Sketches

by Teyla Branton

  Reese motioned for him to come with her, away from the other enforcer. What she had to tell Jaxon wasn’t for common knowledge—not yet.

  “What is it, Reese?”

  She shoved the sketchbook at him with the image of the men dumping the body. “There were three people nearby when Sundry discovered the victim—two men and a girl. She’s the one who just ran away. She saw this.”

  Jaxon studied the paper, and Reese watched as his face paled. “Those look like Estlantic Special Forces patches,” he said, handing the book back to her. “What would they be doing in Dallastar?”

  She didn’t remember drawing the S and F on the patches, but the suits were definitely enforcer blues. “The uniforms might be really good copies.” Reese couldn’t rule that out, though impersonation of an enforcer merited a conspiracy sentence, forced medical enhancement, and permanent confinement to a colony. If the men weren’t enforcers, they were risking a lot more than a murder charge.

  Jaxon seemed to relax at her suggestion. “Could be. Can’t tell from a drawing.”

  They’d looked real in the mental sketch Reese had received from the girl. At any rate, they weren’t uniforms hastily patched together. “The girl was scared enough.”

  “We’ll track her down.”

  “I bet she doesn’t have a CivID,” Reese countered. “Or she’ll dump it. Let’s check the feeds for her now that we know what to look for.”

  Jaxon pulled out his iTeev and bought up the feed, his brow creasing. “So there was a witness . . . and Sundry told me he didn’t see anything.”

  Reese smirked at him. “Like you said, I’m less threatening.” She put on her iTeev and peered at the holographic images of the recorded feed as he slowed it near the point where the men had passed. Their CivIDs appeared in boxes above their heads. The girl was out of sight between the pillars, but it caught her coming into the plaza a half hour earlier. No matter the camera they looked through, no CivID registered on the screen, though hers should have been broadcasting, even when she wasn’t in plain view.

  “Great,” Jaxon muttered. “She’s carrying a blocker or doesn’t have a CivID with her.”

  “I bet she doesn’t know anything more. She didn’t even want to tell me this much. She was scared. Terrified would be a better word.”

  Jaxon pushed his iTeev up off his eyes and onto the top of his head. “If this is Special Forces, we should all be scared.”

  A tremor shuddered through Reese at his words. “What do you mean?”

  Jaxon shook his head.

  “Tell me,” Reese insisted.

  Jaxon studied her for a full minute. Why was he waiting so long?

  Finally, he released his breath and began speaking. “I’m just saying that all Special Forces come from the Headquarters Enforcer Division, and they act only on the authority of the CORE Elite.”

  “Are you suggesting that some CORE official from HED is involved?” She shook her head. “It’s a lot easier to believe those uniforms are fake.”

  “Maybe they are.” Jaxon rubbed his hand over the stubble on his face, and she followed the movement with her eyes. He’d done that as a child too, but it hadn’t looked so sexy back then.

  Jaxon glanced around them, as if checking to see if they were still alone. “Look, Reese, those uniforms aren’t the only strange thing that’s going on in our missing persons cases. Every time I think we’ve found a break, the evidence is tainted or leads nowhere. In the ten years I’ve been an enforcer, I’ve never seen a case like this with so much evidence that turns out to be nothing. We have six cases, seven if this one is connected, and”—he tapped the sketch of the men dumping the body—“at the moment, this is our only lead. It’s almost as if someone in authority doesn’t want us to find these people.”

  Reese considered his comments. Even yesterday, if anyone had hinted at a possible corruption among enforcers, she would have laughed in their faces. Yes, enforcers sometimes acted with more force than needed, and some abused their authority, but ultimately, the CORE Elite placed more controls on enforcers than even the residents of the poor colonies. They were constantly monitored, and the rules they followed were lengthy and precise. Discipline was immediate and severe. She’d personally known an enforcer who’d been sent to enhancement and now he watered flowers for a company in New York. No one wanted to end up like that.

  Now Jaxon was telling her something was going on with his cases, something his experience told him was unusual. She didn’t know if he was the same person he had been, but she couldn’t help wanting to trust him.

  “So what are you saying? Are you asking me not to report this?” She wanted to be clear.

  Again Jaxon looked around. No one was paying attention to them except Garrett, who was giving them a sour stare across the plaza, obviously wanting them to get back to interviewing the crowd. Jaxon ignored him.

  “I’m only suggesting that we poke around a while before telling the captain,” he said. “Meanwhile, we can circulate the image of the girl and bring her in for questioning when we find her. She might know more than she told you. Or know of someone else who has a connection with the case.” He looked like he wanted to say more, but he didn’t elaborate.

  What was he worried about? Reese’s thoughts tumbled inside her, battling with her guilt and the loyalty she felt for Jaxon. Could he be a CORE dissenter? She was the first to admit that some of the CORE Elite’s regulations were restrictive. But their leaders had brought peace to a dying world after the horrors of Breakdown. They’d saved people from starvation and prevented the fringers from stealing their lands and causing more bloodshed. Reese believed with her whole soul that her work as an enforcer made the world a safer place for people to live.

  He was still waiting for an answer, so she said, “I don’t know.”

  His mouth pursed, but he didn’t look angry. “Your call. It’ll only be until we find the girl—because I do intend to find her. But if what she saw is real and not some punks playing dress up . . .” His head swung back and forth.

  Therein lay Reese’s dilemma. If they did find the girl, she might deny everything because of her fear. Even their machines couldn’t detect truth from someone adept at lying. When it came to that, the girl wouldn’t actually be lying because she hadn’t told Reese about the men. People would already be upset at the implication that Special Forces was involved, and with an uncooperative witness, they might question Reese closely about her sketch—especially if the girl accused her of drawing it on her own. The investigation, however short, might be enough to make Jaxon remember her strange ability.

  Panic surged through her. How did she get herself into these things? She’d thought she’d left all the rumors and awkwardness behind in New York. But things weren’t different—they could never be different—because wherever she went, her so-called gift went with her.

  She stared down at her fingers, still clutching the pencil. “Okay, let’s see where the lead goes first. For now.” Maybe by then she’d know if Jaxon could be trusted with her secret.

  Who was she kidding? They weren’t children anymore.

  Jaxon nodded, but he studied her with narrowed eyes, as if deciding whether or not to believe her. Maybe he thought she’d go to the captain with her sketch in the hopes of a promotion, but even if she didn’t have something to hide, that wasn’t her style.

  “So,” Jaxon said finally, the words hesitant. “It’s crazy, both of us here in the same division and unit. What are the chances? Don’t you think it’s a bit of a coincidence?”

  Reese’s rapid heartbeats subsided to a sustainable level. “The thought did cross my mind, but we’ve both been in service a decade. We were bound to run into each other eventually.”

  “When you say it like that, it sounds almost plausible.” His expression remained doubtful. Or was she reading something into it that wasn’t there?

  She opened her mouth to reply, but a sketch of the same woman she’d seen from Jaxon before filled her vision, as cl
ear as if the memory was her own: slight build, dark hair, observant eyes. As vivid as I always received images from Jaxon in the Coop, she thought. This time the woman almost seemed familiar. The sooner Reese drew the sketch and got the woman out of her head, the better.

  “You okay?” Jaxon asked. He reached out to touch her arm and then apparently changed his mind.

  “Fine. It’s just been a long day already,” she said. “I was up half the night on the sky train.” She’d been worried about being followed by the KC so she’d made several random stops and transfers. “Guess we’d better get to the rest of the crowd. Garrett’s giving us the evil eye.”

  Jaxon laughed. “He tends to do that a lot. You’ll find he likes to take control, and as the senior detective, it’s his right. He’s not diplomatic about it, either. But all arrogance aside, he’s a guy you want to have on your side. Spar with him sometime and you’ll see.”

  “I’m guessing I won’t have a choice. We only had to log three hours a week in efficiency training back in New York. Six is a bit overkill, don’t you think?”

  “What can I say? We like to keep at the top of our game.”

  Or maybe it was because they were so near the fringers, Reese was betting.

  She and Jaxon turned back to the crowd, working until finally no more people awaited an interview. As expected, they hadn’t found additional leads. Reese had been careful with her questions, and she only received a half dozen uninvited images from people that she sketched quickly on a page near the back of her book.

  “Guess we’re all finished here,” Jaxon said. “See you two at the office.” He waved at Reese and Garrett as he headed to his own shuttle.

  Reese took advantage of the ride back to division to record the remaining three sketches that batted at her mind like moths flying repeatedly into a light: all of them the woman from Jaxon’s memories. She seemed even more familiar as the quick sketches formed under Reese’s pencil.

  After pulling the shuttle into place, Garrett peeked over at her sketchbook before she could shut it. “Hey, you are talented. I didn’t know you’d met Lyssa Sloan. Or is that Lyra? I always get them mixed up. Makes it weird having both of them on dispatch.”

  Reese jerked her gaze to meet his, to see if he was serious. “Lyssa and Lyra Sloan? Here at Amarillo Division?” Her eyes ran back to the paper. The flashes of the woman she’d received from Jaxon weren’t of one woman but of two—twins. And now with Garrett’s identification, she could span the years that separated them and see the similarities. If she had to guess, it was Lyssa in the first and third sketches, because of the direct stare, and Lyra in the second. Lyra had been prone to avoid prolonged eye contact, even as a child. In the Coop to keep them apart in her mind, Reese had always thought of the double S consonant in Lyssa’s name as two eyes.

  “They both work here,” she murmured.

  Garrett laughed. “Obviously, if you’ve met them. You okay? You’re looking a little pale. I can take you to get something to eat if you’re hungry.”

  “That’s okay. I’m fine.”

  “Come on. I’ll show you your office.” He gave her a strange look before hopping from the shuttle.

  Reese ignored him, her eyes on the paper. No wonder Jaxon had been weirded out about her coming to this division. Two of them from the Coop were an interesting coincidence. But four? That was unlikely. It was also strange that all of them had chosen careers in enforcement. Or maybe impossible.

  Garrett, who was halfway to the shuttle bay doors, turned to call out, “You coming or are you planning to take a nap in there?”

  Shutting her sketchbook with a decisive motion, Reese climbed from the shuttle and followed him inside.

  Chapter 4

  REESE LEANED BACK in the chair at her desk, stretching her arms over her head. Exhaustion weighed her down, but her mind didn’t seem to have any intention of turning off. She stared at two of her office walls, which showed holos depicting a live beach scene. She couldn’t smell the salt and sea, but she could see the waves and even hear the faint cries of the seagulls. It reminded her of the first place she’d ever found peace in Estlantic.

  There was no peace now.

  Lyssa and Lyra were here somewhere in the building. She hadn’t heard from them since leaving the Coop, of course, and she hadn’t looked for them. Or for any of the others, except Jaxon. Now she wanted to know where the twins had spent the past twenty years, what had happened after she and Jaxon had gone missing, and where Eagle and Dani, the other two members of their crew, were now.

  The other walls of her workspace showed holos of her partners’ desks inside their own small offices, but neither of them had been there for the past hour. Jaxon was checking his snitches for a lead on the girl, and Garrett was busy questioning the victim’s neighbors. She had hoped they would return before quitting time so she could catch up on the case and be ready to contribute more tomorrow now that she’d finished her transfer documents. But they hadn’t, and she wasn’t waiting around for them. She’d already been up for thirty-five hours, and she still had to find her apartment before taking the sky train to her great-aunt’s house for dinner.

  After gathering her bag and shoving her sketchbook inside, she opened the door. The walls of her office shimmered and went blank, making the space look infinitely smaller.

  She was tempted to go home in her uniform, but that meant she’d have to be more vigilant. Not that punks would usually target enforcers, but it did happen. She’d had to shoot a man once after he’d accosted her on a sky train, ranting about how his son had been taken in for enhancement. She’d tried to explain that only a tiny and exact part of the brain was removed to adjust his attitude, but that had only made him more upset.

  She’d fired her temper laser that normally stimulated the pleasure center of the brain, calming aggression, but it didn’t have any effect on the father. She’d had no choice but to fire the only other weapon on her at the time—her nine mil. He was left without the use of his right arm, but they’d both lived to see another day.

  She hurried down the hallway to outfitting and her dressing cubical, where she changed, keeping all her weapons on her except the assault rifle, which she carried in her bag along with her spare blues. She dumped her dirty uniform down the laundry chute. Tomorrow, it would be clean and ready for use again.

  Unable to avoid the temptation any longer, Reese headed to dispatch, turning down a few wrong hallways, but eventually finding it. To her disappointment, the Sloan twins weren’t on duty. Reese let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding.

  Should she stay and use the database to search for Eagle and Dani? Just as quickly, she discarded the idea. Eagle had been a nickname anyway, and she couldn’t remember either of their last names. Maybe Jaxon knew. Once they talked, she could tap into the enforcer feed from her iTeev.

  Where was Jaxon anyway? She was almost glad not to know.

  Tomorrow would be soon enough for her questions. Twenty years already separated them, so what was another day?

  She left the building, using her handprint to sign out for the day. A half dozen people were walking outside in front of division, heading in the direction of the sky train, but not one of them looked at her. A stranger in a strange city. It had been a long time since she’d felt that way, though in many respects, she’d always been an outsider. Until now, no one else in her professional life had come from a colony, and her ability had always required a carefulness that she often hated.

  Reaching the station, she passed a monitor, which scanned her CivID chip in her back and allowed her to pass through the gate. The code also permitted her to carry weapons onboard without setting off any alarms. She climbed the steps to the train platform and waited for the next arrival. The solar-powered sky trains, rising above all but the tallest of buildings, had been built to replace the overland and subway trains of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and they were amazingly fast, but no real improvements had been made since their original inc
eption. For twenty years after Breakdown, they’d sat unused and damaged, but CORE engineers had eventually restored their power. Now the trains ran through and between each city in the CORE Territories, even in the welfare colonies, as a free service to all valid citizens. Rumor had it they still wound through most of the Desolation Zones that bordered the CORE, though no one Reese personally knew had risked venturing inside to salvage the tech.

  By long habit, one amplified by her recent attack, Reese casually observed her fellow passengers as they boarded the train, but no one looked out of place or psychotic. The thought made her smile because she knew from personal experience that some secrets were buried too deep to see on the outside. At least none of her companions appeared to be hitmen sent from the KC or upset fathers with anger issues. She relaxed her guard and let her mind wander.

  She’d take the sky train to her apartment and grab a nice hot shower before hopping another train for the twenty-minute ride to see her great-aunt. She wished she hadn’t told Theena she’d come today, though she was looking forward to spending time with the woman who had literally saved her life.

  Reese was so intent on her thoughts that as she left the sky train, it took her a few seconds to register that a person had fallen in behind her. She eased her hand into her pocket for the tiny temper laser.

  Had the KC followed her after all? If so, she’d need a real gun instead.

  Two more steps, then abruptly, she turned, smoothly pulling both the temper laser and her nine mil and pointing it at her pursuer. She blinked when she saw it was Jaxon. “What in Breakdown are you doing following me? You want to get shot?”

  He smirked. “You wouldn’t shoot me.”

  “I should.” She stepped closer, jabbing the temper laser at his chest, ignoring the worried stares cast in their direction by passersby. “Maybe you’d even enjoy it.”

  Jaxon smiled lazily at her. “Hardly. Anyway, I’m immune to its effects.”

  “Of course you are.” Sighing, she holstered her gun before any bystanders decided to get involved. “How’d you find me anyway? My new address isn’t in the citizen database yet.”