Chapter 2: Precision Instruments

The next door that gave was four rooms down.

He put his shoulder into it and came through fast — two steps, hands on the frame — before he registered the bars.

Steel. Quarter-inch stock, bolted into the masonry on both sides, cross-welded at two points. The kind of work a hospital pays for after a patient up on the ward decides they aren’t staying. He got his fingers around one upright and pulled. The bar didn’t move. Neither did the frame. He hit the sill once with the flat of his fist, hard enough to sting, because it was the sill or the glass.

The glass held too.

So that was the set. The ground floor had somebody on it. Both ways out of the basement had been chained from the outside. Every window on three had a cage on it. He had come up here for a drainpipe he was not going to reach.

He stood still and did the arithmetic again. The arithmetic didn’t change.

The room was small and cold. White walls with a green band painted around the middle, most of it curling off in sheets where the damp had gotten under the paint. The unit under the window hadn’t run in a long time — the grille furred over with dust, the cord cut short and taped back — and the building was old enough that there was no insulation worth the name in the walls. He didn’t need the clock to tell him it was under fifty in there.

The clock told him anyway. Flat LCD characters over the door: M157 · 01 · 22 · 00:20.

He looked at that a second longer than it was worth, then went through the room.

The bedside cabinet had a quilted work jacket on a hanger — dark, wind flap over the zipper, hood folded down into the collar. A single-strap pack sat on the floor under it, black, and below that a pair of lace-up boots, mid-calf, the same dark as the jacket, and a size that was either his or close enough that a night’s walking would settle the question.

He got the jacket on and the zipper to his throat and his hands into the pockets. He sat on the edge of the bed to pull the boots on and knot them. Then he went through the rest of the room. Under the pillow on the next bed over he found a plastic lighter, the cheap translucent kind, and shook it next to his ear. Maybe half full.

He crouched and clicked it and cupped the flame in both hands.

Heat at that scale was almost nothing — a thumb’s worth of it, and the room taking it back as fast as he made it — but his fingers had gone past cold into a kind of dullness where he wasn’t sure he still had all of them, and the flame gave him back the edges. He stayed down there with it, passing it from one hand to the other, and when he finally looked up, the pack was still on the floor where he’d found it.

It was his.

He knew that the way he’d known the name on the ID. Not remembering — recognizing. He reached over and pulled the zipper.

Paper. A stack of it, printouts, corners curled. The pack had spent time somewhere damp.

The top sheet was a résumé. Two columns of black text, his name in bold across the top, and under it a phone number he did not remember having.

Under the résumé, the replies. Four of them, from four different places, and all four built the same way: one paragraph thanking him for his interest, a second about the strength of the applicant pool, a third about keeping his materials on file. He read the first one all the way down to the signature. He read the others as far as the second line, which was far enough.

Under those, a transcript. Unofficial, printed off a student portal, the university seal gray across the top. He ran his eye down the columns. Mechanics. Materials. Instrumentation. Control theory. A’s, and not the kind that came from asking nicely.

Folded in behind it, a photocopy of a letter from the university. Attendance and conduct. The word unexcused appeared in it four times. There was a line about a review panel and a line about a hold on his registration, and at the bottom somebody in an office had signed it in blue ink.

He sat with that for a while.

The interview came back the way the name had, in a fragment rather than a reel. A conference room with a table too big for it. A man across the table with a legal pad and a pen he kept clicking. The man had been explaining the job — client site visits, a team of four, a lead who’d have to sit with the client’s engineers and keep them happy while the work got done.

“What do you do well?” the man said.

“I’m not good with people,” Ash said. “If you’ve got a position where I can work without talking to anyone, that’s the one I want.”

The man looked at him the way people look at a sound they can’t place. He clicked the pen twice, wrote a short line on the pad — the same short line he’d written there twice already — and stood up and offered his hand and said they’d be in touch.

They’d been in touch. By mail.

He had gone looking for work and come out of it with one eye. The interview, and then a drawer in a basement, and nothing in between that he could account for. There was no version of that he could do anything about tonight.

He put the papers back in the pack and stood and took the paring knife off the fruit tray on the cabinet — short blade, wooden handle, four inches of nothing much, but his hand closed on it the way it closed on a tool, and that was worth something. He put the knife in his jacket pocket and the pack on his shoulder.

He went to the door and looked out through the wired glass.

The nurses’ station was across the corridor from him. Its door stood open all the way.

He watched it for a minute. Nothing crossed the light in there. Then he pulled the door and went.

The station was dark. Somebody had broken the tubes out of the ceiling fixture with something long, and what light was left came in off the corridor and died about a yard inside the room. Cabinets had gone over. Glass vials and packaged tubing lay across the tile in a layer you could hear yourself walking on. The air was thick with alcohol and something under it — the blood smell from the hall, and under that the hay, gone sour in the damp.

On the desk facing the door sat a desktop computer, the plastic case yellowed, the monitor asleep. To the left of it, the desk phone lay on its back and its cord had been cut. Not pulled loose. Cut — both ends of it there on the desk, one with the jack still in it.

He nudged the mouse. The monitor woke up gray and stayed gray, and that was enough light to work by.

He picked the cut end of the cord up and turned it to the screen. Knife tip, two cuts, insulation peeled back off four wires. He twisted the copper of each pair together and rolled the joints tight between his thumb and forefinger. Complex wiring was nothing in his hands; he had done harder than this without needing to look at it. No tape anywhere on the desk, so he held the splice pinched shut with one hand and reached under the desk with the other, after the handset, which hung down off its coiled cord.

He bent.

Under the desk, in the dark the corridor light didn’t reach, a nurse was sitting with her back to the panel, knees up, eyes open. Both hands were locked around her own phone. The screen was cracked across the middle, and the body of it was bent at an angle a phone doesn’t bend at.

Ash stayed bent over with the splice still pinched in his fingers.

Then he reached in and touched the back of her hand. It was cold in a way that had nothing to do with the room.

He came out from under the desk and stood up and stepped back from it. He put the phone cord down on the desk, and the joint he’d made pulled apart behind him, and he didn’t pick it up again.

There was blood under her — it had spread out from where she sat and gone dark at the edges, still tacky in the middle — and where she’d come down into it, the print of a shoe had been left in it. He crouched at the edge of it with the lighter up.

The print was wrong. The heel was a hoof. Split in the middle, two points down. Two more prints of the same shape went out from under the desk toward the door, and from the door they went right, and past that the blood thinned out into the corridor and he lost them.

He checked the room once more for anything he could use and found nothing that wasn’t glass, and then he stood in the doorway and worked it.

She hadn’t been dead long. He’d been in the ward across the corridor for a while and heard nothing — no arguing, no furniture going over. That put the killing before he came up. Which put whoever did it either on this floor or on their way off it while he was standing in a storeroom full of boxes, listening for footsteps.

That was inference, and he knew how much of it was inference.

But he’d seen the print before. Not on a floor.

He went back along the corridor with his shoulder to the wall, knife reversed in his fist, watching the doors, to the storeroom he’d already been in once.

The door, which he had left pulled to, stood open.

He looked up first. The top row of boxes was where it had been, dust thick across the lids, and the goat’s skull with the polished horns was not on it. There was a clean bare rectangle where it had stood, the dust around it undisturbed everywhere else.

He put the knife tip into the flaps of the box below and opened it. Cardboard, empty, three sides folded flat. He felt along the bottom. The board had the same print pressed into it — heel, split, two points — deep enough to have gone through the top layer of paper.

Which meant that on his first pass through this room, the skull had been on somebody’s head. Somebody standing in the boxes, not moving.

He didn’t have a better read on that than he had on anything else tonight. He backed out of the storeroom with the pack hitched up on his shoulder and went to look for a way out of the building.

*

The room had one wall of screens and no other light.

Nine of the panels were live. Two were dead black, and one rolled a slow gray bar down its face every few seconds, and nobody had come to fix it. The man in the room was standing behind the desk rather than sitting at it, both hands flat on the wood, watching a single feed at the center of the wall.

The picture was black and white and soft at the edges. On it, a kid in a dark quilted jacket and a pack came along a corridor with his back to the wall, head turned to listen behind him, stopped at a doorway, leaned to look into a room that held nothing, and moved on.

The feed changed. Same corridor, different camera. The kid went into a storeroom and came out of it, and the pack sat higher on his shoulder going out than it had going in. Fuller. What he’d picked up in there, there was no telling.

The man watched until the kid was out of frame.

Then he laughed, which didn’t carry any further than the desk.

He was still leaning on the page under his hands. Single sheet, printed, two columns. He turned it around to read it the right way up.

KESSLER, ASH
Discipline: Precision Instruments and Mechanical Engineering
Seeking: Special Equipment Development

Special certifications: ninety-ninth percentile, national mechanical and spatial reasoning battery; full-completion and speedrun records, one hundred horror games.

Interests: competitive shooting.

At the bottom of the sheet, in the blank space the applicant had left, somebody had written in pen, in three lines, in a hand that was not the applicant’s:

1. Excellent academic record. Unusual aptitude for precision equipment.
2. Juvenile record. Assault, serious injury to another person.
3. Abnormal thought process. Capable of extreme behavior. Interviewer should use caution.

He read the three lines again. Then he put his palm back down over them and watched the screens, where the corridor was empty, and the timestamp in the corner counted past 00:20.