Tricks of the Trade. Laura Anne Gilman

brainstorming. Nifty and Nick and Stosser were conspicuous by their absence, even though the board said they were in the office. Ian could be anywhere, from his back office to Timbuktu. He ignored the board unless someone else checked him in or out.

      Venec frowned at me, all Big Dog. “Now.”

      Verbal report, then, not written. “It was mostly visual. Fire-current-fire and real fire. Metal spires, shattered, but I think they were representational, not real.” It was tough to tell how, exactly, but real things felt different somehow. A lot had been written up about scrying, but as usual with current, it seemed to work slightly different with each person. That was part of what made our job…interesting.

      “A dragon, turning overhead.” That had felt real. Physical. There was something else, something I wasn’t remembering….

      “A dragon?” Sharon had been trying not to listen in, but that caught her attention. I kept my gaze on Venec, the way his eyes drooped a little at the corners, and his nose really didn’t fit the rest of his face, and the tiny imperfection in his lip, that made it seem almost crooked. It should have been distracting, but somehow his features focused my memory into its usual razor-sharp perfection. “It could have been a projection of emotions, anger, or power. Maybe.” My tone would have told a deaf person I didn’t believe that. “I was being shoved from viewpoint to viewpoint—” that had been the bungee cord “—so a lot of people are going to be involved, somehow. I don’t think it’s associated with this job,” I said. I looked at Sharon as though waiting for some connection to kick in—or not—and then considered the residue of the scrying. “Either job. It feels…”

      “Another scrying of danger.” He stared at me. “Still in the future?”

      Right. That was why it all seemed familiar. I’d had a shimmer of something months ago, during the ki-rin job. That was what I’d told Stosser and Venec, then; that there was a distant sense of danger, of something off-kilter, but I couldn’t identify the source.

      “Yes. Closer now. But not immediate.”

      I hoped. If I was wrong, and that beast was circling overhead even now, even if it was, please god, only metaphorical…

      Venec picked up on what I wasn’t saying, although that was probably just his own instincts working again. “Bad?”

      His words triggered details I didn’t remember seeing the first time; I saw the splatter of blood against the snow, smelled the stink of something burning, the feel of those claws on my skin, and nodded slowly. “It will be, yeah.” I hadn’t known that for certain before, hadn’t even known until he asked. But I knew, now. That’s how the kenning worked. You don’t always know what you know, and sometimes you don’t know what it was until someone else tells you. Combine it with a strong scrying, and I was never, ever wrong. Even when I wished I were. “In winter, I think.” There had been snow, ice. “Not now.”

      “All right.” He seemed satisfied, for the moment. I didn’t trust it. “You wrote it down?”

      I swallowed, tasting the stink of that burning and the blood in the back of my throat, as though I’d breathed it in, deep. “Most of it, yeah. In my notebook.” I’d had to, dumping it out before I could fall asleep.

      “Get me a copy.” He switched gears. “I’m switching you up on the cases—Sharon has your notes, you take hers. See if there’s anything that bites you on the nose.”

      That was the PUPI philosophy—nobody got ownership of a case; we all worked everything. It hadn’t been a problem when we started out, and had one job every couple of months; everyone was chomping to get their teeth into something and who was working what didn’t matter so much. Now, with different cases at cross-times, things might get a little complicated, even confusing. Venec wasn’t going to let that slow him down, though, and we’d damned well better keep up. Like the in/out board, we needed to track things. Lou, bless her, was working on a system for that, too.

      I hadn’t lied when I’d told her we were a stronger team for her being part of it.

      With Venec’s gaze still on me, I sat at the table across from Sharon, creating a tiny spot of current on the table to act as a combination coaster and coffee-warmer. It was a crappy waste of current, but I hated the taste of even lukewarm coffee. Sharon shoved a folder of notes across the table at me, and raised one of those elegant eyebrows at my current-coaster, but didn’t say anything. We were still not forgiven for the pizza-grease stains faintly outlined in the middle of the table.

      I opened the file. Sharon’s notes were neatly handwritten, readable as a printed page. Nick’s…not so much. And it wasn’t a guy-thing, because the others all managed to make their notes legible, and Nifty’s handwriting was better than mine, for all that his hand dwarfed most pens.

      “Someday, one of us is going to have to put some effort into a current-run printer,” I said, trying to puzzle out a word in Nick’s initial overview. The bastard had run over into the margins, and not rewritten his notes for the file when he got back to the office. I was so going to kill him. “A dictation machine or something.”

      “Nice retirement plan. You go for it.”

      Sharon wasn’t being sarcastic—I was one of the better improvisers in the office, and something like that, if I could make it work, could be worth a small but nice bundle in the community. Something to think about later. Much, much later.

      I gave up on Nick’s notes, and moved over to Sharon’s, figuring that I could use his to add color commentary, later. I’d just gotten into a nice comfortable groove, making checkmarks where something caught my eye, when a roar tore through the office.

      “Goddamn it!”

      Once I’d gotten my heart back into my chest enough to determine that (a) the bellow belonged to Nifty, and (b) he sounded more pissed off than angry or scared, I drew the current that had automatically sparked on my skin in defensive mode back down into my core, and spent a minute getting my control—and my heartbeat—back to normal levels.

      Sharon recovered faster than I did, and was on her feet and poking her nose out into the hallway. I noted in passing that the previously closed door now looked like it had been pulled off its hinges, hanging sideways like a post-Mardi Gras reveler, and that Venec was nowhere to be seen. The two facts were not unrelated. Big Dog had scary-fast reflexes.

      Sharon followed her nose out into the hallway, and I followed her. The hallway was empty, but the door into the second conference room was open, if still attached to both hinges. Looking in, we encountered Venec, his back to us, a rather sheepish-looking Nifty, who was covered in a soft gray soot, and Lou, who looked…