by Nina D'Aleo
“It depends on how many corpses there are,” Westor explained. “As I said, we’re very busy at the moment. There has been an influx of deaths of late. More than we’ve ever had.”
Darius muttered something under his breath and Croy said, “Right. Thank you for your time. I’ll have to take this file and we’ll be back down when we need more information.”
She feigned turning away, and Darius went with her. By now he understood exactly how she worked. Let the perpetrators think they’re in the clear and then swoop back in – something John L had taught her. She paused and glanced back at the Morticians. They were looking at each other, Westor’s eyes ablaze with fury. The anger sank back as he realized she was looking.
“Just one more thing,” she said. “There were some post-mortem injuries to the body. Was she brought in like that?”
“Yes,” Westor said without a pause to think.
“Who did it? Who mutilated her?” Croy asked.
“We don’t know. We don’t generally ask questions, but the only people who had access to the body were the girl’s family and Controllers.”
“And you,” Darius added.
“Of course,” Westor conceded tightly.
Croy nodded, turned away again, then back for a second swoop. Now Westor was looking openly rattled and irate and Klinsman had hunched in on himself so much it looked as though he was trying to sink through the floor.
“I almost forgot.” Croy continued her pretense, to further throw them off. “Before we head away we need to see where the corpse was kept.”
Westor stared at her. “I’m sorry, that’s out of the question. Our work areas are not open to the public, and I frankly don’t see how it would help in any way to see where it used to be.”
“I wasn’t asking,” Croy said, maintaining her calm. “Just take us through or I’ll have you and all your people detained while we audit this place from front to back. I’ll remind you: you are not a separate entity, you are still under the jurisdiction of the Conference.”
Westor narrowed his eyes, cold with contempt, and Croy could see this was a dangerous man to upset.
“Controller Croy,” he said. “I’ve heard of you – Barastyna Croy – otherwise known as the Saint.”
As always the sound of her first name made her cringe – she hated it – but she hid her irritation and said, “Well then, you know I’m not bluffing.”
“What I know is that your nickname is well twisted with irony – you’re corrupt. And your father was corrupt before you. Except he wasn’t actually your father, was he indeed? Just a man who wanted to help an orphaned girl, out of the kindness of his heart – except John Lukashenko didn’t have a heart, so I would hazard a guess he took his payment from your flesh.”
“Son of a whore,” Darius cursed and drew his Predator and aimed it at Westor’s forehead.
Before he could pull the trigger, Croy grabbed the gun, wrenching it down and holding it there. She spoke with unshaken composure.
“Then I repeat – so you know I’m not bluffing.”
She held the Mortician’s stare and watched as the derision melted off his face. And then she had him. He backed away to the door and she and Darius followed him through the records room. Darius’ teeth were gritted so hard that sharp ridges cut up on his cheek and veins were twitching in his neck. Croy doubted Westor realized just how close he’d come to having his brains blasted out. Unlike her, Darius never feigned anything.
The Morticians led them through several other hallways and rooms, where many more of their kind were working. They were all male – only men were accepted into their order due to their belief that women were not capable of the work they performed – and they all looked the same, flashing expressions of shock to see intruders in their inner sanctum. In one workroom the walls were completely lined with jars of dead animals of all types in preservation liquid. Croy had never imagined there were so many different creatures and the sight sent a shiver of mixed disgust and fascination through her. She’d always dreamed of seeing an animal in real life – not animal skins, or animal meat or animals in jars, but an actual breathing animal. It was unlikely, since the Conference quarantine laws only allowed carcasses to be brought in through the gates.
Croy kept a hand on her Firestorm until finally they reached a large storage room, half-full with drums of itchem-poly-magmylate.
Westor paused in front of a door and said, “Through here are our cooled rooms.” He gestured to the lines of pipes, which Croy had heard reached all the way through the rock wall of the cavern into the freezing outer tunnels. “Don’t touch the pipes,” Westor warned. “Your hands will turn to ice.”
He took a key from his pocket and unlocked the door. Inside they were confronted with corpses on every surface. It actually looked as though the Morticians had run out of proper storage space and had started putting bodies anywhere they could. Croy had no idea there had been this many recent dead, and Darius’ eyes said he was thinking the same thing.
They exhaled heavy mist, following Westor and Klinsman as they edged around the slabs, with barely enough room to move around the crowded dead. Each one was shaved bald, and as Croy passed them she looked specifically for signs of post-mortem assault or mutilation. From each body she caught a sense of their emotion before they had died. It was something she’d always had a natural intuition for.
Westor stopped in front of one storage chamber and eyed Croy coldly. “This was where the Kilner girl was placed.”
“Open it,” she instructed.
The Mortician stepped back and dragged open the drawer. There was another body inside. With so many extra dead, Croy cold see how they might not have noticed Victoria’s corpse being removed – but still something wasn’t adding up about the whole situation.
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a flicker of movement behind a closed door.
“What’s in there?” she asked.
“Just storage,” Westor replied.
More shadows played beneath the door.
Croy drew her Firestorm and moved toward it. Taking the handle, she braced and yanked the door open. It was pitch black inside. Croy reached for her torch, and a figure lunged out of the darkness, trying to slam a metal bar into her head. She dodged the blow, which impacted on the door post instead, smashing away rock fragments.
Croy stumbled to the ground, her knee burning with pain. The strange buzzing sensation she’d been feeling flared up as Darius rushed past her. Croy staggered up to see her partner struggling with a younger man. Someone else was standing behind them in the doorway. The figure came forward and Croy saw it was a girl with long red hair. She was crying, so terrified that she was struggling to breathe. Darius smashed the kid in the face, hauled him around and put him in a choke hold. He managed to maneuver cuffs around the boy’s wrists and lock them down. The girl started to make a high-pitched squealing sound.
“It’s alright, Kellor, it’s alright!” The young guy struggled to turn his face toward the girl.
“She wanted to go home – in the water – they don’t like the water – they don’t like the water … home … home …” the girl said. She started shaking her head and rocking from side to side.
“Kellor, be quiet!” the guy yelled. Darius kneed him in the leg, pushing him down to the ground. The girl screamed. Croy went to try to calm her, but she yelled even louder and started throwing herself against the wall, smashing her own head. She was shrieking, “You can see! You can see! You can see!”
Croy rushed forward and pressed the girl’s neck in the way John L had taught her. It was completely unauthorized, but highly effective, and knocked the girl out straight away. She slumped to the ground. The guy stopped struggling, staring at the girl with horrified eyes.
“What did you do! Kellor! You killed her! You … Kellor, wake up!”
Croy turned to the Morticians. They were watching with wide eyes, and behind them a mass of other Morticians were streaming through the door into the
cold room.
“Who are these two?” she demanded, indicating the kids.
“I have never seen them before,” Westor said.
Croy felt a buzzing in her head. This time it was exactly the same as at the Strip – a pulse – like words blurred out. She noticed all the Morticians’ eyes changing. They all suddenly looked drugged up, when a moment ago they’d seemed clear. Croy glanced at Darius – he could see it too.
She moved fast, stepping back and snatching up the girl. She was just skin and bones. Croy slung her over one shoulder and aimed her Firestorm with her free hand.
“Alright, back up! All of you!” she yelled at the Morticians.
For a moment, no one moved and Croy thought she was going to have to start shooting, then the death-mongers started to shuffle backward. Darius dragged the young guy to his feet, and the four of them pressed through the crowd of dead and dead-like. Croy had been in a lot of dangerous situations, but she’d never felt this unnerved. Her mouth was dust-dry, and she could feel her hands trembling, but she kept up her hard front and shoved through.
Once clear of the cold room, they moved rapidly back the way they came. Croy felt completely lost, but Darius had a photographic memory for directions, so he took the lead. Behind them the Morticians followed in a dull-eyed herd, coming fast enough to make them break into a run. Croy noticed both Darius and the young guy were shaking their heads in a strange way. Panic pulsed inside her. They made it to the last corridor and crashed through the front gate, breaking for their draggers. As she reached her ride, a feeling raked through her of being drawn back toward the entrance. It felt like starvation – like she had to go back or she would die. Croy looked toward the gates and saw Morticians spilling out the front door. Westor was at the lead, his unseeing eyes drilling into her face. It was enough to force her onto the dragger, with the unconscious girl slung over the front. Darius and the boy were already lifting off the platform.
“Croy! Move it!” her partner yelled down at her.
She kicked her dragger to life and they shot up into open air, the dragger over-revving as though it were desperate to get her clear. As they sped away, Croy looked back down. All the Morticians had vanished, as though they’d never been there at all.
Chapter 11
Eli
Aquais
Scorpia (Ufftown)
It was with the distinct feeling of giddy dread that Eli stepped to the borderline between Heely Gap and Ufftown. The imp-breed word ToUp had been etched into the Ufftown signpost, as it was in most imp-breed suburbs. Its literal translation into Urigin was Enter If You Dare or, as some people said, Enter At Your Own Risk. Before the war, said risk could have included being flour-bombed, bombarded, bamboozled, befuddled, hornswoggled, hoodwinked, swindled, frisked, frolicked, fast-talked, finagled, fleeced, flimflammed, tricked, tickled, wedgied, dacked, double-dealt, triple-crossed, robbed blind, or blindly led – just to name a few possibilities. But now … It was hard to know what to expect. Eli wasn’t sure how the imp-breeds as a community had dealt with the war. Usually his kind tried to make light of (and profit from) anything and everything, but, as far as Eli could see, there really were no amusing angles to mass slaughter and misery.
A tremor shivered through him. He couldn’t stop shaking. He could barely comprehend what had happened. The team had just been reunited. Everyone had survived – and now the others had vanished and Jude was shut down, dying slowly from an unknown poison. On initial testing, Eli had found the toxin completely foreign, unlike any other poison he’d seen, and he’d thought he’d seen them all. So he’d set it up for deep analysis, then injected Jude with as much slowing serum as he had.
Leaving his friend alone in that condition had made Eli sick to his stomach, but there was no other choice. The one consolation was that Penman was there watching over him and SevenM, feeding back their status to Eli’s system. Initially, Santana had said he and the other soldiers would stay as well, but then word had come through that the main United Resistance refugee camp was under attack, and they’d had to fly out. The news that Caesar K-Ruz had also vanished was destabilizing the city all over again. The remaining Androt forces were reportedly re-assembling against the gangsters. Eli could feel the tremors of explosions and battle-fire all over Scorpia and his chest was so tight and stomach so knotted that he could barely breathe. His gran’ma used to tell him that the Khaiti God gives the heaviest burdens only to those strong enough to carry them – she’d say When you can’t carry on, the Khaiti God provides, but this was the same woman who occasionally accused her collection of miniature statues of conspiring against her, so Eli could only assume that either his God had mistaken him for someone else, or was having a good laugh at his expense. The truth was, he wasn’t strong enough to carry this – his legs felt so gelatinous right now he doubted they would even carry him – and so he’d come here to Ufftown, his home suburb, in search of the wisest man he knew: Mr Beatlebee Bellbeater. If anyone could save his friends, it would be the ancient Greer.
Eli’s gaze swept over the multi-colored cobble-pebble streets, lined with picket fences and small, misshapen stone cottages of every color imaginable and then some. Everything was painted, papered, glittered, bejeweled and fabric-draped, from statues to trees to the grass itself. But the streets were empty. Eli had never seen it so quiet and deserted. If not for the wisps of colored smoke rising from the cottage chimneys, he would have believed everyone had left. The silence gave him a very solid lump in his throat. The place was so empty, in fact, that he could see clear across town to the Wintress River and into Thrumburstone – a Glee neighborhood. The wide river forged a substantial divide between the suburbs, but for the two rival imp-breed bloodlines, no distance was distant enough. Glees and Greers didn’t mix, they didn’t even acknowledge each other’s existence, and it was illegal, or at least it had been, for them to marry or breed. His parents had been the odd law-breakers, and now the racial war raged on his skin and in his blood. It was just typical that his family had to be the weird ones.
Eli hitched up his weapon belt. During the war he’d lost weight that he’d never really had in the first place and the heavy belt was sagging. He flexed the fingers of his broken arm. He’d quick-set the bone, but it still felt tender. It would have to do. There was no time for recovery, and no time to wait around trying to find his nerve; he just had to move on without it.
“Okay, girl,” he said to Nelly, huddling in his pocket. “One, two, three …”
Eli stepped over the borderline. A massive water balloon missiled through the air and splatted directly into his face, knocking him backward onto the ground, and providing a quick answer as to how his kind had dealt with the war – complete denial.
Eli sprang back up, spinning, ready to catch the next one. It was on this same street, many year-cycles earlier, that he’d been accidentally baptized before the proper time as a water balloon had drenched him just as a priest was blessing someone else. His gran’ma had been furious. Gran’pa had laughed so much he’d been ordered out of the house and had had to sleep in the garden shed that night. Now Eli heard snickering coming from everywhere around him – and one by one faces started to appear from around corners, over rooftops, through windows, all grinning with wicked delight. This, apparently fun, tradition was known to imp-breeds as the unwelcome party. Eli sighed and clenched his fists. Each of the party were carrying some kind of squishy bomb – flour, feather, dye, water – and yes – there was a stinkwater one too. This was going to get bad. And he knew his kind well enough not to bother to try to negotiate his way out, or run – running was the worst thing a person could do. He’d just had to grit his teeth and take it, and then hopefully they’d get bored and go away.
Eli crouched down and covered his head. He heard the laughter and mocking reach a crescendo and then the whooshes of air as they launched the bombs. He braced himself. Then the ground started shaking under his feet. He peeked up and saw the Corámorán, Flintlock Flystock, with whom
he thought he’d parted ways, now stampeding toward him – closing the distance fast with giant strides. There was no time to move. Eli just rolled into a ball and cringed down as low as he could. He felt the running steps stop and then heard the splat, splat splat of the bombs finding a target. But, strangely enough, he wasn’t soaked, sticky or stinking. Eli unballed himself and peered up. The gargantuan-breed had stood over him and taken the full brunt of the unwelcoming. The marks of the bombs looked pathetically small on her heavily muscled body, the water lines running down her arms looking no more than drips of sweat. The unwelcome party hovered in a circle around them, staring. Flintlock’s nostrils flared, then she opened her mouth and released a sonic roar that blew them all backward. Eli flattened himself to the ground with his hands over his ears. When he finally emerged, all the Greers were gone. No sane person would ever accuse his kind of being unnecessarily brave, that was for sure.
Eli stood up and brushed off his pants. In most places he’d be brushing off dust and dirt – in Ufftown it was glitter and candy sprinkles. He looked up at the Corámorán. As far as gargantuan-breeds went, including the sub-races of Giants, Colossuses, Titans, Behemoths and Goliaths, Flintlock was positively tiny – but compared to imp-breeds she was absolutely enormous and, incidentally, stunning, with thick tresses of curls and the deepest, most soul-searching eyes that Eli had ever seen. The Moi or tribal tattoo on her chin and half her face indicated her clan and rank. Eli wasn’t as well versed in the Corámorán as he was with other types of Giants, but he understood enough to see she was part of a high-ranking clan, but herself well down in the pecking order.
Her clan had smashed her up quite badly. It was believed that most gargantuan-breeds were immune to pain, but they could still get injured and killed. And Eli knew it was his fault that she’d been hurt. Before he could apologize again, Flintlock spoke, her voice rich and deep, heavy with the Corámorán accent.