Trancehack

by Sonya Clark

  He closed his eyes against the headache working its way up from the base of his skull. “‘Are you sure what you’re doing?’ Well, no, I’m not. I just want to do my job.” Why was he spilling this out to a stranger in a bar? Oh right, his ex got their friends in the divorce. He’d ceded an entire city on his own when he moved.

  “Sounds like you’re going through a lot. Like you need a friend.”

  His cop instincts spoke up—he still had a few of those, thankfully—telling him she was looking for trade, not friendship. “Thanks for the offer, but—”

  “But I’m not what you’re looking for. I get it.” She took another drink of her wine. “What if I could be what you’re looking for?” She laid her hand over his, and the cold metal of a bracelet shocked his skin. The air shimmered around her reflection as her face changed into Calla’s.

  Nate jerked away, dropping his glass. Half off the stool, he stared at the woman. “What the hell did you do?”

  “Relax, honey, it’s just a charm.” She tapped the bracelet. “Isn’t this what you want to see?” She looked her new image over in the mirror. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a guy who likes the street look.”

  “Where’d you get that?”

  She blinked, as if suddenly realizing she’d picked the wrong target. “You can get them in lots of places.”

  Nate thought about flashing his badge, arresting her for solicitation, or at least being rude. Instead he swiped his ID through the nearest card reader to pay his bill and stood. “Not interested in a knockoff, sorry.” So that was rude, but he didn’t care. He left without bothering to wait for a response.

  * * *

  Calla swam in a sea of blue-white lines and glittering lights. She piggybacked onto data packets, e-mails, whatever looked like it was moving in the direction she wanted to go. With meticulous precision she teased out the passwords needed to get into the police department servers. She made her way into the Robbery Homicide files, skimming for Nate Perez’s name.

  It wasn’t her goal but his personnel file was too much of a temptation to pass up. His ID photo hung in the aether. He didn’t photograph well—the picture made him look harsh. Like any other hard-ass cop. There was no hint of the way his hazel eyes could glitter with amusement, or the way his mouth could turn sensuous. Or the warmth of his hands through the thin material of her blouse as they danced. She knew these things about him and despite her best efforts couldn’t make herself forget them.

  She scanned the rest of the file, making a note of his address. He was new in town; she already knew that. As she suspected, he was former military like so many cops. He had a good record, both in the military and as a cop. The only thing of interest his file covered in his personal life was a divorce a little over a year ago. No kids, but then she’d already guessed that.

  Feeling too much like a voyeur, she moved on to the links to his case files. The Forbes case being among the most recent, it was easy to find. She read the newest entries first. Santo’s statement ripped her up inside. From the transcript it sounded like because Calla knew Nate that the kid thought he was safe talking to him. Hell, it wouldn’t have mattered as soon as they got the DNA match back. Santo could have said he was on the far side of the moon and he’d still be looking at a murder charge.

  The autopsy report had a lot of information Calla couldn’t make heads or tails of, but she read it anyway. Next were the initial reports from the crime scene. Nothing jumped out. The report in which Nate described finding the nightshade recipe was interesting in that it happened at Forbes’ home. The final report gave no explanation for the nightshade connection.

  That made no sense. Nate was far too thorough, curious even, to leave that hanging. The look on his face when he’d come to tell her the case was over came to mind. There had been no triumph of a job well done there. He’d been upset, enough that it brought him to her door in the middle of the night. She’d been upset too, so she’d reacted before thinking. Not one of her finest moments.

  So had the nightshade angle been dropped because of Beckwith? It made sense. Nate couldn’t go up against that kind of power without risking the decent life he’d built for himself. She couldn’t begrudge him that. She was too much of a realist.

  There was one more file. It hovered behind extra security that took time to crack. She lost track of how long it took. Finally the security folded under her efforts. It was the initial DNA test. She read it carefully.

  Male, blond hair, positive for nightshade. The Santo kid had black hair, what the hell? The next part she had to read several times before it sank in—unregistered Magic Born.

  Unregistered Magic Born.

  Unregistered.

  The shock ripped her out of the trance state. The swirl of color and the sudden lurch of her consciousness returning to her body made her dizzy. She fell forward, catching herself on her palms on the rough concrete. Diving for her wand, she broke the connection with the cable feeding her stolen broadband.

  Breathing heavily, she sat huddled on the floor for a long moment. Oh dear Goddess, they know.

  Forty minutes later Calla was blustering her way into Sinsuality before it opened, insisting on seeing Vadim. The guards didn’t put up much of a fight. They mostly just shook their heads and bitched about her attitude. She ignored them and made her way to his office.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

  She’d told him everything she’d found in the files. Vadim was one of only two people who knew what she could do. “I saw it. I read the whole thing. It was very clear.”

  He sat back, covering his mouth and shaking his head. “It makes no sense. If they know there’s such a thing as an unregistered, why the hell would they let that go? Why frame some dumb kid?”

  “I don’t know, but the report that identified Santo came from DMS. The lab work was done twice. The first report, the one that says unregistered, came from the police lab.”

  “Could it be a mistake? Shitty lab work?”

  “The tests are so old hat by now, you’d think that wouldn’t happen.”

  Vadim poured himself a drink. Perched on the edge of his desk he said, “If it is some sort of cover-up, do you think your detective is part of this?”

  Calla bristled at the insinuation in the word your but forced herself to think about the question. “No. No, I really don’t. He doesn’t seem the type. But if this is a cover-up, why?”

  “Keep the Normals from panicking, I suppose. With the second DNA test coming from DMS I’d say Beckwith had a hand in this. What I can’t figure is why.”

  “I think they forced Perez to drop the nightshade part of the investigation too. The way the reports read, it’s like as soon as they had someone they could charge it was all over. He’s even getting a commendation.”

  “They probably figure they can keep him quiet. Are they right?” Vadim examined her over the top of his highball glass.

  She thought again of the look on Nate’s face. “I don’t know. It’s a hell of a lot for him to risk. And for what? Who the hell knows what was really going on with Forbes.”

  “I’m less concerned with that and more concerned with the people in the tunnels. We’ve got dozens down there, too many to hide elsewhere if there’s a raid. We need to know why they dropped the first DNA test.” He raised his glass, pointing at her with his index finger. “You need to find out what’s going on from Perez.”

  Calla swore and lowered her head.

  “Oh come on,” Vadim needled. “You can’t tell me that’s going to be a hardship. I saw you dancing with him.” He used the glass to gesture at the bank of security monitors.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “Just talk to him, okay? Find out what he knows. I don’t need to tell you what’s at stake.”

  That was true—he didn’t. There were families in the tun
nels, children. Babies, even. Desperate people trying to find a way out of the country, any way that would keep their families intact, and with legal emigration virtually impossible anymore the railroad was the only option for most people. Some were the children of Magic Born whose parents had been able to hide their births and keep them off the DMS radar. Many were Normals who went underground rather than risk their children being taken away. Some of those children would have wound up in a zone, some not. To some parents it was better to hide a pregnancy and run than roll that particular set of dice. FreakTown was just one stop on the way to freedom for those lucky enough not to be in the system or willing to walk away from their entire lives.

  “Okay,” Calla said. “I’ll see what I can do.” This was no help for the migraine coming on like a train through the center of her head.

  Another thing that was true—it would be no hardship to see Nate Perez again.

  Chapter Ten

  Another poor night of sleep did nothing to help Nate. Not used to being unsure of himself, of his job, he felt scrubbed raw inside and out. A jewelry store robbery kept him occupied for several hours, before wrapping up neatly when the thieves tried to pawn the stolen goods. Most cases were like that, he realized. Perpetrated by people who weren’t too bright and not very challenging to catch. As he sat at his desk staring at the screen instead of typing up the necessary reports, he considered that. For years he’d been able to do much of his work without too much effort because of predictable patterns and outcomes. Between that and the kind of idiots who committed most crimes, it was not surprising he’d come to accept the simplest answer to a question without even considering any other possibility. Most of the time the simplest answer was the right answer.

  But what if it wasn’t?

  Nate thumbed off the monitor and grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair. Ten minutes later he was in the coroner’s wing, looking for Henry in the lab. Another tech directed him to a fire escape where Henry took his breaks. Nate climbed out onto the rickety metal and followed the smell of cigarette smoke.

  Henry sat with his back to Nate, hunched over his cell phone and puffing hard. Nate clapped a hand on the smaller man’s shoulder. “How the hell do you afford those things?”

  Henry sputtered, almost dropping both the phone and the cigarette. “Damn it Perez! Give a guy some warning.”

  Nate sat a couple of steps above the lab tech. “Sorry to interrupt your porn time.” He pointed at the naked woman on the screen.

  “You should be. Regina is a real artist of the pole.” He logged out of that account and returned to his home page.

  “Gravity defying, too, I bet. Can I talk to you about something?”

  Henry edged to the far end of the step he sat on, his back against the railing so he could face Nate. Squinting at Nate in the bright sunshine, he said, “Sure.” He sounded suspicious and really, Nate couldn’t blame him.

  Nate rested his elbows on his knees and threaded his fingers together, momentarily eyeing the phone. Tech that good looked foreign, much better than anything he owned. The DNA test to identify Magic Born had been one of the last scientific breakthroughs before things started getting bad. Since then, advances had slowed to a crawl. “I was wondering about that DNA test.”

  The skin around Henry’s eyes tightened. “The one I messed up? That the one?”

  “You said you ran it three times. You said the science is solid.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess my work wasn’t solid.” He looked away, taking another deep drag on the cigarette.

  “Did you really mess up that test?”

  Henry glared at him. “You know why I’m here now? During the day? Somebody called in sick so I got offered his shift. As a double. I got busted down to the night shift and doing scut work. I’m lucky I’m not expected to mop the floor.”

  “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your problem. Why do you care about the test?”

  “I don’t know.” Nate had been trying to articulate his reasons in a way that didn’t sound accusatory to Senator Beckwith. He wasn’t willing to go that far, not until he found something concrete. If there was anything to be found. “I just know that case doesn’t sit well with me.”

  “The DMS says I messed up the test.” Henry shrugged. “There’s nothing to be done about that.”

  “I want to know the truth. I want to know what Forbes was doing messing around with nightshade. I want to know the truth of that DNA test.”

  Henry ground out his cigarette on the step below him. “You go online much? I mean, besides doing your banking and watching TV and the usual.”

  The change in subject threw Nate. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Because if you go online for all the usual reasons, like entertainment or whatever, you’re looking at the same internet most everyone else does. For like, ninety-nine percent of the people, that’s the only internet that exists as far as they’re concerned. It would never even occur to them there’s anything else out there in cyberspace.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “The cops who work in Sex Crimes know about the darknet. They don’t like to talk about it, or what they see there. Because believe me, the part of the darknet the Sex Crimes unit sees is a black hole of humanity no one wants to look at. But that’s not all the darknet is.”

  Nate had never worked Sex Crimes or heard of this darknet. “Go on.”

  “For one thing, it’s the best way of getting past the firewall around the U.S. internet. If you can do it, get out into the internet the rest of the world is using, holy shit. We’re stuck in the goddamn dark ages here. Anyway.” Henry raised a hand. “Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I have once or twice been accused of having a fondness for conspiracy theories.”

  Nate knew there were ways to circumvent the firewall. Most people their age did. He’d just never done it. His normally endless curiosity had hit a firewall of its own in the Congo as far as wondering what the outside world was like. “You’re not going to start reciting some old hacktivist manifesto, are you?”

  Henry shook his head. “I have no manifesto, compadre. Just a combination of curiosity and boredom that leads me to poke around in places most people would never consider.”

  “So what did you find in this poking around?”

  “Rumors. Innuendo. Possibly coded messages. I don’t know—I wasn’t looking to break any codes. If what I think I found is true, then I’m surprised the DMS would...uh, let’s just say that second DNA test doesn’t make much sense.”

  “Spell it out for me, Henry.”

  “There’s chatter on the darknet of people who are unregistered. Both Magic Born and Normal. And there’s chatter of them trying to find ways to hide and ways to get out.”

  “You mean get out of the country?”

  Henry nodded. “Wouldn’t you want to? My cousin had her baby taken away because of magic in his DNA. She wound up in a fucking mental hospital. To this day she’s so heavily medicated she can barely function. Our asshole grandparents told her it was for the best, that the baby was dangerous. Fuck.” He looked away, his normally bland face twisted. “Fuck these laws and fuck the old cowards who keep them in place.”

  Nate remained silent for a long moment. If there really were unregistered Magic Born out there somewhere, why would the Department of Magic Security want that covered up? What would they gain? If it got out, it would frighten enough people that it might actually wind up strengthening the Magic Laws, at least in the short run. For as long as the generation now in power stayed in power at least.

  “That first test, the one you ran, was right, wasn’t it?”

  “Hell yeah it was right. But for whatever reason somebody wanted to hide the truth.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  �
��I don’t know and I don’t care. I’m spending my nights sterilizing autopsy equipment just because I happened to be the one to run the test. I don’t want to know what Beckwith or the DMS or whoever the hell would do to me if I tried playing crusader.” Henry stood, climbing to the step above Nate. “You should keep that in mind, you know. Enjoy your commendation and move on. It’s not like Forbes was some saint, anyway.”

  “It’s my job to solve his murder.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s your job to do what they tell you. My break’s over, I gotta go.”

  “See you around, Henry. And thanks.”

  “Just leave my name out of it if you decide to do something stupid.”

  Nate stayed on the fire escape for a while, letting the heat melt his jacket into his skin. His scalp itched with sweat despite how short he kept his hair. He had no way of proving anything, no leads, and even if he did, the attempt would probably just be a bullet to his career. Might as well go back to his desk and finish that report.

  Or if he hurried, he could make it to the bazaar before it closed for the day.

  * * *

  Thursdays were a good day at the bazaar. The large open-air market, held in what decades ago had been a football stadium several miles from the zone, boasted the most diverse shopping in New Corinth. One-of-a-kind, hand-crafted wares were sold in booths next to wholesalers hawking cheap T-shirts and knockoff electronics. Close to the weekend and Friday paychecks, people were in a good mood. A spending mood. Calla had already made enough to make it worth stewing in the heat under a tattered umbrella. Her table was small since she didn’t want to pay for a bigger one, but she also didn’t mind if she ran out of merchandise and quit before closing time.

  She still had a tray of earrings, but the heat was making her want to pack it in early. All day she’d been trying to think of a way to accidently on purpose stumble across Nate Perez again, and she’d come up with nothing. He’d be suspicious if she showed up at his apartment. She might have to do it anyway. Apologizing for slamming a door in his face might work as an excuse, but she figured he was smart enough to know that that would be out of character for her.