The Watchers: A Space Opera Novella Read Online Free PDF Page B

movement. I split once. Twice. Three times. Eight threads roam the city. I keep it to eight, any more would start to hurt. I hop through people, skimming as many as I can as fast as I can.
    The air smells like fresh rain rising up from hot concrete. I can smell the moisture in the air through the people I skim, the exhaust from vehicles, the food from vendors, even the wet metal from the rising buildings—all smells the majority of the people are blind to. But I’m not. They’ve never spent any time on a space station, breathing, smelling filtered air.
    I stay high above them and resist the urge to go deeper, to experience the city more fully. Thousands of concerns and needs flood through me as I hop through the citizens of Braquito: I’m running late; what should I get my spouse for a birthday; I’m married—That women is smiling at me—I’m married; I haven’t eaten in five hours; and on and on it goes.
    I shift through them by imagining a filter tuned to basic human needs and apply it. Now the leftover thoughts are more specific: The import tax will crush small businesses, and the owner doesn’t have the resources to deal with all of that paperwork; the Grunken staged military drills in the Natau sector, will their child be redeployed; the DNA profiling law of Evaga is a prudent course of action, should it be applied here?
    And there it was. Of the thousands I’ve skimmed, only four are thinking of Evaga. That in and of itself is an answer of sorts. I pull back on the rest and delve deeper into the four. They have no knowledge of the events on Evaga. I check the front of the papers; I stop to watch their broadcasts. No word. Nothing.
    What has happened to Karon and his family?
    How much time do I have left?
    I skim the next largest city, Marto, quickly. Nothing.
    Evaga is twelve parsecs away, which is nothing when the speed of thought is involved.
    Several seconds later I’m back at the hospital on Evaga. The birthing room from before is cordoned off. Flashing yellow tape, with a warning message scrawling across it is stuck to the entrance of the room. There’s no one here. Blood—Karon’s blood—is still on the floor. The window is open.
    A police officer passes by the room outside. Her name is Shannan Wyer. She’s on guard duty and bitter about it. She is taking the detective’s test next week and so missed out on a high-profile case by one week. It would’ve been the perfect way to jump-start her career, to track down the mother and her baby.
    There . Sumiko and Branden live. What about Karon?
    Officer Wyer continues to brood about her missed opportunity. I toy with asking her directly, but avoid it for now. All I need to do is gently nudge her in the right direction. I suggest to her mind the image of her handcuffing Sumiko, of it being played out in the broadcasts and the picture plastered all over the nets.
    She runs with it from there. Working backwards from that imagined point to the present. She would release the information that the husband was dead—
    Karon is dead. The information doesn’t hurt as I thought it would; it was almost clinical.
    —The wife managed to escape before he died. The information would cause the wife grief and that would lead her to make a mistake. They had tracked her to the vicinity of Old Industrial. She was certainly holed up somewhere in there—
    Where? Where is Old Industrial? I don’t want to go deeper—I’m already beginning to feel excited at the thought of finding and arresting Sumiko. I plant the feeling of a dog on a trail. She obliges.
    —Sumiko left through the window. She took their vehicle and fled. She abandoned it in front of Pyuff Park forty kilometers away and is thought to be on foot. There are no records of her taking public transportation, and witnesses saw a woman with a crying baby heading in the direction of Old Industrial. There are multiple empty buildings in that area; police are currently sweeping from one end to another.
    I leave