Can you show me where Mr…. er… Robertson was?”
We go down the aisle of cryo chambers marked 75-100, and stop at Number 100.
Amy reaches toward the empty tray with shaking fingers. I wonder if she’s imagining her parents on that tray, or herself. Before her fingers actually touch it, though, she snatches back her hand and holds it against her.
“So, what should we be doing?” I ask, trying to distract her from whatever thoughts she’s having that are making her draw into herself.
Amy steps back, looks at the ground. Her eyes scan the bare, clean floor, then rove over the clinically neat room.
“I don’t know what I expected to find,” Amy says. “I guess I thought this was like a cop show, and I’d come down here and find a fiber that I could match to Eldest’s shirt, or a blood drop we could DNA test, but I don’t even know if you have DNA testing here—”
“The biometric scanners read DNA,” I interject, but she’s not listening to me.
“Or maybe a giant fingerprint…” Her voice trails off. “Harley’s art supplies,” she says. She looks me fully in the face. “Harley’s art supplies!”
“What?”
“Harley has brushes. And he sketched me with charcoal before he started painting me. He’s got everything I need.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” I say, but I’m smiling too, because she’s gotten back that spark of life she’d lost when she first got off the elevator.
“Harley!” she calls, jumping up and heading toward the end of the aisle. “Harley!”
I have no idea why she needs them. I just know that I’d face another Plague to get them for her if I had to. Fortunately, it’s a lot easier than that.
“Com link: Harley,” I say, pressing my wi-com.
“What?” Harley’s voice asks impatiently in my ear.
“Get your art box.”
“Where’s the hatch with the stars? There are a lot of doors and hatches and things down here, but they’re all locked.”
“Go get us your art box first.”
“If I do, will you tell me which hatch leads to the stars?”
“Yup.”
“Done,” Harley says, and he disconnects the com link.
“What is that thing?” Amy asks me after a moment, when she’s sure I’m done talking with Harley. “I thought you all had tiny headsets or something, but that’s actually embedded in your
I brush my wi-com button with my fingers. “It’s a wi-com. Wireless communication link.”
“Does it hurt?”
I laugh. “No.”
“So cool,” Amy exhales, leaning in. Her soft, warm breath tickles the hairs near my ear. “It’s like a phone built into your ear.”
Her fingers brush the raised skin over my wi-com. My breath catches. She’s right in front of me, tantalizingly close. Amy bites her lip, and all I want to do is seize her, crush her against me, feel her lips with mine.
Then she steps back, dropping her hand, an unreadable expression on her face.
“Doc can, uh, get you one if you like,” I say, trying to ignore how much I want to grab her and pull her back to me.
Amy’s hands fly to the side of her neck, below her left ear. Her fingers smooth the skin. “No,” she says. “I don’t think I’d like one yet.”
Harley shows up a few moments later. He dumps his art box at our feet. I can tell part of him just wants to run off and open the hatch to the stars, but he’s also curious about what we’ll do with his art stuff. For that matter, so am I.
Amy rifles through the box, bypassing jars of paint, nubs of pencils, and scraps of paper. She finally pulls out a pile of charcoal wrapped in thin cloth. Then she smashes it on the ground.
“Hey!” Harley shouts. “I have to make that myself.”
“I need the powder,” Amy says, pulverizing the black bits of charcoal.
“Why?”
Amy grins. “Just watch.”
After selecting one of Harley’s loosest, biggest brushes, she runs the bristles through the black powder, and then twirls the brush over the surface of the morgue door.
“Please work, please work, please work,” she chants as she dusts the metal with a fine coat of powder. Her breath catches.
The powder reveals the whorls and swirls of a fingerprint.
Amy laughs. “Now if there was only a simple way to tell whose fingerprint this was!”
I’m one step ahead of her. “Try this,” I say, kneeling beside her with the floppy from the desk at the end of the aisle. I hold the digital membrane over the fingerprint and press scan. The print shows up on the display in seconds.
“Now,” I say, tapping on the screen, “all I have to do is match this with the biometric scanners… ”
“Wow,” Amy says under her breath. I grin at her.
The floppy beeps.
“Well?” Harley asks, leaning over my shoulder.
“Mine. I was down here with Doc; that’s my print.”
“It says ‘Eldest/Elder,’ ” Harley says, pointing to the screen. “It could be Eldest.”
Amy looks up eagerly, but I shake my head. “We have the same access in the computer — it always shows both our names on biometric scans. But I checked the wi-com locator map earlier, and he wasn’t down here. That has to be my print.”
“Try some more,” Harley tells Amy, and she eagerly turns back to the door with her brush and powder. I scan every print she finds, but the only ones clear enough to scan are four of Doc’s and twelve of mine. Most of the prints are smudged or overlapped to the point of uselessness.
“Found another one,” Amy says, brushing charcoal dust over the top of the cryo chambers. “Is this you?”
“I don’t remember touching there,” I say.
Amy’s eyes glisten. “Maybe this is the murderer!” she says, excitement creeping back into her voice.
I hold the floppy over the print and scan it in. The print is wide and fat — a thumb. A thin jagged line slices its way through the whorls.
“What’s that?” Harley asks as the floppy zooms in on the print.
Amy looks over my shoulder at it. “Maybe nothing — but it looks kind of like a scar, doesn’t it?”
“Eldest/Elder,” flash the words over the thumbprint.
“Another one of yours.” Amy sighs, her face falling. She turns back to the cryo chamber, but she brushes the charcoal dust across the surface as if it were achingly heavy.
“You have a scar on your thumb?” Harley asks.
I inspect my thumbs, even though I know there is no scar there connecting the ridges of my thumbprint.
“He could have just had something on his thumb when he touched the cryo chamber,” Amy says without looking up. “Something that got between the surface and his thumb.”
But I hadn’t touched there.
I know I hadn’t.
Amy picks up the floppy. “Are you sure, absolutely
“Positive. Right after we found Mr. Robertson I checked the wi-com locator map. He wasn’t down here.”
Amy blows air out her nostrils like an angry bull. “I still think he could have—”
