“I was attacked just off Market Square,” Kane was explaining to Grant as he watched the red orb of the sun sink over the Cobaltville skyline through the window of the hospital room. “She targeted me, Grant. I’m sure of it.”
Grant looked at his long-term partner from his position on the hard-mattressed, high bed. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” Kane nodded, bitterness in his voice. “The woman packed a hell of a punch, but I came out of it pretty much unscathed, just a couple of bruises.”
“And what happened to her?” Grant urged.
“I lost her,” Kane admitted. “She disappeared. And I don’t mean that she ran off or anything like that—I mean she disappeared.”
Grant thought for a moment. “Like what? I don’t get it.”
“Like this,” Kane said and he snapped his fingers. “Poof, gone. Just evaporated as I looked at her.”
“You were close to Market Square, right?” Grant clarified. “Did anyone else see this?”
“Well, that’s the strange part,” Kane explained. “Once she disappeared, it was like no one even remembered her, like I was the only one.”
Grant looked at his partner, concern furrowing his brow. “When we were attacked in the Pits,” he said gently, “there was a lot of stuff flying about. Homemade grenades and things. Maybe there was something—I don’t know—to make you hallucinate in among all that junk? Is it possible you imagined this woman who attacked you?”
Kane leaned against the windowpane and watched the people below as they made their way to and fro, busy at their designated tasks. “Other people saw her,” he said firmly, “got out of her way. I know they did.”
“Which could all be a part of the hallucination, pal,” Grant suggested.
Kane turned to the bed, looking at his trusted partner. “She was like nothing I’ve ever seen, Grant. Tattoos on her arms and body, and her clothing was crazy. She wasn’t from Cobaltville. She wasn’t from any ville at all. And yet I knew her. Or at least I think I did. I just can’t tell you from where.”
“Outlander maybe?” Grant said. “They go in for some weird stuff out there. How long ago was this?” he added.
“A few hours, just after 3:00 p.m.,” Kane said. “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time before I came here to talk to you. And there’s something else.”
Grant watched his friend standing beside the bed, encouraging him to continue after a moment.
“I saw a woman in the market, too,” Kane said. “A different woman, a redhead. This was much earlier. And I think maybe I knew her, too. I got the same feeling off her, déjà vu.”
“We’ve chased down a lot of criminals,” Grant said. “It’s possible you arrested her, arrested both of them at some point.”
Unconsciously, Kane’s hand moved to his jaw and his fingers rubbed against the rough stubble that was forming there. “I don’t think it’s that,” he said hesitantly. “This is like something ethereal. I can’t lock down the memory, but I know it’s there. You know?”
“All points to the hallucination theory,” Grant said. “That would fit with what you’re saying. Did you receive a medical when we came out of the Tartarus Pits?”
Kane nodded. “Usual checkup.”
Grant shrugged. “Maybe they missed something,” he said.
“Or maybe we missed something,” Kane said. “Something so fundamental we can’t see it. You ever think that, Grant?”
“How do you mean?” Grant asked, intrigued.
“We are Magistrates,” Kane said slowly. “But what if we got caught? What if we were trapped in a prison cell, a cell so subtle that we cannot see its edges, its walls?”
“Don’t talk to me about cells. I’m already stuck in one room,” Grant reminded him, “and I ain’t going nowhere for a while.”
Kane shook his head, realization dawning. “Yes, you are,” he told his longtime partner. “You’re going to your ideal job. A cozy desk job with no need to ever be in the firing line again.”
“But that’s a good thing,” Grant said. “That’s not a cell. That’s not punishment.”
“What if it is,” Kane asked his partner, “and you just don’t see it?”
Grant looked at him, turning the idea over in his mind. “So what are you saying? That we’re inside a prison and we don’t realize it? Is that what you think? Kane?”
Kane was silent, lost in his own thoughts, and Grant considered what he had just suggested.
“What is Cerberus?” Kane blurted, the question coming from nowhere.
Grant looked up at his partner, distracted. “What?” he said. “A dog. A mythological dog, right? Three heads.”
“Yeah.” Kane nodded. “That’s what I think, too, but it’s not what I feel. I feel it’s something else. Something just out of sight, like this thing I’ve been saying about the two women, about the ‘prison.’” Kane was silent, groping for a train of thought he found more and more difficult to grasp, almost as though his very thought process had been blocked from proceeding along this line. “I think…I think I need to talk to the redhead,” he said finally.
“You think she has something to do with this?” Grant asked.
“I don’t know,” Kane admitted, his hands forming into fists, white lines appearing across his skin as he clenched them tighter and tighter. “I can’t see it, Grant,” he said, “but it’s there. Whatever it is, it’s there.” With that, he turned and headed toward the exit of the room.
Grant rested back on his pillows, gazing at the ceiling, turning the thoughts over in his mind. What was Kane alluding to when he asked about Cerberus? And why had Grant seen the nurse, the doctors with dog faces? Could Kane be right? Could a prison truly exist that couldn’t be detected by its inmates? What purpose would it serve? And, if such a thing did exist, who were the jailers?
KANE STOPPED at an info port in the lobby of the medical hub, standing before the screen and punching in his security clearance code with impatience.
“Welcome, Magistrate Kane,” the screen read. “How may I be of service?”
Tapping into the Cobaltville mainframe, Kane brought up a full list of his arrests over the past two years, requesting details and photographs of each perpetrator. The photos appeared on-screen and he scrolled through them rapidly. After a few minutes he was certain that the redhead wasn’t among them, a fact that didn’t surprise him in the slightest.
Kane stood beside the column that supported the data screen, glancing around at the waiting patients in the lobby of the medical hub, wondering what else to try. The redhead was familiar to him somehow. Perhaps he had seen her before, a perp or a witness for some case he had not been personally involved with. He could search all of the records, but that would take hours, perhaps days. Kane tsked and rolled his eyes, wondering how to approach such an immense problem. Then he remembered the nervous clerk at the reception desk. He tapped the three-digit code that would erase any record of his use of the info port and prevent anyone assuming his security clearance. Then he turned and made his way to the reception desk.
The nervous, spotty youth was still sitting behind his desk, slightly slouched as he flicked through a yellowing book of single-frame cartoons. Kane stood before the desk, casting his shadow across the clerk’s book. The man looked up and almost toppled from his chair as he attempted to tidy himself. He sat more erect, casting the book to one side.
“M-magistrate,” the clerk stuttered, and it looked to Kane as though he was about to salute him, thought better of it and ran the hand through his greasy mop of hair. “Can I…How can I…That is, may I help you?”
Kane’s expression was emotionless and stern, his eyes hidden behind the dark lenses of his standard Mag glasses. “I need you to run a check for me,” he said. “I’m looking for someone. I don’t have a name but I can give you a description.” Everyone in Cobaltville had to take booster shots at least twice a year, which meant that the woman with the red-gold hair, like everyone else, would have a medical file.
The clerk nervously swallowed as he pushed himself across to his DDC computer unit and attached the mike pickup to his ear. “I’ll do what I can, Magistrate,” he promised. “There are a lot of records, of course,” he added as the number of available files appeared on his screen.
“You have pictures, right?” Kane said, leaning against the high desk so that he could see the man’s computer screen. “Once I see her I’ll know.”
“Okay.” The clerk nodded. “I’ll need height, weight, age, distinguishing characteristics?”
“I’m looking for a woman,” Kane began.
“Patient is female,” the clerk said into his microphone, and Kane watched the number of applicable files halve in an instant.
Kane thought back to the woman he had seen in the Market Square purchasing frozen goods with the girl, presumably her daughter. “Height—five-six, maybe five-seven. Weight, about 125.”
The clerk fed the information into the computer via his mike pickup, watching as the number of applicable files continued to drop.
“Late twenties,” Kane decided, “with red hair and green eyes.”
The clerk turned to Kane, waiting to see if he wanted to add anything else. “Any distinguishing characteristics, Magistrate?”
Kane thought back. “Pretty,” he said. “No, not pretty—beautiful.”
“We, um, we don’t have a field for that,” the clerk admitted, “um, sir.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Kane told him, still envisioning the woman in his mind’s eye. She was beautiful, stunning, like no one else he had ever seen. An angel. “What do you have?”
The clerk spoke into his mike once more, and a series of medical case notes appeared on-screen, running to several dozen individuals. “Thirty-eight files,” he said. “You were lucky. If she’d been a brunette that figure would have run to several hundred.”
Kane nodded. “I don’t know if I’d call it lucky,” he muttered. Not if this angel is trying to kill me, he added to himself. He would need to arm himself before he investigated further.
BACK AT HIS APARTMENT, Kane knelt beside the small equipment locker that was hidden behind the sagging couch, and worked the combination lock. He swung the door open and reached inside for the Sin Eater handgun that was stored there beside its holster. With a heavy heart, he strapped the holster to his wrist and placed the compact pistol within.
Kane didn’t like this. The gun would give him an edge over any attacker, especially if the redhead turned out to be as much of a whirling dervish as the tattooed warrior he had met in the street, but somehow he felt like he was making his way to an execution. Furthermore, he had a nasty feeling that it may just turn out to be his own, especially if the redhead was, as he was beginning to suspect, one of his jailers.
Warily, he made his way from his apartment and headed to the address of the suspect.
ABI SAT ON THE OLD couch in the main room, scraping the bowl balanced in her lap with a spoon. From her bedroom, Brigid leaned out of the wardrobe cubbyhole to check that her niece was all right.
“Are you okay, ice cream monster?” she asked.
Abi looked up, seeing Brigid’s face peering through the open door, and nodded as she licked the last specks of ice cream from her spoon. One advantage to living in a one-person apartment was it meant that Brigid could pretty much see everything that Abigail got up to. The downside, of course, was that Abi slept in the lounge, and the place could feel awfully cramped. And then there were the Magistrates—if they ever learned that Brigid Baptiste had an unregistered “lodger” here she’d be fined a heavy penalty, and Abi would probably be taken away from her. She couldn’t imagine how that would feel, couldn’t imagine ever letting go now. That was the single reason that Brigid had never tried to register herself as Abigail’s legal guardian, her fear that such status may not be conferred upon her.
Brigid turned back to the computer screen, her voice loud as she called to Abi again. “Would you like anything else, munchkin?”
“No, thank you,” Abi said in her pleasant singsong voice. “Can I play with the fume, Auntie?”
“Well, okay,” Brigid decided, “but put your bowl in the sink first and don’t play for too long, okay?”
Abi uh-huh’d back and Brigid began tapping at the computer’s keyboard once more, bringing to mind all the documents she had seen in her half day at the Historical Division. The words on the screen glowed back at her as she read them through the rectangular frames of her eyeglasses.
“The quick brown fox never jumps over the lazy dog.”
Had she just typed that? It seemed a strange thing to type, the old mnemonic, but she had to have. No one else was operating the computer but her, the device wasn’t networked, no one could obtain remote access.
“The quick brown fox never jumps over the lazy dog.”
“Never.”
She knew the phrase by heart, and yet it nagged at her for a moment, as though there was some hidden meaning waiting to be revealed.
“The quick brown fox.”
“Never.”
She shook her head and her finger hovered over the delete key, about to get rid of the silly, pointless phrase.
Just then she heard a noise at her door, and Abi’s footfalls as her niece rushed to see who was coming in. Brigid’s apartment, like every other in Cobaltville, had no lock; it was a foundation stone of individual responsibility that ensured that all citizens of the ville were safe.
Brigid stood up and shoved her chair across the room as she closed the wardrobe doors, hiding the illegal computer from sight. She stepped out from her bedroom, into the lounge that ran past the kitchen nook and straight to the front door, and saw the black-garbed Magistrate standing there. He was huge, towering over Abi’s tiny frame as she peered up at him. The man was dressed in street clothes but wearing his Sin Eater sidearm in a holster attached to his wrist.
Oh, sweet baron, Brigid thought, they’ve come for Abi.
“Abigail,” Brigid said warily, “come over here.”
Abi looked over her shoulder, confusion on her face. “But I want to see…”
“Abi, munchkin,” Brigid insisted, “come here, come stand with me.”
Through his dark lenses, the Magistrate watched the little girl rush across the room to stand behind her aunt.
Once Abi was with her, Brigid took a tentative step forward and smiled as best she could. “Can I help you, Magistrate?”
“Are you Baptist?” The Magistrate barked the question like a command, his voice rough.
Some of the terror dimmed from Brigid’s eyes then, and her playful humor emerged. “Are you asking my name or my religion?” she teased, her voice melodically husky.
The Mag stood there, blocking the doorway, his face an emotionless mask. Something was blocking his thoughts, something making it hard to concentrate. “What?” he finally asked.
“The way things are,” Brigid continued, feeling her confidence grow, “I presume you’re asking my name. It’s pronounced Bap-teest. Brigid Baptiste. Why didn’t you knock?”
“I’m Magistrate Kane,” the Mag began.
“And Magistrate Kane doesn’t have to knock?” Brigid pressed, determined to keep the intruder off balance.
The Mag stood there, a huge presence in her tiny apartment, his body tense with a bubbling fury. “That’s right, Baptiste,” he growled. “Magistrate Kane doesn’t have to knock.”
Brigid looked him up and down, peering over the rims of her glasses, wondering what to say. He seemed confused, and he hadn’t mentioned Abigail yet. “So, what can I do for you, Magistrate-Kane-who-doesn’t-have-to-knock?”
Kane knew that he wasn’t controlling the situation as well as he should. Almost casually, he raised his right arm and the Sin Eater shot from its holster into his hand, the barrel pointed across the room at Brigid Baptiste. “Why don’t you start by telling me just what the hell you think you’re up to, Baptiste?”
Brigid moved then, moved so quickly that she would look back and wonder that she had actually done so. She turned, shoving Abi through the doorway and into her bedroom, instructing her to hide and not come out until all of this was over.
“What th—” Kane began, but Brigid was already darting across the small lounge, leaning down and scooping the little fume unit—no bigger than a baseball—from the floor.
“Don’t come any closer,” she warned him.
“Or what?” Kane snarled. “Are you going to throw your kid’s toy at me?”
Brigid looked at the fume, realizing that the Magistrate was right. It was not much bigger than her palm, made of plastic and weighed next to nothing. All the unit did was project images to the retina, giving Abi a huge playground to stir her imagination. Her own thoughts were in turmoil, emotions swinging back and forth, almost as if something had broken inside her. “I just want you to go,” Brigid said, “to leave us alone. Abigail’s a good girl, she doesn’t have anyone but me. You have to understand that.”
“I don’t understand a word of it,” Kane admitted, thoroughly confused by the woman’s actions.
“Won’t listen, you mean,” Brigid accused, glancing this way and that as though searching for another exit where Kane stood blocking the first.
“You need to calm down, Baptiste,” Kane instructed, still pointing the gun in her direction. “Sit down, where I can see you.”
“Where you can see me?” Brigid spat back. “Is that your idea of a joke? It’s a one-person apartment—I know that. But don’t take Abi from me, please. I’m all she has.”
The woman was babbling about the girl, Kane realized, the cute little tyke he had seen at the Market Square, the one who had come to meet him at the door before this Baptiste woman had called her away.
“I don’t care about the child,” he stated.
“Of course you don’t,” Brigid said, her voice becoming strained with a mixture of fury and fear. “It’s just the rules, right? That’s why you have to take her away.”
“No,” Kane said, “you misunderstand.” But as he began to explain, the leggy redhead ran at him, three steps across the lounge, swinging her clenched fist, fume and all, at his head.
Kane sidestepped, bringing up a protective arm to shield his face, but Brigid was ready for him. Her foot had caught behind his leg, and as he stepped she shifted her weight, dropping him to the floor. Kane slammed against the floor, grunting as the air rushed from his lungs. Above, Brigid hurdled over his prone form and into the bedroom.
“Abigail,” Brigid shouted, “come on, munchkin, we’re leaving. Right this instant.”
Sitting on the bed picking at the bandage that ran along her arm, Abi peered at her aunt with wide, innocent eyes. “Now? Where are we going?” she asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” Brigid said, and she scooped Abi from the bed and pushed her to the open doorway. “Outside, into the corridor, quick, quick.”
Magistrate Kane stirred, shifting his body, pushing himself up into a crouch. “Halt!” he shouted.
The girl with the honey-blond hair ran past him, slowing for just a second until Brigid urged her on with an urgent “Go, go!”
Kane brought up the Sin Eater, taking aim at the retreating form of the little girl. Brigid’s heeled boot came crashing at his wrist, throwing his aim.
“Don’t you dare!” she screamed. “Don’t you dare do that!”
Kane charged then, driving himself up off the floor and slamming into the woman’s stomach with his hard head. She staggered backward, her windmilling arms knocking a vase of flowers and a paperweight from the bookshelves before she slammed against the wall.
Brigid’s left hand swung out, smacking into Kane’s neck with the flat edge of her palm. It was a nasty, painful blow, light but well placed into the little cluster of nerves there. He grunted and shook off the blow, bringing up his free hand to block her next attack. With his right hand he raised the Sin Eater pistol once more, bringing the gun up toward Brigid’s chest.
“You know, you shape up pretty good for a bookworm,” Kane told her, a slight trace of admiration in his voice.
In response, Brigid kicked out at him, the sharp toes of her boots digging into his shins, and he leaped backward.
Brigid looked away from her opponent then, saw that Abigail was still standing in the doorway to the little apartment, watching the whole fight with worry drawn on her face. Her hand was on the bandage again, pulling at it nervously, her nails ripping at the scar beneath. Brigid saw the scar rupture then, a trickle of blood running along her niece’s arm. “No,” she cried. “Abi, don’t.”
The Mag was on her again then, his hand snapping forward and slapping against Brigid’s breastbone, shoving her into the wall. His other hand, the one holding the gun, moved and Brigid’s breath burst out of her as he shoved the muzzle into her gut—hard.
“Now, you quit wriggling,” Kane growled, “and together we’ll figure out if there’s any reason I should let you live.”