Incident [TEXT]

“Trouble.” You shake your head. “You win. I'm getting out of here before this gets messy.”

“Not even a guess? I’m a little disappointed. If you were so keen on staying, then maybe you could have been of some help... but you're not. Very sensible. Good day to you.”

The sacerdos watches you pick up the flowers and walk away down another alley. You don’t want to go back the way you came and you don’t want to attempt to step over the body.

After a minute you step back into the sunlight and look around, attempting to place yourself. The street is empty. To your left you can see a roadblock, but the people standing guard have their backs to you. You're on the wrong side. Fortunately, they're focus is the wrong way and they don't seem to have noticed you yet.

You step softly in the direction that ensures this state of affairs will continue. Namely the opposite.

You haven't gone far before you become aware of the stain on the pavement a fair distance away. The blood has soaked into the cement, occasionally accompanied by a bloody handprint. The right hand. Whoever made the trail was bleeding badly and yet still dragged themselves quite a distance...

You walk closer to the stains, until you're standing where the trail turns into an alley. You lean forward.

The dead girl stares at the sky. The sacerdos initially starts, then relaxes and mockingly salutes you.

You lean back again.

Your eyes follow the trail of blood back, back to a point where it stops abruptly. The exact point seems to waver and tremble, almost as if...

“I didn't hear anything about any unrest.”

“Good. Special Branch are doing their best to contain it, which becomes a lot easier when you have an entire unit devoted to illusions.”

Before your eyes someone starts to appear, the wall of illusion lapping over them and partially hiding them before they free themselves of it.

A mercenary walks towards you. He’s following the blood trail, his head down as he walks.

Most of the mercenaries wear uniform, with patches to denote their rank and unit. But a few of the elite get their own unique outfit, as well as a codename and their own persona. They're heroes, the authorities insist. They're here to make Victraedis safer. In spite of everything, a number of these named elite became fairly popular. They’re local celebrities, but that means a lot in a city-state. Especially one as isolated as Victraedis.

Too bad that the instant any of them achieve even moderate popularity they’re kept well away from any of the serious work. Usually.

But you recognise this guy. They call him Zephyr. He’s a telekinetic or has some kind of wind based power. Something like that. You've seen him on the front page of the paper a few times, posing in front of cuffed criminals while the headline declares another victory against the crime of Victraedis. It's a little surreal to see someone straight out of the propaganda walking around in real life.

But he's a mercenary. Or part of the Special Ability Branch, as they're officially known. And the Special Ability Branch is an offshoot of the police. So he'll follow the blood trail, find the body, and everything will be under control.

All you need to do is double back and take the slightly longer route to your office.

You edge back to the empty alley and stand there.

There would have been two kinds of sparkers present during the riot. The mercenaries, and the civilians. The girl was far too young to be part of the former. What happens at riots? The civilians and the police clash. It’s possible that she could have been involved in a fight unrelated to the unrest, especially if it had progressed past the ‘Us and Them’ stage to the ‘every man for himself’ one. But it doesn’t seem likely.

The sparkers in the riots would have been going for the mercenaries. The traitors. For some joining the mercenaries is the only work they can find, but the Special Abilities Branch was formed to deal with sparkers. It was necessary for dealing with criminals with powers. But normals aren’t supposed to even touch individuals with abilities. Too dangerous for the normals, apparently. When sparker unrest flares up, it’s the mercenaries that have to deal with it. Police sparker against civilian sparker. Traitors.

She must have been out on the streets. Suppose she got carried away. Suppose she drew upon whatever inherent power she had and, with her hands raised and aglow, ran towards the nearest mercenary. Or the mercenary had advanced towards her first and she had tried to protect herself with her abilities. The mercenary saw her, panicked… and then what? Stabbed her to death and broke her arm? If they’d struggled that might be possible, certainly if the mercenary had wanted to avoid using their powers on a teenager, but that kind of pacifism doesn’t fit with the stab wounds. And if the mercenary was surprised, it seems more likely that they would instinctively use their abilities.

But what kind of power could have caused the wounds you saw?

There would have been debris, probably. Broken glass. For the right kind of person, all it would have taken was the sweep of an arm.

The right kind of person being a sparker with telekinetic powers. Or wind-based ones, possibly.

And that sacerdos was convinced that the murderer would get there before anyone else, weren’t they?