There's a category of objects that have no message but status. "You can tell I'm well off because I have this." Nicholas Buonaforte's apartment was done entirely in that style. I didn't like it, and I was pretty sure I wouldn't have liked him either, when he was alive.

He'd fallen—or been pushed—and his slide across the kitchen floor ended when his skull hit the corner of the stove. That was cause of death, but not the cause of his other injuries. "Two ribs fractured, one of them complete," said the tech absently. Jaded. "Left ulna complete fracture. Lots of bruises. Minor lacerations."

"From some of this stuff being thrown at him?" The apartment was a wreck—furniture overturned, scattered shards where walls had been hit by dishes that broke, holes where they'd been hit by skillets that didn't.

"Maybe. The rib and arm were more likely when he got tossed through the wall, if he was the one who got tossed." He gestured toward the gaping hole in the living room, open all the way through to the bedroom, trashed drywall on both sides, big enough to expose most of two studs. One of the studs looked a little off straight. "He had to have been hit hard; could have done the rib. If we figure he got thrown into the wall spine first, that stud is exactly where his left arm would have hit it."

I went to take a closer look. I could step through the hole without needing to do more than duck my head. Other residents had reported a domestic disturbance, two people shouting, but the fight hadn't reached the bedroom, apart from the hole. The bed was made, not neatly, and someone had lain on it since then. An object in the wastebasket caught my eye. I picked it up, stared at it until I recognized it, and brought it into the kitchen.

"Does his skin look strange?" I asked the tech. "I mean, under the circumstances."

"Burst blood vessels. Ma'am." I hadn't worked with this tech before; the pause was him deciding how to address me and whether I was intimidating. Some detectives probably never spoke to him. "Might be unrelated."

I handed him the object. "Isn't this one of those needleless syringes?"

"Huh. Yeah. Used and unlabelled." He'd concluded I was harmless.

"Check for marks?"

"These barely leave any. I'll tell them to do a real close look back at the lab."

"Tell them to do toxicology too."

§

One perk of the Status Apartment is there's a front desk. Don't want the wrong kind of people getting in. The clerk's face suggested he didn't love police officers. That, or he didn't like my color. I didn't care which. "You've been on duty all evening?" I asked. He nodded.

"Two visitors to 605," he said. "One at 8:30 and one at 8:55. First one was here about twenty minutes; just missed the other one. The second one couldn't have been in there five minutes—up and right back down again."

Not enough time for the shouting fight. Maybe the first visitor had been the shouting fight. "Can you describe them?"

"First one had red hair, done up in some kind of fancy knot. Blue eyes. Freckles. Not too tall. Late twenties maybe? Might have just looked young. They usually do."

"What 'they' is that?"

"Oh, well ..."

"This is a police investigation."

"It's not like that. It's just, I can't prove it, but I'd bet you they were both metas."

"Why?"

"Ever met one? They look at you like they're taking you apart. Also, they always act like they own the place."

"So because they weren't intimidated by you, you assume they're metas?"

He shrugged. "Suit yourself. The second one was taller, more solid, short black hair shaved on one side, dark eyes."

"More solid? Do you mean bigger, more muscular, more masculine, what?"

"Masculine, hell. If they're metas, who can tell? The first one looked like a librarian and the second looked like she could kick my ass. How's that?"

"That can't be all you've got," I said. "Do they sign in or anything? Show an ID?"

"Oh, sure, I've got names. First one signed in as Alice Wright. The second one, Anastasia Romanov." He gave me a look to show he got the joke and I gave him one back to show that I got it too and wasn't amused.

"Had you seen them before?"

"Not on my nights, which is most nights, and he doesn't get a lot of visitors. Just his girlfriend." He made a face. "She hasn't been here tonight."

"You don't like her."

"Oh, no! She's great. He was an asshole. She should do better. Go ahead, put me down as a suspect."

"Maybe if no one else volunteers. Give me everything you have on the girlfriend and I'll leave you alone."

§

I paid a quick visit to learn that Chastity Clark, the girlfriend, either wasn't at home or wasn't answering her door, then called it a night because I didn't think I'd get far with MRL at ten-thirty pm.

I would have ignored the security clerk's theories but for the syringe. Needleless syringes, especially unlabelled ones, came from MRL. So did metahumans. It wasn't the greatest lead in the world, but it was almost all I had. A little research had found no one else with a useful connection to Nicholas Buonaforte. He did something incomprehensible in high finance, had no immediate family, and his boss seemed to barely know him.

I was a little embarrassed giving the second name to the MRL receptionist when it was such an obvious fake, but to my surprise it was that name, not Alice Wright, which led to a "just a moment, please" and some fast typing on the computer I couldn't see below the countertop. Five minutes later, I was gestured to a door on one side of the lobby.

It was a small conference room, not much bigger than the table and four chairs in it. Thirty seconds after I'd decided I might as well sit down, a different door opened and Liam Parker herself entered the room, taller than life. I might have made a surprised grunt, which is bad because I'm supposed to sound like I always know what I'm doing.

"You have a badge, I presume," she said, sitting down across from me. I handed it to her. She barely looked at it before handing it back. "Sorry. There have been impostors. What is your interest in Anastasia Romanov ... is the title 'Sergeant Detective'? That's unwieldy."

"'Detective' is fine. There's really an Anastasia Romanov here? I was coming mostly to look for Alice Wright."

"'Alice Wright' is a standard pseudonym, Detective Green. Old joke about always giving the Wright name. Anastasia Romanov is a real person. Three people, actually. I know you're listening, Anastasia."

A woman appeared—I mean materialized, from nowhere—standing behind Parker's chair. Glossy black hair in a pageboy, black bushy eyebrows, and dark eyes. She looked completely solid. My synapses finally fired. "Oh! You're the AI. But you couldn't have been on the scene. Someone must have used your name."

"Am I to understand that Anastasia is a suspect in a criminal investigation?" Parker said smoothly. Like the clerk had said, she was looking at me like she was taking me apart; in fact, she knew everything about me and wasn't impressed with any of it. All of this was in her eyes. The rest of her face was carefully free of any emotion at all.

"That's premature. We have a deceased person who may or may not have been murdered. Someone who gave that name was likely the last person to see the deceased alive. If it was a murder, then yes, she's a suspect. But obviously if your Anastasia is an AI ..."

"I've noticed that often when people say 'obviously,' it turns out to be something that isn't obvious at all. Yes, AIs spend much of their time in data; that's their job. Their ability to do tens of thousands of simultaneous tasks is the sole reason to go to the expense of building one. But they're also human, and like all humans—or at least the ones with tolerable lives—they like to go out and have lives too. Have fun. Interact with others. So we also build them physical bodies."

You may question that, which probably means you don't live around here. If you were constantly surrounded by slidewalks and liquid computers and all MRL's other wonders, you'd understand why Liam Parker could say "Oh, yes, we felt that death was an intolerable limitation, so we solved it," and you'd nod your head and not doubt it.

"I'm going to need to ask you some questions," I said to Anastasia.

"Not me," she replied. "I haven't been to anyone's apartment, and I was on duty last night."

"You know I don't like any of you working doubles, Nat," Liam said.

"I didn't say it was last night," I said.

"Yes, you did, at the front desk," Anastasia said.

"Anastasia hears all and sees all. Almost. Don't worry," Parker said. "She is extremely strict about confidentiality."

"What kind of hair did she have?" Anastasia asked me.

"Sorry?"

"You got a description, I'm sure. Long hair or short?"

"Oh. Short. Shaved on one side."

"Tasha," Parker said. "Where is she now, Nat?"

"She swapped with me last shift and Anna next shift. She didn't say where she was going."

"That's convenient," I said.

Nat shrugged. "Anyway, she's not in the complex right now."

"You do suspect her," Parker remarked to me.

"There was a fight in the victim's apartment. Someone was pushed through a wall—completely through, very hard. So hard most people probably couldn't do it. I bet AI bodies are pretty strong? It wouldn't be like you to make them less than excellent at everything."

Parker smiled. Just a little, at the corners of her mouth. "No, it wouldn't, would it? But AIs are metahumans too, and like all metahumans, they dislike killing. We think it's wasteful. We might well throw someone through a wall whom we thought deserved it, but we tend to be very careful about not actually murdering anyone."

"I'll remember. But it also occurs to me that you wouldn't be happy to see one of your AIs on trial for murder. Bad publicity."

"To say the least," she replied, "but I wouldn't stand in the way of the process if she were guilty. Nat, you have nothing else?"

"She kept it to private memory," Nat replied. "But if I had to guess I'd say it was something to do with Amyamy."

This was clearly news to Parker, who raised an entire eyebrow.

"Amyamy?" I said.

"When someone undergoes metahuman adaptation, they often choose a new name. We don't judge," Parker said drily. "Amyamy Salcinetti. A neurochemist. Go on, Nat."

"She was up to something Tasha didn't approve of," Nat said, "but I don't know whether she was going with Amyamy for support or trying to keep Amyamy from doing something."

"Where is Salcinetti now?" I asked. "And by chance is she a redhead with blue eyes and freckles?"

"Also not in the complex," Nat said.

"And yes," Parker added.

§

With MRL a dead end for the moment, I went to check on Chastity Clark again. She still wasn't there, but as I was walking away, a woman passed me. She was Nat's twin—except for the hair.

"Tasha Romanov," I said.

She turned, surprised. "Yes?" she said.

I showed her my badge. "You went to Nicholas Buonaforte's apartment last night," I said, wondering how badly I'd be outmatched if I had to subdue her.

"Yes." She continued to the door to ring the bell.

"She's not there. Did you kill him?"

"I certainly hope not. I threw him through a wall and left. I didn't check to see if he was still breathing. If he wasn't, then it was self-defense. He attacked me. Look, if you'd like to talk to me about this, that's fine, but I'm trying to find someone and it's important, so you're going to have to wait."

"Who are you trying to find?"

"A friend."

"Amyamy?"

She was as poker-faced as Liam Parker. "Who'd you talk to? Come on, I have another place to check. You can interrogate me on the way."

The other place was a long trip west. We'd already been standing on the fast side of the slidewalk for a few minutes when Tasha said, "Well, go ahead, interrogate."

"I can't tell at all," I said. "So much for the Uncanny Valley."

"You could x-ray me and you'd know."

"Does it feel different from when you're in data or whatever she called it?"

"This isn't what I expected to be asked about," she said.

Nor was it any way to begin an interrogation. "Sorry."

"We can't take all that knowledge out with us. We pick a small set to upload when we go physical. So I'm still me, but I don't have access to things the way I do when I'm in data. I can look information up, but it's not the same as having it right there. And when I go physical I can only do a couple of processes at the same time."

"Some of us are lucky if we can manage one," I said. "If you didn't kill Buonaforte, who did?"

"How should I know?" she replied. "Maybe I did kill him. Are you going to arrest me?"

"I probably should," I said, "just on the basis of general disrespect for the law. You're not quite passable yet; you don't react enough."

"I know the reactions, I just usually don't bother. Move left, our exit's coming up."

There was no one home at the house where she knocked on the door. She knocked several times. "She works nights; she should be home now." Tasha sighed. "Well, that's my last idea. All Amyamy's other friends I know about are metas. She doesn't have any family except her sister."

"Then let's go see the sister."

I finally got a reaction: she was puzzled. "Oh. Why were you looking for Chastity?"

"Because she was Buonaforte's girlfriend?"

"Really? Amyamy didn't tell me that. That's interesting."

"I'm confused."

"Chastity is Amyamy's sister. Do you think it's worth trying her again?"

"OK," I said, "let me sort all this out. Sorry, I'm not a metahuman, so it takes me a while."

"You don't like metas," she said.

"Perfect, superintelligent, multi-sexed, and smug? Why on earth would I dislike them?"

She snorted. "We're not perfect, that'd be boring. And we're not superintelligent, we just pay more attention."

"Says the AI."

"I'm not. I can just do a lot of things at once when I'm in data. We're not all jacks either. At least I don't think so. Though I've never been in bed with a meta who wasn't."

"You didn't say anything about smug," I said.

She shrugged. "It's a good life."

We went back to the slidewalk, with no destination in mind. I felt like the whole thing was drifting somewhere I hadn't planned, but on the other hand, it was more interesting than the murder investigation. "Are you a jack?" I asked.

"That's very personal," she said, but she wasn't offended. "I am. They didn't want me to feel left out. I heard that particular bit added a hundred thousand to the cost." She smiled. "But I haven't verified that. My turn to ask you a question. Why is that the one thing non-metas are always fixated on?"

"Are we?"

"Come on," she said. "MRL is thirty years ahead of the rest of the world in I don't know how many fields—biology, genetics, materials science, you name it. The person who runs the company is a genius. She gives good speeches. She's politically canny. She's great on TV. She plays four instruments. She's almost unbelievable. And what do people want to know about her? What she has under her skirt. Last year she went onto a science program to talk about our work on neuroreceptor chains, and the host wanted to ask her about the physical mechanism of her genitals."

"Last year," I said, "my sister had a daughter. We were discussing names a couple of months before the kid was born. One of the names she was thinking about was Liam. I said Liam wasn't a girl's name and she said, 'These days it is.'"

She studied my face.

"It doesn't bother me personally," I said. "I spent years fighting assholes who hated me because of my skin. I'm not one of them and gender's no different. But you can't just take apart an idea and expect everyone to go gracefully."

"Even if it's a bad idea?"

"Doesn't matter," I said. "People like to have some solid ground ... hang on." My phone was ringing. "Green," I answered, listened for two minutes, then hung up. I looked at her.

"What?" she asked.

"The problem is, I don't know what you know."

"You can always arrest me. I'm not running."

"You could kick my ass, and we both know it. But, yeah, I know you don't care. You didn't even bother giving a fake name. That was toxicology. They found a drug in Buonaforte's system that they can't identify; they can't even speculate what it does. They've never seen anything like it. Traces of the same stuff were in the empty syringe I found. A needleless syringe."

"Does sound like us," she said.

"Liam Parker said Salcinetti was a neurochemist."

"Sure. But Amyamy wouldn't have given Nick drugs. She wouldn't give out experimental drugs to anyone, unless it was an approved test, and definitely not to him. She didn't like him. I don't know how she knew him; I guess through Chastity. But she was pissed off at him and she was going to ... confront him about something. I thought this was a bad idea."

"Was she angry enough to kill him?"

"We don't kill people."

"But you were worried."

"I was worried she'd get hurt. She knows how to fight but ... you know, maybe he had guns. Maybe he was coked up. I just figured, let me come along as backup if nothing else."

"But she didn't, and you followed her, and got there too late."

"Yes, and he was raging angry about something and he started screaming incoherent things at me. I turned around to leave, since Amyamy wasn't there, and he charged at me and I threw him through the wall. Where are we going? That was the exit back there, if we were going to Chastity's."

"I wasn't paying attention," I said. "Is it worth asking at MRL—" Tasha was staring at a point past me, though when I turned to look there was nothing there. Then she refocused.

"Move off, we're turning around," she said. "I know where we're going."

"You got a message from the beyond."

"My phone is internal. I got a message from Amyamy."

§

"My mother had weird ideas about names and she named us Amity and Chastity. I think she was hoping we'd have those traits. A friend called me Amyamy in college and I decided I liked it. He was a real asshole and I'm not sorry. You probably want to know about the drugs."

Amyamy was one of those people whose conversational flow made complete sense to her and felt like random teleportation to everyone else. I needed a moment to work out who the 'he' was. "What aren't you sorry for?"

"For killing him. Go ahead, take me to jail. I bet I can get off."

"Tell me about what happened," I said, motioning Tasha not to speak.

"My sister is bipolar. Like, real bad bipolar. 'Pretty much ruined her life' bipolar. We've been working on drugs for mental illness. We've gotten where we can pick out really specific chemical conditions and soon we'll be able to make a drug that's customized for one person, so we can say 'Hey, you have a little too much of this and not enough of that'—"

"Amyamy," Tasha said.

"Oh, sorry. But isn't that cool? Anyway, we're usually pretty strict about that but I had a drug which was exactly right for Chastity and she really needed it so I arranged for her to be a test subject, kinda, and I brought her three months' supply of the stuff. And Nick took it!"

"Why did Nick even want it?" Tasha asked.

"It's supposed to be taken when you're in the low phase. It buffers out, so it not only makes you less depressed but also makes the backswing less severe. But if you take it and you're not depressed I guess it makes you really euphoric? Or at least that's what it did for Nick. He said it was better than X and he stole the whole supply and wouldn't tell her where he'd put it. Anyway, Chastity didn't tell me he took it, but I noticed she'd gotten really down again and that's not supposed to be happening, and if it was then my drugs weren't working and obviously I needed to know that!"

"So you went to go make Nick give the drugs back," I said.

"Yes. And you know what he said? He said he might give me the drugs back if I had sex with him."

"Did you?"

"Um, no."

It's hard to conceal that you don't want to say something when you suddenly go from fifty words per breath to two. "I need to know exactly what happened, Amyamy."

"He deserved it."

"I'm sympathetic. But I can't even start to make a case in your favor unless I have all the information."

"Well ... the thing is, if he hadn't been such a jerk I might have considered it. But he was smirking at me and I was like, 'Okay, dude, I know what will really tick you off.' So I undressed, and I played with myself a little while he watched because I wasn't even remotely in the mood, and then I extended and said 'You ready, asshole?' or something like that."

Tasha laughed. Just once, quickly, but the sound was so unexpected it startled me.

"I think you mean something by 'extended' I'm not getting," I said.

Amyamy gave me a confused look. "Well ..."

"She means she let out her penis," Tasha said. "All that talk about jacks and you don't know how they work? We have an extra set of muscles which allow the clitoris and its supporting structure to be pulled together and extended from the body; the clitoris expands somewhat in the process, forming a glans—"

"OK, I get it."

"There are two kinds of people," Amyamy said. "One kind, you say 'I'm a jack' and they're like, 'Ooh, can I see?' The other kind, you tell them you're a jack and they get really angry."

"Sometimes they even try to kill you," Tasha said.

"I'd have kicked his ass, Tasha. I knew he'd be the second kind. I wanted to piss him off. But then he started to get red. I mean physically red, like something was wrong. Then he froze up and fell on the bed. And his heart wasn't beating. See, what I hadn't realized, he had taken some of the drug, probably just before I got there. When I made him mad, it ... overloaded him, I guess. It wasn't something we prepared for; the people it's supposed to be for are usually so down that losing their temper like that isn't an issue. It's important data, though. We'll have to work on that. Anyway, so, that means I killed him. If I hadn't deliberately made him angry, he wouldn't have gone into cardiac arrest."

Tasha looked at me. I nodded. "Amyamy, he was alive when I got there a few minutes later," she said.

"What?"

"I'm assuming you didn't try to revive him," I said. "How long were you in the apartment after he collapsed?"

"Five minutes, tops," Amyamy said. "I could see the box of drugs in the bathroom. I grabbed it and put my clothes on and got out. I know, I should have called 911 or something. But what were they going to do? He was dead!"

"Apparently he recovered," I said. "All right. You didn't kill him. But ... hmm. Neither of you threw anything—besides him, I mean, Tasha? And you weren't there long enough for it anyway. There's a person missing." I considered it a bit longer. "I think I know who. Tasha, come with me."

"What about me?" Amyamy asked.

"I'd prefer you didn't," I said. "Don't skip town."

§

Tasha was smiling as we got on the slidewalk, like she knew a good joke. "What?" I asked.

"You've gone from thinking I was a murderer to trusting me more than Amyamy, in less than four hours."

"You're more ethical than Amyamy."

"That's an interesting word. Where are we going?"

"To find someone who hasn't been honest with me."

"Amyamy is a good person," Tasha said. "She just doesn't always think things through when she's not working."

"You two are in a relationship, I take it?"

"Another interesting word. We don't quite use it the way you do. But yes. One of several."

"Do you enjoy sex?"

She tilted her head as she looked at me, like a dog does when it's bewildered. "Very much. It's the main reason to bother with this body, if I'm honest. Why do you ask?"

"Just curious."

§

"You lied to me," I said to the night clerk. I hadn't actually laid hands on him, but that was only because he was half-asleep and terrified and I felt I already had enough of an advantage. "You said there was no visitor after Tasha, last night. But there was. Was it Chastity?"

He nodded.

"You and she were good friends, weren't you?"

"Not good enough," he said. "She wouldn't listen to me. She knew what a jerk Nick was, but she wouldn't dump him, I don't know why. He made her miserable! Last night she went up to try to get back something of hers he stole, and he just about tried to kill her!"

"Guess Amyamy didn't tell Chastity she was going," I said to Tasha. To the clerk I said, "You realize she may have killed him."

"She didn't! It was an accident! He rushed her and he fell and hit his head and he didn't get up!"

"She told you all this."

"Yeah, of course, right after. When she came back down. Don't look at me like that! She didn't kill him, and you'd have put her in jail!"

"I really should put you in jail. You know that, right?" He gave me an absolutely panicked look. "But you can redeem yourself."

"How?"

"You're such good friends. Maybe she told you where she is?"

§

"I didn't kill him," Chastity said.

She was a paler, taller version of Amyamy, though some of the paleness may have just been poor condition. Judging from her eyes, she hadn't slept the previous night.

I was feeling tired too. But in my case it was strictly situational. "Go on," I said.

"Not much to say," she said. "I went to go get something he took from me. He yelled something about sending bitches with dicks to kill him and rushed me. He was messed up. I don't know if he even realized it was me. His skin was all red and he was breathing funny. He kept trying to come at me, but he could barely walk, so he was easy to dodge, and that made him madder. He was throwing stuff and yelling and I was yelling back, and then when I ran into the kitchen, he tried to charge me from the doorway, but he tripped, and he hit the stove and he didn't get up."

"All right," I said. "Thanks. I have your number. Don't do anything stupid." I got up. Tasha was giving me the weirdest look, but she got up too and followed me out.

"That's it?" she asked.

"I'll push for death by misadventure," I said. "No one is actually going to give a shit. I just needed to have it all mapped out."

"You're an unusual person," she said.

"When AIs take over the world, I guess people in my job won't matter. You'll work it all out amongst yourselves and not tell anyone."

"AIs won't take over the world. We're too expensive. There'll never be that many of us. What'll happen is metas will become more like AIs. We're working on that."

"Great," I said.

"You only act like that because you're on the outside," she said. "Come on in. The water's fine." We approached the slidewalk. "Am I free to go? Should I not leave town?" Her smile was not quite mocking.

"Beat it," I said. "Don't kill anybody."

"I'll try not to," she said, and she stepped on the slidewalk and was carried away.

It's not fair, but it's true, that some deaths are more important than others. We ignore thousands of deaths in this city every day. But if the empress of One Of Our More Famous Universities is found face-down in a sparkle hall, that's news. Everybody's problem and everybody's business.

You might not be from around here. Slidewalks have a short corridor you have to pass through when you enter them. Locals call them "sparkle halls" because they sparkle. I don't know why. Maybe it's a side effect of the field. Maybe MRL was being whimsical when they designed them. While you walk through the sparkle hall, you hold up your pass card so the systems can scan it. If you don't, or it's not valid, about halfway down the hall you find you can't move forward any more. It's like the air gets thick, and it offers more resistance the harder you press. You can go backward just fine, so you're not trapped in there; every so often someone realizes they forgot to put more money on their card and they have to retreat shamefacedly to the fare machines.

Tiffany Dyson hadn't been able to produce a card. The consensus was that at the time, Tiffany Dyson had been doing well to be able to walk upright. She had multiple stab wounds and probably would have died on the slidewalk if she'd managed to make it in. She was in an entrance in a business district that got very little late-night traffic, and she'd died about three in the morning. Her death was observed on camera and MRL's safety response was there almost instantly, but it didn't matter, and all the footage showed was her staggering alone into the entrance. That entrance was nowhere near the university, which also meant it was nowhere near her home, or any part of her usual orbit. No one had offered any guesses on what she was doing there. Nor had anyone offered a remotely plausible motive—though there was no shortage of theories.

It was everybody's business, but at least it wasn't my problem. I hadn't been given a docket for it, and I was perfectly fine with that. I had closed twenty everyday cases—winos dead of gut rot in alleys, lovers shot in domestic disputes, grandmas found alone in cold houses with stopped hearts—during the same three days that half my co-workers had been flailing around playing Celebrity Whodunit. My personal bet was the Dyson thing was never going to be solved, unless someone unexpectedly grew a conscience and came forward.

It wasn't all that unusual for me to be asked to confer with the deputy superintendent for Homicide. I was one of a small group of at-large detectives, so my position was more strongly associated with the Homicide unit as a whole than a particular district. I had a captain, but the deputy super was no stranger. I didn't get suspicious until I saw they were both in the room, along with a woman I didn't know. The deputy super nodded at me and gestured to me to sit down. My captain remained standing and didn't look happy.

"Green," the deputy super said to me, "I'm detaching you temporarily on special assignment. This is Penumbra Collier. She's going to advise you on how to proceed."

That was apparently all he had. The captain said nothing.

"Is this a homicide investigation?" I asked.

"Ms. Collier will give you the details." Now that I considered it, the deputy super didn't look very pleased either.

I looked at both of them. They didn't want to make eye contact. Collier did, and smiled slightly. "Perhaps I can do a little better," she said. "There's an issue that needs to be investigated and your name was specifically mentioned as the right person for the job."

Specifically mentioned by someone fairly high up the food chain, apparently. Then the correct gear clicked into the correct position in my brain and I got it. "I see. Well, come with me, you can brief me as we go. Assuming we're dismissed."

On the way back to my desk I told her, "Not that I don't appreciate Liam Parker's regard for me, but this isn't going to win me any points around here."

"You shoot well in the dark," she said.

"There are very few people who can come to the police and just make something like that happen," I replied. "Besides, you're a meta. No one else but a meta would be named Penumbra."

"You can call me Penny. Do I call you Ms. Green? Would you prefer Detective?"

I don't know why I explain this, because even if you've been living on Ganymede for the last decade it's probably because MRL has decided to set up a colony there, but Liam Parker, who can do anything she wants and often does, is the boss of MRL, which provides us with metahumans and slidewalks and hoverbuses and bodymods and all the other things that make this city such an interesting and colorful place to live. By this point you might even have some of it in your own city. Don't worry, it's painless.

Two years ago I worked on a case with one of MRL's artificial intelligences. During that case I'd had occasion to meet Parker in person. I had assumed she'd forgotten.

Penny looked more or less normal. Beautiful, of course. Metas tend to be better-looking than the rest of us because they correct minor flaws and such when they convert, and they have the best genes MRL can give them. She was blonde, short straight hair in an unremarkable style, brown eyes, and was of average height et cetera. Nothing to report. Next time I was going to ask them to send me one who wasn't white.

"Whichever you like. What are we investigating?"

"A labor dispute," she said.

I stopped walking. "And here I thought Parker wanted me for something important."

"You don't think mistreatment of workers is important?" Damn it, she was amused.

"Of course it is, but I'm a homicide detective. I investigate murders. Why don't you go find a labor-relations specialist?" I figured such a thing probably existed; they have specialists for everything else.

"The main reason we wanted you," she said, "is that it seemed likely you would trust me. Because I'm going to have to ask you do to that. I'm aware this is strange. I can't say more than that, except that I don't believe your time is being wasted."

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. "All right. Tell me about this labor problem." Since it's clearly useless to try to get you to tell me what we're actually doing.

§

Boston Cryomatter was one of the hot tech firms that had started up in an effort to try to catch a little of whatever magic was keeping MRL thirty years ahead of everyone else's research. Most of those startups would fail horribly, since metas were the magic and they wouldn't work for anyone else. Boston Cryomatter, however, might actually have something. Or at least that was what my scientific contacts with lots of advanced degrees (I have exactly one such contact, and she'd explained it to me painfully over dinner one night) informed me. Something about genetically altered cells that did interesting things when the tissues were held at very low temperatures. I'm a police officer.

The boss of Boston Cryo was Tadeusz Schirow, and he was apparently an asshole. At least that's what his cleaning and maintenance crew told me. They weren't happy with the working conditions, and every time they complained to him about it, he responded with behavior that had gone from dismissive to threatening over the course of the last six months. But none of it was anything that justified intervention—yet. He hadn't laid a finger on any of them, nor hired anyone to do so, and none of the workers we interviewed claimed he had.

"Reassure me that my time isn't being wasted," I said to Penny after the ninth interview.

"Be patient," she said.

"Are you expecting something in particular?"

She didn't reply.

We did ten two-hour interviews in two days, which is two very long days of nothing if you do the math, and by lunch break on the third day, I'd had it. "I'm done. I don't know what you're really chasing but you can find someone else to chase it." I'd had to do all the talking; she insisted on it. I was tired of asking the same questions and getting the same information without even having anything interesting to get to the bottom of.

"Humor me. Just one more, all right?"

"One more just like all the rest of these?"

"Please."

The next interview was a man pushing sixty named Charley Diaz. He worked nights and he was mostly concerned about after-hours conditions. Apparently there was a point when the building was supposed to have no activity so they could clean and go home, but Schirow's people were so dedicated—or something—that they were always around at odd times, which, Diaz was careful to note, was fine with him, but then Schirow needed to pay for true round-the-clock service.

"Ms. Jerome, the other night. Two-thirty. I almost finish that floor and she's in her lab with somebody. What's so important they have to do at that hour, eh? I go do another floor, I think I go back to check later. You miss a lab they yell at you. You don't do a lab exactly right, they yell at you. I come back later, she's gone, and she's left one of the red bags. So, okay, I can't leave that, they'd kill me. So I have to go deal with a red bag at three-thirty in the morning!"

"What's a red bag?"

"Oh, you know. Red. Has that sign on it. You have to be careful with those so they don't get opened. Take them straight to be burned. Carry them yourself. Can't go on a trash cart."

"What, like a biohazard or something?" He nodded. "Do you handle these red bags a lot?"

"Sure. We got special training, big deal, it's what I told you. Don't let them get torn, carry them yourself, straight to be burned. Don't get more money, of course."

I made it through the other two interviews after Diaz without killing Penny. But it was a near thing.

"Give me a better reason," I said.

"I'm not sure what you mean," she replied.

"You know exactly what I mean. Even a homicide detective can see you don't have a case here, and you know you never did, so this isn't really what I'm here for. And we're done with interviews now, right? So whatever it is you're actually trying to do, I'm not getting it. You said to trust you. Okay, I trust you, but I'm going to need a hint."

"Do you drink?"

The last two people I'd worked with from MRL also had that habit of conversing in a way that made you constantly wonder if you missed a step somewhere. Good to know they were consistent like that. "I've been known to."

"Let's go have a drink. And maybe some food."

§

She got bourbon on the rocks and I didn't see any reason why I shouldn't as well. She watched me for a few moments as we sipped.

"Why do you stay alone?" she asked. "You've had opportunities. Some of them, I think, you regret not having taken. I don't think you're scared to let someone in. It's more like you're protecting something. But I can't figure out what you think that is."

"I don't know," I said, "whether I should be annoyed at myself for being obvious or whether I should worry about whether you have mind-reading abilities."

"I do have mind-reading abilities," she said. "But I assure you that, first, I haven't gone very deep at all, and second, if I did, I wouldn't tell anyone what I'd seen there. We have strong rules. It's an assault to breach someone else's mind without their consent."

"Sounds like they've made a lot of progress in metahuman enhancements since the last time I was there," I said.

"This is why we wanted you. Because you would say something like that, instead of shouting or becoming angry or trying to hurt me."

"I don't know that I'm flattered."

"We're trying to help. But ... look, there are things I can't tell you. I probably shouldn't have told you I was a telepath."

"You don't want to prejudice the witness?"

"Something like that."

"All right, but I'm now at a point where I can't proceed. Your labor-relations story is bullshit, and we both know it, and now you think there's something I should have spotted that I haven't. I really do need a hint."

"I'm not sure I can give you one. Perhaps if you were to reexamine today's statements?"

I sighed. "If forced." I finished my drink and stood up.

"You don't want dinner?"

"I'm not feeling very sociable. Give me a day, then check with me again. Go back to MRL and tell Parker I'm kind of slow."

§

It was ridiculous, I told myself for the seventeenth time. It wasn't just that I was being asked to somehow work backwards from point B to some unknown point A. It was that I didn't have the slightest idea what point A was supposed to be.

There was something somewhere in someone's statement. That much I could safely assume. I would be willing, if I were playing the odds, to go further than that and say it was something in Diaz', because Penny struck me as the kind of person who chose her words precisely, and she hadn't said, "Just get through the rest of the day" or "just three more." She'd said "just one more." Diaz was the one she'd wanted me to hear.

All right. So what did we get from Diaz? A custodial team was being asked to do specialized laboratory cleanup, including proper disposal of biowaste, and while I agreed with Diaz that should carry higher pay, if they really did get proper training then there was no case there. Schirow was a jerk. Well, yes. I'd gotten that even before the first interview. Was he doing anything I could go after? Perhaps, but if so it wasn't obvious from Diaz' report. Schirow's people were in the labs at all hours. Given, but again, nothing to see there. What about this Jerome woman?

Damn it, why didn't I take up anybody on any opportunities?

I didn't need the distraction right now and I told the question to take a number and wait, but the rest of my brain wanted a discussion hour. Look, brain, it's a bad idea. Homicide detectives don't get to have relationships. We're all problematic. It's definitional. Proof: We talk to the insides of our own heads too much.

§

Shortly after lunch the next day, my captain called me in.

"If this is about the special assignment—" I began.

She shook her head. "And I'm not supposed to ask you about that, so don't tell me. Pendleton wanted to know why you pulled Janine Jerome."

"She was mentioned in a statement we collected and I was ... considering whether to interview her for supplemental. Needed her contact info. Why?" I asked carefully. If Pendleton saw that someone else had requested the info, then there was a watch on Jerome.

"All right. Never mind, then. Dismissed."

Nobody was telling anyone else a damned thing, then? Was that the rule now? I found Pendleton getting a cup of coffee.

"What's the deal with Janine Jerome?" I said.

"You're not on this case," he replied. He wasn't nasty about it, though. Pendleton was one of the more human detectives. You could have a conversation with him occasionally. If it had been Schwartz I wouldn't even have tried.

"I don't even know what case I'm not on," I said. "I looked her up so I could interview her and the captain called me in for it. What's up? I'm not stepping on your feet."

"Oh, well. It's a dead end anyway, like the rest of it. Jerome is one of the people that Tiffany Dyson had contact with during the three days before her death. All of them a complete waste of time. Friends, family, employees she'd never had so much as an argument with."

"Still no motive? Jerome was a friend of hers, then?"

"Years. They went to college together. Saw each other all the time. Had lunch together two days before Dyson died. Look, if you're planning to interview Jerome for some other reason—"

"Not a word, I promise."

§

I called Penny and she agreed to meet for dinner.

"I've decided I'm going to get one straight answer from you," I said. "So I'm going to ask you a question and you're going to tell me the absolute truth. I know you can do it."

She sighed. "It would almost have been easier if it had been a question about the case. Then you would have only ruined the case."

"I'm not going to hate you."

"I wasn't worried about me. All right. You avoid relationships because you believe no one capable of operating on your level will ever actually be interested in you. You don't want to think yourself judgmental, but if you're being honest, you're pretty sure not many people can keep up with you. I'm not making any judgments myself, you understand; I'm reporting what's in your head. For the record, I think you're probably right. You should come be a metahuman. We're more your speed."

"I've been told that."

"I would tell you why you ignore the advice, but you're already over quota. The Oracle is silent."

Our meals arrived. We distracted ourselves with that for a few minutes.

"The second-to-last relationship I had," I said, "was with a white woman who turned out, after a few months, to have actually been shopping for a Racially Aware trophy. I said fuck that and left. The last relationship I had was great, except she wanted me to stop being a detective because she was worried I'd get killed. I didn't blame her for leaving, but I also didn't quit being a detective. Also, it's difficult being a lesbian in my job. A lot of the men are the worst kind of beat-your-wife-every-night assholes. I'm past the point where I'd tolerate being in a serious relationship that I had to keep a secret."

She continued eating and had almost decided not to say anything. Then she changed her mind. She put down her fork.

"What we're learning," she said, "is that people fear telepaths mostly because they assume that the inner details of their lives are as interesting to everyone else as they are to them. They assume we want to snoop on their hates and their loves and their sex lives, because to them, that's what the world revolves around, and they can't imagine that those things could be almost completely uninteresting to someone else. Especially when you're in a position to see into so many people's heads. The situations and the fears and the concerns all quickly start to look alike. Even among us."

"Sorry for boring you," I said.

"I'm interested in you, don't get me wrong. I'm interested in your well-being. I'd like you to be happier. But you don't need me to tell you what's going on in your head. You're not that kind of person. You're perfectly aware of your drives, and if you do nothing about them, it's not because of ignorance."

"Maybe we should talk about the case instead," I said.

"Maybe we should."

"So Janine Jerome brought someone back to her lab, which is ten minutes' walk from the slidewalk entrance where Dyson was found. That neighborhood is fairly new development and doesn't have slidewalk entrances all over the place yet; that's the only one anywhere close. By the time Diaz came back to check on the office, Jerome and the other person were gone but someone had left him a biohazard bag to dispose of. That's an hour between his visits. Plenty of time for them to go down to the street, for Jerome to stab Dyson, for Dyson to make a run for it, for Jerome to see she wasn't going to live long enough to be trouble, get back into the office, put the knife and any bloody clothing into a bio bag which she knows no one is allowed to open, and get the hell out. Even if no one picks up the bag until the next day, big deal. Also, it was routine for most of them to keep changes of clothes in the lab. Spills and such."

"You've been busy," she said. She was smiling at me like I had done a math problem correctly.

"How do we prove it?"

Her smile vanished. She resumed eating her dinner.

"Oh, come on!"

"I can't," she said. She seemed genuinely upset. "I really can't. Ideally, I wouldn't even be here at all, we wouldn't have any conversations, you'd be on the trail without my ever saying anything that anyone could point to—"

"Why?"

"Because you can't use me in court," she said. "Or anything that you couldn't have gotten from anywhere else but me. Nothing that came from telepathy. It has to be a plausible trail of evidence that you could have reasonably been expected to follow there on your own. It will be bad enough coming up with a reason why I was tagging along on the case with you."

"All right. I don't understand, but all right. But that leaves me up a tree. I don't know how to connect the dots."

"Give it time," she said. "I'm sure you'll get it."

§

I was able to get an appointment with Liam Parker for the next afternoon, which confirmed my suspicions about how actively she was following my progress.

She swept into the conference room, tall and blithe and looking completely unchanged from the last time I'd seen her two years ago.

"Sergeant Detective Green," she said.

"It's Lieutenant Detective now," I replied, "which is even worse. I am formally requesting an interval of surveillance footage from your slidewalk entrance and the slidewalk areas immediately adjacent designated as ... oh, hell, it's on the papers, here. You know which entrance I mean."

"We already gave that to the police," she said, poker-faced as ever.

"That was for around three o'clock, time of death. I want the stuff between, say, one-thirty and two-thirty. Somewhere in there should be Dyson and Jerome arriving. They didn't come in a car. Jerome left in a taxi, which she had to call because by then your people were all over the slidewalk entrance and she couldn't get through even if she'd brazened it out, but they didn't dare come in one. Someone might find the taxi driver and ask him questions."

"Well done," she said.

"Yeah, I do okay being dragged around on a leash," I replied. "I don't mind telling you that this is the damnedest charade I've ever been in. Find a solution, then invent a math problem that gets that answer. Next time find a different marionette."

She pursed her lips. She hadn't sat down, but now she did. She took her time considering what to say before she spoke.

"As of today, there are one hundred metahumans with psi abilities of some sort. Please don't share that. We're learning that it breaks down into various specializations. Most have at least a little bit of telepathy. Some are very strong at it. Some seem to be strongest at kinetics. Some are what we're calling "constructors"—they can manifest auditory and visual illusions, sometimes quite realistically. We have one young woman who is a kinetic, but at the molecular level, and a few other oddities.

"By this time next year, if we keep pace, the number of metahumans with psi abilities will be several thousand. At some point in the not-very-distant future, having psi abilities, including almost always at least some moderate amount of telepathy, will be the norm for metahumans. And we won't be able to keep it a secret.

"How do you suppose the rest of the world will react to that?"

"Not well."

"I agree. So we have to smooth the road wherever we can. That mostly means trying not to have the rest of the world be terrified that we'll spill their secrets. If telepathic evidence is admissible, then that fight is lost. People will be too scared that we'll tattle on the petty things to allow us to be any help fixing the big things. We won't be able to offer even the sort of assistance we offered you, because we'll be in hiding and possibly fighting for our lives. I don't want there to be a war, Detective. But I do intend to keep making more metahumans, and that means more psis. The benefits are too much to pass up."

"So we keep doing this? You spot that something bad has happened, you know who did it and why, and you have to help us pretend to get there the long way?"

"I'm afraid so," she said. "Even if we end up with a metahuman police force I suspect the game will still be necessary. Until—"

I waited. She considered it, then shook her head and stood up again. "I'll have those materials to your office within the hour. They're still not going to be absolute proof, you know. With any luck, though, they'll be enough to get Jerome to confess."

I stood up as well. "This seems like it might have been personal for you."

"It was," she said. "I'd known Tiffany since before this company existed. I was supposed to have dinner with her the night after she died."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"So am I," she replied, and left.

§

You'll be wondering about motive.

It's a funny thing: you think personal vendetta is the easiest motive to spot, but in the right circumstances, it can be the hardest. I mean, if someone gets killed because they trashed someone else's drug cartel or because they were in the way of collecting on the insurance policy, those things tend to leave enough of a trail that you can pick up on them. The same goes for the close hatreds—wife kills husband after vicious argument and things like that—and fortunately most of the vendetta crimes are in the family, where it's easy to spot. But you could have someone come along with an old hurt, maybe a very old hurt, and you'd never know to look for it.

Tiffany Sharpe had married Paul Dyson while they were still in college. Before they got together, Paul Dyson had been in a pretty serious relationship for two years with Janine Jerome, who also happened to be a good friend of Tiffany Sharpe. Janine apparently had never let anyone see the part of her that hated Tiffany for stealing Paul, the part that continued to bear a grudge even though the two of them remained good friends, even after Paul's early death (to natural causes, I should add).

I can't say what suddenly pushed Jerome into murder. None of us can say that. Maybe she brought Dyson to the lab to talk it out and the talk didn't go well. People are very strange.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the sentence Parker didn't finish. Surely you can fill it in. She certainly knew I could.

What she meant to say is "Until most of the world is metahumans."

I have a lot of days now where I wonder if that would be so bad.