Welcome to Gaia! ::

My cousin Angelica Moore killed herself.

I was sitting with her father and my father in the dining room, talking about the upcoming trip, when my aunt came into the room.

“Eve, there’s someone to see you.”

“What?”

“Out front. There’s a man with a car who says he wants to speak to Forever.”

“Oh.” I wondered who it was. As it turned out, it was Lester Wallace, a work colleague. Damn. This couldn’t be good. He’d brought the car to get me.

“Hey Eve.”

I raised an eyebrow. He sighed, his breath a puff of white in the cold air.

“Look, we’ve got a body—suicide on the tracks. Emily’s sick today—you’re the only one in the area right now. Mind being called in for this one?”

I sighed. “Fine. Hang on a moment.”

My uncle Lucas wasn’t happy to hear I’d be heading back in, and neither was my father.

“Furiver, sonny,” he said, getting to his feet, “can’t they get someone else?”

“Emily would normally be on duty instead but she called in sick,” I said, getting my coat, hat and scarf and putting them on. “It’ll just be a little thing and then I’ll be back.”

My father sighed disapprovingly, but his brother put a hand on his shoulder. “Come on, Sasha. Angie should be back soon, and you know she’s the one who’s the brains when it comes to planning.” He smiled at me. “Go on, Eve, we’ll see you later.”

I heard the phone ring as I left the house. Lester half grinned at me as we got in the car and pulled away.

When we got there, a little later than I’m sure everyone would have liked but still fast enough to be considered prompt, the body had been pulled off the tracks and was being pieced back together in a white tent put up nearby. Lester and I looked at the impact site first.

There were great splashes of blood everywhere, already a dark brown in the bold noon sun. It was gruesome; I mean, suicide by train was never pretty, and usually pretty traumatizing for the driver—an unpleasant affair all around. I could track the persons descent from this point, see how they had leapt off the platform and gotten smeared across the front of the train like a bug hitting a windshield. From there they had bounced off the front and gotten rolled under the tracks. From the platform, looking down, I could see the path they had taken, and realized that I was standing more or less in the same spot they had when they’d jumped.

I walked away hurriedly.

Lester clapped me on the shoulder before I entered the tent. “I’ll be waiting by the car, kay? Then I’ll take you back to the station.”

“Thanks.”

The coroner looked up as I entered. “Oh, hello Forever. Here for the skull?”

I nodded.

“Got pretty battered. That won’t affect the reading any, will it?”

I shook my head, looking at the body where it lay on a cot. Female, with long black hair and fair skin. She looked like a rag doll, battered and bloody. Her neck was obviously broken, her skull bashed in on both sides, her hair torn away in patches. Closer examination showed a pointed chin and slanted eyes…she looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place her.

I fumbled for a second with my work kit, which Lester had given me, and slowly pulled out a little leather packet stamped with the insignia of the government, done in peculiar inks that were hard to counterfeit.

Opening it, I pulled a booklet out from the insulated folds and opened it. There were five pages of a thin paper inside, perforated into stamp-sized pieces. I gently tore off a stamp and put it on my tongue, then quickly put the booklet away while the stamp dissolved on my tongue.

I reached forward and gently put my gloved hands on the woman’s smashed skull, waiting for the drug to take effect.
Blue Star was a powerful hallucinogen, and the backbone of Macht’s economy. It was called such because of the first effect that the drug had on a person. You would close your eyes and see bright blue stars. That wasn’t the only effect that the drug had, though. It gave people strange abilities, and the stronger the dose, the stranger the ability. (As with all drugs, there were downsides, but I’ll get to that later.) As a result, Blue Star was highly regulated by the government.

I was what people without tact called a skullreader, and what people with tact called an analyst. With the head of a dead person, no matter how old or damaged the skull, I could see and feel their last thoughts. It was a handy ability, and there was a skullreader in every police department.

I closed my eyes and watched the stars spinning gently against my eyelids.

After a while the stars grew into lines, swirls, patterns. Underneath shapes formed, quickly, until I recognized the station platform. I was seeing it from her point of view, which was slightly shorter than mine. I waited for her thoughts to begin flowing through my head, prepared myself for the deluge of emotions and swirling currents and eddies of thought, the various levels of consciousness.

I watched her watch for the train, heard the hubbub and commotion of the people around her. She saw the express train approaching.

I couldn’t sense her emotions.

She walked towards the edge—

—still nothing—

The train was approaching, express—express doesn’t slow down, it heads straight on—

She jumped off the platform, leaping into the void before the tracks

I pulled away. I couldn’t watch the instant of her death. Some analysts could, but I couldn’t. I never could.

The coroner was watching me. I stared back.

Nothing. No emotions, no thoughts. I knew it couldn’t be the Star; that dose worked every time, and I wasn’t allowed to take another dose for 24 hours anyway, to allow the previous one to get out of my system first. The problem, then, must be with her.

It suddenly hit me who she was. The eyes, the chin—I had both of them, although her eyes were a darker shade of green than mine. Oh god. I staggered backward, away from where Angelica lay, hurriedly thanking the coroner and running out of the tent to go throw up in a trash can.

There would be time to say goodbye to Angelica later.

Forever's a guy. XD8 Don't blame you for not catching that--this is the problem with writing first-person, it's so hard to show the main character.

The next segment of the story introduces a different type of Star user...*waggles eyebrows*

I returned to the office to write my report. It was hard, so much harder than any report I’d written before, because something in the back of my mind kept saying, “This isn’t right. Something’s not right here.”

And it was correct, too. Something was off. Not just about the fact that Angelica had committed suicide, but about the suicide itself.

She was happy. Angelica had gotten a promotion recently, going from a low-level secretary to a higher level Blue Star orders clerk. (It was a prestigious job because of the dangerous content being ordered about. Only trustworthy people were promoted to the post. Couldn’t have anyone slipping orders of the drug hither and yon on the side.) She had been helping to plan the family vacation. Things were good. Life was good. She wouldn’t just up and kill herself.

And then there was the deal with her death. I’d felt and seen all sorts of suicides over the years as a skullreader, with all sorts of people and all sorts of methods. People killed themselves because of lost jobs, lost love, because they didn’t feel capable of dealing with the world anymore. They were sad, stressed, lonely; angry, hateful, spiteful. I’d felt the exact regretful instant when a jumper realized this wasn’t the way she wanted to go. There had been a surge of surprise when a man, alone at home, had realized he didn’t want to die, put away his gun, and died anyway when it suddenly went off. Once, even, there had been a calm, relieved sort of joy as a woman drifted away on the endless tides of drugs and alcohol she’d dosed herself with.

Never before had there been nothing at all. Angelica wasn’t sad, wasn’t regretful, wasn’t even calm and accepting. There had been nothing.

Something is wrong here, my mind said, and I agreed.

If I hadn’t been staring ahead, lost in thought, I might have missed what happened next. A couple of people entered the station.

One of them was a plump young woman with the air of someone older and more experienced. She was blonde, her short hair coiffed neatly under her inconspicuous hat. She wore a jacket and pants, a scarf, good boots and gloves. Her entire outfit was well-made but subdued; not in the way that a somber black suit says funeral or in the way that a perfectly tailored suit says money, but in the particular way that, no matter what the hue or cut, says business. Her expression said business too, pleasantly open but dangerously polite. She held onto the other person’s elbow with one hand as she showed something to an officer with the other.

The other person was bundled head to foot in layers of clothing to combat the bite of the cold—at a glance I took in three jackets of varying lengths, two with hoods, a close-fitting knit cap, a long scarf wrapped around the entire lower half of the face. Their hands were jammed into the pockets, shoulders hunched. I imagined there were multiple layers of socks hidden away in the scuffed but sturdy boots. This outfit, now, this one shrieked of tight money, of well-made things worn to threadbare.

And then, because I was looking in that direction, I saw their eyes. They were red-rimmed above the layer of scarf, opened wide and staring. Their pupils were huge, enormous, swallowing up whatever colors the iris had and reducing them to a thin ring around the outside. They were dead eyes, and I knew instantly who this person was.

This was a government dreamer, and their handler.

Dreamers were scary. Not because of what they did; dreamers were primarily spies above all else, people who, with the proper dose, could astral project, could wander around unhindered gathering information. They were insanely useful. No, the problem was that after a while they tended to be insane too.

It was the Star. Their doses were high enough that they were injected into the bloodstream, not taken orally, and these doses messed with the mind something awful. (This was why every dreamer had a handler, to make sure that they didn’t go chasing after the ultimate high and overdose before they could be useful.) Rare experiments with dosages reported that the high amounts dreamers operated at put them in bizarre half-reality, half-dream states, ones that faded with lack of the drug but never completely vanished.

I could only imagine what sort of things this dreamer was seeing, overlaid against the mundane comfort of the office. Shuddering, I tore my eyes away.

It was about time, though. Our previous dreamer had been killed a week back, murdered along with their handler, their allotment of Star stolen. We hated it when that happened, but it did happen. Everyone knew that those were the government employees you’d have to bribe, mug, or kill if you wanted the goods for the black market. (It wasn’t just dreamers—skullreaders got the short end too. And there were a lot of potentials to bribe; for every one dreamer on the force, there were five skullreaders.)

I watched them for a bit, curious. Captain Lantry came out to greet the handler, and she smiled with a touch of warmth, saying something and tugging slightly at her companion. They jerked. A quick glance revealed that they were still staring at me, unblinking. Scary stuff.

The captain looked, as if following the dreamer’s gaze downward to me, and after a moment the woman’s gaze followed too. I squirmed slightly under their inquisitive stares, and then Lantry gestured and said something to her. She nodded, smile gone, and began walking across the room towards my desk, dragging her dreamer along behind.

I stared. It would be pointless to try and look busy by finishing my report. Lantry obviously wanted her to talk to me. I didn’t know why in the least. If he wanted me to guide her around and show her where everything was, then…well, I’d do it. Captain’s orders.

She halted when she reached my desk and I was able to examine her with the detail I hadn’t been able to get from across the room. Her face was still round with baby fat, it seemed, but her eyes were an intense stormy blue and I couldn’t hold them with my own. Under the pudginess it looked like her features could be strong too; cheekbones, nose, chin.

She swung her hand out to me. I took it and returned the strong handshake I got.

“Julia Art,” she said. Her voice was pleasant but clipped. “Handler. Department of astral travel.”

“Forever Moore,” I replied. “Detective, necromancy analysis unit.” Dreamers and skullreaders.

She looked me up and down, then turned to her companion and casually began peeling off layers. Off came the scarf. One gloved hand came out of a pocket to bat at her a couple of times, then the dreamer shoved it back into the pocket and hunched their shoulders further. Down came the hoods, the cap pulled away.

“You can keep the jackets on,” Julia told them smoothly, “but at least take off the hats when you’re indoors.”

I was able to get my first clear look at the dreamer. They were male, no older than eighteen, with buzz-cut blonde hair and a thin face. His eyes were sunken and staring, with dark circles underneath. High cheekbones accentuated the starved look.

“This is Alan Hest,” Julia said. “He normally doesn’t look this bad but he refuses to sleep on trains, so he hasn’t gotten much sleep for a couple of days.”

I nodded. “You’re the transfer, then.”

“Yes. Three day express up from Janston.” She shook her head. “I’m hoping Alan dies here, because I never want to travel with him again. He was shaking the entire time.” She sighed and glanced at Alan wearily. “He’s paranoid, you see.”

I looked at Alan as well, and he stared back at me. “I see.”

There could be worse ways for the mind to degrade, I supposed. Paranoia would make him hard to work with, though. I was glad I didn’t have to. That’s what the handler was for, caretaker and contact to the real world.

“Is there a place we can bunk up?”

I jerked my head. “Couple of cots in the break room. C’mon, I’ll show you.” I’d finish my report later, once they were out of my hair. Julia watched me put the report into a desk.

“You working on something?”

I shook my head. “Just finishing a case.” Something’s not right, something’s not right! I can’t just finish it! I can’t just let it go!

“Interesting case?”

I shrugged. It was interesting, inasmuch as a relative’s inexplicable suicide could be interesting, but I wasn’t about to tell her that.

“Fair enough.”

I took them to the break room and helped Julia set up one of the cots. The other one Alan took, not even bothering to unfold it, and set it up like a fort in one of the corners of the room. Julia sighed and dragged her cot over to that corner as well. Once she was sure Alan had curled up into a ball on the floor in his corner, she lay down on the cot with a sigh.

I, after a moment, returned to my desk, finished my report, and handed it in. Then I returned to my desk to think.

Just read the first part so far, I'm liking how you're opening up all sorts of possibilities right off the bat, it really makes me curious of what else the drug does. I'll read the next part later tonight!

New part yay! I found it kind of intriguing how Laura jumped to the conclusion that Eve had done something; I don't know whether or not you plan to take that further but it does plant that nagging question of is it foreshadowing or not, which is always nice in something such as this. All in all, good job. Can't wait to read more (again). =D

I'm not sure what kind of people become dreamers. I imagine that it's typically drug users who try Star and get caught and redirected to better use. I think that's how Alan got into it. But there might be some desperate people in there too, who knows.

Hahaha. Funny story about Eve's name. I decided to have a guy character that everyone called Eve, and then made him the cousin of a girl named Angelica Moore. Only later did I realize the pun in his name, groaned, and decided to keep it.

Macht is the working name for the city. If I can come up with anything better, that's grand, but for the time being the German word for "make" is just fine.

I'll post more tomorrow. :3

I dreamed that night. I always dreamed after using Star.

I was standing on the train platform with a slack rope around my neck. There was no one else there, no people on the platforms, no trains, no signs of life at all. I looked over the edge and there were no train tracks, just a bottomless abyss of black.

I stepped out, off the platform, and fell. A sharp jerk caught me—the rope. I dangled between platforms, straining to look up and see the clouded sky but only able to see the sides of the platforms.

I thrashed about (something’s not right something’s not right something’s not right) feeling decidedly calm for someone hanging themselves from nothing. I could feel the pull of the rope on my neck, could feel my feet waggling through the air, but my head was so clear…

I felt myself die, hanging over the abyss.

I woke up at dawn, heart thumping, to the clang and hiss of the radiator. It wasn’t the first time I’d had a dream where I was dying—it was a side effect of the work. Emily had confessed when I’d asked her that she felt like she’d had more dreams about being stabbed to death than any other person on the force.

I wondered briefly if dreamers dreamed at night.

I waited until the sun was up a little more, then showered, changed, and headed into work. The weather was as it always was—a brisk breeze tugged at my scarf and coat, and the clouds overhead muted the bright sun.

Bad news awaited me there. Lantry, who must have gotten to the station at dawn, was waiting by my desk. He had flicked on the green desklamp and was standing in front of it so he was ominously backlit.

“You’re not gonna like this.”

Yeah, probably not. I stared at him politely.

“Looks like your cousin was in a bit of trouble.” He gave me the note and a sympathetic look.

According to the note, Angelica had misplaced a large shipment of kianoastrine, or Blue Star. It had ended up going to an abandoned warehouse, where it promptly vanished. This hadn’t been discovered until after her death, and as a result there would be no investigation as to whether or not it was intentional or not. The people at the company assumed that it was a mistake and she had felt remorse and guilt, and killed herself as a consequence. They were happy to leave it there.

That wasn’t right either. Angelica had fastidiousness similar to mine; she would never make a mistake like sending a care package to the wrong place, much less something as big as Star. It wasn’t a mistake.

Which meant that it was intentional, and that was worse.

She wouldn’t have intentionally misplaced it. She couldn’t have. She was honest, trustworthy, a good girl through and through. This didn’t make sense.

Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.

Lantry was staring at me. I nodded at him. “Thank you, sir.”

He gave me another look, slightly confused, then walked away.

I spent the morning doing research on my three—four—victims, plotting their routes of the week before they died on a city map I’d grabbed from the front desk. The girl was in pink highlighter, Angelica in purple, and the men in blue and green. I traced back and forth from homes to businesses, to schools, to restaurants. There had to be some overlap somewhere.

There were places here and there where one color would cross another, but there were absolutely no destinations in common and no places where all four lines crossed over each other.

Damn!

“Eve.”

I looked up from my map. Lester stood in front of my desk.

“Murder-suicide. You’re up.”

I sighed and got to my feet. The murder reading would be straightforward enough—it was the suicide they wanted me to look at. It was always good for a motive, particularly if they couldn’t ID the victim right away. As I headed to the scene with Lester, I recalled a particular case where a man had viciously battered a woman to beyond the point of recognition, then blew the back of his head through the front to make himself unrecognizable as well. Various pieces of skull (brain matter attached) showed that he was an ex boyfriend and revealed various bigoted and misogynistic last thoughts.

This case was similar—at a glance. The woman was the owner of a small business making clothing, and the man had been a courier. None of the employees said they had recognized him, and he said he had a package the woman needed to sign for. Everything had seemed very normal up until the screams and gunshot. Since no one knew who the man was and no motive was immediately apparent, they decided to call me in. (It was times like this that I really wished the rest of the force would do their own legwork concerning identity and motive, rather than call in a skullreader every time. This sort of work took a real toll on the mind.)

My first impression was how trashed the room was—there had been a struggle here, and a vicious one. Lamps and chairs were knocked over and all the papers had been shoved off the desk and tables to be trampled underfoot.

The victim was sprawled out across the floor, her very long brown hair ripped out of the intricate style it had been pinned into. Her attractive clothing had also been ripped, but with a knife, and it was saturated with the blood from a staggering number of deep wounds to the stomach, chest, and arms.

Her murderer had been nondescript, just a courier. After the vicious attack on the woman, he ate a bullet and left a very avant-garde painting on the wall. I stared at it dully for a moment, then dosed myself and went to work.

The man was first. As I watched stars and lines unfold across my closed eyes, I wondered what could have caused such a frenzied murder. He must have hated this woman very much.

The viewpoint formed. He had just entered the office, the businesswoman looking up at him curiously. He held out the package, and I heard his voice reverberate through my head as he said “Package for you. Mind signing for it?”

In the back of my mind, something started screaming. I couldn’t hear his thoughts, feel his mind—I wasn’t reading his skull, I was just hitching a ride through his eyes! This is all wrong!

I opened my eyes and pulled away. I didn’t need to see him murder a woman if I didn’t get the payoff of his thinking. I could still see the room, that last instant before I broke the connection. The woman was halfway across the room, her murderer reaching into his jacket for what she thought was a pen and what I knew was the knife. The image hung in front of my eyes, a faint overlay to the real room as I swung away and lunged for the dead woman.

Blue stars hung in the air, spinning. The image vanished, replaced with the room from the woman’s point of view. I pressed my fingers against her temples desperately.

A package? Who could this be from? I wasn’t expecting anything. Well, he doesn’t look shifty—if he was here to rob he would have waited until after we closed.

Her confusion swirled around me in blissful waves. She was polite, and curious. Fear swamped the confusion when the knife came out, turning into outright terror when he attacked. Her thoughts became a jumbled mess.

Oh god, what the hell is he doing? He’s going to kill me! Oh god he’s going to kill me! He’s going to kill me! I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die! Someone help! Someone help me oh god oh god he’s going to kill me someone help why isn’t anyone coming oh god help me

I felt the first slashes distantly, and it was the impact of the first thrust to the gut that jolted me out of my horrified reverie. I let go, practically pushing away from the dead woman and falling backwards.

The room was silent. Her thoughts and screams and the swirls and tangles of fear and panic were gone. Everyone was staring at me.

Lester swore under his breath. “s**t, Eve, are you okay?”

“She didn’t know him,” I gasped. A reading hadn’t gotten to me like this in a while. Maybe it was because of the non-readings I’d gotten recently. They certainly threw me off-kilter.

“What?”

I got to my feet and took a deep breath. “She didn’t know her assailant. She didn’t recognize him at all, and wasn’t even expecting a package.”

Lester shook his head. “She doesn’t need to know him—”

“I don’t think he knew her, either.”

“You don’t think?” Lester raised his eyebrows slightly, worried. I left the room, and he trailed after me. “Eve, what’s wrong?”

“I’ll tell you back at the station.”

It was one of the tenser car rides I’d ever been on with Lester. Normally he chatted to fill the silence, but now he kept shooting me worried glances as we drove along on the icy roads. When we got back to the station he trailed me back to my desk, where I showed him the notes I’d made the previous evening.

He looked over them quietly.

Five people. The suicide today brought the known total up to five people. Son of a b***h. There was no way this was accidental. When Lester put the notebook down I showed him the map and explained my reasoning.

“So that’s four people who’ve had wonky readings?”

“Five. I couldn’t get a reading on the man who killed that woman.” I paused. I trusted Lester—he was my partner, and my friend—but I didn’t want him to think I’d started to crack over Angelica’s death. (It was very common for skullreaders to break down. It was often joked that the only skullreaders who lived to retirement were sociopaths. The suicide rate among my profession was phenomenal.)

“Lester, I…I don’t think they’re suicides.”

The radiator in the office made a peculiar grinding noise, as it did every so often, and we both jumped. Lester glared at me.

“What do you mean, not suicides? How can a person killing themselves be anything but?”

I hissed through my teeth, frustrated. “I don’t know! It’s just—things don’t add up!”

He looked worried. “Eve, if it was anyone but you, I’d say that they were making it up. I could believe that a skullreader could lie about the analysis—but you’re the most painfully honest person I know. If you say that these aren’t suicides…” he hesitated, doing the peculiar little headbob that he usually did right before he gave in. “I guess I’ll believe you.”

Thank god. Finally.