Read Online Tricks of the Trade by Laura Anne Gilman - Free Book Online Page A

rubbed off at that. Even if I’d been at loose ends and hot to trot, a quick hit wasn’t my thing. I’m a bit of a hedonist, yeah, but I liked to know the person I was with, more than just a name and a favoritedrink. So with a regretful smile, and not really any regrets, I let that fish slip back into the sea and went back to my team.
    â€œYou feeling all right, dandelion?” Nick almost, almost managed to sound like he was seriously concerned for my well-being.
    â€œYeah, I’m fine.” I twisted on a grin. “She was…too young for me.”
    â€œYoung.” Nifty sounded like he wanted to challenge me on that—and rightfully so, because she clearly had been well above the age of consent, but he didn’t. That, in a way, was worse than if he had ragged on me. It was either pity or worry, neither of which I could deal with right now, even if I had anything to tell them.
    If I let them, the team would ply me with drinks and do their best to console me on whatever they thought was wrong, distract me with bad jokes or horrible stories, maybe try to fix me up with someone they knew who would be perfect…and normally I’d let them, accepting their own odd ways of showing they cared. But suddenly, my skin was too raw, my nerves too exposed, and I just needed to be by myself.
    â€œOkay, I’m out,” I said, finishing my drink. “This little puppy is going home. Alone. I’ll see y’all tomorrow.” I grabbed my bag, paid out enough to cover my drinks, and waved goodbye before anyone could get a wiseass crack in about me being the first to leave. Okay, it was unusual but it wasn’t totally unheard-of.
    Not recently, anyway.
    I worked with trained investigators, each and everyone of them hired because they were obsessively curious,and incapable of walking away from a puzzle. I would lay odds they were playing paper-rock-scissors even now, to determine who got to ask me what was going on, tomorrow. And once they started digging, they weren’t going to let up. Not them.
    Great.
    I walked out into the night with the beginnings of a killer headache under my scalp, and a roil in my stomach that had nothing to do with the empanadas I’d eaten.
    The Merge was starting to interfere, not with my ability to do the job, but my coworkers’. They were going to be focusing on the mystery of me, and maybe not on the work at hand. Of all the problems I thought this might cause, that hadn’t been one I’d considered.
    â€œSo what now, Bonita?”
    The great thing about New York City—you can carry on an entire conversation with yourself, and even without an earpiece nobody gives you a second look. The usual chaos of Port Authority in the evening was weirdly soothing to get caught up in. If you know how to walk with the flow, you can get lost in the swirl of people, like being a single grain in a sandstorm, carried around and dropped off where you needed to be by some weird magic. All you had to do was not consciously think about what you were doing or where you were going, and let the universe carry you there.
    I caught the A train uptown. Spring is the best time to ride the subway: everyone’s dropped off the heavy coats that overstuffed trains during the winter, and the summer’s sweat hasn’t begun yet. Considering how full the train was, that was a blessing. Bad enough some hip-hopwannabe teenager tried to hold the door for his pack of slower-moving friends, causing the conductor to bawl something incomprehensible until they were all inside and he let the door go.
    On another day I might have been tempted to send a spark from the metal door into his hand, for being a jerk, but my focus was all inward, right then.
    Fact one: the thing I’d worried about was here, the Merge was impacting work. That it wasn’t happening exactly how I’d feared didn’t change the fact. So, one excuse for avoiding it, blown out of the