Titan Song Dan Stout (top 20 books to read txt) 📖

shadows with a corpse. I forced myself to turn away from the fires and closed my ears to the screams. The sinkhole might have been a natural disaster or it might have been an intentional act. If it was intentional, then the body in my arms could be the key to unraveling what had caused this nightmare. I started forward again, leaving others to continue the immediate process of saving lives.

I stumbled against the side of the Hasam, dust sticking to my sweat-soaked shirt turning into mud and dripping down in thin rivulets. I managed to shoulder the door open, tip the seat forward, and slide the body into the back seat. It was far from an ideal way to handle potential evidence, but there wasn’t much choice, given the situation.

Chest heaving, I stared down at the body in the back seat. The corpse was clad in a nondescript dark suit, and quality shirt and tie. Classic styling that made it hard to say whether it had lain underground for months or years. Digging in my pocket, I pulled out the PD shield that had been beneath the body. I didn’t know Jax’s badge number, but to see a badge that clean, with the numbers and shield crisp and unworn, I had no doubt it was his.

We had to learn what happened, because whoever had put it there had tried to implicate us in the body’s presence. But now wasn’t the time, not with a sinkhole claiming an unmeasured cost in lives and property. I drew a ragged breath and glanced around. It was the best I could do, and I hoped it would take. Another screech of metal on metal pulled me to the streets. Outside, the fires spread in the buildings alongside the sinkhole, lighting their silhouettes against the night. I pushed closer, my lungs filling with dust and the candy-sweet smell of fire foam. All around heroes rushed to help those in need, a mix of first responders and regular people coming together to save lives. There was determination in their eyes, but also fear.

We couldn’t even trust the ground we walked on, and every shiver, every tremor made us stare at our feet, silently praying we wouldn’t see it tumble away, opening up to blackness below. But the everyday heroes worked on, and I did my best to keep up with them.

It was into the early morning hours when I made it back to the Hasam. I was happy to see that the car and body were as I left them. I had borrowed water from the medics to wash the ash and dust from my face, and picked up a fresh coffee. I figured that was all I really needed before I got started.

I sat in the front seat and stared past the headrest, studying the corpse. I tried to remember exactly how he had been positioned in the sinkhole. He must have been moved to plant the badge, but the sinkhole had poured so much debris into the whole area that it was all covered with a uniform layer of dust.

I didn’t see an immediate cause of death, and he’d been damaged when I carried him out. One leg and chunks of his torso had fallen off, left behind in my abrupt and violent exit from the sinkhole. Still, he had coat and pants, and that meant there was a chance I’d find identification. I flipped open his coat, noticing that the collar was open and tie loosened. Not unlike the way that Mollenkampi dress to provide more room for their speaking mouths. But the skeleton was clearly human, which meant that he had likely been warm at one point. The fact that he still wore a jacket made me question how warm or cold he could’ve gotten. I found a few old pens and scraps of paper with meaningless notes jotted on them, and I found a necklace with a ba, the symbol of the Infinite Path, around his neck. Finally in his pants pocket I found a wallet that held a few dozen bills of various denominations, and a pair of IDs. One a driver’s license, expired decades ago, and the other a laminated identification emblazoned with interlocking circles of the AFS. That card gave his name as Tanis Klein, along with the title Assistant to Ambassadorial Sector.

A sudden rap on the windshield startled me, and I spun to face the intruder. DO Auberjois stood outside the Hasam, eyes fixed on the mummified corpse in the back seat. Eventually he motioned for me to roll down the window.

I did, and handed over the ID and driver’s license. “He had these on him.”

Auberjois studied the ID for far longer than it would’ve taken to simply read it. He was a smart man, and I suspected he was doing the political calculations of whether it was worth the risk to confront the ambassador about this corpse. The decedent was clearly part of the AFS delegation, and the date on the license placed him in the time frame of Paulus’s ascent to power. Add in the TPD badge, and it was a perfectly gift-wrapped present for someone like Auberjois, who harbored a deep dislike of Paulus and distrusted me. The question was, how would he react?

Auberjois placed one hand on the roof of the Hasam and bent low, head almost sticking through the open window. “Why the Hells didn’t you hand him over to a tech team?”

“They’re occupied. Plus, I opted to skip the scene documentation, since there were cars falling on it at the time.” That was true as far as it went, though the real reason I was studying the body alone was that I wanted to make sure there weren’t any other surprises like Ajax’s badge hidden away. Someone was planting evidence in order to implicate me or my partner, and it had been pure luck that I’d found it first.

He raised a hand to his head plates, tracing