February 5, 2054 - 10:21 am

Police Station, West of San Francisco, California

50°F, rainfall 23%, humidity 34%, wind 26 mph.

It was white. Everything was white. The floor, the ceiling, and the walls too. No windows. No face. This luminosity, this room had something familiar, reassuring.

However, there was no furniture in this cube. There was nothing except a bench nailed to the back wall, covered with a thin layer of dust and a few yellowish traces that he preferred not to identify. He had never seen such an empty room before, but the walls were strangely decorated. It was certainly a bit more rustic than what he was used to seeing, but it had the merit of giving a touch of life to the whole room. ‘Fuck you’, ‘you're going to pay for this’, ‘I didn't do anything wrong’, and a series of numbers that didn't make any sense, followed by the name ‘Stacy.’ Some of these words were engraved in the stone, drawn with a sharp object, others had been marked with a pen. His finger retraced the curves of the five letters of the female name. He didn't know any Stacy.

"He’s right here."

Guided by the voice, the young man turned his head towards the one and only transparent wall of the cube. The only exit, too. With these three faces behind the glass wall, and theirs six eyes on him, he suddenly seemed to understand where he was. A zoo. And this room was his enclosure: the smell alone was enough to confirm his theory. Maybe the numbers before the first name ‘Stacy’ on the wall was the serial number of the previous attraction.

"So it’s him, the murdered victim Howard brought back from the dead?"

Two men and a woman. A woman. Maybe it was Stacy. Maybe he would leave his enclosure too and visit the zoo.

"I thought he'd stopped drinking since his wife left."

"He did! I've never seen him drank anything but black coffee."

Ah. This voice, he recognized it. His head turned to the wall as his eyelids closed, imprisoning him to the darkness.

It was dark. Then, there had been a white flash, a blinding eye stuck on him, an immaculate halo on his skin, his hair, his body. This thing corresponded to the idea that humans seemed to have of ‘death’. A light at the end of a long tunnel. He had done some research on this, the first time Alistair had said this word in his presence. He had found no indication of what he could offer him to help him go through what he called ‘the last journey’.

Two fingers had slipped into the hollow of his neck. The skin was dry, slightly warm. As they palpated his throat, he had heard a sound... A voice. A human voice. How long has it been since the last time he had heard words? Words. He had not understood them, but suddenly everything seemed very clear to him: the slow breathing, the regular heartbeats, the smell of wet earth and rainwater, the humidity. So he had to move, to detach himself from that hard and uncomfortable thing on which he was lying. A wave of energy passed through his limbs, an electric impulse so powerful that he shuddered to his toes.

"Ghjbscn it!"

This scream was so loud it leaved a shrill whistle in his ears. That voice... He didn't recognize it. What did he say? Was he talking to him? God, his eyesight was so... imprecise. The flashes of light exploded in a hundred, a thousand vertical lines clumsily cutting out a man's silhouette. His face. He had to see his face.

"Dsd’t mfce! Dsd’t fkuycjg mfce!"

"Idsbuiqjbr!"

That voice. It was him, this anonymous face who was watching him behind the window of the white cube. The second man. He was there, followed by three shadows. This impulse running through his body could not support his weight. It's been too long. That was it: he needed more time. More time to regain his strength, more time for his eardrums to be able to grasp all the sounds coming out of their mouths, more time for him to understand their meaning, more time...

But he wanted to see the face of this man who smelled like rainwater.

An unpleasant tingling ran through his neck. Heat... it was burning. The lines, the colours that rushed before his eyes blurred. And then, a fraction of a second before he sank into unconsciousness again, he saw two greyish eyes on him.

He opened his eyes again. He was facing the white wall, facing ‘Stacy’ and her serial number. He turned his head back towards the window, where the eyes of the three people had left him, escorting a fourth figure who had suddenly invited itself into their small group. The newcomer was a tall man with hair so blond that it seemed as white as the walls of his enclosure. A deep wrinkle passed between his frowned eyebrows and purplish shadows highlighted his brown, cold, impenetrable eyes. Hm. He reminded him of that old documentary he had found about the packs of wild animals that still existed at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It didn't matter which member of the herd had caught the prey: it was the leader who was entitled to the first bite.

"Take him to the interrogation room."

Humans, in the end, were sometimes not as evolved as they seemed to think.

***

"So, what do we know about our new friend?"

The folder slammed on the desk, so light that it did not even shake the surface of the cup of black coffee. Marty vaguely shrugged towards Howard as he sat down in one of the chairs beside him, looking at Chief Johnson, who was leaning against the wall of the observation room. Seeing the dark bags under his eyes, it was hard to tell which one of them had spent the night at a crime scene. Although, if he was as pleasant with his wife as with his colleagues, his beautiful apartment would soon become one.

"What do we know? I’m afraid the answer is : nothing at all, Inspector Harrison," sighed Marty. "He hasn't said a word since he woke up, according to the people who were on duty last night. We spent the morning going through the missing persons reports from all over California, but he doesn't match any of them. I also personally checked the O'Sullivan family's birth certificates, but the old man apparently didn’t have a younger child than Desmond."

"The undead better have spent that time inventing a very good alibi," Johnson pointed out, looking towards the one-way window overlooking the interrogation room. "If he can't explain what the hell he was doing with a dead body, I'll send him to jail in no time."

Howard and Marty wearily glanced at each other before the inspector's eyes turned back to the boy. In his 20-year career, he had seen hundreds of people sitting in that chair, their fingertips nervously tapping the table and their eyes looking at each of the cameras in every corner of the rectangular room. No one, on the other hand, had ever behaved in the same way as him: with his back impeccably straight, his knees and his ankles glued to each other, he had simply joined his hands on the table, stubbornly staring at the wall that was facing him. Howard couldn't even see his chest rise under his breath. He had to be incredibly calm not to feel out of breath under the weight of apprehension, but in any case, this detail was not displeasing to him: Howard would have been quickly annoyed to have to spend hours questioning someone who was blowing like an ox between each word.

"Okay. I’ll go first," he said, tapping Marty on the shoulder before going through the door.

From the moment Howard walked through the doorway, the boy's brown eyes finally left the wall and immediately looked straight into his owns. It was strange to see him like that, so... so conscious. Aside from his paleness, he looked so alive that it really seemed ridiculous that Howard confused him with a corpse. A few strands of his slightly wavy hair fell on his forehead, but he was nevertheless able to see one of his eyebrows being shaken by a slight nervous spasm. His eyes followed Howard to the empty chair on the other side of the table, never letting his eyelids interrupt his observation for a single blink. He had a fascinating beauty, and even Howard was forced to acknowledge it, despite his reluctance to admit the qualities of other men without feeling bitter jealousy. But there was something quite contradictory about his charm. His deep gaze, his smooth white skin, his chiseled jawline, his thin lips of a discreet pink and those brown curls, everything about him radiated an elegant, attractive softness; but there was also that shadow, like an invisible mask, that suffocated his wiles under the icy indifference with which he observed the world around him.

"What's your name?," Howard asked, resting his back against the chair, suddenly feeling the need to keep a respectable distance between them.

The boy almost imperceptibly tilted his head to the right at this question, slightly squinting. Howard suddenly had the unpleasant feeling that he was once again under the inquisitive eye of that dumb psychologist he was seeing once a week. When the young man finally opened his mouth, he almost expected to hear his voice say that the session was over and that he owed him seventy dollars.

"My name is Isaac."

But he didn't have the hoarse, dragging voice of that old bastard to whom he gived all his money because he was good enough to listen to his life story. His was calm, controlled. He articulated each syllable carefully, as if he was talking to someone intellectually limited who was struggling to grasp the meaning of his words.

Howard briefly turned his head back towards the large black window to his right, only watching their reflection, but guessing Marty and Johnson's presence on the other side.

"Isaac. Right. How old are you?"

This time, his thin lips remained closed, his brown irises watching the inspector's greyish blue eyes. These eyes, and these slightly drooping eyelids... If the voice was not a sufficient clue, he was now completly sure that it was this man who smelled like rainwater, and whose dry skin fingers had touched his neck. Today, he smelled like coffee, and his mid-length, curly, greyish-brown hair, tied on his neck, smelled like cheap shampoo.

"Where were you born?"

There were four crumbs stuck in the long hair of his goatee. It seemed to come from the pastries distributed by the flourishing French bakeries in the city. A small daily gift, or perhaps weekly, to motivate him to face a long working day. A deep sigh went through the inspector's nostrils, shaking the hairs of his mustache as he putted his elbows against the table.

"As you wish. Let's get down to business. Did you know Alastair O'Sullivan?"

He was a little stiff, and he had clenched his fists as his jaw bones had appeared through his skin.

"How did you meet him? When? Why? What was your relationship with him?"

His body temperature was increasing. His voice had become deeper, sharper.

"What were you doing in this house?"

All of this was easily understandable.

"Did you kill that man?"

Anger.

Howard violently banged on the table with his fist, even failing to startle the young man. Damn it, the way he was staring at him with his little analystic look... He saw his eyes detailing every inch of his face, from the root of his hair to his chin, as if he could guess a whole bunch of information about him in a simple glance. As if, in the end, it was Howard who was being interrogated without his adversary even having to say a word. He knew that Chief Johnson was not going to blame him for slapping him in the face to establish his authority, but a part of him, more or less conscious, refused the idea of disappointing the so irreproachable Marty by using this kind of process. Or to disappoint himself, perhaps.

"It’s your right to remain silent," he finally said, wiping his sweaty palms off his pants, "but your lack of cooperation will not win you the judges' favour."

As he did a movement to stand up, the young man's calm voice echoed for the second time in his ears.

"You don't understand, Inspector Harrison. It's too late."

Howard slowly turned back to him, who was still perfectly seated in his chair, his hands joined on the table and a revolting calm face. This silence that he had just broken had suddenly brought to light a detail that otherwise would not even have reached his consciousness: since he had entered this silent room, Howard could no longer hear anything but his own breathing. One, and only one, breath.

"How do you know my name?," he suddenly asked, without even realizing it.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

This time, Isaac's eyelids briefly covered his brown irises, creating a thin barrier between them as if he needed to break their eye contact before the tension increased. But for a short, very short moment, Howard saw his gaze fixed on the black glass next to him, in the exact place - and Howard could have bet his life on it - where Marty was sitting.

"You..."

"Your phone, Inspector."

"What do you mea…"

His eyes left his owns to look at the left pocket of his jacket when a muffled ring tone echoed in the room. A few simple notes looped, patiently waiting for Howard's hand to pick up. As soon as the thin screen was between his fingers and the image of a little boy appeared before his eyes, he saw, from the corner of his eye, Isaac's attention staying for a moment on the photograph. A blond child with a bowl haircut, his smile pierced by a missing baby tooth, had jumped on his father's back. Harrison, about 15 years younger.

But before he had time to see more, Howard muttered "shit" before rapidly leaving the room, putting his phone to his ear.

***

It was almost ten o'clock when two shadows had spread over the corridor wall that he could see through the glass of his enclosure. Isaac had opened his eyes as soon as he had heard the first footsteps, but he didn't feel the need to get up from his bench to look at the newcomers. He was simply sitting there, next to the yellowish stain, with his back straight and his hands on his laps, waiting. He didn't really know what he was waiting, but it didn't matter.

"You're gonna end up with your name on this cell, you know?"

Isaac’s lips slightly opened when he hearded that slightly hoarse voice, but he closed them before Inspector Harrison's silhouette entered his field of vision. He had not seen him since the morning, but, with the exception of the police uniform changed for some civilian clothes, he was still easily recognizable by the grey curly hair negligently tied on his neck and by the goatee with a little too long mustache. On the other hand, his light eyes did not even turn to him as he walked down the hall, one hand on the back of a young woman in handcuffs. She, however, wore an unusual outfit: her dark red hair showed two golden rings hanging from the lobes of her ears, at first glance mainly made of tinted steel. Her lips were painted in red, but the lipstick had spread slightly over the bottom of her left cheek, covering the appearance of a small blue hematoma on her skin. On her shoulders, a black leather jacket covered a short dress revealing her thighs, and her bare feet on the cold tile made her jump in discomfort.

"Admit it, Howard, you get bored when I'm not around," she says with a chuckle.

She had an interesting accent, which Isaac did not recognize. At the end of this sentence, the fine features of her face tightened and her front teeth, slightly longer than the rest of them, bitted her lower lip. Pain. Isaac looked down at the hematoma of her jaw while the young woman turned her head towards him, stopping in the middle of the corridor. Her mascara had made small packets on her eyelashes and half-wiped black marks appeared under her dark brown eyes.

During a few seconds, the young woman simply looked at him with an indiscreet interest, detailing him from head to toe while Howard, behind her, let out an annoyed growl and slightly pushed her.

"Come on, princess, it's getting late, so let me put you to bed," he muttered.

Isaac tilted his head to the right. Strange. His tone was different when he talked to this young woman. His voice had become low, as if he was afraid to hurt her with simple words.

"Wait, wait, wait, who’s this guy? He looks even less dangerous than my neighbor's goldfish, what the hell is he doing here?"

"You shouldn't rely so much on appearances."

With a wave of his hand, he vaguely pointed to the wound on the girl's face, without looking at it. Again. It was like that sweet, protective tone he had: he seemed to fear that she would feel attacked by a simple glance. Isaac raised an eyebrow.

"You should have learned it tonight..."

"That asshole? He wasn't a threat. He was just lucky. If he'd been a little more drunk, I would have managed to get his money and get out of the room before he caught me."

"If you say so, Phoebe. I have no doubt that your clients are charming people and that you get a real kick out of scamming them, but you'd better stop dating these kinds of sick people. Get a real job, you're too young to be out on the streets."

"Okay, and what job do you want me to do?"

Now they had left Isaac's field of vision. Howard took a deep breath, as if a weight had left his stomach as soon as he had freed himself from his heavy observation. This kid made him uncomfortable, sitting like a wax statue on his bench, without even touching the food tray that one of his colleagues had left for him two hours earlier. Shit, he hadn't slept, eaten or even asked to take a piss since he left O'Sullivan's room. Several times during the day, Howard had felt the strange need to stand at the entrance to the corridor leading to the cells, his eyes fixed on the red light illuminating the step of the door of the room where the boy was locked up. He was right there. It was not one of those dumb dreams he sometimes had, and from which he woke up without knowing if he just had a nightmare or not.

"Murder?"

"What?"

Phoebe turned back to him as soon as her wrists were released from their handcuffs, placing her hands on her waist.

"The handsome, so clean guy. Did he kill someone?"

"Yeah. Maybe. That's what Johnson thinks, anyway."

"Don't you?"

Howard felt his throat drying up. Neither Johnson nor Marty had been able to see this tiny detail, this gesture so insignificant that Howard couldn’t stop thinking about it since the moment he had left the interrogation room. This gesture was Isaac’s eyes. He had hesitated between answering or remaining silent. It only happened when he asked his last question.

How do you know my name?

He had blinked. He had fled away from his gaze. It was the first time. The only one.

"I don’t."

His hand landed on the cell glass and immediately the transparent door closed in front of Phoebe's nose, who barely had time to open her mouth before the perfect insulation smothered the words she said. Annoyed, the young girl kicked the air before going to sit on the floor, disgusted by the simple idea of approaching the sticky bench. Anyway, she knew that screaming wouldn’t do anything, since no one could hear her: after her countless police custody, she understood that there was nothing more to do than wait until the early morning.

Howard smiled at her before going away, slowly walking down the corridor. The sound of his footsteps echoed on the bare walls, the one and only noise, now, to break the silence. He had already been off duty for at least an hour and his colleagues working at night were still sitted in the cafeteria, staring at the television screen, enjoying the last episode of their favorite serie before going to sleep in front of the computer of their office. First to arrive, last to leave, Harrison thought, shrugging his shoulders. ‘The man who immersed himself in work until he forgot to live’ was the epitaph that would be written on his grave. Just the fact that he knew Phoebe Paige, that 20-year-old girl who had the gift of getting into the worst problems she could find, better than his own son Sean said a lot. And vice versa, by the way. This girl had guessed his thoughts in the blink of an eye.

His feet stopped walking. Damn it.

Slowly, he turned back in front of the large window framed by red lights overlooking one of those white cubes smelling of urine and vomit. The boy, sitted on the bench at the back of the room, was already staring at him, squinting as if he was completely caught up in this observation that he was doing as soon as someone entered his field of vision.

You don't understand, Detective Harrison.

There was something, something he had missed. There was something more than this elegant beauty still intact after twenty hours of police custody. Not a minute of sleep and no dark bags under his brown eyes. Not a shower, and not a slight smell of sweat on his body and clothes. Not a single glance at this food tray on the floor of the cell, not a single complaint about the exhausting lack of comfort.

He was just... there. Waiting. Waiting for what?

It's too late.

Slowly, as if he was afraid to scare him away, Isaac got up from his bench and walked a few steps toward the window. He stopped, keeping exactly the same distance between the transparent facade and his body as Howard on the other side. With his eyes looking straight in his own, his lips closed, he then began to copy like a mirror the inspector's smallest movements: his index finger unconsciously tapping the top of his thigh, his frowned eyebrows as if it was trying to hold his thoughts behind his forehead. But when Isaac, once again, tilted his head to the right, it was Howard who instinctively accompanied his gesture.

"What were you trying to tell me?" he whispered.

He knew that no sound could pass through that window and that this kid had seen his lips move without grasping the meaning of his silent words. That was what he had felt during those long minutes with him in the interrogation room. Talking to a wall.

Isaac blinked slowly. Howard, on the other hand, looked at the exit of the corridor, making sure no one was watching him. There was nothing but his consciousness weighing on his stomach and squeezing his throat. And then, before he even noticed it himself, his hand slapped the transparent door of the cell and the red lights turned green when the glass separating him from Isaac slid to the right.

"Fuck it."

Howard stepped back, never breaking his eye contact with the boy. No surprise had distorted his features. In fact, no emotion had ever seemed to take possession of his face since Howard first laid eyes on him.

"What the hell am I doing?," he muttered for himself, looking down at his hand.

Isaac stood there, without saying a word. Maybe he knew the answer, maybe he understood that Howard would be unable to sleep at night knowing this kid, who was only slightly older than his own son, was still within these four walls, when he was intimately convinced - without being able to tell what had given him such a conviction - that he was not the one who had murdered O'Sullivan. In fact, no piece of the puzzle seemed to make any sense.

"What the fuck are you waiting for?! Get out of there!"

Isaac immediately took two quick steps forward, looking at the door of the cell when it closed behind him.

No. Howard could not leave him with the Chief Johnson, he could not sentence him to prison without understanding who this boy was, without having proof of his guilt in this affair. For him and his unbearable way of staring at every single person he met, it would be a death sentence. If he spent a single night locked up with other detainees, he would be disemboweled before daybreak.

"What the hell are you still doing here, standing in front of me like a pole? Go home before someone finds you here!"

Isaac frowned gently at this last sentence. For a single second, his eyes detached from Howard to get lost in the void and his lips opened without any sound coming out. Was it... confusion?

"What? Don't you know how to get home?"

"It's not that."

Howard was startled by his soft, calm voice. He no longer even expected to receive any answer to anything he was saying to this kid.

"I... I'm sorry, but I don't understand where I have to "go home"."

"What are you talking about?"

"Your order, Inspector. I don't understand what you want me to do. I don't have a place to go home."

Howard felt a burn in his throat. Without even realizing it, his eyes briefly left Isaac's face to rest on the window of the cell where he had just locked Phoebe Paige. This 20-year-old girl, curled up against the cold wall of this empty room, with a taste of blood in her mouth and her bare feet on the icy floor... If her mother knew what life her daughter had in the United States, far from her dreams of being a Hollywood star or a Silicon Valley icon, she would be able to come here, find her and bring her back to New Zealand. But Phoebe couldn’t even think about it. No matter how much she struggled to pay her ridiculously high rent for a broom closet. No matter how many times she had seen her dreams crushed before her eyes. She had nowhere to go back to, since her "home" seemed to be an open-air prison to her.

And Sean... Howard closed his eyes. Sean... He probably said that before. "I have no place to go back to."

A sigh left his lips as he looked back at Isaac's face, who had freed himself from his veil of confusion to regain his eternal indifference.

"Get out of here without anyone seeing you and wait for me outside the police station. Do you understand this ‘order’?"

Isaac straightened his head before agreeing slowly. Without a word, he walked down the corridor, leaving Howard in front of his enclosure. That order, yes, it seemed clear to him like water. But there was indeed a detail, such as an incoherent parameter that detached from this command and twinkled in his mind, something that he could not analyze.

When Inspector Harrison said these words, the tone of his voice had softened in the same way as when he was talking to Phoebe.