I found myself becoming giddy as I headed down the hallway to my apartment, and by the time I got to my front door, I was smiling uncontrollably but I didn’t feel happy. When I unzipped my purse, my hands were shaking and I had to fumble for my keys.
The door next to mine opened and the guy with the red hair stepped out, making me jump and drop my purse onto the floor.
“Good afternoon,” he said.
“Yeah, hi.”
I scooped up my purse and dug my keys out, trying to find the one to the door. The man stood there and watched me as I managed to find it, then tried to stab it into the lock, but I couldn’t keep it steady. The tip of the key quivered as I tried to home in on the keyhole.
“You look like you’ve had some excitement,” he said. “Where have you been?”
“What?”
He was watching me, his expression not changing. It was weird enough that I was about to focus on him and make him go back inside, when my key found the lock and I pushed it in and turned it.
“I don’t see you out much,” the man said. He was still talking, I think, when I pushed the door open, then slammed it behind me and turned the bolt. Shrugging out of my coat, I dropped it on the floor and sat down on the sofa, crossing my arms over my stomach and leaning forward.
My visit didn’t go anything like I thought it might. The place was uninviting and everyone looked at me funny, if they looked at me at all. I didn’t think I’d talk face-to-face with a suspect, and I never expected to see anyone look like that. He was so beaten up, it made me feel sick.
The image of his face clenching up and the blood spraying out of his ear kept playing in my mind over and over again. The popping sound that came from inside his head was horrible. All I could think of was him lying there in that wheelchair with blood draining out of his ear, splattering all over the floor.
Why did I go there? What made me think I could go there and deal with something like that? Nico didn’t even flinch when he examined the body. How could that not bother him?
It worked, though.
Yes, it had worked. For whatever it was worth, it had worked, and Nico Wachalowski was now very interested in me, I could tell.
I remembered his hand on my shoulder, and the electricity I felt when he touched me. I hadn’t been touched in so long it made me ache a little, just in those seconds before he moved it away. I shook my head. There were tears in my eyes.
The room was dark, and behind the shade across the room the sky was gray. I needed a drink. I felt sick, but I needed a drink more.
Someone knocked on the door, breaking me out of my thoughts. I should have ignored it, but instead I opened it like a zombie. It was the woman from downstairs. She was standing there with her hands behind her back and smiling, but her face fell when she saw me.
“Hi,” she said kind of uncertainly. I didn’t say anything.
“Karen,” she prompted.
“Hi, Karen. What do you want?”
“I was thinking about it,” she said. “I think cookies were the wrong way to go.”
“Cookies?”
“Yeah. I brought you something better.”
“Better?”
She brought her hands out from behind her back and held out a bottle. It was clear, filled with amber liquid. I looked at the label; it was top-shelf stuff.
“Wow,” I said. She pulled it back just a little as I reached for it.
“The only catch is, you have to share it,” she said, “with me.”
“Gifts aren’t supposed to have catches.”
“I know, but this one does.”
I felt kind of embarrassed that she thought she could ply me with booze, and even more so that it was working.
“When?”
“Now?”
Maybe I was still just delirious from everything that had happened, but my mouth opened and the word came out.
“Okay,” I said, and she smiled a great, big smile.
“My place is a dump,” I told her.
“That’s fine,” she said.
“Seriously, it’s bad. I don’t want to hear anything about it.”
“My lips are sealed.”
This is a mistake. You know this is a huge mistake….
“My life is a complete mess,” I warned her.
“Birds of a feather.”
She stood there smiling, and I wondered what it was that some people had inside of them that made them enjoy meeting strangers and interacting with them. I wondered how the prospect of coming up here and getting me to just let her in the front door could put a smile like that on her face.
Stepping back, I let the door swing open so she could come inside. She made a face when she first walked in, but true to her word, she didn’t say anything.
“Still want to stay?”
“It could use a little light,” she said.
“I had a lamp, but it broke,” I said. “You can sit wherever. I’ll get some glasses.”
“What about the overhead lights?”
“They burned out.”
There were no clean glasses, so I rinsed two of them out and dried them off with a paper towel.
“What’s all this stuff?” she called. “The notebooks?”
“My notes,” I said. “Don’t read those.”
“Can I move them?”
“Yeah, just put them anywhere.”
“Notes for what?” she asked as I came in with the glasses.
My face got hot. I couldn’t tell her they were full of dreams and visions and other stuff she wouldn’t believe. I couldn’t tell her they were pages and pages, books and books full of a crazy person’s rants. I didn’t know what else to say, so I just stood there not saying anything until her face started to fall again.
“This is going well, huh?” I said.
She shrugged, trying to keep her smile going, but she was getting uncomfortable too. She looked like she was starting to think this was a bigger mistake than I did.
“Sorry,” I told her. “I don’t know what to say.”
I thought she might leave, but instead she got a determined look on her face and the smile came back, at least a little. She patted the cushion of the chair across from her gently, inviting me to sit down, and when I did, she filled my glass about an inch’s worth.
“Tell me about your day,” she said.
I drained the glass, and it felt good. Whatever it was, it was sweet and fiery, and burned going down. Not too much and not too little, and as I felt that heat trickle down my throat and into my stomach, it filled my nose with the smell of spice.
“You’d never believe me.”
She poured me another one, and one for herself. After that, it started flowing pretty freely.
“You don’t want to tell me,” she said.
I shrugged.
“Has it to do with your gift?” she asked.
“My gift?”
“That thing you do,” she said. “The way you calm Ted down. How does it work?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and swallowed another glassful. With my nose in the glass, I breathed in, drawing in the fumes.
“Oh, come on.”
“Really, I wish I did.”
“Are you psychic?”
“I don’t know what I am,” I said, shaking my head.
“For all I know, we’re not even really having this conversation.”
I didn’t notice right away because I was starting to get drunk, but she was looking at me all seriously, and the smile was gone.
“You really see things?”
Instead of answering, I held out my glass again, and she poured some more in.
“Like ghosts?” she asked.
“No.”
“Visions?”
“They’re not hallucinations.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“They’re not. I wish they were.”
“Why?”
Because they scare me. They scare me to my soul, and if they are real and I’m not crazy, then a lot of terrible things are going to happen….
“Because it all burns,” I said, looking into the glass. What little light there was looked red through the liquor, shimmering like little hot embers. When I looked back at her, her eyes had gotten wider.
“What does—”
“I don’t want to talk about that, okay?”
Karen nodded.
“Why wouldn’t you let me thank you before?” she asked.
I shrugged.
“You know he used to hit me all the time,” she said, looking down into her glass.
“I know.”
“But not anymore,” she said, “and that’s because of you. I know this is a touchy subject for you, but just let me say it, okay? I don’t know what it is you do or how you do it, but you’ve been a big help. Whether you meant to or not, you made a difference to me. I’ve always wanted to stop you, to talk to you. I’ve always wanted to thank you, but I was afraid.”
As she spoke, I felt this sort of heaviness coming over me, like a fog or water. The light in the room seemed to dim.
“I need to be clear about something,” I said, and I was suddenly very conscious that my words were slurring. “I can’t change anyone or anything. Calming down a violent person doesn’t make him not violent—you get it? If I know something that’s going to happen, I can’t make it not happen. I can’t change anything.”
“You might think that,” she said, “but you’re wrong. People change things all the time. Maybe they don’t do it by reaching into people’s heads, but they don’t have to. They do it by reaching out to them, even if it’s just something little. That’s how you change things, and anyone can do it. Even you.”
She looked up from her glass, and her eyes were a ghostly color. Like moonlight. They glowed softly, and in that instant before she looked down again, they watched me with a cold, dead indifference.
I felt like the floor dropped out from under me, and my face started to feel cold. From outside the window I heard what sounded like a transformer blowing or a loud firework going off from blocks away. I thought I was hearing things, but she heard it too. When she looked back from the window, her eyes were normal.
“What was that?” she asked.
“You need to leave,” I said. Another sound, one she didn’t hear, was getting louder. It was a sound like voices all talking at once.
“I’m sorry—”
“You need to leave,” I said again, getting up. I felt light-headed and stumbled, almost falling back onto the couch. “I didn’t go down there to help you. I went down there because you were being too loud.”
“I don’t believe you.”
The voices were getting louder, and I could hear they were panicked and screaming. The room was getting darker, and the floor felt like it was moving underneath me.
“Something happened,” I said. “Something terrible happened.”
“What—”
“Get out!” I shouted, and she jumped, almost dropping her glass. The heavy feeling was getting worse. Everything was slowing down. I heard a smash as the glass slipped out of my hands and hit the floor. I was hyper-ventilating and I couldn’t stop.
“Hey, are you okay?” Karen asked, getting up and reaching toward me. I slapped her hands aside and she backed away. I didn’t want her to see me like this. I didn’t want what I was seeing to be true.
“It’s not fair!” I screamed. She was looking at me like I’d gone nuts, but by then it was too late for me to even try to stop it.
I stepped back over a body lying on its back on the floor. Three other men with strange silvery eyes hunched over around him. One turned and raised his head, red, gristly meat clenched in his teeth as he tore away a long strip of rubbery skin.
This isn’t real.
The room disappeared. The voices became a roar as a stampede of men, women, and children charged around me and drowned out everything else. Their faces were burned, their clothing charred off their bodies. Some were bleeding; some were missing arms or legs, stumps flailing as they clawed their way past; some were impaled with pieces of metal, with their skin, bones, and guts torn away. They were screaming as they ran, screaming with eyes wide and blind with fear.
This isn’t real.
Pieces of glass and metal began raining down from the sky as they fought, pushing tighter and tighter against each other until they could no longer even punch or kick their way forward. They piled around me until there was nothing left but the stinking, shoving, and screaming, and I squeezed my eyes shut, clamping my hands over my ears.
“This isn’t real!” I shrieked, but it was and I knew it. It was real, and everyone was going to die, and everything was going to burn. Karen and me and Wachalowski and the dead woman …none of it mattered because it was all going to burn.
By the time we got close to my place, I was so goddamn cold, Luis must have been freezing his second-tier nuts off. The buildings were jammed close together down my way, and no one ever came to plow any road except the main one, so snow was piled up in the places where people bothered to dig out. Down most side streets, the cars were buried ass to nose on both sides, stuck in ice until spring.
I took a left down Iranistan and steered the bike down the narrow path between the stuck cars. The building fronts were covered in graffiti, and half the windows were boarded up.
“How do they get to work?” Luis asked. I didn’t answer.
Up ahead was the old gun shop, or what was left of it, and for the first time in months, there were some guys in front of it. The Turkish guy who ran the market next to it was there in his wool hat, talking to two patrol cops with rifles. A third cop shoved the gun shop’s bent gate open and went in, while a black patrol car with tinted windows idled nearby. The shop used to deal stolen guns under the table and other shit too, but that was a long time ago. Since then it had been torched.
“Are there always so many patrols down here?” Luis asked.
“No.”
The black car gunned its engine when we got closer, and moved into the road to block our path.
Son of a …
We were stuck, so I hit the brakes and we slid to a stop a foot away from the armored front door. One of the two guys with the Turk came up to us with his hand out.
“Hands up,” he said as he came around the side of the car.
“What the hell?” I said. “What now? We’re just—”
“Hands over your heads! Do it!”
Luis’s went up the first time, I think, and I put mine up there too. This guy was tense, one hand on his gun when he came up. The other one was calling in.
“One vehicle, two passengers. Vehicle ID …”
The first one looked Luis over, then me.
“Where’s your ID?”
“In my jacket—”
I went to reach for it, and as soon as I moved my hand the gun went right in my face.
“Hands over your head!”
“Alright! Jesus—”
“Quiet!”
He unzipped the front of my coat and stuck his hand in, right to the lined pocket. He fished in there and pulled out my ID and both sets of knuckles. He checked the ID and scanned it, then looked back at his partner and shook his head.
“Negative,” the other guy said in the radio. “Both passengers were processed earlier today, and were stopped again across town less than an hour ago….”
The goon held out my ID and both pairs of brass knuckles as the black car slammed into reverse and rolled back out of the way. It took a second for me to get that he was giving me my shit back, even the brass. I took it and stuck the lot back in my coat.
“Move along,” he said. Just like that; no fine, no ticket, no speech, just beat it. He stepped back and I went through.
“What was that all about?” Luis asked when they were out of earshot.
“No idea.”
“Something must have happened. They’re looking for someone.”
“Not us.”
He shut up and didn’t talk again until we got to my street. The buildings were mostly dark there, the concrete black from smog and the windows broken or boarded. Rusted chain link leaned around empty lots where new graffiti covered old graffiti. One titty bar-slashwhorehouse had some of the last lit neon, along with some shit-hole martial arts dojo to the left and up. I took us through the concrete pylons holding up the maglev rails that crossed between the housing units, then down between the huge piles of brown ice and snow, mixed with piles of trash bags and dead cars.
“This is where you live?”
“Down here.”
I pulled into my unit and down the ramp to the underground parking area that held two cars that ran, one that didn’t, and my bike. I cut the engine, kicked it, locked it, and armed it.
“Come on,” I said, climbing off and heading up.
The kid looked like he changed his mind, but it was too late for that now. He held up okay in jail, but now he looked twitchy.
“Take it easy,” I told him. “You’re okay.”
He didn’t look sure, but he tagged along after me when I buzzed in the back door and turned the bolt. Another badge at my unit, two more bolts, then the security bar slammed down in its track behind the door and I shoved it open.
“Come on in.”
He made a face when he went in, like he just saw a rat or worse. He stood right inside in front of the couch and stared.
“This is where you live?” he asked again.
“Yeah. Fuck you.”
“No, I know. It’s just—”
“Whatever,” I said. “You want the tour? That’s the kitchen, this is the TV room, the can is through there, and through there is where I sleep.”
“It’s so small,” he said.
I thought of his bathroom and how huge it was. You could see my whole place from the front door. The kitchen had a half fridge, two burners, a sink, and that was it. The TV area had the couch, the TV, a weight bench, and a heavy bag in the corner. The can had a shitter, a shower with industrial plastic sheeting, and a sink with all plain metal and no colored soap.
“Can I use your TV?” he asked.
“Knock yourself out.”
He turned it on and flipped. Not long after, he found what he was looking for.
“…the site of what witnesses describe as a suicide bombing, in broad daylight, right in the center of one of the city’s restaurant districts.”
It was total mayhem. The camera looked over the crowd, where cops were pushing people back. People all up and down the street had blood on their heads and faces, and there was glass everywhere.
“That’s why the patrols are out,” he said. “Shit …”
“If a bomb went off there, why look here?”
“They must be following some kind of lead. Holy shit, look at that,” he said, sitting down on the couch.
It was bad; I had to say that. The place got blown to shit. There were dead bodies all over.
“…took authorities several hours to completely quell the ensuing riot, which resulted in many more injuries, deaths, and damage to local property and businesses. Initial estimates place the damage in the millions. Mayor Ohtomo and his administration have been quick to respond, with plans to deploy the National Guard to prevent looting and other crimes of opportunity until the area can be completely secured. Given the range and impact of this attack, that will be no easy task….”
Luis turned down the sound and got on his phone. He tapped his foot like a junkie.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m trying to reach Dr. Edward Cross, please.”
Someone babbled on the other end, but I couldn’t make it out.
“I know,” he said, “but it’s important. Would it be possible to have someone get him, or patch me through to the lab? I understand. You’re sure he’s there, though? He signed in? You’re sure he’s there? Okay, thanks.”
He hung up.
“Trying to reach your doctor?”
“He’s not that kind of doctor,” he said, eyes on the TV. “Anyway, he’s my uncle. Hey, you mind if I use the data miner?”
“The TV miner? Knock yourself out.” He typed away with his thumbs on the remote.
“You said you’d buy dinner,” I said.
“Sure, whatever you want.”
I watched him work the TV for a minute, until hits and lists popped up on the screen and he started typing in weird shit I’d never seen before and using stuff I didn’t know was in there.
“Don’t get me in trouble,” I said.
“I won’t.”
Promises.
People edged quickly past my desk as I checked for messages, and the normally quiet halls were filled with rapid-fire chatter. There was no word from Faye, Zoe, or any contacts that might provide a lead, just a battery of alerts and notifications marked high priority. A sweep was being set up that covered voice, text, and anything else they could think of. Any circuit that could have a tap shunted in was being monitored as computers sifted through the data, looking for leads. The scope of the effort was huge. So huge that just to get enough bodies on the street, an unprecedented number of revivors had been deployed to supplement foot soldiers at key points through the city. Whoever initiated the attack, they’d stirred up a hornet’s nest.
My ears were still ringing, and I could still smell the burned biochemical stink left behind by the revivor that had detonated the bomb. Nothing useful had survived, but pieces of it had been thrown as far as two blocks away. Fused components were being dug out of vehicles, concrete, and even victims caught in the blast. Initial reports indicated military-grade explosives in a configuration that maximized the blast radius, so whoever wired the revivor knew what he was doing. Despite the relatively small amount of charge, the force was devastating.
Getting out of the restaurant strip had been dicey. We were pinned down until riot control got there, and by then it was a war zone. The explosion had killed at least fifty-three people and wounded almost two hundred others; then another nine died in the riot that followed—five crushed or trampled, three from clashing with other citizens, and one choked with a police baton in the heat of the struggle. Even with escorts, getting Faye to the perimeter was a struggle.
The inventory had come in for the arsenal recovered from Tai’s base of operations. It included explosives that easily could have caused the kind of damage that occurred downtown. The bomb that killed all those people had come through Tai; I was sure of it. Whoever killed him was behind it.
I sat at my desk and watched the footage I had recorded from the interrogation earlier, the window floating behind my closed eyelids. Off to one side I kept a smaller window tapped into a camera that watched from the wall behind me, in case anyone came by.
“Answer her questions,” I heard myself say. Zoe was staring at the suspect, which I had pretty much expected. What color she had drained out of her face. If she was any paler, she could have been mistaken for a revivor.
Given the circumstances, I had switched off the camera in the interrogation room, and I didn’t disclose the POV recording I’d made myself either, but I wanted a record of the interview for my own use. When I first found out why she had really left the note, I had almost turned it off and sent her home. I was glad I hadn’t.
“Are you okay?” she asked in a small voice.
I remember taking a small amount of satisfaction in that. Honestly, I figured once she got a look at the guy, she’d turn around and that would be that. She did better than I expected, though.
“Who are you?” the guy asked.
I scanned forward, looking for the moment when she did whatever it was she did. When I saw her arms go down by her sides and her head start to drift forward, I stopped.
“—lax.”
“Screw you, you ugly little bitch!”
He spit and a glob of red squirted out at caught her right in the face. The camera rose as I knocked the chair back and moved toward him.
I wasn’t looking at her when it happened; I was looking at him. He was glaring at me with a defiant smirk, when all of a sudden his face changed. The smirk disappeared and his eyelids drooped.
“Sleep,” I heard her say, and his eyelids fluttered. They stayed open, but his eyes went out of focus. It was as if he suddenly had gone blind or something. I had scanned him, getting a bead on his vitals; his heartbeat had slowed, and he was totally relaxed. He seemed, in fact, to be very close to sleep.
The camera moved back to Zoe, my hand moving into frame with a paper towel. I froze the image.
She was staring at the guy, her pupils almost completely dilated, like she was loaded on amphetamines. Her face had changed dramatically. I remember thinking that at the time, too. When she first came in, she was nervous, shy almost to the point of paralysis, despite the fact that she had clearly been drinking. Her eyes were always cast downward at the floor, at her shoes, or at her hands. Now she was staring right at someone she knew to be a killer, looking him right in the eyes. It was like a pair of invisible beams connected her eyes to his and neither one could look away, but looking at her face again now, I could see who was in control. She could have looked away at any time, but he couldn’t have. Not until she let him. It was like a completely different personality had emerged from inside her, and the expression in her eyes as she stared at him from over that beaky nose was something that didn’t seem to belong there.
Was it real?
Having done some research on the type of device used to kill him, I found out that it typically monitored for two things: a loosening of the inhibitions caused by prolonged, extreme pain, and a brain- wave state indicative of drug-induced mind control or hypnosis.
He wasn’t in any pain. After the beating he took and the surgery that followed, he was on enough painkillers that he wasn’t feeling much of anything. He wasn’t coerced with drugs at any point.
“Can you hear me?” she asked, as I resumed the recording.
“Yes.”
I wondered whether she had known him previously, if somehow this whole meeting was a setup of some kind. The image of the revivor heart signature she had scrawled on the card she left wasn’t just an uncanny representation; when I compared it to the one I had recorded from the female I encountered in the bathroom at Tai’s place, it was an exact match. Every revivor’s signature was unique. She had to have seen it somewhere.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
I’d seen hypnosis before, but never anything like that. I knew his type, and he was ex-military. He was trained on how to behave if he was ever captured, and he could endure a lot of pain and interrogation. It didn’t make sense that a ninety-pound woman could walk in and make him give everything up in less than a minute, but that’s what it looked like he was about to do.
The kill switch implanted in his head seemed to believe so too.
The more I watched her, the more interesting the strange woman became. I needed to get her back, but I didn’t know if after what happened, I wanted to risk bringing her back in. Maybe I could set something up off the premises….
Backing up the recording, I watched as the man reversed out of his stupefied state and the smirk returned. The spit jumped in reverse through the space between his teeth and Zoe backed away; then the camera did as well as we both moved back down the hallway.
If I had known what was going to happen, I’d have watched her more closely, but as it was, I was focused initially on the suspect and, I had to admit, the message from Faye I had gotten earlier. The only other time we were alone was when Zoe first came in and I met her in the conference room. That had been a short introduction, but it was better than nothing. I kept backing up, looking for the moment when I first walked in and saw her.
The camera turned as we backed into the conference room and then sat at the table. For a while I focused on her face as she spoke, glancing down self-consciously; then I saw her pupils dilate. They dilated completely, just as they had in the interrogation room.
I stopped rewinding and let the footage play.
“…and take me to him. When we get there, do what I say and I’ll prove it to you,” she said.
My eyes had been fixed on hers, just staring, with her staring up at me.
“Do you understand?” she asked.
“Yes,” I heard myself say, and I froze the image.
As sure as I was of anything, that had not happened. I would have remembered it. Frantically, I searched my memory for any trace of that conversation, but it wasn’t there.
Stunned, I scanned back until her pupils returned to normal a few seconds prior.
“…can help you,” she said.
“How?”
That I remembered. I watched as she pushed the paper, her skill list, across to me. I remembered the exasperation and annoyance I had felt when I first realized what I was looking at.
“I’m serious.”
“You know, I can see that you are.”
Her face changed, and then her eyes.
“Wait,” she said.
“Okay.”
“You need to give me a chance,” she said in a low voice. “If you could know one thing right now that you don’t, what would it be?”
“Did she love me?” I heard myself ask. It was barely a whisper.
Zoe’s eyes narrowed dangerously.
“Something to do with your case,” she snipped.
“We have a suspect in custody,” I told her. “I need him to talk.”
“Good,” she said. “I can make him do that. Don’t think about it. Just trust your instincts and take me to him. When we get there, do what I say and I’ll prove it to you. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
She stared at me as I paused the footage again. She looked at me exactly the way she had looked at the suspect. The nervousness, the shyness—they were gone, replaced by a confidence that seemed absolute. Was the awkwardness an act?
The JZI pinged. Wachalowski, it’s Noakes.
Yeah.
There was nothing left. The blast destroyed everything. Serial numbers, lot codes—it’s all slag.
What about organics?
A team is trying to track down a piece we can tie to the revivor, but the site is a mess.
I understand.
No radiation was detected, and no biological agents, but see Sean anyway and let him check you out.
I’m on my way down now. Sir, that bomb was strapped to a revivor, another combat model. It was fitted with a standard communications array. It was definitely military.
Did you make contact with it?
I had extended the connection roughly a minute before the bomb went off. It didn’t think it was going to accept it, but with less than five seconds on the timer, it had. I wasn’t facing it at that point; Faye had come out of the restaurant and I was moving her away when the revivor had suddenly picked up.
Time to wake up, Agent Wachalowski.
That was all it said. Before I could respond, it was gone.
Briefly. It knew who I was. It had to have come from Tai’s unknown contacts. They know we’re on to them.
What about the detective?
She gave me a name one of the revivors from the fire gave her. Also, she saw something I think might have been the attacker underneath an LW suit.
There was a pause before I got a response to that one.
Light-warping technology is top secret. Only a few countries even have access to it. Do you have any idea how expensive that would be?
Someone has money to burn.
What about the name?
A last name only: Zhang. No leads on it yet.
Could it be the name of one of Tai’s customers?
Maybe. I’m following up on the dock revivor now. I’ll let you know what I find.
I switched off the images and made my way to the subbasement, then into the dingy corridor that led to the morgue. The morgue was usually Judy’s domain, and she wasn’t used to sharing it. When the door opened, Sean was leaning over a body that was facedown on the tray while she hovered nearby, her arms crossed in front of her. She glanced at me when I came in. As I approached them, I caught a faint, bitter-tar smell.
“How’s it going?” I asked. The room was brightly lit, and Sean was still bent over the body, squinting into a magnifying lens that was strapped to his head.
“Getting there,” he said. He was peering into a square hole he had cut in the back of the revivor’s skull, teasing at something with his instruments. His white latex gloves were smeared with blackish blood.
“Find anything?”
“Your news jockey’s eyes were mostly intact,” he said, nodding toward a fluid- filled jar on the counter where they now stared out through the glass at me.
“They’re slightly different colors,” I observed.
“Only one is a fake; the other one’s natural. I was able to pull a little bit out of the buffer of the camera eye. I flagged it for you.”
I connected to the server and checked it out. The first clip was little more than a few frames strung together; it looked like the SWAT team escorting one of the revivors out of the building after the raid. The next was actually a shot of me, from when he had approached me in the lobby.
“They go backward,” Sean said, “from the end of the buffer back toward the beginning. The last clip was actually recorded first.”
The last clip was a little over four seconds long. From the looks of it, the kid was standing in someone’s private office. Even though the quality wasn’t good, everything in his field of vision still managed to scream wealth. The desk looked like real wood, and on top of it I could see a polished stone clock with what might have been a diamond at the twelve o’clock mark. A small figure sat behind the desk.
“Is that a kid?” I asked. It almost looked like a little boy at first, except the clothes were those of an adult and the earrings were definitely feminine.
“It’s a woman,” Sean said.
Once I got a better look, I could see it was definitely a female, maybe full-blooded Asian, maybe Chinese. She was definitely adult, but very small except for her head, which looked a little too big for her body. She wore a navy suit jacket and white blouse with a gold neck clasp. I could make out rings on both hands, gold earrings, a slim gold watch on her wrist, and cuff links with what might have been real diamonds on them. Her face was made up heavily but carefully, and she might have been pretty except her lips and eyes were vaguely fishlike.
“…exclusivity?” the kid’s voice asked.
“I don’t care what you do with it after you bring it to me—” the woman said, then was cut off as the clip ended.
“Someone hired him,” I said.
“Someone with money.”
Someone with money, and someone, based on the little bit of footage there was, who seemed uninterested in the monetary value of the footage itself. Whoever it was knew what she was after and must have known where to send him, since there was very little time between their exchange and the images of the revivors. She didn’t want to use or sell the footage if she was turning down exclusivity; she wanted information. She was using him for recon.
I looked back at the eyes floating in the jar. Someone had gotten the kid killed. Someone looking for information on Tai. Someone who wasn’t us.
“Apparently, we aren’t the only ones interested in what was going on over there,” I said. “What about the unit we recovered at the dock?”
“Deanimation was straightforward,” Sean said. “A bullet to the head. You say the other models you picked up there were sex models?”
“Pretty much.”
“Not this one,” he said. “Check out the caboose.”
I took a look between the exposed, flat buttocks and saw that the vaginal opening had been sealed, along with the anus. They did that with legitimate revivors after bring-back in most countries; revivors didn’t have sex urges, couldn’t give birth, and didn’t eat. Any unnecessary cavities were just places to invite infection; packing them with biogel and sealing the whole thing over with a skin graft eliminated the problem.
“Any other bullets hit it?” I asked him.
“No, why?”
“I’m wondering if that bullet was meant for it or for me.”
“Was it destroyed intentionally? No way to know for sure, but if it was, your shooter didn’t exactly succeed. Have a look.”
I leaned in close as he reached into the hole with a pair of slim forceps and carefully began to pull something out. When the end of the tongs came out of the hole, I saw they were clamped around a small, rubbery object about four inches long. It made me think of a translucent, eyeless squid with tentacles coming out of both ends. Sean slowly eased the thing out until the last little tentacle dangled free, then placed it into a large beaker filled with clear liquid.
“That’s the main node,” he said. “If a revivor had a soul, that would be it.”
I took a closer look. I was familiar with revivor technology, but I’d never actually seen one of those things outside the body. I’d imagined it looking metallic, but it almost looked organic. Millions of barely visible little threads ran through it.
“You can see the connections,” I said. Up close it looked like some giant microbe.
“You guys are going to clean this up afterward, right?” Judy asked.
“Sure.”
I looked through the glass at the strange amoeba, sitting at the bottom of the beaker surrounded by a little cloud of stringy goo.
“It hasn’t gone inert,” Sean said. “You might be able to scan it.”
I zoomed in and ran the scan; sure enough, the wriggling amber line coalesced, snapping into the familiar waveform.
“Nice.”
I was able to pull the lot number, serial number, model numbers, versions …everything. Unlike the one in the bathroom, this one was legit; it had a valid code, so it was wired as part of a national program, and it had a military assignment tag as well, meaning it had actually been deployed. Either it never got where it was going or it was AWOL.
Also, unlike the one in the bathroom, the revivor components weren’t manufactured overseas; they rolled off the line at Heinlein Industries.
“Sean, could these parts have been reused?”
“You mean harvested out of an existing unit and put into this one? No. I mean, some of the nuts and bolts, sure, but not the important stuff.”
“Then we may have another problem. Let me see if I can get into the memory buffer.”
I opened a connection to the revivor’s communication node, then sent a specialized virus over the channel. It chiseled through security, then implanted itself and began to map the revivor’s systems. A few seconds later, it sent a bundle of information back over the circuit.
“I’ve got something.”
I pulled the access codes out of the bundle and tapped into its memory core. From there I sifted through recent communication entries. Some of them were encrypted.
A series of text entries appeared before everything scrambled and feedback started coming across the connection. A second later, it dropped. Something made a popping sound from inside the body, followed by a high-pitched hissing.
“Step away from it!” I said. They didn’t ask why; they just did it. The hole Sean had made in the back of the revivor’s neck expanded as white smoke began to pour out.
All at once, the back of the head and neck collapsed, followed by the shoulders and back. A clear gelatin had formed inside.
“Jesus,” Judy snapped, watching the body melt in front of her eyes. She had seen many strange things on her table, but never that. I had seen it, though, and so had Sean.
“You can’t stop it,” I said. “Let it go. It isn’t toxic.”
“What is it?” she asked.
“Leichenesser,” Sean said.
The buttocks, the backs of the thighs, then the calves all melted down like wax within seconds. The gelatin dissolved everything, even the oily blood on the tray beneath it.
Leichenesser was another controlled technology used in combat. It could start as a small seed, but it fed on necrotized flesh. It was used by the field meds to clean out gangrene and other infections, but in combat, it was very useful against revivors. A lot of the newer ones were seeded with it, set to go off in case their memories were tampered with.
“It only consumes dead flesh,” I told her. “That fuels its growth. When there’s nothing left to eat, it dissipates.”
The gelatin continued to dissolve the body, and then it began to boil away into mist. In less than a minute, a single blob of it sizzled around a pool of blood in the middle of the tray like water on a hot pan. Then it was gone.
The tray was empty except for a few surgical instruments, some lightweight shield plating from inside the body, and the long blade that had been concealed up inside the forearm. Sean used his forceps to pick up a cluster of nodules webbed together that had been the revivor components fixed beneath the skull and along the spine, but they were ruined.
“What caused that?” Judy asked, leaning back in.
“I think I did,” I said. The text I’d managed to pull off before I’d triggered the gelatin’s release still sat in a window in the corner of my vision. I brought it to the forefront for a closer look. It was a portion of a list of names.
5. Mae Zhu
6. Rebecca Valle
7. Harold Craig
8. Doyle Shanks
I didn’t recognize any of them. There were four missing from the head of the list, and any number that might have followed.
“I’ll catalogue what’s left behind here and see what I can get off of it,” Sean said.
“You do that,” I said. “In the meantime, I think it’s time I poked my head in over at Heinlein Industries.”
“Yeah?”
“Their product is popping up where it doesn’t belong.”
I pushed through the doors to the lab, and Sean followed me out, glancing over his shoulder as Judy frowned at the cadaver tray.
“As a heads-up,” he said, keeping his voice low, “I sat on my findings regarding your suspect’s kill switch as long as I could, but Noakes knows. He’s going to want to know what you did to set a device like that off while you were alone with that guy in the interrogation room.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“What are you going to tell him?”
“The truth.”
Even as I said it, though, I was replaying the recording in my mind.
…don’t think about it. Just trust your instincts and take me to him. When we get there, do what I say …
He’d been coerced, but not by me. Before I talked to anyone else on our side, I needed to track down that woman again, and try to find out what the truth was.
“Green light,” Shanks said from the passenger’s seat. It was snowing again, but the streets were filled with people, and even this far from the restaurant district, the unease was palpable. News of the bombing had saturated every form of media before authorities could even lock down the site. Every time a new report came in, the death toll went up. The carnage had been horrible.
A horn honked behind us, snapping me out of it.
“Faye, it’s green.”
I gunned the engine and pulled out and veered down the next ramp on my right. At the bottom, I edged out onto the main street, nosing past the stream of foot traffic. When the GPS stopped blinking, I pulled off. Hitting the blues, I flashed them a few times and tapped the siren as I crunched over a snowdrift and partially up onto the sidewalk as pedestrians grudgingly moved out of the way to allow access to the parking ramp.
“Look, Faye—”
“I told you I’m fine.”
I left the blues on steady, then sat there for a minute, watching the light flicker off the snow and concrete while the garage cameras scanned the car and people trudged past, rubbernecking as they went. They all wanted to know what was going on. Who had set off the bomb and why? Were more attacks coming?
I didn’t know the answers to those questions.
“You don’t look fine.”
I felt Shanks move his hand over my own around the steering wheel. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. His hand was warm and dry.
“No one would think worse of you if you took five,” he said.
Shanks was a good guy. A good partner, and a good guy. He knew me as well as anyone did, I guessed, and he knew me just well enough to know I was fraying at the edges. He understood it. I felt like I knew where I stood with him, and it was tempting to give in to the stress and the fatigue and rest, but I couldn’t. If I did, I might never get back up.
He’s right. You’re not fine, but you can’t stop, the voice in my head whispered.
The mayor has placed the city on high alert. Every cop in the city has been deployed. We just had a terrorist attack in a major population center, and we don’t have any idea who was responsible. Shouldn’t we—
It doesn’t matter. The killer won’t stop.
We’ve got bigger fish to fry right now. They’ll pull me off this.
They won’t.
He won’t kill again while security is this high.
He will, and you’re going to find him. Don’t question the rest. Just shut up and do your job.
I shook my head. My heart skipped a beat.
“Faye?” Shanks prompted. He was starting to look at me like there might be something really wrong. I wondered if he wasn’t far off.
“Let’s just do this.”
Shanks had called in the middle of lunch to let me know the killer had struck again, this time taking not one but three victims right inside their own apartment in Alto Do Mundo: first tier and very rich, with lots of security. He had walked in and walked out again, and somehow no one had seen him.
All those people, I thought. I’d never seen anything like what I saw outside the restaurant. There were bodies everywhere. I saw a man’s head on the sidewalk.
There will be more, if you don’t stop it.
Me? I—
My phone rang, and Shanks removed his hand as I reached to answer it. I thought it might be Nico. At least, I hoped it was.
“Hello?”
“Detective Dasalia, I thought I told you to stop following me.”
Snapping my fingers, I signaled to Shanks to start scanning for the signal while I tried the trace again.
“You did.”
“That man sitting next to you is not your friend,” the killer said.
I scanned up and down the street, but didn’t expect to see him. He was close, though. He had to be; he could see us.
“Why did you kill them? What did these people do?”
“If I tell you, you’ll tell him,” the voice said. “You’ll tell him everything. You’re going to have to figure it out yourself, but to do that, you’ll have to wake up.”
You have to wake up…. The revivor had also said that to me.
“What does that mean?”
“Have you imagined being with him?”
An uneasy feeling grew in my stomach. I looked over at Shanks and remembered my dreams. The dream I had been having just before the first call woke me up that morning.
“Have you imagined him touching you?”
“He’s close,” Shanks said.
“It’s happening. Don’t get in the way,” the voice said, and the connection dropped. I looked to Shanks, but he shook his head.
“Close,” he said. “That’s the best I can do.”
The arm barring the ramp rose and I squeezed the car through the gate, curving down the lit tunnel into the underground parking area. The complex was in a pretty good neighborhood, and there were a lot of nice cars down there. Shanks normally would have ogled them, but this time he didn’t.
“What did he say?” he asked.
“He warned me off the case again.”
“Anything else?”
His expression was one of concern.
“He’s taunting me,” I said. “I’ll have them run it again and see if they can get anything else from it. In the meantime, our best lead is inside.”
None of the doors were forced, so he either had duplicate keys or some kind of electronic lock pick. Security cameras were spaced regularly, and there were plenty more inside, but not one of them had recorded a thing as the killer walked right into the place and took three more victims not even six hours after taking the last.
I parked in the visitor’s area and we headed inside, following the path the killer had taken. The door to the apartment hung open and was crossed with yellow tape. A police officer stood outside.
From the looks of it, the door had been forced in from the outside, leaving a clear shoe print next to the knob. On the floor outside the door were boot tracks, and maybe another set of footprints in sneakers. I ducked under the tape, and Shanks moved in behind me. There were three investigators left inside: one taking pictures down the hall, and the other two sweeping for forensics. Near the officers sat a man in a sweater who looked like a civilian. One of the investigators broke off and approached as we entered.
“Detective Dasalia?” he asked, looking from me to Shanks. I shook his hand.
“I’m Reece. Bodies are down here, off the living room….”
He led the way down the hall, which opened up into a spacious living area with a massive sectional sofa on carved wooden claw feet, arranged so that it was facing a flat-screen television with what must have been a fifty-inch screen mounted on the wall. A home theater sound system was arranged around the room, and there was a fireplace with a brick hearth and bronze fixtures on the wall to the left of the sofa.
“Nice digs,” Shanks said.
“They have any personal security?” I asked. Reece nodded.
“Yeah, but it was bypassed.”
“How?”
“Not sure yet, but whoever did it has some know-how, because nothing got tripped. These people never saw it coming.”
He led us to what looked like a playroom, where another television was mounted in front of a smaller sofa. Wires trailed to gaming devices and audio equipment. It was easy to imagine a group of younger kids in there, sitting on that sofa and playing, but instead something terrible had come to an end in that room.
“Who were they?” I asked.
“The Valles,” the officer said. “The father, Miguel, the mother, Rebecca, and daughter, Kate.”
Lying on the carpet in between the sofa and the television were the three bodies, a forensic examiner kneeling over them. Each was lying facedown, as if they had been on their knees and arranged in a circle like they had been facing one another. Their wrists and ankles were bound with plastic ties, and each of their faces lay in individual pools of blood that had joined in the middle. What looked like castoff and various arcs of arterial spurt had painted the carpet, the sofa, and even the walls. Whatever happened there had gone on for a while.
My eyes went to the young girl and stayed there. Anger and frustration welled up from out of the fog, and as I looked at her face, my throat burned.
“This is different,” I said to the examiner. “He takes single victims.”
“I understand,” she said, “but we found traces of the chemical signature you keep finding, the one for the explosives. It matches the one you found in the vehicle earlier. The wounds are a match, too. They were made by your mystery weapon.”
“Can they be moved?”
“Here,” she said, grabbing the mother by the sleeve of her shirt and pulling her over onto her side. “This is different.”
Rebecca Valle had been mutilated in a way that none of the previous bodies had been. There were cuts on her face, neck, and chest. Her sleeves had been rolled up and there were similar marks on her forearms, cut down to the bone in some places. Her belly had been slit open neatly, but not deeply. Just enough.
“He knew what he was doing,” Shanks said in my ear, and I nodded. The mother hadn’t just been killed; she was tortured extensively first.
“No one heard this?”
“Noise screen,” the officer said. “Might be why he picked this room. You could throw a party in here and not hear it in the bedroom. They could scream all they wanted; no one would have heard them.”
“I get it. Was the place searched?”
“Tossed,” he said. “Yeah, especially the bedrooms.”
“He was looking for something this time,” I said to Shanks. That was different too; in fact, it was the closest thing to a motive I’d ever been able to attribute to him.
“The father and daughter didn’t show the same signs of abuse,” the forensics investigator said.
“What was the cause of death?” I asked. “For the other two, I mean.”
“Actually,” she said, “the mother’s cause of death was a puncture wound to the heart via the sternum, made by your guy’s weapon. The other two were killed with the same weapon, but they were struck at the base of the skull.”
Why the mother? I thought. Why not concentrate on the father, the one most likely to be a problem?
Maybe it was to make him talk.
Then why not the kid?
Maybe he has half a heart.
No one with a functioning heart did this.
“So she was tortured; then all three were killed.”
“Other way around,” the investigator said. “Blood patterns indicate the father and daughter were killed first, and then he went to work on the mother.”
She was the key, the voice nagged.
Whatever he was searching for, he thought she had it or knew where it was. He killed the others in front of her. When she still didn’t talk, he tried to torture it out of her …
…but she didn’t know.
“I saw footprints at the door,” I said. The investigator nodded.
“Yes, but I’m not sure they belong to the killer.”
“You matched them to the family?”
“No, but we were able to get an approximate shoe size from impressions in the carpet,” she said. “The placement makes them the killer’s. They don’t match either of the sets of prints at the door, and neither do any of the victims.”
“So someone else was in here?”
“Yes.”
“Before or after the murders?”
“I can’t say for sure, but I think after.”
“Why?”
“The boot tracks left traces leading to and from the bathroom, and that’s it. Whoever they belong to didn’t go any farther into the apartment. The sneaker prints do, but only as far as this room. They were faint, but it looks like whoever they belong to came down the hall, through the living room to this room, stood in the doorway, then turned around and walked back the way he came.”
“Then they should be on the building’s security cameras.”
“That’s the other weird part,” she said. “The logs on the cameras had been tampered with.”
“Tampered with how?”
“The system was breached remotely. A section had been wiped out, but the strange thing is, I don’t think it was the killer trying to cover his tracks. The time of death puts his arrival hours before the section that was missing.”
“So what was he trying to cover up?”
“I’m not sure it was the killer at all.”
“The two who came in after?” I asked, and she shrugged.
“It fits, time-wise.”
Maybe for some reason the visitors who came after the murders—the pair of sneakers that found the bodies and the friend with the boots who used the john—didn’t want anyone to know they had been there. Whoever they were, they didn’t call the murders in.
“You said the killer didn’t force his way in,” I said. “Who kicked the door?”
“The tenant next door,” Reece said, nodding toward the man in the sweater. “He said he got a call for help from the father, but it was over by the time he got in. He didn’t see a thing.”
“A phone call would have been a neat trick, tied up like that. Do you believe his account?”
“I think he believes it, but again, it doesn’t fit. We pulled the call records, and the call he got came after the section of missing security tape was erased. We traced it to a public phone, paid for with a drugstore phone card.”
“It was a tip,” I said. Someone wanted the bodies found, without having to come forward.
A witness, the voice inside said. That’s promising.
The witness didn’t see anything.
He talked to whoever made that call. You should go talk to him. Have Shanks look around the apartment while you do it.
I sighed, my face suddenly flushed, and straightened my jacket. Maybe it did pay to listen to your gut, to trust your intuition. Things could hardly go much worse.
“Shanks, check around. I want to talk to him.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The man in the sweater looked visibly disturbed when I approached him, although I didn’t see any blood on him and there wasn’t any sign he’d been attacked. I waved the officers away and knelt with him.
“What’s your name?” I asked him. His eyes darted over to me.
“Roger. Roger Hammond.”
“Bad night, huh?”
He nodded.
“Did you know the victims?”
“Yes. I mean, as neighbors.”
“That’s pretty brave, breaking in here like that.”
He shrugged.
“Did you witness the attack?”
“No. They were already dead by the time I got inside.”
“You said you got a call from the victim?”
He nodded.
“When he called, what did he say?”
“He was whispering. He said, ‘It’s Miguel Valle. Someone’s in the apartment …they killed them.’ Then the line cut out.”
“Why would he call you? Why not the police?”
He shook his head back and forth slightly, staring at the floor.
“It wasn’t him. I know it wasn’t him.”
“Who do you think it was?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Someone who wanted me to find them.”
“You gonna be all right?”
“Yeah. Were all four of them dead?”
“Three.”
“There’s four,” he said. “Miguel, Becca, Kate, and Luis.”
“Luis?”
“His son.”
“How old is he?”
“Luis? Maybe nineteen or twenty.”
The second set of footprints. The son, and someone else …a friend? He was gone for whatever reason when the killer entered the apartment, and came back after the fact. He found the bodies, and he ran.
“Thanks, Mr. Hammond. That helps.”
Shanks was heading back into the room from down the hall, and I rejoined him and Reece.
“Your guys searched the place room to room when you got here?” I asked Reece.
“Yeah,” he said, making a face. “Whatever your guy was looking for, either he found it or it wasn’t here.”
“Fair enough. It looks like the Valles also had a son, Luis Valle, who may still be alive. We need an APB out on him immediately.”
“I’m on it.”
Reece stalked off to rejoin the others when I knelt down with Shanks.
“You think the kid had something to do with this?” Shanks asked.
“I don’t know.”
Maybe …maybe. The thought nagged at me. But maybe he’s what the killer was looking for….
“Maybe he’s not running from us,” I said.
We need him alive.
“We need him alive.”
“If he’s alive, they’ll find him,” he said.
“You dig anything else up?”
“Yeah. It looks like someone was on the computer when the attack occurred. You’ll want to see this.”
He led me down the main hallway to a room at the far end that was dark except for the illumination from the computer screen. The chair in front of it had been pushed back, leaving trails in the carpet.
“They didn’t find any prints but the family’s,” Shanks said, “but look what I found on the system.”
A little instant message window was sitting in the corner of the screen. There were entries still sitting on it.
“One of them was talking to someone,” I said. One of the names read RVALLE0107. “Rebecca Valle. The mother.”
“The killer must have shut it down, but didn’t exit out completely. He probably thought he got rid of it.”
Leaning closer, I read the tiny text on the screen.
CRAIGH01: Where is it now? RVALLE0107: With him, I think. CRAIGH01: Good. RVALLE0107: Cross was detected, though. CRAIGH01: Yes. RVALLE0107: Hold on a minute. CRAIGH01: What’s the matter? RVALLE0107: Hold on. RVALLE0107: Sorry, we have a visitor. I’ll get back to you. CRAIGH01: Who is this? CRAIGH01: Who is this? RVALLE0107: I have to get back to you. CRAIGH01: What have you done to them? CRAIGH01: Why are you doing this? CRAIGH01: Why are you doing this to us? RVALLE0107: Because someone has to.
You know what that is, the voice said.
Yes. A connection.
These two knew each other.
But the other one isn’t a victim.
Yet.
He said, “us.” “Why are you doing this to us?” Who’s “us”?
If I were you, the voice nagged, I wouldn’t inquire too deeply.
Shaking my head, I stepped away from the screen.
“We need the rest of the conversation,” I said. “Everything on this computer.”
“It’s gone,” Shanks said.
“Gone?”
“Either the victim wiped it when she heard the intruder, or the killer did it. Maybe the techs can pull something off of it, but everything’s gone. The message pane just happened to still be up. If you shut it off, you’ll lose that too.”
That’s not the important thing, Faye.
Then what is?
The only living connection we have right now.
“Craigh,” I said out loud. “Or Craig H? He knew. He knew what was happening over here.”
I headed back out to the living room, Shanks in tow.
“Reece, did anyone else call this in?” I asked.
“Someone else?”
“Besides our witness, did you receive any other calls about a possible disturbance over here?”
“No.”
I turned to Roger, the witness, who was still sitting with the officers.
“Does the name Craig mean anything to you?” I asked. “Craig H? Or H Craig?”
“Harold,” he said. “He’s a friend of Becca’s. I’ve seen him around.”
Harold Craig.
He’s in trouble, the voice said. You need to get over there.
Why didn’t he call it in?
I don’t know, but there isn’t time. Go.
“Shanks, we need an address for Harold Craig….”
We’ll get it on the way down. Go now.
“Are you okay?” Shanks asked in my ear.
“We’ve got to go,” I said.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m so tired….” I whispered.
You’re almost there …just keep going …
“I know, Faye,” he said. “We’re going to get him. We’ll do it together, got it?”
He put his hand on the small of my back, guiding me. It was the second time that day he had touched me like that. It felt firm and reassuring. Somehow, it made me feel like what he said was true, and that we would succeed, and that when we did, everything would be okay and I would finally get to sleep.