Cooper dumped out of the video, tossed the datapad on the table, and took a long swallow of water. Vodka sounded better, but it would make tomorrow morning’s jog less pleasant. The ice had mostly melted, and the glass was slick with cold sweat. He rocked his neck from side to side, then picked the pad back up and began punching through the rest of the file, not looking for anything in particular. The headlines, ranging from dispassionate (ABNORM ACTIVIST SLAYS 73; SENATOR KILLED IN DC BLOODBATH) to incendiary (A GIFT FOR SAVAGERY; MONSTERS IN OUR MIDST). The stories that accompanied them, and the ones that ran in the weeks to follow. Reports of abnorm children beaten at their schools, a tier two lynched in Alabama. Columnists who appealed for calm and decency, who pointed out that the actions of a single individual should not be held against the group; other pundits who spewed smoke and ash, who whipped the baser demons to howl. The event had dominated headlines. But when John Smith hadn’t been caught in months, and then years, the story faded from the foreground of public consciousness.
There was more. Text and video of speeches Smith had made for abnorm rights before the massacre. He’d been a terrific speaker, actually, at once inspiring and intimate. Detailed logs of the Echelon II protocols running to find him. Incident reports from half a dozen near-misses. Biographic details, genetic profile, personal data. Lengthy analyses of his gift, a logistical and strategic sense that had made him a chess grand master at eleven. Transcriptions of every ranked chess match he had played. Terabytes of data, and Cooper had read every word, watched every frame.
And still, today.
A few more stabs at the datapad, and the headlines were replaced by the VCS. Virtual Crime Scenes, there was a piece of newtech he wasn’t sure he was glad of. A photorealistic, completely manipulatable model of the inside of the Monocle as John Smith had left it, down to every smear of blood and spatter of brain matter. Cooper could pan and twist and tilt to any angle, could view the mess from the height of the ceiling or the intimacy of inches. It was an incredibly useful forensic tool that had been instrumental in solving many cases, but that didn’t make it any easier to take when he scrolled down beneath the table where Juliet Lynch had dragged her son Kevin. Being able to see the angle of her body, the star-shaped hole in her face, that was forensically handy. But the ability to see her expression, the remnants of the face of a woman who had without warning watched her husband’s head explode, who had in an incomprehensible instant gone from the simple happiness of a family vacation to howling chaos and the abyss, that Cooper didn’t need or want. It was one thing to understand she had died knowing—not fearing, knowing—her son would die, too; it was another to see the holes in the hand she had stretched out to protect him, as if a mother’s palm could stop bullets.
Screw the jog. Cooper pushed himself up from the couch and walked to the kitchen. The fluorescent light seemed surreal at this hour, and the standard-issue black-and-white floor tile was grim. He dumped the rest of his water in the sink, dropped a couple of ice cubes into the glass, and poured chilled vodka over them.
Back in the living room, he picked up his phone and dialed. Took a sip, savored the icy bite.
“Hey, Cooper,” Quinn said, his voice thick with sleep. “You okay?”
“I was just watching the Monocle.”
“Again?”
“Yeah. What are we doing, Bobby?”
“Well, we’re not sleeping.”
“Sorry about that.”
“S’okay. Just busting your balls. So. The Monocle.”
“The VCS. That woman under the table.”
“Juliet Lynch.”
“Right. I was looking at that again, and it hit me, that could have been Natalie. And the kid, it could have been Todd.”
“Shit. Yeah.”
“What are we doing? All of us, I mean. Ever since I visited the academy, I haven’t been able to shake it.”
“Shake what?”
“The feeling that things are about to get a lot worse. That we’re on the brink, and nobody seems to want to step away from it. All these horrors we’re creating. The academies, the Monocle, they’re the same. Flip sides of the same horror. And meanwhile, I’ve got two kids.”
“And mentally you’re putting Kate in an academy and Todd at the Monocle.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t.”
“I know.”
“All of this stuff, it’s a mess. I know. We all know. Not just DAR. The whole country, the whole world knows it. We’ve been on this collision course for thirty years.”
“So why aren’t we swerving?”
“Got me, boss. That’s above my pay grade.”
Cooper made a sound that wasn’t a laugh. “Yeah.”
“You know what I do, these thoughts hit me?”
“What?”
“I pour myself a stiff drink.”
“Check.”