All I had to do was relax my guard for one second, and its will would slip into me like a curl of steam. It would even be sweet-smelling at first, relaxing, like settling into a warm bath. Then I’d go numb.
After that, it would have control of my body. Just a heavy pinch, like the dental needle passing into your gum, swiftly, a flash of silver and the feeling of sudden coldness. The tug of anesthetic. Then the undulating swell of you, everything that was you, spreading out slowly in a blank pool. And once the pool dispersed, you were gone.
Basuram was staring at me again. “Where do I know you from?”
I tried not to look at it. “Maybe we went to school together.”
I didn’t like the pressure of its eyes. But I couldn’t look away. I kept breathing, kept covering my defenses. There couldn’t be any weak spots. It sensed what I was working on, but didn’t push too hard. It was still playing with me.
“Your odor makes me remember something.” Its eyes widened. “I recognize it now. You’re his daughter.”
Selena looked at me sharply.
I swallowed. “Whose daughter?”
Basuram leaned back with a smile. “If you don’t know his name, I’m not going to be the one to tell you. But I can see the resemblance now. It’s undeniable.”
“Tell me his name.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Are you afraid of him?”
“Yes.”
I approached the table. “Tell me.”
“Tess.” Selena gave me a warning look. “Let me handle this.”
“I’d much prefer you let Tess handle it.” Basuram was smiling. “I can’t believe I’m looking at you in the flesh. His own daughter. And you weren’t even hard to find.”
“How do you know him? What is he? One of the Ferid?”
“What are you willing to give up for that information?”
“Do not answer that.” Selena glared at me. “Tess, you need to leave.”
“Not until he tells me—”
Basuram moved so fast that its arm was a blur. One second it was standing still. Then its hand plunged through the curtain of force that separated them. The baryon field devoured its hand, stripping the flesh and muscle tissue. It kept reaching, until its hand was almost entirely skeletonized.
I don’t know how Selena anticipated it, but she managed to move out of the way. Its ruined fingers closed over empty air. Snarling, it withdrew its hand. The flesh was already regenerating.
Selena hit the intercom button on the far wall. “Reactivate it!” she yelled.
I felt a subtle vibration in the air. Nothing changed, but Basuram’s eyes suddenly went blank. It stood absolutely still for a moment, hanging like an aimless puppet. Then its body slumped over the table. Its eyes remained open.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Selena.
“It was goading you. Just smoke and mirrors.”
“All of it?”
“Come on, Tess. I doubt it knows your father. Basuram was messing with you. It sensed that you’re mixed-blood, and it wanted to manipulate you.”
“Are you sure? We thought Ru was telling the truth, and now he may be hiding a weapon on us.”
“I don’t think either of them are telling the truth. And they’ll keep lying until it profits them not to. For now, all we can do is explore every possibility.”
We exited the interrogation room. Selena sealed it behind us. The elevator doors opened just as we were reaching the end of the hallway, and a group of agents poured out, all carrying athames.
“Don’t wake it up,” Selena said simply. “Call me once it’s been transported.”
They nodded and filed past us.
“What if something goes wrong?” I asked her.
She stepped into the elevator with me. “Something already has gone wrong. We’ve got one demon that we won’t be able to hold for long, another who’s probably lying to us, and a security leak on top of it all.”
The doors closed. I leaned against the paneled wall. “You want me to check up on Rashid tonight? It may be tricky if he’s still in custody.”
“No. It can wait until tomorrow morning.”
That was good. I had to meet with Mr. Corvid soon. I hadn’t seen Corvid since the demon had given me Hex two years ago. It promised to be an interesting conversation.
“For now,” Selena said, “I need you to come look at Ru’s test results.”
“Something weird?”
“That doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
“Can we get something to eat first? I’m starving.”
Selena looked like she was about to say no. Then she blinked suddenly. “I wouldn’t mind that, actually. I’ve barely eaten anything.”
“I have an apple in my bag.”
“I’ve got some instant oatmeal packets in my office. And soda crackers.”
“That sounds amazing.”
7
When we got to the serology lab, we saw Linus
standing over a gas chromatograph, his back turned to us. He placed something in the injector port and switched on the heat. The chemicals grew volatile as they were heated, separating from one another. Then a rush of carrier gas swept them away in a stream. When they reached the chromatography oven inside the heart of the machine, they would enter their own steel capillary column and begin to simmer.
Linus turned to face us. His blond hair was getting longer, and I wondered if he was growing it out, or if he’d just forgotten to cut it. Sometimes I liked shoulder-length hair on guys. It was tricky, though. It had to be well kept. And Linus obviously took care of his hair. It was so shiny that I wanted to touch it.
“Liking the jeans,” I said.
He didn’t quite smile, but I saw the pleasure in his face. “Thank you.”
“Did you process that last round of samples?” Selena asked.
“Nearly.”
“ ‘Nearly,’ as in, you’ll be done in the next hour?”
“No. Each test has its own quirks. If you want a detailed restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis, you have to deal with the time-consuming process of electrifying a plate of gel and plotting out the numbers yourself. It’s not fast food.”
“The STRs must be almost done, though. Short tandem repeat testing is always a lot faster than—”
“I know that it’s faster. It’s faster because it’s not as detailed. You can’t have detailed and fast at the same time; you have to pick one.”
“I need both.”
“Then you need to buy me better equipment.”
“The next budget meeting isn’t for a week. You can put in a requisition form.”
“The last time I did that, you claimed that my form was lost.”
She blinked. “I promise that won’t happen again. Let’s just see what results you have so far from the serology panel.”
Linus opened up a folder. “Results. That’s all anyone ever talks about around here. I feel like I’m working at Walmart sometimes.”
“Uh-huh.”
He scanned the STR data. “These samples gave our machines a bit of trouble. They’re calibrated to process demon epithelials, but we don’t have many pureblood profiles in our archive.”
“They don’t tend to submit to needles,” Selena said.
“Exactly. So we had to cobble together a few different profiles to use as an exemplar. But even that didn’t make the job much easier. Most demons have double helices, like us, and a few purebloods have extra RNA helices that we can barely decipher. But these epithelials have a completely different shape. Take a look.”
I leaned over the Fourier-transform microscope, adjusting the focus. It looked like I was staring at a cluster of pins, all squeezed very close together. As I looked closer, I realized that the “head” of each pin was actually a tiny chain composed of links. Each link was a collection of scales, and even the scales had a kind of chemical engraving on them.
“The human genome has about three billion base pairs of DNA, which are the chemical building blocks of life,” Linus said. “Plants have a lot more, sometimes up to ten times more, but most of that space is empty. Their genomes are like abandoned rooms with a lot of cupboard space. But these strands are packed full. There must be close to one hundred million base pairs here. Imagine that as one hundred million drawers, and each one of them is full.”
“The helices look more like chain mail.” I stepped away from the microscope. “I’m not even sure what we’re looking for inside of it.”
“We need to figure out what has the Ferid so interested.”
“We still have no evidence that the Ferid even exist. Ru and Basuram could both be making up some shadow organization to cover their own tracks.”
Selena gave me an odd look. “Are you sure about that? When I look at Ru, I see a kid suffering from post-traumatic stress. I don’t think he has anything to gain by making things up.”
“You don’t
know
that you’re seeing PTSD. Not for sure. He’s a pureblood demon with DNA that looks like something out of
Beowulf
. We don’t know what he’s feeling, what his motivations are, just like we don’t know anything about Basuram.”
“Come on. Your mothering instincts didn’t kick in when you saw him?”
“That seems like precisely the sort of thing you’d tell me to ignore.”
Selena half smiled. “Professionalism is important. But when I look at him—I mean, he’s not just a homeless demon. He’s alone in this world. He may never make it back home, and now he’s stuck here. I can’t imagine what that feels like.”
“It feels to me like you could both be having this conversation in another place,” Linus said, returning to his computer. “Unless you have any more questions about base pairs. The more detailed restriction fragment length testing should be done within the next eight hours or so, but it may take longer.”
“I won’t ask how much longer,” Selena replied sweetly. “Just page me when it’s done. Whenever that might be.”
“Of course.” He didn’t look up. “It’ll be the highlight of my evening.”
We both left the DNA lab. Selena chuckled. “Sometimes I think that Linus is the only professional working here.”
“You’re pretty professional.”
“That’s faint praise coming from you.”
“Ouch!” I shook my head. “Still—it feels like our roles are reversed lately. You’re lecturing me on empathy, and I’m talking about physical evidence.”
Selena sighed. “It’s just the direction my life is taking.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m not even sure. I barely understand it myself.”
I suddenly remembered a moment last year. Selena was testing Derrick’s intuitive abilities by using flash cards. At the end of the exercise, he was supposed to read her emotions, and he picked up something while she was staring at a drawing of a gun. Fear. Selena Ward, our director, afraid of a gun. It didn’t make sense.
Who’s Jessica?
Derrick had asked her that. It was a name that he’d heard by accident while reading her mind. As soon as he mentioned it, she shut down. Nobody had mentioned it since then, but I knew that it had something to do with Selena’s change in behavior lately. I knew it in a way that wouldn’t break down into numerical data or chemical peaks and valleys. It was like the footprint of a feeling.
“How much time have you been spending with Ru?” I asked.
“Not much. He’ll only talk for a certain amount of time. I get the impression that our language is very inefficient for him. He can’t express himself as precisely as he’d like to, and he gets tired of it. Then he just goes quiet.”
“Not precise enough? Have you heard him talk about quantum physics?”
“I don’t mean grammatical precision. I think a component of his native language may be gestural, or even telepathic. It’s not that he can’t make himself understood perfectly in English. He’d probably pass the Graduate Record Exam with flying colors. But our language’s innate shortcomings seem to bother him.”
“They didn’t seem to bother Basuram.”
“He’d be a sadistic bastard in any language.”
We came to a secure area. Selena gestured to the security guards standing on either side of the door. Both of them had an athame, sheathed but ready. I could sense that they were trained specifically in the use of thermal materia. Their auras smelled a bit like campfires.
They stepped aside. Selena swiped her key card, and we walked through the door into a short hallway. CT scanning panels had been positioned along the walls. As I walked, I saw my body being mapped on liquid crystal screens, from my bone structure all the way down to my cranial topography. I tried to ignore it. Data flickered past us. We were weighed, measured, and judged, like souls on an Egyptian scale.
A bell chimed as we reached the end of the hallway. The scans hadn’t flagged anything, so we were free to pass into the secure chamber beyond. A second door opened, and I felt the temperature change. It was colder. I could sense faint lines of materia running from the hallway into the next room.
It actually resembled a hotel room instead of a storage chamber, which surprised me. I thought that Selena had set up something ad hoc, a converted closet of some kind, but this room had obviously been designed as a guest suite. There was a bed in one corner and a love seat against the opposite wall. There was even a flat-screen TV.
“Has this always been here?” I asked.
“It’s new.”
“But—just to be clear—we have a high-security hotel suite in the lab. With cable.”
“You can’t use it.”
“But I hate sleeping on the couch in the break room.”
“You don’t have to. You can sleep at home, like other people.”
“Is that bed a queen?”
“You’re
never
using this room. Understand?”
I sighed. “It’s not like we have paradimensional demons staying with us all of the time. What about when it’s not in use? Am I just supposed to ignore it?”
“Yes. You need my key card to get in, so it doesn’t matter.”
“Where was this room when we needed somewhere for Mia to stay?”
“It hadn’t been built yet.”
“Is there a bathroom over—”