Marked (10 page)

The member entrance was a double set of doors down the hall, in sight of the atrium but not within in. There had always been a camera there, to track who came in and out of the Guild. The camera was still there, with two new ones I assumed recorded at different frequencies. The Guild had never had the hang-ups about recording the normals did, but this seemed excessive.

Ahead were four security guards, extended rope barriers funneling us straight ahead to them, and to the large machine behind them. It was a long, multiple-textured arch in shape, with flashing lights and strange matte panels above a low chair with a headrest and what looked like automatic restraints, currently deactivated. The dark-colored chair was inset with shiny metal circles along the back and in the headrest, circles that looked similar to the monitoring devices the Guild used to screen schoolchildren for Ability.

“What is this?” I asked, wary.

The first guard said, in a low, bored voice, “It's for your own protection.”

Sure. And being locked up or destroyed—according to Stone, the only recourses—was for the Guild's protection, not mine.

“No, thanks,” I said. “How about I keep my mind to myself and we'll call it even?”

Stone held up his Enforcement badge. “We don't have time for this. Give me the form and we'll move through.”

“It's for everyone now. New rules, new lockdown. Sorry.” He didn't look very sorry.

“Fine,” Stone said gruffly. He sat in the chair.

A low buzzing came from the machine as one of the guards powered it up. Then a sense of wrenching pressure and an Escher-like impossible bubbling and twisting of space—and then it was over. The red lights on the arch turned to green. Stone let out a small pain sound.

Now with sweat dripping down his face, he stood, wobbly. He rebuilt his former stoicism, then walked to the wall to wait for me.

I thought about leaving then, about turning all the way around and getting out of Dodge. Kara could fend for herself. I didn't need extra trouble in my life; I had plenty with the police. I needed to stay on the wagon and stay healthy.

“If you want to test the Guild's threats concerning failure, turn right around,” Stone said. “Otherwise move.”

“Just so you know I'm not happy about it.” I walked up to the Throne of Frightening Lights and sat.

A guard hit a few buttons on the side of the arch, then that sound as it powered up.

Pain—unimaginable pain—as someone put my mind through an invisible blender. Razor blades pulled apart every shred of me from every other—

And then it was over. Utterly, completely over. My entire being rang with the sudden silence.

The guard in front of the arch pulled his eyebrows together in a worrisome look. “No madness, but you're not exactly a—”

“Does he pass or not?” Stone asked.

“He passes.”

I staggered to my feet, unwilling to be in this horrible chair any longer than necessary. I pushed off and duck-stepped away, to the far wall. I stood against it, breathing, trying to recover.

One guard laughed to the other. I suppressed the urge to throw that pain at them. I had things to do today. I couldn't be in that cell again, not now.

Obviously it had been far, far too long since I'd been through pain desensitization at the Guild. But even when I'd done that, even when I'd been there, it wasn't like this. We hadn't had our minds shredded for no more than a test. We'd been treated with respect, not like cattle in a line. Even if the threat was imminent, there was something about the whole thing that left a bitter taste in my mouth.

I didn't feel like holding out my mind for the cattle prod again, and if the rank-and-file Guild members were used to it, well, that didn't make it right.

The guards gave us a yellow flag to pin to our badges, a flag that said we'd been cleared this day, and we moved on.

•   •   •

“You seem out of sorts,” Stone told me as I trotted after him. Enforcement had their own floors set into the basements of the professional building—far more basements than I'd known about previously. We were traveling to the third-level underground, something that required a special elevator and a flat rectangular key that fluoresced in the light. Tech, I was betting, even if only the lightest possible touch of living circuits and bioluminescence.

“I don't like all the security,” I said. “I don't like having my mind shredded when I haven't even been exposed yet.”

He turned around. “It's necessary. If we have another North Rim on our hands, it will get worse before it gets better.”

“Even so, all you have so far is a suicide and a madness report, I assume in the usual fashion. It doesn't add up to anything this frightening yet.” Did it? Was I just lying to myself to avoid facing the real danger I was under?

“Over a hundred people have checked themselves into Mental Health, some with third-degree exposure. It's a problem, Ward. A much bigger problem than you realize.”

The elevator
ding
ed
and the doors opened. The hallway was dimly lit, long, with a tiled floor and doors on both sides spaced widely apart. Straight ahead was a set of double doors with small windows that leaked light onto the patterned tile.

“We need to go. I don't know how much longer we can hold the body, so that's our first step.” He strode toward the doors.

I followed, pulling myself in a little in Mindspace. The surroundings were rather grim, but I smelled a faint lemon-scented cleaner, which helped. “Where to after that?” I said. “I'll need to talk to whoever reported Meyers as mad in the first place, and the last person to see him alive.”

“The last person to see him alive was Enforcement leader Tobias Nelson,” Stone said. “He, of course, is above reproach, and has interviewed with me to my satisfaction.” His mind added a full stop to that thought, and an unwillingness to discuss this truth any further. Stone pushed through a double set of doorways at the end of the hallway, and they swung, loudly.

•   •   •

On the other side was a plain room with rows of metal tables and easy-to-clean tile on both the floor and the walls. It looked like the morgue in DeKalb County except for the charts (Guild reading charts in blues and yellows) and the lack of buzzing in Mindspace. In the morgue, they used quantum status drawers to keep the corpses from deteriorating; here, of course, the way they affected Mindspace would be a constant low buzzing, which might change a measurement significantly.

The room was smaller than I was used to, and cold. Very cold.

There were two minds in the room, a bright, cheerful skittery-kinetic mind belonging to a short plain woman near the far table, and a deeper mind like a French horn playing into the darkness, stronger and subtler and more tinged with pain than the woman's mind. He was closer to the doorway, and looked up when we entered.

He was a large man, late forties, muscled like someone who expected to fight on the front lines, with a haircut just as short. His eyes were odd, red with white striations, a central black pupil staring at us as he blinked too often. A network of fine scars encompassed his eye sockets, cutting through one of his eyebrows and halfway down a cheek; whatever had happened to him to require the artificial eyes had clearly been traumatic.

Stone had already moved forward to greet the man, and they were engaged in a conversation.

“This is Adam Ward,” he said.

“Nice to meet you,” I replied, making sure my mind reflected that and only that. I did the strong nod of greeting. “I'm sorry. I didn't catch your name.”

“Ruthgar,” the man said, in a voice like an ancient smoker's. “I'm the necrokinetic on duty today. Sandra over there is my assistant. She's micro, but remarkably talented.”

She waved hi from across the room, where she was currently pulling out one of the drawers to release a body onto the stretcher.

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

Not here to be social,
Stone's mental voice told me again.

“Necrokinetics?” I asked.

Ruthgar smiled, a disturbing sight, although the mind behind it was genuinely pleased. “It's a quiet specialty,” he said. “Not common, and we don't get a lot of press. Necrokinetics specialize in dead tissue. We determine cause of death, as the MEs do in the civilian world, but we also deal with necrotic tissue or near-death patients. I was particularly good with isolating the effects of chemical weapons in soldiers; our unit had half the death rate as the average in Brazil during that period, although of course the injury rate was similar.”

“Of course,” I said, for lack of any other clue what to say.

“Well, you didn't come here to listen to war stories. Shall we talk about what I found?” he asked.

I frowned, uncomfortable.

“Let's see what there is to see,” Stone said.

With the help of a small antigravity plate in the bottom of the stretcher, Sandra had moved the body to the table. Well, it was “the body” until I moved closer; Meyers had always had a large birthmark, a red-purple splotch down the side of his neck, and seeing that now was like a calling card. Like a distinctive tattoo or a signed letter reminding me of who I was looking at. Seeing his face screwed up in what was obviously horrible pain was disturbing.

He'd deserved better than this, even if he had been crazy. He'd deserved care and help, not this ridiculous panic reaction from those around him.

Cherabino's words about looking at the floor if it got too much, words that she'd said the first time she took me to the morgue in DeKalb, came back to me then. I fought through it, sitting on the emotion hard. It had been a long, long time, and it could as easily have been me on that slab.

“You knew him,” Ruthgar said to me, quietly.

I stared him in the eye. “It was a long time ago.”

“I hadn't realized.” He went over to the front of the table, by Meyers's head, and placed his hands on his face. A dull crawling sensation moved through Mindspace like a half-heard song.

“You don't—” Stone started.

“It's done,” Ruthgar said, still blinking too often. He stepped away.

The seized look of intense pain had disappeared from Meyers's face, to be replaced by a look of peace, of sleep.

“Thank you,” I said, amazed. Even the best micro guy I'd ever met would have taken a lot longer to accomplish anything like that. And the skill with which he'd done it . . . Necros apparently were in a league of their own.

He blinked five or six times in a row. “It would have been done eventually anyway, for the funeral. Most investigators prefer to see the original circumstances first, and the Chenoa family has been very insistent that investigators be given full access.” He blinked again and moved away.

I noticed then that Meyers didn't have a Y-cut; whatever they had done to determine cause of death hadn't used knives. He was naked, of course, but that was the same in the police system.

Sometimes I wished that emotion and thoughts clung to a person's body after death, not just the scene around him or her. But times like this, I didn't. The emptiness of the room was comforting. There were no surprises here, just the sad waste of a good man whose life was over.

Sandra lifted up Meyers's right hand in her gloved ones, angling it so we could see the palm. “You'll notice the entry point for the electrical arc was here.” A dark burn pattern covered most of the hand, moving up partially toward the wrist. Even two feet away, days after the fact, I could smell the burning flesh. My stomach roiled.

Ruthgar moved around me toward the feet. “Exit burn on the right heel, as the electricity left the body along the metal ironing board feet. Enough amps moved through the tissue to cook it, ensuring death in at least four ways, but the heart stopped likely in the first few seconds of contact. That's what I'm calling the mechanism of death in this case, for the sake of simplicity. It wasn't pretty, but it was quick.

“My sympathies for your loss,” he told me.

“I didn't know him that well,” I said, looking at the burns again, overwhelmed with a sense of senseless waste. But now I was thinking too. Something Cherabino had said once about a case nagged at me. “Doesn't household electricity not usually leave a mark? Or a really small one? I remember the police having trouble identifying cause of death in one of these cases. This looks obvious—maybe too obvious?”

Ruthgar blinked twice.

Sandra said, “This was household power?”

“The electricity was being pulled from the shielding system, not the household outlet,” Stone said.

“Is that normal?” I asked.

“No.”

“Shall I leave you two to discuss the case?” Ruthgar asked.

“We're leaving now,” Stone said.

Sandra pulled a sheet up to cover Meyers's face. It wrenched me then, all over again. Of the two of us, the one who should be on that slab was me; I'd done the risky drug behavior, lived on the street, dealt with the dangerous people. He'd worked his way up to Council. Been a decent guy. Done the right things.

He'd even thrown out his knives. Who died after throwing out their knives? Even if he was crazy, that told me he was actively avoiding violence. Considering what had happened at North Rim, it made me respect him more. He'd been avoiding violence, not embracing it.

And now he was dead.

•   •   •

Outside the morgue, I asked Stone, “Why was the electricity being pulled from the shielding system? I mean, it's an iron.”

“I've already set up an interview with the woman who reported Meyers as disturbed,” Stone said. “We can go talk about the electricity and the expert's findings afterward.”

“I'd like to do that now.”

“We're doing it afterward.”

I paused, in the low light of the hallway. “Fine.”

“Fine.”