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CY

T he apartment was bougie as hell—and I mean rich enough to get away with any crime bougie.

It was all sleek metal and marble that you weren’t even allowed to mine anymore.

Too bad the ambience was ruined by the entire place being coated in blood.

It looked like a retro slasher film in here, with blood and guts smeared on nearly every surface in the kitchen and surrounding rooms. The ceiling was just as coated as the floor—a fuckin’ Jackson Pollock of someone’s insides.

“So what have we got here, boss?”

I heard Maddox’s teeth clench as he took in the scene around us, and Tex adjusted his gloves as he walked ahead into the space, tugging at the wrist to pull them on tight, the leather squeaking.

“Forensics has already been through here and catalogued everything, so take a look at whatever you need.”

“You going to explain what I’m looking at here, Tex?” I sidestepped as a glob of…something…fell from the ceiling where I had just been standing.

“This was the home of Beaufort Renard, CTO of POM industries,” Tex responded, straightening the lapels of his tetracarbon jacket.

“Was the home?” Maddox asked.

“He doesn’t seem to have much need of it anymore,” Tex said, waving his hand to various viscera around the space.

“Shit, you’re saying all of this is the CTO? What the fuck happened?”

“That, Cyanos, is what we are here to figure out.”

This guy had been blasted to bits, that much was obvious. No piece of him bigger than a tooth was left.

“Any residuals of explosives found?”

Tex clipped us the files from his Vysor, and I scrolled through.

“Shit, Tex, I thought with this being a high-profile kill you would’ve put the A-team on this. The nerds didn’t find anything on site.” Maddox grunted in affirmation as he scrolled through the limited report as well.

“Cyanos, you can be assured that the very best assets were used. In fact, two different teams swept the space and came to the same conclusion.”

I flicked off my screen and looked around the space again. “Nothing?”

Tex nodded. I walked around, keeping my shiny dress shoes out of the piles of gore.

It reminded me of a scene I’d seen as a kid—one of my mom’s idiot boyfriends had gotten himself blown up trying to cook some new version of Vector.

He’d only been missing his top half, and the wall behind him had looked just like the patterns of blood here.

Maddox let out a long whistle behind me, back near the center of this open-concept monstrosity. “Is this what I think it is? I thought it was destroyed during the Italian revolts in ’57.”

Tex chuckled. “Funny how so many lost things find their way into the homes of the wealthy.”

I didn’t know what was so impressive about the hunk of marble both men were gazing at—an old-school angel with his spear raised over some chick who looked like she was having the time of her life. But what did I know about art?

I walked over to the bar near the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the Green District. Now this was art. In Neo Stellaris, a view was something you couldn’t even pay for most of the time, not with the amount of megabuildings blocking any skyline.

I peered through the cabinet window, looking past the blood.

Damn, some of the alcohol this guy had was older than me.

Luckily, he’d had the decency to have his cupboard closed when he exploded.

I swung the glass door open and grabbed one of three crystal-cut highballs and poured myself some of his good stuff.

“That’s disgusting, Cy.” Maddox grunted, still taking pictures of the room.

“What? Not like he’s going to drink it. Tex said we could touch whatever.” Maddox rolled his eyes.

I turned and saw the lines of gore moving away from me, radiating like the rays of the sun just touching the horizon outside the tainted windows.

“Just trying to get into the vic’s mindset. He was standing right here when it happened.” I raised my glass in a mock salute to the recently departed. It caught the dying sunlight and burned down my throat with notes of peat and honey. Damn, this was the good shit.

“Forensics confirms that,” Maddox said, still looking through the files on his Vysor, his eyes defocused from the reality around him.

“Any glass shards found in this mess?”

“Yeah, a few. Why?”

“This is exactly what Renard was doing when he got blasted to high heaven,” I replied, taking another swig.

No residuals of explosives, no forced entry, nothing on the security footage. That five million was slipping out of my fingers. No wonder boss wasn’t leaving this to the NSPD idiots.

“So do we know anything? Any suspects?”

Maddox made a grunt that I knew meant he also felt we were screwed on this.

Tex reemerged from the neighboring room. “Renard was CTO of the most powerful corporation on the west coast. Everyone in this city is a suspect.”

“So we are royally screwed,” I said.

“Security has always been tasked with closing any holes in POM’s defenses, by any means necessary. I thought you would enjoy the challenge,” Tex replied, with the hint of a twinkle in his eye.

He wasn’t wrong, but I didn’t like my odds with my three weeks already ticking down and shit all for leads. “Guess we might have to start making some noise, see what rattles loose.”

At that, Tex frowned. “Mr. Ameré has tasked us with this because of our discretion. ”

“Yeah, can’t have the CTO’s murder affecting stock prices.” Tex nodded but thinned his lips in a way that made me think there was more to it. I raised my eyebrows in question, but he didn’t respond. I just tucked that note away for myself.

“PR has already handled the rollout of the information. We need to figure out what happened here.”

As Maddox and Tex continued to buzz around the apartment, I stepped up to those enormous windows again.

From a place like this, you could almost imagine Neo Stellaris was a beautiful place.

The stiff’s apartment was nestled up in the hills above the Green District.

Rich enough to even look down on the rich.

This part of the city was a deep, lush green, watered by the seeded clouds overhead—artificially maintained green space.

Everything glowed orange and pink and hopeful as the sun finally winked away behind the towering buildings of the Magenta District in the distance.

I took another long sip and followed a dark cloud of smoke down to the Green data center, the Stellaris lines flickering erratically as power was diverted around the destruction.

It could be coincidence that Renard was murdered at the exact same time as the attack.

It could be. But it wasn’t.

The deep orange glow that never left the sky at night claimed the skyline, catching in the deep amber of my drink.

I swirled it in my hand, and just as it had for the last few days, her laughing face smirked at me.

Tex thought she was just a coincidence too.

An electroteknik, who found me at just the right time and knew exactly how to handle me.

Sure, she could’ve just been a working girl hired to distract some assets, but it didn’t feel like that.

Even now, I could practically feel her lips on my ear as she whispered, Come and find me .

The data center, Renard, and her—it was all connected. Despite what Tex thought, she was the best lead I had, and I was going to enjoy hunting her down.

I threw back the rest of the drink and slammed the glass down on the marble bar so hard that Maddox jumped behind me.

Don’t worry, doll. I’ll find you.