Fortunately, the school administrator intervened. Kirsten had been spared the points but wound up required to attend extra therapy sessions to deal with her selective mutism. She smirked. She hadn’t considered herself mute, even selectively… merely terrified of grown women. With ghosts, other kids, or non-aggressive men, she could talk just fine.
Kirsten shoved the door open and got out.
A slim girl appeared out of nowhere seated on one of the swings. She looked to be in her early teens, but wore clothing from fifty years ago, back when glowing lines in fabric had been a fad. The young woman gave off energy like a spirit, but not as strong as the eerie presence in the alley across the street from the park. As soon as Kirsten locked eyes with her, the girl jumped in shock—much the way normal people reacted to seeing ghosts.
Kirsten looked back and forth from the spirit to the alley, then decided to go talk to the girl first, her throat nearly closing up with sorrow at the sight of a girl around thirteen who’d died. Dorian followed, looking around at the area.
“Hi,” said the girl.
“Hey,” rasped Kirsten.
She smiled at Dorian. “Wow. I didn’t know they have police on this side.”
“I’m an exception.” He nodded in greeting. “Most of us don’t stick around too long.”
She looked at Kirsten again. “Oh, don’t be sad. I wasn’t this young when I died. At least not when I died physically.”
“What?” Confusion grabbed Kirsten’s building sadness in a headlock and pulled it out of the way of her voice. She cleared her throat. “Died physically?”
The girl smiled. “My mom died when I was fourteen. Dad didn’t cope well, and I wound up taking care of him and my siblings. My childhood died. Making myself look like this reminds me of being happy. I survived to sixty-three, but I’m not sure I ever truly smiled again.”
“Sorry.” Kirsten let out a sigh. I should know better. Kid spirits don’t linger. Either demons or… situations like this. “Is there anything I can help you with…?”
“Mila. Thanks, but I’m not stuck here for revenge or guilt or anything like that. Just chasing my own personal heaven. That’s all any of us can really do, right? Focus on the best parts of our life and try to make them into some version of paradise.”
“Sitting on a swing set?” asked Dorian. “I don’t mean to criticize your choice of haunt, but this area is… a bit bleak.”
“It’s all right.” Mila smiled. “This place is different from how it looked years ago, but I still see it as I remember. I’m trying to remind myself how it felt to be happy and not have to worry about anything.”
A tiny bit of jealousy rose up, but died in seconds. Kirsten had never had such a time in her life. Well, perhaps her life had been normal before she reached six years of age and her powers manifested, but she couldn’t remember anything from that long ago. Plenty of people had wonderful childhoods, and her lack of one shouldn’t make her resent them. If anything, it cemented her resolve to give Evan that kind of life. Some might consider her an indulgent parent, but the boy didn’t seem the type to be spoiled or ungrateful. He deserved whatever happiness she could give him.
“Is it working?” asked Kirsten with a sad smile.
“A bit. Kinda lonely though. Maybe I’ll move on eventually. I used to play here before the area became bad. It’s so weird to meet someone who can see me.”
“There aren’t many astrals.” Kirsten gestured at the alley. “Did you notice anything strange happen in that alley over there?”
Mila stopped swinging. “Yes. I’m not sure how long ago it happened… time is somewhat fuzzy to me. But, I remember seeing some men pull a dead man out of a van and drop him there. People came by and took his things. Then this burst of black fog blew out of him.”
“Burst of black fog?” Kirsten’s eyebrows went up. “Do you remember when that happened compared to when those guys dumped the body?”
“No… it felt like minutes to me, but it could’ve been days.”
Dorian scratched at his chin. “If you’re daydreaming of the past most of the time, that’ll happen. Time gets blurry for us on this side. I do tend to lose track of when I’m not actively following my partner around.”
“So you’re not bored at night?” Kirsten blinked, then smiled at him. “That makes me feel better.”
“Not usually, no. Feels like you leave for the day and come back in a few minutes. Gives me time to recharge.”
Kirsten faced the alley. “So, those guys left the body here, people looted it, then at some later point, you observed a release of black vapor?”
Mila nodded.
“Did the body give off any strange feelings prior to that?” asked Kirsten.
“A little, but I didn’t get too close. Dead people freak me out.” Mila shivered.
Dorian chuckled.
“Oh, not ghosts.” She laughed. “Just bodies. I know it sounds stupid since I’m dead, but, they still bug me.”
“Thank you for the info.” Kirsten turned back to smile at Mila. “If you ever think you need me to help you with anything, please let me know… like passing a message to the living.”
“I appreciate that. Alas, my siblings are all gone and I never had kids,” said Mila, no trace of regret in her voice. “At the moment, this place is everything I need.”
“All right.” Kirsten managed to smile at her despite her appearing to have died way too young. “I need to go work on a case.”
Mila waved, and resumed swinging.
Kirsten headed out of the old park, crossing the street and going past the patrol craft into the alley. This sector had shorter, more spread out buildings rather than the usual high-rises that made her feel like a bug walking at the bottom of pile carpeting. The instant she passed the corner, a sense of spectral gloom intensified.
Cold wisps surrounded her legs as though she waded into a standing cloud of heavy air, thicker and more fluid than the rest of the atmosphere. All the windows visible from the alley appeared filled with black smoke. Up ahead, a half-block long section of alley had taken on the washed out sepia tone of the astral realm.
“There could be a rip here.” Kirsten gestured at the shadowy windows. “Last time I saw that, we were pretty close to a gateway.”
“Charles Prentice,” whispered Dorian. “I mean, where he died.”
Kirsten nodded once, continuing to advance. The abyssal energy tainting this area seemed much stronger than the other sites, almost aware. She stared into all the hiding places and black windows, increasingly certain that an entity of some kind—quite likely an abyssal—watched her.
“Oh, you know I’m here, don’t you?” She stopped walking in the area of washed-out color, and turned about, studying every shadow. “Why don’t you do us both a favor and just stay on your side of the line, huh?”
Nothing appeared, spoke, or made a noise… though she found the complete silence here stranger than any spirit.
Not even the whirr of a distant ad-bot reached her. Kirsten’s heartbeat and breathing filled in where all of West City had ceased. A sense of something moving to her right made her swivel, though no apparitions manifested. She couldn’t quite call it ‘malice’ per se, but an apparition made of dread incarnate and wrapped in fear stalked her… or at least observed her from a distance.
“Guess you’re not in a talking mood then. Maybe you haven’t crossed over yet, but if you do, I’m going to have to send you back. Can we maybe skip that whole runaround?”
Kirsten gazed up past the six-story buildings surrounding her at the relatively clear—albeit sepia-colored—sky. Are those Seraphim watching me? She pictured the two she’d seen, the counterparts of Harbingers… One, a woman with scintillating wings of white-blue energy ribbons, the other, a man with flaming, feathered wings. They sure looked a lot like Mother’s mythological ‘angels,’ but that did make sense in a way. The Seraphim likely had shown themselves to people a long time ago, and, as they had done with Kirsten, probabl
y didn’t offer much of any explanations… so humans filled in the missing parts by guessing.
A blur of shadows raced by on the left. She spun, but not fast enough to see anything.
“Are you here or teasing me from the other side?”
Shaking, Kirsten reached out with a mental feeler, searching for the thin spot between realms. For no reason she could understand, the idea of locating a breach between the tangible and astral worlds frightened her. Projecting didn’t bother her. She’d seen the Astral Realm plenty of times, but a hole in the fabric of the world offered the risk of being drawn across physically. Not knowing how a living body would react to the energies of that place worried her.
Now, more than ever before in her life, she couldn’t let herself die. Not with Evan needing her.
Like a child venturing into a creepy basement, Kirsten edged deeper into the alley, drawn toward a side passage that gave off a somewhat more intense darkness than the rest of the area. She grasped the corner of a grungy thermacrete building in both hands and peered around into a narrow channel full of jutting component boxes and narrow pipes. A person could squeeze down there, but it would be far from comfortable. Only windblown trash stared back at her, despite her near certainty that something watched.
“Last chance to talk. I’m about to leave since you only seem to be toying with me. I don’t think you’ve really crossed over yet.” She eased away from the maintenance passage, eyeing her surroundings. After a moment of nothing appearing or speaking, she sighed. “Yeah… you’re just playing with my head.”
Grumbling, Kirsten returned to the patrol craft, flopped in the driver’s seat, and pulled up the Navcon. The prior two plots stood out as forming a curved line… and when she added the location of the fourth victim, Diego Rojas—a member of the Angels gang—she blinked at the clear hint of a circle.
“Crap.”
“What?” asked Dorian.
She added victim five, another John Doe who belonged to a gang called the Dead Boyz, then stared at the five dots on the Navcon screen surrounding a large black zone with Sector 4196 as its heart, one additional five-mile-square sector in each direction also blacked out, with a two-sector-deep layer of grey around it. In short, a horrible place.
“It’s a damn pentacle.” She pointed at the Navcon. “A five pointed star. Juan Miguel in Sector 4141, John Doe #1 in 4350, Lin Tran in 4354, John Doe #2 in 4147 and Diego Rojas in 3988. The bodies were discovered in five locations that outline a pentacle with a freakin’ giant disavowed area at the center.”
“Wouldn’t that be a pentagram?” Dorian glanced at her.
“Why, because it’s being used for something dark?”
Dorian gestured at the screen. “No, because two points are on the north end, the single point to the south. That’s an inversion of the elemental star. I have no idea if it actually matters, but the practitioners of dark occultism reverse it on purpose.”
“Fair point but…” Kirsten folded her arms. “These are Diablos. Do you really think they’ve managed to figure out legit occultism?”
“Did you or did you not feel something in that alley?”
She shivered, not from the energy, rather the idea that people as psychotic as Diablos might have unlocked genuine… something. Her brain refused to call it magic. “Well, it might just be theatrics. The Diablos could have simply dumped the bodies in a five-pointed-star arrangement to draw their symbol on the map.”
“Possible. Though, an entity of some kind was lurking in that alley.” Dorian floated up in his seat, sticking his head out through the roof. “It’s still there, but it’s not showing itself.”
“Any idea what it is?”
“Feels like a weak abyssal. Perhaps the same critter that threw the Oblivion guy out the window—or tried to.” He sank back into the car.
Kirsten scrunched her eyebrows together. “Oblivion guy?”
“Adrienne’s apartment? Possessed that big dude who shit his pants. If I remember correctly, his rear end was perilously close to your face at the time.”
“Ugh. Stop. Yeah, okay, I remember.” She shuddered. “That thing has been running around for a while yet, laying low. I’m fairly sure Konstantin summoned it as a trial run for Char—the big flea.”
Dorian chuckled. “Now I’ve got you refusing to say the name. Don’t tell me you’ve become superstitious.”
“No sense tempting fate. But, the one from Adrienne’s has been around for a while. The Diablos wouldn’t have summoned it… at least not with these five murders.”
“Maybe they haven’t summoned anything at all, but whatever they attempted to do attracted it.”
Kirsten flipped screens and read over the case notes. “The Diablos are believed to reside in Sector 4196. This could just be their version of putting the heads of their enemies on posts as a warning. They’ve drawn a pentagram around their home base with corpses.”
“So, perfectly normal stuff for a Diablo to do on a weekend.” Dorian cocked his head at her.
She grabbed the control sticks. “Might as well check the other two spots.”
“Hoping to find something in particular?”
“At this point, finding anything new would be an improvement. Am I expecting to? Not really. But I have to be thorough.” She pulled the patrol craft into the air, oriented it toward the next Navcon dot, and accelerated.
“Right.”
A moment passed filled with only the soft thrum of the car’s electronics.
“Dorian?”
He glanced over.
“How do I tell if I’ve stepped over the thin line between being thorough and wasting time?”
“That’s a good question. If humanity ever figures it out, let me know.”
Kirsten sighed, and accelerated. “If I’m going to waste time, I might as well waste as little as possible.”
11
Subject to Interpretation
Diego Rojas had been dumped in a vacant lot near the sector border, partially buried in a mound of wires and hoses.
Kirsten landed the patrol craft right in the lot since it had enough space. Trash, plastic hoses, and small fragments of whatever building used to stand there skittered away from the ionic downblast of the engines. She watched the thin blue sparks dance around on the plastisteel ground for a few seconds, then stared off to the south at the increasingly intact buildings moving away from the grey zone toward Sector 4040 a few hundred meters north of her.
As with everyone the Diablos had killed—at least in relation to this apparent ritual—the victim had been left near the separation between civilization and grey. Disavowed sectors or ‘black zones’ had a tendency to spread decay outward as those with money or a sense of self-preservation left the areas around them, allowing in the desperate poor and even more gangs.
She didn’t know what caused the creeping blight to stop, but every grey zone eventually had an edge… or at least slowed down its expansion enough to feel like a border had formed. Maybe the kids who went off for colony adoptions had the right idea. Earth, at least in the United Coalition Front, did seem to be woefully overcrowded and bleak. AIs and dolls had taken over almost every job here that didn’t require advanced education or a ‘human touch.’ No one quite accepted artificial people running a day care center, for example.
This, of course, created vast amounts of idle youth with no hope of escaping life on the streets—at least not without leaving the planet. Fortunately, OmniSoy provided such a cheap source of food that the population of fringers didn’t starve. Between Cyberburger’s charity (mostly motivated for good PR), government assistance, and dumpster-diving, anyone on the street that thought to look for it could find something to eat. Southern West City had more fringers due to the warmer climate.
Diego Rojas had been part of the Angels gang, named for the area they considered their territory. Centuries ago, it had been called Los Angeles… or rather the ground seventy-five meters below the city surface had been called that. Whatever remain
ed of LA sat beneath the city plates, out of sight.
Kirsten exited the patrol craft and looked over the roof at a mound of electrical junk, trash, and hoses. The area held a charge of dark supernatural energy, but more in a residual way. Unlike the last site, nothing here made her feel as if something watched her. She let off a belabored sigh and walked over to crouch by the spot where she assumed the body had been concealed.
“This area is…” Dorian whistled. “Pretty rough for a grey zone. They’re going to black this one out in a few years, I bet.”
“Am I picking up on a ritual, or is this place tainted because of all the awful stuff that happens here?” She traced her fingers over a length of ridged black hose. “Diego Rojas, are you still around somewhere?”
Eyes closed, she beaconed into the Astral Realm, calling out to his spirit.
“Oh, shit,” muttered Dorian, breaking her concentration a moment later.
Her thoughts returned to the physical world and the crunch of footsteps approaching from behind. Kirsten leapt to her feet, spinning with a hand on her E-90. A group of mostly men drew close, all wearing the dirty torn-up clothes of street-dwelling fringers. None displayed gang logos, though more than half had obvious cybernetics, including the man her attention focused on.
A startlingly tall guy with a scarecrow thin frame stood at the middle of the pack, his already imposing stature made more threatening by a pair of metal arms, each as long as her legs. Shaggy dark green hair half covered a long, narrow face studded with patches of beard growing around scars.
“That’s close enough,” said Kirsten when they reached about ten feet away.
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