the others they’ve sent. Don’t go running off just yet.” She took the phone from me, looking at the background photo and smiling.
“What happened to Brynner’s mother?” I was already so far out on the ice it couldn’t hurt to ask.
“There was only one witness. So all I can tell you is what he told us. Did you know Lara ran BSI’s investigative labs?”
Ran them? I knew she’d done a stint in the armory, but I’d read no papers with her name on them. “No. I thought she believed in magic and religion. I can’t imagine that mixing with science.” I put my head in my hands. “I’m sorry. I’m going to go someplace else, lie down, and just forget the last few days happened.”
“Oh, honey, it ain’t like that. Lara believed, all right, but she liked to know as well as believe. So Heinrich finds this perfect mural, written by one of them meat-skins while the Re-Animus was in it. And she brings the whole damned mural back to her lab.”
And I saw it coming, making perfect sense. “She thought it might be a spell?”
“Thought you didn’t believe in magic.”
I bit back the acid response that came so naturally. “Every skeptic has a level of proof. Make a believer out of me.”
“Lara was trying to translate it. Understand it. My sister swore the words were only part of the meaning, and the key was the understanding. So she kept it on a wall in their lab, trying different interpretations.”
This idea of a rational Carson seemed at odds with what I’d read about his father, or seen from Brynner. Much more my style. “And?”
She paused, studying me. “One of them must have worked. Brynner said she was just gone, and in her place were the knives the boy carries, and a silver jar.”
The thought that Brynner had seen—whatever it was—that happened to his mother made my heart ache. If he believed it was a result of magic, that certainly explained his reaction to my disbelief.
“I thought his dad made the blades. There’s nothing like them in the BSI arsenal.”
Aunt Emelia shook her head. “Heinrich believed they were sacrificial knives. Even he didn’t know how they were made, only that they seemed made to kill meat-skins.”
“And the jar? What was actually in it?”
She shook her head. “Heinrich guarded that jar like nothing I’d seen. I never saw him open it, but he said it was a heart.”
Right there, I spotted my first problem. Canopic jars held other organs. Not the heart. Removing the heart represented ultimate death in ancient Egypt. “Where is it?”
Emelia stood and took my hand, pulling me to my feet. “I suspect that’s what you were sent to find out.”
I opened the phone dialing history and chose the most common number. Held my breath as it rang. When the phone picked up, no one spoke for ten, almost fifteen seconds. Then a mechanical voice buzzed. “Carson, you’re in a shitload of trouble.”
I swallowed, my lips suddenly dry. “This is Grace Roberts. I need to speak to field command. Brynner Carson quit this morning.”
In the background, a noise like a vacuum pump continued, then the mechanized voice cut in. “We are so fucked.”
The line went dead.
BRYNNER
I didn’t want to go home. Couldn’t go home, and not just because Grace might be there. I could blame her for the director’s assumptions. Or I could accept the truth. Of the two, one of us had a history of causing trouble. I guess the shrink back in Seattle was more right than wrong. It wasn’t any one thing, but the accumulation of a lifetime spent fighting an enemy that never gave up, never slept, and against whom I never seemed to win a permanent victory.
So I drove down the highway, past the high school, and up a road to a citrus farm. A dusty trail led down to the farmhouse, and by the time the truck pulled up, a man stood outside, waving to me.
“Brynner Carson,” said a man with white hair and more wrinkles than skin. He walked over and took off his hat, giving me a one-armed hug. “Rory’s out running irrigation, but I’ll send a hand to let him know.”
I missed these people. I’d spent more summer nights here than I could count. “I’ll stay away from the barn this time, I swear.”
He slipped his hat back on. “I’m not mad about that anymore. Haven’t been for sixteen years, if that’s what kept you away. Get on in out