Tricks of the Trade - By Laura Anne Gilman Page 0,27

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...

Smug. Really, quietly smug.

I laughed, reading the scene quickly, with the ease of familiarity. Nifty had done something stupid, and Lou felt she was finally out from under the mockathon. If he’d blown anything up, she was right.

“Anybody dead?” I asked. Venec turned his back on the tableau, and glared at me.

Oh, boy. His hair looked like he’d just run his hands through it in exasperation, his eyes were dark like whoa, and if you really looked at his body language you’d think he was about to start swearing, but his wall was down just enough that I got hit with a full-body blast of tight-wound hysterics just waiting for privacy to explode.

Whatever had happened, Venec thought it was funnier’n hell, and I was the only one who knew. Laughing, though? Not a good idea right now. Especially if Venec had to read Nifty the riot act over something he’d done wrong. I turned away, looking out the sole window in the room to give myself time to recover, and blinked.

A pigeon had just flown past the window... backward. Oooookay. Maybe J was right when he said I needed some downtime, maybe a vacation in the tropics somewhere... .

I was still staring out the window trying to decide if I’d really seen that or just hallucinated it, most of my awareness still on the scene behind me, when the sound of the office’s front door slamming open bought me back to the scene in the room.

“Lawrence, go get cleaned up. Make sure you get all of that off your skin, or it will just make the