Epitaphs (Echoes Book 2)

by Knite, Therin

  And given EDPA’s (well, Dynara’s) tendency for throwing money at any potential problems—like echo-damaged public spaces—the Allison Morris Computer Science Building will likely receive the facelift it needs before the majority of students even return from holiday vacation. Nobody (who wasn’t there) will suspect anything out of the ordinary happened in these halls.

  Total silence. Total erasure. Total secrecy.

  That’s EDPA policy.

  Chai and I reach the atrium, cold air spilling through the open front doors. “I can think of a couple reasons why someone might lie in the face of an echo,” I say. “Particularly this echo. If they went downstairs sooner than they claimed, it’s possible they saw the sandstorm in action. It’s possible they saw the monster inside. It’s possible they saw the impossible, and they were so terrified they’d be labeled crazy that they came up with a story that would absolve them of the responsibility to explain what they saw.”

  Chai stops before the left-side doorway, eying the snow-covered sports field beyond, the frozen trees, the churning clouds overhead. “Or, it could be that they’re involved peripherally somehow. Maybe they knew what was going to happen ahead of time, which is why they were in the building, why they were the first witnesses on the scene. Maybe they’re in cahoots with the actual killer, willingly or through some carefully applied pressure. Hell, maybe they were bribed to tell a specific story in an attempt to throw us off.”

  I mimic Chai’s position in the right-side doorway as I tug my gloves on. “Maybe. Or maybe there’s a whole other picture here we just can’t see yet. Maybe there aren’t enough lines drawn, enough colors on the page. Maybe we need to fill in more details before the picture begins to clarify.”

  “We? As in you and me together? Working side by side as an ass-kicking, behavior-analyzing duo?”

  “Don’t push it, Bennett. I’m still barely tolerating you.”

  She scoffs. “Why? Because I picked up on your multitude of untreated emotional disorders?”

  “Don’t start.”

  “I didn’t start. That was you.”

  “You know, maybe we should stop talking now and have our own personal brainstorming sessions. That’s my latest hypothesis.”

  “Yeah? My guess is we should save our brainstorming sessions for later.” Chai points at a bulky blur mad-dashing through the snow on the other side of the sports field, fifty yards away. And with a jolt, I realize it’s Murrough. Chasing a much smaller figure, dressed in red, across the GM Poly campus. And not far behind the Security Captain is Dynara, sans white coat, a tiny streak of uniform black flitting across the grounds.

  I dig my ear-com out of my pocket—Chai does the same—and clip it on my ear in time to hear Dynara say, “All EDPA crowd control units on scene, block off the campus exits. I repeat, block off the campus exits and do not let anyone wearing a red coat past the perimeter. Strike team fall into pursuit. Current location: Planter’s Field. We’ve got a runner who may have information pertaining to the DuPont case. Orders are to subdue. Nonlethal force approved. Do not let this person escape.”

  Chapter Four

  This is the story of how I become a human snowball:

  The second Dynara’s order cuts out on my ear-com, Chai and I dart off down the snow-coated sidewalk parallel to the chase in progress. The runner in red banks right and then streaks toward the iron gate of a tall brick fence that surrounds the cluster of mathematics buildings. Before the runner makes it past the metal bars, a strong gust of winter wind knocks the red coat’s hood back, revealing a college-aged woman with short, dark hair. Then she’s inside the mathematics courtyard, moving through the maze of shrubbery and statues as fast as her short legs can take her. She turns at a sharp angle and vanishes behind the fountain of a man in a suit (who appears to be the previous generation of Dean Anderson), leaving only her footprints in the packed powder on the ground to track her by.

  Chai falls in with Dynara and Murrough, who are a sore twenty feet behind the runner. But before I conform to the pursuit pattern, I pull up my mental map of the GM Poly campus. The mathematics courtyard abuts a small patch of woodland riddled with bike trails that provide shortcuts for students who need to quickly pass from one side of the campus to the other. There are a series of small openings in the brick fence that let out onto these trails, and if the runner is a student, she’ll know them well. If she reaches the trails, she’ll get away scot-free (or until EDPA brings out the security cam footage).

  I break away from the pursuit and adjust my heading toward the cluster of trees a hundred feet from the courtyard. Chai calls out to me, but I ignore her and focus on the opening to the trail nearest to the courtyard wall. My face is numb from the glacial air, my legs ache with the extra torque required to run full speed through snow, and my pitiful lungs are already burning from three blocks’ worth of exercise, but I speed into the woods regardless.

  Shadow falls over me, and for a second, I can see nothing but a veil of black, the evergreen canopy blocking out the dim light from a snowy day. Then my eyes adjust, shapes defined: trees and prickly bushes and sticks jutting up at dangerous angles and a dozen other types of obstacles in my path. I dodge to the left to avoid gouging out my eye with a vine covered in thorns and leap over a fallen, rotten log that must’ve caused more than one bike crash. Once, my feet slip and slide across an icy patch half hidden by new snowfall, and I wave my arms around like a madman trying to maintain balance.

  Finally, though, I get my stride and power through the winding trail, eyes scouring every inch of the brick wall for an opening, a flash of red, the swift-moving legs of a young female college stud—

  She barrels out of the first opening in the wall. And despite the fact she must’ve traveled these trails a hundred times, she isn’t quite ready for the combined tripping power of a steep incline plus frozen soil. Her feet fly out from underneath her, and with a yelp, she careens down the hill toward the trail, bouncing all the way, impact after impact, until she rams…right into me.

  Because I’m also running too fast for my own good, and I can’t stop in time.

  The force of her body knocks me from my feet and pushes me over the edge of the trail. Where there happens to be a ten-foot drop-off overlooking an icy stream below. We roll down the sharp slope together, a tangle of bruising limbs, both of us shouting in panic. Snow clings to every inch of my exposed skin, my hair, my clothing, and pointy objects jab at my face. The world around me becomes a blur of shades of gray, and the last thing I see before we hit the thin ice cap of the stream is a thorny vine whipping past my eyes, a hairsbreadth from blinding.

  And then we’re in the water.

  It’s only a foot or so deep, but the shock of cold knocks the breath out of my lungs. Water floods my nose and mouth, choking me. I thrash around, reaching for the air, but the woman is half on top of me, her weight holding my chest underwater as she scrambles to get up. That primal fear of drowning pulses through my veins, and I flail. One of my hands whacks the woman’s face, and she tumbles onto the muddy, frozen bank. I sit up, face breaking air, and hack all the dirty stream water from my throat. Shivering assaults me, head to toe, and for a moment, the world around me is unfocused.

  But then it steadies, and I spot the woman trying to rise and flee. I grab her ankle and tug, the steep hillside working in my favor now, and she loses her footing, smacks the ground face first. “Stop running!” I rasp at her, throat raw.

  Shaking, cold and scared, she turns her mud-streaked face toward me. Her eyes are a ruddy brown color, wide and round and barely masking horror. “Please, I didn’t do anything. I swear. I just wanted to know…to know…”

  “To know what?” I roll over and brace myself on my knees, try to take in slow, deep breaths to calm my hammering chest. “What did you do to set off the chase?”

  “She was hiding in the bushes,” says Dynara’s voice from above. “Listening in on our conversations while we canvassed the area around the CS building.”
/>   Crouched on the edge of the top of the hill, she looks down on us with contempt (and no attempt to veil it). Her black field uniform is spotted with flakes of snow and twigs and thorns that caught on the armored fabric, and one hand rests on the gun strapped to her hip. A few feet behind her, Murrough paces back and forth to cool down from the sprint, and farther behind him, Chai is catching up to the “accident scene” at a leisurely jog. I also spy dark forms moving in between the trees—the strike team. May’s lithe body leans against a vine-covered trunk, looking on.

  Dynara points at me and makes a Get up, fool motion with her hand. I grab a low, sturdy branch and pull myself to my feet, my other hand sliding up to the woman’s shoulder to ensure she doesn’t try to bolt again. She stands with me, legs wobbly under her weight, and glances around from me to Dynara to Murrough to Chai to the menacing, murderous shadows beyond. “Please,” she says again. “I’m not involved. I just wanted to know what happened to Mark.”

  Her voice cracks on Mark, and a sudden clarity falls over me, speckled with guilt. “You were his friend.”

  She nods weakly. “I was coming to get him for lunch. I knew he was in one of the labs, working overtime on that stupid project of his. He never takes a break.” Sobs interrupt her words. “I was right outside, on the sidewalk, when it happened. I was looking up at the windows—he always sits near a window—to see if I could find which lab he was in so I didn’t have to search them all. Asshole never has his Ocom on.” A tear rolls down her cheek. “Had. Never had his Ocom on.”

  Dynara sighs and rubs her temples. “What did you see?”

  “I saw…” The woman’s eyes widen and widen until I’m sure they’re a quarter of an inch from popping right out of her skull. “I saw some kind of storm or something. In the lab room. And in the storm there was this thing, moving around. And I saw it…I saw it…I saw it…pick up Mark and…” Her breaths come in short bursts, and I take hold of her arms to keep her steady.

  “Ma’am, you need to calm down,” I say. “You’re starting to hyperventilate.”

  “But I saw…”

  “I know what you saw.” And I know you don’t have the background to get away unscathed after seeing it. “You don’t have to relive it.”

  “Girl, what’s your name?” Dynara’s hand moves from her gun to the Ocom clipped on her belt. Threat analysis complete.

  The woman swallows and picks a couple of pine needles out of her hair with trembling fingers. “Chelsea Lang.”

  “You a student here?”

  “Yes.”

  Dynara nods and looks over her shoulder. “Chai, escort this girl back to the office and take her statement, please. Delicately—you know the way.”

  Chai skirts around Dynara’s rising form and descends into the gully with careful feet. She takes Chelsea Lang out of my care and helps her up the hill, murmuring reassurances into the terrified woman’s ears. There is nothing Chai can say to alleviate the horror of watching your friend get his head ripped off by a monster that shouldn’t exist. But if anyone can set a traumatized young woman on the path to recovery, it’s Chai. From what I’ve read of her exploits and achievements in a dozen plus medical publications, Chai Bennett was the best of the best back in Houston.

  (I hate psychiatrists with a passion, sure, but to some people, in some situations, they have their uses.)

  Chelsea Lang disappears around a turn in the trail, her crying, quaking body in Chai’s embrace, as she tearfully talks about Mark DuPont’s death. Not fair, she says. Why him? she asks. Who would do such a thing? she wants to know.

  Always the same questions.

  Always the same answers.

  I clamber out of the stream and half crawl, half stumble up the incline, until I reach even ground. Dynara observes me (she doesn’t offer to help), and when I finally free myself from the treacherous grasp of foot-deep water and pointy sticks, she blows a strand of white hair out of her face and smirks at me. “It’s nice to see that good head of yours can be useful outside of crime scenes, Adem. But really, if you’re going to take part in action sequences and all their associated threats, you might want to consider hitting the gym more often than twice a week.”

  I brush the tree debris off my sopping wet coat. “Hey, I caught her, didn’t I?”

  “No, she caught you. And by accident, too.” She flicks my chin. “I was right behind her, you idiot. I saw the whole thing. If that girl hadn’t screwed up, she’d have gotten the best of you, easy. She’s twice as fast as you are and three times more agile. You lucked out, and you owe the nasty, godforsaken weather for your good fortune. But someday, it’s going to be sunny and clear and dry, and the only thing you’ll have going for you is your uncanny ability to memorize maps. Which isn’t going to help your slow ass catch up to someone miles ahead of you.”

  I spit out a glob of mud that was lodged in the corner of my mouth. “I’m not that slow, Dynara. You act like I’m a snail.”

  She whips around and waves at me, dismissive. “You run a twelve-minute mile, Adem. You are a snail.”

  Murrough, still hovering a few feet away, doesn’t bother to hide his smile. And when I raise my hands like, Seriously?, he rolls his shoulders and nods in agreement with the woman I might actually hate more than Jin hates my microwave chicken dinners.

  “Fine. Have it your way. Let’s all laugh at Adem’s poor physical performance. Ha. Ha. Funny. Funny. Har. Har. Har.” I clap my gloved hands together, then throw up my arms in a poor impression of a mosh pit wave. “Now, what’s next on the agenda? Throwing darts at my head or solving this case?”

  * * *

  After forty-five minutes of stewing in the foxhole task room, it becomes abundantly clear to everyone involved that we have bupkis.

  The forensics team found prints and fibers from dozens of GM Poly students, as well as three professors, two custodians, and a group of fourteen high school prospects for the following fall term—not helpful. There was no physical evidence that any person of interest had staked out the lab as Mark DuPont’s death scene ahead of time. Even better, there was no security footage that depicted any potential murderers scoping out the dilapidated halls of the CS Building in advance. And best of all, DuPont had no records of any suspicious calls made to or from his profile in the hours or days immediately preceding his death.

  So much for an open-and-shut case. We can’t even see the possible doors.

  We sit around the long table again, Donovan and McLeod absent this time. Night Team One (plus Frederick, the researcher), in all our glory. Dynara and Murrough commanding the room with their combined, oppressive authority emanating from every pore. Chai winking at me from across the table, a promise to prod me about personal problems I’d much rather forget I have. Lance, still shaken from the Nexus 4 scene, scrolling through his completed analysis of the code stream from the sandstorm dream.

  Once Dynara decides it’s time to move on from a futile search for easy answers, she calls on Lance. “Did you find anything hiding in the stream?”

  His workstation glasses (now clear of blood) rest on the bridge of his nose, and as he speaks, various sets of data pop up and vanish on one lens or the other. “Nothing that stands out to me as abnormal. Only unusual. The maker, by my estimation, is a Class Four Command Controller. One step below the fearsome might of our dear Adem Adamend here.” He throws me a weak smile. “That means they have a lot of raw talent to work with. High content production power, fine control of dream objects, rapid development between echo levels. The whole deal. This person would be a wicked adversary even without formal training.”

  Murrough’s back straightens, and he snaps out, “Are you suggesting this person had formal training?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Lance adjusts his glasses. “No doubt. The kind of dream building mastery demonstrated in the sandstorm echo is not something you can achieve without training from a more experienced maker or someone who knows everything about echoes. Or both. I’ve been working here four years now, and that
desert is one of the top three echoes I’ve ever seen in terms of transitional stability. The way it was constructed, the maker could have altered everything, grounding to sky, in a couple of seconds. Which is how the breach went down, as described by McLeod. As soon as the maker hit the breach point, they stripped out all the content they deemed unnecessary.”

  “Unnecessary to murder DuPont,” I mutter.

  “Exactly.” Lance rubs the back of his head. “I don’t know if we have another mole after…Lana, or if this is yet another repercussion of the information she gathered for her mysterious employer, or what. But I do know that somebody has the lowdown on the methodology of echo construction, either this maker or someone in contact with them.”

  Frederick scratches at his gray beard. “It is possible Dr. Carter snuck out our entire educational curriculum for new echo makers.”

  “In which case,” Dynara says, swiveling her chair around, “we could be looking at a whole new generation of well-trained havoc-wreakers heading our way in the next few years. Especially if those textbooks end up on the black market. Especially if they are already there, passing from highest bidder to highest bidder and threatening a disastrous national press leak.”

  A collective cringe circles the table.

  Lana Carter was an excellent doctor—and an effective mole. And if it hadn’t been for an “unfortunate” coincidence involving me and one Club Valkyrie, she might still be roaming these halls, spying for a man whose name and intentions we do not know.

  “All right.” Dynara sighs and rolls her chair away from the table. “Frederick, how go the background checks?”