by Jes Battis
“I know that it’s faster. It’s faster because it’s not as detailed. You can’t have detailed and fast at the same time; you have to pick one.”
“I need both.”
“Then you need to buy me better equipment.”
“The next budget meeting isn’t for a week. You can put in a requisition form.”
“The last time I did that, you claimed that my form was lost.”
She blinked. “I promise that won’t happen again. Let’s just see what results you have so far from the serology panel.”
Linus opened up a folder. “Results. That’s all anyone ever talks about around here. I feel like I’m working at Walmart sometimes.”
“Uh-huh.”
He scanned the STR data. “These samples gave our machines a bit of trouble. They’re calibrated to process demon epithelials, but we don’t have many pureblood profiles in our archive.”
“They don’t tend to submit to needles,” Selena said.
“Exactly. So we had to cobble together a few different profiles to use as an exemplar. But even that didn’t make the job much easier. Most demons have double helices, like us, and a few purebloods have extra RNA helices that we can barely decipher. But these epithelials have a completely different shape. Take a look.”
I leaned over the Fourier-transform microscope, adjusting the focus. It looked like I was staring at a cluster of pins, all squeezed very close together. As I looked closer, I realized that the “head” of each pin was actually a tiny chain composed of links. Each link was a collection of scales, and even the scales had a kind of chemical engraving on them.
“The human genome has about three billion base pairs of DNA, which are the chemical building blocks of life,” Linus said. “Plants have a lot more, sometimes up to ten times more, but most of that space is empty. Their genomes are like abandoned rooms with a lot of cupboard space. But these strands are packed full. There must be close to one hundred million base pairs here. Imagine that as one hundred million drawers, and each one of them is full.”
“The helices look more like chain mail.” I stepped away from the microscope. “I’m not even sure what we’re looking for inside of it.”
“We need to figure out what has the Ferid so interested.”
“We still have no evidence that the Ferid even exist. Ru and Basuram could both be making up some shadow organization to cover their own tracks.”
Selena gave me an odd look. “Are you sure about that? When I look at Ru, I see a kid suffering from post-traumatic stress. I don’t think he has anything to gain by making things up.”
“You don’t know that you’re seeing PTSD. Not for sure. He’s a pureblood demon with DNA that looks like something out of Beowulf. We don’t know what he’s feeling, what his motivations are, just like we don’t know anything about Basuram.”
“Come on. Your mothering instincts didn’t kick in when you saw him?”
“That seems like precisely the sort of thing you’d tell me to ignore.”
Selena half smiled. “Professionalism is important. But when I look at him—I mean, he’s not just a homeless demon. He’s alone in this world. He may never make it back home, and now he’s stuck here. I can’t imagine what that feels like.”
“It feels to me like you could both be having this conversation in another place,” Linus said, returning to his computer. “Unless you have any more questions about base pairs. The more detailed restriction fragment length testing should be done within the next eight hours or so, but it may take longer.”
“I won’t ask how much longer,” Selena replied sweetly. “Just page me when it’s done. Whenever that might be.”
“Of course.” He didn’t look up. “It’ll be the highlight of my evening.”
We both left the DNA lab. Selena chuckled. “Sometimes I think that Linus is the only professional working here.”
“You’re pretty professional.”
“That’s faint praise coming from you.”
“Ouch!” I shook my head. “Still—it feels like our roles are reversed lately. You’re lecturing me on empathy, and I’m talking about physical evidence.”
Selena sighed. “It’s just the direction my life is taking.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m not even sure. I barely understand it myself.”
I suddenly remembered a moment last year. Selena was testing Derrick’s intuitive abilities by using flash cards. At the end of the exercise, he was supposed to read her emotions, and he picked up something while she was staring at a drawing of a gun. Fear. Selena Ward, our director, afraid of a gun. It didn’t make sense.
Who’s Jessica?
Derrick had asked her that. It was a name that he’d heard by accident while reading her mind. As soon as he mentioned it, she shut down. Nobody had mentioned it since then, but I knew that it had something to do with Selena’s change in behavior lately. I knew it in a way that wouldn’t break down into numerical data or chemical peaks and valleys. It was like the footprint of a feeling.
“How much time have you been spending with Ru?” I asked.
“Not much. He’ll only talk for a certain amount of time. I get the impression that our language is very inefficient for him. He can’t express himself as precisely as he’d like to, and he gets tired of it. Then he just goes quiet.”
“Not precise enough? Have you heard him talk about quantum physics?”
“I don’t mean grammatical precision. I think a component of his native language may be gestural, or even telepathic. It’s not that he can’t make himself understood perfectly in English. He’d probably pass the Graduate Record Exam with flying colors. But our language’s innate shortcomings seem to bother him.”
“They didn’t seem to bother Basuram.”
“He’d be a sadistic bastard in any language.”
We came to a secure area. Selena gestured to the security guards standing on either side of the door. Both of them had an athame, sheathed but ready. I could sense that they were trained specifically in the use of thermal materia. Their auras smelled a bit like campfires.
They stepped aside. Selena swiped her key card, and we walked through the door into a short hallway. CT scanning panels had been positioned along the walls. As I walked, I saw my body being mapped on liquid crystal screens, from my bone structure all the way down to my cranial topography. I tried to ignore it. Data flickered past us. We were weighed, measured, and judged, like souls on an Egyptian scale.
A bell chimed as we reached the end of the hallway. The scans hadn’t flagged anything, so we were free to pass into the secure chamber beyond. A second door opened, and I felt the temperature change. It was colder. I could sense faint lines of materia running from the hallway into the next room.
It actually resembled a hotel room instead of a storage chamber, which surprised me. I thought that Selena had set up something ad hoc, a converted closet of some kind, but this room had obviously been designed as a guest suite. There was a bed in one corner and a love seat against the opposite wall. There was even a flat-screen TV.
“Has this always been here?” I asked.
“It’s new.”
“But—just to be clear—we have a high-security hotel suite in the lab. With cable.”
“You can’t use it.”
“But I hate sleeping on the couch in the break room.”
“You don’t have to. You can sleep at home, like other people.”
“Is that bed a queen?”
“You’re never using this room. Understand?”
I sighed. “It’s not like we have paradimensional demons staying with us all of the time. What about when it’s not in use? Am I just supposed to ignore it?”
“Yes. You need my key card to get in, so it doesn’t matter.”
“Where was this room when we needed somewhere for Mia to stay?”
“It hadn’t been built yet.”
“Is there a bathroom over—”
“Forget it.�
��
“Fine.”
Ru was sitting on the love seat with his feet folded underneath him. When he saw me, he got up and walked over, holding the remote control.
“I don’t understand the transmission functions on this device.”
“It’s basically infrared,” I said. “Just press the up and down buttons.”
He gave me a sour look. “I know how to ‘change channels,’ as you call it. That was relatively simple. But some of the programs are demanding currency.”
“That’s pay-per-view.”
“Yes. I’d like to watch it.”
“No,” Selena said. “We aren’t budgeted for that.”
“How disappointing.” He returned to the couch.
He flipped through a series of channels until he found the Food Network. Then his expression became slightly glazed. It was as if we’d ceased to exist.
I sat down across from him on the sofa. “Ru? Would you mind talking to us for a minute? You can go back to your show as soon as we’re done.”
He turned to regard me. He was 99 percent human boy this time. To most observers, the biological photocopy would have been perfect. But as I looked into his eyes, I could see the barest hint of something nonhuman. Just a speck. The longer I stared at that speck, the bigger it seemed to grow, until I felt myself leaning over the edge of a vast alien consciousness.
I thought of the strange armored scales of his DNA. I could only imagine what Basuram’s looked like. So far, his body had rejected all methods of DNA testing. We couldn’t even pierce the epidermis. We might have had better luck peeling back a dragon’s skin.
Ru turned off the TV. “I can pay attention to both at the same time. But I’ve already seen this episode.”
I turned to Selena. “Can we teach him how to download—”
“Absolutely not.”
But I’d already piqued his interest. “Download?”
“We’ll talk more about it later,” I said. “First, we have a few questions.”
He folded his hands on his lap. “All right.”
I looked at Selena. She nodded.
“Okay. You’ve mentioned the Ferid,” I began. “Basuram confirmed that they were looking for you, but wouldn’t say more.”
“I’m sure he said all sorts of things.”
“Are the Ferid performing experiments on the Ptah’li?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
“It would help if we had some physical evidence that this genetic testing was going on,” Selena said. “But we don’t know enough about your DNA. There’s no way for us to tell if it’s been manipulated without having an exemplar, and our only sample is from you. We need more.”
“I’ve already given you blood and spinal fluid.”
“Yes. You’ve been very cooperative, and we’re grateful for that. But we need a different sample. Something for comparison.”
“I have nothing more to give you.”
“Then tell us more about the Ferid. What are they up to? Why would they be chasing someone like you?”
“Nobody knows why they do anything, except out of hunger.”
“What kind of hunger?”
“It’s difficult to explain.”
I wanted to try a different tack. “Tell us about the chancellor,” I said.
Ru looked at me. His eyes were opaque, like green glass. “Nobody sees the chancellor. We only hear his voice. Once or twice a day, he’ll announce a new directive or enact a summons. If he says your name, you’re bound by law to appear before him that very day.”
“And what happens to those who appear before him?”
“They vanish.”
I turned to Selena. “This sounds like an interplanar civil rights case. We have no real reason to hold Basuram, and we don’t even know how either of them got here. I’m not sure what our next step is here.”
“Ru”—Selena held his eyes—“Basuram said that you tried to kill the Ferid chancellor. He said that you were part of an anarchist group.”
“He’s lying. I’m not part of any group.”
“You mentioned your family. Could any of them have been involved?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember.” He closed his eyes. “I can almost see their faces, but it all goes dark so quickly.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Don’t push yourself too hard. Basuram’s not going anywhere, and you’re safe for the moment.”
“We need to return to the scene where Ru was found.” Selena stood. “There could be some trace evidence that hasn’t yet been obliterated by the elements.”
“The beach felt haunted,” Ru said.
“What do you mean by that?” I asked him.
“I don’t know how else to say it.” He hugged his knees. “I could hear voices. There was something alive in the sand and the shells, something groaning underwater. I heard it before everything went dark.”
“Well, we’re not the Ghostbusters,” Selena replied. “But we do have a topographical mapping device. Let’s see what we can do.”
8
Jericho Beach was cold and empty when the CORE forensics team arrived. Although we did have the technology to keep onlookers from wandering onto a common scene, that worked only under controlled conditions. There wasn’t enough materia in the world to keep people away from the beach in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighborhood during the day. Our only alternative was to analyze the scene at night. Instead of crafting a veil, we posted agents at key spots where early-morning joggers and drunk kids might accidentally wander in too close. I’d heard they were working on some kind of personal veil, something to do with our athames. But I so rarely asked questions anymore unless they pertained to my salary.
We marked out a search zone in four bands, using small sensors that looked like garden lights. Needlethin wafers of xenon, a heavy metal, were stacked inside, acting as attractors for the unpredictable family of particles that we called “materia” for lack of a better descriptor. Our technology was similar to dark-matter detectors in Italy and Switzerland, only designed to work on a much smaller scale. The physicist Elena Aprile was trying to discover dark matter itself with her XENON100 detector in Gran Sasso. We already knew it existed and just needed to entice it.
We’d already been over the site with a flux magnetometer, testing for wave echoes that might indicate something buried. The lines of energy would bend around certain objects, especially metallic ones, whose presence created a ripple in the ground-mapping data. The magnetometer itself was small, but the battery pack was awkward and heavy. Selena complained that it was giving her tendonitis.
“Are the photomultipliers set up?” I asked. “I don’t help with those anymore. I accidentally broke one, back when Marcus Tremblay was still unit chief.”
“I know,” she replied. “I was the one who cosigned the expense report.”
“In my defense, the calculations were only a millimeter off.”
“And that millimeter ended up being the difference between finding nothing and discovering the buried skeleton of a tortuga demon.”
“He was so small, though. Poor little guy.”
“He ate souls.”
“Yeah. He did. But, to be fair, that was his natural sustenance. He couldn’t help himself. But, really, can you imagine this cute little turtle with bony spurs on his marbled blue shell, just sort of waddling up to you in the middle of the night? You don’t think he’s going to suck out your soul.”
Selena frowned at me. “You work for an occult organization. A mean-looking turtle appears in your house, at night, and starts crawling up your stairs. You wouldn’t even take a moment to think that it might not have your best interest at heart?”
“He wasn’t mean-looking. He reminded me of the Dr. Seuss turtle.”
“Hate to break up this conversation,” Linus said, pushing the ground-penetrating radar device in front of him. “But we’ve got less than two hours.”
The GPR locator resembled a fusion between a push la
wn mower on wheels and a battery-powered generator. The radar was mounted on an orange steel chassis, and a white plate stuck out in front to comb the ground. The data would be sent to a laptop in peaks and valleys of yellow and mauve light, which Linus would then get to sift through for the next forty-eight hours.
He’d worn a lot of hats in the department since last year, when our budget was slashed. With Becka on sick leave, our herd had definitely been thinned, and we were all feeling the crunch. But we’d really lucked out when Linus agreed to come work for the CORE. Marcus had found him through the alma mater registry at his university. My former boss may have been a psychotic killer, but he was also a phenomenal headhunter. Office gossip suggested that Linus had experienced some sort of mystical “accident” while he was a grad student. It was low-level, but Marcus still used it to his advantage in convincing Linus to come on board with the CORE. Nobody was sure if Linus had been pressured to join, or if he’d entered willingly into employment with us.
“Where’s Ru?” I asked.
“At the lab. There’s a marathon of Chef at Home on.”
“And Basuram?”
“Sedated. Under twenty-four-hour watch.”
“Do you think what we’re doing to the Kentauros demon is humane?”
“I think you just contradicted yourself in that sentence.”
“You know what I mean. The Kentauros has rights, just the same as Ru does. But we’re not too bothered at the idea of pumping him full of soporific drugs and forcing him into a zombie existence.”
Selena sighed. “I get your point. And no, it doesn’t feel good. But it’s a danger to the entire building. We don’t have a lot of other options.”
“It just bothers me that I think of Basuram as an ‘it,’ and Ru as a ‘he.’ I’m the one who looks like an ‘it’ to them.”
“Right. And we all just have to see past our otherness. In the meantime, this scene is waiting, and eventually, we’re going to run out of drugs.”
“Also—” Linus interjected, as he pushed the GPR mower slowly past us. “I get paid time and a half for doing fieldwork. I was hired as a lab director.”
“You’re right,” Selena said. “And we appreciate your extra efforts.”