THIRTEEN

 

“YOU SURE YOU WANT TO go in here?”

“No,” Rachel replied, forcing herself to not peek inside the coffee shop from the other side of its locked front door. “Pretty sure I don’t, actually.”

It was still three hours from sunrise, and the buildings on the west end of Gayle Street were cast in black shadows. The fourteen blocks that had been affected by the bombings were still closed to traffic, pedestrian and otherwise, but these had been end-capped by two additional blocks: explosions weren’t clean, and debris and damage tended to travel. There was a single coffee shop which fell in this dead zone. It stood on the far side of Santino’s ruined bookstore, untouched by the bombs but still abandoned.

Hope Blackwell stood at Rachel’s back, her face turned towards the street as if she was expecting them to be attacked from behind, while Phil struggled with the front door. With the exception of the city cops standing watch down the road, they were the only living things in sight. The Forensics teams were still concentrated along the east end of the incident, and the paparazzi and other ghouls who haunted the crowd control barriers were down where the action was. That part of Gayle Street had portable generators and high-intensity floodlights. The three of them had a single portable scene lamp with a dying battery. Rachel tried to keep the light steady for Phil, as he jammed key after key into the security lock.

“Damn!” Phil snarled, dropping another key back on the ring.

“The lock’s a Schlage,” Hope said. “Are you trying just the Schlage keys, or all of them?”

Phil’s colors glazed over and he glared at Hope. “They’re copies of copies of copies,” he said, rattling the heavy ring at her. “The MPD got the originals from the store owners in case we needed to enter a building, and they’ve been handing the copies out like candy. I don’t know if any of these keys actually work.”

“Right,” Rachel said. She handed the lamp to Hope, then picked up a good-sized chunk of broken pavement and chucked it at the store’s front window. The window collapsed in on itself in a crash.

“It was already cracked,” she said to them as she kicked out the remaining glass from the bottom of the panel. “And I’m perfectly fine standing around in the dark, but if you guys want to run down the battery while you play with your keys…”

“We’re good,” Phil said.

Rachel shimmied through the opening and let the others in through the front door.

“Don’t move around too much,” she told them. “I need to scan the floor.”

“Stinks,” Phil said, covering his nose.

“Five-plus days of curdled milk,” Hope said. “Power’s been out.”

Five-plus days of dust, Rachel thought as she knelt by the entrance. Fourteen blocks, but three gas main shutoffs… I hope I’m not wrong about this. We’re running out of ideas.

Her lizard brain had scratched her awake at two in the morning, funneling numbers into her head. The math hadn’t added up. If each gas line was loaded for five blocks, why had only fourteen been affected? Shouldn’t the explosions have covered the full fifteen?

She had threatened her lizard brain with everything from whiskey to a hundred milligrams of diphenhydramine, but the math kept coming. In fact, new numbers started to wedge themselves into the equations. The two murdered officers, dead for nearly three days before they were found…

And then came the question Meisner had asked in the hospital—a simple “I wonder why”—and Rachel found herself unable to go back to sleep because those shops were left standing. She had finally dragged herself from her nice warm bed and started making calls.

Santino was nowhere to be found (and Zia had a privacy notice up), so she had left a message for him to meet her at the west end of Gayle Street as soon as possible. Then a call to Sturtevant; the Chief of Detectives might have been used to phone calls in the witching hours, but he had been excruciatingly clear about how he felt about being woken on a hunch. Still, he had arranged for a member of the bomb squad and a paramedic to join her, just in case. Phil dropped by her house to pick her up within five minutes, and neither of them were surprised when the paramedic turned out to be Hope.

Rachel walked into the middle of the coffee shop. She had decided not to explore the space until she was standing inside of it; she missed too much when she relied on her scans instead of walking the scene in her own body.

The air inside the store was stale and autumn-cold, and also somehow empty. The power was off, the only working electronics the odd battery-operated flashlight, the abandoned radio on a shelf in the back room. The digital ecosystem that defined her waking hours had been shaken to its roots; she needed to throw her mind a full block to the south before she pinged off of the nearest working streetlight.

She traced the gas lines from the front of the shop to the rear of the building. These lines were different from those in the building where she had fallen through the floor. There, the lines had entered through the basement; here, they came in through the back wall.

Rachel moved her sixth sense away from the utilities and into the room. Her scans caught on a trash can, full of flies and mold, and churning with life. She winced and shifted her attention to the floor. Nothing. Could have sworn…

Her scans caught on the light tracing of footsteps through the dust behind the counter.

Bingo.

“Phil? You’re sure nobody’s been in this building since Gayle Street was locked down?”

“You saw that key ring. Of course I’m not sure,” he said. “But my best guess? Yeah, we’re the first ones in here. This store isn’t a priority site. It’s out of the blast zone but within the lockdown, and no one’s had the time to check for structural integrity yet.”

“Okay,” she said, kneeling. “Might want to call for a Forensics team, then. Someone else has been in here within the past five days.”

“Let’s hold off on that,” Phil said. “If we are dealing with a potential bomb site, I’ll have to secure it first anyhow.”

“I can tell when you’re lying,” Rachel said, grinning at him to show no harm done.

Phil blushed pink. “It’s a wild goose chase, Penguin.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe. But try to walk where I walk, just in case.”

The three of them crept through the store to the back room in a single line. “There,” Rachel said. “What do you see?”

Hope crouched low. “More dust?”

“Drywall dust,” Phil said, his colors beginning to brighten. “Someone’s busted up an interior wall.”

“Recently, too,” Rachel said, noting how the white layer of drywall dust had fallen on top of the ashy residue that had covered all of Gayle Street since the bombing.

The source of some of the dust was a roundish indentation about five feet above the floor. “This was caused by hard contact with someone’s head,” Hope said.

Rachel, who had seen Hope in a fight, didn’t question what she considered to be a professional opinion. Instead, she kept walking towards the back of the store where a trail of dried liquid droplets fluoresced as organic.

“Hope?” she called. “Can you take a look at this?”

“Oh, man.” The other woman knelt a second time, and brought the light as close as she could to the droplets without touching them. “Blood. Mostly skeletonized around the edges… Whatever injury caused this probably happened at least two or three days ago.”

“There’s a piece of pipe against the wall,” Rachel said, pointing. “There’s more blood on it, plus some hair.”

“Yummy,” Phil said. “I think I’ll call Forensics now.”

Phil stepped outside to make the call in peace; the Agents had learned it was harder to ignore distractions without an actual phone. Somehow, an object pressed against the ear helped ground the conversation.

“Some spatter up the wall,” Hope said, following the spray of blood with the light of the lamp. “And by the back door… Rachel, is that blood?”

Rachel nodded. A black stain had spread, thick and noxious, across the floor and towards the drain in the center of the room. Neither of them felt the need to mention that whoever had lost that much blood was undoubtedly dead. Someone had walked through the pool, leaving a crisp trail of footprints across the back of the room.

“What happened here?” Hope asked softly.

“I think this is where the two cops were killed,” Rachel told her. “The timeline’s right.”

“Why would they be in this store?” Hope asked as she set the lamp on top of a nearby rack of old pastries. A swarm of flies rose in protest, and she waved them aside. “This block wasn’t part of the bombing.”

“Yeah,” Rachel said, following the gas lines again. “But it should have been… Hah! C’mere,” she said to Hope. “Take a look at this.”

Hope tilted the head of the lamp towards Rachel, and joined her at a utility panel large enough to be a good-sized doggy door. “What am I looking at?”

Rachel removed a pen from her suit coat pocket, and used it to swing the panel door open. A faint smell of gas wafted out. Inside was a cluster of utility junctions. One of these, a copper tube only slightly thicker than the pen itself, had its two exposed ends hanging free in midair where it had been cut in the center.

“See?” Rachel pointed to the open ends of the copper tube with the pen. “The gas line was pinched and cut, probably with a pair of heavy-duty pliers. Whoever did this was working in a hell of a hurry. I’d bet they were removing one of those gas storage cylinders.”

“Oh shit,” Hope whispered.

“Your guess that the blood’s a few days old seems right,” Rachel said. “Gas dissipates pretty quickly. I think any major leakage would have taken about that long to clear out if he had locked the room up behind him.”

“Why didn’t he blow this place, too?” Hope said.

“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “If it were me, I would have punctured the canister and chucked a lit cigarette at it on my way out of the door. Maybe there was equipment failure. Maybe the cops interrupted him, he killed them, and then he panicked.”

“Or maybe he knew that if the bodies were found here, they’d pick the place apart.”

“Interesting theory,” Rachel said, sweeping her scans out again. “But now that we know what happened, it’ll be picked apart anyhow.”

She went over the bloody footprints, her mind lightly brushing over the ridges which separated the dried blood from the dust. In and out, over and through, a pattern she had seen before…

God damn it.

“What’s wrong?” Hope asked her.

Rachel glanced up at her; she didn’t realize she had spoken aloud. “Shoes.”

“The footprints?”

“No, the whole… Okay, sorry, this might be wordy but I need to talk it out.”

“Shoot.”

“Here’s the thing about shoes,” Rachel said to Hope. “In the early days of forensics, shoes were a pretty useful tool. You could tell a lot about a person based on the type of shoe they wore, how they wore it… Sometimes you could break a case if you matched a print to a wear pattern.

“These days?” she said, casting her scans to retrace the light holes in the dust. “Basically you’ve either got very poor people who wear their shoes until the soles fall off, or not-very-poor people with closets full of them. Manufacturing methods help—most makers will stamp their brand into everything, and it’s become so cheap to innovate and produce a rubber sole they can make a new design for every shoe—but there’s a tradeoff to that because mass manufacturing means mass manufacturing. Cheap to buy, cheaper to ditch, especially if your average murderer has turned on a television set in the last fifteen years and realizes his blood-covered shoes are a one-way ticket to the needle.”

“Your Texas is showing,” Hope said, grinning.

“No, we’d still hang them in Texas if we could,” Rachel said. “But my point is that shoes are nearly useless in an investigation, unless…”

“Unless?”

 

Rachel was quiet for a moment. “Unless the person wearing them got them from the military.”

“Oh hell,” Hope muttered, her kaleidoscope of colors catching gray along the edges.

“It gets worse,” Rachel told her. “Did you know there’s no such thing as standard military-issued footwear these days? Or,” she amended. “I should say instead that you always get something when you go through boot camp, but the days of every soldier wearing the same style of shoe are over. The military’s got multiple suppliers, multiple types of footwear… Soldiers like me from hoity-toity suburban families never bothered with military issue, either. Our parents usually shipped us something nice which matched our ballistics vests each Christmas.”

“So these footprints aren’t… I’m not following you.” Hope said, staring down at what she couldn’t see.

“Well,” Rachel said. “There’s an exception to every rule. With the military and shoes, it’s Special Forces uniforms.”

“Oh shit.”

“Yup. Everybody’s supposed to match when they go on missions. Part of their outfit is a pair of top-of-the-line combat boots. Anybody can buy them, but only a very few people outside of Special Forces wear them. Unless they’re civilians with dreams of grandeur,” she corrected herself. “Military guys know better. They strut around in those boots, and they’re treated as though they’re pretending they’ve earned them. Usually doesn’t end well.”

“So we’re hoping these footprints were left by a civilian?”

“That, and we’re also hoping the bullet stuck in the cinderblock doesn’t match Special Forces issue,” Rachel said, pointing to the far wall.

Hope tilted the light to shine on the pocked hole. “There’s no blood around the hole,” she said.

Rachel nodded. “Looks like a stray. I don’t know why they didn’t bother to dig it out of the wall when they left; cinderblock can wreck a bullet, but Forensics will still be able to get something from it.”

“I don’t like this place,” Hope said, glancing warily around the room like a rabbit in an open meadow. “Something is not right here.”

“I’m with you,” Rachel said. The hairs on the back of her neck were itching. “I think we should wait outside.”

They left the room as quickly as possible, backtracking through the shop until Hope could close the front door behind them. They kept walking until they found themselves standing in front of the stationery store across the street, as far from the coffee shop as they could get.

“I hate bombs,” Hope muttered under her breath. “Cannot stand the ticky things.”

Rachel grinned at her. “Me too.”

“You’re both nuts,” Phil said as he rejoined them. “A bomb is more predictable than a person. I’d take an unstable bomb over an unstable psychopath any day.”

“What about unstable psychopaths wearing combat boots?” Rachel asked, and told him her theory.

Phil’s colors brightened and dimmed in turns. “This is the best lead we’ve had yet,” he said. “But…”

Rachel shook her head. “It wasn’t us.”

“Rachel…”

“It’s not,” she insisted. “The evidence can point wherever the hell it wants. There is no motive big enough for us to do this to ourselves.”

A major advantage of finding a smaller crime scene within a larger one was the response time. The nearest Forensics unit arrived within minutes, a team from the FBI that had just finished processing a site three blocks up. Rachel caught sight of a familiar core color from within their group. “Stay here for a sec,” she said to the others, and jogged back across the road.

“Campbell,” she called to the man with the pea green core. “Got a minute?”

His conversational colors brightened when he saw her. “Peng? They said an Agent had found the site. You?”

“Yeah,” she said. She and Santino had assisted Special Agent Campbell on a bank robbery a few weeks back. He was a good man, and the Forensics team he led was solid and thorough. His voice reminded her of Laurence Olivier’s; Campbell tended to ramble, and she didn’t mind at all. “I came down here on a hunch. If I had thought it was a real lead that would pan out, I probably would have waited until morning.”

“No,” Campbell chuckled. “We’re thrilled. We needed some real evidence.”

She nodded. Everyone working the Gayle Street scene was wearing the same gray across their uniform blues, but Campbell’s team had shaken most of it off. Phil had been right: everyone had needed a new lead. Desperately.

“Do you need our help?” Rachel said, indicating Phil and Hope across the street. OACET had the authority to freeze Campbell out, but Rachel was well aware Campbell and his team were more qualified to process the scene.

“It’s better if we work it alone,” Campbell hedged, his colors going a slightly-sick green as he thought about them clomping through his near-pristine crime scene. “Unless you want to watch?”

“That’s not necessary,” Rachel said, shaking her head. “A note that OACET found it would be nice. For the record, I was the one who broke the front window, and the paramedic and I walked into the back room to check if anyone was injured.”

Campbell smirked at her white lie. A certain level of intrusion was to be expected, but it still looked bad on the paperwork. Nobody could raise a fuss if someone entered a site in the best interests of possible victims. “Sounds about right,” he said. “I’ll make sure you get credit for the find.”

“Thanks, Campbell,” she said. “I mean that.”

She crossed Gayle Street to rejoin Hope and Phil, and the three of them stood around, chatting idly as they waited for Campbell’s team to process the scene. Now that the adrenaline was fading, Rachel could feel the cold starting to creep through her suit; she checked Hope’s colors and found her shivering.

Ten minutes later, they had invaded the nearest all-hours diner. The three of them had spread out in a booth large enough to seat eight, and were halfway through a platter of hash browns. The hash browns had arrived on a diner-dirty plate, with small scraps of previous meals baked onto its surface by countless trips through a dying dishwasher. The three of them couldn’t care less; Hope used a thumbnail to chip off a sliver of old tomato, but it was more for science than sanitation, as she inspected it for a full five seconds before flicking it into a basket of lukewarm creamers.

Rachel used to be picky about food. Well, “picky” was a stretch. Maybe “selective” was a better way to look at it. In the old days, she probably would have sent the hash browns back and demanded a salad on a paper plate. Now, she slathered ketchup on her share and wondered if she could talk the others into adding some ranch dressing.

(Once in a while, she caught herself remembering how it used to be, back in high school and in her easier Army postings, when almost every conversation she had with other women revolved around food. Calories, specifically—one friendship-ending conversation in particular had caused Rachel to implement a policy to never discuss dieting, or dessert shaming, or any personal weight-related topic with anyone outside of the medical profession, ever. It had been a minor epiphany, really, when she finally recognized that eating with other women led to endless rehashes on the consequences of food. And did those same topics come up when she ate with men? No, never. It was ridiculous, she had thought at the time, how much energy women spend resenting energy. But stick a chip in her brain and fast-forward five years, and food had reasserted its rightful place as a commodity instead of a liability. Jenny Davies believed the implant consumed anywhere between thirty to fifty percent of an Agent’s daily intake of calories; less for smaller women than larger men, certainly, but Rachel hated how she was now as obsessed with food consumption as a supermodel. It was poor comfort that she was no longer trying to consume too little, but rather worrying about whether she was consuming enough. Food had value again, and she supposed that was how it should be, but oh, how she loathed the reason why.)

And then she caught a glimpse of a smooth gray core hurrying past the window. “Hey…”

“What’s up?” Phil mumbled around a mouthful of fried potatoes.

“Spotted someone I know,” she told them. “Be right back.”

She pushed open the door to the diner and got hit with a blast of cold air; the wind had picked up. The person’s size and core colors were a match, so she called out: “Bell?

The girl stopped dead in her tracks, her colors snapping tight around her to protect her. She half-turned towards Rachel, and the armor fell away in recognition. “Agent Peng. Hey!”

“What brings you out at this hour?” Rachel asked.

Bell sighed and shook her head. “I lost track of time and the buses stopped running. I’m just trying to get to a working Metro line before I get mugged.”

Whoa, Rachel thought. Washington D.C. wasn’t the biggest city out there, but if Bell was coming from the makers’ loft, she must have already walked more than a mile. At night. And she was wearing another bohemian outfit, more holes than wholes, and was thoroughly chilled in icy blues. Rachel could already hear Santino shouting.

“We can give you a ride home,” Rachel said, “if you don’t mind sitting through an early breakfast with us.”

Bell’s conversational colors flared with a gnawing red at her midsection: the girl was starving. A money-green hue suppressed the red. “Thanks, but I should get going,” she said after a long moment.

Rachel was not personally acquainted with the starving artist phase of young adulthood, but she had seen it often enough to recognize it in others. “My treat, I insist,” she said. “Santino isn’t here, but there’s another Agent. Phil Netz? He works with the MPD’s bomb unit.”

The reds of hunger and pride wove through each other as Bell fought with herself. Rachel sighed—she really didn’t have the patience to see which of Bell’s drives would win—and played her trump card. “Oh, and Hope Blackwell is here, too,” she added. “So if you’re still looking for donors, this might be a good chance to get to know her.”

Bell’s mouth fell open and her surface colors went white. “Blackwell?”

“Yeah,” Rachel said as casually as she could. Hope’s husband might be the reason she was famous, but she was the reason Patrick Mulcahy was rich: Hope was apparently a literal genius when it came to day trading. The woman’s net worth was somewhere upwards of fifty million dollars and climbing. She worked as a paramedic because, in her words, she got bored easily and there were fewer fights at home after a twelve-hour shift.

Guaranteed food and the possibility of money? Bell couldn’t resist. “If you’re sure they won’t mind…?”

“I promise,” Rachel said. “Come on, you’ll like them.”

Phil’s colors lit in blue recognition when Bell came over to the table.

“You’ve met her?” Rachel asked him while Bell introduced herself.

“Only in your construct,” he said. “I didn’t realize her hair was actually green.”

Interesting, Rachel thought to herself. She had been sure she didn’t pay attention to faces. If Phil could recognize Bell from nothing but Rachel’s image of the loft, then maybe she was better at visualizing people than she had assumed—

“Sorry, no. I didn’t recognize her from her face,” Phil cut in. “You nailed her movements and build perfectly, though.”

Rachel snapped their connection shut with a mental snarl. She wasn’t sure if she was mad at Phil or herself, so she took it out on the hash browns.

It took Bell a few minutes to adjust to warmth, food, and strangers. She kept her hands wrapped tight around a thick cafeteria mug until she had drunk three cups of coffee so light they were mostly sugar and cream. Phil drew her out; by the time her omelet arrived, the two of them were happily discussing the pros and cons of six-speed manual transmissions.

“So,” Rachel finally interrupted when the car talk had reached soporific proportions for her and Hope. “When I was at the loft, Bell showed me this incredible project she’s working on for military vets.”

Bell nodded. “It’s a physical therapy device. It’ll take some time to get the system in place, but the potential is crazy.”

“Oh?” Hope said.

That was all the opportunity Bell needed. She launched into the same presentation she had given to Rachel, minus the visual aids and with as much medical terminology as she could cram into it; Hope was in her paramedic’s uniform, and Bell was tailoring her pitch to her audience.

“That’s amazing,” Hope said when Bell had finished. “How did you get started with this project?”

“Oh, God, it’s so sad,” Bell said. “The guy who owns the loft? Terry Templeton? His son was killed in Iraq. He offers free workspace to qualified candidates—students, mostly—and when he interviewed me, we got to talking about medical uses for 3D printers. He’s the one who put me in touch with the V.A. hospital so I could get funding.

“Some funding.” Bell corrected herself as quickly as she could. “I’ve won a few government grants, but those don’t go nearly as far as they did before the recession.”

“The economy’s starting to come back,” Phil said. “It might not be too long before the grants pick up, too.”

“Doubt it. The government’s screwing researchers,” Bell said, squeezing a generous helping of ketchup across the top of her omelet. “It takes years for the science and service sectors to get funding, and when that funding’s pulled, it’s almost never replaced. Drives me crazy, how the politicians and the military gets everything they want—Congress even gets their gym renovated!—but the science side gets screwed over. Seems like we’re the only ones who are trying to do good, but the government’s just interested in the bottom line.”

“‘Government’... I hate that word,” Hope said. “Such a shitty catch-all.”

Bell went bright red in embarrassment. “I’m sorry!” she said. “I didn’t even think…”

“No, no,” Hope said, waving the girl’s concern away. “It’s not what you said. I just hate that term in general. I mean, my husband? And Phil and Rachel here? They’re with the government, but they’ve got nothing to do with science or funding.”

“No kidding,” Phil said. “Every time Congress goes up for a vote, I walk around telling strangers I’m not with those guys. I’d fund your projects over a new military base any day, Bell.”

Rachel, who used to wear thick rubber-soled shoes in the shower to keep from being electrocuted by the current running through the metal floors of Afghanistan’s repurposed Soviet-era bathrooms, kept her mouth firmly shut. Like most former grunts, she had learned long ago that there was the military, and there was the idea of the military, and these could not coexist within the same mind without a hell of a fight breaking out. She dumped more eggs on her plate, and let the others decide how to run the country.

“But…” Bell was struggling to say exactly what she thought Hope wanted to hear, her surface colors thick with Hope’s pulsing blue-black core and wrapped tight within the color of dollar bills. “… if we don’t call the government—well, the government!—what should we call it?”

“There’s nothing else you can call it!” Hope said. “Not without breaking each department down, and that’s just not gonna fly in everyday conversation. But to call it ‘government’… No. That term’s just wrong. It groups every person who works in a government office into a single thing, and they aren’t. The government’s not even a hydra with a hundred heads. It’s… It’s a bunch of poor dudes stuck in the same clown car, ‘cause that’s the only way they can get to work.”

“That’s about right,” Phil said. “And half of the time, you’ve got to wonder who’s driving the thing!”

Bell laughed, a light, happy sound, and Phil smiled at her. He was slowly shifting from casual blues to a more intense purple, with a thread of red lust. The lust was hard to place; Rachel couldn’t remember the last time she had seen it in him.

Phil caught Rachel looking. “What?”

“Little young, isn’t she?”

“Half your age plus seven,” he replied.

“And how old would that be, again?”

“I don’t want to ask her,” he sighed across their link. “If she’s old enough to vote, I’m just barely safe.”

Rachel tried not to wince. They had lost five years to the Program, and she couldn’t quite wrap her head around how she had woken up one morning and had chronologically aged out of her prime dating years. These days, women who should have been attractive had become… girls. Bell was smart and cute, but she was exhaustingly young. Rachel wished Phil luck.

“If you want to see a part of the government that’s actually working, I’ll take you on a tour of the MPD’s Consolidated Forensic Laboratory,” Phil said to Bell. “There’s an Agent who works there, and he’s got the most impressive video setup you’ll ever see.”

Bad move, Phil, Rachel thought to herself. Phil was cute in his own way, but Jason was haughty and model-sleek, and Bell was still young enough to find arrogance an attractive trait. Best for Phil to keep her away from Jason’s lab complet—

There was a sudden thin tremble in the air.

Everyone at the table stopped talking.

“Earthquake?” Bell said, when the shaking had stopped.

“I don’t think so,” Rachel said, throwing her scans back towards Gayle Street, two blocks over. She hoped she was wrong…

She wasn’t.

She felt Phil’s scans pulse beside her own. “Penguin,” he said, his mental voice almost broken. “Did we cause this?”

The coffee shop they had explored barely an hour earlier was gone. She searched the space where it had stood, her scans not finding anything but a fresh rolling cloud of smoke and debris. “No,” she told him. “We absolutely did not cause this. We weren’t the ones who booby-trapped the store.”

She didn’t mention that it was absolutely their fault for not finding the trap, and broke their link, hard, before Phil could pick the guilt out of her mind.

“Phil, take care of Bell.” Rachel dropped her long-distance scans and stood.

“They need me—”

“No.” She came down on him with her full mental weight. “You will see Bell home safely, and then call Sergeant Andrews and tell him to join us at First District Station for debriefing. You will not talk to anyone else. Do you understand?”

There was a moment when she thought Phil would fight her. It passed, and Phil looked down and away. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll take her home.”

“Thank you.” Rachel turned away from the other Agent. “Hope? You good to run?”

“Shit. Yeah.” Hope threw her paramedic’s bag over her shoulder, and the two of them were out the door before Bell could ask what had happened.

They sprinted back to Gayle Street. The moment they turned the corner, Hope froze.

“Oh my God,” she whispered. “That could have been us.”

“It wasn’t.” Rachel grabbed Hope’s arm, maybe a little too roughly, and pushed her towards the group of law enforcement officers clustered around three men sitting on the ground. Hope stumbled forward, then launched herself into paramedic mode and went to do what she could for the injured.

Rachel turned to the nearest person shouting orders, and waited until he was done before asking, “What happened here?”

“Agent Peng?” Special Agent Campbell seemed to barely recognize her. He had his left arm up and his coat sleeve pressed against his forehead to staunch the blood from a cut on his forehead. “We don’t know for sure. We were processing the scene when the back room blew. Did you… You didn’t see anything when you were back there to suggest there was a second bomb?”

“No. I scanned that building from top to bottom. There was nothing live in the entire place that could have been a—oh. Oh no,” she said, finally realizing what she and Phil had missed.

“What?”

“There was a battery-operated radio on a shelf, and a big emergency flashlight on a charger. Both of those still had power.”

Special Agent Campbell’s colors shifted towards reds; her turquoise core appeared within the middle of his anger. “Agent Peng—”

“I know what you’re thinking,” she interrupted him. “But there was no way I could have known if either of those had a bomb in it. I’m not omniscient. I can tell when a radio has power, and I can look inside of it, but if I don’t know what the interior is supposed to look like, it could be filled with plastic explosives shaped to mimic speakers and I’d never know the difference. I wasn’t even thinking of looking for traps. After I realized it was a murder scene, I got out of there and called it in.”

Rachel intentionally left Phil out of the discussion. Phil did know what a bomb secreted inside of an electronic device would look like, but he had been the one who had gone outside to call for backup. She needed to keep the focus off of him.

Special Agent Campbell weighed her words, then nodded, reds fading at the edges. His own team had been trained to spot hidden explosives: there was plenty of blame to go around. “Do you think someone remote-activated the bomb?”

“I don’t know,” Rachel said, shaking her head. “If it was hidden in the radio, maybe. I would have noticed if the flashlight could talk back to me, but the purpose of a radio is to pick up radio waves. If it was wired for remote detonation, I wouldn’t have noticed anything wrong.”

“So it was in the radio.”

Rachel turned to look at the speaker, an MPD officer she didn’t recognize by either his voice or his core. She pinged the RFID tags in his badge and got his name and credentials: Officer Kerry, out of Fourth District Station. “I didn’t say that,” she told him. “What I said was that I wouldn’t notice if it was. As far as I know, this could have been caused by a landmine on a tripwire. I went in, saw it was a probable murder scene, and got out.

“I have the ability to talk to machines,” Rachel said, hitting Officer Kerry with the cold, soulless gaze that was only possible when the other person had no idea they were looking into the eyes of a blind woman. Almost everyone she met assumed her eyes worked; this assumption, coupled with her long experience in dealing with problems that didn’t want to be solved, gave her an unbeatable competitive edge in staring contests. The officer took a step back and turned away, but she kept the pressure on him, moving forward and leaning in as close as she could. “But none of the machines in the store told me they were bombs. I did not presume to check for explosives. I did not think to bring a bomb-sniffing dog. Please tell me what you would have done differently if you were in my place.”

And please, she silently begged any higher power listening in, don’t let them remember that a man who works with their own bomb squad was the other Agent with me.

Kerry finally relented. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Sorry.”

“All right, then.” She took a breath to steady herself. “How many were killed?”

“No one,” Campbell said.

Relief smashed into her so hard that she nearly bent in half. “Seriously injured?”

He grinned at her and pointed to his forehead with his free hand. “You’re looking at the worst of it.”

“Campbell?” she said when she could trust herself to not punch him. “Never do that to me again.”

“Try and find the bomb next time, okay, Peng?”

“Come with me,” she said, and dragged Campbell over to where Hope Blackwell was patching up his team. She left Hope with firm instructions on how to treat Campbell (“Don’t be gentle, and anything you’ve got that burns like acid in an open wound? Double up on that.”), and stepped away from the group to call Phil.

Their connection opened, but he didn’t greet her. Instead, she felt a steering wheel under her hands, one foot on the brake, the other on the gas… “Phil?”

“I’m taking Bell home,” he said.

Rachel wasn’t sure if he had meant to add “Like you ordered,” but she had heard that thought nonetheless; Phil was furious.

“No one was hurt,” she told him. “Couple of scratches, at worst.”

Phil’s sense of relief was stronger than hers had been. Rachel had to reach out and steady herself on a nearby mailbox until the surge of his emotion passed. “Thanks for telling me,” he said after a moment.

“Phil—”

“Not right now, Rachel.”

She threw some authority into their link. “Yes, now. How do you think it would have looked for OACET if their resident bomb expert got an FBI forensics team killed?”

“I know!” he shouted. “I know the collective comes first! But you think I want to walk away and let you take the blame?”

“Chain of command, Phil. Doesn’t matter what you do when I’m the one who’s responsible. If there was any fault here, it was mine. I should have been the one to go outside and make the call, not you. But no, I was too busy thinking about shoes.”

Phil’s raw anger filled her, and he broke their link without answering.

“Rachel?”

“What?!”

Hope and Campbell each took a step away from her when she snapped at them, but Hope started grinning. “Brain fight?” she asked.

Rachel nodded. To Campbell, she said, “Walk me through what happened before the bomb went off.”

“Uh,” Campbell said, mildly orange and uncertain. “Everything was business as usual, and then the back room went up. We were all outside at the time, so—”

“Wait.” Rachel threw up a hand to interrupt him. “Was anyone in the store?”

Campbell shook his head.

“Shit!” Rachel whispered as she turned to face the bulk of Gayle Street. She threw her wide scans out and ran them up and down any building with a direct line of sight on the coffee shop.

Campbell picked up on her thinking almost immediately. “Shit!” he agreed, and moved to rejoin his team.

“What?” Hope asked Rachel. “What’s happening?”

“If the bomb wasn’t on a tripwire or was activated manually—”

“Oh!” Hope looked up and around. “Remote… uh, detonation?”

“Yeah,” Rachel said. “So unless the bomb was on a timer—which I doubt, because I would have noticed a timer—someone had enough control to decide when to set it off.”

“You think he waited until everybody was out of the building?”

Shit, Rachel thought to herself. “Hey Campbell!” she shouted to the FBI. “I’ll be right back.” She snatched Hope’s medical bag off of the pavement and started walking. “Come on,” she whispered to Hope. “I have to get you out of here.”

“I can’t leave the scene,” Hope said. “You think cops are the only ones who have to deal with paperwork?”

“I think the guy who set off the bomb didn’t want to hurt anyone in law enforcement,” Rachel said in a low voice as she grabbed Hope’s arm and pulled her into a jog. “And you’re the only person here who isn’t part of that club.”

She had expected the other woman’s colors to go white, but Hope pulled away from Rachel, electric blue with intent and purpose. “No,” she said, searching the street. “I’d know—”

Hope’s colors shifted to greens, an odd combination of sage and an odd almost-orange lime. Rachel had no idea what those colors meant, and she didn’t care; Hope finally relented. “Yeah,” she said. “You’re right. Let’s get out of here.”

Rachel nodded, and the two of them fled into the dark.