8) Tina

The next morning I already had an email to go pick up my new phone at the dead drop, which turned out to be a twenty four hour automated storage facility with my prepaid unit, D-4, having 1188 as the pass code.

Which had been quickly set up and it was rather nice that Shimmer was still trying to respect my privacy. There wasn’t really much point. She knew where I lived, my real name, and I had met her parents.

I’ve had girlfriends who hadn’t gotten that far.

The phone was sleek, black, thin, and had a discrete little white lyre symbol on the back of it. No case, but it felt like something that bullets would bounce off of so I wasn’t too worried about dropping it.

The featureless white box it had come in has six earplugs. Shimmer had explained that she and the rest of the team had nano implants that they could break up using an app on their phones if they needed or wanted to get rid of them. But Regenerates tended to reject implants.

Or body piercing. I had heard tattoos required some pretty pricey ink to be permanent as well. But I wasn’t ever going to get sick again in my life. Sort of made it worth it not being able to have youthful regrets permanently on my skin.

There was no charging cord. So I had to wonder if I was supposed to toss it in the microwave or something to recharge it. Instead, I tapped the screen and saw the startup screen showing the side view of a brain over a mechanical gear logo of Cortex, the Genius run tech company started by the city’s founder, Core.

...I think Shimmer just gave me a fission powered device to carry around in my pocket.

Ooo, it's got free internet and long distance calls. Sold. The regeneration should take care of any sterility issues.

Two days of playing with the Genius tech phone which had linked up with every electronic device in my house, other than up in the Attic, and had begun using my desktop, laptop, and tablet as dumb terminals. I decided that I never wanted to go back to twenty first century electronics. I think the thing could even power my whole house.

Then I got a text from Shimmer saying she needed to talk to me. So I called her.

"No I meant in person, I wanted to ask a favor. Look I'll be out there in a few minutes."

She came in from the tree line, sitting in her iridescent box dressed in a rather somber set of casual clothes.

After she landed on her feet as the box vanished a few feet up in the air, I asked “What’s up.”

She seemed to take a moment before she began to speak. "A girl went missing over in Idaho. She's been missing long enough I think you can find her long before anyone else can."

“Oh.”

I had done this sort of thing before. Another one of Mike’s ideas, but he lost interest when I said I wouldn’t take money for it. Some of the times the person who had gone missing had already been discovered by the time I got there, or would be found still alive while I was still searching.

Some of the time.

Most of the time… Well, there had been a reason I kept a burner phone around. A discrete message at least let people know what had happened to their loved ones. And sometimes it led the police to who had happened to them and was stupid enough to keep the remains on their property.

Or… parts.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

I explained most of this to the young woman who was hoping to help someone, but I got the feeling she already knew how seldom anyone could be helped when things like this happened.

I skipped the bit about finding parts. It wasn’t pertinent, and she was already pretty somber. No need to pile more onto a teenager who could get upset and start crying. Or get upset and start smashing things, like my house. Or me.

Neither situation was one I was ready to deal with.

Normally it would have been a seven hour drive. But we got there a bit quicker even though we took my car.

She lifted the old rusty truck I had inherited from my grandfather up into the air on a sort of tray of shimmering force she was able to carry it along at very high speeds. "It's quicker than flying, well, flying in a plane. But having car seats is a lot more conferrable than sitting on a rock hard plane of force.”

I nodded at her from the driver’s seat. I had insisted on sitting there since it was my car even if she was “Driving.”

What was upsetting to me was that she had taken over the radio and was listening to AI pop. I complained she gave me an "OK Boomer" and still didn’t change the station.

I refused to even look at her for an hour. I guess refusing to apologize is part of her “Don’t do lies.” bit.

Once in the area where the girl had gone missing, she made a simple box for both of us to sit in while she flew us around since the car would be a bit too visible. "I can wrap myself in armor like outer layers to fly around and enhance my strength like my Dad does, and you know, protect me. But my curved force constructs give off so much light I can’t see through them. Flat planes are much less glowy.”

We were also using a box since it didn’t block out the ground directly beneath us like my truck would. But I did make her make the box wider than she wanted it since I didn’t want to end up in cuddling distance of a seventeen year old girl. I also grabbed a blanket out of my truck to fold up for both of us to sit on.

I could normally sense the dead within a hundred feet or so. Further, if I concentrated. But we could move at a faster speed since I was only trying to sense human sized bodies. Or child sized ones.

We didn’t find anything the first night, other than some long dead larger animals and graves that were so old there was barely anything left for me to sense. Shimmer paid for both our hotel rooms as well as meals.

She didn’t offer me anything for my time, and I didn’t ask.

The next night I found the bodies. All of them child sized and all together. “I got something, but we should call in the police.”

She went pale and spoke in a whisper. “We’re too late?"

I slowly shook my head. “Maybe, maybe not. She isn’t his first. It may be just the others I’m sensing."

There was only one house in my range. She at least set me down on the ground before she went inside by way of a going through a wall. By the time I caught up to her, she had one very scared creepy looking guy pined up with bands of blindingly bright multicolored serrated bands of force wrapped around his throat, wrists, and ankles.

He was scared but, “I’m telling you I don’t know nothing about no girls. I got rights.”

I stepped back outside and had a seat on a wooden bench, his couch didn’t look all that clean.

The nearest body didn’t have any eyes left to open, and there wasn’t enough left of her for my increased power of regeneration in corpses to work with, but I could give it the strength to dig its way out of the deep grave. My strength. It was even enough to break through the hard plate of cement between it and the open air.

I couldn't see or hear with bare bones. But I could feel where the dead were, and where I was. That fact that I counted as one of the dead to my power… nope, that never kept me up at night.

This close though. I could sort of be half there and half here. With my eyes open I could see the tiny little skeleton held together with the force based Brute portion of my powers walking its way out of the darkness and up the creaking wooden stairs.

The creepy guy began to sputter.

Shimmer informed him. “I think someone wants you to try lying to me again.”

True, I did at least.

I sort of had to walk the remains over to the far wall and begin to feel along it until I felt the resistance of the bones hitting the creepy guy's body.

“No, nonono! Get it away from me! Don’t let it touch me!” The feeling along the wall bit is apparently pretty scary when you see a set of little girl’s bones closing in on you. Good.

Shimmer let him scream and yell for a bit. "I've been told there are a lot more out there. Should we bring them all in, or do you want to tell me where Tina is?"

He screamed some more as I had the bones feel their way up his body. Then I began leaning back and forth on the wooden back steps, each time the board step creaked like someone else was making their way into his house.

It was enough. I guess he really didn’t want to see them again.

The teenager zip tied him and we followed his directions to where the girl was being held in a sort of homemade bomb shelter under a shed. She was scared and filthy, but alive.

Shimmer took the girl home. I asked her to pick me up on the way back. She looked at me and started to say something, then stopped and looked at the house. "What are you going to do?”

I didn’t look at her. “If I don’t tell you, you can honestly say you didn’t know.”

Some people don’t deserve to live. No one, let alone another child, should ever be at the slightest risk of ever being hurt by that man again.

But... he wouldn't suffer in the grave. The families of those he killed had to right to know that he would be locked in a cage for the rest of his miserable life. And prison could be very hard on someone who had hurt children. Even criminals have families.

I did want to kick him a few times, in the face, but it would have made it look like Shimmer did it.

So instead I marked the remaining graves with some sticks with bits of one of the creepy guy's formally white tee shirts tied onto the ends. Then Shimmer came back to collect me for the ride home. We never spoke of the matter, but now and then she would ask me to help her look for a missing person. Mainly children.

It was usually better when it wasn’t me that found them.