It was bright outside. Too bright for this early in the morning, if you asked me. The weather was cool, and pedestrians strode in their usual haste, none bothering to spare a glance at me, the dishevelled woman in her faded hoodie and tired denims. The world seemed to have fared fine without me.
I didn’t feel like walking, so I decided to drive to a place I hadn’t been to in years: the Crystal Lake Warrior’s arena.
It took me about half an hour to arrive at the arena. When I turned off the engine, and looked up at the magnificent oval-shaped edifice of glass and chromium-plated steel, I felt a rush in my stomach. I couldn’t help it; I loved hoverball. The teamwork, the speed, the resounding thwack when a striker’s bat hit the ball into the goal—they all made the sport so beautiful.
The arena was open to the public, so I strolled in and walked down the cold empty halls that led to the stands. It was training time, and the field echoed with the cries and commands of Crystal Lake’s team and its coaches. There were few other visiting spectators, but otherwise the stands were empty. I found a seat upfront, and watched the geared players whizz across two hundred yards of carpet grass on their hoverblades.
As I watched, I fondly remembered a time when I had loved the Crystal Lake Warriors. It wasn’t that I resented them now. It’s just: when I first moved to Crystal Lake, I had spent almost every afternoon of my first month in the Warriors’ arena. That was before they lost eight consecutive Championship qualifier rounds over a span of four years, ripping my heart out of my chest, and smashing it into the ground in the process. Now, the team was at the bottom of the State League, faring only a little better in the World League. Yes, the Crystal Lake Warriors had repeatedly displayed the true extent of their incompetence as a team, and they did not deserve my faith any longer.
Alright, perhaps, I was a tiny bit bitter.
At least I had never lost credits wagering on them, thank Light.
The rules of hoverball were simple. There were ten players per team: four pitchers, three defenders, two strikers, and one goalie. Only pitchers and strikers were allowed to cross the half-field line into their opponent’s zone. Though strikers usually led the offensive, it was the pitchers who did most of the passing, and it was they who served the ball for the strikers to score. Only strikers were allowed to score, and they had to use a bat. Except for the goalie, no players were allowed to hold on to the ball for more than five fractions; it was a fast, often dizzying, game. Tackling was not tolerated. A player wanted to take the ball from his opponent? He had to intercept a pass for it. The object of the game: get the ball past the goalie.
It was a beautiful sport, and I was more than just a little passionate about the game. Even now, in spite of myself, I could feel shivers going down my spine as I watched the players train.
I clapped with the other spectators when a player knocked the ball into the net. “They’re good,” an elderly man behind me said in surprise, and I had to admit it: the Warriors seemed to be in good shape. The Championship was about a month away. We wouldn’t win; that honour was usually reserved for the Capitol City Titans. But maybe, this time, we wouldn’t make utter rumps out of ourselves.
My eyes strayed off the game, and fell on a young Ruby man on the players’ bench. I wondered who he was. He looked younger than the players, and he was the only one on the bench still in a tracksuit. His posture was rigid and he was biting on his bottom lip.
“Heller, you’re up,” someone barked suddenly. I looked to see the Warriors’ coach, Pitch Gambull, waving the young Ruby onto the field. So, he was a player. I watched him slip on a pair of hoverblades, grab a bat, and glide onto the field to replace a Sprite player. The Ruby was still in his jumpsuit.
“A little odd to be playing in a jumpsuit, no?” the same elderly man behind me remarked, and this time I realized that he was talking to me.
“I was thinking the same thing,” I responded. “Looks like we drafted in a new player.”
“Wonder where we got him from.”
“Some obscure college in the countryside, probably,” I said.
The coach blew his whistle, and they started to play.
Right from the start, Heller, the jumpsuit player, displayed a staggering amount of skill. I watched in disbelief, as he zipped effortlessly between defenders, and met the served ball with the flat of his bat. The ball flew straight into the net—on the first try. The spectators jumped to their feet, whooping and clapping.
I gawked.
“But he’s good,” the man said.
“I’ll say,” I murmured.
The players prepared for another play. This time, Heller handed over the bat to a teammate, and assumed a pitcher position. At the blast of the whistle, he shot off towards the goal. The ball was passed rapidly around, and then tossed high into the air, in Heller’s direction. It was a bad pitch; too much power, too much spin. But Heller didn’t even flinch. He spun around to glide backwards, and then leapt just in time to snag the ball neatly out of the air. The spectators roared again, as he zigzagged around his opponents, and pitched the ball for a striker. The striker batted the ball into the net.
Another goal.
“What the bleak—“ I said.
The players got in position for a third play. Heller received his bat again. Back to striking.
I stood up. “Who is this guy?”
Whistle blast. Heller didn’t even bother approaching the goal. He was barely over the half-field line, when a pitcher served him the ball. He drew back, and with a loud grunt, swung his bat. I barely saw the ball. There was a streak of orange, and then, it was in the goal. The spectators went insane.
I applauded, hollered and whistled with everyone else, as Coach Gambull called Heller back to the bench. But even whilst I celebrated, I noticed that Heller’s teammates and coaches were not as surprised as we were. Heller and his mind-blowing proficiency were only new to us, the fans. What we had just witnessed was not a training run; it was an exhibition. We’d just been privy to what was, without doubt, the most spectacular display of hoverball skills in the league. And if I understood what had just happened—and I was pretty sure that I did—then that player was ours.
I looked at the coaches smirking to themselves on the sidelines, and laughed out loud.
The crafty bastards. I wondered if there were any spies from the other teams amongst us. Probably not. Our team had been discounted for so long that nobody gave a muck about our practice sessions, and the coaches knew that.
Of course, Heller was going to be public information before the Championship began. It was mandatory to disclose recruiting activities before the games began. Still, by the time the news was public proper, it would be too late for the other teams to do anything about it. They wouldn’t know what hit them.
“Wow, y’all are a gleeful lot for fans of a team that blows.”
I turned. Crawer was standing beside me. Evidently, he had missed Heller’s display. I was glad that he had; he was a Titans fan.
I frowned at him. “What’re you doing here?”
“What do you think? I went by your apartment, and you weren’t there.”
“So how did you find me?”
“Got Tech to run a city-wide scan of all public and private cyber-link hotspots. Your cell-comm was connected to the network here.”
“You could have just said ‘techie-thingummy’ and I would’ve been fine,” I grumbled.
“Techie-thingummy.”
“Thank you.”
I turned back to the practice game. He sat down, and watched with me.
After a while, he said, “You’ve gotten better.”
“We’ll trounce you this championship,” I said.
He grinned. “And serpents will grow legs, sure.” He paused. “Actually, I was talking about you. You look better.”
“Did the Lieutenant send you?”
“No. As far as he’s concerned now, you’re taking your annual leave. So yeah, you’re on holiday.”
“His kindness know
s no bounds.”
“How are you doing though? Are you better?”
For a moment, I didn’t answer. “I don’t know. Probably not,” I admitted.
“Oh.”
“I said ‘probably’. Why? What is it?”
“I planned to tell you this only if you were feeling better.”
“Ugh, now you’ve got to tell me.”
He hesitated. Then, he pulled his cell-comm out of his pocket. He tapped the screen a couple of times, and then handed me the device.
“We were called in last night, eleventh hour,” he said. “This happened in District 25.”
I inspected the picture on his cell-comm, and furrowed my brows. “I can’t make this out. What am I looking at?”
“Give it a moment.”
I kept staring at the picture. And then, I saw them: two heads, arranged side by side but inversely to each other. There were no features; no eyes, no noses, no mouths…no skin. Just butchered flesh. And blood.
“One Lillith male and a Ruby female,” Crawer told me. “Both very young. Both black-bloods. We think they were a couple.”
My hands were shaking now. I swallowed because my throat had gone dry, and then I tried to say something. My tongue failed me.
“The boy was an Engineering student, and the girl was studying Law, both at a local college. They were only sixteen. We invited their parents down to the temporary office in District 20, and then I had to watch each set of parents break down when I delivered the news. It was horrible,” he mumbled. “The Cegal siblings hadn’t had any family, so I guess that made it…easier to deal with. “This though…” He stopped and shook his head. “This…”
I handed him back his cell-comm, and clasped my hands together.
“We think it might be a copycat,” Crawer continued. “But that’s hard to believe because this crime scene was even cleaner than the last one. Unless, of course, there were two killers all along. Either way, we’re stuck until we can determine a motive for killing those kids, because unlike the Cegal siblings, these two have no dirt on them. As it stands now, we have no clues, no leads, zilch. We’re back to square muckin’ one.”
Finally, my tongue obeyed. “There is one lead we could try,” I whispered.
He raised a brow.
“But,” I said, “you won’t like it.”
CHAPTER 16
I knocked on the door, and waited.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Crawer muttered. “This is the very definition of chasing fireflies.”
“Hey, you were the one whining that we’re all out of clues,” I said. “At this point, we can’t afford not to chase fireflies.”
We heard the sound of shifting locks, and the door opened.
A sleepy Dr. Starr stood in the doorway, dressed in a giant pink shirt, fuzzy slippers, and no pants. There was a bowl in her hand, a dribble of milk at the corner of her mouth, and her hair was a disaster of black frizz. She didn’t have her glasses on, and without them, she had to squint to recognize me.
But when she did, she was mortified.
“Dr. Starr, this is Sergeant Crawer, he’s also with the MEA,” I said to the speechless woman. “Sorry for dropping in unannounced, but we were hoping to ask you a few questions concerning the uh…Ripper case?”
Immediately, she invited us in.
“How do you know where I live?” she asked.
“Well…” Crawer began.
“Please don’t make him answer that,” I interrupted. “We have a good technical team. Let’s leave it at that.”
Dr. Starr’s apartment was cluttered with files, papers, and books stacked high. I hadn’t seen real paper in so long, much less in these quantities. Crawer and I found some room to sit in her sofa, between two stacks of encyclopaedias.
“Sorry, so sorry. I’m obviously not ready for company.” She ran around flustered, straightening out the place.
I apologized again. “We would have called, except you weren’t picking up.”
“Yes, I can’t seem to find my cell-comm,” Dr. Starr said, scratching her head and throwing her eyes about the room like a hyperactive bird. “I kept hearing it ring, but I think this room has an echo. The sound kept bouncing all over the place. Couldn’t quite…pinpoint it…hold on.”
She let out a few loud squawks, truly startling me. Crawer looked incredulous.
She put a hand up to her ear, and listened for something. “Nope. No echo,” she finally mumbled. “Odd.”
“Are you okay, Dr. Starr?” Crawer asked.
“Huh? What? Yes, yes, I’m fine. I mean, other than the fact that I haven’t worked in over a year.” She let out a nervous laugh, and then looked embarrassed, like she hadn’t meant for that to slip.
Crawer gave me a look. I ignored him.
After Dr. Starr had changed into something more appropriate, and offered us something to drink—I politely declined, Crawer had a kho’late—we got talking. But even before we began, Dr. Starr made something clear.
“I was only Sol King’s counsellor. There were some things he was not authorized to tell me. If you want more details, you’ll need to talk to him yourself.“ She looked hopeful.
My smile was tight. “Let’s see how this goes first, shall we? What can you tell me about the Ripper?”
“Except for what you already know, not much.” She looked thoughtful. “King had handled a lot of high level assignments, but the Ripper was his biggest yet. That was five years ago. At the time, I think the Ripper had just killed somebody really important in Hiti. Like a minister, or something. It was covered up as a fire.”
“A fire?” I racked my brains. “The only dead official I can recall from five years ago is Vice Chancellor Orj Gondo.”
Dr. Starr lit up. “That’s him!”
“Gondo?” Crawer frowned. “His chalet caught fire. He didn’t have his face ripped off.”
“But a fire would cover it up pretty well,” I thought aloud. “That is: if it was a cover up.”
“It was,” Dr. Starr said. “Senior Intelligence found his face—what was left of it anyway—buried in the beach outside. But they couldn’t tell anyone. They had no idea who the killer was, and it looked too much like an assassination. Think of how long it took all the five worlds to unite and work together—nearly a century. Sol said the last thing they needed was to spark an inter-dimensional incident.”
“So they decided to investigate quietly,” I said.
“They looked at a lot of deaths over the last three decades—intelligence agents on the field, a few ministers, one or two high-profile celebrities, even a terrorist leader during the Rim War. They had all died in mysterious fires. During their autopsies, coroners had all reported a surprising lack of epidermal tissue on the faces of the corpses. But of course—”
“They all attributed it to the fire,” I finished for her.
“So this Ripper guy was taking out ministers and intelligence agents,” Crawer said. “Why the flaming muck is he taking out black-blood nobodies?”
I gritted my teeth. “Why is he taking out kids?”
“Why isn’t he covering up his murders anymore?” Crawer added. “Why is he littering the place with faceless bodies, upsetting everyone like a muck head?”
Dr. Starr looked overwhelmed by the barrage of questions. “I-I don’t know. He takes all kinds of jobs, I suppose. I’m sorry, I don’t really know. Why has he stopped covering them up? I don’t know. I’m so sorry.”
“Maybe he isn’t getting paid as well?” I suggested.
“Spiting the employers?” Crawer said. “You don’t think that’s a bit unsophisticated for a super assassin?”
“You mean the guy peeling off his victim’s faces?” I said. “Yeah, he’s far too classy for that.”
“Maybe this line of victims is personal. You thought so at the start of this case,” Crawer said. “Or maybe he’s anti-black-blood.”
I sighed. “Please, not the hate crime theory.”
“It
makes sense. Super assassin feels the need to purge the worlds of what he deems is an abomination. Or somebody else does, and hires him.”
“Ridiculous,” I said. “A percentile of the population is made up of black-bloods; he can’t kill them all himself. Not all of them will be easy kills. Many will be deadly. Many live together in densely populated communities. Think of Lunis Cegal and the trouble he gave a team of armed enforcers, and remember that even he was just one paranoid untrained guy.”
“Alright, back to the personal theory.”
“If it was personal,” I said, “he would do all the murders himself. And considering that I am a hundred per cent certain that Agent Q blew that other guy’s head off…”
“Not all personal murders are personally committed,” Crawer argued.
“Most of them are,” I argued back. “And anyway, I have a better theory: he’s always had a—I don’t know, call it a fetish I suppose—for taking his victims’ faces. But for a long time, he was expected to cover it up. Well, what if this time, he was hired for that exact purpose: to take his victims’ faces?”
“So, he wanted to hide their identities?” Crawer looked sceptical. “He could have still burned them up, and achieved the same result. In fact, if he had, we wouldn’t have known his victims were black-bloods.”
“Yeah,” I said, frowning. “But three fires in a span of two weeks? Who would buy that? The average is twenty per year in Metro State. Five per year in Crystal Lake.”
“Oh, but people would buy three corpses with their faces ripped off?”
“People would attribute it to something stupid, and unlikely. Like hate crime. Which they are doing. In fact, that may have been the Ripper’s intention all along.”
Crawer sighed. “I don’t know. Seems like a long-shot theory.”
“We don’t have any more simple theories.”
Dr. Starr gave us a strained smile. “I’ve heard my client toy with those possibilities so many times. I do not doubt your abilities, detectives. Don’t take this the wrong way, please. But you will not discover the Ripper’s motives quickly enough. You will not solve this case quickly enough. Not before he is through with whatever mission he’s been sent to Metro to carry out. Then he will disappear again. Go underground. Transfer to another world, maybe. And we will never get him. But that cannot happen. You have to talk to my client. You have to speak with Sol King. Please. You have to get him out. You have to—” There were tears in her eyes now. “You have to—” She choked on a sob, and stood up. “I’m sorry.”
The BETA Agency Page 7