I ask myself, in reality, how different could it be? Someone stabbed Vuk and ripped him open that night, and no one else was in the room but my sister. He didn’t do it to himself. I push the doubt away. It’s too much. I’ve never been more thankful for Mana-ma’s training. “What more can you tell me about Vuk?” I ask. The information I have on him from the police download is scant at best.
“Pretty sure he took out at least one person a week for the Ratel, between his other duties. With all his schmoozing, he could gain access to places many members of the Ratel couldn’t. For all that, though they trusted him, I doubt he was in their very inner circle, though he was hoping to be. He’d had a lot of mods and upgrades to his body, according to the autopsy.” He pauses to scroll through the medical chart. “Muscle implants and nanobots, almost an entirely new face, a prosthetic hand with skin grafts, new teeth. He even changed the shape of his ears. So whoever he was before, he wanted to make sure we’d never know, not even in death.”
I swallow. “Can I … go into the crime scene for a closer look?” I ask, my mouth dry.
“Yes.” His eyes go distant as he accesses the controls with his ocular implant, and the bubble pops. Carefully tiptoeing around the blood, I ignore the body, as that’s not what catches my attention. I look closer at the coffee table.
My fingertips hover over the items on the table.
“Can I move things?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
I reach out and move the glass with the lipstick print. I can’t feel it. It’s like I’m holding air. There’s a chip on the rim. It had fallen over, but Tila had put it to rights before she left. Below where the glass was is a hasty carving of five points. Next to it are a few other scratches. The glass falls from my hand and slides back to its original position on the coffee table.
“She didn’t stab the coffee table. She carved it,” I whisper.
Nazarin looks over the crime scene notes. “They noticed those. Five points. That’s the symbol for the Hearth, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” I haven’t seen that simple design in a long time. Why did she leave it here? She hates the Hearth as much as I do.
“We couldn’t make any sense of these, though,” Nazarin says, nodding toward the dashes and dots, almost like Morse code. “No language or code we could figure out.”
I shrug, not wanting to tell him, looking at other things.
“You understand those markings,” he says. “I can tell.”
I debate lying, and then decide it’s pointless. “It’s an alphabet Tila and I made up when we were children, so we could write notes to each other nobody else would understand.”
“She knew you’d see it.” Detective Nazarin scratches the stubble at his chin. The muscles of his bicep flex under his shirt, and I’m reminded of how much larger and stronger than me he is. He’s suspicious. And why shouldn’t he be?
The fact is, I’m just as flummoxed. Why would Tila leave me a sign? And why that as a sign? She had no way to anticipate how all this would play out … did she?
I feel sick. I back away from the blood and the scratched coffee table, breathing loudly, and move to the bay window, looking out over the cloudy San Francisco day. The sailboats are coming into port, the hovercars leaving and arriving the Embarcadero to and from their sundry destinations. The sun is setting, and everything glows that soft pink and purple of approaching dusk.
Detective Nazarin glides to my side, silent. I press my forehead against the cool glass of the window. Throughout it all, my mechanical heartbeat has barely quickened. Somewhere out there, Tila is in her cell, and her heartbeat is more or less in time with mine.
“What does it say?” Nazarin asks. He’s close to me now, but his voice is gentle, and his breath puffs on the back of my neck, smelling of spearmint. But the gentleness is a ruse—underneath he’s all steel.
I could lie. Tell him it means something else, and they’d never be able to follow the path any further. Then I could try and do it on my own. But I wouldn’t be able to, would I? If Tila is involved with the Ratel, then I don’t know the first thing about how to deal with them.
Nazarin does.
“‘MIA,’” I say, still turned to the window. My breath mists the glass. With a fingertip, I write the letters in our secret alphabet.
“And what’s that? Missing in Action?”
“It’s not a what. It’s a who. Mia. The woman who took us in after we left the Hearth.”
“Why do you think she wrote that name? Where can we find her?”
I shrug, wrapping my arms around myself. I want to go home and close my eyes and wake up and have everything fixed.
“She’s an apostate of the Hearth. Like us. She got Tila into hostessing. Used to be one of the best in the city. But now she’s a Zealot. We can find her at the Mirage in the Mission district.”
“That’s a shithole.”
“Yeah. But the Ratel haven’t tampered with the Zeal there and replaced it with Verve?” I ask.
“Not that I know. Fuck.” He rubs his hand over his shaved head. “If they have, it’s dangerous to go there. Someone could be watching.”
I say nothing.
“She’ll be there now?”
“She’s always there.”
“Then let’s go.”
Nazarin accesses his implant, and the crime scene hologram disintegrates into nothing.