the most recent data point charted being last month.

      Whatever it was causing the activity, it seemed to have ended.

      The agent knew that sometimes cases were like that. You accepted the fact that you’d never get an answer, and moved on to the next, because the one thing you knew was that there would always be a next. The world was like that.

      It was why there were people like them, in offices like this. To catch the ones they could, and not drive themselves crazy over the ones they couldn’t.

      And yet, something about this case still bugged the brain, itched the instincts, and left questions hanging. You couldn’t let those cases go.

      The agent went back to the desk, dropping the pretzel stick long enough to reach for a yellow-tagged file, pick up a pen and jot down a new comment in the margin of one of the sheets. The motion held the weary but still determined air of someone who is no closer to a solution than a week before, but can’t stop. It didn’t matter that the search had been going on for almost a year now: if you are determined enough, the Bureau teaches, and you follow all the leads through to the end, luck will be on your side. Eventually.

      A phone rang somewhere, outside the office and down the hall. Someone answered it on the third ring, and the echo of low voices carried faintly into the office and was swallowed by the shadows. The figure didn’t even look up.

      The annotated paper was returned to the file, and two photos were pulled out: one, of a tall, lean man in a dark suit, talking to two other men in the middle of a crowded food court. The other was of that same man, more casually dressed, in a subway car. A much shorter woman stood with him, their body language suggesting both familiarity and tension. Both photos were clearly taken without their knowledge, the angle and grainy texture suggesting a surveillance camera of some sort.

      Two years ago she had heard whispers of something the higher-ups knew, of a group or organization in various American cities that the government might or might not consider a threat, a group that might or might not be causing those ups and downs in specific crimes. Of individuals who were more than human. Casual queries had gotten her stonewalled, left with the impression that this was a Secret only a few select were allowed to know.

      Very few things got up the nose of an obsessive investigator like a Secret they were told they couldn’t share.

      Her first probe had gotten her a name, and that had led to another name, and she’d pulled enough strings to get a temporary watch put on those subjects, and who they interacted with. But the lead had faded and gone cold, and when there were no more incidents in that city, her line of investigation was cut off. Officially.

      A man came to the office door, pushing it open just enough more to stick his head in. “The Old Lady wants to see us,” he said.

      “Uh-huh.” The room’s