False Hearts (False Hearts #1)(38)

I swallow. “Can I … go into the crime scene for a closer look?” I ask, my mouth dry.

“Yes.” His eyes go distant as he accesses the controls with his ocular implant, and the bubble pops. Carefully tiptoeing around the blood, I ignore the body, as that’s not what catches my attention. I look closer at the coffee table.

My fingertips hover over the items on the table.

“Can I move things?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

I reach out and move the glass with the lipstick print. I can’t feel it. It’s like I’m holding air. There’s a chip on the rim. It had fallen over, but Tila had put it to rights before she left. Below where the glass was is a hasty carving of five points. Next to it are a few other scratches. The glass falls from my hand and slides back to its original position on the coffee table.

“She didn’t stab the coffee table. She carved it,” I whisper.

Nazarin looks over the crime scene notes. “They noticed those. Five points. That’s the symbol for the Hearth, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” I haven’t seen that simple design in a long time. Why did she leave it here? She hates the Hearth as much as I do.

“We couldn’t make any sense of these, though,” Nazarin says, nodding toward the dashes and dots, almost like Morse code. “No language or code we could figure out.”

I shrug, not wanting to tell him, looking at other things.

“You understand those markings,” he says. “I can tell.”

I debate lying, and then decide it’s pointless. “It’s an alphabet Tila and I made up when we were children, so we could write notes to each other nobody else would understand.”

“She knew you’d see it.” Detective Nazarin scratches the stubble at his chin. The muscles of his bicep flex under his shirt, and I’m reminded of how much larger and stronger than me he is. He’s suspicious. And why shouldn’t he be?

The fact is, I’m just as flummoxed. Why would Tila leave me a sign? And why that as a sign? She had no way to anticipate how all this would play out … did she?

I feel sick. I back away from the blood and the scratched coffee table, breathing loudly, and move to the bay window, looking out over the cloudy San Francisco day. The sailboats are coming into port, the hovercars leaving and arriving the Embarcadero to and from their sundry destinations. The sun is setting, and everything glows that soft pink and purple of approaching dusk.

Detective Nazarin glides to my side, silent. I press my forehead against the cool glass of the window. Throughout it all, my mechanical heartbeat has barely quickened. Somewhere out there, Tila is in her cell, and her heartbeat is more or less in time with mine.

“What does it say?” Nazarin asks. He’s close to me now, but his voice is gentle, and his breath puffs on the back of my neck, smelling of spearmint. But the gentleness is a ruse—underneath he’s all steel.

I could lie. Tell him it means something else, and they’d never be able to follow the path any further. Then I could try and do it on my own. But I wouldn’t be able to, would I? If Tila is involved with the Ratel, then I don’t know the first thing about how to deal with them.

Nazarin does.

“‘MIA,’” I say, still turned to the window. My breath mists the glass. With a fingertip, I write the letters in our secret alphabet.

“And what’s that? Missing in Action?”

“It’s not a what. It’s a who. Mia. The woman who took us in after we left the Hearth.”

“Why do you think she wrote that name? Where can we find her?”

I shrug, wrapping my arms around myself. I want to go home and close my eyes and wake up and have everything fixed.

“She’s an apostate of the Hearth. Like us. She got Tila into hostessing. Used to be one of the best in the city. But now she’s a Zealot. We can find her at the Mirage in the Mission district.”

“That’s a shithole.”

“Yeah. But the Ratel haven’t tampered with the Zeal there and replaced it with Verve?” I ask.

“Not that I know. Fuck.” He rubs his hand over his shaved head. “If they have, it’s dangerous to go there. Someone could be watching.”

I say nothing.

“She’ll be there now?”

“She’s always there.”

“Then let’s go.”

Nazarin accesses his implant, and the crime scene hologram disintegrates into nothing.

*

When people think of Zeal, they don’t think of the dark, dingy Zealot lounges. They think of brainloading. They think of the bright, shiny lounges in the nice parts of the city, a place for people to go to let out a little steam and return to the real world, refreshed. They think of the drug that keeps the city largely crime-free, and provides a little fun along the way; all thanks to Sudice, Incorporated. The company I used to work for, along with so many other people in San Francisco. I’ve never thought before about how many tendrils the company has within the city, and how much the government owes it for its many inventions.

Those dark Zealot lounges, though; those, most of the city tries not to think about, and they do a very good job of forgetting. They don’t sit and imagine those who might be the worst criminals, serial killers or rapists or abusers, locked in the Zealscapes, too out of it when they come out to think about anything except plugging in again. The people who go there have dreams so dark they don’t dare go to the beautiful lounges. They say the government can’t properly eavesdrop on dreams, not in great detail—but not everyone believes that. So they go underground.