“I’ll interrogate anyone left in the building after we finish here,” the Partial said.

What a pleasure that’ll be for them.

Still, Finch didn’t volunteer to do it. Not yet. Maybe after. Not much worse than door-to-door interviews in unfriendly places. Many didn’t believe his job should exist.

“What do you think, Finch?” Heretic asked. Just a hint of mischief in that voice. Laced with it. Just enough to catch the nuance.

I think I just walked in the door a few minutes ago.

The bodies lay next to each other, beside the sofa.

Finch frowned. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

The man lay on his side, left hand stretched out toward the gray cap’s hand. The gray cap lay facedown, arms flopped out at right angles.

“Might be a foreigner. From the clothes.”

The man could’ve been forty-five or fifty, with dark brown hair, dark eyebrows, and a beard that appeared to be made from tendrils of fungus. That wasn’t unusual. But his clothes were. He wore a blue shirt long out of fashion. Strange, tight-fitting long pants. Dirty black boots.

“He’s not from the city,” Heretic said. Again, an inflection that bothered Finch. A statement or a question?

What’s on his mind?

Finch squatted beside the bodies. Took out his useless pen and his useless pad of paper. Above him, the Partial leaned over to take a picture.

The dead gray cap looked like every other gray cap. Except for the one glaring lack.

“I don’t know what caused the injury to the other one, sir.”

I don’t know what caused the leg situation.

“When we find out,” Heretic said, “we will be just as understated.”

The exposed cross section, cut almost precisely at the waist, fascinated Finch. He almost forgot himself, poked at the tissue with his pen.

The cut had been so clean, so precise, that there was no tearing. No hemorrhaging. Finch could see layers. Gray. Yellow. Green. A core of dark red. (A question he was too cautious to ask: Was it always that dark, or only in death?) Within the core, Finch saw a hint of organs.

“Is this … normal?” Finch asked Heretic.

“Normal?”

“The lack of blood, I mean, sir,” Finch said.

Gray caps bled. Finch knew that. Not like a stream or a gout, even when you cut them deep, but a steady drip from a leaky faucet. Puncture wounds healed almost immediately. It took a long time and a lot of patience to kill a gray cap.

“No, it’s not normal.” The humid weight of Heretic was at his side now. A smell like garbage and burnt glass. Made him nauseous.

“None of this is normal,” the Partial ventured. Ignored.

Finch looked up at Heretic. From that angle: the pale wattled skin of Heretic’s long throat.

“Do you know who…” Finch hesitated. Gray caps didn’t like being called “gray caps,” but Finch couldn’t pronounce the word they did use. Farseneeni or fanaarcensitii? The Partial circled them, blinking pictures through his fungal eye.