Marked

by Alex Hughes

  “Hawk would rather you didn’t,” he said. Nobody in or out without Hawk there was what the man had said, his mind supplied.

  I paused. “Is Hawk dictating to the Erickson-Meyers clan now?” I asked.

  Gustolf smiled. I’d asked the right question. “No. Kara has been elected to speak for us, even with the house arrest. She says the fastest way to find out the truth is to let you do your thing.”

  “Good for her,” I said, and meant it. “Is she giving out a lot of orders?”

  “Yes, but they all make sense.”

  Even better; from the look of him, she’d won their respect, no small thing. Kara had just become a major player in the Guild, at least until the Erickson-Meyers family sent somebody over from Europe, which they might decide not to do.

  “You want him in or out?” Gustolf asked, referring to Stone.

  Now I smiled. Choices. And, surprisingly, a Kara I recognized was working for me behind the scenes. Maybe she hadn’t betrayed me after all. They had said she’d spoken for me.

  “I’d rather take a look without him the first time,” I said. “It’s an easier read.”

  “Go ahead.” He moved out of the way.

  Stone sent him some kind of private message over telepathy, and Gustolf crossed his arms.

  “Kara says Adam’s the expert,” Gustolf said, out loud, making a point. “What he wants goes until Kara says differently. I’ve told you before. What Johanna has to say is her business. She has the right. But we’re not letting this go. Nobody’s getting in without permission.”

  Stone sent something else; I got the edge of its passage through Mindspace but no real content.

  “Enforcement has already made its position clear,” Gustolf said. “If you go through me, the rest of the family would be glad to show up in response.”

  Stone looked frustrated. “We’re on the same side,” he said. “I am not the one trying to eliminate evidence. That’s not me.”

  A disturbance in Mindspace—

  And a one-foot flame appeared in Gustolf’s hand. His humor was gone. “You try to influence me again and I will burn you alive.”

  The air nearly crackled in front of Stone as his mind settled for battle. Enforcement training was brutal. He’d probably been burned before and wouldn’t blink at doing it again. With Guild medics on standby, your opinion of serious damage changed radically.

  “Stop,” I said.

  Both glanced at me. Heat poured from the flame in Gustolf’s hand. Mindspace rippled from the force Stone was holding in potentiality.

  “We all want the same thing,” I said carefully. “Guild First would love you fighting among yourselves. Gustolf, Kara trusts Stone’s judgment. Stone, Gustolf is protecting his family against people who are trying to destroy evidence. Both of you want the same thing. All I need is ten minutes to check out this crime scene. Can you wait ten minutes?” I asked, hitting the number deliberately hard.

  Gustolf turned off the flame.

  Stone slowly let the energy dissipate.

  “We’ll wait,” Gustolf said.

  Stone thought about that with a cop’s cold calculation. Finally: “He doesn’t touch anything.”

  “Agreed,” I said. While I’d originally asked for time alone for convenience, now it was an actual necessity. This much roiling emotion in a crime scene was asking for trouble, and would likely obscure anything I’d find. “Ten minutes,” I repeated. “I’d suggest you spend the time calming down. Whatever is going on here won’t be helped by anger.”

  Then I went in, praying they wouldn’t kill each other. Praying that whatever madness looked like, it wasn’t what I’d just seen.

  • • •

  I closed the door behind me and took a few steps forward to let space (and the Inverse-Square Law) insulate me some from the minds behind me. They still made waves I could feel, of course, but the farther away, the fainter those waves felt. I took another step, and the Guild anyonide shielding took effect; it was like the rest of the world didn’t exist.

  I closed my eyes against the bland entryway and just enjoyed the sound of nothing. The feeling of Mindspace calm like a lake at rest, with no bleed-over from any other minds. Something in me relaxed, something that hadn’t fully relaxed in years. Nothing would get through those shields to surprise me, but my mind was unchanged.

  In my apartment, in the machine I’d rigged based on the design of a friend, the shape of the electromagnetic fields were the opposite of my brain waves in Mindspace, like those headphones you wore to hear nothing. The two sets of waves canceled out, but my brain always felt fuzzy and disconnected. Here, the world was still there, my mind still there in perfect clarity, but I didn’t have to hear the sound of others thinking.

  I enjoyed it, just enjoyed it for a second, and reached for calm. What I’d told them was true. Three days later, the traces of a murder would almost certainly be here, but fading. Any strong present emotion might obscure potential clues, even fear, even justifiable fear. The crime scene wouldn’t care.

  So I took a breath, opened my eyes, and focused on my surroundings as a way to lose the fear. It was the nicest Guild apartment I’d ever seen, decorated in pale blues and golds and browns with navy striping, clearly done by a professional decorator. No man I knew would have chosen the sprig of pale purple fake flowers over the mantelpiece on the right, for example, but it suited the space and seemed restful, if a little feminine. The knickknacks out and about and the oddly shaped blobby coffee table were all a little too casual, a little too planned. But they—and the blues and browns—added up to something a lot better than your average Guild apartment, which normally was a white-painted box with a brick gas fireplace and a white-cabinet kitchen. To be honest, they worked you too hard most of the time to think too much about living quarters; most Guild members moved every few months to few years, going where the work was.

  Clearly, in the last few years Meyers had had money and power both, as well as good taste. He’d planned to be in this city for enough time to worry about the apartment, and he’d gone to the trouble to get a designer and crew into the building past security. Or maybe the elite luxury apartments had that done for them; it’s not like I was in a position to know.

  The living room area and open kitchen areas were relatively neat, a few dishes in the sink now with small spots of mold starting to grow, untouched for days. I wondered how long the cousins had been standing there, to keep people out.

  A jacket lay on a chair at the light wooden table, linens around it untouched except for a single stain on one side, like something spilled from a glass that hadn’t been cleaned up. A pair of shoes sat next to the large couch. Small things; he’d been a neat man, but he’d lived here. I could almost smell the scent of his mind, a fragrance sunk into the space. His baseline emotion seemed a mix of concentration and worry, but he had a high-level political job. Perhaps that was normal.

  For that matter, I could also smell something odd in the physical world. I went back into the bedroom, through a hallway to the left, past a laundry space with waterless washer machines that looked no more than five years old. Also an upgrade from typical Guild digs.

  The smell, a kind of scorched tacky thing like burned popcorn mixed with some kind of oily material and left to rot, got stronger as I moved down the hallway. When I opened the door, Mindspace exploded.

  The very air screamed. Energy and death—I squinted past the incredible sensations. Stinging crazy energy too hot, too hot, too hot. Madness?

  I closed it out with determination, with grit, with a strong shield that wouldn’t budge. Mindspace remembered here. It remembered all too well what couldn’t seep away through the apartment shields. But, shielded, I didn’t feel any different. Just another crime scene.

  The real world came into focus, and the first thing I saw was a long black mark up the wall on top of an electrical outlet. A
n ironing board, tipped over, on the floor. A man’s dress shirt wadded between it and the floor, also scorched, places burned away—or was that the ironing board cover? And next to both, still plugged in, an iron.

  A stain covered the carpet for a few inches next to the iron—a brown, oily, textured something—and the face of the iron had the same stuff coated on it, a long piece of it extending past its edge. Someone had been burned, and burned badly.

  But that scorch mark up the wall, the sensation of Mindspace . . . that was an electrical death. That smell—that horrible smell—was the smell of that burn, that death, that horror. The hole cut in the drywall had to be where they’d accessed the electrical system, two feet to the left of the burn mark.

  There was no body on the floor here, though a few other stains could make out its shape if you looked hard enough. Two dark stains and scorch marks that once might have been shoes. Lighter stains where he must have fallen.

  Suddenly what I’d agreed to hit me like a ton of bricks. It was my job—and mine alone, without Cherabino—to decide what had happened in this room full of screaming Mindspace.

  I went to sit in the bathroom, away from this smell, for just a minute, and talk myself into lowering my shields. Either I’d come down with madness or I wouldn’t. They could treat it—probably—and I’d agreed to this. They’d saved Swartz’s life.

  • • •

  It was the strongest and the worst thing I’d done in a long time to force myself back into that room. A break was fine, Swartz had said once. A break was totally fine, but you couldn’t run from something this bad. You had to face it.

  So I screwed my courage to the sticking place and opened the door again.

  Again, the smell hit me in the face like a hammer. And again, Mindspace screamed unimaginable pain. Meyers’s Ability had been strong, and the scene reflected it. But just a scene, just a scene, I told myself.

  I breathed through it this time, and started to pay attention, to sink down into the midst of it and examine it from the inside. I let it wash through me, let the pain run where it would. No worse than the second rehab, where they wouldn’t give me drugs for withdraw symptoms. No worse than the Guild locking me in a box to dry out, screaming over and over and over again for someone to make it stop.

  The pain settled, and I emerged “under” it. I could see again. I was deep into Mindspace now, deeper than was strictly safe without an anchor back to the real world. Deep, with some terrible, terrible pain above me. If I wasn’t very careful, I’d get lost here, like a deep-sea diver unable to tell which way was up. I’d suffocate, eventually, swimming forever deeper, until the very space crushed me.

  I missed Cherabino. I missed her being there as an anchor, and I missed her. I swam around the room, slowly. Odd. The death-spot, the hole in the fabric of Mindspace that should have come and filled in and settled, was gone completely, nothing there. He had died here; I could feel it. But there was no evidence in the field.

  Did that have to do with the electricity? Had it obliterated the usual signs of death? I’d never dealt with something like this before, not in Mindspace. This was the kind of death the department usually trusted the medical examiner for.

  I moved, carefully, carefully, around to see if there was anything else I could pick up.

  I sorted through traces, strong ones, faint ones, nothing notable. A disturbing dream in the bed to my left. A calm sexual moment. Worry about work. Pages and pages of fiction read here, few making enough emotion to leave anything behind. And there—there!

  Mindspace was rippled, like the ocean floor after wave after wave had passed through the water above. I’d never seen anything like it. And the ripples went deep, like they’d been here for weeks.

  I moved slowly, tracing the ripples back . . . to one, exact . . . yes, there they joined into one spot and got wider as they moved out. This was not a natural phenomenon, I thought. No way this was natural.

  I rose out of Mindspace slowly, very slowly, ever so careful to follow the path I’d left behind. It was fading, almost gone, and without it I might lose track of up and down, and wander forever. Slow steps forward, forward, up, ever up, as I scratched against the pain of the deep and prayed for direction.

  I was drenched in sweat by the time I surfaced, my hands shaking from excessive adrenaline. I felt lightheaded and strange.

  But I’d done it. I’d surfaced, with the shape of the space in my mind.

  Years of practice among the normals let me map the real space to the mind space; I walked over to the one spot the ripples had emanated from. The headboard. There was a painting over the headboard.

  The back of the painting over the bed had a discolored place about the size of a golf ball, square, with a tear in the paper backing at the top and a notch in the upper frame, like something had been attached with wire and glue and then ripped away too quickly.

  I checked. The mirror and the paintings along the right wall all had a layer of dust on top of them. The print over the bed, not so much. Nowhere else did a frame have a tear in the back of the paper.

  “Gotcha,” I said.

  Someone had planted some kind of device, and I was betting it was an influencer, something that had made Meyers’s mind continue to see visions even after he took such extreme steps to end their possibility. I’d seen plenty over the last year, plenty enough to make me believe the Guild had this kind of technology.

  And the same someone who knew the Guild well enough to sabotage the shielding system without burning down the building—well, that someone probably also knew the Guild well enough to get to the hidden technology.

  When I opened the door Stone and Gustolf were laughing about a rugby game, laughing a little too hard with suppressed tension.

  I waited until the laughter died down. “Let me show you both what I found.”

  • • •

  Stone closed the clamshell-shaped case. It held various small compartments, the largest containing the usual latex gloves I’d seen everywhere in the cop world, others with tweezers, spray-bandage, and other assorted things too folded to see clearly. At the top of the clamshell were three flat things with inlaid designs, each no bigger than a pack of gum, two of which had flashing lights. He’d pulled out one and taken readings of the area around the painting. Now, he folded everything up and put it away.

  “That’s it?” Gustolf asked.

  “That’s it. This was good work,” Stone added.

  “Chain of evidence rules—”

  “Oh.” Stone cut me off. “No, we don’t have those. You take a photo, you take a reading, and that’s usually plenty. Investigators have to explain conclusions to Nelson, not a jury. Nelson’s pretty quick on the uptake.”

  That was assuming he wasn’t covering anything up. “What’s a reading?”

  Stone pointed to the upper section of the clamshell. “Fingerprint fluorescer and imager, camera with multiple light frequencies, Mindspace field reader. Not that the last doesn’t act up in cases like these, with so much noise. Research is still working on it. To be honest, I’ve never had a reading be all that useful in the field. The mind’s a lot more useful tool. But Nelson likes documentation.”

  He was toting around probably the most complex—and likely illegal—computer-based technology I’d seen since pictures of pre–Tech War life in history class. “Those are very sophisticated devices there,” I observed.

  “Don’t worry. We have a secure storage facility for when the normals send their inspector. We’re careful,” Stone said.

  Wow. I took a moment and absorbed the ethics of that, especially as Gustolf didn’t seem to blink an eye.

  “Well.” I explained what I suspected about the device. “I’d like you both to put out feelers. We need to know who makes these things and who would have access to them.”

  “I’ll make some inquiries, but it will take a while,” Stone
said. “Getting access to Research takes Nelson and a hell of a lot of paperwork.”

  “Oh,” I said, now worried. If Nelson was behind it . . .

  “I’ll ask,” Gustolf said. “We have cousins in the lab in Chicago who might be able to find out. I will contact you if they know anything.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I looked around again, at the physical location, the unmade bed, the stain on the floor, the burn marks, the smell. Trying to figure out if I’d missed anything.

  My stomach rumbled, loudly. I was used to skipping meals under Cherabino’s driving pace, but it was maybe three in the afternoon and I hadn’t eaten since early this morning. “Food?” I asked. Was it odd that the smell wasn’t damping my appetite?

  “If you want,” Stone said. “We were just leaving anyway.”

  • • •

  I pushed the elevator button for Level Five, the skybridge. The doors closed.

  “Good work in there,” Stone repeated.

  “Thanks.” Unable to help myself, I added, “Seems like way too much trouble for a regular suicide, don’t you think? Especially from a guy who’d throw out half his apartment to keep a suicide from happening?”

  “Yeah,” he said, not happy.

  The elevator stopped on Level Four, someone pushing through into the elevator. Stone was already off, too late.

  I followed. A long line of people stretched around the side wall, some standing, some sitting on the floor with their backs against the wall. One guy near the end scratched at his face too hard, over and over, and the people standing near him were pulled away as scratches spread through the whole line, one person after another scratching face, hands, arms absently.

  An overwhelming fear feeling came from the man at the end of the line, and I shielded up to my gills. Suicide or homicide, the Guild still had the Madness contagion to worry about. And me—well, I had that to worry about too.