by S. L. Huang
We crept through the silent rooms. We’d entered in a meandering back hallway across the building from the main entrance, and I worked toward the front, keeping a floor plan of the place active in my brain and scanning for offices. Most of what we’d passed through so far seemed to have an unspecified use—meeting or event rooms of some sort.
We came across Dr. Teplova’s office quite suddenly, double doors with gilded lettering spelling out her name. I pressed down the ornate handle—unlocked—and pushed the door open.
“Oh my God,” breathed Pilar, her whisper rising to a slight squeak.
We’d found Dr. Teplova.
Most of her.
Pilar stayed by the door, looking away and breathing shallowly. I stepped carefully into the room, avoiding the blood and … other bits … splashed across the floor. The dim ambient light from the windows gleamed blackly across the mess.
Still wet. This had happened tonight. Jesus.
“Keep an eye out,” I called to Pilar in a low voice. She nodded rapidly and straightened, facing the hall. Probably relieved I hadn’t told her to come in.
Fuck, I didn’t want to go in.
I let the numbers draw out the room for me dispassionately, concentrating on the waveform: the amount of pressure that must have been generated to do this, the milliseconds of time that pressure would have been generated within. Dr. Teplova had been sitting at her desk. A nice heavy chunk of explosive material had been strapped to her chest, and then it had been detonated.
About a quarter of her skeleton was still draped across what remained of the chair, wetness caking it. The rest of her was splayed across the space, outlining the bomb’s flow field, expansion fans sprawling their gruesome graphs around the corners of the furniture. I edged over behind the desk and found a picture frame with shattered glass in it fallen flat on the blotter. I picked it up, automatically scanning the corpse to try to reconstruct the topography of its features from the pieces of skull that were still intact.
As little as was left, the reconstruction came together for me within instants, in the time it took me to right the photo. The skeleton’s youthful face snapped into conclusion at the same time I locked eyes with the version in the frame.
Memory whiplashed out from nowhere.
“Medicine isn’t just healing,” said the woman in the photo, only she was a girl with short-cropped hair. “It’s making people better.”
My hip slammed into the blood-soaked desk, and my elbow came down hard on the blotter, crushing against residue I didn’t want to think about. Who was—what the hell—
I’d dropped the photo again. This time, it had landed faceup on the floor. My eyes crawled over to it. The woman in the chair had been the same woman as in the photo, as of a bit under ninety minutes ago. Large-framed with sandy hair, one arm slung around a German shepherd. Sharp, intelligent eyes. Smiling. Slyly arrogant.
And oh, Jesus … I knew her.
The man outside hadn’t been a hallucination. Both of them were phantasms I’d been familiar with in some earlier life, before I’d lost who I was to Simon’s misguided attempts at saving me.
Of course, that didn’t help me one whit. Who they were, or what they had been to me … it was all lost in striated layers of deleted identity. All I knew now was everything I had feared—my past was involved here too.
Fuck.
I fought against the sense of titans rising unseen around me. Giants playing a board game where I was only one of the pieces.
Why was my past intersecting with Checker’s? What had Arthur stumbled onto?
Investigate now. Think about it later. I pushed myself back to reality. What had Dr. Teplova been doing in this chapter of her life that had gotten her so very dead?
I shivered. I couldn’t remember enough to know if I should be frightened by her murder, but if she were like me … well, I knew how hard I was to kill. The desk had no lock, but had been painted shut with the carnage. I considered the wisdom of messing with what was sure to be an active crime scene in the very near future, but I’d already disturbed it fairly drastically by accident. I pulled my sleeve over one hand to pry at a corner of one of the drawers until I got it open. Bits of the former doctor glopped down onto the files.
Which were all things like promotional packets and propaganda about the wellness center, nothing I even needed Pilar’s help on. This was a place Teplova had sat with potential clients to hook them and put them at ease, not where she’d done the real work of the facility.
Whatever that was.
I left the drawers open and wound my way back to Pilar. “Dead end. Let’s go.”
The pronouncement sounded brittle to my own ears, but she only nodded tightly. Now wasn’t the time to talk, I told myself. I’d get everybody in the loop once we were out of danger. I would.
We took a lucky turn, then, down a hallway behind the doctor’s office that looked less shiny and more official. I pushed open the next door to find an open area with desks and file cabinets set up across it as a bull pen-style workspace.
For the first time, the light was on, and a dark-haired woman stood engrossed in the open drawer of a file cabinet.
seven
EMPTY OR not, my Colt was out before I could think about it. Surprisingly, Pilar and her CZ were only a second behind me.
The woman dropped the papers she was holding and whipped her hands into the air. Then her face twisted into anger. “Damn you!” she shouted at us. “Goddamn you! Eva was helping people. Go ahead, kill me too, leave more evidence—”
Pilar shifted her gun so it was pointed down and raised her other hand. “Calm down! We’re not here to kill anyone, promise. What’s your name?”
The woman’s eyes flicked to me and then to Pilar and back again. Sharp and unafraid.
I studied her in return. She was distractingly beautiful. I found it impossible to guess her ethnicity: she might have been Italian, Asian, Spanish, or Indian, or from an island in the Pacific, or a mix of ancestry aesthetics that had made her the winner of the genetic lottery. The bones of her face cut at breathtaking angles, her eyes large and luminous. Her waist was improbably small and her legs improbably long, and the way her body curved in between struck me as exactly within the error margins of the clearly digitally reshaped models who graced every magazine and advert. Except she was real.
I’d never seen anyone like her, and I lived in LA, cesspool of models and movie stars.
She also wore an expensive-looking scarlet dress, one with a modest cut that was belied by its exactly fitted tailoring. I didn’t know anything about fashion, but it was obvious that dress was designed only as a picture frame for the body inside it. It also didn’t seem like the type of thing someone would wear to commit murder …
I blinked. It wasn’t like me to make assumptions that gave people the benefit of the doubt. I refocused on keeping my gun up and aimed—she didn’t know it was empty, or that I could kill her just as easily without it.
“You heard the question,” I said. “Who are you?” Her face hadn’t sparked any dark flashbacks for me, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Though she didn’t seem to recognize me either. I tried not to feel unduly relieved by that.
“My name is Willow Grace,” the woman said. Her inflection didn’t give a clue as to whether it was a double first name or if Grace was her surname. “You can verify that.”
“Wait, are you the same—you are! Aren’t you?” Pilar said. “I mean, you’re the news anchor. Cas, I’ve seen her before, on TV.”
Wait, what?
“What are you doing here, then?” I demanded. “Some kind of journalistic exposé?”
She brought her hands down a smidge. “I’ve told you who I am. Do me the same courtesy.”
“I’m Pilar, and this is Cas. We work for a private investigator,” Pilar said, straining the truth into zigzags.
“Show me your licenses,” said Willow Grace.
“I said I work for a PI, not that I am one,” Pilar
said. “We’re—”
“I’ve got a license,” I cut in. “One second.” I took my left hand off my gun and pulled a handful of cards out of my pocket.
I managed to riffle through them one-handed by flipping them between my fingers. The first PI license I found didn’t have a name similar to Cas on it—goddamn Pilar—but it turned out I had another one. I shoved the rest of the cards back in my pocket and held it up.
“Cassie Wells, PI,” I said. I expected Pilar to glare at me, but she gave no outward sign—which was probably good, as I wasn’t sure my bravado sounded all that convincing. I wasn’t a very good liar even when I wasn’t feeling jerked around by unseen foes.
But people respond well to pieces of paper, even ones that are forgeries. “Thank you,” Willow Grace said.
Oddly, her acknowledgment made a little nub of pleasure flare in me, that she’d accepted us. That she’d decided to respect us. Damn—I hadn’t thought I’d respond that way to someone’s appearance, but somehow this woman’s face seemed to make me want her approval.
Steady, Cas.
“I’m here because Eva is … was a friend,” Willow Grace continued. “And I worked with her. Unofficially.”
“What does that mean?” I said, trying to keep the words brusque.
“I brought her clients. Among other things.” Apparently no longer concerned with my gun, she dropped her hands all the way. “What are you investigating?”
“Well, now we’re investigating Dr. Teplova’s death,” Pilar said smoothly. “It may have a connection to one of our cases. Will you tell us more?”
“On one condition. I want to be kept out of the police investigation. Don’t tell them you saw me here.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because if they look into me, it would ruin me,” she answered bluntly. “In exchange, I’ll tell you why, but only under strictest confidentiality.”
“You were one of her clients, weren’t you?” Pilar said. For some reason, she sounded sad. “That’s your secret. You’re afraid the media would shred you for it.”
“They would.” Willow Grace said it very calmly, straightening her spine and meeting Pilar’s eyes. “You must know what women run up against in a career like mine. I’m asking you. Do me this favor.”
She stepped slowly across the room as she spoke, until she was close enough to put a hand on Pilar’s arm.
“No—yes, of course we will,” Pilar said, flushing slightly. “Cas, she’s right. It won’t do any good to out her, and we’d be doing a pretty terrible thing. She’s one of the most respected women in news and journalism. Let’s not destroy that for no reason.”
I didn’t care about politics, but it wasn’t like I wanted to involve the police either …
Willow Grace turned her fine-boned face to me. Her eyes were liquid darkness. Looking at her made it hard to think.
“No.” I shook my head, physically and forcefully, trying to concentrate. “You can’t be just a journalist. Teplova was—” Someone like me … “not a normal doctor. What do you know about her? What do you know about her enemies?”
Pilar glanced at me, her forehead creasing.
And Willow Grace’s well-shaped eyes narrowed as she studied me.
“You’re right,” she said finally. “It’s not just that. Eva had enemies you can’t dream of. If we involved the authorities—”
“You might have saved her if you had,” Pilar murmured, showing a shocking level of contrarianism.
“No,” Willow Grace said. “I’d be dead too. I can’t break this story. I can’t broadcast it. All I could do was help Eva stay hidden, and I would have done anything to keep them from finding her. But if you’re truly not working for them…”
Her gaze flicked between us.
“Them who?” Pilar asked.
“You know where Teplova came from,” I realized. “You…” I can’t break this story, she’d said. “You had an investigation that led all the way into a black hole, didn’t you? Conspiracies. People with abilities who were out to manipulate the whole world, who were—who were turning children into weapons. Tell me I’m wrong…”
My hand had started shaking against the grip of my gun. Very slightly, too slightly for anyone to see, but I could feel it.
“You know about them too,” Willow Grace said slowly.
I am one.
Pilar gasped, the slightest intake of air.
“How did you meet Teplova?” I asked.
“I was her friend,” Willow Grace said again.
“You say you protected her. You … you got her out.” I knew—or had been able to piece together—what Rio had done for me. Flashes of bone-deep knowledge that he had saved me. Hidden me. Looked out for me, before I built a new identity that barely remembered the old one.
This reporter … it sounded like she was Teplova’s Rio.
Not that Eva Teplova had likely had her whole personality erased like I had, but I felt a thrum of kinship with her. She’d found a way to use her skills quietly to build a good life for herself. And become rich too. I never had any objections to that.
A younger Teplova flashed in my mind’s eye again, brandishing a bloody scalpel above a blurred impression of brown and red. Some sort of small animal, a part of me felt sure.
I blinked the disturbing image away. After all, it’s not like I had never done anything questionable with my skill set.
“They tracked her down. After all this time,” Willow Grace said softly. “When I found her, I knew.”
She spoke with a startling lack of emotion. But then, as someone who was friends with Rio, I didn’t need people to show their tears on their sleeve.
“Get on the computers,” I said to Pilar, finally lowering my gun. “Grab everything you can. Hey. Willow Grace. Do you know the passwords and everything?”
She hesitated. “No.”
On the fly, I struggled to make all the pieces jam together. The man on the lawn—an unseen enemy, someone from our joint history? Teplova’s murderer, and possibly someone who’d be happy to kill me too?
But the way she’d been killed … it had lacked all finesse. Messy. Uncoordinated. Same with Arthur’s office.
Not to mention, Arthur wouldn’t have kept any investigation into my past a secret from Checker …
“What about other enemies?” I asked Willow Grace. “Did anyone else have disagreements with Teplova?”
“Of course,” she answered. “Everyone who knew of her work felt obligated to have an opinion. Which wasn’t a lot of people, but when you have a business, you have to spread the word to some degree. After we became close, and she worked on me, I reciprocated by bringing her other high-end interest. But not everyone reacted well.”
Pilar made a small noise. I glanced over, but she was busy with the computer.
“Anyone who would hire a batshit mercenary explosives expert?” I pressed.
Willow Grace’s eyebrows lifted slightly.
“I saw how she died,” I said.
“She did have wealthy enemies from this phase of her life,” Willow Grace admitted. “Their resources would have been extensive. But I don’t think—”
“There’s more than one piece to this,” I cut her off. I just couldn’t see how yet. The man on the lawn, and the creature and the bombs … “Pilar, look in particular for any mention of D.J. or Pithica.”
“You still think D.J.’s involved?” Pilar said, but I was more interested in Willow Grace’s reaction. Her perfect complexion had paled about three shades.
But it wasn’t from the word I’d expected.
“D.J.?” she repeated, her aggressiveness gone almost faint.
Oh, shit. Sometimes I hated being right.
“Yeah,” I said. “What do you know about—”
A sharp crack sounded from outside.
“That wasn’t gunfire,” I said, and ran for the door.
“This way!” called Willow Grace, and took a turn down another corridor that opened out onto a
patio. More booms and cracks—
We burst outside. The sky was filled with fireworks, spouts of white light pinwheeling into cascades.
I double-checked in my head. It was August. Way too late for Independence Day shenanigans.
The sky cleared momentarily, and then a single firework soared to the center of the starless blackness. It popped into a squiggle, the line of brilliant white dots painting a sideways S across the smoggy clouds.
A second lone firework came a moment later, exploding into a sharply angled curve.
Next came a ring in a perfect circle. Then two loops with long tails.
The final one burst into a long, two-pronged fork, the pinpoints of light dripping from the shape and dissolving into the dark.
The message hadn’t been all that obvious, but patterns always make themselves clear to me, even ones scrawled on the sky in messy English.
“Sloppy,” I said aloud.
“What?” Willow Grace had gone even paler.
I pointed upward. “Letters. They spelled sloppy.” The display hadn’t been a very high one. On a clear night, it would have been visible in Ventura, but today, I estimated the population who were even in a position to see it to be no more than a few thousand—to see it unobstructed, even less. And it had been centered almost right on top of us.
“This was a message for somebody here.” I turned to Willow Grace. “Who would they be talking to? Your friend? Her murderer?”
“I don’t—I don’t know. I swear I don’t.” I tried to read her expression, but couldn’t—shock, fear, confusion? Anger?
A hum rose on the edge of our senses.
“What’s that?” said Pilar. She’d come out behind us, poised like she thought she’d need to run or fight.
She wasn’t wrong.
“Drones.” I turned and shoved Pilar ahead of me back under the eave of the patio and then inside the building, Willow Grace following. My ears teased out the frequencies, calculating differentials in the Doppler effect: small drones, on the order of remote-controlled helicopters you could get at any electronics store. But a lot of them—