False Hearts (False Hearts #1)(37)

He starts up the stairs and I follow hesitantly. The old wood creaks beneath my feet. At the top, he turns to the right and opens the first door.

“Wait,” I say. I suppose I’m not ready. I need a moment. I’m about to see a re-creation of a gruesome crime scene. One that my sister might have created. I’ve never seen large amounts of blood before. “Will it look … real?”

“At first glance, it’ll look exactly like the crime scene, down to every last angle and splash, but remember: it’s not. It’s only a hologram.”

A flash of Tila gripping my shirt. Not my blood. I rub a hand over my new face, composing myself. “Right. OK.” I push open the door and step inside, Nazarin following me.

A transparent plastic bubble lies over most of the open floor, mirroring the one that would have been put over the real scene as soon as the authorities arrived, and just after Tila had apparently fled the scene. A huge bloodstain lies within, wet and glistening, as if it’s just been spilled.

I fight down my gag reflex. It is so much blood.

Almost all five liters of it, some of it soaking into the white rug, ruined beyond repair. Just a few days ago, Tila had been in that original room in Zenith, entertaining, joking, flirting, laughing. I can imagine it so clearly now, after being there last night. What happened? What changed?

I want to understand everything—whether she’d known this Vuk she’d attacked, and if so, how, and from where. I move around the bubble, Detective Nazarin watching my every reaction. His brown eyes have flecks of gold in them.

I don’t know what he wants me to find—if there is anything to find. There are empty glasses on the replicated coffee table. Most are overturned or shattered, but a wine glass is still upright and unbroken, the imprint of lipstick on its glass. Purple, the same shade I painted my lips last night. I try to remember if it was the same color Tila was wearing on Thursday night. I only saw her for those few moments before they took her away. The make-up, half-smeared across her face by rain, tears and wiped-away blood. It must have been purple lipstick.

“Have they done the autopsy?” I ask.

“Yes. They sent through the report and a possible re-creation. I can show it to you. Are you sure you want to see it?”

I nod, even though watching it is the last thing I want to do.

He takes out his tablet and places it next to him on the sofa. He presses a button and a little holographic display comes up. He could have streamed it right to my implants, but I appreciate him putting it on the tablet instead. It gives me the illusion of distance.

Three-dimensional holograms appear and, unlike the solid-looking crime scene around us, these are as transparent as ghosts.

Vuk is laughing, knocking back champagne. He has a similar look to Nazarin—bulky and muscular, with short-buzzed hair. But where Nazarin’s features are strong, Vuk’s are almost delicate, the features too small for his face. He sets down the glasses, chatting with his friends. Tila perches next to him, her legs crossed, as she sips from a wine glass. It’s a re-creation from the infrared sensors at Zenith, so their expressions are only the bare minimum—a huge smile or no emotion at all. One by one, the other people leave, until Vuk and Tila are alone.

The image wavers. Ostensibly this is where Tila and Vuk speak, but the program does not know what was actually said that night. Normally, the cameras in Zenith would, but in the Zeal lounges, clients can pay extra for privacy. When the image clears again, Tila holds a knife. Vuk turns back to her with the drink and she attacks him. He manages to fend her off. She cuts him in a glancing blow to his wrist, which accounts for the blood splatters to the left of the large bloodstain. She manages to stomp on his instep and her knee flies up between his legs. He crumples, and Tila doesn’t hesitate. The knife flashes and goes beneath his ribcage and up, right to his heart. She rips the knife down, widening the wound, and Vuk bleeds out on the floor. She has no expression on her face. She bends down to the coffee table in front of her, driving the knife into the wood.

The holographic image goes dark.

I’m shivering, despite the perfect temperature of the room. It can’t be true. There must be some mistake. The infrared sensors were tampered with. It wasn’t actually my sister. It was someone else. Something. I can’t believe that Tila would do that, with no hesitation, with such precision and skill. There has to be more to it. There has to. Because if not, then I have no idea who that woman is I just watched kill someone in cold blood.

“That’s only one way it could have happened, right?” There’s a note of pleading in my voice, and Nazarin looks at me with a hint of pity. I turn away, not wanting to see it.

“Right. From infrared we know there were two people in the room, but their body movements weren’t mapped. This is their best guess as to the sequence of events, judging by the wounds, but the order could be off, and we have no context.”

I ask myself, in reality, how different could it be? Someone stabbed Vuk and ripped him open that night, and no one else was in the room but my sister. He didn’t do it to himself. I push the doubt away. It’s too much. I’ve never been more thankful for Mana-ma’s training. “What more can you tell me about Vuk?” I ask. The information I have on him from the police download is scant at best.

“Pretty sure he took out at least one person a week for the Ratel, between his other duties. With all his schmoozing, he could gain access to places many members of the Ratel couldn’t. For all that, though they trusted him, I doubt he was in their very inner circle, though he was hoping to be. He’d had a lot of mods and upgrades to his body, according to the autopsy.” He pauses to scroll through the medical chart. “Muscle implants and nanobots, almost an entirely new face, a prosthetic hand with skin grafts, new teeth. He even changed the shape of his ears. So whoever he was before, he wanted to make sure we’d never know, not even in death.”