Dragon Justice by Laura Anne Gilman

wild leap. More often, it took both.
    “If it’s not the usual suspects, but the gossip points there…”
I didn’t want to say the word, but I had to. “You think it’s the Silence, come
back?”
    For years, an organization called, ironically, the Silence had
been spreading enough lies and rumors around the city, enough to nearly destroy
the Cosa Nostradamus. We’d taken to the streets to
fight them, one snowy night last year, and they’d finally disappeared from the
scene a few months ago, their office building still sitting vacant. Wren Valere
had been elbows-deep in what was going on, then. If they’d come back, Wren would
have known. She would have told me, us. Right?
    “If they were back, the Dynamic Duo would have let us know,”
Danny said, echoing my thoughts. “Right?”
    “Right.”
    I sounded convinced, but there was a low note of doubt in my
stomach to go with everything else. Wren Valere was my friend. A genuine hero,
although she’d scoff at the thought. She was also a Retriever, and like Danny,
she took discretion to an art form when needed. Discretion that, to me, could
translate as withholding evidence. How far could we trust her to share
information? Yeah, hero, friend, etc., but…
    I couldn’t afford to be distracted by a maybewhatif. Useless
dithering, Torres. Focus on the facts. “I’ll have Venec put a few feelers out,
just in case.” Ben had friends in seriously low places, even for the Cosa, and if the Silence were back, those friends
would be scurrying for their lives. “But for now, we focus on the girls and work
our way out to their captors, not the other way around.”
    “Right. Here.” He pulled a handful of sheets from the folders
and shuffled them together. “Copies of all the known facts on my girls. Okay to
copy yours?”
    “Yeah, go ahead.” We’d hired Danny for side work before;
Stosser and Venec trusted him. Besides, I’d already spilled the part I wasn’t
supposed to say; wasn’t like his having hardcopy would change anything.
    The copier machine was a tiny little thing, off in the corner
of the room. Danny fed the sheets in, one at a time, while I grabbed one of the
client chairs and draped myself into it.
    Better to fess up now than get caught out later. But
indirectly…
    *boss?*
    There was a slight lag in his response. Nothing that would have
been noticeable with anyone else, but I’d become accustomed to Venec being just
next to my thoughts at all times. Distance was a factor in pings; maybe it
mattered here, too? If so, he wasn’t in the city anymore. Huh.
    *what?*
    *twist in the job Stosser gave me. taking Danny on. he has a
case that might match it*
    A sense of acknowledgment, acceptance, and being busy somewhere
else. Ben was leaving the city. Yeah, moving… I concentrated a little.
Southward.
    *?*
    *do your job, torres*
    And then he was gone. Okay, fine. There was absolutely no
reason for me to feel like I’d been punched in the stomach, right? He was the
boss, and I was the pup, and we’d agreed that was where we were and he had no
obligation to tell me where he was going, any more than I checked in with him,
off-hours.
    I’d never been jealous before in my entire life. Not even when
J, my mentor, went out to visit his first student, now a lawyer out in
California, and didn’t invite me to come along. I’d understood I shared J, and
was okay with that. Not when lovers had moved on, or when a potential lover had
chosen someone else. It just… I had never understood how you could resent
someone spending time somewhere else, like only you had a claim on their
life.
    But I did now. And I didn’t like how tightly I hugged that
feeling, as though it should give me comfort instead of pain.
    “Okay, here.” Danny came back and handed over the originals.
“You want to work this together or split up?”
    Having something concrete to work on would keep Venec and his
mysterious errand out of my mind. “Split up.” Plausible deniability was