Tricks of the Trade by Laura Anne Gilman Page A

Because why should even simple cases be easy? I went back to my notes, and let Nick do the same with mine.
    And if there was a part of me that was listening for the touch of Venec’s core against mine, I wasn’t going to admit to anything.
    It said a lot about how trained we’d gotten in the past year that when Venec didn’t come back that afternoon and Stosser never made an appearance all day, we still remembered Venec’s Law: Nobody Pulls an All-Nighter without Big Dog Approval. At least, I think we all did—when I left at six, Sharon was still going over her notes, looking at the diorama she and Nick had started putting together. But of all of us, she was the least likely to lose track of time—or to use that as an excuse to disobey standing orders.
    Lou, who had managed not to blow herself up during the spell trials, was putting on her coat when I headed out, and we walked out together, after I made sure the coffeemaker had been turned off for the night.
    I’d headed for the stairs at the end of the hallway when Lou stopped me with a puzzled question. “Why don’t any of you use the elevator?”
    It was a good question. Easy to answer, except for the fact that none of us were willing, or able, to talk about it, even now. Also, if I made Lou paranoid, too, Venec would kick my ass. So I didn’t tell her about the teenage boy who had been killed during an attack on us when we first opened shop, when power shorted out and the elevator plummeted into the basement. I just shrugged, and pushed open the door, giving her a lesser truth. “It keeps us in shape.”
    Truth, but not the entire truth, and it came out as natural as honey. As a painfully self-aware teenager, I used to insist on the whole truth and nothing but the truth, because anything else was a lie. I’d thought black was black, and white, white, and the right answers were obvious to anyone, if you only thought about it.
    I had been an arrogant twit back then, and it’s a wonder J didn’t lock me in a closet until I was thirty.
    With everything else going on, between the two new cases and the underlying worry about where Venec had disappeared to, that thought about lying should have come and gone. Instead it nagged at me. Lou and I went our separate ways on the sidewalk and I—on a whim—decided to walk home rather than taking the subway. It was only a couple of miles, and I felt the need for freshair, rather than being packed into rush-hour mass transit. I stopped in the local bodega for a bottle of water and a halvah bar to have for dessert, and started walking.
    We had been funded not to hand out judgment but to establish the facts—the where and the who—of a crime, which would lead us to the why and the how. But facts didn’t exist in a vacuum, neatly cut and packaged. We had to shake them out of the messier tangle of human emotions and motivations.
    Black and white. Truth and lies. The ki-rin hadn’t been able to lie, but it had deceived. Aden Stosser, our boss’s sister, lied about us and what we did, and thought that it was the truth. Sharon suspected that our newest client was lying about the break-in but he was so good at it, she couldn’t tell. Sociopath. Maybe.
    Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive. Sir Walter Scott, not Shakespeare. Deception and truth and half truths. It was the reason we did this job; so that nobody could hide behind magic and deny their actions or deeds. And if sometimes we allowed those actions to be buried again, for the greater good…
    â€œIt’s not our job.”
    I swear, I thought I’d said it out loud until I realized that Venec was walking alongside me.
    â€œMotherofgod.” It came out in a hot breath, and I shuddered at how easily he’d managed to come up next to me, without my even noticing. “Also, goddamn it. I thought you said this thing would make us more aware of each