by Therin Knite
“That says a lot about who the murderer is,” I murmur. “And who the accomplice is. They both know more about me than they know about you, though the accomplice doesn’t know my name. Which means the accomplice has limited access to information, perhaps more so than the murderer. The accomplice isn’t as experienced as the murderer either. To call such a crummy hitman was a big mistake, one the meticulous Manson killer wouldn’t have made.”
“So they’re not actively collaborating. If they were, the murderer never would’ve let this mess happen.”
“We got lucky.”
“Correction,” she says, “you got lucky. And if you want to stay lucky, then we need to get out of here.” She hauls me back into a standing position and coaxes my trembling legs to move. We start off slow this time, Dynara marking a pace even my pathetic physique can keep up with. I’m a mere four steps behind her when she turns the corner of the alley and emerges onto a sidewalk. She’s out of my sight for half a second.
And that’s all it takes for me to get shot.
The bullet shatters my shoulder blade and blows a hole through my chest, before tumbling off into the brick wall of a jewelry store across the street. My knees hit the ground first, my forehead second—the mind-numbing pain follows shortly thereafter.
I try to scream, but all I do is gurgle. I try to cry, but all I do is gasp. I try to think, but my thoughts become transient puffs of smoke scattered in the wind. For a handful of seconds that feel like eternity, I’m paralyzed from the neck down, but then a wave of adrenaline surges through my veins, compelling me to get up and run, run, run before the shooter shows up to finish the job.
But, like usual, I’m too slow. Just as my knees start to bend in a vain attempt to simulate forward movement, a shadow falls over me. A man in SWAT gear, his laser-guided gun aimed at the middle of my neck, halts beside me, hitches a boot under my stomach, and flips me over.
I’ve never known the pain of bone shards piercing my shoulder muscles before. The blood-curdling scream I vaguely recognize as my own tells me I should avoid a repeat performance.
Light blankets my face. The SWAT agent leans closer before freezing in an awkward stoop. His face is obscured by his computer-enhanced helmet, but he’s sporting a standard uniform adorned with rank-declaring insignia. That’s what tells me who he is during his dismayed revelation of who I am.
“Adamend?”
“C-C-Commander Briggs. Good evening.”
“Why the fuck are you—?”
A VERA blast erupts above us, swallowing Briggs’ head and shoulders. He seizes, contorts, and drops straight backward, unconscious before he hits the ground.
“In the name of every old god, Adem,” says Dynara, “how the hell do you keep getting into these situations?”
“Careful with him. We could puncture a lung.” Dynara’s hands support my back while someone else heaves my quivering legs up. “Where’d you park the car?”
“Around the next corner, like you asked. I should’ve parked closer.” His voice is gruff, and when we pass under a streetlight, I glimpse his features: mid-fifties, light brown skin, stubble-lined frown. It’s the scruffy-faced man who was lounging on the bench in Pentagon Park. Because of course Dynara Chamberlain wouldn’t walk into potentially hazardous situations alone.
“Someone could’ve seen you. I knew we were being watched.” She steps off the sidewalk, scuttling across the street backward with me in tow, eyes and ears alert for the whirring of hovercopter blades or the smooth hum of car engines.
“By who? The Manson killer?”
“Doubtful. Calling a low-class hitman doesn’t fit our killer’s pattern. We’re searching for multiple suspects now.” She balances my upper body on one hand while the other pops a car door open. “Easy does it.”
They slide me onto the back seat, the friction gnawing at my mangled shoulder. The door closes, but the one on the opposite side opens a moment later, and Dynara climbs in, adjusting my head slowly until it rests in her lap. She pulls a medikit from beneath the front passenger seat with her foot and gathers a mountain of gauze.
Half the pile is stuffed under the entry wound a hairsbreadth to the left of my spine; the other half is pressed against the contorted mound of muscle and skin and bone that used to be the front of my shoulder. Pain shoots up my neck when one pad snags on a bone shard. A wet gasp passes my lips. I can’t scream anymore.
“Book it, Murrough. He’s going into shock.”
Murrough takes her order to heart. He illegally switches from autodrive to manual and floors it. The car lurches forward, blowing past the speed limit. We must be going a hundred miles per hour. One slip of concentration and we all end up burst organ balloons on the asphalt.
But he doesn’t make a mistake. His hands are steady as rocks, and he never takes his eyes off the road, transitioning from one-way streets to the highway and back again without missing a beat. I don’t know where we’re going. My eyes won’t stay open long enough for me to recognize any landmarks.
“Adem? Hey, can you hear me?” Dynara leans over my face. She doesn’t sound worried. She sounds curious.
“Yes.”
“You doing all right?”
“No.”
“Are you in pain?”
“N-Not anymore.” The intense agony has faded into numbness.
“Pick up the pace, Murrough. He’s lost way too much blood.”
“What happened?” I ask.
For a moment, she seems genuinely startled. “Do you not remember? You were shot.”
“No, not tonight.” My voice is a harsh whisper, and she bends closer to hear me. “Last night. In the dream. After I was attacked. What happened? I didn’t get a chance to ask while we were dancing.”
“Oh, that.” Her ungloved hand runs through my hair, but her fingers twitch and falter. She doesn’t comfort people much. “The dream collapsed not long after you were hurt. My coordinator, the guy I was talking to before the dragon attacked, spotted the signs and pulled me out of the Nexus. Getting caught in a dream collapse isn’t fun.”
“W-Why did it collapse? Because the maker changed it?”
“Exactly. Their hubris caught up to them. They managed to hold it together for a while after changing the laws of the dream, but they’re not that good. They made the dream too rigid, so when they altered it a bit too much, by changing the way sound worked around only the dragon, the echo crumbled. Though I don’t think they realized it was falling apart until the damn sky started cracking. They would’ve aborted much sooner had they noticed.”
The car slows, and Murrough parallel parks us across the street from a government building I’ve seen at some point but can’t place at the moment. “I’ve already alerted medical,” he says. “They’ll be out with a gurney in two.” He unbuckles himself and turns around. “Do you need any help?”
“S-So the maker was good enough to change a complex echo but didn’t realize it would collapse after they did?”
Dynara and the man share a glance. “Yes,” she says. “And?”
“They haven’t been making echoes long. They’re good, naturally, but they don’t know all the underlying theory of the ability. They’re smart, but they haven’t had any formal training. They’re not EDPA then, but managed to get enough info for a crash course in echomaking. They don’t just have clearance. They have connections.”
Someone knocks on the window, and Dynara opens the door, revealing a team of emergency doctors prepped with lightweight medical equipment. Dynara props me up again, and two doctors gently pull me from the car onto a gurney. A third scans my injury with a handheld medical computer and winces at the image on the screen. “Call Dr. Carson,” she says to the younger medic by her side. “Tell her to prep for a serious GSW to the left shoulder.”
Dynara glides out of the car, waving off a couple doctors who try to scan her too. “I’m fine. It’s not my blood.” She maneuvers her way ahead of the gurney as the medical team wheels me inside the building t
hrough a side door, telling anyone who crosses our path to move it or lose it. We pass through hallways littered with agents—EDPA agents—some wearing field uniforms, others business suits. A team dressed in military-grade defense armor storms out of an elevator as we near it, and all five line up before Dynara, saluting.
“Get Non-Echo Field Teams Eight, Nine, and Ten,” Dynara says, “and head to Club Valkyrie. Paolo de Saint’s body is in a dumpster in the alley on the north side of the building, if the IBI jocks haven’t already found it. Tell Greta to send a jurisdiction override ASAP. Those idiots have gone and rescued a hitman from my ‘evil clutches.’ I want the bastard booked and tossed into a holding cell in the next hour. Designate him anonymous. No interrogation. No ID run. Got it?”
The man in the middle gives a sharp nod. “Yes, ma’am. Move out!” His four comrades follow him down the hall, and a throng of agents who’ve gathered to watch the drama unfold parts for them without question.
I’m rolled into the elevator, but Dynara remains in the hallway, tapping five commands a second into her Ocom. Behind her, the crowd continues to build, many of the agents gawking at her blood-spattered appearance. There’s a hush of admiration and the low undertone of worship that accompanies the performance of small miracles by gods in human form. And such a scene makes perfect sense, I think as the elevator doors slide closed—because Dynara Chamberlain is such a god.
She’s the god of war.
Chapter Ten
Ingram Walker squats beside a dumpster for three hours, playing a popular shooter game on his Ocom to pass the time. He scoots closer to the overflowing trash pile every time a car goes by, and each voice that sounds off across the street jerks his attention from the game and costs him a dozen life points.
Thirty seconds after his tablet time bar reads eight o’clock, a young man with firecracker red hair hops off the bus at a street corner stop and approaches the target location. Ingram reluctantly ends his game before reaching a save point and exchanges his Ocom for a polished government handgun. He considers shooting the man—the kid, really—while he’s pacing outside the club doors, but even on a slow Saturday night, the random passerby risk still stands. No reason to waste a bullet.
So he waits until a guy in a suit escorts the kid inside to set the killing scheme in motion. Enter through a side door? Check. Locate target within building? Check. He’s dancing in a dark room with a girl several inches shorter, their conversation lost to the din of some terrible music blaring through the club. Pacing the perimeter is the suit guy, who seems to be acting as a bodyguard; Ingram figures the lady is somebody important. Regardless of her identity though, the guard is a complication. He needs to be taken care of before the plan can proceed.
In the end, Ingram chooses the simplest method. He steps out of the shadows for a moment, setting off the guard’s danger alert, before hightailing it back the way he came. The guard pursues, unexpectedly fast, but Ingram has enough of a head start to bolt out the alleyway entrance and come to a stop behind the dumpster.
The guard barrels out the door without bothering to stop, and though his gun is poised to shoot, the brief moment it takes him to scan the alley is just long enough for Ingram to hop up from behind the dumpster and nail the guy in the head with a large-caliber bullet.
Ingram stares at the man’s body—he doesn’t want to leave it out in the open—and then figures that if you can hide behind a dumpster well enough, you can certainly hide a body inside one.
Once the deed is done, Ingram charges back into the club again and settles himself in a position at the edge of the dance floor nearest to a stage exit. The target and the short girl are still dancing, and as the song comes to a long-winded close, the kid bares his back to Ingram, inviting the kill shot.
Ingram aims for the heart. He fires.
His bullet hits the wall.
The short girl drags his target out of the way at the perfect moment, and the next thing he knows, she’s popping rounds his way. One hits the speaker above his head. One whizzes past his ear. And one blows a fleshy chunk off the top of his shoulder. Crying out in pain, Ingram scrambles away from the dance floor and flees for his life.
The exit, thank the old gods, leads to the street where he parked his car. He’s booking it down the sidewalk, faster than he’s ever run in his life, and he’s seconds from driving off…when he’s engulfed by a VERA field.
In his next waking moment—
“Wow, that’s a big one.”
My reconstruction of Ingram dissolves into the view of a metal ceiling. In my periphery, a shadow of the EDPA doctor, Lana, peers down at a fascinating chunk of shoulder bone. I turn my head and exhale, blowing the white cloth erected between my face and the grotesque surgery taking place a few inches away. Lana’s dark-haired head pops up over it—I swear there’s something familiar about her, but I can’t place it—and she lifts the tongs to show me her gory find.
“This bit was hella close to your lung, Adem. You would’ve had a much nastier experience if you’d been any less lucky.” Her struggling grin, the distinct sign of an overworked surgeon, suggests she could’ve had a much nastier time too, if I’d been brought in with more than a couple hours’ worth of work.
“Oh, look. A brief point of relief in the middle of my nightmare,” I say.
She releases the bone shard into the little metal basin on her surgery cart. It’s two-thirds full already. “Aw, don’t be like that. I swear life around here isn’t usually this bad. The Manson case is a rarity. It’s got the whole office buzzing. Different teams keep bugging Dy for permission to join the investigation, and she got so annoyed by Custer from Analytics last night that she poured her coffee on his head.”
Intense pressure resonates up my neck.
“Are you sure you’re not amputating my arm over there?”
“Positive. Although it doesn’t look much like an arm right now. More like ground beef.”
“Wonderful.”
Another bone shard tops the pile. “No worries. As soon as I get these last few chunks out, I’ll set the nanites to work, and you’ll be fully healed in about six to eight hours.”
“That long?”
“Med-three isn’t quite as quick as med-four, I’m afraid.”
“Was that a jab at my propensity for being seriously injured?”
“Now, wherever would you get that idea?” She hums a tune to liven up the surgery suite, and the soft vibrations of her voice make my eyelids sag. My gaze falls to the right, where the double doors sit as still as they’ve been for the past two hours. Dynara hasn’t come to check on me once, nor has Murrough, the driver of our getaway car. I feel so appreciated.
My Ocom beeps. I have another message from some EDPA agent named Frederick, who’s been sending me Manson case updates since my surgery started. I guess I’m on the EDPA mailing list now.
The new message contains four additional pages of info on Ingram Walker, filling in the blanks left by the rough outline Frederick sent me earlier, which I based my reconstruction on. Furthermore, the origin of the call that spurred the IBI operation to “save” Walker has been pinned down: Someone rang the emergency hotline from an untraceable restricted profile and requested an IBI SWAT team. Using a level six clearance code.
Retracing Walker’s steps was easy. He’s about as complex and interesting as broken windshield wipers. But retracing the moves of his employer is proving strangely difficult. Even the amateur accomplice to the Manson murder has enough clout to hold in their possession a code that makes the IBI jump through hoops, a code that gets Briggs out of bed and back into a SWAT uniform he hasn’t worn in years. Who are these people?
I reopen the master file of Manson clients and pick up where I left off the night before. It’s possible that the perp isn’t one of Manson’s legal enemies, as I first surmised, but I’m still convinced that the bastard is in some way connected to Manson’s work. Unless the lawyer really pissed off some government higher-up at an upper-class functio
n, he probably made himself a target through helping the enemy of someone with level six resources.
Last night, I stopped in the middle of the C list, and it’s about two-thirds of the way through that I discover a problem. For several cases, all of the client information has been redacted, including the names. All I have to work with is a single picture and a brief summary of the case details. The A and B files were all intact, which is why I didn’t notice anything amiss until now. If I had, I would’ve looked at this case a lot differently.
These are IBI files. Briggs’ files. The only possible reason that someone could have for withholding valuable information from an IBI commander with level five clearance is that information having a level six designation. Either Manson was working top-secret cases, or someone doesn’t want prying eyes investigating some of his clients. Maybe both.
“Reading up on the case?” asks Lana as she maneuvers her way around the surgical cart to the cabinet on the far wall. She sifts through a lineup of labeled autosyringes—S+, R1, UT, OP12, Q9—and picks one with the delightful name of UnP1, also known as blank nanites. Her Ocom is used to program them in under a minute with the necessary shoulder-rebuilding code. Then the static red light on the syringe’s cap switches to a blinking green to indicate the machines are ready for injection. “Manson’s case is a tough one,” Lana adds, “or so I’ve heard. Things always get tricky when you have lawyers and politicians involved.”
“Yeah, they do,” I absently reply. At least the redacted files have an image of the client. (I wonder if someone forgot to remove those in their haste.) I can read a great deal from the way a person looks. That and reverse image searches work wonders when it comes to tracking a person’s movements.
After filtering out all the regular files, I’m left with an assortment of lonely photos and inadequate descriptions of complex crimes. I skim through them to see if I recognize anyone.
There’s an old man with teal hair I think I’ve seen during a few televised Columbian Senate sessions. There’s an up-and-coming moderate party leader, whose smile is plastered on every billboard from here to Richmond, and who has apparently gotten herself into bribery trouble lately. There’s a media CEO who illegally filmed several people having sex with him and who only avoided jail, I assume, due to political connections. There’s a…
