Free Blood from Stone by Laura Anne Gilman Page A

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 uponto 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 wasajar, 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 halfheartedly 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 nearestcorkboard. 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