15 Seconds
“People vanish. I’d seen it happen before more than a handful of times, but never quite like that time in Ceronka.”
I’d never been to Ceronka before then, and I didn’t particularly care to go out there when I was called. They didn’t want me either. I’d heard of a few of those outlying provinces on Jarir—that island continent on the far side of the planet. And not only that, Ceronka wasn’t even a suburb of Jarir, the main city on that minor outlying continent. It was out in Kmeno, and landing there, I have to say, it looked more like a mining outpost than a metropolis. It was gray, wet, cold, dark. And that was Kmeno, a city of a few hundred thousand.
There was a small permanent HIB office downtown in Kmeno, to which I was to report. There were six permanent officers in the district headquarters, but when I got in, I could see at least two of them were functionaries. They also had a housebot out front, an Andrew.
“Officer LuMeia?”
“That’s me,” I told it. “I’m looking for Dumeis, I think. Somebody called me in.”
“The local constable. Dumeis is on her way. She wasn’t expecting you so soon.”
I shook my head at it. “I came in from Heinan. Is there some reason she couldn’t track the shuttle?”
“No, sir.”
“So why isn’t she here yet?”
“I am just relaying what was told to me,” the Andrew said.
I looked over at the two functionaries, one of whom was facing me through her translucent floatscreen. I could tell she was pretending she didn’t see me there looking for clarification. She continued to ignore me through the silence. What the hell these HIB functionaries were doing in this mud-rock mining outpost was beyond me.
“Never mind,” I told the Andrew. “Let her know I’m here, and tell her to get her ass down here.”
“I will relay your frustration, sir.”
There was a lounge that I figured was for the public to wait if they had federal business. The windows looked out over a dull city, which itself popped out over a bleak landscape. So that was Kmeno. I didn’t expect much from Dumeis—if she even bothered to show, that is. She took her sweet ass time and still came walking in looking run down despite the clean clothes and combed hair. It was her eyes. And then when she got close, her breath. I could smell it on her before she even introduced herself. It had been a long night.
“Special occasion?” I asked her.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Celebrating into the night, were we?”
“Well ... oh. Kmeno, you know. Stay here long enough ... Anyway, I’m Kitt Dumeis. You can call me Kitt. Officer ...?”
“LuMeia. You can call me LuMeia. I’m the specialist. Your office flagged me on a missing person and assigned you as the officer liaison. You’ll be my junior on the case, Dumeis. Do you want to brief me here in the waiting area or do you have an office?”
She looked back at me funny.
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that, LuMeia. I’m not sure how that got all the way through to Heinan. They shouldn’t have sent you out.”
“You’re telling me it’s a mistake?”
She shrugged. “Not a mistake, per se.”
“Then what?”
One of the functionaries began to chuckle about something. I looked over that way angrily and Dumeis and the two others all got quiet and anxious. I was about to chew all of them out.
“Look, it’s a local thing. I understand you must be used to the way things get done in Heinan, but Kmeno’s a different place. Different pace as well.”
I almost couldn’t believe my ears.
“So have you located the girl, Dumeis?”
She shook her head. “It’s not that simple, LuMeia. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
“Actually, yeah, I think it is,” I barked at her. “Do you know where she is or not. Yes or no, officer?”
“No, sir.”
“Then we have a case to work, wouldn’t you say?”
She shrugged. “Probably not, sir, if I’m being honest.”
“I would love to hear an explanation for why an open case file isn’t a concern for you, Dumeis, really; especially when it seems you have much more important matters elsewhere. Am I right?”
“No, sir. You’re not right.”
“Are you from here, Dumeis?”
“Kmeno? No, sir. I’m from Rassa Park. It’s a suburb on the west end of—”
“North Central Heinan. I know it. Pretty town, Dumeis.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How long have you been all the way out here?”
“Three years.”
“Care to guess why you’ve been stuck in this rock-biting mining outpost for three years?”
“Sir, I think we’ve gotten off all wrong. I don’t know what you think—”
“I think we have a job to do.”
“And respectfully, sir, if you’d listen, I’d tell you that we have a case like this every few weeks that amounts to nothing and has everything to do with the local people here in Kmeno, which you seem to know nothing about.”
“Something you should’ve been briefing me on twenty minutes ago, Dumeis.”
“Yes, sir. I know. That’s my fault, but it doesn’t change the dynamic of the case any.”
“I’m listening now,” I said, at least opening a window for her to climb her way out of the hole she’d dug herself into.
“The report came in from the local constable in Ceronka, which is the outermost stop on the tram line, clear on the north side of the lake. I’m not sure how much time you’ve had to look at the geography, but that’s about as close to nowhere on Heinan as people can be. It’s an enclave of Charran religious fundamentalists. They’re called Tenŏs, a sect of old-world Christians, and, like I said, about every other week some one of their kids come to town, sometimes a boy, but usually the girls, and they meet some bright-eyed young miner, fall in love, fall in his bed, get pregnant or smitten or ashamed or whatever, and they get scared to go home again because their people are ... I don’t know ... what would you call them, Ennie?”
“Prudish,” one of the two functionaries listening-in answered from her workstation.
“Yes. Prudish. Sexually repressed. So mom and dad come down here, looking for their sweet, little, pure-of-heart child who would never ever ever even dream of getting mixed up with the wicked old people in Kmeno, insisting that they must’ve been snatched up against their will and forced to do all sorts of nasty things they’d never dream of doing on their own. Right? You get the idea, LuMeia?”
“I understand your meaning perfectly.”
“So, I’m sorry, but the case file never should have come to you.”
“Then why did it come to me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you brief me on the specifics of this case, Dumeis?”
“Late teens, I think. Pretty girl. Parents came in to the locals in Ceronka day before yesterday. Same story as all the others.”
“What’s the girl’s name?”
“All those Charrans ... Cyan. Cyan something. I’d have to look it up.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ve heard about enough. I’m going to tell you why the case got to me. It got to me because somebody here in this province must’ve complained to someone in the central headquarters in Jarir or Heinan because you weren’t doing your job, Dumeis. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s another runaway first love scenario just like you outlined. But it’s a case file. And your job is to clear case files so bullshit case files don’t ever get to me. So here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to go get something to eat, and then I’m going to come back here again when I’m done eating, and you’re going to brief me. And we’re going to clear this case file the way every single case file should be cleared, diligently and professionally. Is that clear?”
“Crystal clear, LuMeia.”
“You’re still HIB,” I stated, stepping toward the door angrily, “even out on this dirt heap of a city.”
I could sense the awkward energy from those functionaries as I cleared out of there. I’d never even heard of a satellite office so poorly run, much less been to one.
I had already pulled the case file to my eyewear earlier while I’d been waiting for Dumeis. I flipped through it over breakfast, and found that it was largely as she’d said, at least on the surface. The girl’s parents had reported her missing. The local constable up in Ceronka had run them through the intake questionnaire late into the morning when she failed to come home two nights prior. Her name was Tyritha Sian Ilanova—third of seven children, nineteen years old, and, as Dumeis had said, she was a very pretty girl, plain-looking because of the way her people dressed—no facial enhancements or makeup—but she was as pretty as could be despite it.
While I was eating, I looked at the Kmeno office’s log of cases in the category. It was just as Dumeis had reported, similar story about every two months or so. Cases open, a week or two pass, and these Tenŏs kids would pop up with a boyfriend among the regular people here, and then it would turn into a whole drama about face-saving—the kid looking for a way to deflect from their totally unnecessary guilt about doing what humans do; the parents looking for a way to deflect familial shame from the eyes of their insular community; and the lover, often having to swear innocence over their influence, which was almost always innocuous. The biggest crime in any of those files, from what I could see, was puppy love. Maybe sometimes the boy would be a year or two older than propriety might find ideal for the girl, but first relationships are hardly ever ideal.
Honestly, after cooling off, I felt a little embarrassed. I told myself that after I made Dumeis go through the thorough and performative process of a comprehensive briefing that I’d blame my bad mood on the early flight out and the shitty, dark, wet weather. And then we’d take a few hours and clear the case as the flow sheet indicated. If she did a decent job, I might not even write her up for showing up late and hungover.
I sat by the window in the most pitiful little restaurant I think I’d ever seen on the entire planet of Heinan, and then I imagined that the girl and her enclave came from an even smaller town than Kmeno. No wonder these kids would run off and grab onto the first thing that grabbed onto them.
The coffee there was absolutely terrible.
Dumeis pulled herself together pretty well. She gave a decent briefing and apologized genuinely when I found her in her office a half hour later. For my part I told her I could understand. It didn’t excuse her actions, but it was only human to recognize a pattern and react to it accordingly. I told her that was the reason for my bias as well. I get all the real ones, the people who vanish for real. So it was only natural I’d see that outcome as the logical conclusion.
“We’re going to work this case to the line, though,” I told her. “And I’d like to hope you follow through that way on every file from now on.”
“For the one that is real,” she concluded, nodding. “I know. And I should know better, LuMeia. I’m sorry it did get to you, but now that you’re here, I’m grateful for the opportunity to work a case with a specialist of your caliber—to see how it gets done in Heinan.”
“That’s great,” I replied. “What do you see in the file? What elements of the file would you interrogate further?”
“The parents, probably,” she answered.
“Why?”
Dumeis shrugged, looking up at me as though I had the answer.
“What do your instincts say?”
She winced ever so slightly as she considered the question. “Their answers weren’t as specific as they could be. You know?”
“I do know. Articulate it, though. What specifics do you want?”
“They said she came in to town every now and again. This time was no different supposedly. That’s kinda vague.”
“Should be more exact. I agree. More to the form.”
“So we go ask them? All the details?”
“Agreed.”
“Right, then. We should go out to Ceronka? Pay them a visit?”
I nodded.
“I’ll get the aircar and pick you up out front, LuMeia.”
“How did the girl get here?” I asked. “And how would she get home? Not by aircar.”
Dumeis shook her head. “The Tenŏs are like bare-bones Purists—simple dress and all that. They don’t even keep eyewear.”
“So? How do they get to town and back?”
“The tram.”
“So we take the tram.”
“Retrace her steps?”
“Maybe,” I said. “If she was even on the tram. At least we see it from those eyes, though. Know what we’re looking at.”
“Fair enough, LuMeia. Tram stop’s a five-minute walk from here.”
I stood and gestured to the door to her office. “Lead the way, Dumeis.”
The tram was clean but very spartan, a bit like the people aboard it, who though rugged and plain, looked like they had that certain Trasp pride about themselves—perhaps even more so than the folks in Heinan, maybe because that was the best thing they could hold on to. And, to be fair, to live in a place like that was worthy of some pride. They weren’t first-generation colonists forging a whole new living space out of bare rock, but it wasn’t like life in Heinan either. They were the middle children of a history they’d never see, some years in the future when this city had a little culture—a university, a few theatres, maybe a symphony and a sports team or two. These people had work and dreams and a landscape that haunted.
Each little town got progressively smaller along the tramline as the floating cars approached the shore of the great black lake Ceronka. These towns consisted of plain rectangular structures of framed concrete washed over with local stucco. Function over fashion. They wore sturdy waterproof boots along the Ceronka line. As the people stepped away from the tram stops, most would set off down rocky paths into the open, unsteady landscape rather than the paved roads, patios, and flat sidewalks of the small central villages. It began to rain heavily enough that it was hard to see very far out into the gray rolling hills. The tram got delayed along the lakeside town of Harra-Oh, as a pedestrian bundled up in a heavy jacket failed to notice the tram approaching behind her with the raindrops pelting off her hood. She was walking atop the flattest ground along that rugged shoreline—the dirt fill over the floating tram’s magnetic rails. The operator chimed to get her attention, opened the door, and the soaked woman climbed aboard, dripping water all over the front of the compartment. No one seemed bothered by it. They’d all been out there in that rain before themselves. I noted a pair of children—one girl of about twelve giving instructions to a boy a few years younger. They were carrying bags. They looked different, probably of the sect Dumeis had mentioned.
There was a long gap in stops between Harra-Oh and the three towns at the very end of the Ceronka line. Here, instead of following the shoreline directly, the tram veered back into the open land, and slightly uphill, I could see out the side, down toward the water, individual little huts and pop-up shelters along the shore. Boats, a few pulled up on the rocks, several docks with larger watercraft parked. There were a few commercial vessels down there, though I wasn’t sure what sort of profit there was to be made on those waters.
When we got to Ceronka, the two children, as predicted, began to walk off into the open landscape along a dirt road. At first, they were suspicious of our trailing behind them ever so slightly. I thought it was awkward enough that I introduced myself and then Dumeis. I spoke with them as I might to a child in Heinan and quickly found that there was an entirely different aspect to them. They understood how to present themselves to adults in a way children in Heinan rarely would. They were able to understand the playful from the serious and identified Dumeis and I as serious instantly. They answered our questions directly and soberly. They were surprisingly informative. They told us they knew the Ilanova family. The elder girl even reported that Tyritha was a teacher for her one year in an after-school bible class a few years earlier.
“Did you like her?” I asked the girl, trying to gauge what type of kid Tyritha was.
“No, sir. I love Tyritha. She was my favorite teacher at gospel.”
“Why, do you suppose?”
“She’s the kindest person. Never a cross word for anyone. Even us kids when we were behaving badly. She just has a way. People want to listen to her.”
“Okay. When was the last time you saw her?”
“Is something wrong? Is Tyritha okay, sir?”
Until that point, I’d assumed word might have been out in such a small community. Dumeis piped up.
“Nothing to worry about right now, sweetheart. We’re going to see her family.”
The kids quickened their pace along the roadway, almost running. We didn’t see any reason to step on their heels. Dumeis explained that the parents wouldn’t have spread the word amongst the enclave yet, not until they knew for sure what might have happened to Tyritha. And at about two hundred meters or so from the Tenŏs’s little village outside Ceronka, the skies opened and it began to pour.
“Those clever little bastards knew it was coming,” I remarked as Dumeis and I hustled toward the houses, getting plenty soaked as we ran.
“They live out here,” she shouted back.
When we got to the main muddy road that ran down the center of the enclave, she pulled us up to a porch, ducking under the first roof that presented itself. Dumeis knocked on the door and asked where we could find the Ilanova house. A very plainly dressed woman pointed it out through the rain. She didn’t ask any questions. Again it seemed like that sort of situation—some other family’s family business.
“Should we wait, sir?” Dumeis asked me, gesturing toward the rain.
“My shoes aren’t going to get any wetter than they already are,” I said. “Let’s go now.”
We dashed down those dirt roads to the sturdy stucco home that first Tenŏs woman identified for us. Mrs. Ilanova came to the door, eyeing me suspiciously, but then, upon examining Dumeis’s face carefully, opened her door to us. She seemed young to have a daughter Tyritha’s age, never mind the two older children. Two more, she told us were off at school. And the two little ones were about. Mr. Ilanova was off at work. He, like most of the men in the village, gathered minerals and ores that were separated and processed on the southern side of Kmeno.
I allowed Dumeis to lead the questioning, most of which she did a proper job of, following the form and asking decent secondary questions when it seemed appropriate. I could see in Mrs. Ilanova’s eyes that there was deep, genuine concern, but she was also cautious, never quite allowing her sometimes shaky voice to get away from her, nor did she allow her watery eyes to tear over with her two little ones about.
At one point, as Dumeis was questioning the mother, I got up and stepped out onto their porch. I wanted a look at that little village. We’d run in too fast for me to get a sense of the place. The rain had subsided a little, but it was still coming down. It was mid-afternoon, and grey and dark as it was, the lights were on in front of these little houses. It was hard to tell how many people there were in this enclave, because the roads stretched out in a few different directions, but everything was close. From their porch, I could see the center of their community—a modest church, where beside it, a much bigger school building stretched back into an open dirt field. I was out there taking things in when I saw a stream of children exit the school and fan out into the community, a certain orderly but frenetic rush as the kids each went their different ways, skipping along to avoid getting soaked in the rain. I sat on a bench on the Ilanovas’ porch, watching the kids progress until two approached the house.
The elder boy, perhaps twelve stepped in front of his younger sister, looked at me directly, and asked, “Who are you, sir?”
“I’m from Heinan,” I told him. “I’m Officer LuMeia. I’m looking for your sister Tyritha. Can I talk to you?”
He nodded and sent his sister inside, stepping up under the roof himself.
“Sit?” I asked him, gesturing toward the bench as the door closed behind the sister.
He nodded. I asked the boy, Drake, what he knew about Tyritha’s disappearance. And he claimed to know nothing more than anyone. Then I asked him about her. And like the two little ones from the tram, he told me she was sweet. I asked him if she had a boyfriend he knew about. At first, I’d phrased it to give the impression I was talking about someone in Kmeno, someone the parents knew nothing about. Drake dismissed that possibility outright. He also told me there was no way Tyritha would have left Ceronka of her own accord. Not without notice like that. I asked if maybe she was having a crisis of faith, considering leaving the community. Again, he told me she was as steady as anyone he knew, still volunteering as a teacher in the kids gospel classes even when most of the girls her age had given that up years before.
“What about a boyfriend in the community?” I asked him.
He shrugged and gave me a name of a boy she’d been close with through school.
“He left Ceronka, though,” Drake said. “Works in the spaceport.”
“In Heinan?” I asked him.
“Jarir. They split up when he left, though.”
“Why?”
“He left the town. Left the faith.”
“That’s important to her you think?”
“The most important thing.”
“Do you have any idea where she might be, Drake?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “If any of us did, I’m sure you wouldn’t be here, Officer LuMeia. You’re going to find her, right? I presume you people are very good at that?”
“Sometimes it’s difficult,” I told him. “It can be hard to find people sometimes, but I can promise that my partner and I are going to try very hard. And the HIB will never stop looking.”
“I appreciate that,” he said.
He was very close to tears. I could tell he was sucking them back as he stood and stepped inside the house. I followed him inside.
Dumeis had more details on the girl’s movements the night she went missing. So we discussed it briefly and decided to go back to Kmeno and retrace her steps.
I sent a message to our headquarters in Jarir to have an officer drop in on the ex-boyfriend. I figured it was low probability, but, as I explained to Dumeis, this was the way you closed a file—eliminate all the probable pathways until you find a path forward or everything closes. Usually, before that ever happens, you find your target, but Tyritha Ilanova wasn’t in Jarir. The young man was shocked to receive a visit about Tyritha, allowed officers to search his flat and devices, and offered as many ideas as he could about where she might have gone. He didn’t have many.
Tyritha’s mother had explained to Dumeis what the girl had been doing in Kmeno. She’d taken part-time work for a retailer in the city—a Tenŏs family that lived in Kmeno, who ran about four different types of businesses out of their building. The storefront sold an odd assortment of products, from tech to jewelry to clothing to cookware and even the stovetops to heat it. She was working to buy a picture-book library that was one of the few tech products they allowed kids in their sect to own. Their church sanctioned a reading list of biblical stories and some of the more wholesome secular pop-fiction comics, and her little brother Lotte, who had to rely on his big brother to lend him his book, wanted a book of his own. Tyritha went into Kmeno once or twice a week to do odd jobs for the owners around the store and the building. The night she’d gone missing, she’d come in as usual and left at her regular time. We asked for all the camera footage, which the owners eagerly provided, but they’d reviewed it carefully already and reported no unusual customers or people lurking around. Tyritha had walked toward the tram, as usual, and they had no reason to think she’d gone anywhere else before heading home. So we pulled the footage from the tram hub.
“What are you thinking, Dumeis?” I asked her as we waited for the data to upload from the hub.
“I think I’m hoping we don’t see her on this footage.”
“Why do you say that?”
“If she got on that tram home and never made it there, then I don’t know what happened to her. And I’m not sure we want to know.”
“Well, we have to know,” I said. “That’s what we do.”
“That’s what you do, LuMeia. Out here, I chase lovebirds, not homicides.”
It was the first time either of us said it.
“We chase what we need to chase,” I insisted. “Let’s take it one step at a time.”
It didn’t take us long to find the girl on the footage. She came walking into frame exactly at the expected time, from the direction we expected, alone, as expected.
Dumeis sighed.
“What next?” I asked her.
“We follow the trail.”
I immediately called back to Heinan to have all the footage we pulled run through HIB headquarters, which ran an old ingenious Svaarta clone who could run pathways like no other mind in the Protectorate. Because there were almost no holes in surveillance in a city like Heinan, the story of what happened to Tyritha Sian would’ve been short and complete. Out here, though, between the tram stop in Kmeno and that little village outside Ceronka, we could only hope the system had caught the right frame of video somewhere along the line.
As that was uploading and processing, Dumeis and I went out and asked all the businesses and homes between the store and the tram hub for their video. Most were accommodating.
It wasn’t more than an hour after that we had a complete video file of Tyritha beginning at the shop’s door, with her, alone and in no apparent distress, all the way to the tram hub, seated on the tram to her stop in Ceronka—alone and again unbothered—to the platform in Ceronka, where she walked off in the direction of the Tenŏs enclave as expected without a single hint of anything troubling in her bearing or gait. There was nothing to indicate she shouldn’t have gotten home that night.
“Oh, my God, LuMeia,” Dumeis said, tearing up as we exhausted the footage bank. “I can’t believe I was so stupid. So unbelievably selfish.”
Her two fists were clenched together and she appeared to be biting the inside of her lip in an attempt to keep from losing complete control of her emotions.
“That’s not going to help us,” I told her. “Whatever you’re feeling, the best thing both of us can do is bottle it up so we can think straight and do our jobs.”
“I know. You’re right,” she said, exhaling. “But what if she was out there while I—”
“What if nothing, Dumeis. We’re going to need to find this girl.”
“How do we find her? How do we find her?”
“Take a breath,” I told her. “I’m going to broaden the radius on the footage and have the Svaarta go through it all again. It’s time to put the word out. Go back out to Ceronka and call that community together. Then stop in all the communities along the shore on the way back. There must be an alert system out here?”
Dumeis nodded.
“All right. You’ve put one together before?”
“A few times. Never had to activate one, though.”
“If she’s not in that village by the time you get up there, we’ll activate it then. Let me see the draft before you release the alert.”
“All right, LuMeia,” Dumeis said. “You know, I didn’t like you at first. It’s probably not a surprise. But I’m so grateful you’re here now.”
“We’ll get through this,” I stated.
And she looked at me very purposefully, examining my eyes, letting my exact words roll around in her mind for a few seconds. And I could see her realize the implications of what I’d said and what I hadn’t said. I never told her we’d find the girl.
Dumeis took an aircar up to the village and met with the parents again briefly, letting them know what we’d found. Word had gotten around among the Tenŏs that Tyritha Ilanova hadn’t made it home from Kmeno, and this time it was different. Dumeis asked if she could meet with the town’s leaders, and within twenty minutes, the pastor was introducing her to the entire adult population of the congregation at the foot of the altar in their church. The kids who weren’t in bed yet, minus their sitters, had all been gathered in the school’s auditorium. The teachers were taking any and all tips and rumors on Tyritha. The sins of snitching or gossiping were absolved in advance, and everyone was assured that on this occasion there wasn’t anything that could go unsaid. In fact, if anyone knew anything and kept quiet, they were informed that would be a sin of the highest order. Yet apart from the normal reports of who last saw her when, none of the children reported anything out of the ordinary.
Similarly, as word got out into the lakeside communities, there were no meaningful tips.
Dumeis canvassed the neighborhood around the store in Kmeno for a time after she got back from Ceronka. She found me at the video terminal I’d been planted at all evening as Svaarta and I drew the circle wider and wider. Dumeis mentioned a bar in the city. She knew it herself—the character of it.
“Did you hear something?” I asked her.
She shook her head. She sat beside me silently for a few minutes, watching as I scrutinized feed after feed.
“What do you think happened to her, LuMeia?” she asked me.
“I don’t know what happened to her,” I replied. “If we posit a theory prematurely, we might miss the lead that we don’t expect.”
“I’m asking professionally, not emotionally. I’d like to have an idea about a profile.”
“My professional opinion?”
She nodded.
“An older man, 15-30 years her senior, lonely or otherwise sexually frustrated, probably not very attractive or charismatic, few friends, access to a means to hide or dispose of the girl. In this case, Dumeis, it’d be someone who’s seen this girl a few times. Maybe even an older male in the community who’s noticed her growing up, maybe a history of abuse, seen her patterns, waited for her along the road. I’m going to order an ariel survey around Ceronka.”
“They’re very closed to outsiders, the Tenŏs,” she said.
“I don’t doubt that. I do doubt that there are zero creeps among the men in that village, though.”
“I’ll dig into our files and pay another visit to the pastor up there. He didn’t mention any names this evening, but I can press him.”
“Ask the women,” I told her. “Women always know who the creeps are.”
She nodded. “Yeah. We know.”
“And go get some sleep,” I told her. “If there’s anything here, Svaarta and I will find it.”
I’d run an analysis on every last passenger who’d shared the tram with Tyritha the night she disappeared, both on the way down to Kmeno and back. There wasn’t a hint of anything suspicious. Then I had a thought. This was a small place. I was sending Dumeis up to explore the possibility that one of the Tenŏs who knew her had been waiting for her along the road. What if it wasn’t a Tenŏs at all? I checked the other trams that came back that night, looking for anyone who’d exited the tram at Ceronka in the hours before Tyritha did. Then I had Svaarta pull data on all the male passengers who’d shared a ride with her in the previous two months. That’s how I found him.
They’d shared a car three times in the previous two weeks, twice on the way down and once on the way back. That ride was particularly troubling. He was visibly intoxicated, seated halfway across the car from her, and he couldn’t keep his eyes off her. He was a rough-looking guy, mid-forties, lived along the water, name of Gricor Mineyah.
As soon as I had his ID, I back-traced his whereabouts on the night Tyritha went missing. I asked Svaarta to pull everything on him and flag anything odd. I got up to head to the HIB’s flat, where visiting officers and technicians stayed while in Kmeno. I had to get some rest to be even remotely functional the following day. Before I’d even gotten to the office door, Svaarta had video of Gricor Mineyah alighting at the Ceronka platform an hour before Tyritha’s tram arrived. There was also footage of him in Kmeno up and down the street where the girl worked, even a clip of him looking in from across the street, possibly to confirm the girl’s location. He’d visited the very bar Dumeis had spoken about in the interim.
It was too thin to make a case for exigent circumstances; otherwise, I’d have flown up on his place right then. I asked Svaarta to go back as far as possible and pull any fare-card overlaps to see if he and the girl had ever interacted on camera. I needed something more robust than a hunch and a few recent overlaps before serving the guy that night. But I planned on letting Svaarta run on him all night and questioning him in the morning.
I still wanted the ariel survey. That was my last thought before leaving the HIB office for the night. But this guy Gricor worked on the water, in a boat, and this lake—Ceronka—the size of it, the depth, the darkness. It was a black hole.
I couldn’t get her face out of my mind anymore, her smile. Sweet little thing, Tyritha Sian.
When I returned in the morning, Dumeis was already there. She’d been studying the file on Gricor Mineyah. It was troubling and got more troubling to my mind as she briefed me. Mineyah had a history of domestic violence that had popped up several times in his past with different women—two girlfriends and an ex-wife. He hadn’t been in legal trouble for some years, and not since coming to Ceronka six years prior, but that didn’t mean he’d become a pillar of the community. Dumeis had pinged a few people she knew in Kmeno who were familiar with the nightlife in town. None of them had many positive words for Gricor. He was a nasty drunk who’d been in the middle of more than a few barroom scraps in the early morning hours, and none of the women in town had a kind word for him if Dumeis’s contacts were to be believed.
What disturbed me more was his living situation in Ceronka. He stayed in a house adjacent to several out-buildings and pop-up habitats strewn on a wide stretch of shoreline. Mineyah was a contract worker for an aquatic mining outfit that owned both the modestly-sized commercial vessel and the pier along the waterfront property that Gricor was leasing from them. The mining methodology was to drop and drag large carbon fiber buckets to scoop up the loose gravel-ore lakebed, which the boat operator would sort through an industrial spreader to separate anything valuable, before dumping the worthless dirt-slag back into the water. Those buckets, about half the size of a one-person outbuilding, had a limited lifespan, such that eight broken down buckets formed a small graveyard of dark spots on the aerial survey of the property, each of which could’ve obscured a half dozen men, never mind a single teenage girl.
At that point in our investigation, Mineyah had no reason to think we were looking at him, and we didn’t need to go through legal channels to go up to the property and knock on his door. I wanted to do it while he was on the water, so we waited, looking down from the drones to be sure Gricor’s boat was out before Dumeis and I went up there. In the meantime, we had a good long look at the dirt on the property from the sky to see if we could discern any suspicious signs of activity on the grounds. Unfortunately, it had poured rain several times since Tyritha had vanished, so even as there were areas that were more compacted than others, it was impossible to distinguish much from those residual imprints of old footprints in that sandy ground.
As soon as his boat went out, Dumeis and I started up that way. We dropped the aircar at the tram stop in Ceronka so we could walk the route from the station to Gricor Mineyah’s property. Along the way, I was giving Dumeis a refresher course in how to survey for biomatter with HIB eyewear. She’d had classes in the basics, sure, but it’s as much about knowing where to look as using the gear. You had to put yourself in the head of an offender. The sorts of places a perpetrator would wait to grab someone, how they would drag them, to where, what a pathway might look like in the dirt even after a few days. Because of the rain, I wasn’t optimistic about evidence presenting itself, but if there’d been even a modest amount of blood anywhere along the route, the eyewear would’ve shown a little glow at least. We had no such luck along the road, though.
Dumeis had a surprisingly keen understanding of the regulations and how such encounters were supposed to go. What she didn’t understand was the gray area in the law. Those mining buckets weren’t along the direct ingress between the roadway and the residence, but there was no specific regulation about how an officer needed to get from the public way to the residence or which door they needed to approach and how. I took a fairly loose interpretation in this case, thinking it would be reasonable for an officer from Heinan to be curious enough about those buckets to take a casual look on the way to the door. I made sure the pathway I took weaved through them, and I got a good visualization of the buckets’ interiors, inside of which, little evidence would have washed away in the rain. But neither of us had any luck identifying biomatter there. That cursory look, though, didn’t mean the girl hadn’t been there.
We ambled up to the door, looking around as we did, before knocking loudly and performatively, buttoning the door pager.
“I seen you,” Gricor replied after Dumeis hit the button. “Get off my property.”
“We’d just like a few words,” Dumeis stated. “We’re with the HIB.”
“I know who you are. I’ve got nothing to say to you.”
“We can make this otherwise friendly conversation much less so,” I replied. “A few questions, here and now, and we won’t bother you again. We are exhausting every lead on this matter and will not simply walk away, Mr. Mineyah.”
“I’m on the boat,” he said. “I won’t be in for several hours. What do you want to talk to me for anyway?”
“You’re aware a girl from the Tenŏs settlement has gone missing?”
“So why are you asking me about it?”
“Right now, we’re asking everyone.”
“I don’t know anything about it. Get off my property and don’t come back.”
“Understood,” I replied. “Good day, Mr. Mineyah.”
I gestured toward Dumeis, letting her lead the way back off the property. Again, I had a good long look at the lake as we left. It was not an encouraging scene.
We were alone on the road, so I figured Dumeis and I could talk it through as we walked back.
“We know he had the opportunity,” I began the discussion. “Motive is also clear enough. Lonely, unsuccessful, sexually-frustrated middle-aged male notices pretty young girl alone in transit through unmonitored, dark area. Grabs her with the understanding he can dispose of the evidence afterward. What did you see on that property, Dumeis?”
She shook her head. “I get your meaning, LuMeia. The means.”
“Put yourself in his head. How does he get rid of her?”
“The boat. The buckets.”
I nodded. “Get her in there, dump enough rocks and fill over her, and drop the whole thing down to the bottom of the lake.”
Dumeis grimaced as she stepped along the sandy road. “It’s a nightmare scenario, LuMeia. I’m not sure whether it’s obvious enough to you yet, or whether it’s more local knowledge, but as many busted buckets as there are lining those water miners’ properties along the lakefront, word is there are just as many on the bottom of the lakebed.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“It’s not easy to recycle the carbon up here. It’s as much of a pain in the ass as anything. A lot of the smaller outfits, it’s just as easy to dump the gear when it wears out.”
“How many do you suppose are down there?”
Dumeis shrugged. “Along the whole lakebed? Hundreds? Gricor had a bunch on his property. Multiply that by every other miner on the shore and then go back fifty years, maybe more.”
“So, a lot is the answer.”
I looked out at that expanse of dark water. We were at the thin end of it, a narrowing bay that stretched out to a vast open, watery horizon.
She nodded. “If we can get a magistrate to sign off on it, we could check the transponder data for the boat and cross-check locations from the past few days? Run sonar, see if we have a hit?”
“It’s a good thought, Dumeis. It’s still thin. There’s nothing illegal about being an asshole on Heinan, though. If they’d gotten off the car at the same time and he’d followed her out of frame on the camera, that’d be one thing.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“We might get satellite data and see if we can clip that boat of his somehow. That’d be lucky if we did, I’d wager. I do want to lay eyes on him, though. So let’s make a show of it, do a little canvassing, ask the neighbors, and flag the drones to let us know when he’s coming in again. When Gricor brings that boat into the dock, I want to be there to talk to him. We can also approach the company, but I don’t want to get them involved unless we dead-end on him.”
She looked at me inquisitively. “Why not?”
“In my experience, corporate interests don’t care to be party to investigations. And they’ll have better lawyers than Gricor.”
“Whatever you say, LuMeia.”
We canvassed for several hours. It was a pretty empty place up there during the day. Ceronka had a few spots where folks gathered, sat for coffee and food, talked. Dumeis and I questioned several people there. I advised her to be generic after she asked a local woman about Gricor directly. As soon as she’d said it, Dumeis knew by the woman’s eyes what the implication was. It wasn’t even that direct a question, more about his property, and when the woman told her who lived there—Mineyah—Dumeis followed up with something innocuous like, “Do you see him in town much?” They all knew what we were doing there. That was all it took. That and the fact we hustled back out of town and along the shore to his property again when his boat turned around about mid-day.
We were waiting for him when he hit the magnets on the pier, locking off. He was furious at the sight of us, shouting at us that he’d already told us to get lost. We insisted we were talking to everyone. And we asked him about his hands, scratched up as they were.
“Man, what do you think I do for a living, Mr. HIB?”
I asked him about a scratch on his face.
“That’s old,” he declared. “You limp pricks can’t be serious, coming down here harassing me over that girl?”
“Give us a reason to leave you alone,” Dumeis said.
“Yeah, sure,” he replied, squinting at her angrily. “I know you. I ain’t giving you nothing.”
“If you want things to go that way, Mr. Mineyah,” I told him. “I believe we can do things the unpleasant way. Or we could talk right now, clear your name outright.”
“I don’t gotta clear nothing by you, officer,” he said, spitting out the word officer with a healthy disdain. “I have rights.”
“And the girl?” Dumeis asked. “What about her rights?”
He didn’t take the bait.
“That’s nothing to do with me. Get the hell off my property.”
When we got to the road, Dumeis asked me if it was enough. “The scratches?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “The scratches.”
We had help from the Saraswathi in Heinan getting the petition in order, and within the hour, we had a response from the magistrate as well as a bill for an HIB Forensics team out of Jarir to process the property. I didn’t know the magistrate well, but I’d had a decent record with her. She signed off on it, but I did get a private message to my eyewear, which was very much out of the ordinary. Her message was one word long: “circumstantial”.
I replied simply, “Given the gravity of those circumstances ...”
“I hope you’re right,” she wrote back.
I hoped we weren’t right. I thought we were, though. In any case, Dumeis and I had to run down every other possibility we could in the meantime. We were tracing traffic in and out of the airfield, running every dock camera we could get footage from through Svaarta—any vehicle that could hide a box big enough to fit a teenage girl in. There was just nothing out of the ordinary. Dumeis spent the afternoon up with the Tenŏs talking to as many people as she could.
By the time the forensics team got up from Jarir, something was happening out at Mineyah’s property. The footage from the air showed a group of people walking along the shore road. I flagged several images to Dumeis and asked her if that was normal, whether people usually walked there.
“You need to get out there, LuMeia,” she snapped right back.
I was going up to the property to meet the F-group anyway so we could serve the order. But the whole situation was a mess. Word had got out that the HIB was onto Gricor for snatching the girl, and the people in Ceronka were furious about it. Gricor himself must’ve had at least one friend somewhere in that town, because he was well aware and had gone out on the boat as people were gathering along the road. By the time I got up there, there were about thirty people at the edge of the property. For the moment, they were just looking and were well behaved enough while I was there, and I figured they weren’t going to do anything while the F-group processed the house, but I didn’t imagine Gricor had a good place to lie low once they left. Nobody was anticipating crowd control in a place like Ceronka, so I had to stand up there on the road until we could get some people up from Jarir to keep the peace.
I was up there for three hours along the road trying to convince people to go home and let the F-group do their work. Nobody stepped off the road toward the property, but few of them took my advice to go home.
The F-group was still working when the officers from Jarir arrived. Right about then, I saw Gricor’s boat approach the pier, but he didn’t come in. I walked down there to the pier and waved him down. He ignored me, looking over at the shore from the bow of his boat. I had a connection for his eyewear, so I pinged him.
“We’re going to question you, Mr. Mineyah. Might as well do it now.”
“I’ve already got representation, LuMeia. Yeah, I know who you are too, officer.”
“That’s fine. Come in and do it clean, formally refuse an interview, and we’ll be out of your hair in a few hours.”
“Suck my ass, LuMeia. You’ll never find a thing.”
Then he clicked off.
I was in communication with the team on the ground at Mineyah’s residence that evening while working out of the office in Kmeno. I kept getting reports that things were heating up out there. The officers on the ground expressed reluctance to leave when the F-group finished their processing of the site. We were also getting angry messages from the attorneys at Rukke AQM, the mining company that owned the property and the boat. Then I learned the magistrate was considering an emergency injunction to prevent us from searching the boat, which seemed a strange PR move to me from the company’s standpoint. Granted, it’s not a great look to have one of your people suspected of a horrible crime, but shielding that person so that the HIB can’t get to the bottom of that horrible crime seemed a higher degree of ugliness to me.
That was on my mind when Dumeis walked into the office again, and trailing behind her was a modestly dressed girl in her early twenties, who bore a decided resemblance to Tyritha. She was a bit plainer-looking than her bright sister’s pictures, but to be fair she had good cause for the grave look she was carrying on her brow. Dumeis told me she’d insisted on talking with me. This was Fescha, twenty-one and no longer in the household, as she was living in a group house with a number of other young adult Tenŏs women in the village.
“You have something to tell me?” I asked her after Dumeis introduced Fescha.
“I hope it will help.”
“Please,” I told her. “Anything could be the break we need.”
“I understand you’re looking for Tyritha along the lake.”
“We’re looking for Tyritha everywhere we can—all the places that make sense.”
She was sitting beside Dumeis in the chairs along the side wall of the office, and she leaned back visibly as I said that, as though recoiling.
“In the water too?”
I nodded. “I’m sorry to say that it’s possible we may find her in the water, Fescha. We hope to not find her there, but as soon as we have the aquatic resources, we’ll begin the search.”
“She’s not in the water,” the girl said with an almost steely certainty. “Officer LuMeia, I know she’s not in the lake.”
“How do you know that?” I asked her. “Do you know where she is?”
She shook her head. “I have a strong connection with my sister. I’ve been with her every day of her life, you must understand. If she were in the water, then that would mean Tyritha is dead, and I can tell you definitively she is not dead, Officer LuMeia.”
“What makes you so certain of that? You haven’t seen her since she disappeared, have you, Fescha?”
“No, I have not. But I can feel that she is alive.” She placed her hand over her heart. “She’s lost. I think she’s lost. I think she’s in darkness somehow. But she is not dead, and she is not in the water. I know this.”
I wanted to be respectful, but I could see the direction the conversation was taking. I asked her if she had any specific information that might help us to locate Tyritha. Fescha shook her head and then looked down at the floor.
“You don’t believe me,” she mumbled.
“There is nothing that I would love to believe more,” I told her. “But we have an obligation to follow every lead, good or bad, until we bring Tyritha home to your family.”
“I understand,” she replied. “I won’t take up any more of your time, Officer LuMeia. Our family and the whole community are praying for you and Officer Dumeis.”
“We could use the help,” I replied.
She could tell we weren’t believers like them, just trying to respond respectfully. I think she appreciated that, but she didn’t leave that office any less sullen that night.
I got an emergency call from the F-group and the officers out at Mineyah’s a little less than an hour after Dumeis left to bring the Ilanova girl back to the Tenŏs village. Gricor wasn’t the only one out there with a boat, and it was impossible to hide out on the water. Those people had been watching him cussing at me and visibly deriding the investigators on site, refusing to come in to answer the simplest questions. It wasn’t long before they got impatient and figured they could go get some answers themselves. The F-group was done at the house, but they were afraid the people out on the road would tear the place apart if they let the officers go. They were only flying basic transport for scientists and support staff, though. They weren’t prepared to fly into a tactical situation between Gricor’s mining vessel and the growing number of boats that were approaching him at the skinny end of that massive lake.
“It could get ugly very fast up here, LuMeia,” the lieutenant of the F-group told me. “And if the team on the road goes out on the water, that crowd up there might come down here and take out their frustrations on the property.”
“Do you have everything you need from the house?” I asked him.
“Everything we’re going to have, sir.”
“Any news?”
“Nothing obvious. We’ll know for sure after we get our samples to the lab, but on first glance, it looks clean in here.”
I thanked him and told him I was on my way. I grabbed the housebot from the office and dropped a few of the ariels to hover over the property, just to make a show of the fact the HIB was watching. Then I rushed back out there.
The lieutenant wasn’t exaggerating one bit. I dropped the HIB office’s Andrew with the Tac-team for support and told them to hang right there while I saw about Gricor. Mineyah’s boat was cruising out toward open water with a group of six smaller boats in pursuit. They were playing a dangerous game, trying to pull alongside for long enough for someone to grab the rail and board him. But any time one of them got close to Gricor’s side, he would swing the bigger boat at them wildly. I saw it happen twice as I was tailing the group, and I could see the group learning in real time how to coordinate it—to pinch him in and sneak on from the opposite side when he lunged. It might work, but at that speed, Gricor might figure it out and slam back into the second boat before they had a chance to swerve back out of the way. Somebody was going to get killed out there.
I took the aircar over to hover and opened the PA, advising all those smaller vessels to stand down. They pulled back a bit but didn’t break off pursuit. So I pinged Gricor.
“I can get you off of there in one piece,” I told him. “Or I can let them chase you halfway to Heinan. Odds are good somebody’s going to get on that boat eventually.”
“This is your fault, you asshole.”
“Assigning blame’s more an academic exercise right now, Mr. Mineyah. You can spend the next twenty minutes of your life in my aircar contemplating it, or you can keep running that ship of yours and see what happens.”
“What do I have to do?”
“I’m going to tell them I’m arresting you, and then when they back off, you’re going to slow your boat. Then I’m going to hover beside you. Can you climb aboard?”
“What do you mean, can I?”
“Are you physically capable?”
“Of course, I can. That’s not the issue. What about the boat?”
“I’ll have one of the Tac-team take it in. Anything you need to worry about on there?”
“No,” he said. “I never did anything.”
I didn’t argue with him. Instead, I barked out orders for all the other boats to stand down, announcing that Gricor Mineyah was under arrest, and that nobody was to touch the boat per order of the HIB, that it was a crime scene under investigation.
So when they slowed, and Gricor gradually slowed, we did as planned. He climbed in the side slider in the back compartment of the aircar, and I pulled away with him aboard, fully intending to take him back to Kmeno and question him at the HIB office.
He expressed his preference vociferously, not being very keen on that idea. He demanded clarification on the point of his being in custody or not.
“Protective custody,” I told him. “For now.”
“So, I’m free to go?”
“Soon as I find a safe place to land. It doesn’t seem that you’ve made that many friends around here.”
“No thanks to you. I’m calling my attorney.”
“You’re welcome to call whomever you like.”
“I’m not giving you permission to search my boat.”
“It’s not your boat as we understand it. It’s Rukke’s boat.”
“That’s a matter for the court.”
“We agree on that much,” I told him. “Do you have somewhere to go in Kmeno where you’ll be safe?”
He didn’t answer, shaking his head instead. “I don’t know. I don’t know what the hell ... I wasn’t doing anything.”
“So you don’t know anything about the girl?”
“I’m not talking to you, HIB! This isn’t a conversation. Just get me out of here.”
“As I said, as soon as we find a safe place to let you out.”
He’d pinged his attorney by then, so I listened as Gricor explained the situation in his own colorful way. I had a brief conversation with his advocate, who explained that he would be listening in to the remainder of the flight.
I took Gricor down to the HIB in Kmeno more or less in silence from that point. He immediately walked off into the city. I told him to ping me if anything happened, but I figured I wouldn’t hear from him again.
It was late, and there was a light on, so I went inside to see if Dumeis had made any further progress.
I thought I might get some sleep, but Dumeis kept me in the office longer than I’d hoped to be. She was engaged in a way I’d never have predicted at the outset, asking smart, probing questions, half the time answering them herself and then letting those answers take her to the next set of questions. She was watching in real time as data sets started to come back from the forensics lab in Jarir. The most incriminating result was an “inconclusive finding” for female DNA in the bathroom sink that was most likely a contaminant, and certainly not evidence Tyritha Ilanova had been in that house.
“That doesn’t clear him, though,” she kept repeating. “Only that she might not have been there.”
But as the night wore on, it became increasingly less probable that she was ever on that property, and whatever the F-group pulled from the boat—the other potential crime scene—if anything, it wouldn’t be admissible under the circumstances.
I didn’t like Gricor Mineyah, but it was also true that liking him was not a prerequisite for innocence. I was growing increasingly less convinced that we were going to find Tyritha as each data set came back. It felt more and more like the rain had simply washed all trace of her away.
Dumeis couldn’t stop talking about the Tenŏs. She’d spent more hours up there in one week than all the years she’d been in Kmeno, and I could tell that for all the contradictions in their worldview to hers, she was growing to respect them and their firm, quiet ways.
We were getting word that an aquatic group would be up to Ceronka the following day early afternoon. That black lake, though, fathoms and fathoms, for all the good it would do.
I told Dumeis it was time for her to get some sleep. I had to order her out of the office; otherwise, I’d never have gotten out myself. And I was just about to close up and head to the flat when he called.
“LuMeia! LuMeia!” was all he said. I heard him shouting and huffing and footsteps smacking the ground, and I could hear screaming in the background. It was just one question at that point, as I sprinted toward the aircar in the back lot at the HIB: could I get to him before they did?
I zeroed in on his eyewear as I got the car up. He wasn’t far off, but far enough that I couldn’t get there on foot in time. Maybe in the air.
It wasn’t quite as big a group as before at the house, but it was big enough and angry enough. It only took one.
I pulled the car down into the road, and the sight of the HIB vehicle slowed down the crowd long enough for Gricor to run up on it and hop into the door as it slid open in the back. He thundered onto the floor, smacking his head on the wall on the far side of the vehicle, and before even taking a breath or acknowledging the hit, he was shouting: “LuMeia! GO! GO! GO!”
And as I got the aircar up, I could hear him back there, huffing and moaning. I flipped on the rear cab through my eyewear to get a look at him there, flat on the floor, and yeah, he’d sure taken a hit on the way in, but it was just one in what looked to be a long line of them.
Finally, he exhaled. “They were going to kill me.”
And he said it with the wide-eyed realization of a truth that had sunk deep to his bones. It was the look of someone shocked that he could be so powerless.
He didn’t even ask where I was taking him. Elsewhere was good enough.
After a few minutes lying on the deck motionlessly, breathing, Gricor sat up and began to assess where he’d landed after his leap out of the proverbial frying pan. I didn’t know exactly what to do with him. If he couldn’t find a place to lie low in Kmeno, he certainly wasn’t going to find sanctuary along the shoreline up to Ceronka.
“Where are you taking me?” Gricor asked as he brought himself up to his feet, holding steady with his hand on the back of my seat. “LuMeia, what are you going to do about it?”
I gestured for him to sit beside me. I noticed his clothes were all disheveled. He’d barely gotten away. He’d been struck, grabbed, pulled, and chased. I noticed he didn’t have his eyewear handy anymore. He was lucky he still had his shoes and his pants. He sat and looked out into the darkness. For the first time since I’d landed in Kmeno, the sky had begun to clear out. Even a few stars were poking through out over the lake, moonlight reflecting off the water. From the lights of the villages curving around the end of Lake Ceronka, though, I could see he now had his bearings. We were heading north, toward his house.
“You’re not taking me home, are you?”
I scoffed at the thought. “The irony now, is that about the only place within fifty clicks of Ceronka I’d have any confidence you wouldn’t be torn limb from limb is up in that Tenŏs village. Maybe I’ll drop you there, have them look after you.”
“You can’t drop me there.”
“Relax, Mineyah, I’m not going to drop you there,” I told him.
“Where, then?”
“I’m thinking about that, probably Jarir.”
He looked around, thinking about it himself.
“You’re going the wrong way, LuMeia, if we’re going to Jarir.”
“Would you prefer I advertise our destination exactly, or do you mind if I take a less direct route?”
“Oh,” he said.
I flew the aircar out over the water, taking a long, wide, arcing flight path out toward the center of Lake Ceronka before turning us south again. We were flying for probably a half hour in silence, and I’d thought he’d passed out. Perhaps he was near sleep and unfocused enough to say anything at all.
“Those religious nuts. Bet you thought that was pretty funny, LuMeia, threatening to take me up there.”
I let that comment hang in the darkness of the cab for a long while, maybe thirty seconds or so.
“I’ve come to know those people a little,” I told him finally. “Do you know they believe in confessing their sins to God? They believe that if they repent the things they’ve done before they die, they’ll be forgiven and live on in heaven with God.”
“So what, LuMeia? Those people are crazy.”
“Are they? You didn’t see your face when I pulled you off that street a few minutes ago. They were going to kill you. What did you think when you realized they were going to tear you apart?”
“Getting the hell away. Not repenting of nothing, that’s sure.”
I had the car on a glide path, my hands on the controls more so I didn’t have to interact with Mineyah than to actually steer the vehicle.
“I just had another funny thought,” I said. “We’re about six hundred meters up, Gricor.” I popped open that sliding door in the back, setting off an alarm up in the front cab as a rush of cold air came bursting into the vehicle. “I imagine that’s probably ten, fifteen seconds tops before you hit the water from this height. Nobody’ll miss you. Not here. Not in Jarir.”
He looked over at me and then down at the sidearm in my belt-holster.
“Cut the shit, LuMeia,” he said, posturing tough, but I could hear the fear in his voice, even over the roar of the air rushing in.
“Do you think you can clear your conscience in that time, Gricor? Fifteen seconds?”
“I didn’t touch that girl! I never saw her that night. I was passed out, home.”
“I didn’t ask you about the girl,” I shouted back over the rushing air. “Fifteen seconds?”
His eyes got nearly as wide as they had been earlier on the floor.
“I’m not a good person. Is that what you want to hear, LuMeia?”
I counted it out in my head, one to fifteen—so much longer than I’d thought it would feel like. Then I shut the slider, and the alarm went quiet. After the cold air blasting in, the hum of ordinary flight seemed like silence.
“You could learn a lot from those people, Gricor.”
“So could you, you psychopath,” he replied, scowling at me, thinking it had been some sort of joke.
In my whole life I’d never done anything like that before. It wasn’t a joke. I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t feel anything about it, one way or the other. Gricor got up angrily and belted himself in on the back bench in the rear cabin.
“Wake me up in Jarir,” he barked before leaning over and lying on the bench.
I looked down at that expanse of lake. We’d gotten the first cursory survey of the lakebed from the archive at Central in Heinan. It was a decade old, and it was littered with discarded mining gear. How many buckets had been dropped in a decade—hundreds? Over thousands of square kilometers? They were sending up four aquatics from Jarir and two techs to run them. We were never going to find that girl down there, if she was down there. I didn’t think Gricor had anything to do with Tyritha Ilanova’s disappearance, not anymore. Nor did that assessment have anything to do with my pulling him off that street in Kmeno and taking him to Jarir. And I don’t think it was professional responsibility either. I had a lot of time to think about it on the way down. Maybe it was that thought I had—those fifteen seconds—the things I had to account for.
When I got down to Jarir a few hours later, I dropped into a mostly empty lot on the outskirts of the city. Then I grabbed Gricor Mineyah by the coat and rustled him awake.
He sat up and looked at me indignantly.
“I suggest you make yourself scarce down here,” I told him.
He unclicked the single lap belt he’d been flying by and stood up.
“Don’t expect any gratitude from me—” he started to say.
“Don’t worry. I didn’t.”
“You’ve ruined my life.”
“I’ve ruined ...? I’ve ruined your life?” I laughed, shaking my head at him as he stepped out into that vacant lot. “Some life.”
“Go to hell, LuMeia!”
“Maybe I’ll see you there, asshole.”
He let out a string of curses at the side of the HIB car as I stepped up front and closed the door. It was going to be light by the time I got back up to Kmeno. I figured I could get a little sleep along the way.
I was in Kmeno for fourteen weeks after that night. Over that time, Dumeis and I didn’t ever find a hint of what happened to that Tenŏs girl, not DNA, not a fingerprint, not a digital trace, not a piece of clothing, not even a rumor. We worked to open and close as many leads as I’d followed as in any case in my career and certainly Dumeis’s. We ran all the particulars through Svaarta in Heinan to calculate probabilities throughout the search. On the day I was ordered to shift the case to the cold category and return to Heinan, the fundamentals ran as ninety-seven percent that Tyritha was dead, two percent in hiding on Heinan with an unknown confidante, one percent somewhere off world in parts unknown. I didn’t want to do it. Both Dumeis and I wanted to keep looking, but where?
Dumeis took me up to Ceronka to meet with the Ilanovas on that final afternoon. I told them I’d keep working to find Tyritha back in Heinan, that I’d do everything humanly possible. Dumeis, they knew, would be doing the same just down the way in Kmeno.
They prayed over us. The whole family put their hands on us and blessed us after we’d failed them.
On the way back down to Kmeno, Dumeis pulled the car down along the waterfront at the property Rukke AQM had been leasing to Gricor Mineyah. We’d heard from our contacts down in Jarir that he didn’t stay there long. Last we’d heard he’d bought passage off Heinan, out into the Letters somewhere. Some new life. Somebody else’s problem.
The property was vacant now, the boat fixed at the pier, the busted buckets still sitting in the dirt leading down to the shore. Dumeis gestured to the door of the aircar as she got up and stepped out. It wasn’t raining, so she started walking down to the water off the property to the north side along Lake Ceronka.
We walked maybe half a kilometer in the sand along the shore before Dumeis stopped walking, staring out over the water.
“I don’t want you to go, LuMeia. It feels like giving up, and I don’t want to give up on her.”
“You know, you’re a totally different person, Dumeis, from the woman I met just a couple months ago.”
“I’ll never be able to look at this place the same again, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
She stood there in silence, staring out over the water. Inhaling. Exhaling.
In her face, I could see a glint of the same helplessness I saw in Gricor that night, the moment he realized the people there were going to kill him. There may be no place better to feel it than a shore that stretches to a horizon of dark water. You can always feel at least a hint of it there. A feeling that eventually will wash over us all.
People vanish. I’d seen it happen before more than a handful of times, but never quite like that time in Ceronka with Tyritha Sian Ilanova. I’d resigned myself to the belief that death had come for her that night in some form, just as it would for me one day. I hoped she’d had time to make her peace with it, and I hoped she hadn’t suffered.
I don’t know if I believe what her people do, but I do know that a part of me, maybe most of me, in my final moments, hopes that I will have little to confess and less to be ashamed of when the moment comes. But I did learn in Ceronka that the life I was living takes care of itself, and it works, and it gets me through the things I do each day, and it will continue to do so until it doesn’t. It’s the next part I don’t have an answer for.
What comes after. Those fifteen seconds and what comes after.
And I still don’t know what to do about it.