Chapter 3.1 Traitor
Inner-Sector 1 — Resonance Tower 47F, 09:12
Rain streaked the corridor windows, but inside the lab the air hung thick with silence. Dr. Arvid Halden was pinned to the steel bulkhead like a specimen—arms spread wide, palms perforated by two industrial driver-bolts the size of a child's thumb. His bare feet dangled five centimetres above the floor, casting a shadow crucifix across the white tiles.
Blood had traced twin paths down the wall and, before drying, someone dragged a finger sideways between the streams to write a single word over his head— TRAITOR.
Clean work. Deliberate work. Nothing left to chance.
Sub-Inspector Mara Vahl stopped at the threshold, breath catching in her throat. The metallic tang of ozone mixed with iron knotted her stomach. She counted—one, two, three—a habit that kept her from saying what she really thought. Then she raised her pocket-cam with trembling fingers and captured the scene.
The lock hissed behind her.
Mara straightened instinctively as Praetor-Marshal Lysander Sorin entered without ceremony, his black coat shedding rain like scales. She'd only worked under the Marshal twice before—both times she'd been terrified of disappointing him. His pale eyes swept the room with the same cold efficiency she remembered: the body, the empty ceiling rails where surveillance drones should have been hovering, the overturned stool beneath Halden's feet.
"Aurora programme," she said, forcing herself to sound professional. "Dr. Arvid Halden, lead engineer. Time of death approximately oh-six-fifty. Security feed went dark for twenty minutes starting at oh-six-thirty. And this corner…" She gestured toward the bulkhead. "It's a blind spot."
In Sector 1—the innermost ward where the mean CIS hovers above eighty-five and no violent incident has been logged in decades—the idea of a deliberate killing, let alone the execution of a highranked scientist, was unthinkable. Whatever did this hadn't merely overridden every safeguard; it splintered the belief that the core was inviolate
Sorin moved closer, the soles of his boots silent on the lab floor. He crouched beneath the hanging body, studying the angle of the bolts. "Killer had to lift him into position. Someone strong, or someone with equipment."
Mara forced herself to look at the scene professionally. The single latex glove on the workbench. The absence of footprints in the pooled blood. The way rain dripped through the shattered skylight above, running down Halden's forehead like a mockery of benediction.
"Why display him?" she asked. Her voice sounded steadier than she felt. "If someone wanted him dead, why not just… disappear him?"
Sorin stood, his gaze moving to the desk where a plastic crucifix lay in two pieces—snapped from the wall shrine that now hung empty and broken. "Because death wasn't the point. The message was."
Beyond the lab's windows, Sector 1 spread out in perfect geometric precision. Dawn light caught the terraced avenues, the gliding trams, the pristine streets where crime statistics stayed at zero. Far off, the Hudson River gleamed in a soft arc, and at its center a new pale-gold statue rose from its own platform, thin spokes of light fanning from its lowered arms across the water. From this height, the world below still looked flawless.
But something had crawled into paradise.
"Sir," Mara said, watching Sorin examine a smear on the door handle. "The work schedule shows he wasn't supposed to be here until oh-eight-hundred. Someone called him in early."
Sorin pressed adhesive film to the mark, peeled it away. The residue showed only a ghost of a fingerprint, blurred at the edges as if the skin itself had refused to leave a trace. "Someone who knew his patterns. Someone with access."
He handed her the sample. "Process this. Full spectrum analysis."
Mara pocketed the evidence, her thumb working nervous circles against her palm. The small ritual helped steady her hands. "Crime scene lockdown?"
"The entire floor. And Vahl?" Sorin paused at the door, his reflection ghostlike in the rain-streaked glass. He lifted one gloved finger to his lips—a wordless order to speak of this to no one. "Keep the news feeds away from this. Whatever's happening here, it's bigger than one dead scientist."
She nodded, activating her comm. "This is Sub-Inspector Vahl. Priority lockdown, Resonance Tower floors forty-five through fifty. Immediate effect."
When she looked up, Sorin was gone, leaving only the soft hiss of rain and the weight of questions she couldn't yet ask. The twin bolts caught the morning light like tiny suns—bright, perfect, and impossibly wrong in Sector 1's ordered world.
The lift chimed softly in the corridor outside. Heavy boots echoed against polished floors—multiple sets, moving in formation. Mara glanced toward the doorway as the first uniform appeared: Sector Police, regulation grey, their faces professionally blank as they took in the scene.
Behind them glided two Analysis Units, their chrome shells reflecting the lab's harsh lighting. The lead unit's sensor array swept the room with mechanical precision, recording everything in clinical detail.
"Forensics team," the senior officer announced, nodding briefly at Mara. "Standard sweep and documentation."
She watched the AI units move past her toward the body, their movements eerily synchronized. One began photographing the scene from multiple angles while the other extended sample collectors toward the blood spatter. Their quiet efficiency made the violence seem almost sterile.
For a moment Mara wondered if a rebel infiltrator had slipped all the way into Sector 1—but Sorin's silent warning at the door still pressed like a finger across her lips. Don't guess, not yet.
Mara took one last look at the broken crucifix on the desk, then stepped back as the team filled the small space. Whatever message the killer had left, she had the feeling they were only just beginning to understand it.
Mara left Resonance Tower just after 10:30, audio-recorder still warm in her pocket. She'd spent the last half-hour taking a statement from Halden's deputy—Drissa Keene, all dark circles and trembling hands—who swore she knew nothing, except that the air in the lab had tasted wrong for days, like hot metal and dust.
The rain outside had faded to a mist, but Mara's coat still carried the tang of cauterised blood—a scent she tried to drown with hot coffee from the corner kiosk. Sector 1's glazed footpaths shone pearl-white; commuters moved in quiet rows, wrists brushing the low guide-rails that tracked their metrics. No one looked up.
She found a recessed bench under a transit awning—thirty seconds before her mother's daily holocall. Punctual as sunrise.
"Morning, Maruška."
The familiar pet name softened the edges of the last two hours. Her mother's face hovered palm-sized above the cup, hair wrapped in the regulation scarf of the Outer Nursing Guild. They spoke about trivialities: the scarcity of decent tea leaves, whether Mara was eating enough, a cousin's engagement request. Mara answered in short, steady pulses, careful not to let the crime-scene grit bleed through her voice.
When the guardian-bell chimed seven-fifty-nine, her mother asked if she'd slept.
"A little," Mara lied.
"Good. Body and spirit, both need rest," the older woman said, making the sign of the halo. "You'll visit for Renewal next month?"
"Of course," Mara promised, though she couldn't imagine leaving the core anytime soon.
The call ended. The kiosk window reflected her own face: clipped brown hair escaping its pins, eyes ringed faint violet. Sorin's finger-to-lips warning replayed in her head. Don't talk. Don't assume.
She tossed the cup, straightened her collar—and her wrist comm lit amber with an urgent tag from Sorin.
Sorin: "I need a quick tree of Halden's contacts for the last seventy-two hours. Flag anyone with facility clearance or a missed biometric check-in. Have a provisional suspect list on my desk in the control center by fourteen-hundred."
"On it, Marshal," Mara answered, already opening the access logs.
The comm's glow settled into a steady pulse, a silent metronome counting down the hours.
Mara exhaled through her teeth. So much for coffee.
Mara returned to the evidence alcove just after eleven, coat still damp at the hem. The scene-tech AIs had finished their sweep hours ago, issuing a terse preliminary: thermal-edge cautery, residual quartz particulate consistent with deep-vent maintenance dust.
Sorin had taken their printed report—and Halden's bolt, now sealed in a polymer vial—down a staff-only lift for his own tests, leaving her with the crumbs. Fine. She had her own questions.
A portable spectrometer sat on the counter—Sorin's, judging by the muted-grey casing and the dings along its edge. Quartz dust still coated the sampling plate in a faint amber film.
Mara set her wrist-pad to local only, thumbed the privacy toggle, then called up PIX.
PIX (whisper-mode): "Sub-Inspector! You've entered a restricted workspace without registering an evidence chain. Naughty."
Mara: "Stow it. Run an offline scrape: Halden's outgoing messages, past forty-eight hours—no routing logs, just headers. Filter for maintenance staff."
PIX: "Digesting crumbs… This may void your warranty."
Tiny progress glyphs spiraled across the pad while she slid the quartz-laden plate beneath the spectrometer lens. The readout stabilized: VENT-GRADE SILICA // 97% purity. She snapped a pic, saved it to a hidden folder labelled "dust-trail."
Quartz that pure was only stocked in shaft-repair kits. And there was just one shaft on this floor scheduled for filter replacement yesterday—Shaft 200-B, the same vent line Keene swore was "breathing wrong."
Her comm buzzed—PIX again, quieter now.
PIX: "Results! Nine messages from Halden to 'YUN.P' and 'SATO.L', encryption shell Δ-Cipher. Subjects blank, timestamps clustered between 03:40 and 04:10. That's your witching hour."
Mara: "Any replies?"
PIX: "Zero. Both recipients dark after 04:30."
Mara: "Flag them, store local only."
She pulled a paper mask over her mouth—inner protocol said spectators could contaminate samples with a single breath—and slid the quartz plate back where she'd found it. A faint ridge of dust remained on the counter; she touched it with a gauze swab and slipped the swab into her own evidence pouch. If Sorin had plans for the main sample, she'd keep a spare.
PIX: "Shall I file a custody note, or are we playing pirate today?"
Mara: "Pirate, but discreet. And kill your auto-backups."
PIX: "Backups… accidentally misplaced. Oops."
Mara sealed the pouch, checked the corridor: empty, humming with low HVAC. She tucked the spectrometer back exactly as she'd found it, then headed for the service core. Shaft 200-B waited eight storeys down; Sorin had set the sweep for fourteen-hundred, but nothing said she couldn't get there first.