“No. Go ahead.” She tossed them at him. Lyra tossed hers at him too, followed by Lyssa and Jaxon.
Dani aimed her bag at Eagle’s head, laughing and shaking her head, the white strands of her hair poking out crazily. “You deserve them,” she said, hitting him on the forehead.
Ten minutes later they were heading to math class, the one class they all had together. By then Reese was sweating and shaking.
She had to draw the image of the teacher she’d seen from Eagle’s mind, but it wasn’t as though she could mask what she was doing. They used Teevs embedded in their desks, and all schoolwork was submitted electronically. The only exception was art class. In math class, the teacher would notice her scribbling, maybe even take away her precious pad and drawing pencils, the only things of value she owned, a gift from her father’s aunt on the outside. She’d filled the other pads already, and this one still had so many fresh white pages.
Jaxon nudged up against her as they entered the room. “Whatever you need to draw, do it,” he whispered. “Sit behind me. I’ll get Old Geyser talking. He won’t even notice you sketching.”
Reese nodded, unable to speak. If she didn’t get it out, she’d be shaking the rest of the day, and that wasn’t good. She couldn’t afford to fail.
She slid into a seat behind Jaxon and pulled her drawing pad out of her ragged sack. In minutes, the sketch of the substitute teacher appeared under her hand, as if of its own volition. She was aware of each line, each curve, each bit of shading, as if it were a part of her—and yet somehow coming from outside. She didn’t need her eraser once. She wished she could use some of the colored pencils she’d permanently “borrowed” from her art class, but those were at home, tucked under her CORE-issued mattress. She shaded the redness of the man’s face with her pencil instead.
Relief filled her as the urge to sketch drained away. The result wasn’t her best drawing ever, but close. Someone tapped her on the shoulder, and she turned to see a scrawny boy she didn’t know well sitting next to her, his head craned to see her drawing. “You got his face exactly right,” he whispered. “So glad that pus bag was only here for two days.”
Nodding in agreement, she gave the boy a smile and shut her drawing pad, tucking it under her. At the front of the classroom, the math teacher paced back and forth, waving his hands animatedly in the air to emphasize his story about the usefulness of math in every profession. Jaxon glanced back at her and winked. He wouldn’t ask about the picture later, and she wouldn’t remind him. This was why he was her best friend.
He would always be. Nothing could separate them. Not even leaving the Coop.
Except in the end, it didn’t work out that way. Not even a little.
Chapter 1
Location: Amarillo City, Estlantic
Year: 2278, 80 years after Breakdown
DETECTIVE REESE PARKER began recording the sketch, her hand moving quickly over her drawing pad. She ignored the prisoner, Arlie Cruz, seated across the table with his cuffed arms folded up to his bony chest in a way that clearly said he wasn’t going to tell her anything.
But he already had. More than he could ever guess.
A man’s image formed under her fingers. The blunt curve of his jowly face, the lumpy nose, the swollen, pouty lips. The hair that was short in front and touched the material of his collarless suit in the back. His ears were large for even his decidedly hefty proportions. He wasn’t a handsome man by any stretch of the imagination, though he might have been in his younger years, but he exuded power and confidence. The smoothness around his brown eyes testified of Nuface therapy, and he’d probably had it more than once. Yet weight and age had caught up to him in the end, showing in the puffy, saggy cheeks and the uneven nose. His chest was also heavy above his comparatively slender legs, in that way men sometimes got as they aged and ate in too many restaurants instead of sticking to the filling and nutritionally balanced readymeals.
What she didn’t know yet was how the man in her drawing related to the man seated in front of her and the juke they’d found in the destroyed building.
“What are you doing?” demanded the prisoner, craning his thin neck to see her drawing, but Reese kept the pad angled so he couldn’t see it.
She was also careful to keep it out of direct line of the room’s camera. Anyone watching her interrogation would assume she was simply preparing her canvas with a blank character, similar to those in Teev-generated identification programs. Because that was what she’d told them in the past. After all, she couldn’t possibly sketch a suspect that hadn’t yet been verbally described. Her coworkers already thought she was strange to work with paper and pencil, which was far more costly than using a Teev and its elaborate software, but the ninety-nine percent identification rate from her drawings had given her leeway with Captain Homer. He complained about the cost of paper, though, and these days she bought as much on her own as she ordered from division. Too many of the sketches she received from those around her had nothing to do with enforcer business. She’d grown accustomed to carrying a personal notepad along with her official one.
She let her prisoner stew for a moment, her pencil shading in the man’s suit. It was black with silver threads woven throughout, but she couldn’t tell from the drawing if it was a name brand outfit or one of the cheap knockoffs. Probably it was real. He also had a thick gold chain around his wrist and a heavy gold ring.
“I’m waiting for you to tell me what you were doing in that building, Mr. Cruz,” she said finally. “I know you’re selling juke.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Cruz retorted, one corner of his narrow lips lifting in a mocking sneer. With his small eyes, pinched mouth, and pointed nose, he was completely unlike the man in her drawing. More like a ferret she’d seen on a pre-Breakdown animal show.
“Why don’t I believe that?” Reese said mildly.
“Look, I was just poking around and that building seemed interesting,” he continued. “That’s all. It ain’t a crime to investigate an empty zone, is it? Not yet anyway. Does that kid even claim to know me? If he does, where’s his proof?”
“We found the juke,” Reese reminded him, looking up at Cruz but not stopping her sketch.
“Are my prints on it? My DNA?” Cruz snorted, his mean little eyes triumphant. “You don’t have anything on me. I’m an honest, hard-working man with a wife and kid.”
The problem was, he was right. Not the honest part, but the part that she didn’t have anything solid on him. For weeks, she and her partner had been following a student from a Teev certificate institute, a twenty-year-old kid known for selling smeg laced with juke. On its own the mildly addictive smeg, a drug that simulated a sexual rush, wasn’t illegal, but mixed with the harder juke, it had a devastating effect on CORE youth. Today the student had led them to a dilapidated building in an empty zone, and Reese had been sure they’d finally followed the tiny fish to a medium-sized fish, and somehow, by CORE, she was going to find the daddy fish.
The problem was, there was no direct Teev feed in most of the empty zones, and Reese and her partner had to go in blind. The result was that while juke was present at the house, they had nothing substantial to connect it to Cruz. Even the student denied knowing him, saying Cruz wasn’t his usual contact, and nothing on the drugs themselves showed any link to Cruz. Captain Homer had already sent the boy to reconditioning. It was his first offense, so a little education might turn him around. If not, his next stop would be banishment to a colony or permanent medical enhancement. Usually the colony threat was enough to turn around anyone who wasn’t addicted to juke.
“So when are you going to let me go?” Cruz demanded. “You can’t hold me.”
He was right about that too, but Reese wasn’t willing to admit defeat. At least not yet. When she’d asked Cruz where he’d gotten the drugs, his mind had clearly sent her the flash of the man in her drawing. A flash she called a sketch. Without realizing it, Cruz had identified whoever was over him, but since their conversat
ion was being recorded by the cameras in the room, she had to get him to verbalize a description before she could act on the drawing.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go through it again. What were you doing there?” It wasn’t the first time for the question, but she wanted to see if he gave the same answer. “It’s the middle of the day. On a Tuesday. Shouldn’t you be at work?”
Cruz worked for Kordell Corp, or the KC as it was often referred to. The company was the largest non-CORE-owned business in Estlantic, and they created and packaged readymeals. Their largest single client was the CORE itself, and the company supplied most of the charity units donated to the six welfare colonies. With three hundred thousand of the CORE’s two million citizens confined to the colonies because of their inability to support themselves, that was significant. The colony contract alone meant Kordell Corp received a lion’s share of the fifty percent taxes levied on both the CORE population and businesses alike. But while the KC was impressive, Cruz was just a low-level manager, and Reese was nowhere close to determining if he was acting on his own or if the company was also involved. The more she thought about it, the more readymeal packaging seemed a perfect front for a drug operation.
“I told you.” Cruz’s tone was aggrieved. “My girl, she’s into pre-Breakdown history, and her birthday’s next week. I went to the empty zone to see if I could find something. I thought I’d better do it before they make them off limits altogether. Rumors say that’s next.”
The way he said it was angry and indignant, and Reese recognized the not-so-subtle hint that his loyalty to the CORE might not be complete. If the Elite made the empty zones off limits, it might reduce the amount of pre-Breakdown tech turned in, but it would make her job easier, not to mention protect people from any of the radiation-crazed monsters from the desolation zones.
“Why go so far northwest?” she asked. “That’s getting close to the North Desolation Zone. You know the radiation there is dangerous.”
“Right, but everything closer’s been picked clean,” he growled. “Everyone knows if you want to discover something valuable, you have to do a little footwork.”
“Why that particular building?”
He shrugged. “It looked more intact than the others. And big. I thought it might have a basement. Office buildings sometimes have interesting equipment.”
“You know all technology must be turned into our office.”
“Yeah, yeah. I didn’t mean that. I meant furniture or a picture.” He leaned forward suddenly. “Or maybe some of those pencils and notebooks like you got there.”
It was much the same story he’d given her before, with only nonconsequential variations. Nothing she could lever to make him rat on whoever pulled his chain. She knew he was guilty, and that he knew far more than he was saying, but unless she requested truth drugs, he might not tell her anything. And those cases were always transferred to the Headquarters Enforcer Division, or HED, to be overseen by the Controller himself.
“Okay,” she said, leaning back and taking the drawing pad with her, still careful to protect it until Cruz gave her the pertinent information. “Maybe you aren’t involved, but you’ve got eyes. If you’re not responsible for the drugs, someone else was in that building. Did you see anyone?”
“Just that kid.”
“Right. But what about before you reached the building? Surveillance at the edge of that particular empty zone didn’t show anyone else entering where you did.” This was a lie, but Cruz had no way of knowing that. There had been exactly six other people entering, and her partner was currently tracking them all, but at first glance none of them seemed likely. “You were there searching, obviously, for your daughter’s birthday gift. You might have seen someone else. The drugs had to get there somehow, so if you saw even a glimpse of someone else, that might go a long way to corroborating your story. And helping me identify him would protect children like your daughter.”
Would he jump at the bait?
“Now that you mention it, there was someone,” he said hesitantly. “But I only saw him once a few minutes away from the building.”
She nodded. “Good. Okay, that’s a start.” Now she had to make him describe the person in her sketch. And that meant leading questions, not waiting for him to come up with his own lie.
“So, did he have long hair or short in the front? I hope short, so you can tell me the color of his eyes.”
“Yeah, short. Above the eyes.” Cruz relaxed in his chair, letting his hands drop to his lap.
“So longer in the back, if the front was short? Brown hair and eyes, like ninety percent of the population?”
“Right,” he said. A slight smirk hovered around his mouth for a second. He thought he was being smart, and Reese didn’t mind letting him believe he was playing her. She was more than ever convinced he hadn’t seen anyone besides the student in the empty zone, not even the man in her drawing. But the man in the drawing was somehow connected to Cruz and the drugs.
She shaded a little more on the image, as if concentrating. In reality, she was filling in the background, a darkened room with only hazy features. Nothing really identifiable. “Was his nose smooth, or was it the kind that might be more lumpy from being broken? A guy like that has probably been in a lot of fights.”
“Oh, lumpy,” he said quickly. “I’ll bet he’s even been detained by enforcers before. He’s probably in the database.”
Everyone’s in the database, Reese wanted to sneer at him but somehow manage to refrain. “Older man then, with some experience under his belt?”
“Yeah, yeah. Real strong.”
And so she led him along the trail she needed him to go. Each feature he identified could have been the base for tens of thousands of other people in the CORE, but they also fit the man in her drawing. Only another sketch artist would catch what she was doing or wonder how she came up with details in her final sketch, but she was the only artist in this division. Most enforcer artists worked for the Central Identification Unit and were called temporarily to different divisions as needed. The CIU was always trying to recruit her, but she’d wanted to do more than just draw. So for the past ten years she’d clawed her way up the enforcer ladder to detective status, and she wasn’t about to give that up. Maybe someday the skills she was learning would help her solve the murders from her past.
Cruz was talking again, asking when he could be released, but she held up a finger. “Just a minute. I’m almost finished. And I’ll need to show you the sketch before you leave.” But she needed one more thing first—a background of sorts that might lead to an identifiable location. She carefully phrased her next question, hoping his mind would automatically focus on the real man behind the drugs. “Where exactly did you see him? This man responsible for the drugs. What did the building he was near or in look like?”
Cruz cleared his throat, as if stalling for time. Too late for him. A sketch of the same man as before flashed to Reese’s mind. This time he was inside a large factory of some kind. Behind him to each side, two lines of workers, dressed in white from head-to-toe, stood at tables scattered with juke hypos.
“Uh, just out in the rubble,” Cruz said, coming to life as if aware that his reaction was too telling. “You know, tangled metal, chunks of concrete. I didn’t really see him for long.” He shook his head. “I’m sure whatever I’ve told you won’t solve anything. I’m really sorry.”
Reese didn’t have time then to put the second sketch into her book, but it would remain crystal clear in her mind until she did. In fact, it would gnaw away at her until she recorded it, but she could wait without shaking, as long as there weren’t too many images piled up in her brain.
“Thanks,” she told Cruz. “You’ve been a big help. Let’s get this into the Teev and run a search.”
“Don’t I get to see it?”
“Of course.” She smiled and extended her pad.
Cruz leaned forward and gave an audible gasp. Color leaked from his face, leaving him pasty. “No
!” he grated. “That’s not him. I don’t know that man! I didn’t see him!” The words came with a strange panting breath.
“But you said you did.”
“No!” His reply was strangled, and with it came another sketch to Reese’s mind. A flash of a dead man lying on a floor, a bullet hole through his temple. The image sent a shudder through her body.
One thing was clear: whoever the man in the sketch was, selling juke was the least of his crimes.
Chapter 2
CRUZ LURCHED TO HIS feet and brought up his cuffed hands, jabbing one finger down on the man’s face. “He. Was. Not. There. That man is nothing like the one I described.”
The door slammed open and two enforcers entered the interrogation room, weapons drawn. “Sit down,” one of them barked. “No sudden moves, or we’ll shoot.”
“But it’s not him. It’s not!”
Reese grabbed the cuffs holding Cruz’s hands and lifted them enough to pull her drawing pad away. She still had to scan this in properly, though the cameras in the room would have already recorded it by now.
“On the contrary,” she said. “You described him perfectly. And I’m sure our database will be able to find him.”
“But—”
“I said sit down!” One of the enforcers yanked Cruz back into his seat.
Cruz stayed in place with his mouth shut and his eyes wide, as if stunned into silence.
Reese studied him. He was not only afraid, but mortally afraid. That meant her drawing was important. “If it’s not correct,” she consoled him, “I’m sure the database won’t find anything.”
A suppressed sob burst from his throat. Gone was his mocking confidence. His impatience. He looked beaten and terrified. Reese exchanged a glance with her fellow enforcers near the door. The men were younger than she was, standard beat enforcers, Neil Sumas and Mack Riding. They both had brown hair and eyes, but Neil’s pug nose was dusted with freckles and Mack, the taller of the two, had a long face that made him look too thin. Underneath their surprise was a hint of amusement.
Insight Page 2
