There were rumors, Woten noted. In a community as large as the Universidad de Buenos Aires, total secrecy would be impossible. CBAST’s condensed stringer reports—Woten had them display as a small-font marquee across the lower edge of his spectacles—proved what he might have guessed: everyone knew about the murder.

Or thought they did. Only five people had actually seen what had been scattered behind the fence around Trash Collection Point 14 at the Biblioteca de la Ciudad Universitaria at roughly two o’clock that morning. The student who’d first discovered it was still restrained on a gurney at the University security office, trying to stammer out a statement. The janitor who’d come across it next had slapped the emergency call button, then walked two blocks to commit suicide by bus under the wheels of the 45. Two CBAST patrolmen had responded to the call, and both were now under close observation, receiving the best counseling that the Facultad de Psicología could offer. The fifth—Lieutenant Woten himself—had just arrived. He grimaced as he looked over the scene of the crime, because his coffee was cold.

The body parts and trails of blood were a complete thing, a deliberate creation. Defensive psychology hadn’t been invented when Woten graduated from Berkeley’s Criminal Science program, but his field tended to engender a talent for it. He was already picturing Jolene’s smile in his head, so the initial wave of shock and revulsion gained even less purchase on his mind than it normally would have. The two beat cops hadn’t been rookies; they’d been places and seen things, which is why they’d ended up with just a case of the shakes while the janitor had killed herself, and the student had been strapped down to prevent him from chewing open his own wrists.

Woten spoke with the mangled dead on nearly a daily basis, but being jaded wouldn’t have been enough, in this case. The psychic form embedded in the pattern of strewn body parts located Woten’s mind via the sparse stirrings of horror that managed to squeak out from under his thoughts of his late wife Jolene and the armor of a veteran’s dispassion. From there, it selected targets in his subconscious and tried to feed them an array of dark, self-destructive notions. But the psychic form’s aim was off, like a gun with bad sights; and the brunt of the attack dispersed harmlessly. Woten sipped his cold coffee, isolating and neutering what little had gotten through.

The real problem with the attack was that it was completely impersonal—no psychic trace remained of the murderer, at least at first glance; the entire psychic form was comprised of psionic energy harvested from the victim himself. Or herself—that first glance didn’t reveal the victim’s gender, either. The murder wasn’t the worst thing he’d ever come across, but it was at least as bad as anything else in his experience.

["Bill. What's up?"] Capitán de San Peregrine didn’t call Woten by his rank or surname because he correctly believed it displeased the forensic officer. Woten didn’t rise to that particular bait for the same reason he’d ignored de San Peregrine’s initial overtures of friendship, when Woten had first arrived at the precinct.

“The crime scene should be considered highly toxic until I say otherwise. Nobody within fifty feet, and no surveillance of any kind.” Rather than bothering with physical speakers, either worn or implanted, Woten preferred direct stimulation of his auditory functions via psychic emanators built into his Mirror-linked data glasses. Similarly, the barely-audible mutter of his reply was picked up by the psychic detectors in his glasses, built up with his own stored voice patterns, and beamed back across the Mirror. The weather indicator in Woten’s spectacles told him that the February breeze ruffling his dark long coat was 25° Celsius. His shoulders trembled with chill anyway, because his heart was no longer pumping hot blood through his body at a high enough rate.

["Sure, Bill. Consider it locked. Need an ambulance prepped?"] It’d take a much dumber person than de San Peregrine to pretend that his department wasn’t phenomenally lucky to have Woten, personality conflicts notwithstanding. Woten eyed the ground around him in the Emiaro as bony fingers started to claw their way out. No one else had ever see the apparitions that haunted him, but since investigating them had led to a nearly perfect ratio of solved to unsolved cases, he preferred to believe he was simply more sensitive than other psychics… rather than more crazy.

“That would be helpful. I’m logging out.” Woten closed the Mirror link to his Capitán and sank into a lotus position, shrugging his coat closer. The lines in his weathered face deepened perceptibly. As his heart rate slowed further, it became less and less able to spit out the poisons of continued operation, creating painful fatigue. His arms and legs were already as sore as if he’d run ten miles while lifting dumbbells. But the decrease in heart rate was a symptom, not a cause, of the condition Woten was forcing on himself.

His chin dipped to his chest, and with a final sigh of relief, Woten died. The clawing ghosts rushed over his skin, filling him with terrible images.

*

“De agradecimiento,” Woten panted as the EMT, a grim-looking young woman with barbs of ritual scarification showing where her CBAST uniform didn’t cover her wrists and neck, distractedly pulled him to his feet. Her forearms bunched with muscle like steel cables; she was small-framed, but had the tone of a bodybuilder, if not the bulk.

“But his heart…” the ambulance driver protested in English. Unlike the scarred woman, he wasn’t willing to listen to Woten’s staid reassurance that the episode hadn’t been a heart attack—they’d found him sitting on the curb, weakly clutching his chest. Very few EMTs would have listened, unless the patient had flat-out refused service.

The scarred technician’s departure from procedure was welcome, since Woten had more important matters than explaining to a doctor that the ghosts talked to him more clearly when he himself was dead. Her hand, as she steadied Woten on his feet, had as much give as an ice statue. Woten found her interesting; the ambulance driver had already stopped making noise about Woten’s “heart attack”, so he must have found her creepy as hell. He had reason to—ghosts clung to her like faint ribbons of spiderweb, too small and weak to do anything but moan softly. Not that anyone but Woten could see them.

She’d looked into the garbage bin enclosure. Besides shattering the psychic form after he’d finished examining it, Woten had thrown a weak glamour over the entire scene; she should have seen only dingy green dumpsters and piled trash. The ambulance driver had glanced into the enclosure as well—once, before shrugging and returning his attention to his job. Both had heard the rumors, but the driver saw nothing interesting, his mind tricked and diverted by Woten’s psionic construct. The scarred technician turned her head to stare darkly into the enclosure again as she helped Woten into the back of the ambulance. Woten seated himself heavily on the gurney, then turned to track her with his eyes as she rearranged medical supplies to clear a place for herself to sit. The ambulance’s electric engine buzzed and pulled the vehicle into a careful, tight turn. Stabilizers leaned the cabin into it, making Woten feel slightly heavier until the driver straightened into the Biblioteca’s exit drive.

“Take me to the Facultad de Psicología, please.” Woten leaned forward to dangle his CBAST badge in the space between the cabin and the driver’s compartment before the driver could protest. The gold shield embossed on it glinted in the midsummer sun, and the ambulance turned left out of the driveway. Woten sat back, trying to steady his breathing, to find the scarred EMT staring at him. He extended his hand. “William Woten.”

“Race,” the technician answered after a moment, shaking his hand once. “Oxygen,” she added, pointing at the small compression bottle with its attached mask. “For your breathing.”

It wasn’t, Woten decided, anything personal. Nor was her attitude a reaction to what she’d seen in the enclosure around Collection Point 14. Race simply went through her life angrily—not at any person or thing, just angry. Understandable, he decided, given her history. Had he not been recovering from his self-inflicted near-death experience, it wouldn’t have taken him this long to recognize her features. She’d been all over the news, even down here…
“Thank-you, Miss Escobedo.” He leaned down for the mask as she went still at the mention of her last name. But she got up a second later and wordlessly helped him fit the mask’s strap over the back of his head. “You saw?” he asked, his voice slightly muffled by the carbon weave and the euphoric rush of huffing a lungful of pure oxygen.

Race took her seat on the steelplast bench/supply box. “Yeah.” Her voice was hard and constrained, like she was perpetually trying not to shout. “Pretty fucked up.”

“Indeed,” Woten agreed mildly. Race sat back when it became apparent that the detective wasn’t going to press further conversation on her. By degrees, her shoulders loosened.

Rosebud. Sensing the keythought, Woten’s spectacles opened a translucent menu on the right side of his field of vision. Record, thought-to-text. As the ambulance navigated the narrow streets of the campus, he began taking down notes of what he’d witnessed during his out-of-body experience at the crime scene.

*

“Profesor Gorodischer?” Woten limped carefully through the lunch crowd, stopping at the table over which the maître’d had posted a Café Café swoosh as a Mirror marker keyed to Woten’s spectacles, its virtual presence given depth by showing slightly different images in each lens.

The man who looked up from his bowl of crillo de pollo moved with the care of great age. In the Mirror, a small window popped, displaying a list of organizations Gorodischer was party to. First on the list was La Sociedad para el Adalanto y Estudiar del MIRO. Woten had read that the Society’s use of the acronym for Matrix of Interrelated Outlooks, rather than the commonly-accepted syllabic abbreviation Emiaro, was actually a continuing experiment in the practice of psychic privacy through disassociation from common trends.

“Sí?” For all that his face was deeply lined along his cheeks and forehead, he showed very little wrinkling elsewhere, and his skin was the same warm color as the meat of a healthy nut. “What might I do for you, young man?” Woten’s own face greyed slightly as he gingerly seated himself opposite the Profesor, wincing when his knee gave out and dropped him the last few centimeters. Most days, he didn’t need the cane, but most days, he didn’t force his soul out of his body, endure subjective hours of slow death, and then go running around looking for someone to talk to afterwards.

“Lieutenant William Woten, CBAST.” Woten showed his badge and shook Gorodischer’s hand in the same motion to limit the number of eyes that might catch on the reflective gold of his shield.

“Ah, the murder,” Gorodischer nodded, taking Woten’s hand warmly, if not firmly. “I appreciate your discretion,” he added, indicating with his eyes the badge that Woten was putting away. No one else in the café had noticed it. “You would be the CBAST’s extraordinary forensic Detective, would you not? Is this murderer’s mind so difficult to understand, then?” He pronounced the acronym as “say bossed”, rather than spelling it out the way someone without experience in its operations might.

“Yes,” Woten answered in reply to both questions. “Can I Emiaro you?” he asked. “I’d like you to see everything I’ve seen.”

“Of course.” The Profesor closed his eyes and opened a portion of his mind; Woten recognized his icon by the self-image that was part and parcel of the psionic greeting. Gorodischer’s self-image was quite close to the reality—closer than Woten’s, most likely. The Lieutenant selected the block of his own memories which contained his impressions of the crime scene and placed them into Gorodischer’s waiting envelope, then scanned the psychic space around them while the Profesor closed the envelope and internalized the data. Woten saw that their conversational aura—a faint haze in the navy blue non-space that most psychics used to visualize the world of the mind they interacted with—had been altered by the Profesor to make it appear they were discussing a former student of Gorodischer’s who was applying for an internship at CBAST.

“How very sad.” Woten refocused on Gorodischer’s face, rather than his Emiaro icon. “Your talent is quite remarkable, Lieutenant. I don’t recall ever encountering psychometric memories as clear as yours. I believe the victim was this man,” Gorodischer continued as a name dropped into Woten’s icon. Checking it in the Mirror brought up a link to the same dossier that Woten himself had downloaded after a fifteen-minute search of the Universitaria database: Hector Viñao, student actor and model.

“That was my finding as well.” Woten focused himself, using Gorodischer’s slight pause to open both an audio and a thought-to-text file, linking both to his CBAST storage space so that his spectacles wouldn’t run out of room. Gorodischer’s earlier use of the word “extraordinary” to describe Woten’s abilities was looking like more and more of a compliment.

“We will trust your forensic assessment that the crime took place the same location the body was discovered.” Gorodischer’s voice lost its faint quaver as he warmed to the subject, opening a shared psionic hallucination that showed various images of the murder scene. “The psychic form which the murderer created from the energies released by the torture and death of the victim was created quite skillfully, but was notably impersonal. You have indicated here that there are no footprints in the blood pools, no silhouettes in the sprays, and no fingerprints. The location, yes, makes fiber retrieval impossible—no way to tell what the murderer left, and what is simply trash.

“From the limited effect of the form, we can deduce that this is part of a series—one does not put this much detail and preparation,” he explained, gesturing at the inverted pentagram that had been formed by careful arrangement of Hector Viñao’s small intestine, “into a single such small act. Michelangelo’s genius could not be contained by one tiny portrait.” The Profesor paused for comment, but Woten merely nodded and continued taking notes in his virtual display.

“The murderer is quite self-aware, and seeking further self-knowledge—you can see that he kept poor Hector alive as long as possible, plucking each lower limb off individually, then following with the upper limbs. Your analysis of the blood sprays matches this; as you noted, the upper and lower torso were only separated after the victim’s limbs were all removed and arranged. The head was last of all. The murderer was studying Hector’s body as it died to gain insight on human anatomy—his own anatomy, in effect. He was also studying Hector’s reactions to gain insight on human psychology—again, studying his own psychology by proxy. One can only learn so much from books, and the murderer feels he has reached a point where the knowledge in books is insufficient.”

“He’s a student of Logical Psionics?”

“Consciously or not, yes indeed.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. The murderer used his hands to perform the entire act,” Woten pointed out. “He must have worn gloves, since there aren’t any fingerprints, but he didn’t use any tools. The strength you’d need to pull a man’s shin from his thigh…” Woten quirked his mouth in distaste and grudging admiration. “He’s either training for the Olympics, or he’s got a lot of psionic juice. Nobody heard any screams.”

The detective looked up to find Gorodischer studying him intently. He found his thoughts wandering back to the scene of the murder, and then inexplicably to Racine Escobedo.

“Possessed of quite a bit of psionic power, I would certainly agree,” the Profesor said as he carefully lifted a piece of chicken on his spoon. “Physical augmentation, aural dampening, plus creating and configuring the psychic form… quite powerful indeed. I should look for someone of great physical ability, since psionic power most often follows channels set by physical development and especially self-development. Knowledge is power,” the Profesor opined, “and self-knowledge is the most valuable and powerful of all. Hm… I wouldn’t discount the possibility that the murder has actually operated psionically on his own mind and body, altering himself to more closely fit what he sees as the perfection of his form.

“It is of course a given that the murderer is quite active in the Emiaro, though of course he has great reserves of his psyche to which he makes no psychic reference—too easy for someone to follow the wrong link and discover his psychoses. For that reason, the murderer will be especially proficient in psychic defense and possibly Emiaro security. In the Mirror, the murderer is probably less proficient, disdaining networking technology for the power and subtlety of mind-to-mind contact in the Emiaro.”

Gorodischer leaned forward to take another spoonful of his creamy soup, chewing and swallowing thoughtfully. “If I may pry, Lieutenant, what brought you to me? La Universidad has any number of criminal psychologists and psionic experts—no need to seek out the head of La Facultad de Psicología. Not,” he added, “that I feel in any way put-upon by your request. Indeed, I am honored.”

“CBAST sent an ambulance in case I needed a hand after my survey of the site,” Woten replied, leaning back as he shuffled his notes into a more logical arrangement. “The EMT was Racine Escobedo.”

“Ah, young Race. I regret that her mental state was not improved during her treatment and study by myself and my colleagues, though I believe her to be stable enough. She holds her bones—her own bones, you know that the doctors had to build titanium supports into her entire skeletal system—as a sort of talisman, a bedrock. The scars, though… I’m rather afraid that her scars may signify, to her, some sort of deeper paradigm shift. Still, she did help us fill in great expanses of our map of the abnormal mind. ‘Here there be dragons…’ well, at least we now know what those dragons look like.

“As for what this murderer looks like,” Gorodischer said, inhaling deeply, “I would say male, or masculine. The murder was too impersonal and far too public to fit the standard female serial killer’s profile. There is room for error there, but,” he shrugged, “I feel quite comfortable with that prediction. I also feel quite confident that the murderer marked himself or herself in some way, after leaving the scene of the crime. To commemorate the kill.”

Woten sat up and opened a new section in his recordings. “I don’t follow.”

“The logic is somewhat convoluted, but solid. It is based on the premise that the murderer siphoned off some of the psionic power released by the murder and kept it for himself, using the rest to power the psychic trap. Given the publicity of the kill, it can be deduced that the murderer sought to show us—the public, the authorities—the power he gained from this act. At the same time, in order to keep the power he stole from his victim’s death, he must form a bond with the victim. He left nothing of himself at the crime scene, so it follows that the link must be on his person—a very personal link, something on or even cut into his flesh. The flesh is very important; young Hector’s boyfriend notes Hector’s remarkably soft, clear skin as one reason he was so successful as a clothing magazine model. Yes, yes—you note here that the victim’s skin has been cleaned of blood with rubbing alcohol. The link must be on the murderer’s skin.”

“Interesting…” Woten mused. “I’d like to discuss ‘why’. He’s studying, you say—that’s why he killed. But why is he studying?”

“Why this murder in this fashion,” Gorodischer clarified, temporizing. “What need is the killer trying to fulfill. Firstly, the near-complete destruction of the victim’s body—the killer’s study of that destruction—speaks to me of building up the self. You see, the knowledge of how to utterly destroy a human is useful for one of two things: destroying people, and saving them from destruction. The care put into this kill leads me to believe that slaughter on a mass scale is not the goal; therefore, the killer must instead seek to understand how a body and mind might be armored against destruction.”

“Destruction by what?”

“We live on a perpetually hostile planet filled to the brim with our ceaseless predatory fellows. Most people seek equilibrium, satisfied to keep their heads above the water. This person, this killer, is driven to pull himself out of the maelstrom entirely, to conquer it and destroy it as it seeks to destroy him.”

“Sounds like Nietzsche.”

“Oh?”

“As interpreted by the unread, at any rate. Survival of the fittest, all that. Pulp conception of the Übermensch.” Woten shrugged.

“Hm. I suppose it does. I would have identified him as an Objectivist, myself—a Randian. Regardless, there is another facet of this murder: I cannot point to this or that and say why, but I detect sex in this crime. Someone who has not come to grips with his or her sexuality, or who has been the victim of a sexual crime.”

“How frequently will they kill?”

“Quite frequently. As a matter of fact, I can say with certainty that he or she has killed before. No matter how deeply sociopathic a person is, they are still vulnerable to the shock of their first few kills—but there are no hesitation marks on this victim. He or she must have killed before, in order to perform this murder with such confidence. When he or she realizes that this most recent, most public murder will not be immediately solved, he or she will certainly strike again.”

“Then,” Woten sighed, leaning forward to lift himself with his arms instead of trusting his weak knee, “I’d better make sure we do catch her. Or him.”

“One more thing, Lieutenant,” Gorodischer said. “It is of course a given that you will monitor each crime scene carefully, in hopes of catching the killer as he or she monitors your progress in turn. But you are entering new territory—the intersection between abnormal psychology and the Emiaro is still largely unexplored. I fear that this killer, as psionically powerful and psychically active as he or she is, may go one step further, and actually attempt to spy on your mind. Perhaps even tampering with the evidence, as it were, by meddling with your very thoughts. Be wary.”

*

Rosebud. Woten opened a fifth thought-to-text window and labeled it Psych Anomalies. The first line he thought, copying from the Mirror window he had open, was, Journal of Paranormal Psychology, Anderson, 2023. Psychic serial killers seeking to draw psionic energy from the death of their victim must generally imprint themselves on the victim, or the victim on themselves, during the crime, rather than afterwards. The symbolism in performing the marking ceremony during or directly after the kill is personal: ‘I killed this person’, whereas marking oneself (or even the victim) at a later time is less personal: ‘I killed someone’.

Frowning, Woten maximized the images he’d had coalesced from his stored memories of the crime scene. Hector Viñao’s corpse remained unmarked, aside from having been pulled apart and arranged in an impressionist image of a human face.

Across the street from the one-seater Honda El Girasol which Woten had signed out of the CBAST garage, Race thumped the heel of her fist into the solar plexus of a man with two gunshot wounds in his left biceps. The man’s two-meter frame spilled off the edges of the gurney he was nominally strapped to. Up until that point, he’d been struggling to free himself. There were five other gurneys behind him in line to get through the emergency care entrance of the Fernández Hospital, all wounded as badly or worse than he. When Race struck him, he whuffed out a lungful of air and went quiet, eyes bugged out as he struggled comically to catch his breath. By the time he’d reminded his body how to breathe, Race had popped him a sedative, checked the dressing on his wounds, and moved on to the next patient. As CBAST ran both the ambulances and the hospital, Race apparently shifted between EMT and ER nurse. According to her records and the past two days’ surveillance, she performed both functions with a marked efficiency and a distinct lack of empathy—more akin to a talented technician than a human saving other human lives.

Race checked the other four patients, but none required immediate care. She glanced at her watch, ran a hand through her short, dark, backswept locks of hair, made eye contact with another nurse, and headed inside.

Woten brought up his control panel for the hospital’s internal security cameras and tracked her to the female locker room. Without hesitating, he flipped the locker room camera, bringing up its logs as a sidebar. To his complete lack of surprise, the female locker room camera was checked very frequently by the hospital security staff. At least this time it really will be police business, he sighed.

Race reached her locker, stripped quickly, and pulled on a pair of many-pocketed cargo pants, tucking them into thick combat boots held in place by an array of leather straps. Over her off-white tanktop, she zipped up a hi-collar breathable windbreaker and shrugged a small messenger bag over her shoulder. In short order, she was pushing through the door marked ‘exit’.

Swallowing his distaste and numb horror, Woten studied the stills he’d selected from the camera’s feed. The scarification of her torso and limbs was… extensive. He’d read about it on the news, but actually seeing it was hellish. Several of the scars indicated wounds which should have been lethal. And on her left shoulder, between the blade and the top of the triceps, there was a newer cut quickly healing into another scar. Allowing his link to CBAST’s security computers to track Race, he zoomed in on the cut. If he squinted, it could be a human face.

Shaking his head, he minimized the images and picked up Race’s location. She was already three blocks away, jogging down the steps of a Metro entrance. CBAST’s reach was wide; Woten phoned in a request to use the subway cameras even as he brought a list of them up in a smaller window. Selecting the stop nearest the hospital, he watched Race get on the Recoleta line.

The Lieutenant frowned. He could find no data on Race’s habits outside her work, but she’d headed to the Recoleta slums both of the prior days he’d had her surveilled. The difference tonight was that she did not first ride up to the Ciudad Universitaria and walk to the scene of the murder. Last night, and the night before, she’d spent over ten minutes simply staring morosely into the garbage enclosure where Hector Viñao had died.

The Metro cameras in Recoleta were patchy, and the traffic cameras nonexistent, so Woten brought the Girasol to whining life and pulled out into the street. As he passed the hospital, he cycled the car’s skin from its current pimento color to a dull maroon patched with primer.

Automating the cameras tracking Race and navigating to Recoleta divided his attention roughly equally. On the way, he brought up the Psych Anomalies file and transcribed a bit more: Psionic Energy and the Modern Serial Killer, Fuentes, 2033. Vampire-type subjects are rarely compelled to return to the site of their kill, for the simple reason that the important part of the kill—the harvested psionic energy—is already with them. For the vampire, the joy is not in the kill, it is in possessing the fruits of the kill

Warned by his tracking program, Woten looked up in time to see Race step out from under a concrete arch slashed with jagged paint that read “AÑEJO AIRES”. He’d always found the Recoleta neighborhood melancholy, with its beautiful architecture run down and smeared with acid rain and graffiti. The portion of Argentina’s cocaine trade which flowed into the city was, for the most part, sold within these few blocks. The portenos who made their lives around this trade tended toward wretched dregs, surviving only a few months or a year before sinking into the detritus and being replaced by another life approaching its nadir.

There was a flash of movement, and Race was gone. Woten blinked, ducked his head and looked up in time to catch a fleeting glimpse of the scarred woman running the last few meters up a four-story building and disappearing onto its roof. Shit. Didn’t know she could walk on walls. Woten threw El Girasol into gear and brought it around in a fast u-turn. Two blocks later, he hit the brakes and watched. The street corner was devoid of life; not even any lights in the surrounding buildings. Woten buzzed off again. He stopped again three blocks further away, then again four blocks north without seeing any of the faces he was looking for.

Finally, on his fourth stop, he spotted Angél Virone, the pimp Race had spoken to both previous nights. Both times, he’d laughed at whatever she’d told or asked him, and she’d left without another word. Rumors attached to his file suggested that several of the prostitutes he managed had disappeared in the past few weeks.

Angél was alone, waiting for someone. Woten checked the rooftops, searching for Race, but didn’t spot her until she slammed into the concrete feet-first and bounced into Angél. The power of her legs, combined with the force of ricocheting off of a five-story leap, was enough to carry both of them through the thick oak door of the abandoned café across the street. Woten blinked, then belatedly reached for his service automatic. A scream echoed from the café’s interior, then cut off with a sharp crack.

Moving low at a fast hobble, Bersa Servicio Relámpago-10 out and safety off, Woten approached the shattered door from one side. Pausing, he struggled to catch his breath and listened for signs of life inside. Adrenaline made it possible for him to hop up the two shallow steps in front of the door and spin into a crouch behind his weapon.

Angél lay face-down inside. For a moment, Woten thought he’d laid his head in a depression in the floor, but the blood and bone chips splashed in all directions around his face—what had been his face—told the truth of it. Laughing skulls that only Woten could see danced as they welcomed another into their troupe. Race was gone.

*

Rotting bones caught on Woten’s jacket, jerking him off-balance and twisting his knee so painfully that he almost collapsed. The psychic intrusion was more surprising to the Lieutenant, who’d thought he’d known what to expect, than it would have been to someone less aware. Woten had erected defenses; their failure added to the shock of the event itself.

The cars he was carefully working his way through were half-seen lumps of colorlessness against the darker background of the Emiaro. The pain and fear of those who had occupied the vehicles until recently slimed their plastic exteriors; Woten kept his hands in his coat pockets, unable to overcome the false impression that the dirt would somehow rub off on his skin. Allowing his personal phantasms to modify his behavior was a rare concession—but in the face of the virtual maelstrom he was walking into, there wasn’t much choice. The Lieutenant simply didn’t have the mental resources available to sweat the little things.

Woten paused for breath after stepping across the ferrocrete gutter that marked the city-side edge of Highway A001. The car beside him was a CBAST cruiser, lights still flashing. The ground sloped steeply in front of him to support an overpass, in the crook of which was a smeared shape. Rather than heading up to it, the detective looked back on the wreckage that smear had caused. Three dead in the twenty-car pileup—if he listened, he could hear their despairing wails. The cries of the dead infant were especially piercing.

Procrastination would only make his job more taxing; the effort of holding back the psychic storm that raged around him was already beginning to tell.

Crawling up on all fours would be easier, physically. With a sigh, Woten began to shuffle carefully up the slope, shoulders hunched with the effort it took to keep himself erect. It would take a hell worse than this one to force William Woten to kneel.

Caba Primera Ginata Denevi screamed without ceasing at the top of the overpass. Her throat had been crushed, and her lips sewn shut, so she screamed with her mangled soul. Everyone within a half a kilometer could feel the echoes of it; when it waxed most piercing, people would stop in the middle of the street and look around in confusion, certain that something was terribly wrong. Wildlife had fled in droves; the CBAST stringer reports showed huge numbers of animal attacks—domesticated and wild alike—within the vicinity of the murder site. Most people were bludgeoned into depression by the air of apprehension that spread like a plague cloud. Psychics were forced to leave the area entirely, or focus most of their attention blocking out the peals of horror which filled the Emiaro around Ginata Denevi’s body.

The incident report Caba Primera Denevi had begun to fill out popped up in the right side of Woten’s spectacles; he faded it to full opacity from its default thirty percent. There was not much information; the killer had been working Denevi’s mind even before she pulled him over—had, most likely, given her the idea via psychic suggestion to select his vehicle for random inspection. The killer’s reason for selecting her was obvious, even in death—Denevi had been on the fleshy side, with unflatteringly tight features, but her skin was flawless. Blood loss had turned her a deflated, waxy white-blue, on which her sparse traces of makeup and lipstick stood out like the greasepaint of a clown.

The blood—her entire blood supply—used to ink the nonsense text inscribed in a circle around her body had been drawn out through her wrists. Woten carefully squatted over Denevi’s corpse. Rosebud. Record, visual capture. Click. The several wounds on Denevi’s right wrist froze in electronic perfection before whisking themselves across the Mirror to Woten’s branch on the CBAST Open Case server. Click. Only one wound on each wrist had bled extensively. Click. Actually, from the distension of the skin around those two wounds, Denevi’s blood had been pulled out of her body with the pressure of a garden hose. Click. The other wounds were shallower; one of them was ragged, as if the blade used had been stuck in and then jerked out. Click.

A CBAST officer had been pulled up to the overpass, strangled into near-unconsciousness, and then had her blood drained and used to paint the ferrocrete around her—and no one had noticed. Then suddenly, about twenty minutes after the time of death, everyone near the scene was suddenly so fascinated by it that they completely forgot whatever they had been doing. The immediate effect had been a gigantic mess on the highway, causing delays, detours, and further accidents all around the city.

Standing, Woten crushed the psychic machine that Ginata Denevi had been reshaped into. It was a release and a relief, which deflated the detective’s anger at being ordered to do it. Valuable evidence had been contained within the shattered, used mind of Ginata Denevi—evidence that was now lost forever. Few would hesitate to call Woten a pragmatist, but a true pragmatist would have no regrets about restoring relative order to Buenos Aires at the cost of evidence which would have likely proven inconclusive anyway. That had been Capitán de San Peregrine’s logic; he was a pragmatist. Woten, by contrast, was driven. The nature of the case ensured that whatever secrets Denevi had taken to her grave, they could be replaced—when the killer struck again.

But the loss of Denevi’s evidence—even the sacrifice of the killer’s next victim in the name of keeping peace—did not bother Woten as much as the question of why Hector Viñao had died of wounds that were strong and sure, while Ginata Denevi had died with hesitation marks.

*

The Ciudad Universitaria was largely dark, except for the student dorms on the southern edge. Behind him, Woten’s Girasol was wearing its official skin: white, with gold stripes and a seal reading “Ciudad de Buenos Aires Seguridad del Transporte”. There were a few lights on at the Facultad de Psicología, but Woten had no idea which might be Profesor Gorodischer’s.

He parked and got out anyway, led by a niggling sense of wrongness that, through his years of detective and forensic work, he had come to rely on without question. The front doors of the department building were locked; he could have had them opened with a simple phone call, but his sixth sense was urging him in a different direction anyway. Shivers trembled his shoulders and chattered his teeth. The texture of the automatic’s grip warmed him slightly, but the closer he got to the Biblioteca, the more his body chilled.

Unlike the rest of la Ciudad, the library building was well-lit, if apparently deserted. Woten examined the Emiaro around him carefully, and found threads of psionic energy attached to his icon. Breaking them warmed him immensely; more reached for him from the Biblioteca, but glanced off his psychic shielding now that he was aware of their presence.

He rounded the corner to the east entrance and found Profesor Gorodischer kneeling over a man in club clothes. The Profesor finished tying the man’s wrists behind his back and looked up at Woten. Ghosts whirled about him like angry comets. Sensing Woten, they rushed out with bony hands, gleefully ripping at his mind.

“Well, this is somewhat awkward,” Gorodischer grinned, and Woten sank to his knees under the weight of the visions that slammed into him.

A decrepit body, unworthy of the mind it housed. Rotting out from under him, betraying him after so many years of faithful service. Outrage. Unfair. Limits are not for such as he: the moral had crumbled years ago, the mental was bowing further to his mastery now. Only the physical balked him.

A voice, a calling from the darkness, a new path: perfection. Sacrifices required—of course. Merely another hurdle in his path, a limitation to be smashed to rubble beneath his iron feet. Whores. The face of a grinning angel, credit passing from one anonymous account to another. Knives—blood. Enough horror and death to change him; his heart now ran smoothly, no longer threatening mutiny. The flesh beginning to submit to his will. Another whore, a different abandoned apartment building. Correcting the mistakes of his last kill, he gains even more power. His body changes beneath his skin, granting him the strength of a beast. Ink splashed on his hands the next day, reminiscent of the blood of the night before, the pen broken accidentally between his fingers. A laughing victory over the frailty of humanity.

More. His underbody—his overself—squirming, incomplete. The risk of discovery is a barrier he must destroy; skulking in the dark with paid women no one will miss does not provide the challenge he requires. What does not destroy us, makes us stronger—he will destroy the world and gain its strength. He starts with Hector Viñao, pulled to pieces as a child might toy with a spider.

“Ah, your visions,” Gorodischer chortled. “So you know what I have become. Killing you will give me such power.”

Woten retched as the Profesor stepped towards him; then he sat up, drew his pistol, and fired three times. His hands were unsteady, so instead of punching a trio of holes through the top of Gorodischer’s breastbone, the rounds were spread across his chest. Gorodischer looked down, annoyed.

“I was not ready to abandon this flesh. Such an inconvenience,” he sighed. His fingers flexed, his shoulders bulged, and with a sudden bloody rip, the black crab-like monster that had been hidden under his skin cut its way free. “Perfection!” it crowed in Woten’s mind, stepping out of the glop of flesh and clothing.

“Hey!” Race shouted from behind Gorodischer.

Woten aimed and squeezed off a shot that sang off of the thick armor that formed the monster’s skull. Gorodischer ignored it and turned daintily on its many legs. “Why, Miss Escobedo. What a pleasure to see you again,” Gorodischer burbled.

“Gimme a kiss, beautiful,” the scarred woman snarled.

The crab-monster’s first attack was clumsy, an obvious feint with its smaller left claw and a sudden clash of its larger right. Race batted at the larger claw and sidestepped out from between its edged pincers. Gorodischer scuttled forward, trying to keep her within the circle of its claws, but Race danced backwards and slipped out of range easily. Woten washed in and out of focus, caught in the maelstrom of Gorodischer’s mind, but he managed to crawl over to the student that had been the Profesor’s intended victim.

“You move so prettily,” Gorodischer cooed, snapping and clawing as Race ducked around him. A light pole shrieked as it went dark and toppled, sliced cleanly apart by the crab’s pincers. Race didn’t respond, her movements grim and stark in contrast to Gorodischer’s oily clumsiness.

Woten got an arm around the student and started dragging him towards the shadow cast by the Biblioteca steps. “Send.. backup. Damn it… Rosebud. Send.” Woten couldn’t complete the thought that would summon help, much less the sentence.

“And now—!” The crab-monster suddenly surged closer to Race, nipping out with its left chela. Instead of dodging, she stuck out her forearm and let the pincer whack shut on it. The razor edges sliced through flesh easily, but clinked on her bones instead of snapping through them the way Woten expected. Gorodischer snarled, bringing his right claw around in an overhead smash. The attack deflected off of Race’s upraised other arm, which darted across in a sharp spear-finger jab. Shocked, Gorodischer’s left claw released, and he shuffled back a step, eyestalks waving. Race set herself, left hand out and right fist cocked by her ribs. The punch crashed into Gorodischer’s torso with a metallic clang that sat him on his back legs and sent him sliding several meters.

“Rosebud,” Woten snapped in a moment of clarity. “Backup, my location. Officer in severe danger. Tell de San Peregrine to send in the… uohh. The army. Woten…” The Lieutenant’s head sank until his forehead was touching the grass.

“Yes! Send—” Gorodischer’s feelers carefully explored the cracked discus-sized dent that Race’s punch had put into his frontal armor. “Send the army! I’ll kill them all!” Skittering towards Race again, the crab-monster shrieked incoherently and raised both its claws. The scarred fighter jarred the smaller claw harmlessly upwards with an elbow, wrapping her arm around the right claw and spinning around to face the other direction. The claw popped out of its socket, hosing the sidewalk with dark, viscous spray. “Die! Die!” Gorodischer roared, rearing up on its back legs. Race stepped in, and then stepped up the monster’s long body, suddenly sprinting in defiance of gravity. At the top, she lashed out in a bicycle kick that flipped her out and away from the crab’s grasping claw.

Shedding remnants of black ichor, Gorodischer’s grotesque head spun almost twenty meters into the air before finally arcing back to earth.

Woten sat, waiting for his head to clear and watching Race speed off into the night. On the back of her right arm, there was a new cut that flapped like an angel wing as she ran.

*

“You understand, Bill?” Respect for the Lieutenant made the question a real inquiry, rather than the end of the conversation as it might have been for another officer under de San Peregrine.

“I do.” Technically true—Woten understood. He just didn’t agree. A word bubble appeared at the edge of his spectacles and began to blink. Remaining focused on his Capitán, he clicked on it and activated the text-to-thought interpreter.

“Okay.” de San Peregrine was smart enough to catch the tone in Woten’s voice, and smart enough to let sleeping dogs lie. In the detective’s mind, voiceless words formed: Hey. “So, wow. I have to figure out how to cover up a giant fucking monster walking around in front of the goddamn Biblioteca.”

“I’d advise against that.” I didn’t expect to hear from you, Woten thought.

“What do you mean?” Well. The cops aren’t kicking down my door, so I figured I should say thanks.

“Everyone knows about the murders. Attempting a cover-up would only attract attention.” I have too much compassion for my fellow CBAST employees to send them after you.

“So what do we say?” If I killed cops just for comin’ after me…

“Blame it on Peru. One of their secret experiments in psionic surgery got loose.” …then I wouldn’t have been there to ’solve’ the case, Woten agreed. “Peru will deny it, tensions will rise for a while, and everyone will forget about it the next time we make a Vory v Allah coke bust.”

“What about Gorodischer?” Yeah, about that. You know that cop chick wasn’t Gorodischer’s kill, right?

“I don’t know,” Woten sighed. Yes. Do you have anything I can use, on that? “Say the damn monster ate him.”

“Sorta true. In a way.” de San Peregrine didn’t laugh at his own joke. Workin’ on it. Nothin’ that, y’know, a court would accept. The Capitán looked at Woten, thought about voicing his questions.
“Do you trust me, Martín?” I will make it acceptable.

“I… yes, Bill. I trust you.” You ain’t askin’ the questions I thought you’d ask.

“I don’t remember how I killed Gorodischer. It may have been an unconscious manifestation of psychic abilities of mine which are normally latent. The only forensic psychometrist available who is skilled enough to determine exactly what occurred is me, and I am too disturbed by the experience to examine the site.” I already asked them, during the course of my investigation. They have been answered to my satisfaction.

Capitán de San Peregrine eyed the blank surface of his desk before looking up at Woten. “Are you…?” Okay.
“Fit for duty? Yes.” I owe you a thank-you.

Just means we’re even. “Alright. Well… I guess you’ve got your caseload.”

“That I do.” If there were two killers, there could be more.

“You should at least take today off,” The Capitán opined. Kinda what I was thinking.

“I don’t think that’s an option, Capitán. Too much on my plate.” Woten opened the door to de San Peregrine’s office and stopped to speak and thought-text simultaneously: “Time to get to work.” Contact me later, Race.

---

About the Author

Aaron Wilsford is a native of Pittsburgh. He spends most of his time either writing as an excuse to put off his work as a web designer, or working as a web designer as an excuse to put off writing.