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wooden chair in the room, and nothing else. I closed the door behind me, and leaned against it, trying to let my center settle itself.
    â€œSeal and protect,” I said, triggering the wards we had setup to keep things inside the room inside the room. Once I felt the wards click into place, I pulled out the chair and sat down at the table.
    Wood. Everything in our office was wood or plastic; no metal if it could be avoided. Wood didn’t conduct current the way metal did, which meant we didn’t have to be quite so careful all the damned time. I placed my hands down on the surface, my palms sweaty against the varnish, and exhaled.
    â€œAll right,” I said to the packet inside me, reaching down with a gentle mental urge. “Come on out and show me what we’ve got.”
    We’d originally tried to create a virtual lockroom for things we pulled from scenes, both magical trace and physical debris. It worked great on the deposit, but got corrupted whenever someone tried to access it. We still hadn’t licked that problem. This dump-and-display was something that Stosser and I had invented out of old spells and new needs. Some of the stuff the team came up with worked, and some didn’t. We had to be flexible, adapt. Find better ways to fail, and then find a way not to fail.
    Visuals were the easiest to process and share. Anyone could do it, theoretically. In practice, not so much. Nick and Sharon both made a total hash out of every try on their own, Pietr was around sixty-five percent, and even Nifty only got about eighty percent of each gleaning back in one piece.
    I had a consistent ninety-three percent return rate on visuals, and a decent eighty-two percent on the other senses. That was why, no matter what happened in practice, it wasme in the barrel, every time, and the hell with everyone taking turns.
    Basically, the cantrip used current to create a permanent, three-dimensional display of the visual record I had garnered, sort of like what a computer would generate using pixels, only it was running off the electrical and magical impulses of my brain. The only problem was that, although the image would be here, in the room, I’d still be the one hosting it. The echo would still be in my brain until we dumped the gleaning entirely and I could detox, which generally required a full dose of current, a pitcher of margaritas, and a very hot shower.
    I wasn’t all that thrilled with my gray matter being used in that way, but Stosser swore it wasn’t doing any permanent damage, and so far it seemed to be working. Whatever worked, we used.
    It wasn’t something I was going to tell my mentor about, though. J had let me hunt for the truth about my dad’s murder when I was a teenager, had seen how much the simple fact of knowing what had happened to Zaki set me free. He was coming to terms with what I did, the physical and magical risks, but that didn’t mean he liked it, and he’d like this bit of current-risk even less. J’s always—some part of him—going to see me as the kid he took under his wing, someone he needs to protect. So, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t telling him everything.
    I sat back, relaxed as much as I could, and closed my eyes. The current-camera rolled, the virtual film unreeled, and the figures took form in front of me, one-third of the size but every bit as real. The shiver I’d had at the scene intensified,until it racked my entire body, a seemingly endless rolling wave of cold rippling along my skin. I’d known it was going to happen, it happened every time, even in training, which was why I was doing this alone. Unloading sucked.
    The problem was, you couldn’t disengage from what you gleaned, not after you took it inside. Visuals, sound, magical trace, it all carried emotional residue—a thousand tiny fish-hooks that caught at you. We’d learned that the hard way, going in to gather trace on murder victims