heels on the pavement was, in a word, unnerving. Wren kept thinking that someone was following her, until she recalled that she was wearing actual dress shoes, not her usual sneakers or soft-soled loafers. Charlie was sweeping the leaves and dust off the pavement in front of Jackson’s E-Z Shopper; he waved, and she nodded in acknowledgment, but didn’t stop to talk.
Hey!
At first, Wren thought it was just a random thought of her own, the nagging voice come back uncalled-for, until the nudge came back with a firmer swipe.
Hey!
She reached in and grabbed the mental touch, tagging it in return, a sort of delivery receipt to let the person pinging her know she was paying attention now.
Tagging was a game younger Talents played, fine-tuning their controls, typically as the setup for a practical joke. Or, with adults, as a way of challenging another Talent, letting them know that they were moving into territory that was already claimed.
This didn’t feel like either.
She stroked a filament-thin strand of current, coaxing it up out of her core until it coiled down her arm, into her left index finger, ready for the next tag.
Valere. A sense of parlay, of truce, like a mental white handkerchief floating in the breeze. Nobody she knew, at least not well enough to recognize the taste of their mind, but the really good taggers could disguise that.
Lee had been one of the really good ones. The thought sent a spasm of loss through her, and she shoved it down ruthlessly. Not while she was working, damn it. A flick of her finger, and the current went out into the ether, following the swiftly fading trail the last tag had left.
Who?
She continued walking down the street; her only external acknowledgment of anything happening was a change of direction the moment the first tag landed. The subway was faster and cheaper, but a cab was more secure, if someone was trying to screw with her. Besides, she rationalized, the persona she was playing would take a cab, not the subway. Small, concrete details made the illusion complete.
Sarah.
The name carried with it no sense of recognition.
Need to talk to you. Soon.
Wren wasn’t naturally suspicious of other Talents, but nothing in her life was normal these days, and just accepting any tagger’s invitation to a sit-down was potential suicide.
Who? she asked again, even as she came to the corner of Hudson Street and raised her hand for a cab.
Sarah. This time the name came with a sense of self: tall, ebony-skinned, teeth that should flash in an exuberant laugh now hidden behind a grim line of lips, eyes almond-shaped and shadowed like an Egyptian queen’s. A scent of good, dark beer, and stale cigarette smoke, and Wren placed her in the jumble of memories. Council-raised, only she crossed the stream two, no three years ago, now. That’s when Wren met her, at the party a friend of Lee’s had thrown to welcome her to the lonejack fold.
Wren hadn’t stayed long; coming down off a job that had sucked all the sleep out of her, the last thing she wanted to do was stand in a crowded bar and down overpriced beer until she stank like last call. But one thing about the evening had stood out, even three years later, and made her interest in this unexpected tagging spike sharply.
Sarah was a Proggie. A Prognosticator.
A Seer.
Oh, shit.
A cab slowed, and Wren opened the door and got in before it had fully stopped, still immersed in the inner conversation.
“Where to?” The driver pulled into traffic without waiting for an answer, flicking the meter on as he did so. The heat was on, and the windows were rolled down all the way. Crazy.
“Central Park West and Sixty-eighth. Thanks.” With luck, Eighth Avenue would be clear enough that they’d only pick up traffic going crosstown, so the meter wouldn’t ratchet up too much.
Hello? A reminder that she had left Sarah hanging.
Another tug of current from her core, and Wren sent a final tag. Tonight. Red Light? A bar that had perfect acoustics for conversation—pick the right table, and while you could hear every word said, someone standing a foot away wouldn’t be able to make out anything—and dark enough to make lip reading problematic.
Electronic eavesdropping wasn’t really a problem, not with two Talents at one table. And, the way Wren was feeling, pity the bastard who tried to plant current-bugs on her again. She’d fry them, and him, and any unrelated electronics in the path between.
Will be there. A sense of the table Sarah was thinking of, the same one Wren had in mind.
You read my mind, Wren sent, and signed off just as the snort of psychic amusement reached her.
The sound of swearing in some foreign language made her look up just in time to see the cabbie slap the small black box set into the dashboard with the palm of his hand. The impact did nothing to reset the electric meter, which had gone from clicking off the quarter-miles to flashing “00.00.”
Ooops.
And then the cab was turning the corner, gliding through clogged sidestreets to her destination. When he pulled to the curb, she handed the guy a twenty. Probably twice what the fare would have been, but she felt bad about wrecking his meter. Cabbies, like lonejacks, got shafted enough without her adding to it.
Taking a deep breath, Wren shut down the part of her that was awareness of her own life, letting the current rise and reach into every square inch of her body, tampering with her self-image.
Exiting the car, Wren gave herself over to the current entirely. She could feel her legs getting longer, the slim skirt and button-down blouse she had put on giving her the impression of height, while the professional-looking black leather pumps added a reassuring nudge of respectability. Her hair was coiled in a soft bun at the back of her neck, and the gentle smudges of eyeliner and lipstick gave the overall feeling of overworked competence. She based the look on the women she saw on their lunch breaks, not the ones rushing back and forth, but the ones who stopped, walked slowly, their faces up to the sunlight, taking time to remember to be thankful they were out of the office even for a few moments. That was who she needed to be: a woman who cared about the small moments, the shared intimacies. Who could coax the same out of another woman.
“I’m here to see Mrs. Worth-Rosen.”
Even with her Talent-enhanced appearance, the doorman still would have turned her away without an appointment. He was that kind of employee, the sort who took the well-being of “his” building more seriously than the residents did themselves. But the woman had a listed phone number, which meant that she wasn’t as peon-phobic as others in her position, and as a competent, well-tuned doorman, he had to be aware of that as well.
Scooping some of the current sizzling just under her skin, Wren gave the uniformed gatekeeper a shy, diffident smile, and Pushed a sense of her total innocence and usefulness toward him. Of all the skill sets Talents had at their use, the Push was the most useful—and the most open to abuse. The fact that she still worried about that, according to Sergei, was proof she wasn’t about to run amok with it. Wren still worried.
“I’m Jenny Wreowski? The mediator from Darsen, Darsen and Kelvin?” Assume complicity, and most people will rise to the occasion. The doorman was no different; he knew that Mrs. Worth-Rosen was going through a tough time, and a legal mediator in the form of this soft-spoken, delicate-looking, Southern-sounding woman was surely harmless, if not proven helpful. He went to get the appointment book, already expecting to see her name listed there.
If you can get someone to that point, of anticipating, it almost doesn’t take much Talent to convince them to see what you want them to see. In a matter of minutes she was in the tastefully ornate elevator, being shuttled up to the fifteenth floor where “Miss Melanie” resided.
“I’m sorry,” the woman who opened the door said. “I don’t know why Jordan let you up here,