Hidden Gem

by Lissa Kasey

  “Sorry.” Aki hated cutting into anyone else’s profits. Life was hard enough without having other people pull you out of parties that could earn a week’s pay in just a few short hours. And Candy was the only one who could ever touch him because somehow he was just colors and clouds, never memories or thoughts.

  “It’s okay, hun. I hate those big groups anyway. Always so grabby and not enough pay for the hands and crap flying around. I only like to work them if I’m with you. ’Sides Preston and Royce were drooling over the party. They can have it.”

  All that money that McNaughton had waved around, had he left any sort of payment? Aki groaned. Since he hadn’t been conscious, it wasn’t like he could have given them anything. “No shoes for me, I guess.”

  Candy laughed. “You and your shoe fetish.”

  “No different than you and your superhero undies fetish. I’ve never met anyone with more underwear than you. Especially since you’re a whore.”

  “You know how hot those make some of those oldies? You should try it sometime. I can’t be as pretty as you—my face just isn’t girly enough—but flash a little comic undies and they all come running.” He yanked Aki up. “Let’s get your face washed. Bart wants to make sure you didn’t actually hurt yourself. If you did, he’s going to fine those detectives.”

  “It was my choice. There was a girl—”

  “McNaughton knows better. After that head injury one, Bart told him no more with possible dead.” Aki had slept nearly a week after that one.

  Candy led him into their tiny bathroom and helped him wash his face and then brushed his hair. Two fingernails were broken, and he had a handful of shallow scratches on his face that were going to be a bitch to cover up, but nothing permanent. Candy expertly applied a liquid bandage that would heal the cuts in less than two days.

  “Manny thinks Bart should ban McNaughton.”

  “It was my choice to touch the damn shirt.” Aki didn’t know why the thought of getting rid of the detective made him twitchy, but it did. He’d sort of been a staple in Aki’s life for the last two years. McNaughton was a consistent bit of chaos.

  “The new guy left his card. Wants you to call.”

  “I didn’t see anything.” That was usually the way of it. Aki never found anyone in time to save them. “The girl was only sixteen.”

  “Makes sense that he’s grasping at straws since she’s just a kid. Sixteen, eh? Only two years younger than me. I have a little sister who’s sixteen. Dunno how she is. Mum won’t see me anymore. Not even for a quick vid call. They live in the South anyway.” He fingered his necklace, a simple silver chain with a piece of wrapped candy dangling from the end. Candy never took it off, and when Aki had asked about it, Candy told him it was a gift from his little sister.

  Aki wrapped Candy in a hug, hating that he couldn’t help his friend forget his horrible past. Maybe they hadn’t gone through the same things, but he understood better than most how bad memories could hurt.

  “I just wanted to save one, you know. Why see all this stuff if I can’t do anything?”

  Candy pressed his cheek to Aki’s. His warmth was a heaven the psi rarely got to experience. “Call the detective, tell him everything. See if he can pick it apart. They get stuff out of nothing all the time. Else they wouldn’t keep coming back, right? Well, for more than a good blow job.”

  Maybe.

  He let go, handed Aki the card and the phone, then headed toward the door. “Make him buy you those pretty shoes. I’ll tell Bart you’re okay and call Regina to come fix your nails. Get some rest. No use going back out there for the night, all the high-paying clients have gone home.”

  Aki sighed and sank down on the bed. Call Taylor? Was it odd that he didn’t want to? The man had been so hard to read, like McNaughton, only not. And then there was the Irishman. Not someone who usually allowed himself to be pushed around, and yet he’d let Bart kick him out before he could ask Aki anything. Though Aki couldn’t help but be glad to have gotten out of servicing the man for the night. The man made his head hurt, not from the crap that was in his, but from the grip on his hair and the ache in his jaw from stretching around him. McNaughton was built like a tank all the way around and carrying a damn cannon. But Aki would do a lot to see that dimpled smile, even if it meant a little discomfort.

  Instead of calling, he set the phone and card aside and curled up to sleep. The toll of using his mutation was not only the nightmares and pain that it could bring, but utter exhaustion. The detective could wait. Mandy was already dead.

  THE NEXT morning Aki was roused by Regina, who insisted on repairing his broken nails right away. He protested the time, since it was only 9:00 a.m. He worked nights and had only gone to bed at four, but she would have none of it. When she finished, his nails shone, covered in clear lacquer and tiny gems, and Aki was wide-awake. Careful not to upset Candy, Aki made his way around the bedroom, pulling on regular clothes, long pants and a fitted sweater, before heading out into the bright light of the day. A cup of coffee and an egg later at his favorite diner and he felt human again.

  The memories of the night before still chilled him. To think that anyone could invoke that sort of torture on another human being, especially a teenager, was frightening. Though really, it wasn’t all that different from his time in the concentration camp. Those memories were just as vivid. That last time with Hyeon clung with vengeance even more than two years later.

  Sometimes Aki wondered if the stench would ever fade. It lingered, days after a pit of the dead had been set on fire. A new batch of bodies had to have been burned that night. The air and soot covered everything, and the smell made him retch. How long had Aki sat there, staring into the fire as it consumed corpse after mangled corpse? Just like his own body, ragged people, sick with malnourishment, some missing limbs or scarred from some horrible experiment gone wrong. All with the strange pale pupils in their eyes, the mark of the psi. Punishment for something done a half century ago in another country a world away.

  Most of the faces were Asian, though almost none had ever set foot on another continent. Genetic experiments altering the human code to plant a psi ability that was then used in the Third World War turned any who was psi into a villain. Fifty years later, most of the original psis were dead, their children suffered, and the gene flourished, taking root in the most random of children and no longer constrained to foreign soil and faces.

  Only a handful could have passed for Caucasian in the camp, other than the guards, of course. Were it not for the shape of his eyes and the color, would Aki ever have been taken? His stomach hurt too much to think about it for long anyway. When was the last time he’d eaten? Days? Maybe a week ago?

  Hyeon dragged him to bed sometime after the wailing had died down. The sky was still dark, like the promise of rain that would never come, everyone huddled together on the cold floor for warmth. The building had been some sort of warehouse before the war. Now it was falling down, holes in the roof, birds roosting in the rafters, rats scurrying through the walls, and them.

  One of the guards stepped inside, eyes searching the masses, for what, Aki could only fear. But then the detainees weren’t much different than the rats, just another form of pest to be exterminated.

  Aki should have slept when Hyeon had laid his dark head next to his, but all he could see was the flame devouring the mutilated bodies of people he’d come to know and see every day. When had he begun to think of them as something more than “them”? In the beginning it had simply been them and him. As long as it happened to them, it was okay.

  Until they’d taken a pretty little girl named GuEal away. She’d been seven. Aki had watched what was left of her burn up in the pit. Dry heaved for a while since he hadn’t eaten in days, and prayed to whatever might have more power than soldiers and guards of the containment camp that no more would die, or at least, if he had to, it would be fast.

  “H78420, on your feet,” a guard was shouting. It took a minute for the words to seep through
the exhaustion and hunger to realize he was talking to Aki. “H78420, now.” The man pulled out a stick and jabbed him with it, delivering a heavy jolt of electricity that had Aki’s spine bowing in pain. “H78420, get up.”

  Hyeon dragged him to his feet. “Just do what they say, Aki. Please. Whatever they ask you to do, just do it.”

  Aki glanced back at Hyeon’s pretty black eyes, his pupils a pale brown that he’d come to think of as comforting, and wanted to cry. The guard zapped him again, dropping him to his knees.

  “Stop, stop, please. He’s coming. Please.” Hyeon pulled Aki up again just as a handful of guards joined the first. They ripped him away from Hyeon, dragging him toward the door. Everything seemed to narrow down to that final trip across the dirty floor toward the dark portal leading to only Goddess knew where. Maybe they’d just throw him in the pit and light him on fire too. At least then it would all be over.

  His heart pounded in his chest as two guards remained behind, pushing Hyeon around like he was nothing more than an injured dog to be put down. Aki wanted to beg, anything to free himself and Hyeon from whatever they would do next, but couldn’t find the strength to raise his head or force the words from his parched lips. That had been the last time he’d ever seen Hyeon alive.

  Aki shook the memory away, swallowing bile and fighting to keep his breakfast. They’d dragged him off to be strapped down and tortured. Experiments, they’d called it, like that somehow made it better than the torture it really was. Days had passed, and eventually he’d regained consciousness to find himself unbound and alone, entire camp dead, including Hyeon. He’d run then, almost hoping for gunshots to come out of the soot-covered darkness and snuff out his retched existence too. Yet here he was more than two years later.

  He strolled by Just Shoes, trying to get his mind off his past. He stared longingly at the iridescent blue heels on display in the window. A strap snaked around the back, covered in blue fire gems, to wrap several times around a delicate ankle. The gem-like blue spike heel was just under four inches high. He wanted those shoes so bad. Somehow owning something so beautiful could make him forget for a while. Whenever he dressed up in all the glam, he felt like his past must have really been some sort of mistake. Maybe it had even happened to someone else and not really him. Sometimes he could pretend it was just the memory of a movie or a book he’d read.

  He sighed. He had tried the shoes on a few days before, but the price tag had given him sticker shock. Real gems, the owner had said. There was only a single pair in eight different sizes. Thus the five-digit price. A boy could dream, though, right?

  He made his way to the park. Taking a seat on an empty bench, he enjoyed the brisk air of the mid-May morning and glanced at the vid screen attached to the bench that broadcasted news. The headline talked about Mandy’s abduction and her death. The police found her remains and the remains of several others, but no arrests had been made. McNaughton hadn’t said that there were others missing. Whomever the other remains belonged to were not identified. So at least they’d found enough of Mandy in one piece to know it was her. Aki closed his eyes and thought back to that moment. So much pain. So much blood. Her captor wanted her to suffer. But why? What did he gain from killing a teenage girl in such a brutal way?

  Aki remembered how long it took some of the captured soldiers in the camps to break and finally loosen their tongues. Sometimes it would be days before they’d start screaming. By the end they all would have confessed to killing the Goddess herself if it meant the torture would end. Eventually everyone just died, if not in the flesh, then of the mind. Even Aki could recall enduring great masses of pain without letting a peep fall from his lips. It hadn’t been that he’d been trying to restrain himself. It was more that he’d become used to retreating inside some further untouchable place within his head. Often he feared that no matter how far he dove, it would one day not be far enough and they would truly kill him like they had so many before.

  Someone sat down on the bench beside him, and for a moment Aki didn’t bother to look up. His mind swirled with horrible memories mixed from his past and Mandy’s last nightmare. Only the faint scent of peppermint wafting by broke him free of his mental funk. McNaughton. Aki wasn’t sure if it was gum that he chewed or maybe a shampoo, but the man almost always smelled vaguely of peppermint. He looked tired, nearly gnarled with his overgrown scruff as he slouched against the back of the seat.

  “You stalking me?” Aki joked, trying to lighten the mood. This case was bad. And Aki knew McNaughton didn’t usually let things get to him like this. The way it bothered him tainted the air with bitterness and anger strongly enough that Aki didn’t need to touch him to feel. “Can I help you somehow? I mean, not just about Mandy….”

  McNaughton set a box on the bench between them. “You know they were all missing their eyes. Hard to tell at first since they were so cut up. Trophies probably. Didn’t know she’d be that far gone. Most have been found more than a week after. She was just a kid.”

  “You wanted to save her.” Aki touched the man’s leg, wishing he could offer more support. “I wanted to help. I’m sorry I couldn’t.”

  McNaughton shrugged as though it didn’t matter, but Aki knew better. “Anything you remember? Anything about her captor at all?”

  Aki shook his head. She had no eyes. Odd how much he relied on that sense since he couldn’t touch others. “I could hear the blood hitting the floor and that the place was cavernous. When my memories snapped into place with hers, I was screaming and the sound bounced off the walls. I couldn’t hear her at all. Like no memories of her actual self or awareness. It was like she wasn’t home. And when we joined and I screamed, it was like I had control and struggled but there was no way to get loose.” Aki had seen a lot of death in his life. Watched people bleed to death, walked through enough blood to last a lifetime, and felt enough pain to know what could or at least should kill a person. He’d even dug the small metal tracking chip out of his wrist himself after finally escaping the camp. Aki had a scar to prove it. Paris had paid to surgically remove the barcode that Aki had mangled trying to get the chip out. The biohazard symbol the guards at the camp had tattooed above the code had only faded, not vanished. He hid that wrist from everyone, even Candy, though the companion had seen it more than once. “They cut out her eyes, and with the odd feeling of weight on her body, it was like her limbs had been cut off.”

  “Surgically removed,” McNaughton said quietly. “Filled with a chemical cocktail strong enough to make her comatose. It’s surprising she wasn’t dead, at least not physically.”

  “You know, in the camps they used to take pride in killing a person’s soul before killing their body. Though I guess they don’t believe psis have souls in the South.” Aki shook his head at the memories. “It almost felt like I was back there. The way it felt large and empty like the warehouse we were herded into every night. And the cold, sterile distance of the space. Like no one was around. Or at least no one who cared.” He sighed, hating the old memories that were coming back. “The news said there were other bodies.”

  “Unidentified as of yet. We have no others reported missing, but we’re matching DNA. This is one sick fucker. We’ve found his lab, but it’s only a matter of time before he finds another base and begins again.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know how you can do the job you do.” So much death. And people looked down on Aki for being a whore. There were so many worse things to be.

  McNaughton shoved the box Aki’s way. “We’re square. Later, kid.” Then the man was up and moving away. Aki wondered about him sometimes, but no, there were more important things in his life than analyzing the cryptic behavior of Detective Shane McNaughton whose smile was like sunshine.

  The box looked ordinary enough. When Aki opened it, it was the shoes. His dream shoes. His heart did a little flip-flop as he ripped off the sandals he’d thrown on that morning and stepped into the heels. Heaven, oh merciful Goddess, this had to be what heaven felt like.<
br />
  He walked all the way home in those heels feeling like a princess.

  FIVE

  SHANE FELT a little better about the previous evening’s encounter after he’d given Aki the shoes. He owed the kid more for the pain he suffered but figured there would be plenty of time for that. The case wasn’t over. Mandy was dead, and they’d interrupted the killer; in fact, Shane believed Aki had scared the killer when he jumped into the dying girl’s memories. Maybe it was some sort of astral projection that began with Aki’s post-cognitive abilities. The ability was unheard of in the ISS archives, but so was most everything Aki could do.

  There were two other confirmed dead, unidentifiable by anything other than DNA. He just had to wait for the results to come in on them. So far all the kids taken had come from powerful, wealthy families. So who was missing someone that wasn’t speaking up? No way were these random this late in the game. He growled at the idea. Biniski had been livid. But there was nothing else that could have been done. His girl had been killed less than five hours after being taken. That upped the normal schedule for this perp. But he’d been interrupted, as Mandy had mostly been intact. Shane shuddered at the memory of it. She’d been mutilated, but nothing like the others.

  The perp had fled, leaving his lab and all of his equipment behind. The cops had seized it all on sight. Every inch of the place would be combed for trace data, the precinct would have surveillance on it day and night, and the bastard would have to start over. Maybe it’d slow him down.

  Shane worried about Taylor’s interest in Aki, knowing the detective was pretty firmly bound to the ISS and that Aki disliked them as much as he disliked the South. The kid was smart, wary, and well protected as long as he stayed at the Gem. There were benefits to being a contracted whore. Laws protected them like regular citizens, and the owners of the contracts acted much like the mafia when it came to their companions. No one got in, no one hurt them, no one even looked their way without a by-your-leave.