Sorrow Space Read Online Free PDF Page B

he exited the school premises, back out into the driving rain.
    * * *
    T HE KID RAN IN THE SAME social circle, but he was smart already. Smart enough to know what his classmates wanted and how to package it for them in bite-size chunks that he could sell for a tidy profit. Where he was getting the ingredients from was still a mystery to Kane, but he would find that out in time.
    Magistrate Kane didn’t bother to knock when he reached the Pelleritos’ apartment; he just walked right in. The Program of Unification had decreed that no citizen of the villes could have a lock on his or her door; trust was expected of every person if society was to function.
    Jerod Pellerito wasn’t home, and his parents, well, they weren’t anywhere at all. Later, Kane would discover that Jerod had slipped through the net after his parents had been hurt in an engineering accident at the plant where they both worked. Now, the mother was dead and the father was in a coma in the medical facility, just as he had been the past seven months and would probably be for the next seven, at the very least. Their son, the fourteen-year-old Jerod, had been left with a lot of time to explore Cobaltville without supervision, and he had made some new friends in the undercity where things were a little closer to lawlessness than the Magistrates would care to admit.
    Kane stood at the open door, listening. A short corridor stretched back from the front door, tunneling into the meager apartment in the residential complex, the same rabbit warren as everyone else. The apartment was all straight lines, dominated by a large living area with a single, flat window that looked out over west Cobaltville. The light from the far window was filtered through the heavy rainclouds, casting the interior in a miasma of shadows and gloom.
    Stepping over the threshold, Kane powered his Sin Eater handgun into his hand from its hiding place in the wrist holster beneath his right sleeve. The weapon seemed to take shape in Kane’s hand, extending to its full fourteen inches in length, a stubby muzzle jutting from its cruel, black body. The official side arm of the Magistrate Division, the Sin Eater was equipped with 9 mm rounds. The trigger had no guard, as the necessity had never been foreseen that any kind of safety features for the weapon would ever be required. A Magistrate’s judgment was, after all, above suspicion. Kane held his finger straight as the weapon slapped into the palm of his hand; if his index finger had been crooked the pistol would have begun firing automatically.
    Warily, Kane took a step into the apartment. He didn’t expect trouble, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t come. Kane nosed into the dark apartment, the Sin Eater stretched out before him in a two-handed grip. Kane listened with preternatural intensity, his fabled point-man sense reaching out to try to detect possible dangers. The apartment buzzed and clicked as the hot water churned in the tank and the refrigerator hummed to itself, but there was nothing out of the ordinary.
    “Magistrate business,” Kane called out, breaking the silence. “Anyone home?” His words echoed back to him from hard walls and empty rooms, but no one else made a sound.
    Pushing the front door closed silently behind him, Kane entered the apartment, the Sin Eater still poised in his hands. As he reached the end of the short corridor, Kane brushed one hand close to the wall, triggering the motion sensor that fed the overhead lights. The lights snapped on, dimming for a moment as they found a comfortable lighting level to complement the rain filtered gloom.
    The apartment was empty; Kane was sure of that now. It smelled of dust and unwashed clothes and of something else—grease and oil, like a mechanic’s bench.
    Kane looked around. Though it was empty, the apartment was not without interest to a Magistrate. Few were. The main living space had been converted into what appeared to be a workshop, reminding Kane a little