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

necks, looking up to the voice. Another worker scampered off to find patrol cops. The red-faced man pointed to us. “Sounds like they’re playing your song, Parker.”

I exhaled and looked at Ajax. He shrugged. The labor was far less taxing for someone in his physical condition. “Let’s go see what they need.”

We picked our way through the debris field and badged the engineers. They stepped away, revealing another ledge like the one I’d fallen onto the previous night. They’d pulled aside a layer of rocks and jagged chunks of demolished steel, revealing a slight depression in the wall, almost a protective alcove. Beneath a pile of shattered windshield glass was another mummified body.

I stepped closer and crouched down for a better view.

The body was weathered and misshapen from mummification but still recognizable as that of a young girl. Maybe fourteen years of age, she was human, with wispy dark hair clinging to the desiccated scalp. She wore a maroon jumpsuit, cinched with a dark gray belt. It looked like the kind of thing that might be assigned to a prisoner at a juvenile detention facility. The face was leathered and taut, dehydrated, with just the hint of the dimpled chin that I knew so well. The mummified girl was a younger version of Gellica, and of Ambassador Paulus.

For a moment I wasn’t clinging to the side of a sinkhole at the foot of the Mount. Instead, I was in my kitchen, listening as Gellica told me her greatest secret, that she hadn’t been born, she’d been grown. Paulus had made a dozen attempts to obtain immortality, and the closest she’d come was a half-human, half-magical clone: Gellica, who’d grown up knowing that her sisters had died and been disposed of. I was looking at proof that even that insanity had been a lie. The body before us was simply a teenage girl to the others; I knew it was far more. Jax’s badge may have been planted, but the mummified body of Paulus’s clone meant the intrusion in the geo-vents had more secrets than we’d believed.

I pressed a hand to my hip, peering at the body and doing my best to not let any of those thoughts show.

“Carter?” Jax pointed toward the body. “Around her neck.”

The brittle fabric of a lanyard held an ID. I brushed away glass shards and flipped the ID. Paulus’s photo stared back at me. Below the photo was her name and title of Ambassadorial Envoy. That dated it to Paulus’s ascent to power, when she was simply an old-money aristocrat beginning to flex her political muscle. Had the girl stolen Paulus’s ID? Was it given to her? Only she and Paulus knew, and one of them wasn’t talking.

Around us, the engineers were muttering. One of them, a young Mollenkampi woman whose mandibles trembled excitedly, said, “She must have been in here for years. There were people in here for years!”

I winced. As word got out about this, rumors and speculation would grow. We’d quickly become yet another high-profile case.

Crouching beside me, Jax spoke in a whisper. “She was curled up in a small alcove in that cavern. She wasn’t with the other body; she wasn’t stretched out searching for rescue. You know what I think she was doing?”

I stared into her eye sockets, dry voids begging for help, for justice. “Yeah,” I said. “You think she was hiding.”

“So,” Jax tapped a tusk as he peered at the body of the victim, “why would a child be hiding in a cavern that shouldn’t exist, from an adult who worked for the AFS?”

“I don’t know.” I let the ID fall back to the dead girl’s chest. “But I know who we can ask.”

We needed to talk to Paulus. We needed to do it immediately. And that meant we needed help from Captain Bryyh.

I wheeled my desk chair across the Bullpen and settled outside Bryyh’s office, to be sure I didn’t miss her. I’d just started to doze off when she arrived. She paused in front of me, took one look at my filthy clothes, and simply sighed. Her exhaustion was as obvious in her slumped posture as it was in her bloodshot eyes.

“Wake up, Carter.”

“Hey, Cap.” I waved to Jax, and he headed over to meet us.

Bryyh pulled back a lip, and looked at Jax’s outfit dubiously, but didn’t upbraid me further. “What do you want?” she said as we followed her into her office. “And don’t you sit down in here. You’ll dirty up my furniture.” That was mildly laughable, as the dust still hung in the air, even indoors, clinging to her braids, making them look even grayer than usual.

Regardless, we stayed on our feet as Bryyh dropped her purse behind the desk and took a seat. I briefed her on the body I’d found during the sinkhole collapse, and additional ones we’d just uncovered, and the IDs that tied them to the AFS. I didn’t mention the detective badge I’d found beneath the body.

“The AFS.” Bryyh closed her eyes. “What would anyone be doing in the vents, let alone the federal government?”

“It’s not like it’s without precedent,” I said. “There was that pawnbroker who tunneled into the bank on the far side of his block. I don’t remember his name.”

Her hands were folded in her lap, her ever-present frown more thoughtful than fierce. “Jabez. I still think he was set up.”

“But the tunnel was real. And there are cases of stashes burrowed to hide drugs, weapons, even people.”

“Small-time hoods and bank robbers. You’re talking about government employees. What would white-collar workers want with that kind of crime?”

“Titanshaders don’t mess with geo-vents,” I said. “Too much social conditioning. But the feds? They don’t give a damn about what we think, or what their games might do to our city.”

“Paulus was born in Titanshade.”

“She’s the exception,” I said. “She doesn’t care about anything but her own power, and she’d have a staff of federal workers to coerce into doing whatever she said.”

Bryyh