Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [62]
He shouldn’t have been so hard on Dancy. You couldn’t be in the game and not get talked about, and that’s what this all was, a very deadly serious game. And the moment he walked into the building, people knew. He might call it gossip…active Handlers would call it intel. Their lives sometimes depended on it.
“Didier?”
He turned, bracing himself until he saw who the speaker was.
“Adam.”
“I never thought I’d see you at one of these again.” There was an unspoken question on Adam’s lean face, a concern that dated back twenty years, when they were both raw recruits in the Silence’s ongoing battle. Adam never seemed to age, damn him. A little more silver in the reddish hair, a few more lines around the eyes and mouth, but still the same. His companion, a younger woman with dark brown ringlets and an open, curious face, watched the two of them as though she had her eye to a microscope.
“I had need of the Library. Sheer bad luck to pick today, but figured as long as they were pouring…”
Adam pursed his mouth. You didn’t go to the Library unless and until you had exhausted all your usual resources. But Sergei had just enough of a reputation as a renegade that he might do anything at all.
“Did she let you in?”
A twist of the mouth that might have been a smile. “Sent me to Douglas.”
“Ouch.” The Library was harsh on people who wasted her—its—time. But Douglas was almost worse. “Was it worth it?”
Sergei shrugged. “Won’t know until I know.”
The Silence was small by most corporate standards, but it still had an organizational chart with three branches: Action, Information and Operations. Douglas was Operations. He pulled strings, and Action—the branch that oversaw Handlers and their agents in the field—danced.
Douglas knew where the bodies were buried, how deep, and what it might take to dig them up again. You went to him only when you had something of value to trade.
Adam looked at Sergei with renewed interest, but his companion finally had enough, and elbowed Adam in the ribs just hard enough to make her point.
“Ooof. Right. Sorry. Clara, Sergei Didier. Sergei, Clara Maroony.”
“You were a Handler,” she said, sizing him up with a cool eye he might have found appealing at another time, on another day.
“Not anymore.”
“Not right now,” Adam said, and returned Sergei’s glare with a cool eye of his own. “He’s freelancing at the moment. I’m thinking of taking him as my mentor.”
Clara snorted, and turned on her heel, leaving them in search of more interesting conversation.
“Heard of me, has she?”
Adam made a “what can you do?” move with his hands. “There are those who still like to talk about the lad who told the Silence to take a long walk off the short pier. If it helps, most of the young’uns haven’t a clue who you were. Still are.” He held up a hand to stop anything Sergei might say in response. “Spare me, okay? We’ve been friends for too long to fight over this. Even if you are stingy with the Christmas cards. Just remember that you do still have friends here.” His expression grew intent. “And that you can do more with friends than enemies.”
“Thank you.” There really wasn’t anything else he could say. And friends were always good to have. He might have need of them. Soon.
Adam clapped him on the shoulder, and turned to follow Clara. Sergei stood in the middle of the growing crowd, feeling it swirl around him in an intricate two-step of office politics. Sharks and lampreys, circling, looking for something struggling in the water.
An ugly image, and probably not fair. The Silence operatives were the good guys. He had to remember that.
If Sergei was going to be honest with himself, there was a lot of truth in what the two men had said. If he were to return to the Silence, bringing Wren with him, he would be their golden boy again, a position he’d held for most of his adult life.
Look at it logically, old man. On the one hand, if he agreed to be Wren’s Handler, he would be in a position to help her adjust to the…particulars