Page 17 of Grave Beginnings

He froze, confusion crossing his face. He stared at me in shock. “They threw you in here right after getting out of the hospital?”

“I guess. I wasn’t sick or anything. They did a ton of tests on me, but they finally had to let me go, ‘cause while I have the antibodies, they can’t pinpoint a specific ability.”

“Wait. I’m confused.”

“I think I’m confused, too. What are you confused about?”

“I thought you’d been in MPD and they finally put you over here ‘cause they couldn’t hide your variance anymore. The order came from the governor, or that’s what Sergeant Hanna said. I thought you were in hiding or something.”

“Uh, yeah, no. Never hid anything in my life. My parents kicked me out at sixteen for coming out as gay. So yeah, if you pegged me as queer emo Ken, that was me in high school. But prior to two weeks ago, I was a regular homicide detective. The variance thing is new.”

“And not now?” he parried as he turned and headed down the long row again. Wow, he had a great ass, and solid shoulders. The glowing orange band made me wonder what he was. How did I get paired with the hottest guy on SED? And how unfair was life?

“Still queer, if that’s your worry, though I consider myself more punk than emo. Haven’t dyed my hair black in over a decade. Gives hella split ends, and I look like I’m on death’s door with dark hair.”

“What triggered the mark? You worked in homicide. Were you sick one day and some dead guy started talking to you?”

“No. I can’t remember being sick. Not more than the sniffles in the past few years. But my old partner and I responded to the daycare thing.” I assumed, as this was the closest SED unit to the new split, that they’d been called in. If he hadn’t been on that callout, he’d have seen it on the news. Rich people got more media than the rest of us peasants. “There were kid zombies and everyone thought I had control of them.”

He stopped again to turn and stare at me. “Controlling zombies is a level five SV ability.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“It’s rare. Most SVs can sense the dead or sometimes talk to them. There are, like, five in the world that can control zombies. All work for the military.”

“Maybe that’s why everyone freaked out? I wasn’t controlling them. I said stop, and they stopped, but maybe they just heard me?”

“You ever met a zombie before?”

“Before the daycare? No.” I left out what Joe had told me about my eyes turning red. Was that an SV thing? Had he really seen something, or only thought he had?

“They test you with one in the hospital?”

“Do they keep zombies for variant testing?”

“Yes. And a whole lot of other shit.”

“They locked me in the morgue.” I shivered at the memory, knowing I’d lost some time in there. “But no one stood up and did the bone dance.”

He stared at me in confusion. Didn’t he watch kids Halloween TV? I mimicked the bone dance from Disney’s black and whitedays, throwing my hands up from side to side and doing a little shuffle, but he shook his head. “You’re so fucking weird. I mean, all SVs are weird, but wow.”

Ouch. “Okay, yeah, no zombies on a tether or anything.”

“Strange that they didn’t test you with an actual zombie.” He led us to my locker.

“What’s the orange of your band mean?”

“Shifter,” he said. “The chip codes itself. Once embedded, based on your ability, it changes color.”

“Oh. What if no color showed up?”

“It doesn’t happen. The chip won’t work at all without the antibodies. No glow, no variance.”

I glanced at my arm and thought about the intense glow that nothing could hide. “Is there any way to hide the brightness?”

He stopped at a locker, and studied me for a few seconds, head tilted. Damn, he was hot. “The brighter it glows, the more powerful the variant.”

“But I tried covering it up with clothes, even layers of winter coats, and it still glows through.”