Harbinger

by Matthew S. Cox

  He patted her on the shoulder. “You’re young yet. Plenty of time.”

  “Argh.” She sighed. “I need more information to even start looking. Maybe you have a point about that motel being significant… but I didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary except for in that room. And the energy came from his being there. If this ghost spent a lot of time at the place, I would’ve sensed his residue all over.”

  Dorian burst into laughter.

  Kirsten blushed. “You know what I meant. Residual energy, dammit.”

  “What you meant and what a dirty mind would hear are different things.” He composed himself and rubbed his chin. “Probably not a good idea for you go out there alone. I could check around, see if I can find anything.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think that location had any special meaning to the ghost. If it had been somewhere he frequented while alive, he’d have haunted it for years. Most likely, he knew of its reputation as a hotspot for sexual assault.”

  “So…”

  “So, I’m going to go check the motel again.” Kirsten locked the terminal and stood.

  “But that’s exactly the wrong place for a young woman to go alone.”

  She smiled. “I’m not alone. You’re with me. Also, I have Suggestion and I’m not afraid to use it—for self-defense.”

  Kirsten set the patrol craft down in a square parking lot surrounded by cheap motel.

  Four stories of balcony walkways dripped with dosers, prostitutes, and fringers loitering around hundreds of battered red doors. So many bodies lined each level, she could barely see the walls.

  “Wow.”

  “Told you.” Dorian raised an eyebrow. “This crowd took off or stayed in their rooms when Div 1 rolled in with three cars. If you go walking around here, there’s a good chance you’ll be making some ghosts today.”

  She gestured at the windscreen. “No, I mean, they’re actually awake at before nine in the morning. That’s shocking.”

  Dorian blinked, hesitated a few seconds, then looked around again. “Now that you mention it, yeah, that is kinda strange. Maybe they’re still awake from last night. Still, not smart to get out of the car here.”

  “This ghost is powerful enough that I don’t need to go into every room to get a read. If I so much as pass the door I should feel something. Though… I’m not too interested in trying to walk along those balconies.”

  “Considering you’d be naked by the time you reached the first corner, that’s probably best.”

  She smirked at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Highly aggressive pickpocketing.”

  “My uniform?”

  “The people have skills.” He winked.

  “Okay. New plan.” She lifted into the air again and set the car to auto-hover at 800 feet.

  After settling in her seat, Kirsten closed her eyes and concentrated on astrally projecting herself out of her body. It took her a few seconds to set frustration aside and find enough calm to perceive the separation between her spirit and flesh. At a mental nudge, she floated free as a vaguely nude energy form of amber light. A thin silver cord emerged from between her eyes, connected back to the same spot on her living body.

  “Ahh. Good plan.” Dorian smiled, offering a hand. “Shall we?”

  She accepted. “Let’s.”

  They dove together down through the bottom of the car, flying to the motel eight stories below. She leveled off at the parking lot and drifted over to the room where the attack happened. Four twentysomething men in varying degrees of dress from nothing at all to the regalia of the ‘Deth Express’ gang lay passed out among a ridiculous amount of synthbeer canisters and pizza boxes. The table by the window held an assortment of chems: derms, autoinjectors, ampules, and even pills.

  Her attention went straight to the bed, engulfed in a miasma of black energy that somewhat resembled fire. Both men draped over it sideways appeared to be experiencing fitful sleep. The naked guy face-down on the floor in the pile of silver canisters slept soundly, as did the dude in his underpants on the sofa with half a pizza over his face.

  “Wow… retro.” Dorian poked a finger at one pill, making it wobble. “Solids.”

  Having little interest or curiosity in the chems, Kirsten glided over to the bed. Being astral gave her a slightly different perspective, allowing her to see the energy she could only feel otherwise. She held a glowing amber hand out toward the black ‘flames.’ They radiated neither heat nor cold, rather, a palpable sense of malice. It gave her the sense of a spectral stain of sorts, a phantasmal footprint in reality more than anything the ghost may have done intentionally.

  “This guy is so twisted, his presence here affected reality.”

  Dorian walked over, frowning. “The bed soaked up the energy he gave off during the attack. Think it’s like food?”

  “No, he didn’t derive energy from this.”

  “I meant that more in the sense of experiencing food. We’re both operating under the assumption that this spirit had been a criminal in life. That’s not necessarily true. The man could have developed such an intense craving for sex he could no longer obtain, it drove him to do this? Like possessing a person at a restaurant to remember how it felt to eat.”

  Kirsten floated around the bed, not wanting to cross over it, and briefly stuck her head into the wall to check out the next room—empty. She pulled back and rotated to face Dorian. “If a ghost simply missed having sex, he’d randomly jump into someone already doing it. This guy targeted Mia at home and brought her 200 miles away to this place.”

  “True.” He set his fists against his hips. “Maybe because she’s well off? Bring the princess to the slums? Extra trauma?”

  “Could be. I wish I knew why he targeted her.”

  “You assume there’s a reason other than wrong time, wrong place?”

  She drifted around the other side of the room, but picked up no trace of paranormal energy there. “I hope that’s not it. If so, finding this guy’s going to be a chore.”

  “This one is going to be painful.”

  “Yeah. C’mon. Let’s get out of here before someone starts taking shots at the pat-vee.”

  Kirsten flew from room to room, too fast to pay much attention to what the people inside them did, unless she picked up a trace of spiritual energy. Other than a handful of recently murdered gang thugs, the vicinity of the motel held nothing of paranormal interest.

  She grasped the silver cord and shot back to her body in a second, jolting upright in the seat with a gasp. The disorientation of her surroundings changing so abruptly left her woozy, the world spinning. Fortunately, her astral form had no sense of smell, so whatever horrors lurked in the rooms—especially the one with the black stuff growing in the bathtub—had not stained her memory.

  Dorian reappeared beside her. “That was a waste of time, though your thoroughness is an asset.”

  “Being thorough usually has a payoff.” She swiped at the terminal screen, pulling up the results for her search on Rafael’s brother’s associates.

  “Didn’t Eze ask you not to let the P10 inquest steal time from your primary duties?”

  She shrugged. “It’s not like I can do anything else at the moment other than waiting for the next victim to show up. Might as well do something productive.”

  The file showed Juan Miguel Esparza spent most of his time in the company of another Jade Scorpionz member named Nestor Ortega, at least by how often their NetMinis occupied the same location. Kirsten plugged the address into the Navcon and swung the patrol craft around to point in that direction.

  “You’re frustrated and planning to cheat with telepathy, aren’t you?”

  “Yep.” Kirsten narrowed her eyes. “There will be much cheating.”

  Nestor Ortega’s address led to a worn-down looking century tower four blocks away from a grey zone.

  Despite being nineteen, the man had the look of someone in their later twenties with a thick neck and muscular sho
ulders. The expression on his most recent booking photo surprised her: he grinned. Granted, he’d been picked up for discharging a firearm in public without due cause, a minor offense on par with a traffic citation—provided it didn’t occur in a sector full of high-end businesses or wealthy citizens. There, they’d call it ‘public endangerment.’

  Kirsten dove out of the traffic lane at the fiftieth story, chasing the Navcon pin that the computer drew in over the world outside as a giant literal pushpin stuck in the side of a 102-story building. The structure lacked roof parking for hovercars, though it did at least have a small flat spot marked for emergency vehicles only. While she couldn’t call her presence here responding to an emergency situation, she still visited in an official capacity, so didn’t feel too guilty about parking there. Fire suppression units didn’t need to land to do their thing, and she left plenty of room for a MedVan to set down beside her patrol craft.

  The roof access door led to an elevator smelling of lubricant fluid and sweat. She rode it to the thirty-seventh floor and proceeded to apartment 379. A woman in her later forties answered, surprisingly short—only eye level to Kirsten. Two toddler boys crawled around on the floor behind her, and a thin tween girl sat on the sofa watching something on a holo-screen. Thick, warm air laden with the scent of Mexican food, child, and a hint of fruity ‘kid perfume’ rolled out from the open door.

  “Hi. I’m looking for Nestor Ortega. Just need to talk to him for a sec.”

  The woman frowned. “What did he do this time?”

  Kirsten peeked at the woman’s thoughts. Nestor’s mother reacted much the way she imagined most parents would to their kid ‘misbehaving at school,’ likely since Nestor hadn’t been arrested (yet) for anything worse than shoplifting, vandalism, randomly shooting inanimate objects, and of course, gang fights. But Div 1 only arrested people for gang fighting as a means to stop the violence of the moment. Most wound up released within a day or two, unless they attacked the police.

  “I’m not here about anything he may or may not have done, Mrs. Ortega. A friend of his was recently killed. I’m investigating that… wanted to talk to Nestor about what he knows of it.”

  “Oh.” Mrs. Ortega’s posture relaxed. “He’s probably downstairs either in the lobby, the courtyard, or out behind the building with his friends. I think he’ll be surprised anyone’s bothering. They don’t usually put much effort into crimes around here.”

  “We’re overwhelmed,” said Kirsten with a bit of a sigh.

  “And the law works better for people with money.” Dorian wandered past the wall into the apartment.

  Both toddler boys looked up at him, turning their heads to follow as he went by. The maybe-eleven-year-old girl on the sofa showed no reaction. Curious, Kirsten surface-skimmed the boys. They saw a light ball go by… perhaps a product of them being so little. But, neither had any trace of psionic ability.

  “At least you’re honest about the police here.” Mrs. Ortega shook her head. “Juan Miguel was almost like a brother to Nestor. How’s his little brother, Rafael, doing?”

  Kirsten’s heart sank. “He’s… well, he’s off the street.”

  Mrs. Ortega’s eyebrows went up. “Oh, no. He was always such a nice boy.”

  “They always say that,” called Dorian from deeper in the apartment.

  “He’s not hurt. But he’s in a bit of trouble.” Kirsten tried to stay positive. “Still, he’s safe.”

  “Oh, that’s good.” Mrs. Ortega put a hand over her heart, smiling. “Rafael’s a nice, quiet boy. Some other boys from the building were giving my daughter Julie some trouble. I don’t know what Rafael said to them, but they haven’t come near her since.”

  The girl on the couch laughed. “He told them to go away and leave me alone… and if they wanted to grab a butt, grab each other’s butts.” She laughed again. “Julio grabbed Eddie’s ass, and they like got into this big fight.”

  “That was… nice of him.” Kirsten fought hard to keep a straight face.

  Dorian reappeared and walked out into the hall. “Nestor’s not in there. Wonder if his gang buddies know he still lives with his mom.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Ortega. I’ll see if he’s downstairs.”

  The woman nodded. “All right.”

  A few steps away from the door, Kirsten snickered at the ‘lives with his mom’ remark.

  “I suppose that’s a fairly tame thing to do with Suggestion, but the boy is young.” Dorian whistled innocently. “What do you suppose that hotel man you told to go eff himself would’ve done if you didn’t stop him?”

  Kirsten shivered. “One: that was an accident. I didn’t mean it to be a command. Two: I don’t want to know.”

  She stepped into the elevator and rode it to the lobby. The instant the doors opened, a weak eerie feeling prickled at her senses. Kirsten peered out at a mostly empty room, save for a crude doll receptionist—a torso and arms on a post—which had seen better days. Five dosers lay here and there, propped up against the walls, all high enough to be staring into the eighth dimension. None paid any attention to her as she crossed the lobby to a hallway that led past several utility rooms to the alley behind the building.

  Seven people loitered around, sitting on dumpsters, old boxes, or the railing by the basement access of the building across the street. All wore some manner of green, from logo jackets with the Jade Scorpionz symbol to green belts or earrings.

  Nestor Ortega turned out to be quite a bit shorter than she expected from his photo, barely a half inch taller than her, though his arms looked thicker than her thighs. At the sight of her emerging from the building, he smiled and waved.

  The others glanced at her with varying degrees of ‘hey what’s up’ or indifference.

  Kirsten walked over to them. “Nestor, right?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Hey girl.”

  A few of the Scorpionz regarded her with confusion.

  “Yo, that a real uniform?” asked a twentyish teal-haired woman sitting on the railing. Her large cyan eyes brimmed with interest as she studied the lines of Kirsten’s body.

  “Sure is.” The young man beside her in a Jade Scorpionz hoodie raised his head enough to reveal striking amber irises. “The cops have psionics, too. She’s one of ’em.”

  A thin guy and a busty teen girl on the far right stiffened, radiating nervousness at the mention of psionics.

  “They why you bailed on that other group you ran with?” asked the girl with teal hair.

  “Nah. Dude running it was legit psycho.” He stuffed his hands in the front pocket of his hoodie. “Couldn’t shake the feeling a shitstorm was coming.”

  Kirsten glanced at him. Division 0 protocol required trying to talk psionics into joining, though she suspected he’d already been given the sales pitch. “We talk to you already?”

  He nodded.

  “So, what brings you out here?” Nestor stepped closer, offering a handshake.

  “This guy seems oddly friendly,” said Dorian. “Unusual for a street gang. They’re not often happy to see the police. But… he probably knows Zero won’t bust their balls.”

  Kirsten accepted the handshake, reading nothing from the guy’s surface thoughts to indicate hostility. “I’m looking into Juan Miguel’s death. Trying to collect information that might help me figure out who killed him.”

  Nestor’s smile evaporated to an expression of grimness. “You for real?”

  “Yeah.”

  The other Scorpionz murmured in surprise.

  “Yo,” said the teal-haired girl. “You involved ’cause Juan was psionic?”

  “Dude couldn’t have been psionic.” The busty teen rolled her eyes. “He never saw it coming.”

  Nestor shot her a dire glare.

  “Not cool, Val.” The amber-eyed man sighed. “We don’t all see the future. And no, I don’t either.”

  Kirsten cleared her throat to get their attention. “I hadn’t known Juan was psionic, but it makes sense given his brother is.”r />
  “What happened to the little guy?” asked Nestor. “Haven’t seen him in a while.”

  “He’s why I’m on this case. Rafael’s safe, but he got into a little trouble attempting to force a couple cops to find the killer.”

  The Scorpionz all cringed at once.

  “He seems like a good kid. I’m sure he’ll be fine. But, I also promised him I’d find who killed his brother.”

  Nestor shook his head rapidly. “Don’t you go believin’ any of that bullshit about this bein’ some kinda turf war. Juan Miguel vanished for like a week. Then his body turned up here. Alex”—he nodded to indicate the guy with amber eyes—“said he felt real fucked up around the spot.”

  “You think Juan Miguel may have been abducted?” asked Kirsten.

  “Something like that, yeah. He wouldn’t have gone off and left Rafael alone like that. Not unless he got arrested or some shit.” Nestor paced about, muttering to himself. “Just dunno why anyone would’ve taken him out. Juan Miguel didn’t have no static with no one.”

  Dorian tilted his head. “Does that mean he had static with someone, or…?”

  “Do you have any idea who would’ve done it?” asked Kirsten.

  “Had to be some random shit. Maybe some dumbass who sees a dude wearin’ colors but don’t know shit about us so he thinks he’s bein’ a vigilante or somethin’.”

  Kirsten held her left arm up to access the terminal and opened the record for Juan Miguel’s case. “They found him not too far from here.”

  “Yeah.” Nestor pointed down the alley. “Right over there.”

  “Mind showing me the spot? Maybe he’s lingering around.”

  Alex looked up again. “Lingering around? What, like a ghost?”

  Kirsten nodded.

  “You see one around here? Kinda getting that same weird feeling I did around his body, but not as strong.” Alex scanned the area, but didn’t appear to see Dorian.

  “Yes, but not Juan Miguel.” Kirsten started walking down the alley.

  Nestor pushed away from the wall he’d been leaning on and hurried to catch up. “Pretty sure someone dumped him there, covered him up, too. No one around here heard anything happen.”