Skin Deep by Brandon Sanderson

  I slipped through the hedge to the other side right as the car turned around it, following Wilson. This meant that I was separated from Zen by the squat wall of densely packed foliage. It ran all the way along the parking lot here.

  I scurried along the hedge, head down, keeping pace with Zen’s car. It passed Wilson as he parked, then continued on in a presumably nonsuspicious way toward another section of the parking lot. I caught brief glimpses of black car through holes in the hedge—a shadowed driver, but nobody else visible. The car pulled into a parking stall a short distance from where the hedge ended.

  Ahead, the leaves rustled, and J.C. slipped through, handgun out, joining me. “Nice work,” he whispered. “We’ll make a Ranger out of you yet.”

  “It was your push,” I said. “Sent me tumbling exactly the right way.”

  “I said I’d help.”

  I said nothing, too nervous to continue the conversation. I was manifesting something new, an extension of my previous . . . framework. What else could I learn to do by having one of my aspects guide my fingers or steps?

  I peeked through the hedge, then took out my handgun. J.C. motioned furiously for me to hide it in front of myself, so cars passing along the street to my right wouldn’t see. Then J.C. nodded toward an opening in the hedge.

  I took a deep breath before scrambling through and crossing the short distance to Zen’s car. J.C. tailed me. I came up beside the car in a crouch.

  “Ready?” J.C. asked.

  I nodded.

  “Finger on the trigger, Skinny. This is for real.”

  I nodded again. The passenger’s side window, just above me, was open. Palms sweating, I threw myself to my feet and leveled my gun through the open window at the driver.

  It wasn’t the assassin.

  11

  The driver was a dark-haired kid, maybe eighteen, wearing a hoodie. He cried out, dropping the pair of binoculars he’d been using to look toward my SUV, his face going white as snow as he stared down my handgun.

  That was most certainly not Zen Rigby.

  “In the car, Skinny,” J.C. said, looking around the parking lot. “Back seat, so he can’t grapple you. Tell him to keep quiet. Don’t look suspicious.”

  “Hands where I can see them,” I told the kid, hoping he didn’t see that my gun was shaking. “Don’t say a word.” I pulled open the back door, slipped in, but kept the gun on him.

  The kid remained quiet save for a whine in the back of his throat. He was either terrified, or was a very good actor.

  “Where’s Zen?” I said to him, lifting the gun up beside the youth’s head.

  “Who?” he said.

  “No games. Where is she?”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t know anything . . .” The kid actually started weeping.

  “Damn it,” J.C. said, standing by the front window. “You think he’s acting?”

  “No idea,” I said back.

  “I should fetch Ivy.”

  “No,” I said, not wanting to be left alone. I inspected the kid’s weeping face reflected in the rear-view mirror. Mediterranean skin tone . . . Same nose . . .

  “Don’t kill me,” the kid whispered. “I just wanted to know what you did with him.”

  “You’re Panos’s brother,” I guessed.

  The kid nodded, still sobbing.

  “Oh hell,” J.C. said. “No wonder it was so easy to spot the tail. Two people were following us: an amateur and a professional. I’m an idiot.”

  I felt cold. I’d heard Wilson’s honk through the line when on the phone with Zen, so she had been nearby, yet we hadn’t spotted her. Zen had been invisible to us all along.

  Bad.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the youth.

  “Dion.”

  “Well, Dion, I’m putting the gun away. If you are who you say, then you don’t need to be afraid. I’m going to need you to come with me, and if you start to run, or cry out, or anything like that . . . well, I’ll have to make sure you stop.”

  The youth nodded.

  I climbed from the car, gun holstered, and pulled the kid out by his shoulder. A quick frisk determined he wasn’t armed, though he considered himself quite the spy. Flashlight, ski mask, binoculars, a mobile phone which I took and turned off. I marched him across the parking lot, fully aware that this whole exchange would have looked very suspicious to anyone watching. With J.C.’s coaching, though, I maintained the air of someone who knew what he was doing—arm on the youth’s shoulder, walking confidently. We were in the government complex; hopefully, anyone who spotted us would think I was a cop.

  If they didn’t, well, it wouldn’t be the first time the police had been called to deal with me. I think they kept a department pool going on the frequency of it.

  I shoved Dion into my SUV, then climbed inside, feeling a little more secure with the tinted windows and more of my aspects in attendance. Dion moved to the back seat and slumped there, forcing Audrey to climb onto Tobias’s lap—an event so unexpected, the aging aspect almost seemed to choke.

  “Wilson, please give me warning if anyone approaches,” I said. “All right, Dion. Spill it. Why are you following me?”

  “They stole Panos’s body,” Dion said.

  “And by ‘they’ you mean . . .”

  “I3.”

  “And why on earth would they do such a thing?”

  “The information,” Dion said. “He had it stored in his cells, you know? All of their secrets. All the terrible things they were going to do.”

  I shared a look with J.C., who then facepalmed. Panos had been talking to his family about his research. Wonderful. J.C. removed his hand and mouthed to me, security nightmare.

  “And what kind of terrible things,” I said, “do you assume I3 was going to do?”

  “I . . .” Dion looked to the side. “You know. Corporate things.”

  “Like take away casual Fridays,” Audrey guessed.

  So Panos hadn’t completely confided in his brother. I tapped my fingers on the armrest. The family assumed that Yol and his people had taken the body to keep their information hidden—and, to be honest, that wasn’t far from the truth. They’d been planning to see it burned, after all. Someone had merely gotten to Panos first.

  “And you’re following me,” I said to the kid. “Why?”

  “You were all over the internet this morning,” Dion said. “Getting into a car with that weird Asian guy who owns I3. I figured out that you were supposed to crack the code on Panos’s body. Seems obvious. I mean, you’re some kind of superspy hacker or something, right?”

  “That’s exactly what we are,” Audrey said. “Steve-O, tell him that’s what we are.” When I said nothing, she elbowed Tobias, in whose lap she was still sitting. “Tell him, grandpa.”

  “Stephen,” Tobias said, somewhat uncomfortable, “this youth sounds earnest.”

  “He’s being honest,” Ivy said, inspecting him, “so far as I can tell.”

  “You should reassure him,” Tobias said. “Look at the poor lad. He looks like he still thinks you’re going to shoot him.”

  Indeed, Panos had his hands clasped, eyes down, but he was trembling.

  I softened my tone. “I wasn’t hired to crack the body’s code,” I told him. “I3 has plenty of backups on all their information. I’m here to find the corpse.”

  Dion looked up.

  “No,” I said, “I3 didn’t take it. They would have been perfectly content to let it be cremated.”

  “I don’t think he believes you, Steve,” Ivy said.

  “Look,” I said to Dion, “I don’t care what happens with I3. I just want to make sure the information in that corpse is accounted for, all right? And for now, I need you to wait here.”

  “Why—”

  “Because I don’t know what to do with you.” I glanced at Wilson, who nodded. He’d keep an eye on the kid. “Go climb in the front seat,” I told Dion. “When I get back, we can have a long conversation about all of this. For
now, I have to go deal with a very surly coroner.”

  12

  The city coroner was housed in a sterile-smelling little office beside the city morgue, which was only one set of rooms in a larger medical complex. Technically, Liza liked to be called a “medical examiner,” and she was always surprisingly busy for a person who seemed to spend all of her time playing internet games.

  At the stroke of eight, I strode through the medical complex lobby—suffering the glare of a security guard who was far too large for the little cubby they’d given him—and knocked politely on the coroner office door. Liza’s secretary—I forget his name—opened the door with an obviously reluctant expression.

  “She’s waiting for you,” the young man said. “I wouldn’t call her excited, though.”

  “Great. Thanks . . .”

  “John,” Tobias filled in.

  “. . . John.”

  The secretary nodded, walking back to his desk and shuffling papers. I strolled down a short hallway to a nice office, hung with official-looking diplomas and the like. I managed to get a glimpse of Facebook reflected in one of them as Liza turned off her tablet and looked up at me.

  “I’m busy, Leeds,” she said.

  Dressed in a white labcoat over jeans and a pink buttoned blouse, Liza was in her late fifties, and was tall enough that she was very tired of answering whether or not she’d played basketball in school. It was fortunate her clients were, for the most part, dead—as that was the only type of person who didn’t seem to bother her.

  “Well, this shouldn’t take long,” I said, leaning against the door frame and folding my arms, partially to block Tobias’s adoring stare. What he saw in the woman, I’d never know.

  “I don’t have to do anything for you,” Liza said, making a good show of turning toward her computer screen, as if she had tons and tons of work to do. “You’re not involved in any kind of official case. Last I heard, the department had decided not to involve you anymore.”

  She said that last part a touch too triumphantly. Ivy and J.C. shared a look. The authorities weren’t . . . particularly fond of us these days.

  “One of your bodies went missing,” I said to her. “Isn’t anyone worried about that?”

  “Not my problem,” Liza said. “My part was done. Death pronounced, identity confirmed, no autopsy required. The morgue had a lapse. Well, you can talk to them about it.”

  Not a chance. They wouldn’t let me in—they didn’t have the authority. But Liza could; this was her department, no matter what she said.

  “And the police aren’t concerned about the breach?” I asked. “Sergeant Graves hasn’t been poking around, wondering how such a terrible security snafu happened?”

  Liza hesitated.

  “Ah,” Ivy said. “Good guess, Steve. Push more there.”

  “This is your division,” I said to Liza. “Don’t you even want to know how it happened? I can help.”

  “Every time you ‘help,’ Leeds, some kind of catastrophe follows.”

  “Seems like a catastrophe already happened.”

  “Hit her where it hurts,” Ivy said. “Mention the hassle.”

  “Think of the paperwork, Liza,” I said. “A body missing. Investigations, questions, people poking around, meetings you’ll have to attend.”

  Liza couldn’t completely cover her sour grimace. Beside me, Ivy grinned in satisfaction.

  “All this,” Liza said, leaning back, “for a body that should never have been here.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “There was no reason for us to keep the corpse. Kin had identified him; no foul play was suspected. I should have released the body to the family’s chosen mortician for embalming. But no. Not allowed. This corpse had to stay here, and nobody would tell me why. The commissioner himself insisted.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Now you. What was special about that guy, Leeds?”

  The commissioner? Yol had done some work to keep this body in custody. Made sense. If he’d had the corpse released, then given it some kind of crazy security, that would have advertised to the world that there was something special about it. A quick call to ensure Panos stayed in the city morgue, locked up tight, was far less suspicious.

  It just hadn’t worked.

  “We’re going to have to give something up, Steve,” Ivy told me. “She’s digging her heels in. Time for the big guns.”

  I sighed. “You sure?” I asked under my breath.

  “Yes, unfortunately.”

  “One interview,” I said, meeting Liza’s eyes. “One hour.”

  She leaned forward in her chair. “Buying me off?”

  “Yes, and?”

  She tapped the top of her table with an idle finger. “I’m a medical examiner. I’m not interested in publishing.”

  “I didn’t say the interview had to be with you,” I said. “Anyone you like—anyone in the medical community you need something from. You get me as barter.”

  Liza smiled. “Anyone?”

  “Yes. One hour.”

  “No. As long as they want.”

  “That’s too open-ended, Liza.”

  “So is the list of ways you’re annoying. Take it or leave it, Leeds. I don’t owe you anything.”

  “We’re going to regret this, aren’t we?” Tobias asked.

  I nodded, thinking of the hours spent being prodded by some psychologist who was looking to make a name for themselves. Another paper in another journal, treating me like a strange species of sea cucumber to be dissected and displayed.

  Time was ticking though, and it was either this or tell Liza why the body was so important.

  “Deal,” I said.

  She didn’t smile. Smiling was far too human an expression for Liza. She did seem satisfied, though, as she grabbed her keys off the table and led me down the hallway, my aspects trailing.

  The air grew appreciably colder as we approached the morgue. A key card unlocked the door, which was of heavy, thick metal. Inside the room, one could see why Liza had chosen to work here—not only was it frigid, all this chrome probably reminded her of the spaceship that had dropped her off on our planet.

  The door swung closed behind us, thumping into place. Liza settled in beside the wall, arms folded, watching to prevent any shenanigans. “Fifteen minutes, Leeds. Get to it.”

  I surveyed the room, which had three metal tables on wheels, a counter with various medical paraphernalia, and a wall full of large corpse drawers.

  “All right,” I said to the four aspects, “I want to know how they got the body out.”

  “We need proof too,” J.C. said, poking through the room. “Something to tie Exeltec to the crime.”

  “That would be wonderful,” I said to him, “but honestly, we don’t want to be too leading. Maybe they don’t have it. Focus on what we know. Find me clues on how the thieves stored or moved the body, and that might lead us right to it.”

  The others nodded. I turned around slowly, taking the whole room in, absorbing it into my subconscious. Then I closed my eyes.

  My delusions started talking.

  “No windows,” J.C. said. “Only one exit.”

  “Unless those ceiling tiles are removable,” Ivy noted.

  “Nah,” J.C. replied. “I’ve seen the security specs for this building. Remember the Coppervein case? No crawl space. No air ducts. Nothing funny about the architecture.”

  “This equipment has been used lately,” Tobias said. “I know little of its purpose, though. Stephen, you really should recruit a coroner of our own eventually.”

  “We do have Ngozi,” Audrey said. “Forensic investigation. Why didn’t we bring her?”

  Because of you, Audrey, I thought. My subconscious gave you an important skill and inserted you into my team. Why? I missed the days when I’d had someone to ask about things like this. When Sandra had been with me, everything had made sense for the first time in my life.

  “This place is secure,” Ivy said, sounding dissatisfied. “
Inside job, perhaps? One of the morgue workers?”

  “Could one of the workers here have been bribed?” I asked, opening my eyes and looking toward Liza.

  “I thought of that,” she said, arms still folded. “But I was the last one in the office that night. I came in, checked everything and turned off the lights. Security says nobody came in overnight.”

  “I’ll want to talk to security, then,” I said. “Who else was here that day?”

  Liza shrugged. “Family. A priest. Always accompanied. This room doesn’t open for anyone other than me and two of our technicians. Even the security guard can’t get in without calling one of us. But that’s all irrelevant—the body was still here when I left for the night.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah, I had to write down some numbers for paperwork. I checked on it specifically.”

  “We’ll want to fingerprint the place,” J.C. said. “Like it or not, we might have to go through the precinct.”

  I nodded. “I assume the police have already done forensics.”

  “Why would you assume that?” Liza asked.

  We all looked at her. “Uh . . . you know. Because there was a crime?”

  “A corpse was stolen,” Liza said dryly. “Nobody was hurt, we have no actual signs of a break-in, and there is no money involved. The official word is that they are ‘working on’ the case, but let me tell you—finding this body is low on their list of priorities. They’re more worried about the break-in itself; they’ll want someone’s hide for that . . .”

  She refolded her arms, then repositioned and folded them again. She was trying to play it cool, but she was obviously worried. Ivy nodded at me, obviously pleased that I could read Liza so well. Well, it wasn’t hard. I picked up things from my aspects now and then.

  “Security cameras?” J.C. asked as he inspected the corners of the room. I repeated the question so Liza could hear it.

  “Just out in the hallways,” she said.