Two bulging boxes of investigative files were carried into TRAP headquarters by a homicide detective. Abigail, already standing by with a bottle of disinfectant spray for the folders, chewed her lower lip in slight shock. It was a hell of a lot of documents that had accumulated in a relatively short period of time regarding the underground incidents. Much more than she had expected. It would take her at least a week or more to process all the information. In search of help, she looked around at the others as the detective left. Yanny seemed to have guessed her thoughts and smiled at her. Of course, why hadn't she thought of that? The cyborg could process a page of information perfectly in a few seconds.
"Will you help me read all this?" Abigail asked Yanny a little timidly.
"Sure!" she confirmed beaming and immediately started to open one of the boxes. She was always happy to do something useful for important missions. "I'll get right on it, shall I?" Then she pulled out a folder, sat down at the desk and started reading. At the rate she flipped through the files, she looked as relaxed as if she were flipping through a supermarket brochure for a special offer. Abigail watched Yanny for a moment, scratching her cleavage in embarrassment. If she sat down next to her and started reading, it would be depressing in more ways than one. Not only would her progress be much slower, but she would have to take notes in order to retain and filter the most important information. Suddenly she felt quite useless.
"Um... would you like me to make you some tea? Or would you prefer lemonade?" she asked Yanny uncertainly, scratching the tabletop with her index finger. The cyborg looked up briefly and beamed at her.
"Lemonade, please," she replied, her eyes already back on the folder.
"Okay... coming right up," Abigail nodded and went into the kitchen. When she returned with an open bottle of orange soda, Yanny was already pulling another folder out of the box. "You already finished the first one?" Abigail asked in awe, clearing her throat.
"Yes," Yanny replied giggling. "Is it okay if I don't give you a summary until I've read through all the documents?" she asked, looking longingly at the soda bottle in Abigail's hand.
"That would be great, thanks," Abigail said, holding the bottle out to her. Yanny accepted it gratefully, raised it to her lips and took a sip. Then she tasted it with a thoughtful expression on her face.
"Very good, so nice and sweet," was her verdict. "Mineral water, sugar, carotene, antioxidant, orange juice concentrate, citric acid, carbonic acid..." she began to enumerate while taking small sips of the drink and smacking her lips. Abigail looked at her in surprise.
"You can tell all that just by tasting it? Or did you read it off the label?" she asked.
"I can taste it," Yanny nodded, then looked at the label. "The amounts on here aren't right, there's a lot more sugar and sweetener in there than they say," she explained, tapping the bottle.
"I didn't know you could do that," Abigail said, still amazed. "Like a walking chemistry lab."
"Sure. If you ever get sick, all you have to do is kiss me properly with tongue, like in that one perfume commercial. Then I can thoroughly test your saliva for germs," Yanny announced enthusiastically, already glad to be able to make herself useful in such a case. Abigail, on the other hand, felt the blood rise in her cheeks and couldn't help but blush at Yanny's offer.
"Um... I... uh... will get back to you on that..." she said, turning and stomping quickly back to the kitchen. Sometimes the clueless nature of the cyborg touched points you couldn't expect. Abigail was reminded again of Viktor Konakov's kiss on the Sea Lord, whose business card had been destroyed by the seawater as they swam back to the beach. She wondered how he was now. What was he doing now? Was he still in the city or had he moved on? He thought for sure that she had not contacted him again because she was not interested and not because she had accidentally destroyed his phone number. She sighed deeply and took a box of cookies from the kitchen cupboard. She had to pull herself together and forget Viktor once and for all. These cookies would help her. Yanny, who had finished the second folder in the living room and was already fishing the third out of the box, glanced in the direction of the kitchen, where she suddenly heard loud munching noises. Luckily, she didn't have to eat to survive, she thought to herself. It must be terrible to be so hungry all of a sudden. Then she opened the next folder and continued scanning, page after page.
That evening, the TRAP agents sat in the living room, eager to hear Yanny's summary of the investigation.
"Most of the material they've compiled doesn't really give us any new information. It just confirms what Mr. Morgan has already told us," she began. "However, I did come across two things that we should definitely look into." Yuri, holding a large knife and slowly sharpening the blade with a whetstone, grumbled without taking his eyes off the weapon.
"Very good, now getting exciting," he murmured. Yanny unfolded a map of the Elysium Transportation Company's subway network on the table, on which she had made some notes.
"These are the locations of the attacks," she explained, pointing to her handwritten entries. "Basically, almost the entire city was affected, but there is a cluster at Node 3, Node 6, Chicken Road and Heavy Steamer stations," she continued.
"So clearly in the south of the city, the four stations are all in the industrial area and all on the Green Line. Only Node 3 is also crossed by the Blue Line, which connects the west with the east," Harry mused, now standing next to Yanny to better read the network map.
"And the cops didn't notice that?" Ralph asked, letting his hand disappear into a bag of chips he'd clumsily opened earlier.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
"Morgan pointed out that Homicide is completely swamped right now. They probably don't have anyone to do the data analysis properly," Abigail noted, looking sternly at Ralph. After dinner, you could usually tell where the old warhorse had been by the crumbs. At least she had managed to teach him not to chew with his mouth open. Small steps forward that made living together easier.
"This also fits very well with the second conspicuous thing," Yanny continued, opening one of the folders. She took out a certain file that contained a transparent envelope with several photographs. She spread them out on the already unrolled subway map and then turned it towards her comrades so that they could see the photos better. "What the hell..." Yuri said, raising his eyebrows as he looked at the pictures.
"Is that one of... *them*?" Abigail asked in a small voice. Trying to make sense of everything she had seen, she suddenly realized that the road to their villa was going to be more than difficult.
"The attacks were swift and surprising each time, so these crawlers had little resistance. They also seem to have some intelligence, as they seem to avoid confrontation with the security forces as much as possible. However, about two weeks ago, two undercover police officers were with a group of passengers who were ambushed. They did not survive, but managed to kill one of the crawlers. Forensics took the dead crawler to a police station, from where it was to be transferred to the pathology department for an autopsy. That's when these photos were taken," Yanny said.
"Looks like a smaller, skinny human, but the eyes are a little bigger... no pupils... and then this skin..." Abigail muttered.
"Looks like after two weeks in tanning booth," Yuri completed her thought. It was true: the skin was coal black, and if you looked closely at the pictures, you could see that it was partially covered with blisters, like severe burns. Yanny pulled two more photos out of the clear envelope and placed them on top of the others.
"Look at this one, this is its back," she said. Ralph took one of the pictures and held it up to his nose, squinting his eyes.
"I think I know what you mean," he said hesitantly.
"What?" asked Abigail impatiently, reaching for the second picture.
"Had a good tattoo artist, this guy," Ralph finally announced, flicking the photo back onto the table. Harry and Yuri also looked at the picture more closely now. Indeed, despite the black skin, there were several symbols visible on the back. However, this did not appear to be a common form of tattooing that left only images on the skin. Any color would not have been visible in this blackness anyway. The symbols stood out as bulges on the skin, more like carefully carved scars.
"What do these symbols mean?" Harry asked, turning the photo over and over in all directions, trying to decipher something.
"I don't know. I can't decipher it, can't understand it. The sequence of symbols is definitely not random, it's a text in an unknown language. The investigators didn't know what to do with it either, as I could see from the file. In the meantime I learned Russian and compared the symbols with all known codes of secret services, no result," Yanny said. Abigail looked at her in surprise. She knew the cyborg had enormous computing power. If she didn't find a solution, it made things even more sinister and mysterious than they already were.
"So what did the autopsy on this body reveal?" Harry asked thoughtfully.
"That's the next big mystery in this case: there never was an autopsy," Yanny replied.
"What? Why not?" Harry blurted out, and the others were now looking at her in confusion as well.
"The Crawler's body disappeared from the police station the very next day without a trace," she nodded.
"Did he get up and run away? That's understandable. I'd do the same if they tried to hold me in a police station," Ralph remarked with a slightly sardonic undertone.
"Maybe went to get cigarettes," Yuri added with a grin, now placing the knife and whetstone on the table in front of him. Abigail, on the other hand, made a face and it was now clear how scared she was.
"Where would be the best place to start?" Harry asked the group, carefully rubbing his still sore jaw. "We've got the area with the clustered attacks, the missing crawler, and the photo of some writing we can't decipher."
"The missing body is highly suspicious, but we are staying out of that story. We weren't hired to investigate a police station. It could end up getting us into a lot more trouble," Abigail argued, to which Ralph nodded in agreement and gave a thumbs up, then stuffed another handful of chips into his mouth.
"We could try the photo of the writing at the university," Yanny suggested. "Maybe there's someone there who's seen these symbols before and can help us?"
"Good idea!" said Harry, smiling at Yanny. "We'd better split up, though, or we'll lose the precious time we've gained from your wonderful help in sifting through all those files." Yanny beamed at his comment, and Yuri looked back and forth between the two of them, eyes narrowed to slits.
"Good, and how we do that?" he asked. Harry thought for a moment and then explained his idea.
"You, Abigail and I will go underground tomorrow. The nearest subway station is Node 2, which is already on the Green Line. From there we'll head south, checking out the likely stations one by one. Ralph takes Yanny in the agency car directly to the university. If the people there can really help us, she can handle the new information better than any of us. She'll just call us on the mobile phone and let us know the results while we check the crime scenes.
"That's good plan," Yuri nodded approvingly. "Or as they also say in my country, the farmer sadly hatches eggs himself when there are only roosters in the yard."
"Now he's starting with those sayings again!" Abigail sighed.