Tricks of the Trade - By Laura Anne Gilman Page 0,35

oddly gnarled and twisted in the wrong direction, if you looked at it carefully – made a flat pass over the top of his cart, and the metal construct – hot dogs, sodas and all – disappeared.

A second later, so did the vendor.

* * *

five

Much to my surprise, I’d managed a hard seven hours of dead-to-the-world sleep, got up in time to not rush through my shower, and still made it to the office by 8:00 a.m, even stopping on the corner to grab a bagel with a-schmear from the coffee cart guy.

The teenagers were missing from the stoop again.

I forced myself to take the elevator, shivering slightly as I did so. But the doors opened safely on the seventh floor, and that felt like victory. Someone had just gone into one of the two offices across the hall – the photographer’s – closing the door softly behind them, but other than that the hallway was empty.

I unlocked our door, shucked my jacket, and hung it in the closet. Only one coat there – Pietr’s – but the weather was nice enough that that didn’t mean anything. There was the low murmur of conversation from the small workroom, and a light showing under the door, down the hallway in Stosser’s office. Since we’d long ago tossed the idea of nine to five out the window, I wasn’t surprised not to be the first one in, despite being early.

I went back to the break room and grabbed my mug – Sharon’s gift, with a brightly feathered, very dead parrot painted on the side – out of the cabinet, filling it with coffee and doctoring it to a proper consistency, and took a long hit, feeling my brain start to kick in for real. There were, as I saw it, two options. I could hang around and see what was happening, or I could get to work.

I got to work.

“Steady... ”

It took real willpower not to growl at the helpful – and unwanted – voice in my ear. “I do know how to do this.”

The voice backed off – a little, and the sense of current up against my back, supporting me, faded. “Right. I’ll go fetch you some coffee then, shall I? Decaf?”

I waitted until Pietr left the room – double-checking to make sure he actually had left the room, and not just disappeared – before letting out a heavy sigh and lowering my shaking hands to the table. I shouldn’t have snapped. He was right; I wasn’t at top form. There were too many other things crowded into my head – Venec, mainly, and the damned Merge. But I was still better at reconstruction than he was, so his advice really wasn’t all that damn useful, and he knew it.

I looked down at our work, trying to see it with an impartial eye.

The diorama Venec had asked for was an outgrowth of the re-creation spell we used to glean and then display crime scenes, when we needed an overview rather than an eyewitness view. The thing was, the diorama was made entirely of current, built out of the observer’s original memory made three-dimensional. That meant the caster had to maintain control at all times, or it would snap back and burn you. Not fun. The spell Lou and Nifty had been working on when he got ashed, apparently, was a variant that would make a stable diorama, allowing the creator to anchor the current used to create the display into the diorama itself, so that it would self-maintain. So far, no matter what they tried, it still snapped back the moment they took control off. That had been what caught Nifty.

Lou had been able to avoid getting powdered with current, but even with their newest modifications, the spell still required the caster to be aware of it constantly.

In terms of pure current-use, a gleaning display was easier for me to set up and maintain, but it left the remains tucked into your head like pond scum, which was both unpleasant, and allowed for shifting memories or external influences to blur details. The diorama-spell scraped everything out and put it into real, if miniature, form, leaving your own memory free to fade normally. I preferred the risk for that return, me. Some things you didn’t want to remember in that much detail.

The real added benefit to the diorama, though, is that it wasn’t a gleaning-display but a true re-creation. A gleaning showed you exactly what was there, forever static. A diorama,