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  Patrick shook the man’s hand. “I’m Atropos, the leader of this team. Are you the official police-super liaison for this investigation?” Patrick threw his shoulders back.

  I stifled the urge to roll my eyes. We all knew each other, so this was nothing but posturing on Patrick’s part.

  The detective quirked an eyebrow but didn’t miss a beat. “Yes, I’m Detective Burbine. I believe we’ve met. My partner Detective Floriendo is speaking to the manager now.” He took out a little notebook from his pocket and flipped it open. “We’ve got a doozy of a scene here.”

  “Tell me everything,” Patrick said.

  “According to the branch manager, one of the guards heard something, a sound,” he looked down to review his notes, “—like ‘a fly in a bug zapper’—down here, so one went to investigate. When he didn’t come back, two more guards went down, and they also didn’t come back. The manager didn’t hear anything that sounded like a break in, so he went down to see what happened. He found a hole in the vault door, a hole in the wall that leads to the basement of an adjacent house, and the guards dead on the floor. So far it looks like nothing was taken, but we’re still confirming that.”

  “Can you look at security footage?” I asked.

  Patrick glared at me. I looked down at my boots.

  Detective Burbine shook his head. “No, and that’s one of the things that made us call you guys in. The cameras were turned off via a massive program override. So were the sprinklers. We’ve never seen hacking like that.”

  I didn’t think that sounded like Super work, but I kept silent this time.

  Patrick thought similarly. “What makes you think Supers did this?”

  The detective pointed to the vault and the wall with his pen. “Only Supers could have blasted holes like that without making a loud noise…and then there’s the bodies.”

  We all turned to stare at the sheet-covered bodies. The technicians were finished examining them, so we made our way around the blood to the nearest corpse and kneeled down.

  Before Detective Burbine pulled back the sheet, he looked up at us. "I've seen a lot of stuff in my fifteen years on the force, but I don't mind telling you guys these bodies really give me the creeps." He uncovered the first body.

  None of us had a problem with gore, but everyone flinched at the sheer strangeness of what was underneath.

  My guess of a massive head wound wasn’t far off the mark, except the man’s head and neck were simply gone, as if someone had taken some kind of cosmic eraser and rubbed them away. The blood had poured out from the hole at the top of the rib cage, making a sight that was as fascinating as it was grotesque. Detective Burbine put the sheet back over the corpse.

  “What do you make of this? The other two are just like it.”

  “I’ve…never seen this kind of thing before,” Patrick said. “Has anyone else?”

  We shook our heads.

  The detective sighed. “Well, take a look around and get the information you need. Here’s my card if you need to contact me later, since this is our first introduction and all,” he said, waggling his eyebrows. He handed Patrick his business card. Patrick nodded curtly, a muscle flexing in his jaw.

  Patrick pocketed the card and gathered us in a far corner as not to be overheard. He looked at Reid and Marco. “Go talk to the residents from the adjacent house and see what they know. Marco, make that smile convincing. Reid, at least try to act smart.”

  Both Reid and Marco turned pink but walked away towards the hole in the wall.

  He turned to Ember, who tensed. “Find an animal, a bug, a bacterium, something, that saw what happened. I don’t want to see you again until you have a witness.”

  Ember nodded quickly and walked off. He rounded on me and my heart rate increased. “I don’t want to hear from you unless you have something exceptionally important to say. Just get to work looking for clues and get out of my sight.” I nodded and took a few steps back, more than happy to get away from him.

  I started with the vault, deciding to throw myself into my work to block out the memory of pure hate coming from Patrick’s eyes.

  The robbers had managed to cut a clean three-foot circular hole in the vault door, but their method wasn’t clear. There was no tell-tale warping caused by intense heat from a torch or a laser beam. Blades of any kind leave obvious marks. The door simply had a giant hole in it. I stepped through the hole into the vault.

  The interior of the vault held no clues. There was no debris, not trace of the missing part of the door anywhere. The safe deposit boxes were all closed. The table and chair inside were undisturbed, a fine layer of dust covering them. In fact, a fine layer of dust covered a lot of the vault. That seemed odd to me—didn’t people go in the vault all the time?

  I poked my head out of the vault door and called over to the bank manager. “Sir, when was the last time someone accessed the vault?”

  “A patron came in to access her safe deposit box an hour before the break in.”

  I thanked him and went back inside the vault. So someone had sat in the chair and probably put things on the table. Why was there dust on it? And why was there dust on the floor and the boxes? Snapping on a latex glove from my utility belt, I knelt down to examine the area by the vault door where the dust was thickest. I ran a gloved finger over the floor and held it up to the light.

  The dark gray substance that covered the vault was the finest powder I’d ever seen. I blew on my hand and it swirled into the air, nearly invisible. I sniffed my finger and detected a whiff of metal, like the graphite in pencil shavings. I frowned and sniffed again. No, it wasn’t graphite. It was like the sharp, thorny smell of my knives.

  I unsheathed the knife on my thigh, enjoying the sound of the action, and compared the scents. Yep, they were the same. The dust was steel, or something like it.

  I looked from the powder to the door and back, searching for connections. Why was the steel dust coating the inside of the vault? How was it used during the break-in? Was it part of the process of making the hole? I looked closer at the door. Like the headless bodies, there was no sign of force on it. It was as if part of it had been erased from existence.

  Then a thought occurred to me. I left the vault and walked over to one of the bodies. “Detective, can I see the body again?”

  Detective Burbine lifted the sheet and this time I looked at the area around the corpse, especially the area where the head would have been. I put on a clean glove and swiped a finger on the ground next to the pool of blood. A faint powdery residue, similar to the vault dust but lighter in color, came up. I directed the officer to pull the sheet back further so I could examine the torso. As I suspected, there was more of the substance on the man’s clothes.

  A few minutes of investigation revealed that it was on all the bodies. I could see small piles of dust underneath the hole in the wall; it looked like fine sand.

  I walked over to Patrick, who was talking to a computer technician working on the security terminal. “I need to talk to you.”

  Patrick paused in his conversation and stared at me in disbelief. “What?”

  “There’s something you need to see in the vault and on the bodies,” I said. For once my confidence superseded my internal tremor.

  He crossed his arms. “Well, what is it?”

  “There’s a kind of dusty residue around the holes and bodies. I don’t know what it’s from but I think it’s connected to the robbery.”

  “Dust? You interrupted me to tell me you found dust?” I was sure that Patrick was about to launch into a rant about my investigative skills, but he saw the technician’s shocked expression and dismissed me with a wave of his hand. I knew better than to push the subject, so I tried Ember instead.

  She was crouched down in the corner and staring intently at something in her hand. I knew without looking that it was some hideous bug.

  I glanced; yep, a large spider. Even though I’d grown up outside, I didn’t care for spiders.

 
; “She’s friendly,” Ember said, tipping the spider back on the ground. It went back into a crack in the wall. “But unobservant. What’s the point of having eight eyes if you don’t use them?” She brushed herself off and stood up. “The spider was the only living thing in the room that survived the robbery. I’ve been listening to everyone and nobody knows anything.”

  She inclined her head towards me. But I heard from Patrick that he’s planning to do a random phone search soon, though I didn’t hear when.

  I was so glad I had the forethought to think of the label “Snitch #5.’”

  “I need your help,” I whispered to her. “Can you get something that can taste?” I have an idea that’ll make Patrick happy with the both of us.

  She looked surprised but nodded. “Just give me a minute.” She walked upstairs and reappeared a few minutes later with her hands cupped over something. “I saw mouse traps upstairs when we came in. This little guy was in a break room cabinet.” She opened her hand, and a small gray mouse poked its head out.

  I held the finger with dust from the body up to the mouse. “Ask him if this tastes like anything.”

  Ember held the mouse up to my hand, and after a few seconds the little rodent bumped its nose onto my hand and stuck out his tongue to get a taste. Ember’s jaw dropped. “He says it tastes like bones and meat.”

  “Are you sure?” This was exactly what I wanted to hear.

  “Yes, I’m sure! It’s a very clear thought, bones and meat. He’s thinking of…yuck, eating other mice.”

  “Here’s the other thing I want him to taste.” I held up the glove with the vault dust. Again the mouse bumped his nose to the glove.

  Ember frowned. “He doesn’t like that one. It’s not food.”

  “What is it, then?”

  She shook her head. “Mice’ll eat nearly anything. If he doesn’t recognize it, it’s probably inorganic.”

  I went and scooped up a little bit of the sand beneath the hole in the wall and offered it to the mouse.

  “That’s rock,” Ember said. She kissed the mouse on the head. “Good boy.”

  She went upstairs to release him, hopefully outside and away from traps.

  I was missing something obvious, something that was straining at the edges of my understanding. I looked at the vault, then to the bodies, then back to the vault. The mouse tasted bones…bones and meat and something…inorganic…

  “Atropos,” I said loudly, striding towards the vault. There was no way he could get mad at me for interrupting him, not now that I was about to make him look good by solving a mystery on his watch. “I checked out your theory, and I’ve figured out what happened to the door, the hole, and heads.” The sentence sounded better in my head than it did out loud.

  Everyone in the room stopped talking and looked at me. Patrick raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

  I took a steadying breath. “They were disintegrated.” I scooped up a handful of dust from the vault. “Firelight confirmed that the substance in the vault and by the wall and the substance on the bodies are completely different. The first two aren’t organic, probably metal and stone. The dust around the bodies is bones and flesh. I’ll bet you anything that we’re dealing with someone who can reduce small areas to this stuff.” I tossed the metal powder into the air.

  For once Patrick just nodded, his face blank.

  While the police collected samples, my team hovered around me. “Any idea who could do this?” Reid asked Patrick.

  Patrick pinched the bridge of his nose. “No.”

  “I once heard about a supervillain who could melt stuff,” Ember offered. She looked at Patrick. “We learned about her from your dad, remember? I’m pretty sure she’s dead, though. Maybe she had a relative with similar powers. Disintegration is similar to melting, right? Or maybe it was a Westerner?”

  Marco snorted. “Why would a Westerner come all the way to Georgia to rob a bank?”

  “Do you have a better idea?” Ember shot back.

  “Stop it,” Patrick hissed. “We’re in public. Either pretend to agree or don’t say anything at all. And smile.”

  We instantly obeyed.

  “A person who can turn someone’s head to dust is memorable,” I said through clenched, grinning teeth. “Maybe we should ask around. You know, hit up the usual sources.”

  Dangle the bait…

  Patrick cut in. “Everyone, go get into civilian clothes and start making the rounds. Firelight, you’re going to go to Northside. Helios, you have Downtown. Tank, you’re on the river. Battlecry, you have Old Town.”

  Gotcha.

  He was going to Saint Catherine’s Island, the biggest of many islands in the city and his usual patrol zone. But it didn’t matter where he was going, as long as it wasn’t Old Town.

  We said goodbye to the police officers and left the bank. I was unusually lighthearted since I’d contributed to the investigation and successfully lied to Patrick.

  We went back to the dilapidated house we called base camp. The others ran to get dressed, but I was in no hurry.

  I walked up the narrow stairwell to my bedroom and pulled off my uniform, replacing it with the jeans, blouse, and glasses I’d worn earlier. I grabbed the sling from my bedside table and while I fastened it, looked around my small bedroom.

  I’d grown to enjoy the feeling of confinement that four walls and a roof provided, though my bed, with its squishy mattress and green wool blanket, made my back hurt. I didn’t have any decorations in my room like Ember did, but if I ever personalized my room, I’d incorporate flowers into it somehow. Asters and borage grew wild in the open meadows back home, and once upon a time my brother Gregory and I had delighted in making flower crowns for our mother.

  While I put my uniform away, I looked at the empty dresser top and thought maybe a sketch of Gregory would be nice, too. He’d been my favorite sibling, before he’d been murdered by the Westerners.

  Marco and I walked in the afternoon sun towards our assigned zones. He kept glancing at me.

  “Seriously, where did your injuries go? And if your shoulder is better, why did you put the sling back on?”

  I elected to answer the second question only. “I’m wearing the sling to test out a theory.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. I was still riding the high from my little victory at the bank and I was positive my next theory was correct, too.

  “What theory?” He sounded skeptical.

  “Don’t worry about it.” I used my big-sister voice, hoping he’d take the hint.

  He didn’t. “Come on, Jill. You’re killing me. How did you heal so fast?” He widened his eyes in a clear attempt to pluck at my sensitive side.

  “Nice try. Miracles happen, Marco. Even to a person like me.”

  He snorted. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all.” I wasn’t in the mood for chitchat. My mind was already miles ahead of us, sitting on a loveseat in a coffee shop.

  We parted ways at High Street. Marco headed downtown while I made my way back towards Old Town, where Café Stella was. When I reached Davis Street, I pulled out my cell phone and pulled up Snitch #5’s number.

  Patrick had been so eager to look decisive and important that he’d taken my suggestion to find leads and ordered it without thinking. Had he been a little more thoughtful, he would’ve remembered that my “usual sources” were hookers, dealers, and other denizens of the night. There was nothing I could do in early afternoon.

  Except one thing.

  My finger hovered over the call button while I asked myself if I was certain I wanted to do this. This wasn’t a one-off decision. This wasn’t an order in the heat of battle. This was open rebellion.

  I pressed call.

  5

  “You’re an inspiration. No, really.” Benjamin lifted his chocolate coffee in the air.

  “Shut up,” I said with a laugh. “All I did was come to a café for the second time in a day.”

  “Yes, but in
doing so you managed to ditch your evil boss for the second time in one day. This is the best ‘screw you’ I can think of that doesn’t involve painting something on a water tower.”

  We were back on the loveseat in Café Stella, coffees in hand. Benjamin had bought me his favorite drink, which he said was called a café mocha, with extra pumps of chocolate and a small mountain of whipped cream. I also had a cheese Danish, a fat blueberry muffin, and two biscotti waiting to be consumed. My hands were already trembling from the sugar and caffeine.

  “I had more fun today than I’ve had since moving to Saint Catherine,” I said through a huge bite of Danish. It was the most delicious thing I’d ever eaten. “I hope you don’t mind that I called.”

  He waved away the idea. “I don’t have any friends in the city, so it was an unexpected pleasure. As you can see,” he said as he gestured towards his nursing textbook, “I don’t have a lot going on. The alternative was going home, which I’m trying to avoid.”

  I sighed. “I understand that completely.”

  “Bad home life, too? That sucks.”

  I wasn’t sure whether the lump in my throat was from the Danish or my sudden nervousness. “I live with some unpleasant roommates.”

  I was unsure whether or not that was a lie.

  “That’s a rough situation.” His eyebrows knit together. I had the distinct impression he was thinking critically about something, but I wasn’t sure what.

  My eye caught the corner of a magazine that was underneath a newspaper. I recognized the blond hair in the picture, and I moved the newspaper aside to see the cover. Patrick’s image smiled at me underneath a blurb that promised an exclusive interview with “Atropos, Georgia’s Sexiest Superhero.”

  Benjamin laughed. “Why the face?”

  I’d made a face? “That superhero on the cover. I just don’t like him.”

  “What? Why? Don’t superheroes fight muggers and stuff?”

  “They do a lot of things,” I said dully. “They’re important to the city. But Atropos seems unpleasant. I saw him in action today and he, um, was…really…hard on his teammates.”