Hounds of the Underworld (The Path of Ra Book 1)

by Dan Rabarts

  “Where shall we start?” she says to no one in particular as she buttons her coat. The refrigerator replies with a change in vibration.

  “So, you reckon the clothes, then?” Penny answers. “I agree, it’d help if we could determine that the garments were Fletcher’s. I think I’ll run a DNA comparison of the saliva from the toothbrush with any DNA found on the clothes. That way we’ll be able to safely assume they belong to him.”

  The refrigerator hesitates, then hums again.

  “OK, OK, you’re right. Or they could belong to whoever borrowed his toothbrush last.” Penny screws up her face. “Eeew. Sharing a toothbrush. Yuck. I can’t think of anything worse.”

  The refrigerator groans its agreement.

  Oh my God. Penny snorts at her own silliness. What is she doing? All that furtive muttering under his breath and Matiu’s got her talking to herself now? Although it’s odd that he should be doing that again. Penny would’ve thought he’d have his childhood demons under control by now. God knows, he’s had enough counselling over the years; he’s practically moulded to the couch. But she definitely heard him mutter the name of his imaginary friend when they were in Fletcher’s apartment.

  Makere.

  That’s it. Penny hasn’t heard that name in a long time. Matiu’s childhood friend, invented to keep him company. There hadn’t been a lot of playdates; the other kids had found him too strange—or worse. Doctors had suggested Asperger’s since Matiu exhibited several symptoms typical of the disorder: struggling to look people in the eye, inappropriate responses in social situations, weird stimming behaviours like talking to himself, and pacing the room as if he were a lion taking a wide arc, sizing up the herd.

  Oh, and occasionally bashing the shit out of other kids.

  Yes, it’s fair to say he didn’t always see eye-to-eye with people. Even now, Matiu has this Aspie off-the-wall way of looking at things. That’s the beauty of the condition. Its sufferers—or those gifted with the condition, depending how you look at it—perceive things without all the usual constraints and conventions that normal, neurotypical people apply to their thinking. It’s as if they approach problems from a different dimension, examining and reorganising them into new, often startling, permutations, the way a poet arranges words to reveal the obvious in a fresh and surprising way, or how van Gogh saw moonlight as a dappled swirl of blues and golds. For a long time now, Penny has wondered if all the world’s original thinkers have had an element of Asperger’s or Autism in their make-up. The social scientists seem to think so. Einstein, Turing, Mendel, even Isaac Newton, all thought to have been Aspies. So perhaps Penny’s appreciation of her brother stems not from their familial connection but from the fact that scientists and Aspies both have an innate need to examine things: Penny testing her hypotheses through method and rigour, and Matiu looking for answers in his own inscrutable way. Oh sure, there’s all the normal sibling dynamic between them, the bickering and the teasing, but it’s a smoke screen. A trick with mirrors. Because for all his weirdness, Matiu really gets her, and Penny has learned to read her brother better than anyone. She trusts his instincts. Although, to be fair, she doesn’t always listen.

  The refrigerator hums pointedly: ‘He didn’t like Cordell, did he?’

  “Shut up!” You’re a refrigerator. You are not sentient. You don’t get to offer an opinion.

  The whiteware shudders, but continues its quiet murmurings, obviously miffed. Penny ignores it and begins to remove the samples from her satchel, lining them up on the bench. Maybe she should pay more attention to Matiu’s ramblings. Especially if Makere is back on the scene. What is it they say about misery and company? Matiu’s imaginary friend has a tendency to turn up when Matiu is at his lowest. The last time, Matiu had ended up in a bit of trouble. Actually, that’s understating it. Using ‘a bit of trouble’ to describe Matiu’s past is like using a candle to light a canyon. Penny’s parents had tried to protect her from it, but for a while there, Matiu had been a regular prince of the underworld.

  Penny considers the samples. Since there are several of them, and not because anyone told her to (she glowers at the fridge), she decides to start with analysis of the hairs found on the clothing. Taking a pair of sterilised tweezers, Penny lifts the sampling tape and holds it to the light to study the single ash-blonde strand. Is that a hint of pink? Penny hopes the hair hasn’t been chemically treated. These new Breadmaker™ sequencers are fantastic at providing discriminatory analyses with limited material. In fact, they’re so sensitive that in 62% of cases the machine can deliver a profile from a single hair without the hair root, using just the hardened cornified nuclear material in the hair shaft. Amazing. But mass production always has a downside, and one thing these bench-top models can’t do is sequence DNA which has been degraded by chemical treatment in the enhancement studios, they wreck your hair that much. Mum always said so: ‘You’ve got beautiful hair, Pandora. Leave it alone. Don’t ruin it.’

  Penny rotates the sample. It looks like the follicle’s intact, so that’s something. Carefully placing the hair in a cuvette, Penny pops it in the centrifuge, then heads to the fridge for the reagents Beaker made up earlier: the DDT/proteinase incubation solution, the manufacturer’s recommended lysis solvent, primer, and the polymerase. It takes her a few trips to bring them all across to the analyser, the fridge rattling each time she closes it.

  Still miffed then.

  Using a pipette to fill the relevant compartments in the machine, Penny turns her back on it, more interested in what’s really bothering Matiu. Mum and Dad were overbearing this evening, but then they always are, so it can’t be that. It must be something to do with the case. The scene in that storeroom was pretty gruesome. Could that be it? Matiu did seem upset, and sometimes the smallest thing can set him off. It’s funny really, because all the textbooks say Aspies lack empathy. Which is so wrong because if anything Matiu feels more than a neurotypical person does. He feels so much, and so acutely, that for him it’s like a physical pain. How researchers haven’t worked this out has Penny flummoxed, since she’s known it forever. She’d discovered it one weekend in her second-to-last year at primary school. Sent to find Matiu for lunch—he can’t have been more than four and already he was doing one of his disappearing acts—she’d found his upturned tricycle in the downstairs lobby. Of course, an eight-year-old Penny had gone looking, slightly panicked that something might have happened to him. She’d found him in the cleaner’s cupboard, near the lock-ups. Penny hated going down there. It was dark and spooky and full of spiders, but she’d pushed open the door and there he was, curled up on the concrete amongst the coils of grey vacuum hoses, his hands over his ears, his eyes screwed up, his body trembling, and his face streaming with snot and tears. He was crying, only he wasn’t making any sound. Like he hadn’t wanted anyone to know he was there. Penny wasn’t sure he knew she was there, until she’d touched him on the shoulder.

  “Matiu?”

  He’d turned then, and flung himself at her, howling and screaming, pleading with Penny to please, please make Makere stop, to make them all stop because he didn’t want to feel any more. It was hurting him. Hurting his head. Hurting! Penny’s first thought was the boy in the back apartment. Had he been bullying Matiu again? Is that why her brother was hiding out here in the murk? But Matiu was clinging to her—this kid who didn’t like people touching him—so it wasn’t just that. He was hysterical. His fingers squeezing her arm, leaving little dents in her skin. Then she’d seen the graze on his knee, the tiny droplets of blood beading in the torn skin, and something, she’s not sure what, had made her bend over and brush her lips over the graze. She’d kissed it better. Kissed the hurt away. Well, it was what you did when babies hurt themselves, wasn’t it? She’d only meant it as distraction, because that scrape wasn’t the real reason Matiu was upset, but it had worked because Matiu stopped crying, wiping the snot on his shoulder and
giving a last sniff-in sniff.

  “S’OK. Dey gone now.”

  Just like that. Weird. Penny had never mentioned the thing in the cupboard to their parents, but she’d understood that something in Matiu’s head hurt him, and that Makere, Matiu’s imaginary friend, wasn’t always a friend. Penny had kept her little brother close after that, and like a duckling he’d taken to following her around. For a while, he’d been like her own little fandom. That is, until he hit his teens and discovered that you didn’t need to feel anything to have a crowd of people flock to you: all you needed was a decent set of abs.

  Switching off the centrifuge, Penny slides the cuvette into the Breadmaker™, closes the lid, and starts the machine. There. She checks her watch. It should incubate at 65°C for an hour, and when that’s done the machine will vortex off the buffer, holding back the eluted DNA solution for the subsequent annealing cycles and the enzyme digestion phases, which it does automatically. And just like baking bread, the machine pings when it’s done. Honestly, if science gets any easier she’ll be out of a job.

  - Matiu -

  The ringtone buzzes in Matiu’s ear.

  “Yo, bro,” floats the disembodied voice down the line.

  “Hey,” Matiu says. “How’s it?”

  “Thought you’d ended up inside again or something, been so long. Where you holed up?”

  Matiu shrugs, though no one can see. Cerberus is lifting his leg to a power pole. Good dog. “Been working an’ shit. Keeping out of trouble.”

  “Nah eh. But now you’re calling me. That’s trouble all by itself. What gives?”

  “Scour, I gotta ask a favour.”

  “What sort of favour?”

  “Got an old lappy I need to crack. If I patch you in, can you hit it?”

  There’s a pause, not much, but enough that Matiu notices it. “Hard core?”

  “Dunno. It’s a personal machine, old school. Like, 2020s old.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “Bro, don’t make me blackmail you. Do it because we’re family.”

  Scour sighs. “You’re not gonna get me into any shit, are you?”

  “I’ll let you know once you crack it.”

  “Riiight. Make sure your connection’s secure. I don’t need this shit getting back to me.”

  “All good,” Matiu nods. “I’ll be ten minutes. Say, any idea what happened to old man Hanson? He still around, doing his thing?”

  “Fuck man, why you wanna know about him? You said you were trying to stay out of the shit.”

  “Just curious.”

  “Well, he’s not gaming in the same spot anymore. Had to move around a couple times, even had the pens raided once so he’s gone to ground out in the rurals. Someone’ll know, but chances are as soon as you ask, he’ll know you asked. And he’ll want to know why.”

  “You let me worry about that. Catch you in a bit.”

  “Laters, bro.”

  Matiu swipes the call to end it and whistles to Cerberus, who’s wandered off to investigate an overflowing rubbish bin. The dog trots over and lets him attach his lead. Pondering, Matiu heads back towards the lab through the humid night air.

  Pushing through the heavy doors and locking them behind him, he hears Penny’s voice in the back section of the laboratory. “Yo,” he yells, “you talking to yourself again?”

  Her reply is a small squeal of terror, accompanied by a tinkle of breaking glass.

  “Oops,” he says, coming around the bench to find her crouching on the floor. “Did I frighten you?”

  “Oh, shut up,” she growls. “You made me drop important evidence.”

  “That’s all right,” he says, “I’ll let you clean that up. Where’s the laptop?”

  “Over there,” she points, her face a thunderstorm in a teacup. “Now stay out of my way.” Matiu sidles over to the desktop that serves Penny as an admin desk and boots up the laptop. “Sit,” he tells Cerberus, who promptly lies down and starts to snore. Reaching under the desk, he finds a coiled up Ethernet cable, grimed in dust that Penny must never have seen, and clicks it into the machine’s port. “Yip,” he mutters to himself, “real old school.” Hell, most machines don’t even have USB anymore, much less Ethernet ports. The fan hums to life, and Matiu wonders how much precious battery life that anachronism will suck up. Once Scour cracks the OS security, Matiu doesn’t expect to find passwords conveniently stored in a text file or pre-populated at secure web addresses, but he should be able to get the ball rolling, at least.

  Swiping Penny’s desktop, Matiu brings up a floating window and opens a browser to sign into his inbox. Grabbing the LAN properties and pasting them into an email, he taps out a message to Scour:

  U R IN. Deets below.

  Send.

  “Watcha doing?”

  Matiu all but falls out of his chair at Penny’s voice over his shoulder, and Cerberus is suddenly on his feet and barking with excitement.

  “Shit, you gave me a heart attack!”

  “Oops,” she says, glancing over the laptop’s login screen, one hand drifting to the dog’s neck to ruffle his fur and settle him down. “But seriously, what are you doing?”

  “What do you think? I’m cracking his password so we can look at his emails.”

  “And why do you think he’d leave anything useful on a cruddy old machine like this? Looks like he dredged it up out of the twenties.”

  “Call it a hunch, whatever. We won’t know until we try.” The laptop flickers and goes dark, then the start-up window kicks in. “Magic.”

  Penny frowns, noticing the dusty blue cable snaking down the back of the desk. “Hang on, you weren’t even using the keyboard. How did you crack the password?”

  Matiu shrugs. “I’ve got a little help on the line.”

  “Someone’s on our network, hacking his security? Is that even legal?”

  “Yeah,” Matiu says, deadpan. “This is legal hacking. Perfectly legit.”

  She lurches for the laptop, but Matiu grabs her wrists. “You can’t do that! You can’t make me a part of this, this, something…criminal! If they find out they’ll track it straight to my lab and I’ll be…”

  “Pandora, relax.” Matiu crosses her arms in front of her, pulling her close to him, their faces inches apart. “This guy’s missing, right? Might be dead, but he might not be. Which means there’s a chance we can find him alive.”

  Penny jerks against his grip, before sagging. “There are procedures…”

  “And if they worked, the cops would’ve found him already, but they haven’t. So we try something else.”

  “The cops don’t have his laptop! We do! Illegally!”

  “Yes, we do. And it’s in better hands than it would be with those IT geeks the cops have working for them. You know they’re on minimum wage, right?”

  Penny fumes. “I don’t know what you’re doing Matiu, but if Fletcher has any sense, he’ll have something a little more sophisticated to protect his online accounts than some backroom hacker you met in a pub in Waitakere will be able to crack. After those photos of Hayley Nevada with that pig got loose…”

  “It’s not his social profile or his bestiality selfies we want.” Matiu smirks. “I reckon he uses this dumpy old machine for personal stuff that he doesn’t want floating around where anyone could find it. OS is likely so old no one’s bothering to write viruses for it anymore, so it’s pretty damned safe—safer than any new machine.” Cautiously, Matiu loosens his grip on Penny’s wrists, her skin flushing red where his fingers were. “Let’s just step in, have a look, see if we can find any clues. That’s what detectives do, right?”

  “We’re not detectives. We’re just handling the evidence. The stolen evidence.”

  Matiu fixes her with a glare. “Your precious det
ectives don’t even know what they’re looking for, much less where to start looking. If we find something helpful, we’ll pass it straight along to the cops, right?”

  “You’re sure no one will know you were doing this from here?”

  Matiu opens his mouth, closes it again. Nothing’s certain when you start cracking the lid on the sort of shit he’s delving into. But he smiles and says, “Sure.” Turning back to the desktop, which is popping up shortcut icons at a painfully slow rate, while the ancient hard drive grinds and whirs under the brushed chrome casing, he slides the mouse towards the local email client. “OK, Mister Fletcher, who have you been talking to?”

  Penny raises a finger to protest, but falls silent as she scans the list of senders that pops up as Matiu opens Fletcher’s inbox. She chews on a nail, a nervous habit Matiu thought she had trained herself out of ages ago. “Who’s that one from? Buchanan. Why do I know that name?”

  He looks at the subject line. Re: Re: Re: Treatment Options. The message preview is garbled. “He’s a doctor, maybe? Must be important, he’s used some sort of plugin to encrypt the message internally. Paranoid, much?”

  “Maybe he didn’t want his nosey sister reading his emails,” Penny muses. Something beeps on the other side of the lab. “Hold that thought,” she says, and scurries away.

  Matiu leans closer to the screen and continues to scroll through the inbox. Halfway down the page, he sees another name that just might prove his hunch right: Hanson’s Canine Services. He hovers the mouse over the email link.

  Clicks it open.

  CHAPTER 7

  - Pandora -