No point checking the gray cap. Their skin didn’t retain marks or burns or stab wounds. Anything like that sealed over. Besides, the cause of the gray cap’s death was obvious. Wasn’t it? Still, he didn’t want to assume murder. Yet.

Out of the four “murders” in his sector over the past year, two had been suicides and one had been natural causes. The fourth solved in a day. Disappearances were another subject altogether.

He stood. Looked down at the tableau formed by the dead. Something about it. Almost posed. Almost staged. But also: the man’s neck, half hidden by the shirt collar. Was it … twisted? Who could tell with the gray cap. Impossibly long, smooth, gray neck. (Did that mean Heretic was old, this one young?) But also torqued.

Finch glanced up at the tired, sagging ceiling. About ten feet.

“They look like,” Finch said. “They look like they both fell.”

Could that be the sound the neighbors heard?

“The spore camera’s first shot is of them on the floor,” the Partial said.

Finch had forgotten him.

Turned, stared at the Partial. The Partial stared back. Taking Finch’s photo with each blink.

“I could…”

“What?” the Partial said. “You could what?”

I could tear out your eye with my bare hands. Not a thought he’d seen coming.

“You know what I think?” the Partial said.

Finch tamped down on his irritation. Tried to remember that, in a way, none of the Partials were more than six years old. Disaffected youths no matter what their age. All pale. Or made pale. Humans who’d gotten fungal infections and liked it, Truff help them. Got an adrenaline rush from heightened powers of sight. Enhanced by fungal drugs autogenerated inside the eye. Pumped into the brain. In a sense, their eye was always looking back at them.

I’ll never know what you think. Not in a million years.

“You volunteered for that,” Finch said. Pointed at the Partial’s eye. “That makes you crazy. So I don’t need to know what you think.”

The Partial snickered. “I’ve heard it all before. And you’ll never know what you’re missing … But here’s what I think, whether you want it or not. That man’s not really human. Not really. I should know, right? And something went wrong. And maybe they didn’t die here but were, I don’t know, moved.”

Finch gave the Partial a long glance. Turned to kneel again by the man’s body. The second half of what the Partial had said made less sense than the first.

“Just do your job.” I’ll do mine.

The Partial fell silent. Hurt? Seduced by something new to click?

Finch really didn’t care. Something had caught his attention. Two fingers of the man’s left hand. Curled tight into the palm. Grit or sand under the fingernails. Finch got to his knees, leaned forward, took the man’s hand in his. The warmth of it surprised him, the green spores already ghosting into the flesh. He pried the fingers back. Revealed a ragged piece of paper. A pulse-pounding moment of excitement.