“There are no lesions, deep or otherwise,” Dr. Indrah stated simply, and Mr. DeSoto sighed in frustration.

“So, no physical evidence of the damage?”

“From what I can tell, the damage to her cranium was minimal, and the lack of lesions means the internal impact did not cause extensive or profound effect.”

Seating himself by his daughter’s bed, Tomás tapped into the Stream and rang Hazel’s handheld. “Hi, Hazel. Mr. DeSoto.”

“Hi, Mr. DeSoto. Any change?” Sophie had lapsed into a coma over a week ago, and Hazel had visited every day to talk to her best friend. True to his earlier encouragement, Mr. DeSoto had moved the computer next to Sophie’s bed, and he insisted that Hazel play with a speaker so Sophie could hear the action.

“No change,” he affirmed, and Hazel could hear his despondency. “I wanted to ask you a question about that day.”

“Okay. There’s not much to tell.”

“Still, something you said…did you say that you and Sophie had fought?”

The tears welled in the corners of Hazel’s eyes. “We fought, but it was nothing too dramatic. I mean, we were arguing about the Wire, of course. Safety, prevalence, population, stuff like that-”

Mr. DeSoto interrupted. “I’m less interested in the subject of your argument and more interested in the timeline.”

Confused, Hazel began to replay the ride home.

“You said that after you argued, Sophie stopped talking to you.”

“Yeah, I mean, it was pretty common. I would get defensive, she would get irritated, we would stop talking for thirty minutes or so. She had only gone silent for about four minutes when the car flipped.”

Mr. DeSoto didn’t speak for a moment. “I think that helps me,” he declared. “Thanks for the info.”

Not sure what she had offered, Hazel turned off the handheld and stood from Peter’s chair. She couldn’t really gain any more stats for the night, not with her best tank missing. More than anything, she wanted to forget the whole stupid Bridge, Peter, Tripartite, Manticore, the Queue. Anything that reminded her that Sophie lay comatose in her room with no rational explanation.

Fortunately, it was time for Hazel’s one foray into actual physical humanity. For the third time in the week, Hazel had dance class.

++++++++++++

When Rel strolled into the spacious office of Veronique Garrison, he had to smile. Maybe he would manage to hang on to his job – if she had, with all the irritation she had caused her higher-ups.

Rel had eaten up the stories Veronique told, stories of toes stepped on and analyses rejected. After she had proven herself right enough times, management had stopped denying her. Of course, Rel had yet to prove himself on anything of significance, though he had shown himself competent in the day to day.

“Show me this chart,” Veronique insisted.

“Okay, but just understand. This is more hunch than evidence.” Rel pulled out a giant rolled-up paper and spread it across her desk.

“This is the whole world,” she leveled skeptically.

“It is,” he agreed. “And I get that it’s hard to establish a pattern with a data set this disparate, but the pattern is not the incidents. The pattern is the silence.”

“The silence?”

Rel then began explaining all the various events he had tracked, the small and the large, those with significant effect for the many, and those with mere inconvenience for the few. By the time he had finished, Veronique had tilted her head to peer at the dots on the map. “Very interesting targets, if that’s what they are. Nothing too flashy. All important in their own way.”

“But, if you consider that these situations were not reported in the news until significantly after they happened, there we have a pattern. It requires that a. the person responsible for the situation had to have either missed it or successfully hidden it, and b. any or all failsafes…failed. How were no alarm bells set off? Who was monitoring these things? It’s almost as if the people who took the fall knew they were going to take the fall and, I don’t know, sacrificed themselves on some altar. Imagine if enough of these types of situations happen at once, or in a short period of time! How much of the functioning world could collapse? Maybe literally.”

Veronique stood up and crossed her arms, staring down at the paper. “Are you thinking some kind of huge conspiracy?”

Sighing, Rel shook his head. “That’s where my analysis breaks down. All I know is who and where. I see a common denominator. But it’s like seeing someone with red hair. I can tell their hair is red, but I don’t know why. Is it hereditary? Is it a good dye job? Is it a really good wig? Is it a genetic mutation? If I don’t know why these things are happening or why they are covered up, then how do I figure out what to do with the information?”

“Problem is,” Veronique started to pace, “if there really is a correlation, this has crazy and dangerous implications.”

“So, you see it, too!” Rel couldn’t contain his enthusiasm. For weeks, he had been trying to make anyone see, and either no one understood or no one cared.

“I see it, Rel, but I’m going to have to think about what to do with this. I’ll tease it to my supervisor, but I kind of want to keep a lid on it until we can figure something else out.”

Rel leaned back in his chair and stared – almost eye level – at Vee where she stood. He couldn’t believe what she was saying. “But if you see it, and if you think it is potentially dangerous, why do you want to bury it?” For one moment, he had held out hope.

“Take a look at these dots right here…” She pointed to a spot in Sino-Russe. “Right here…” Another spot in Greater Persia. “And here…” A spot in the far north of Scandinavia.”

For close to a minute, he stared at the dots on the paper.

“What am I looking at?” he finally asked.

“For someone smart enough to put all this together, you are missing something really obvious.”

“Okay, insult me. That helps.” He wasn’t actually offended, but his frustration at having his idea recognized only to be shot down had set him on edge.

“Look at their job titles…” Vee replied in a hushed tone.

Rel looked again. “Sinorussian Ministry of Defense…director of counter-terrorism in the Swedish Security Service…Director of GP’s General Intelligence.”

“Three significantly powerful intelligence agencies, three incidents, all kept quiet by society at large and the agencies where they happened.”

“These were the least bothersome to me,” Rel asserted. “I mean, it’s intelligence. The whole purpose is to keep things under wraps.”

“From the general populace of humanity, sure. But in the intelligence community itself? Seems to me there’s a good chance that information like that would have filtered down into the NCB on some level. No offense, but I wouldn’t expect a just-above-entry-level like you to hear these things, but I have an ear to the associate director, and I had not heard anything about this until you just brought it to me.”

“Okay, so, again. Why are you not wanting to tell them then?”

“If it is possible that these other agencies had lapses, it’s possible that ours will, too. Who did you say you told about this?”

“Associate Director Lewellen.”

“And he shut you down?”

“Jolted, yeah, but I didn’t make my case very well.”

“Did you show him this?”

Rel shook his head. “He didn’t really give me time. He basically gave me a pat on the head and sent me on my way – all the way to field duty.”

“You must have been sitting down…”

“What?” The extraneous comment confused him for a moment.

“If he patted you on the head, you must have been sitting down.” Vee laughed at her own joke, and Rel threw her a sour look. “I’ll put out some feelers,” she continued, “see if I catch any hints that something is brewing.” She rolled up the paper and handed it back to Rel. “I hope you don’t mind if I captured a shot of this.”

“No, of course.” He wasn’t convinced she was right to keep the information to herself, but at least he wasn’t alone with his hunches anymore.

“Good. I’ve got a meeting.” She reached out to help him up, and he restrained a snicker, taking her hand but lifting himself using his own legs rather than strain her muscles. As soon as he stood, she released his hand. “Just to be clear, about the date.”

Peering down at her face, Rel could read no encouragement in that direction.

“You’re too young for me,” she leveled.

Rel didn’t rein in his laugh this time. “I’m twenty-five. You’ve got to be about the same.”

“I’m twenty-nine. I have a strict rule. I only date guys between eight and fourteen years older than I am.”

“That’s oddly specific.”

“I used calculations, but that’s none of your business,” she grinned up at him.

“Did you think I was older when you agreed to the date?”

“No, I made an exception because Kirsten is in love with Harry. They had only had one date, and she was nervous. Don’t worry, though. I really like you. And you’re obviously a brilliant analyst. We’ll have a long-term relationship,” she smiled again. “Just not that kind.”

Mollified, Rel held out his hand with a smile. “It was a pleasure, Veronique.”

“Vee,” she corrected. “It was. I’ll message you later if I figure this out.”

Rel stepped out of her office both more frustrated and more excited than he had entered. Maybe his message wouldn’t make it all the way to the director general, but maybe Vee Garrison could help him solve the mystery that had nagged at him for weeks.

++++++++++++++

With everything in her, Hazel hated confrontation. She would walk several blocks out of her way if she could avoid an acquaintance who insisted on debating the Wire with her. Not that she was void of opinions – sometimes her tendency to think outside the mainstream created horribly stressful conversations. Instead, arguments usually sprang from how intractable she proved on anything she believed. Sophie was a prime example. Hazel and Sophie found themselves in far too many arguments for friends, but they both had instant forgiveness, so it signified very little.

For anyone more than a breath away from her best friends, though, Hazel would just smile and nod and let the person believe whatever he or she wanted to believe – as long as Hazel didn’t have to argue about it.

So, the fact that Hazel now intended to walk up to Manticore in person - to beg him to come back and play with her for the tournament – was tantamount to climbing Mount Everest.

She knew Manticore by name and face, though only having met him a couple of times. Other than Sophie, every other gamer she played with hid behind his gamertag. The only reason she had met Manticore was an ill-advised attempt at a date, managed through chat and quickly regretted. Fortunately, though they did not personally hit it off, they had talked a lot about Tripartite, and soon they had joined together as regular teammates.

Going to his apartment, though? Hazel kind of wanted to die. If she could have thought of any other way to figure out what had happened, she would have. Instead, stepping up to the apartment intercom, she pressed the button next to the name “Donald Yates.”

For a full five minutes, Donnie didn’t answer. Hazel rolled her eyes at herself, frustrated that she had trekked twenty minutes across town to visit an empty house. A moment later, a middle-aged woman stepped out of the building, and Hazel stuck her foot in the crack before the door could close.

Hazel had never visited Donnie’s house – their relationship hadn’t gotten past coffee. From what she could tell from the outside, Donnie made a decent amount of money. Or at least his parents did. In the typical architecture of the neighborhood, the entire building seemed one room wide, and the stairwell ran up six flights. Still, the narrow ascent was well-lighted, and the distress of the paint and looked intentional. The place definitely spoke money.

Floor by floor Hazel paused to look for Donnie’s name and finally found his apartment on the fifth floor. Just as she raised her hand to knock, a lady about her own age descended the steps from the level above, and noticing Hazel, the young woman cleared her throat.

“He’s not here,” the woman explained, and Hazel spun to take in the face of the stranger.

“Donnie?”

“About a week ago? His mom and dad came with movers and took all his stuff, his furniture – his computer; you know how he felt about that computer. He’s not here if the computer isn’t here.”

“Are you sure?” Hazel inquired. “I’m an acquaintance of his, and he’s disappeared from the Stream for the past week or so. Maybe his parents decided to cut off his support or something.”

“It’s possible, I guess,” allowed the woman, her unnaturally azure, bobbed hair flipping around her face as she shrugged. “But I haven’t seen him. We went to coffee pretty regularly, and he’s not returning my messages or anything. It’s like he dropped off the face of the earth.”

“Thanks for the info,” Hazel grimaced. As the woman continued down the stairs, Hazel raised her hand to knock anyway. After a few minutes with no response, she accepted Ms. Blue Hair’s assertion and made her way back out of the building. The flashing lights when she stepped outside forced her eyes closed. Though she could usually make out the general sense of the billboards when she looked at them, she often didn’t want to – they had been created to appeal to the Wired. Without a Wire, the lofted rectangle just dazzled the ground with erratic lights, and Hazel didn’t see the need to endure the barrage to read the words.

Of course, she rarely succeeded in ignoring them. For whatever reason, the planar displays always drew her eyes – a trauma response from the day her dad had died. For days after his death, the billboards had listed the names of those killed during the Crash. Now, her eyes always rose to make sure the words were not names – or not lists of names like had run that day. Sometimes an individual would meet an untimely end, but never the hundreds. Never to look for her dad.

As usual, the feed just informed her of a generic tragedy, a failure of a dam that ended in a thousand homes flooded, fifteen deaths. It was very sad, and Hazel didn’t dismiss it, but it wasn’t the Crash. She sighed away her anxiety and finished her trek to the east end. Ten minutes later, she had settled herself at the computer next to Sophie’s bed.

Hazel could only stay a few hours, since she had to sleep at some point, but she had some things to pay attention to, and she didn’t care to manage them with limited bandwidth. For one thing, she wanted to do some digging about Manticore. She had heard rumors about players going missing, but the numbers didn’t seem particularly concerning. People stopped playing for lots of reasons, personal struggles or changes in interests. A new game had come out that had drawn a lot of Trip players away, and Hazel figured Manny had tested it out and liked it, and then had been too afraid of conflict to explain it to his team. As much as Hazel hated conflict, she certainly understood.

After she had searched for info about Manny for half an hour, she would dive into that code from Peter’s computer. Maybe getting some epic gear could make up for losing her tank. Certainly, ferreting out a mystery would provide a nice distraction from her depression over Sophie.

To get the easiest task out of the way, she immediately logged into her game, settling in against the Propaganda Ministry so she could upgrade her equipment before doing some digging. Making her way through the streets of Prussia, she sought out some of the players who had teamed with Manticore in the past. By the time she found anyone who had spoken with him in the past month, she was an hour into her play – at least she had upgraded a couple of spells on the way.

Hazel finally encountered Tazerfan, who had played with Manticore longer than anyone, including Hazel.

“So, do you have any idea why he disappeared?” Hazel prompted.

“I don’t know, to tell you the truth. All I know is that he was pumped about playing at the Partie. He talked about it for weeks, as soon as he made elite. Cloaked up bigtime. Talked about you, too. The typical anti-wireless stuff. How the reason you hadn’t made elite yet was that you weren’t Wired, all that. I think he was nervous to play without you, but he was doing the bravado thing. Then, of course, you show up right after he leaves.”

“Do you really see him giving it up like that? He’s not a Rexist,” Hazel countered. “He could’ve joined up with fifty different teams and been better than their current tank.”

“I mean, no,” Taze allowed. “But I just kind of provided myself with that explanation because nothing else makes sense. Quitting because he was nervous. Unless he got sick or something.”

With a stutter, Hazel lost sight of the screen for a moment as the thought hit her. Maybe he got sick, she considered, glancing at Sophie. The words stirred an idea in Hazel.

“Have you heard of anyone else who’s gone MIA? MadLady had an accident and is incapacitated. Now Manticore. I heard Princely and StepWise are missing, and my friend’s ranger is out. Anyone else?” It had to be a coincidence – Manny was fine, just didn’t want to play.

“I mean, I hadn’t noticed anything too weird. Pandem2102 has bowed out, but she spent a lot of time talking about how her mom wouldn’t support her anymore, and how she didn’t want to mess up their relationship. Her dad had left the mom dirt poor while he lived like a king, and she said she needed at least six sponsors at level five to stay on. Doesn’t sound like illness.”

“You don’t happen to know how I could contact her, do you?”

“I just know she’s in Europe. I’m in the Philippines, so I don’t have a lot of contact outside of play. There’s her page. Sometimes people post contact info there.”

She wondered if she or one of her friends could work out an algorithm to notify her when a Trip player went MIA. A problem for another day, she decided, glancing at the clock. “Gotta go, Taze. Time constraints.”

“Good luck with a tank.”

“Thanks.”

Hazel had played and talked so long that she had little time to dig into Pete’s message; still, she needed to take a few minutes for it. “What is going on here, Sophe?” Hazel murmured, giving Sophie’s hand a quick squeeze. Opening a prompt, Hazel typed in the trace command. On another screen, she pulled up the message forwarded from Peter’s computer. She had copied and forwarded the original message to herself, and she pulled up the file’s location on the Bridge.

In the first window, she typed in the Stream route, and a moment later, her screen spit out a series of tracers. She decided that if she could manage to locate the physical source of the message, she could identify the sender, and then could figure out how to prod or coerce her way into the Trifecta.

She read the information three times before she processed it. There was no identifier associated with the location, and the only thing she could discern was a physical address. Fortunately, though, if the tracer had read correctly, the message had originated within a five-mile radius of her apartment. She didn’t particularly relish the idea of making physical contact, but if virtual contact was out of the question…

“Well, Sophie,” Hazel peered at the screen. “I might just have to go engage with some more humanity.”

+++++++++++++++

“Who is she?” Vee wondered, staring at the feed of the woman who stood banging on the door.

“Not sure,” Rel mumbled. “She’s tall.”

Vee snorted. “You would notice that, Beanpole. Pretty, too.”

“In a Scandinavian kind of way, I guess. But irrelevant. Could be anyone. Delivery person…”

“She didn’t leave anything. She wasn’t carrying anything.”

Rel shrugged. “She’s not wired, which is unusual. Other than that, there’s nothing striking about her. Nothing linking her to Donald Yates. I can ask the neighbor with blue hair, but I think the visitor is a dead end.”

“You remember that feeling you had, Rel? In the office with Associate Director Lewellen?”

“Yeah…”

“I’m getting one of those now about the visitor. There was something about her emotion; not casual. Maybe she’s a girlfriend. Maybe she knows something. You’re a field agent now – you need to get out of the office. I think you should find her and figure out if there’s a connection. I mean, this Donnie kid is the son of your cityworks head engineer - the only person on your diagram who lives in this region. I really think you should follow every possible lead about him. Do you have anything else?”

Rel shook his head. “The kid was kind of my last hope since the engineer won’t talk to me, but Donnie’s parents moved all his stuff out a week or so ago, so he’s apparently not available to mine for information. All the cityworks employees I spoke with said the incident was an unrepeatable coincidence of timing that couldn’t happen again if someone planned it. They are certainly not concerned, and none of them blames the head engineer. I got nothing from them. Without some kind of warrant, a team of engineers, I’m not getting anywhere there.”

“And you and I both know Lewellen won’t approve that kind of Bureau investment, either because your evidence is sketchy or because he doesn’t want it to be investigated. Check out the rest of that footage I sent you. It’s only another twenty-four hours, then find the girl. Maybe she can tell us something about the kid.”

“I don’t think the son of a person of interest is going to be that relevant, but I’ll see what I can find on him. That, and I’ll hound a few of the higher up cityworks guys. It’s more than nothing – barely,” Rel huffed. “Thanks for your help, Vee.” He stood to his feet.

“You know,” she grinned, “I’m short, so I’m used to looking up at people. But I never get used to you.”

“I’m only six foot five…” he countered.

“There’s no ‘only’ about that,” Vee chuckled.

“If we’re going to be that way…” Patting her on the head, he turned and left the room. He could hear Vee’s laughter through the door after it closed.

Drifting to his cubicle, he sat down at the little desk and woke up the screen in front of him. For watching uninteresting footage at high speed, viewing on his Neurex would make him dizzy, so he turned old school for a few minutes. Fortunately, he didn’t have to watch every second since the technology marked whenever motion passed the camera. Unfortunately, the stairwell saw a lot of traffic. Each day, a delivery drone flew up to the door, no doubt sent a signal, then when no one responded, it flew above, then back down without stopping.

Rel had already watched a week’s worth of the footage, and he seriously doubted one extra day would offer much. He had a still shot of the kid, but no video footage. Honestly, he wasn’t sure if he would recognize the guy if he saw him.

Wrenched back to the screen, Rel reversed the footage ten minutes, minutes that had passed in under ten seconds at the rapid speed. Not a delivery drone. Not a flash of azure hair. A team. A whole team of doctors, nurses, techs. A stretcher. Like he had received a Jolt…

The reason he couldn’t get any information from Donald Yates was because Donald Yates was in serious medical distress.

Tapping into the mainframe, Rel searched the Bureau database to find the young man’s Wire. It was easy to access, and Rel pulled up the reading of Donald’s vitals. To his surprise, the vitals pulsed steady and within normal ranges. Slowly winding back to the time of the footage, Rel noted that the young man’s vitals never changed during the entire extrication. He wound back a little more, searching for the spike that would have signified some distress. Nothing.

Apparently, up until a week and a half ago, Donald Yates had functioned normally, his vitals following a predictable pattern from wake-up to bedtime, the occasional adrenaline rush, but nothing to signal distress. Then ten days prior, Donald Yates’s vitals had dropped to a steady thrum of subnormal maintenance. Low, steady heart rate. Minimal brain activity. Hormone levels functional. Not particularly indicative of a Jolt.

No, it almost looked like Donald Yates’s brain had just turned off.

Rel’s heartrate sped.

Tapping into the Mainframe, he ran back his Neurex feed to the little Sinorussian woman he had encountered a few days prior. Facial recognition tagged her as Zarina Saidov, sister of Firuz Aliev, head of the Central Pollution Control Board.

What were the chances that two of his hundred or so incidents involved a child whose parent ran important parts of the infrastructure and where that child had now met with catastrophic brain injury? Not likely; those are the chances. He wondered exactly how much evidence he would need before Lewellen would have no choice but to pay attention. Someone – or had to be more than one someone – maybe carrying around a stave or two and putting down young adults with a Jolt? It was heart wrenching.

Perhaps the young woman on the feed knew nothing about Mr. Yates, but if Rel could find her, maybe she could provide some evidence beyond a hunch.