Staying Dead by Laura Anne Gilman

system like some kind of invisible pinball game.
    Wren swallowed a third, much heavier sigh. Wizzarts .
    â€œMax. Focus.”
    â€œI’m listening,” he said, cranky as an old bear with arthritis. “Get on with it before I decide you might make good fertilizer for the grass.”
    He was making an effort for her. That was nice to see. Wren organized her thoughts quickly, compiling and discarding arguments and appeals. Finally, feeling the pressure of his current-games pushing at her eardrums, almost to the point of pain, she went for broke.
    â€œWhy did you threaten to kill Oliver Frants?”
    The moment the words were out of her mouth, she knew that she had made a mistake. The question was too vague, too loosely-worded. He could answer her without telling a damn thing, whatever obligation or guilt or connection he felt satisfied, and she’d be out on her ear before she got another chance.
    â€œMan’s a waste of piss.”
    And that was it, the sum and total of his elaboration. Typical, she thought in disgust. A wizzart didn’t need to have a reason to do something. They thought it, they did it. For that quirk alone Wren could have written Max off the suspect list—this kind of indirect assault on the client required planning, thought—some kind of long-term intent behind it. And nobody in their right mind would have hired a wizzart to do a job like this—there was too much risk that the wizzart would get bored, and deposit the stone in the middle of the local police chief’s bedroom, just because.
    The problem was, a wizzart simply didn’t have anything left over after the magic. Their entire existence was dedicated towards channeling the energies, feeling them as completely as possible, every cell turned towards the goal of becoming the perfect conductor. And that included their brain cells.
    Because of that, wizzarts lived in the moment, the instant of action. It made them irascible, ornery, obnoxious—name your adjective and someone would double it without hesitation. “Waste of current” was the popular view. But the Council, in one of its few and far-between acts of mercy, had forbidden anyone to harm wizzarts. There but for the grace of God go you, was their official line. Truth was, Wren knew, the Council used wizzarts. When it came to the major mojos, to understanding the byplay of forces, the correlation of events and probabilities, they were the chaos-theory scientists of the Cosa Nostradamus.
    Unstable, yeah. But the very fact that they were that unpredictable also meant that Max could have done it, either for a client, or a passing whim. The only prediction you could make about the unpredictable is that they’re going to do something you didn’t even have in the list of possibilities.
    â€œI have a problem,” she said quickly, before his attention went into a sideslip. “Someone pulled a nasty job on my client. Someone with a bad sense of the funny. Your name was on the list, and I—” The pressure against her eardrums rose dramatically, and the energies between his hands manifested in zizzing spurts of static electricity. He giggled in pleasure. She had lost him.
    A night spent chasing down leads, checking up on suspects’ alibis and whereabouts, coupled with a morning of phone calls and in-person follow-ups on local suspects, topped by the two-hour drive to this godforsaken town that wasted even more time she probably didn’t have, finally made her temper snap. Ignoring all known procedures and common sense for dealing with wizzarts, she reached forward and slapped her hands over his, forcing the energy into a cage of her own flesh. Energy channeled took on the signature of its user. And right now, trapped between her hands, was a solid buzz of Max-imprinted magic, ready for the scrolling.
    hey hey HEY brat. bitch. A flash of herself, much younger, all eyes and ears and good intentions flickering like a beacon