“Pretty sure he took out at least one person a week for the Ratel, between his other duties. With all his schmoozing, he could gain access to places many members of the Ratel couldn’t. For all that, though they trusted him, I doubt he was in their very inner circle, though he was hoping to be. He’d had a lot of mods and upgrades to his body, according to the autopsy.” He pauses to scroll through the medical chart. “Muscle implants and nanobots, almost an entirely new face, a prosthetic hand with skin grafts, new teeth. He even changed the shape of his ears. So whoever he was before, he wanted to make sure we’d never know, not even in death.”

I swallow. “Can I … go into the crime scene for a closer look?” I ask, my mouth dry.

“Yes.” His eyes go distant as he accesses the controls with his ocular implant, and the bubble pops. Carefully tiptoeing around the blood, I ignore the body, as that’s not what catches my attention. I look closer at the coffee table.

My fingertips hover over the items on the table.

“Can I move things?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

I reach out and move the glass with the lipstick print. I can’t feel it. It’s like I’m holding air. There’s a chip on the rim. It had fallen over, but Tila had put it to rights before she left. Below where the glass was is a hasty carving of five points. Next to it are a few other scratches. The glass falls from my hand and slides back to its original position on the coffee table.

“She didn’t stab the coffee table. She carved it,” I whisper.

Nazarin looks over the crime scene notes. “They noticed those. Five points. That’s the symbol for the Hearth, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” I haven’t seen that simple design in a long time. Why did she leave it here? She hates the Hearth as much as I do.

“We couldn’t make any sense of these, though,” Nazarin says, nodding toward the dashes and dots, almost like Morse code. “No language or code we could figure out.”

I shrug, not wanting to tell him, looking at other things.

“You understand those markings,” he says. “I can tell.”

I debate lying, and then decide it’s pointless. “It’s an alphabet Tila and I made up when we were children, so we could write notes to each other nobody else would understand.”

“She knew you’d see it.” Detective Nazarin scratches the stubble at his chin. The muscles of his bicep flex under his shirt, and I’m reminded of how much larger and stronger than me he is. He’s suspicious. And why shouldn’t he be?