her partner when they had, by chance, made their grisly discovery.
“And when was this, Senora Shizuka?” the man asked, speaking for the first time. He had a refined accent, as if he had learned English from the upper-class British of a bygone age.
“Ten minutes,” Shizuka guessed. “Less maybe. I don’t… It was very unexpected.”
The woman touched Shizuka’s bare arm gently. “We understand, you must have had quite the shock.”
Shizuka took a slow, deliberate breath, gazing past the two officers to focus on the fallen bodies strewn about the room. She had seen worse than this, many times in fact—such was the cost of a life of adventure. But there was something poignant and hopeless about finding these people hanging here like this without warning or explanation. It sickened her, and for the first time since she and Grant had arrived, Shizuka had the chance to stop and realize that.
Pretor Cáscara raised her dark eyebrows, peering at Shizuka as she saw her tremor slightly. “Do you need to sit down?”
“Yes,” Shizuka blurted, so sudden that the word caught her unawares. Even as she said it, Shizuka wavered in place as if she might fall. Shock, she realized at a disconnect, as if she was thinking about someone other than herself.
The woman called Cáscara took Shizuka by the arm and led her from the room, asking one of the hotel staff in Spanish to bring a glass of water as she escorted Shizuka into the hotel lobby.
* * *
PRETOR JUAN CORCEL was left alone with the doctor as the relevant authorities arrived to remove the bodies and take the survivors away to a nearby hospital. The hotel staff had departed the crime scene, waiting nearby. As he surveyed the room, pacing in a small circle on his Italian-made loafers, the doctor asked him a question.
“I bet you have never seen anything like this, eh, Pretor?” the doctor said in Spanish while several of the living where taken away on stretchers.
Corcel shook his head. “Sadly, that is not the case.”
The doctor looked surprised. “You mean this has happened before?”
Pretor Corcel looked back at him with haunted eyes, saying nothing. “How many are alive?” he asked finally, gazing at the stretchers. Some of the sheets had been pulled over the heads to hide the faces.
“Seven,” the doctor said.
“Yes,” Pretor Corcel agreed distractedly, pacing across the room. He had seen this before; in fact this was only the latest in a spate of something that one might have called serial killings. But the details were vague, uncertain. He and his partner, Cáscara, urgently needed a break on this, before things became any worse. There had been sightings, two black men appearing close to the scenes sometimes, vague recollections of a woman, but that was all circumstantial, hearsay, like trying to grab ahold of something from a child’s drawing. There had been tiny slivers of evidence—another Pretor had been killed using a razor-sharp disc that had been pushed into his belly somehow, shredding his gut apart; bloodred feathers scattered at two of the scenes. But it all felt disconnected, with no clear picture emerging.
Corcel huffed, shaking his head. Who would do this, and why?
It was then that Juan Corcel, Pretor of the Zaragoza Justice Department with a twelve-year unblemished record of service, had what he considered at that moment to be the greatest lucky break of his career. The twin doors leading out of the ballroom crashed open and one of the black men from the eyewitness reports came hurrying through, breathless from killing. He held one of the throwing disc-like weapons in one hand, a bloody feather protruding from his jacket pocket.
In a flash, Corcel pulled his blaster—a compact Devorador de Pecados—from its hidden underarm holster and targeted the man in its sights, even as he stepped into the room. “¡Congelar!” he shouted.
* * *
GRANT HAD DASHED back to the hotel as quickly as he was able, concerned at leaving Shizuka alone amid the nightmare scene. He wished he had some way to remain in touch with her in those moments as he sprinted through the back alleys of this strange city, wished she had a Commtact like the Cerberus personnel. But she wasn’t Cerberus, despite working with them on occasion.
It took a minute or two of backtracking before Grant reached the service door to the hotel, the same one he had rushed through in pursuit of the strange trio he had spotted close to the scene. His breathing was coming heavier now, the night air cold on his skin as the initial surge of adrenaline passed.
Grant trotted down the corridor, reciting a mantra in his head, praying that Shizuka was still alive.
The twin doors to the ballroom were closed, so Grant switched the sharpened disc to his left hand before reaching for the handle with his right. By now, the feather protruding from his pocket had become bloodred; not wet, but its whole color had changed.
Grant pulled at the door and stepped through, coming face-to-face with a handsome, dark-haired man in a loose-fitting suit. Before Grant could say a word, the man produced a compact blaster and jabbed it toward Grant’s surprised face.
“¡Congelar!” the man hollered.
Grant’s Commtact translated the bellowed word automatically: “Freeze!”
One side effect of the fall of the baronies was that obtaining food had become a source of dispute once more, Kane reflected. Kane was a powerfully built man with broad shoulders and rangy limbs that lent something of the wolf to his appearance. His hair was dark and his steely blue-gray eyes seemed to emotionlessly observe everything with meticulous precision. There was something of the wolf to Kane’s demeanor, too—he was a loner at heart, and a natural pack leader when the situation called for it.
Like Grant, Kane had once been a Magistrate for the Cobaltville barony in the west, where he had enforced the law of the ville. But he had stumbled upon the conspiracy behind the ville—that is, the intended subjugation of mankind—and had turned against the regime and found himself exiled along with his partner and fellow rebels. From that day on, Kane had become an active member of the Cerberus organization, dedicated to the protection of humankind, freeing humans from the shadowy shackles that had been used to oppress them and stunt their potential for hundreds of years.
Right now, Kane was sitting in the rear of a six-wheeler beside three dozen sacks of grain as it trundled along a dirt road in the province of Samariumville. The road was narrow and straight, flanked by the scarred earth of fields that had been abandoned and left fallow as legacy of the radioactive fallout from the nukecaust. Radiation levels fell year on year, but it remained an unwanted gift from the past that just kept on giving, spawning mutant crops and poisonous fruit that was of no use for consumption. Therein lay part of the problem that Kane and his team were tackling with their guarding of these transports—so much of the land was still too damaged to sustain life, even two centuries on, from the nuclear exchange that had slowed down Western civilization.
One of three, Kane’s vehicle featured an open bed, the sacks secured with rope, leaving it easy-pickings for the scavengers and cutthroats who roamed the barony. The cloudy sky was dark and ominous, and only the occasional bird caw could be heard over the growl of wag engines.
It
