05 – Extraction

People often confuse transparency with truth. They are not the same. No institution can function if it is forced to present every contradiction, every cost, and every unfinished decision all at once. Public trust depends as much on coherence as on disclosure. The question is not whether information is managed, but whether it is managed in service of the many or in service of private power.

—Naomi Feld, The Collective Balance: An Introduction to Macro-Societal Utility

Sleep came in thin increments, a trickle charge with random power interrupts. Ari floated in the grey seam between waking and sleep, where time lost its edges and thought stumbled through what refused to be forgotten. The afterimage of his failed hack kept stuttering behind his eyelids as broken frames. The phantom admin and the abrupt lockout came with it, along with the cold sense of having grazed something important.

His mind ran the attempt again from different angles, as if one more pass would reveal the missing variable. When he surfaced, it returned as a physical sensation, a tightness in the chest that had no label in any of his internal protocols.

Adrenaline had burned out hours ago. What remained was a residue that sat in his muscles like grit. Exhaustion, and beneath it a low-frequency paranoia. He had touched a secret. He did not yet know whose.

In the quiet of the flat, his uncertainty expanded into the room itself. Corners felt occupied. The line of the wardrobe door seemed too straight. Even the dim glow of his terminal, sleeping on the desk, looked like an eye. He lay still, letting his breath settle into an even cadence. That part was habit, a behaviour loop he’d written long ago and never patched. If he couldn’t sleep properly, he could at least act asleep.

A clunk interrupted the silence, followed by the metallic click of a magnetic lock disengaging.

His eyes stayed closed. His breathing stayed even. The last traces of sleep vanished like a screen wiped to black. He was no longer waking. He was online.

The lock had not been forced. No fracture noise. No vibration through the floor. Either someone had an authorised key, or they had an exploit. Authorised could mean police. It could mean building maintenance. It could mean Francis had sent CGS security to haul him in for his own protection.

The door slid open. Footsteps followed, near-silent on the polished floor. More than one set, their spacing deliberate. They didn’t hesitate at the threshold—no perfunctory “Hello?” to satisfy a social protocol.

Professionals, he thought, and then forced himself to slow down. Professionals was a conclusion, not a data point.

He mapped the room without moving. Bed centred. Door to his left. Workbench to his right with its clutter of tools, cables, and half-disassembled components. The window.

Then he ran inventory. Light disc in trouser pocket, if he hadn’t taken it out. Terminal on desk. The tool case he’d dragged home. The chair with clothes draped over it. A screwdriver. Copper wire. A heavy diagnostic scanner with a cracked edge. All potential in the abstract. None within immediate reach.

The footsteps stopped beside the bed.

Air pressure shifted subtly. Someone had leaned in. A faint scent of rain-soaked fabric. The electric bite of ozone. Three distinct breaths, shallow and controlled.

He waited. The first sentence usually told you what script they were running.

“Mr Feld,” a controlled voice said. “Please get up and get dressed. Slowly.”

Mr Feld. Personal but not familiar. A voice that issued an instruction like a command, then waited as if compliance were inevitable.

He let a groan leak out, sleep-thickened, and reached for something convincingly human. “Not now, honey,” he mumbled, pulling the line from an old vid file that had nothing to do with his life. “Trying to sleep.”

A hand clamped down on his arm. The press of each finger, the placement of the thumb, the way the pressure found leverage rather than pain. The intruder hauled him up with a rustle of sheets and a grunt. His shoulder twisted past comfort, heat flashing along the joint. His eyes snapped open, his vision whitening at the edges for a moment.

Three men in simple black stood over him, lacking CGS Security’s clean polymer-moulded uniform and any visible insignia. Their weapons were scarred, metal exposed, like tools altered by use. Their faces were blank with practised neutrality. Factory-default expressions, except for the one still holding his arm.

He was big, broad through the shoulders, built for force rather than display. Close-cropped blond hair. Pale eyes that held a flicker of amusement that didn’t reach his mouth. The other two hung back half a step, not sloppily, but with a precise acknowledgement of hierarchy.

“Time to wake up,” the big man said, voice a low rumble. “Narinder.”

The name executed like a root-access override. It bypassed every firewall he’d built over decades, every partition he’d insisted was permanent. It reconfigured the present around a past he’d buried. Narinder was not a nickname. It was a file path to his past that he had tried to delete.

“Bloody hell.” His mouth moved before his mind could reassert control.

The big man released his arm and cracked his knuckles. Dry, sharp pops. He gestured with his chin to the clothes on the chair. “Get dressed.”

One of the others tossed him his clothes and went to get his boots from beside the door.

If they had Narinder, they had his entire chain of custody including the legal name change and the links to Francis and the Founder. And if they had that, they almost certainly had the transmission too. The thought startled like cold water. This wasn’t CGS security. This was off-book.

He forced himself to stand slowly, obeying the instruction while he ran probabilities at near-panic speed. Three hostiles, armed and physically superior. He could not win a fight. He could, maybe, buy seconds. Seconds were sometimes enough.

His mind tried to build a decision tree and kept collapsing branches. Workbench was too far, exit vector blocked by their bodies, window reinforced. There was no clean exit.

He picked up yesterday’s clothes with deliberate clumsiness, letting his fingers fumble on fabric as if he were still partially asleep. He needed them to underestimate his coordination.

As he pulled on his trousers, he let his hand trace the seam longer than necessary, as if searching for the fastening. The motion served two purposes. It made him look anxious. It let him take inventory.

His light disc was still in the pocket.

Boots flew at him. He barely saw them in the dark but caught them before they made contact with his head. He slipped them on and zipped. The men watched with bored impatience. That was good. Bored meant they were confident. Confident meant they were careless at the margins.

He ran the geometry. The big man stood slightly forward. The man to his left opened a narrow gap, a fraction of space that existed because the two of them trusted each other’s positions. Beyond that, the door.

He could not outrun them in the flat. He could not fight them. His only chance was to change the environment fast enough that their training misfired.

He turned slightly as he stood, angling his body so the men couldn’t see his hand slip into the pocket. The disc fit his palm like a coin, familiar weight, reassuring in a way that made him almost angry. He should not have needed reassurance from a piece of hardware.

He spun back and slapped the activation stud.

The disc sang. A resonant buzz cut the air as a beam of white light erupted, focused and blindingly intense, cutting through the room’s darkness with a piercing glare. He swept it across their faces, deliberately, painting their eyes with light they could not ignore.

They cried out. Hands flew up.

That was his opening. It was smaller than he wanted, and it was all he had. He launched himself towards the door, shoulder-first. He hit it hard enough to send a shock up his arm. The panel opened and he burst into the corridor.

He slammed it shut and slapped the panel to lock it. He knew they could open it, but he hoped it would slow them down a few more seconds.

He skipped the lift and ran down the stairs. He heard their boots pounding above him. He reached the bottom and spilled onto the street-level walkway at a dead run.

The air was thick with the sour reek of stale sweat and the ammonia sting of unwashed bodies. It pressed in like humidity. The early-dawn Mono commute, usually a smooth, predictable flow of calibrated politeness, was gone. In its place was a human torrent, chaotic and noisy, the demonstration’s fear and anger flooding outward from the CGS plaza and up into Mayfair’s streets like a spill that no one had contained.

Ari tried to vanish into it. He dodged the sick where he could. Some staggered, faces sheened with sweat under jaundiced streetlights. Others lay on the ground, ignored—obvious glitches in the city’s emergency response, bodies the system had failed to route.

He told himself that anonymity was protection. In a crowd, an individual became noise. Noise was hard to isolate. He let the mass carry him, using its pressure to accelerate, a packet lost in a congested buffer.

Behind him, the door to his building burst open.

The blond man and his two companions spilled onto the walkway, blinking in the dim morning light like optical sensors struggling to calibrate. They scanned the crowd.

Ari tried not to look back. Looking back was a tell. But the pressure in his spine forced his head anyway, just enough to catch the blond man’s movement.

He raised his gun and fired a single shot into the air.

The crack was an alien sound in the heart of CGS London, a concussive thump that hammered against Ari’s eardrums. For a moment, everything stopped. Silence swallowed the street, a stunned pause.

Then the pause ended and all protocols failed at once.

People screamed. Bodies surged. Politeness, already eroded, disintegrated into trampling calculus. The crowd became a DDoS attack made of flesh, overwhelming every social bandwidth constraint. Elbows drove into ribs. Feet lost contact with ground. Ari was lifted, carried, shoved. He fought to stay upright. The compression squeezed his chest, turning his breath into a series of shallow, ragged pulls. He could not move against the current, only ride it and steer at the edges where flow was less violent.

He saw a grey booth at the edge of the walkway. A tunnel entrance. He forced his way towards it, letting bodies shove him sideways until the booth was within reach. He slapped his palm against the flush door.

“Open up,” he said, voice raw.

Voice identification Ari Feld, Communications Technician for the Council of Global Stability. Permission to enter service tunnels, granted.

The door slid open. Ari lunged through the gap, a desperate dive into darkness.

A fraction of a second later, a bullet sparked off the metal where his head had been. The clang and the shriek of ricochet cut through the human roar. Panic recoiled from the lift entrance, parting around it in a wave, and for an instant it created a clear lane straight to Ari. His pursuers sprinted into it.

The lift hissed shut, sealing Ari in the familiar dark. He leaned against the cool metal wall, body trembling, lungs burning. Jack’s frustrated face remained burned on his retinas. He wasn’t sure when he decided to call the blond man Jack, but it fit. The name was blunt and artless, a fitting tag for a brute.

The doors hissed open and damp, mildewed air spilled in. For a fraction of a second, relief rose so sharply it almost made him laugh. He stepped into an environment he understood. Concrete, pipes, junctions, protocols.

Then the doors hissed closed again. Confusion stalled his processing. The lift jerked upward. For them. Jack had access.

“No,” he whispered into the dark.

The lift wasn’t an escape route. It was a delivery mechanism. A trap that moved him deeper into a space where he could be hunted without witnesses.

Ari ran, snapping the disc light to his chest. Its beam carved a narrow cone through the gloom. He braced a hand against the wall at the first corner and his palm came away slick with cold slime.

The tunnels formed a chaotic network of concrete and rusted steel, passages intersecting with no obvious logic. Grime-covered utility lighting cast long shadows that jittered in the low light, turning refuse into crouching figures. His mind kept trying to resolve each shadow into inert or threat. He forced it to stop. False positives would kill him as surely as true ones.

Behind him, the low hum of the lift began its descent again, a sound that promised imminent violence.

He didn’t know these specific passages, but he wasn’t running blind either. Signs marked junctions, flows of power and data, maintenance access points. To Ari’s eye they were legible, a language of infrastructure. He built a rough schematic in his head as he moved, updating it with each new sign, each angle, each change in air pressure.

A gunshot cracked. The sound was impossibly loud in the enclosed space, a physical impact against his ears. The bullet ricocheted off a pipe with a high-pitched scream.

His mind tried to solve for distance. Footfalls were muffled by concrete. He could not triangulate cleanly. He could only model likelihood. Likelihood was high that they were too close.

He rounded a corner into a T-junction and spotted a small metal panel on the wall, its edge caught in his disc light. Environmental Systems.

His first thought was that it was useless. He didn’t have admin privileges. But this wasn’t admin. This was emergency. Emergency logic ran on different permissions. An exploit flashed in his mind. He reached the panel and pried it open. His fingers found a recessed manual override lever. He slammed it down. A klaxon erupted, deafening, rhythmic, filling the tunnels with a whooping alarm. Hidden speakers came alive.

Fire alert in section four four two. Safety measures activated.

Behind him, a heavy metal door slid down from the ceiling, thick as a bank vault. It dropped with hydraulic certainty. Twenty metres down the corridor, his pursuers emerged, weapons raised.

The door slammed shut with a booming clang. A volley of bullets hammered into it, each impact a dull percussive thud that vibrated through the floor.

Ari sagged against the cold metal, lungs screaming for air. The klaxon kept blaring. For a moment, relief came, hot and dizzying. The thought contained a satisfaction he did not trust. He let it exist anyway. He needed it to keep moving.

His mind tried to project next steps—an exit, the surface, data to Sharon, then Francis.

He pushed himself off the door, eyes darting down the two remaining paths. The klaxon’s rhythm made thinking harder, like a hammer striking the inside of his skull. He looked for signage, a map, a conduit marking. Anything. And then he froze.

Jack and his two shadows stood at a junction fifty metres up the tunnel, entering from a side passage. The fire door had not trapped or delayed him. He had bypassed it through an intersecting passage. He could read the layout.

Jack’s mouth pulled into a grimace, the expression of someone about to spawn-camp. He offered three slow, mocking claps. The sound travelled through the corridor, even over the klaxon.

Ari’s relief collapsed into a deep hollow. He hadn’t escaped them. He had only cut off one branch of his own decision tree. Every patch he applied introduced a worse bug.

Fire alert in section four four two. Safety measures activated.

He spun and bolted in the opposite direction. Footsteps pounded behind him, closer now, more determined.

Jack stopped. Ari felt it as much as heard it, a shift in sound. Jack was aiming.

This was it. There were no corners, no alcoves, no cover at all. Ari’s mind ran a loop of inevitability faster than he could inject an interrupt. He envisioned the outcome before it happened, a clean line between gun and body.

One of Jack’s accomplices grabbed his arm, yanking the shot wide. The bullet sparked off the ceiling.

Jack snarled and spun, rage glitching across his face. “Get off.”

Then the rage vanished and the colour drained from Jack’s cheeks. His eyes widened at something beyond his man’s shoulder.

The change was absolute, like a fatal exception. Jack and his accomplices turned and ran, scrambling back the way they had come, away from Ari.

Ari skidded to a halt, breath tearing in and out. He stared at their retreating backs. They had him. They had a clear line. They had nothing to gain by retreating.

A vibration shuddered through the soles of his feet.

A subsonic rumble rose fast, like a massive turbine spinning off its axis. It grew in intensity, building beneath the klaxon’s rhythm until the sound became a single pressure, shaking concrete and teeth.

The rumble emanated from the side corridor Jack’s man had come from. A huge displacement of air carried a new smell, rich and ancient, like subterranean rot and disturbed silt.

A wall of water exploded from the junction, vomiting into the corridor in a pressurised rupture. Emergency lights strobed red over a slurry of silt, glinting metal fragments, chipped bricks, vile flotsam. The water filled the passage from floor to ceiling with frightening speed.

The connections clicked into place with sickening clarity. The fire protocol hadn’t just dropped a door, it had initiated a full system flush. He had weaponised the infrastructure, and the infrastructure had no allegiance. With no admin privileges, he was not a user. He was debris.

“Bollocks,” he breathed.

He turned and ran.

Unlike being hunted by men, hydraulics had no intent and could show no mercy. The water chased him around corners, filling the passages behind him with a roaring weight.

His legs pumped like failing pistons. His lungs burned as if scoured by static. His mind narrowed to a single directive. Stay ahead.

He took turns on instinct, half-reading signs, half-feeling air pressure changes. Twice he committed to a corridor and had to reverse when the angle suggested a dead end. Each reversal cost metres. Each cost felt like a year.

His disc light shook on his chest, beam jittering with his stride. Shadows jumped. Water growled behind him in a growing wall.

He rounded a final corner and his mind crashed. Dead end. The tunnel terminated in a sheer concrete wall, but the wall was broken by a huge black hole, a circular reservoir at least seven metres across. A pit. The water was coming. There was no exit behind him that wouldn’t be filled.

He ran the diagnostic. No ladder. No maintenance hatch. Sheer wall. Chasm. Probability of survival negligible. One variable remained. The jump to the ledge on the other side.

He stepped back, drew in a ragged breath, and ran. He launched himself across the chasm, arms outstretched, a desperate projectile. Spray hit him mid-air. He flew through it anyway. His chest slammed into the opposite wall just below the ledge, impact driving the air from his lungs in a choked gasp. Raw concrete scraped through his suit. His fingers scrabbled, slick with spray, searching for anything.

They found a cluster of old rusted pipes bolted to the wall. He clung to them. His mind did what it always did. It evaluated load, shear stress, corrosion. The estimates were grim. The metal was fatigued. The bolts were old. He hung over the abyss, body dangling, hands screaming.

The water hit the end of the tunnel and poured into the pit. For what felt like an eternity it battered him, flattening him against the side of the pit. He held on, hoping not to lose his grip, praying the pipes would hold. He held his breath until he wasn’t sure he could hold it anymore.

Then his head was above the rushing water, the remaining flow plunging into the reservoir with churning violence. The surface rose fast, dark and turbulent, swallowing the space below.

His muscles trembled like over-torqued cables. For a moment, he believed he had succeeded.

The roar faded to a gurgle. The reservoir filled, the surface settling into a dark, placid swell that nearly reached his feet.

Then the pipe cluster gave a grinding lurch.

A bolt sheared with a metallic crack, followed by a shower of rust and concrete dust. Another bolt went. Then the whole cluster tore free with a percussive crack.

He fell.

It was only a short drop into the frigid water. Shock punched through him, stealing breath and thought. The cold bit into bone instantly.

“Brass monkeys,” he sputtered as his head broke the surface.

He gasped, treading water, limbs numb and lagging. The disc light cut through the foul water below, revealing a grotesque soup of bloated rats, shimmering slicks of industrial waste, drifting debris. He forced himself to move towards the wall, hands slapping against wet concrete.

The ledge was too high. Two metres above the waterline now.

He clawed anyway, fingers slipping, nails scraping uselessly. His body was heavy. His legs kicked more slowly. He wasn’t a salmon. He wasn’t anything with leverage. He was biological waste in a sump pit, waiting to be flushed again.

The klaxon finally stopped. A synthesised voice delivered the final insult with perfect calm.

The fire has been extinguished. Safety in section four four two has been fully restored.

“Right,” Ari gasped, bitter air bubbling up. “System nominal. Lovely.”

He leaned his head back against the cold wall, eyes closed, strength draining. His kicks grew sluggish. His limbs lagged like overloaded servos. Treading water only postponed the inevitable, a delay loop without exit.

Something coarse slapped him across the face, stinging his frozen skin.

A voice echoed from above, rough as gravel. “Grab on.”

Ari blinked, disoriented. A rope dangled into the pit, heavy and wet. For a puzzled moment his mind refused to accept the new input. Then his hands moved automatically. He grabbed the rope.

An astonishing force yanked him upward, lifting his dead weight as if he were nothing more than wet laundry. He rose out of the sludge, water streaming from him, coughing hard enough to tear. His body cleared the ledge and he collapsed onto concrete in a shaking heap, lungs burning, teeth chattering. He forced his head up to thank the rescuer.

A monolith of black leather and matted hair loomed over him. The man’s face was a hard knot of unreadable features in the gloom, eyes sunken into shadow. He smelled of old sweat and damp earth, nothing like Jack’s rain-wet fabric.

Ari’s mind, even half-drowned and freezing, catalogued details. The heavy boots. The rope calluses. The weight distribution of someone who knew physical work. The brass teeth of a zip-adorned jacket cuff, catching a stray glint of tunnel light.

Relief tried to rise again. He shoved it down. Relief was how he died.

The man’s fist came in without warning. It crashed into his face and snapped his head sideways. Pain flared white. The last thing Ari registered, sharp and absurdly precise, was the brass zip glinting just behind the knuckles.

Then the world went black.

---

Morning rain dropping from a featureless grey sky pattered against the glass at New Scotland Yard. Alene ignored it and focused on the puzzle of Ari Feld. Her preliminary query with his direct superior, a middle manager named Adebayo who was already under suspicion for peddling data, had been telling enough. When she pressed him on the breach, he wet his lips, the sticky sound carrying through the comms link.

“Would you, professionally speaking, consider Mr Feld’s actions a security risk to the CGS?” Alene said, her voice mild.

“That determination does not fall within my authority,” Adebayo said. His tone was level, but stripped of warmth. “All personnel matters regarding Mr Feld are handled directly by Councillor Herbert.”

Alene’s eyebrow arched. “Personally? For a communications technician?”

“That is the current reporting structure.” Adebayo did not elaborate. “If you require an assessment, you will need to address it to the Councillor’s office.”

The deflection was precise and procedural. Alene ended the call with a predatory smile. The case had become a matter of state.

A knock rapped on the door. The rhythm was unmistakable. “Come in, Hatch.”

DC Leo Hatch entered, bringing a draught of hallway air that smelled of floor wax and stale coffee. He stood before her, chest heaving, eyes focused past her head. “Go on,” she said, knowing that he needed the prompt.

“Ma’am, we have new data indicating that Ari Feld initiated another directed data infraction last night, this time from his residence.”

“What was he after this time?”

“Unclear so far, ma’am.”

“What do you know, then?”

“Nothing concrete, ma’am.” He swallowed. “But it is an escalation.”

Alene leaned back, steepling her fingers. “Escalation, or desperation? There’s a difference.”

“Yes, ma’am. The logs suggest the latter.” The synth-leather of his holster creaked as he shifted his weight. “The intrusion vectors are more aggressive, less concerned with stealth. He’s done sneaking in the window. Now he’s kicking the door down.”

A genuine smile touched Alene’s lips. He was learning to read motive, not just logs. “That’s good, Hatch. What’s your next…”

Her terminal chimed, announcing the connection she’d requested. Leo, recognising the cue, gave a slight nod and turned to leave.

“Stay, Constable,” Alene said without looking at him. He froze, then returned to his position.

A moment later, the air hardened into the holo projection of Francis Herbert. The Britannia Councillor’s skin had the grey, translucent quality of old wax. She pressed a hand to her forehead, the gesture heavy, as if gravity had doubled within the CGS’s dome.

Face-to-face with one of the world’s most powerful women, Alene was no longer investigating a simple information violation.

“Councillor Herbert,” Alene began, her tone direct, “DCI Ardone, Information Violations. Thank you for making the time. I’m calling about a communications technician on your staff, Ari Feld.”

“Inspector, your timing is fortunate. I was about to contact New Scotland Yard myself,” Francis replied, her voice strained but controlled. “He left his office to conduct a routine repair yesterday and hasn’t returned. He’s not responding.”

She’s leading. Alene’s eyes narrowed slightly. Framing this as a missing person case, not a criminal matter.

“We may have some insight into that, Councillor. Before he disappeared, Mr Feld allegedly attempted to illegally access classified CGS medical databases from his home terminal.”

Francis’s projection tightened at the mouth before she made her face still again. “Illegally? Ari has the clearance to access almost any part of the CGS network. Why would he need to break into a system he holds the keys for?”

“That’s what I was hoping you could help me understand, Councillor.”

Francis paused, her gaze momentarily distant. Worry showed, and then the politician resurfaced. “Unless,” she said slowly, “he didn’t want his access logged. He didn’t want anyone to know what he was looking for.” Her eyes met Alene’s. “Perhaps not even me.”

She isn’t speculating. She’s offering a managed truth.

“Why would he want to hide his search from you specifically, ma’am?”

“Ari… has had his share of difficulties,” Francis said, the formal politician dissolving into a concerned guardian. “His parents were very dear friends of mine. After they died, I became his foster mother. I’ve always tried to look out for him.”

The emotional appeal. Concern for family. Alene had learned long ago it could be just as coercive as any fist or shouted order.

“Has he been under any particular stress recently? Anything that might explain this behaviour?” Alene asked, keeping her voice even as her gaze shifted past the holo to DC Hatch. His eyes were wide and unblinking.

“His divorce was finalised a few weeks ago,” Francis sighed. “It’s been difficult for him. But he’s always buried himself in his work. He’s a brilliant technician. The best I have. He finds… comfort in solving problems.”

“And what problem was he trying to solve in the medical database, Councillor?”

Francis’s expression went smooth and procedural. “I have no idea. That’s why his disappearance is so troubling. Ari is a creature of habit. For him to vanish—it’s a critical deviation from his baseline.”

“We’ll find him, Councillor,” Alene said. “Given his connection to you and this unauthorised access, I’m escalating this immediately. You’ll be kept informed.”

Francis’s demeanour broke, showing a brief loosening around the mouth and eyes that Alene had not expected. “Thank you, DCI Ardone. I’m certain I can count on you.”

The connection ended, dissolving the Councillor’s image. The room went quiet, save for the coil whine of the terminal’s power supply, a mosquito sound that drilled into the pause. Alene leaned back, her fingers finding their familiar place on her chin.

Alene rose and paced to the window. From this height, the city should look like a secured perimeter, a marvel of Francis Herbert’s order. But now, breaches marred the view. Stalled pedestrians clustered in the greenways, and public info-feeds on building facades had gone dark.

She turned from the window to face her constable. He was still standing at attention, but he was bouncing on the balls of his feet, the rubber soles of his boots squeaking rhythmically against the polymer floor.

“Hatch, what did we learn?”

Released to speak, Leo exclaimed, “That was Francis Herbert!”

“Yes, it was.”

“Councillor Francis Herbert!” Leo’s mouth split into a grin that creased his cheeks. “My mum’s going to go absolutely mental. Me, in a secure holo with Francis bloody Herbert!”

“Language. And you were not in a holo meeting with Francis Herbert. You were present at my meeting with Francis Herbert.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Right, pull yourself together, Detective Constable. What did we learn?”

Hatch shook his hands in front of him as if he were drying them and took a few breaths. “Feld is missing, ma’am. Likely on the run, and Councillor Herbert has a personal interest in him.”

Hatch met expectations, nothing more. She rarely relied on constables to see deeper into the case, especially in the face of power that clearly disarmed them. Titles failed to impress Alene. Power was only expensive polish over the same human rot.

“Yes, Hatch, those are the facts, but what did Councillor Herbert ask us to do?”

“She didn’t ask us to do anything, ma’am. She answered your questions and then you said we would find Feld, which we were going to do anyway.”

“If we were going to do it anyway, then why did I say that?”

“Because that’s what she wanted to hear.” Hatch’s voice lilted slightly—almost a question—as if he were afraid Alene would suspect he was accusing her of pandering.

“Correct, Hatch, but why would I tell her what she wanted to hear?”

“Ma’am?”

“What did I want her to think?”

“That we’ll find Ari Feld for her,” he said. “Won’t we?”

“No, we won’t. We’ll find Ari Feld because we have an investigation to conduct, not because Councillor Herbert needs a threat contained.”

She paused, her green eyes locking onto his.

“Are you saying that she wants us to find Feld and make this investigation go away, ma’am?”

“Are you saying that?” Alene’s face went blank.

The rubber squeak of his soles against the floor ceased. He went rigid, the blood dropping out of his cheeks.

“I guess I am. Bloody hell. I mean, she’s Francis bloo—”

“Herbert,” she interrupted. “I know. The Councillor isn’t asking for an investigation, Hatch. She’s asking for a clean-up. She wants the scene bleached before forensics arrives.”

Hatch stared at the empty space where Francis Herbert’s image had shimmered. He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing above his stiff collar. “If she’s initiating a cover-up, she’s an obstruction. She’s… she’s a suspect.”

She saw the tension in his shoulders, the way he gripped his stylus like a lifeline. He had the eyes to see the dirt. Whether he had the hands to dig in it remained open.

Alene continued, her voice low and sharp. “We investigate crimes, Constable. If the Councillor is burying one, we dig it out.”

She picked up the nickel whistle from her desk.