The Hunter

by Melissa Faye

  Did someone kill the traveler?

  I pulled up the Face Finder and enlarged a picture of the traveler’s face.

  “Do you know this man?” I held it out for the doorman to see.

  “Yes! That’s him!”

  “Where did he go? Did he get away already?” Harrison asked.

  “No, of course not. The ambulance is coming for him. He’s the one who was killed!”

  Harrison and I snuck out of the lobby as we heard sirens coming. The doorman was in shock, but a resident walked by and listened to him tell the story again.

  We unlocked our bikes.

  “So the man I found wasn’t the traveler. Then why was he at both crime scenes when the other victims were murdered?” Harrison asked discretely. We kept an eye out one everyone around us. Could any of them be the actual traveler?

  The traveler had murdered a third person. This time it was in the middle of the day in the victim’s own home. He was hunting his victims down and taking them out with no pattern I could discern. Another person killed, and I was no closer to understanding what was going on.

  THE TRAVELER HAD COVERED his tracks well. According to the detectives I saw at the warehouse, the traveler left no genetic clues behind. Now he murdered one of his own accomplices in the middle of the day in the accomplice’s home without a trace.

  I pulled up the Face Finder program and saw the accomplice’s face appear. It made me shudder. I adjusted the program to run a search of the two crime scenes and now the accomplice’s apartment to see if any faces matched across all three locations. I didn’t expect anything to come out of it, and I was right.

  Meanwhile, I spent the afternoon in the dining hall plugging away on my computer. I had only hacked police records a few times, and not in several years, so I expected that would take more time. I needed to see exactly what they found in the victims’ autopsies.

  Honey was grabbing a late lunch and sat with me while I divided my time between a peanut butter sandwich and my laptop. She raised her eyebrows when I tried to discretely shift the laptop out of her line of sight.

  “Homework?”

  “Yup, more homework.” I smiled uncomfortably.

  Honey took a few bites of her food.

  “Did you know I’m going pre-med?”

  “No, I had no idea. When did you decide?”

  “Ages ago, I think.” Honey took more bites of food and avoided eye contact with me. “I always wanted to be a doctor. Or a medical researcher. But I’m saying, if you want someone to talk to you about organic chemistry stuff, you can talk to me.”

  I pursed my lips.

  “It’s not that I know everything yet. But I’ve done plenty of reading. I took all the advanced classes in high school. And I’ve seen you before, looking up stuff about hormones and biology. And now that.” Honey nodded towards my screen.

  I had pulled up the crime lab’s diagram of the compositions of the two drugs found in each victims’ bloodstream. Like the CI said, they read like a combination of a chemical formula and a computer system. There were dozens of combinations of elements, but they snaked back and forth between one another. The diagram on the screen was a mess itself. There was typing, then hand-writing, and a few sketches of how a few of the pieces fit together.

  I slid the laptop towards Honey.

  “Okay. What do you make out of that?”

  She leaned over the computer with me. She traced her fingers over the path someone noted between different formulas. I waited while she studied the document, and scrolled up or down when asked.

  “I don’t understand what you’re trying to do.” She squinted at the screen. “You’re referencing all different compounds, but it’s like a robot. If this, then that. If this reaction and this chemical at this amount, then this reaction and move onto Step #45. Is this for one of your projects?”

  “I didn’t make this.” I bit my thumbnail. “Do you know any of the formulas?”

  “It’s not really like that. See this one right here?” She pointed to a section of text towards the top of the file. “That’s related to human growth hormones. But it’s different, like someone took the two dimensional structure, twisted it around, and stuck it on the side of something else.”

  “What do you think it does?”

  “I thought you - never mind.” Honey shook her head. “That’s the only piece I understand, the hormone. But it’s also in this diagram over here.” She pointed to the second page, where the second injection’s materials were diagrammed awkwardly in blue ink.

  “This second one, here. This program keeps referring to the hormone again and again. Like it’s trying to find more of it, or remove a lot of it, or make more of it.”

  “Does that hormone have anything to do with aging, by chance?”

  “You mean like turning someone gray and old when they’re only 22?” Honey smirked and kept going. “Yes, but it’s the opposite. This hormone stimulates cell reproduction and regeneration, among other things. So it wouldn’t make anyone very old all of a sudden.”

  I scrolled through some of the CI’s own analyses. We were all on the same path. HGH was involved. The CI located a few other relevant hormones that I would need to look up. The programming component was both more and less confusing. I didn’t see how it fit together because I didn’t understand what the chemicals were doing. But I could see the logical reasoning in place. If this, then that, like Honey said.

  The more I stared at the two injections, the clearer the pattern became in my head. I pulled out scrap paper so I could draw the design. If A, then B, then C, but then if D, then E. The scrap paper wasn’t big enough for all of the if/thens. Honey nodded encouragingly.

  “Alright, Nancy Drew,” she said. “You keep me posted.”

  Like I said: Honey knew a lot more than people gave her credit for.

  Chapter 5

  PROFESSOR GARVEY AGREED to meet with me early Monday morning. I came prepared with a one page synopsis of the two chemical trails found in each victim. Each program was set to do something different to the victims’ physiology, but I needed help figuring out what exactly it was.

  “Another thought experiment, June?” Professor Garvey joined me at the large lab table at the front of her classroom. “What am I looking at this time?”

  I pushed a copy of the paper her way.

  “I can see there are two chemicals involved. They do something similar, but I’m not sure what yet. The strangest part may be how the chemicals react to one another and to whatever they’re acting on.”

  “Whatever they’re acting on?” Professor Garvey stared at me before looking down at the sheet of paper.

  “Yes. For instance, if the chemical is injected into a rat. Or a spider. Or...a person.”

  Professor Garvey furrowed her brow but began a dutiful inspection of the paper. She analyzed it like I did - tracing the pattern of different reactants as they passed through the implied logic system. She got to the second one and did the same, only stopping when she got to the repeats.

  “June, where did you get these?”

  I paused.

  “...Thought experiment?”

  “This isn’t a thought experiment. You’re either trying to invent a strange new biological nanobot, or you’ve found someone else’s and want to figure out what it does. And all the compounds related to human growth and aging make me wonder how this is connected to the recent slate of age-related murders we’ve seen.”

  I looked away. It was one thing to invite Harrison along. It was another thing to let Honey help out without telling her the truth. But Professor Garvey?

  Professor Garvey sighed.

  “Are you sure each of the victims had both of these in their system?”

  “I’m not sure I -”

  “Come on, June.”

  I covered my face with my hands.

  “Yes. Both victims were injected with both compounds.”

  “I’m talking about the third victim. The middle aged man who was
killed in his home.”

  I hadn’t looked at that coroner’s report. It never occurred to me that his evidence would be any different.

  “No. I don’t know about him. Why do you think he would have a different injection?”

  The professor pointed to one of the two chemical programs - or biological nanobots, as she called them.

  “Look at this one. This one is pulling chemicals out of the victim. It’s much more straightforward than the other one.”

  I compared the two. They were the same length, but Professor Garvey had a point. One was much simpler than the other.

  “The other bio-nanobots, if you’ll allow me to coin a term, are significantly more complicated. For example, this part over here is unrelated to any of the victims’ processes. That chemical is often related to biological tracking tools. It’s a small part of the formula that only works to track whoever was injected.”

  “What about the rest?”

  “The simpler injection is pulling chemicals out. The more complex one, besides tracking the person, is stimulating growth of a variety of chemicals over time. As if it’s turning the person into a slightly different version of himself.”

  I was starting to dislike biology more and more as the year went on. If I could read chemical compounds like this, I’d be much better at my job. Unfortunately, most of this was lost on me.

  “Why does that make you think the third victim would be treated any differently?”

  “First, because the other murders were planned. They’d have to be planned to remove a young man at his physical peak from his surroundings and bring him somewhere different to inject the second chemical. The third man’s murder wasn’t planned as carefully. No tracker was necessary. The murderer knew him. Plus, a young man’s body would have a stronger reaction the tracker chemical. An older man wouldn’t have as large a concentration of these hormones within his system for the more complex program to accomplish meaningful results.”

  So the traveler found his victims ahead of time, then administered an injection that prepared him for the second injection and allowed the traveler to track the victim until he was ready to kill. It reminded me of the way hunters tracked big game before eventually killing them.

  Getting Professor Garvey involved might be a very good idea after all.

  RIDGE DIDN’T APPROVE of how much Honey and Professor Garvey knew about my investigation. We exchanged angry texts back and forth before I refused to talk to him anymore.

  “I don’t know what’s going on between you and Ridge, but he’s driving me crazy.” Harrison snuck behind me as I walked towards class that afternoon. He showed me his phone.

  “A dozen texts about how irresponsible you’re being. I stopped responding.”

  “Me too. Sorry. That’s why he’s annoying you now.”

  Harrison held my hand.

  “Do you think he’s right, Wires? About Honey and Professor Garvey? Maybe you should stay away from them for a while.”

  “I live with Honey. And I have the professor’s class tomorrow.”

  We stopped in front of my class building.

  “Besides, I trusted you, didn’t I? And look how that turned out!” I smirked. The first time Harrison helped me with a traveler, I erased his memory of it. I didn’t know him and didn’t want to take the chance of him telling everyone about my part time work as a time travel vigilante. I didn’t want to make that mistake again...But it felt like I needed more people on my team these days.

  “Are there others you’ve trusted? Besides me and Leslie Leslie?”

  “No.” I chewed on my fingernail. Things were moving faster all of a sudden. Like that first traveler with the cube and the message from my dad opened up the flood gates. “I don’t think I’ve ever had this many travelers in a row. And I’ve never been surrounded by people like Honey and the other girls. It’s hard to keep secrets here.”

  “Do you trust Honey and do you trust Professor Garvey?” Harrison asked.

  “Yeah. Yes. I definitely do.”

  “If you trust them, I do too.” Harrison kissed me on the top of my head before letting go of my hand. “But you have to update me later. Ridge mentioned nanobots. That sounds awesome.”

  I spent the next several days pouring over the CI’s data. Just as Professor Garvey suspected, the middle-aged man only had one of the two chemicals present in his body. He was an irregularity - not part of the pattern. Someone who’d helped the traveler and was killed for it.

  Thursday evening, we found out that a junior disappeared. The college sent out a schoolwide email saying that they didn’t know what happened, that the police were investigating, and that they couldn’t say more. The details quickly emerged through a gossip train that spread across the campus within hours.

  Rami Emam, 21, didn’t come back to his dorm after his last class Wednesday afternoon. His roommate was already nervous because Rami was acting strange. He complained he wasn’t feeling like himself - he felt “off.” Hyped up like he’d had too much coffee. When Rami didn’t come back to the dorm overnight and wasn’t answering his phone the next morning, his roommate reported it to campus security.

  The school brought the issue to the police after several hours of confusion. No one knew where Rami was, and no one was sure whether it was a big deal or not. College students sleep over at other people’s dorms. College students don’t turn off their phones, but if they’re out, their phones’ batteries run out of power. But because of the other murders and Rami’s complaints about how he felt - plus the roommate’s assurances that Rami wasn’t having a secret fling - the school needed to let the police know.

  It was my first new lead in days. It was easy to find out where Rami lived; everything about him was shared online as people’s panic grew. I excused myself from dinner with my roommate Lacey in the dining hall and headed for Rami’s dorm room.

  His whole floor was eerily quiet. The few people I saw were sitting together, whispering to one another. I received several rude stares and comments when I knocked on Rami’s door.

  “Judd’s not there,” someone called from behind me. “He’s staying at a friend’s tonight.”

  I tried the door. It was locked.

  “Get out of here!” the same person yelled. I turned to see an irritable upperclassman in a college sweatshirt sitting with two other guys.

  “I wanted to talk to Judd about -”

  “Yeah, about Rami. It’s none of your business.”

  “Maybe, but -”

  “Get out.”

  I huffed as I walked away. Right before I got to the stairs, I noticed the men’s room to my left. I peeked inside.

  It was set up exactly like the women’s restroom on my floor. A large tiled floor with stalls and showers. There was a row of shelving to the left where students stored their shower caddies. I scanned the plastic tubs until I found one that read “EMAM.”

  I could use one of my inventions, Ridge’s Map, and a sample of Rami’s genetic material to track Rami no matter where he was, even if he wasn’t visible on video cameras around the city. I pulled a piece of scrap paper from my messenger bag and used it to pull Rami’s toothbrush from his caddy. I folded the paper around it and put it into the bag’s front pocket.

  The door slammed open.

  “Hey! What are you -”

  I turned away from whoever was yelling at me this time and rushed past them out the door, down the stairs, and out of the dorm. I texted Harrison, and he met me outside the dorm ten minutes later.

  “Do you really think Rami was taken by the traveler?” Harrison stood over me as I sat on a cement planter.

  I had already taken out Ridge’s Map and used it to find Rami’s location. Ridge’s Map was a small box that looked like a compass, except the top had a screen. I placed a genetic sample on a thin tray, then pushed it into the slot on the side. Future technology and a few adjustments worked their magic, and Rami’s location was displayed on the screen. He was in the Meatpacking District, like
the second victim, but several blocks away. I showed Harrison.

  “It looks like it.” My heart beat fast as I imagined what was happening to Rami as we spoke. He had obviously been injected with something before he was abducted. Maybe it was a week or more when the traveler found him. Then he was hunted down, stolen away after his class, and now who knows what was happening in that warehouse.

  Harrison gently took Ridge’s Map out of my hand.

  “Did you call the police?”

  “What are they gonna do? The traveler might kill them.”

  Harrison sighed and pulled out his phone. I had set it up so his identity was masked, like mine was on my phone. No traveler would be able to pull up his contacts or anything else unless the phone was physically in their hands. It also meant Harrison could call the police without being traced.

  “Hello, yes. Is this the hotline about the missing City University of Technology student?...Yes, that’s right. Rami Emam. I think I know where he was taken.” Harrison read the address off Ridge’s Map. “Got it?” He listened to the response, then abruptly hung up.

  I shivered in the cold November air. Harrison sat with me and put an arm around my shoulders.

  “The police will get there in time, I’m sure.”

  I shook my head. The police wouldn’t be able to stop this traveler. He was able to hide from video cameras. He wasn’t going to get caught by the cops. Travelers were always, always one step ahead.

  “I’m going down there. Do you want to come?” I stood and put Ridge’s Map back in my bag.

  Harrison opened his mouth as if to speak.

  “I’m going. Don’t argue with me. Are you coming or not.”

  “Coming, boss.”

  We took the subway downtown. Rush hour traffic made everything take longer than I wanted it to take. I couldn’t talk to Harrison on the ride. I was thinking about Rami and what could be happening to him right that second.

  It took us over an hour to get down there.