The BETA Agency Read online

  “Close. Vasmine.”

  “I want it. Bad night?” she asked, because she knew I wouldn’t take my time to bath after Crawer called.

  “Kattie. She woke me up. With cake.”

  “Cake?”

  “Cake.”

  “Kattie?”

  “Kattie.”

  Evon looked mystified, but pleased. “She’s getting better.”

  “She’s trying harder.”

  Crawer was waiting for us on the fifth floor. He was a Lillith, which meant bone white skin, black hair, and red eyes. When he was irritated, he looked especially unsettling. “Are you girls going to spend all night yammering?”

  “Don’t get your underwear in a bunch, sir,” Evon said, because of every enforcer in Crystal Lake, she was without doubt the one who gave the least mucks about rank.

  Crawer led us into an apartment, the scene of the crime. There was a body on the floor, face covered with a blood soaked cloth. There was blood pooled underneath its head. A forensics team was hard at work already.

  Al Scrubb, head of the forensics team, walked up to us with a bio-scanner in his hand. “No fingerprints, or DNA, except for the victim’s.”

  “The killer was wearing gloves,” Crawer said.

  “No residue bio-mana either,” said Scrubb.

  “Really?” Evon looked surprised. Bio-mana was almost impossible not to leave behind. Almost.

  “The only way to erase residue is to use a bio-mana dissipater,” I said.

  Evon nodded. “Or to have impeccable control over your bio-mana emission.”

  “Either way, he’s a pro,” I mumbled.

  One analyst tossed a metal ball into the air. The ball floated around the room, throwing out multiple beams. When it floated back into his hand, the analyst said, “Visual is complete, sir.”

  “Upload it,” Scrubb said.

  As soon as the analyst complied, our cell-comms beeped. Evon accessed the upload, and an exact holographic replica of the room, analysts and all, hovered above her screen. Her cell started to analyze evidence.

  Me, I preferred using my eyes. As Crawer talked, I walked around the apartment.

  “The door shows signs of forced entry. Victim doesn’t have a domestic A.I. installed, so that’s a dead end. Neighbours said they heard the shots around the second hour. Accounts help us estimate that the shooting started roughly at about fifteen moments into the hour,” Crawer said. “Emergency call centre says she called at twenty moments in.”

  I looked at the shattered utensils, and the singed walls in the kitchen. I looked at the wall opposite the kitchen; it was clean. So, the attack had been mostly one-sided. Judging by the burn spreads, the assailant had stood in one place as he fired. I noticed the armchair in the trajectory.

  I walked towards it and sat down. Then, I stood up again and played at shooting the blast burns. Perfect match. The killer had been waiting for her. Sitting in her chair.

  Cocky bastard.

  “She would have noticed the forced entry,” I said. “And she’s Lillith, so she would have sensed the intruder too. She still waited till there was a blaster pointed at her to dial triple nil?”

  “Maybe she knew her killer,” Crawer said.

  “Maybe she was just stupid,” Evon muttered.

  Crawer shrugged. “They say the screaming started soon after the shooting.”

  I frowned. “From a blaster?” The pain of the weakest blaster could knock most grown men out cold.

  “No, she wasn’t killed with the blaster.”

  Evon looked incredulously at the burns around the apartment. “Oh, please, there’s no way he was such a bad shot. Not if he…”

  “Or she,” I chipped in.

  “…Had the guts to wait in the mucking armchair for her,” Evon finished.

  I shook my head. “So, the killer was toying with her?”

  “He was,” Crawer said. “He was toying with her so that he could do this.” He tapped on his cell-comm, and a sound bite started to play:

  There’s a killer in my apartment, the voice rasped. Please send someone! Send someone now—ah! There was the sound of a scuffle. A thump. Silence—long, uncomfortable. Then there was screaming. So much screaming.

  My stomach churned, and Crawer stopped the recording.

  “What did he do to her?” I whispered.

  Crawer nodded grimly at the body.

  We walked up to the body, and I lifted the sheet off her face.

  Evon swore. Bile rose up my throat.

  The body’s face had been sliced off.

  CHAPTER 4

  I stared at the mess of flesh for a moment longer. The killer had posed her: her inky black hair had been fanned out to frame the gore, and to contrast against her ashen skin. It was like a work of art. A sick work of art. I dropped the sheet.

  “A lot of rage,” I muttered. “Wonder if it was personal.”

  Evon had stopped swearing, but then, she had already looked away.

  “Who is she?” I asked.

  “That’s where we’re having a slight problem,” Crawer said. “She doesn’t seem to have any physical or digital ID. We checked the name the apartment is registered under.”

  “And?”

  “A Juun Albright. Except Juun is a Ruby who died three years ago in Hiti. You may have noticed that our victim here is Lillith. Oh also, did I mention that Juun was a man?”

  “Damn unisex Ruby names,” Evon mumbled.

  “No ID, so no credit code,” I said. “She must’ve made transactions under another name.”

  Crawer nodded. “But there’s no record of any transactions under the name Juun Albright after his death. She must’ve had a credit code under some other dead sucker’s name. Then again, that wouldn’t slip under any bank’s radar for very long.”

  “Great,” I grumbled. “And she’s unrecognizable, so we can’t do a facial ID. Aren’t there any cameras in this building?”

  Crawer rolled his eyes. “You don’t think if there were cameras that it would be the first thing I brought up? You think we’d be standing here weighing mucking options?”

  “Any of the neighbours have pictures? Do they know any of her friends?”

  “I’ve sent some of the guys door to door, but from the initial responses, I’m guessing we won’t be getting squat from anybody. Seems like she generally kept to herself. For obvious reasons, we can’t use a sketch, not for a facial ID.”

  True. Sketches were notorious for drawing a ludicrous number of false matches in the facial recognition programs.

  “Ugh, I hate this,” I said. “So then, that leaves her bio-mana signature.”

  “Forensics is on it. There was no match in Crystal Lake, or the Metro State, so they’re going to have to cross-reference with every bio-mana entry in Aurora.”

  I sighed. “That will take forever. At least a day.”

  “Or two,” Crawer admitted.

  “By then the trail will be so cold, we could preserve the victim on it for the funeral,” Evon complained.

  “So,” I said. “What next?”

  “What’s next,” Crawer sighed, turning around, “is that now we go home and hope the victim isn’t a ghost on the bio-mana database too. Moral of this story, kids? Don’t be anti-social.”

  Evon and I watched helplessly as our boss walked out the door.

  “It grinds my leaves, how quickly he gives up,” Evon snorted. “How did he become sergeant, anyway?”

  “Wheedling,” I said, without humour. “Wheedling, and an uncle in the governor’s office.”

  We left the apartment to talk with the other enforcers. But Crawer was right. The guys had already talked to as many neighbours as they could. No one knew the victim. No one had any pictures, or video.

  We had never faced so many dead ends in so short a time.

  It was morn on the dot by the time we exited the apartment building again. The skies were tingeing a beautiful azure, but I was too overwhelmed with frustration to appreciate them.
There were a few reporters waiting on the street. We ignored their questions and walked right past them.

  “Want a ride?” I asked Evon, because she didn’t drive.

  Just as she began to answer, a blue two-seat transporter in even worse shape than mine screeched to a stop next to us. A flustered Lillith leapt out of it.

  “What happened? What’s going on?” she cried, and tried to rush towards the building.

  I rushed after her, to stop her before she slammed into the light-barrier and hurt herself. “Calm down, miss,” I said. “What’re you doing here?”

  “I-I heard on the news. There was a shooting. A shooting here!” She was hysterical.

  “Are you looking for someone?” Evon asked.

  “Yes. Please. My best friend.”

  “What’s her name?” I asked.

  The woman stared at me, with hope in her wine coloured eyes. “Her name is Juun Albright.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Back at the station, I stood in the observation room, and looked through a glass pane into the opposite room. The Lillith woman was sitting at the interrogation table. She had been crying.

  Evon came in. “Her ID checks out. The name is Bel Trufford. She works at a local dessert shop. The manager there confirmed having a Juun Albright on staff, but it’s such a small shop, they don’t keep pictures of employees. They don’t have cameras either so Tech is trying to see if it can pick up a visual on her from street surveillance.” She looked up from her tablet. “Want to take this, or should I?”

  “Let me,” I said, and stepped out of the room. I entered the adjacent door.

  Bel looked up when I stepped in. Her eyes were the brightest red I’d ever seen on a Lillith. Maybe they all had eyes this bloody when they cried. I didn’t know. This was the first time I had seen a member of the people cry. They were proud creatures.

  “She invited me over for ice cream, you know?” she said, when I didn’t move. “If I had said yes, if I had gone over, then maybe…then maybe…”

  ‘Then maybe you would be dead too’ was what I thought. “There’s nothing you could have done,” was what I said.

  She dropped her eyes, and I took a seat. I offered her a small pack of tissues from my pocket. She thanked me, and blew her nose.

  “So you knew Juun from the Dessert Inn?” I asked.

  “We’ve worked together for three years,” Bel said.

  “Friends?”

  “Yes. Good friends.”

  “Do you remember the first time you met her?”

  “I almost didn’t get the job at the Dessert Inn, do you know?” She sounded so distant. “The owner, Opa Finch? He’s a native of the Hiti world. He says Hitis are the best employees for a dessert shop.”

  I thought of the Hitis, and their stout, comically round bodies and perpetual smiles. Her boss had a point.

  “He says nobody wants to see pale skin, and red eyes when they’re buying frozen yoghurt.”

  I waited patiently for her to make her point.

  “But I needed the job. I was fresh out of college, and too few people were hiring a girl with a degree in Literature. I think it only made it worse that I was a Lillith girl who had chosen to study Rubian Literature. Anyway, I begged him for days. Finally, he hired me. But it was lonely, you know? Being a Lillith in a store full of Hitis. The Hitis are nice, don’t get me wrong, but you know…”

  I waited for the stupid stereotype.

  “They’re a little dumb,” she finally stuttered.

  There it was.

  “Then Juun applied for the assistant manager position. I remember the first time she stepped into the shop, I was shocked by how beautiful she was. And I could tell she was smart. Oh, it was so obvious. They say all Lilliths are smart, but it’s not true. Not really. But Juun, she was smart. So brilliant. Opa hired her without a second thought. She was so beautiful, and funny, and competent. And she wanted to be my friend. ” She looked up again, out of breath from her rambling. Then she said, “So, I let her.”

  “Do you know anyone who would want to hurt her? Vindictive exes, maybe someone she didn’t get along with at work?”

  Bel shook her head. “Juun mostly kept to herself, but she was a sweetheart.”

  I nodded. “One last thing: in all the time that you knew Juun, did you ever call her by any other name, or hear someone call her by another name?”

  Bel’s face was a tribute to bewilderment.

  “Never mind,” I sighed. “Tell me you have some pictures of her.”

  Bel handed over her cell-comm. I navigated to her pictures, and stared at the first shot that came up. Bel was in the picture and, hugging her, flashing a stunning smile, was a gorgeous woman. So this was ‘Juun’. I skimmed through the other pictures. There were a lot of them.

  I chose a good shot of the victim, and sent it to my cell. Then I uploaded it to the Metro Enforcement Bureau servers.

  Check my last upload. Run the facial ID on that, I messaged Evon.

  On it, she messaged back.

  I looked through the pictures one more time, and my eyes narrowed. In every picture, she was wearing a scarf.

  “Is there a reason why she always has the same scarf on?” I asked Bel.

  Bel shook her head. “I don’t know. I asked a few times, but she always laughed it off. Said it was her lucky scarf.”

  I jumped out of my seat. “I’ll be back,” I said to the bewildered Bel, and shot out of the room. I ran all the way to the nearest lift, and pressed the button for minus one. The platform took me underground and, there, I ran all the way to the morgue.

  I flashed my badge at the guard, and panted my name and rank. He allowed me through.

  I’d been hoping the attendant would be there, but he wasn’t. It didn’t matter. I accessed the morgue database on my cell, and looked for recent entries. Unidentified Lillith was tagged as B17.

  I looked around the morgue for drawer B17. It was freezing in there, so I hurried. I found the drawer, and pulled. The faceless corpse of ‘Juun Albright’ slid right out on a tray. I inspected her neck.

  Nothing.

  I deflated. How was that possible?

  Suddenly, something I had seen in a show years ago came back to me. I grabbed a black light off the shelf, and shined it on the neck.

  “Yes!” I cried, like a crazy person.

  All along the woman’s neck, in tightly spaced lines, were the intricate patterns and symbols of rubriq. This woman was a caster, she was a channeler.

  She was a black-blood.

  CHAPTER 6

  I was ten, I think, when I saw that history documentary on the screen. I remember sitting with Pappy in the living room sofa. I was drinking a glass of juice, he was drinking something stronger. It was an hour to the first hoverball game of the season, and Pappy was bored of the pre-match discussions. He changed the channel.

  Now, a narrator was talking about a tragedy that had happened over a century ago. It was called the Syfron Experiments: two hundred street children and orphans, subjected to heavy doses of something called greywater.

  “Pappy, what’s greywater?” I asked.

  “Remember what greystone is?” he asked.

  I nodded. It was the stuff the Pillar was made from. It could conduct, and store mana. It was mined on the outskirts of Aurora, and in other worlds as well. Pretty much every piece of technology needed it to work. Mammy’s teaching swam around in my tiny head.

  “And rubriq? You remember that?”

  I nodded again. At first, in order to use mana, people could only channel it through their bodies. But then, people discovered that mana had a code, something like a language. They called it the rubriq. So people learned to speak rubriq, and they called controlling mana with speech casting.

  Eventually, a society of true lovers of knowledge grew amongst the people: they were called the Learners. After a lot of hard work, the Learners developed a way to write rubriq, a process they called spelling. But written rubriq needed greystone to work. So
the Learners engraved rubriq into pieces of greystone, as instructions to the mana in the air, and in the ground, and in the water. And the mana obeyed.

  This was how most technology worked. This was how our world worked.

  My heard swirled with information. Mammy had taught me well.

  “Well, greywater is like a liquid form of greystone, made artificially in labs. It’s used to write rubriq. Most new tech use greywater, instead of greystone, because it’s supposed to be more environmentally friendly.”

  Pappy must have been tipsier than he thought, because he was speaking awfully fast, and not softening the knowledge like he usually did.

  But I understood anyway.

  Now, the narrator was talking about the victims of the Syfron Experiments. They had corrupted genetics, he said. The greywater had made the victims stronger, more powerful at channelling, and casting, and spelling. But it had also destroyed their minds, making them prone to many forms of psychiatric disorder.

  The victims of the experiments were identifiable, by the numerous lines of black rubriq that burned from their blood into their skin. Society was calling these victims ‘black-bloods’. I wondered why, and if it meant that the victims truly had blackened blood.

  I would learn later that it did not.

  Today, the narrator said, some black-bloods try to hide the evidence of what they truly are. They bleach the rubriq off their skin. But studies have shown that under a black light, the rubriq will still show.

  At this point, Mammy stepped out of the kitchen. And when she saw what I was watching, she was furious. For the first time in my life, I was scolded for learning something new.

  As she scolded Pappy too, the narrator uttered his last words, words that would stay with me for years:

  It turns out that in the end, nobody can hide who they really are.

  CHAPTER 7

  We were standing over the victim’s corpse now—Crawer, Evon, and I. We were staring at the rubriq under the black light. Crawer looked a tad pale, even for a Lillith.