Infernal Affairs (12 page)

“Forget it.”

“Fine.”

Ru was sitting on the love seat with his feet folded underneath him. When he saw me, he got up and walked over, holding the remote control.

“I don’t understand the transmission functions on this device.”

“It’s basically infrared,” I said. “Just press the up and down buttons.”

He gave me a sour look. “I know how to ‘change channels,’ as you call it. That was relatively simple. But some of the programs are demanding currency.”

“That’s pay-per-view.”

“Yes. I’d like to watch it.”

“No,” Selena said. “We aren’t budgeted for that.”

“How disappointing.” He returned to the couch.

He flipped through a series of channels until he found the Food Network. Then his expression became slightly glazed. It was as if we’d ceased to exist.

I sat down across from him on the sofa. “Ru? Would you mind talking to us for a minute? You can go back to your show as soon as we’re done.”

He turned to regard me. He was 99 percent human boy this time. To most observers, the biological photocopy would have been perfect. But as I looked into his eyes, I could see the barest hint of something nonhuman. Just a speck. The longer I stared at that speck, the bigger it seemed to grow, until I felt myself leaning over the edge of a vast alien consciousness.

I thought of the strange armored scales of his DNA. I could only imagine what Basuram’s looked like. So far, his body had rejected all methods of DNA testing. We couldn’t even pierce the epidermis. We might have had better luck peeling back a dragon’s skin.

Ru turned off the TV. “I can pay attention to both at the same time. But I’ve already seen this episode.”

I turned to Selena. “Can we teach him how to download—”

“Absolutely not.”

But I’d already piqued his interest. “Download?”

“We’ll talk more about it later,” I said. “First, we have a few questions.”

He folded his hands on his lap. “All right.”

I looked at Selena. She nodded.

“Okay. You’ve mentioned the Ferid,” I began. “Basuram confirmed that they were looking for you, but wouldn’t say more.”

“I’m sure he said all sorts of things.”

“Are the Ferid performing experiments on the Ptah’li?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

“It would help if we had some physical evidence that this genetic testing was going on,” Selena said. “But we don’t know enough about your DNA. There’s no way for us to tell if it’s been manipulated without having an exemplar, and our only sample is from you. We need more.”

“I’ve already given you blood and spinal fluid.”

“Yes. You’ve been very cooperative, and we’re grateful for that. But we need a different sample. Something for comparison.”

“I have nothing more to give you.”

“Then tell us more about the Ferid. What are they up to? Why would they be chasing someone like you?”

“Nobody knows why they do anything, except out of hunger.”

“What kind of hunger?”

“It’s difficult to explain.”

I wanted to try a different tack. “Tell us about the chancellor,” I said.

Ru looked at me. His eyes were opaque, like green glass. “Nobody sees the chancellor. We only hear his voice. Once or twice a day, he’ll announce a new directive or enact a summons. If he says your name, you’re bound by law to appear before him that very day.”

“And what happens to those who appear before him?”

“They vanish.”

I turned to Selena. “This sounds like an interplanar civil rights case. We have no real reason to hold Basuram, and we don’t even know how either of them got here. I’m not sure what our next step is here.”

“Ru”—Selena held his eyes—“Basuram said that you tried to kill the Ferid chancellor. He said that you were part of an anarchist group.”

“He’s lying. I’m not part of any group.”

“You mentioned your family. Could any of them have been involved?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember.” He closed his eyes. “I can almost see their faces, but it all goes dark so quickly.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Don’t push yourself too hard. Basuram’s not going anywhere, and you’re safe for the moment.”

“We need to return to the scene where Ru was found.” Selena stood. “There could be some trace evidence that hasn’t yet been obliterated by the elements.”

“The beach felt haunted,” Ru said.

“What do you mean by that?” I asked him.

“I don’t know how else to say it.” He hugged his knees. “I could hear voices. There was something alive in the sand and the shells, something groaning underwater. I heard it before everything went dark.”

“Well, we’re not the Ghostbusters,” Selena replied. “But we do have a topographical mapping device. Let’s see what we can do.”

Jericho Beach was cold and empty when the
CORE forensics team arrived. Although we did have the technology to keep onlookers from wandering onto a common scene, that worked only under controlled conditions. There wasn’t enough materia in the world to keep people away from the beach in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighborhood during the day. Our only alternative was to analyze the scene at night. Instead of crafting a veil, we posted agents at key spots where early-morning joggers and drunk kids might accidentally wander in too close. I’d heard they were working on some kind of personal veil, something to do with our athames. But I so rarely asked questions anymore unless they pertained to my salary.

We marked out a search zone in four bands, using small sensors that looked like garden lights. Needlethin wafers of xenon, a heavy metal, were stacked inside, acting as attractors for the unpredictable family of particles that we called “materia” for lack of a better descriptor. Our technology was similar to dark-matter detectors in Italy and Switzerland, only designed to work on a much smaller scale. The physicist Elena Aprile was trying to discover dark matter itself with her XENON100 detector in Gran Sasso. We already knew it existed and just needed to entice it.

We’d already been over the site with a flux magnetometer, testing for wave echoes that might indicate something buried. The lines of energy would bend around certain objects, especially metallic ones, whose presence created a ripple in the ground-mapping data. The magnetometer itself was small, but the battery pack was awkward and heavy. Selena complained that it was giving her tendonitis.

“Are the photomultipliers set up?” I asked. “I don’t help with those anymore. I accidentally broke one, back when Marcus Tremblay was still unit chief.”

“I know,” she replied. “I was the one who cosigned the expense report.”

“In my defense, the calculations were only a millimeter off.”

“And that millimeter ended up being the difference between finding nothing and discovering the buried skeleton of a
tortuga
demon.”

“He was so small, though. Poor little guy.”

“He ate souls.”

“Yeah. He did. But, to be fair, that was his natural sustenance. He couldn’t help himself. But, really, can you imagine this cute little turtle with bony spurs on his marbled blue shell, just sort of waddling up to you in the middle of the night? You don’t think he’s going to suck out your soul.”

Selena frowned at me. “You work for an occult organization. A mean-looking turtle appears in your house, at night, and starts crawling up your stairs. You wouldn’t even take a moment to think that it might not have your best interest at heart?”

“He wasn’t mean-looking. He reminded me of the Dr. Seuss turtle.”

“Hate to break up this conversation,” Linus said, pushing the ground-penetrating radar device in front of him. “But we’ve got less than two hours.”

The GPR locator resembled a fusion between a push lawn mower on wheels and a battery-powered generator. The radar was mounted on an orange steel chassis, and a white plate stuck out in front to comb the ground. The data would be sent to a laptop in peaks and valleys of yellow and mauve light, which Linus would then get to sift through for the next forty-eight hours.

He’d worn a lot of hats in the department since last year, when our budget was slashed. With Becka on sick leave, our herd had definitely been thinned, and we were all feeling the crunch. But we’d really lucked out when Linus agreed to come work for the CORE. Marcus had found him through the alma mater registry at his university. My former boss may have been a psychotic killer, but he was also a phenomenal headhunter. Office gossip suggested that Linus had experienced some sort of mystical “accident” while he was a grad student. It was low-level, but Marcus still used it to his advantage in convincing Linus to come on board with the CORE. Nobody was sure if Linus had been pressured to join, or if he’d entered willingly into employment with us.

“Where’s Ru?” I asked.

“At the lab. There’s a marathon of
Chef at Home
on.”

“And Basuram?”

“Sedated. Under twenty-four-hour watch.”

“Do you think what we’re doing to the Kentauros demon is humane?”

“I think you just contradicted yourself in that sentence.”

“You know what I mean. The Kentauros has rights, just the same as Ru does. But we’re not too bothered at the idea of pumping him full of soporific drugs and forcing him into a zombie existence.”

Selena sighed. “I get your point. And no, it doesn’t feel good. But it’s a danger to the entire building. We don’t have a lot of other options.”

“It just bothers me that I think of Basuram as an ‘it,’ and Ru as a ‘he.’ I’m the one who looks like an ‘it’ to them.”

“Right. And we all just have to see past our otherness. In the meantime, this scene is waiting, and eventually, we’re going to run out of drugs.”

“Also—” Linus interjected, as he pushed the GPR mower slowly past us. “I get paid time and a half for doing fieldwork. I was hired as a lab director.”

“You’re right,” Selena said. “And we appreciate your extra efforts.”

“He’s the only one, right?” I asked Selena once he’d passed.

“Yes. Absolutely the only person in the lab who knows how to work the GPR. Between this and the weapons locker, his salary must be close to mine.”

“Or higher.”

“I was trying not to think about that.”

“How did he end up getting the weapons gig again?”

“He used to be in the army.”

I blinked. “Seriously? I mean, in a research capacity?”

“I don’t know the details. He’s got military training, though.”

I watched the tall, skinny blond man gently pushing an oversized metal detector across an empty beach. He didn’t look particularly like an expert on weapons.

“Ru was found on this spot,” Selena said, “so we’re interested in any thermal signature changes in the area. We need to figure out how he got here. Basuram isn’t about to tell us, and both of them must have some kind of transit device. Especially if the Ptah’li home world is as far away as it seems.”

“It might not be made of metal. It could be partially organic.”

“We’re scanning for just about everything.”

“I’m about to turn on the photomultipliers,” Linus said. “Is everyone’s cell off?”

Selena and I both nodded.

Linus pressed a button on a remote control. The xenon towers clicked open, and dozens of highly sensitive one-pixel cameras emerged from them. The air seemed to thicken slightly. It tasted metallic, heavier. The currents of materia being harvested by the xenon cells were laying invisible lines of tension across the square of beach. The power was almost syrupy and reminded me of a car heater gone bad.

For a while, all we did was watch Linus pushing the GPR over squares of sand demarcated by colored tape. We drank coffee silently. It was too early in the morning to make small talk. Selena’s phone vibrated once, but she ignored it.

“Here’s something,” Linus said, after an hour. “Come and look.”

We walked over and examined the laptop screen. There was a long bar of green with an x-axis at the bottom. The top layer of soil was a yellow plane, and beneath that, there was a green layer that seemed to roil, more liquid than turf, as the radar illumined it. A line of purple, slightly deeper, bisected the green layer, and beneath that was only a cloud of dark, like spilled ink.

Linus pointed to a dark shape, adjacent to the purple. “This could be a lot of things,” he said. “But it’s not a shell or a rock. It’s giving off weak radiation.”

Selena was already dialing a number on her cell. “How far away do I need to be to make this call?”

“Thirty meters. We won’t know where to dig until we’ve processed the radargrams, though. Don’t get too excited.”

“Right.” She was already walking away from us.

I stood in silence for a moment, staring at the black mark on the screen.

“It could be anything,” I said. “And we’ve got less than an hour of darkness left. Maybe it’s just someone’s piggy bank.”

“They don’t generally give off weak radiation.”

“You think it’s made of uranium?”

“It’s made of something that’s buzzing with energy like a hornet’s nest.”

Selena came walking back.

“Who did you call?” I asked.

“Cindée. If we can use carbon markers to get a radioactive signature from the debris, she may be able to match it to mystical trace that we have on file. Or at least to something we’ve heard of.”

“The sun’s rising soon.”

“We’ll keep crowds away for as long as we can. Then we’ll just have to pack up and come back tomorrow. We can make it look like a construction site.”

“On a beach.”

“You’d be amazed what people will believe if you just throw up some caution tape and orange signs. It’s one of the few things that makes our job easier.”

I rolled up my sleeves. “Where do you want me?”

“Nowhere.” She gave me a look of moderate exasperation. “Go home. Get some sleep. You’ll be back in the lab soon enough, and there are plenty of competent shovelers on their way already. I don’t need you here every second.”