A Strangled Cry of Fear. B.A. Chepaitis
way.
She broke contact and looked away. “Paul knows about us, doesn’t he?” she asked quietly.
“Yes.”
“Anyone else say anything about it?”
He nodded. “They don’t want to push it. They just want to use it to push us.”
“That sounds right. You’re sure Dinardo’s not trying to get rid of me?”
“Not this time,” he said. “Apparently you have some senators in your pocket.”
“I don’t have pockets,” she noted. She mused some more. “If I do this, he’ll owe me in a big way, won’t he?”
“He already does,” Alex pointed out.
“But this time he’d have to acknowledge it.”
“Jaguar, what’re you thinking?”
“That it might be good to get a pocket and put him in it.”
Alex shook his head. “We can manage without that.”
“Maybe you can,” she said, “They won’t transfer you. They’ll transfer me, and who’ll they put me with? Galentas, the petty fascist pig dog who substitutes a gun for the deficit of a tiny prick? My ass is on the line either way. And yours isn’t.” She turned her back to him and gazed out the window.
She’d named a truth he couldn’t deny. Her profile, her gender, the color of her skin, the bent of her mind, all testified to it. She was at risk. He was not. He walked to where she stood.
“We could call it quits,” he offered. “Temporarily at least.”
“And I could retract my vote on Durero. Which do you think is more likely?”
He put a hand on her shoulder, but when he touched her, a shiver ran through him. Crows walking on his grave, he thought. That’s what Sophia, the old lady who taught him his arts, had called those unexplained shivers. And since he was an Adept, skilled in precognition, she also taught him to pay attention when they came.
“Something happening, Spider Magus?” Jaguar asked quietly. Though the art of the Adept wasn’t hers, she always sensed its particular tingle in him.
He was silent as he attended the feeling. No vision accompanied it. Just a sudden sensation of being dropped into emptiness. A loss of earth. An unboundedness, encompassing more than him and Jaguar. It held a presence larger than time, a part of everything that would happen on Planetoid One. He breathed in. Breathed out. Let go of Jaguar’s shoulder.
“Something,” he said. “I don’t like this, Jaguar. I think you’d feel the same if it was me.”
She turned to face him. “I’m sure I would,” she agreed. “And I’m sure that wouldn’t stop you.”
She had him there. “You’re going, aren’t you?” he asked.
“I am.”
“Why? All expediency aside, tell me why, Jaguar.”
She took a step away, turned toward the window. “Diane was my friend. I want to know what happened to her.”
No surprise there. Though others saw her as a maverick, inconsistent and unpredictable, she had the most persistent loyalty of anyone Alex had ever met.
“She wasn’t your friend when she knew the truth about you,” he pointed out.
“When I find out the truth about her maybe I won’t be hers anymore. Then we’ll be even. In the meantime, she’s dead and Durero didn’t kill her, and I want to know who did.”
There it was, he thought. “Then we’ve got a job ahead of us,” he said.
She shifted, turned and faced him again. “I notice you haven’t yet asked why I think he didn’t kill her. And that you agreed with me.”
“You’re very observant,” he said coolly. “What do you make of that?”
“I’m thinking you saw the forensic report, which says Diane was hit from behind before she was strangled. Francis always approached face first, going for the throat without any blows.”
“That did seem important to me. Anything else?”
“You’re pretty thorough, so I’d guess you had a talk with Francis yourself.”
“An accurate guess. And?”
“And you saw the same thing I did. He’s not a paranoid schizophrenic, like they say. He’s carrying an ephemeral. One that only kills empaths, which Diane was definitely not.”
Alex sighed. That confirmed what he’d found. An ephemeral. The term empaths used when someone was possessed by a ghost, either as shadow memory or an actual spirit. Not a term recognized by the penitentiary system, but one he and Jaguar both considered when they worked with prisoners. And something he’d seen in Francis, just as she had.
Long before Francis was arrested, his brother Damon was killed by a woman who was, by all reports, an empath. She’d beaten the charge, claiming self-defense, which may well have been true. Damon had two previous assault charges, and was known to have a temper. Now his restless spirit was still with Francis in some essential way, perhaps seeking revenge, or perhaps protecting the little brother he’d left behind. But Alex hadn’t determined if he was there as memory or spirit.
“Any idea if it’s shadow, or a true ephemeral?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I didn’t go deep enough to determine that, on advice of my Supervisor. But maybe my Supervisor went against his own advice and dug a little deeper”
“He didn’t,” Alex said. “Not the right place, and there wasn’t time. But he agrees with you. Diane wasn’t an empath, Francis isn’t paranoid schizophrenic, and he didn’t kill her.”
He saw the small muscles around her neck and shoulders relax. Brief time had passed since they’d become lovers, since he’d stood with her on the mesa and shown his willingness to give his life for her. They were both adjusting to a new emotional order, and she was still relieved when he believed her.
“There’s more, Alex,” she noted. “I think Francis’s meds suppress the ephemeral, no matter what kind it is. He showed no antagonism toward me when I was obviously there as an empath. And I think he could be cleared pretty easily, if he was in the right program.”
He heard frustration in her tone and wondered once more at her contradictory nature. She wouldn’t hesitate to kill Francis if she had to, but she would still rather see him healed than dead, would rather see his brother’s spirit at rest than punished. She held firmly to a core belief that healing was a better solution than revenge, and she hated to see a job botched.
On both counts, he agreed with her.
“I know, Jaguar,” he said. “And maybe we’ll get him here when this is over. For now, that’s absolutely not your job. No trying to find the ephemeral, no attempts at empathic contact with Francis.”
“I’ll get nowhere without it,” she said.
“You’ll get dead if you try it on your own,” he replied crisply. “In fact, I want you to do as little as possible until I send back-up.”
“You said they won’t give me any.”
“They won’t, but I will.”
“Who could you get?”
“Rachel’s already looking into that,” he said. Rachel Shofet, former prisoner and now good friend to Jaguar, was the best researcher and hacker on all three Planetoids. “She’ll get the right person. You know she will. I’ll follow as soon as I can.”
“You? Alex, everyone knows you there. You can’t possibly—”
“They can’t possibly