Alice is gripped in a momentary paralysis as she stares at the body in Nikki Freeman’s bedroom. The impulse to give chase is stayed by her realistic appraisal that it would be futile. This is Nikki’s turf, she’s got a head start, and in the unlikely event that Alice did catch up with her, she doesn’t like her chances of physically apprehending a woman who may already have chalked up two kills in as many days.
What is also keeping her in stasis is a horrified fascination at the sight of the victim. Alice doesn’t have a name for her, due to her lens remaining stubbornly on the fritz, but it is not the dead woman’s identity that is asserting a hold strong enough to pin her in place: it is what the body tells her about who Nikki Freeman truly is.
With a shudder she surmises that she may have gotten off lightly. Jessica Cho was only intended to lose her career as a price for getting in Nikki’s way. What measures might she have taken had Alice proven a more formidable obstacle?
Alice has seen plenty of murder victims both in the morgue and at crime scenes, in cities all across the Earth. Nonetheless, something about this one gets her in the gut, more even than the floating carnage in the Axle. That was too weirdly abstract to even relate to on a human level, its victim broken down into constituent parts that made it impossible to imagine the whole. This, by contrast, is intimate, immediate, heart-breaking. It is an affront, an insult to everything she wanted to believe about CdC. It was supposed to be a place where new futures were imagined and constructed. Instead she is looking at a healthy young woman who should be walking around right now: a million possible futures choked off in one ugly act.
Alice is stirred from her frozen solitude by the sound of footsteps on the stairs. She turns, half expecting to see Nikki bounding back, perhaps to tie up a very large loose end. Instead she sees an athletic-looking and sharply dressed man stride towards the doorway.
“Is everything okay? I just saw Nikki high-tail it out of here like the place was on fire and oh Jesus Christ.”
He has seen the body. Alice reaches to close the door but she knows it’s too late. He has already looked at it for a lot longer than the micro-second glimpse she needed to understand the situation.
He clamps a hand over his mouth, his eyes wide, staring at Alice almost accusingly in shock and growing fear.
“Wait,” she says, but it functions only as the cue for him to flee.
He takes off, running down the stairs, and she knows she has no chance of catching him any more than she could have tailed Nikki. Even if the guy tripped and broke his ankle at the foot of the stairs, she is not empowered to detain him, and certainly has no way of preventing him from communicating.
There is no containing the situation like there was in the Axle. There’s a witness on the street, possibly in possession of a grabación, and she doesn’t even know his name.
This just went public.