Splintered Path (Shattered World Book 4), page 16
Viv watched in silence, wondering exactly why Jasper had wanted her to be here for the autopsy—apart from the sheer desire for revenge. Unlike Luca, there was nothing she could add to the situation; all she could do was ask questions, not offer useful interpolations. And even her questions were limited by her lack of knowledge when it came to everything blood and body.
“Very tidy,” said the Coroner, making her jump. “What a lovely, professional job!”
Viv said, “Um,” unsure of what was expected of her. The collection of body parts on the stainless steel table in front of her looked anything but tidy or professional.
Still, the Coroner seemed to think that she had been agreed with—or that Viv had presented her with an opportunity to teach.
“You don’t see this kind of pride in a job anymore,” she said, nodding. “Not since the Steward gave up the work. They’ve even left the tattoo untouched.”
She held up Jonno’s foot for Viv’s inspection, indicating a small, round tattoo that had been etched into the foot just below the ankle and above the heel.
“A very tricky spot, that,” said the Coroner, answering the question Viv didn’t ask. “But they’ve neatly cut this ankle at a diagonal toward the join of the bones—two cuts instead of one, to keep the skin there intact. The knives were sharp, the cuts were precise, and they’ve only had to use one stroke for each cut besides this one.”
“Isn’t that very hard?” Viv asked. “Or do you just have to have really sharp knives?”
She had worked at a chicken shop once, years ago, and separating the chickens into pieces had taught her that there was no easy way to separate bones.
“Both,” said the Coroner. “It’s very hard and you have to have very sharp knives. It also helps if you have expertise, experience, and if you are assisted by magic in some form or other.”
“That sounds like Luca,” said Viv, rather ruefully. She had just been with Luca that morning, sitting and talking with him in an otherworldly café with otherworldly cheesecakes, and that quiet, peaceful time was at direct odds with the chaos she saw in front of her.
This made the Coroner wheel to face her immediately, still holding Jonno’s foot. One of her brows was up, her expression quizzical. “Yes, I did hear that you were acquainted with the author of this particular artwork. It’s refreshing to go into an autopsy without being expected to help name the perpetrator.”
“I suppose so,” Viv said. “I’m not sure what Jasper wanted you to do, though.”
“You would be surprised,” said the Coroner. Viv didn’t doubt her. “I’m not just here to tell you how someone died—most people in the police forensics department could do that.”
“I suppose they could, especially with this one,” Viv said, rather ruefully.
“This wasn’t all done before death,” the Coroner said, in surprise. “No, most of it was done after he was dead. I would say that the only initial pre-mortem cuts were the ones that took off his hands and his legs. The head was severed directly afterwards, but he would have bled out in less than a minute, regardless.”
“How—” Viv had to stop and clear her throat before she could continue. “How do you know the order?”
“That’s one of the specialties I offer,” the Coroner told her, smiling serenely. “Any coroner can tell you whether an injury happen pre- or post-mortem, but I have a few…extra abilities. Whatever your man was doing, he wasn’t torturing the victim—though I would suggest that he was making a point.”
Suddenly a great deal more interested, Viv asked, “What sort of a point? This just looks like mess and blood.”
“Nobody kills like this—or dismembers like this—without there being a reason for it,” said the Coroner crisply. “Look here: the limb has been severed exactly where the bone meets bone; the muscle has also been stripped out.”
“Is that why it looks so messy and…rubbery?”
“Yes,” said the coroner. “It’s organised chaos. And that’s not to mention that the body has been drained of magic. I’d bet that there’s a reason for the muscle being stripped out, too.”
“What sort of reason?” asked Viv, her mind on Luca’s bloodstained face.
He hadn’t told her why he had done what he had done, or who had paid him to do it. It wasn’t that she had thought he had killed Jonno in the most bloody and messy way for the fun of it—she had, she now realised, assumed that Jonno had done something unspeakably bad to account for his death—but she hadn’t wondered why it was so bloody, either.
She had, she thought, probably been trying to avoid thinking about it altogether. Luca going back to his old line of work while still being exactly the Luca who helped and terrified her in equal measures wasn’t something she had been prepared for.
“Well, to start with, the body is utterly unusable,” said the Coroner, as if pointing out the obvious. “Even if someone wanted to use it again, they couldn’t. The magic is drained and gone. There’s no musculature in there to keep it upright and moving. No full hide to make use of; it’s all in pieces. Even if someone wanted to use part of the body, they wouldn’t be able to. Unless their taste ran to human flesh, of course.”
That reminded Viv of something, too. “Are you talking about someone like the men in skin suits?” she asked. “They just use the skin, don’t they?”
Viv didn’t miss the way the Coroner’s lip curled. “I wouldn’t really call those men, myself,” she said. “I don’t think I’d even call them human anymore.”
“No, I didn’t think so, either,” Viv said. “But it keeps making me wonder: why are they with Forex and calling themselves humans in a human-first company if they’re not human?”
“I said they’re not human anymore,” the Coroner corrected. “They were, once. What is inside of the skinsuit is the remnant of what is human about them, physically speaking. Mentally—or perhaps I should say spiritually—there is very little left of them that is human.”
Viv found herself at a loss for words. Eventually, she said, rather plaintively, “But why? Why turn themselves into…saggy-skinned caricatures of themselves if they were already human?”
“They couldn’t remain as humans long enough to suit them. Or someone tried to sever the cord between soul and body before they were prepared to give up this mortal coil.”
“I didn’t know that it was an option to stay,” Viv said. She wanted to laugh because it was so ridiculous, but in this new world that she had entered it was no doubt not just likely or possible, but true.
“You’re a lot newer to this than I’d expected,” the Coroner said, with something of a quizzical look. “Especially since the Forex…men are taking an interest in you.”
“I haven’t been here long,” Viv told her. “I’m still not very sure why they’re interested in me, except that I’ve annoyed them a couple of times.”
The Coroner observed her for a moment longer, one brow very slightly raised. “You should probably ask Jasper exactly why they’re interested in you,” she said. “It’s not like him to protect his employees from the consequences of their own actions—or to keep them if they’re inclined to bring about consequences.”
“I got the impression that he finds me too useful to get rid of,” Viv said, not without some dryness. “I helped someone to get away from the company instead of dobbing on them, that’s all. Oh, and I also helped one of their water-fae employees to quit, and a group of selkie elders find someone who was killing selkies but useful to Forex and who had a lot of information that was apparently good for blackmail.”
“Oh, is that all?” said the Coroner, but there was a light of laughter to her grey eyes. “I understand now why Forex is interested in you; I am even more surprised that Jasper is keeping you around, however.”
“Jasper’s nerves are soothed by the fact that Forex can’t prove that any of it was me,” Viv said promptly.
“I very much doubt that’s what soothes his nerves,” said the Coroner. “But I have to say that you seem to have done him some good. If you know what’s good for you, I would suggest that you don’t annoy Forex any more than you already have. Their agents aren’t fools, and it’s dangerous to think of them as such.”
Viv would have liked to have pointed out that it was neither her job nor her intention to do Jasper—a whole adult male—good. Instead, she asked, “What do you mean, they aren’t fools?”
The Coroner, with swift, precise movements, began to gather up all the body parts that she had been examining, and packing them carefully and neatly into a very large, lidded metal box.
“They have more experience than they seem to, and they all have real-time access to a central knowledge hub, so no matter which agent you deal with, they’ll probably already know about you.”
“I wondered if they had something like that,” Viv said, pleased with herself. “How much of them is still human at this point, then?”
“Not a great deal,” said the Coroner. “Being part of a human organisation that fights against—or at the very least protects against—the non-human elements in the worlds has a lot of downsides. One of those downsides is the comparative life-span. Some behindkind only live for a few years, but most of them live for decades, if not centuries, especially when you get to the fae side of behindkind. If you want to live long enough to keep fighting—or just to feel as though things are fair—you have to do things that change your humanity not only drastically, but unfixably.”
That didn’t seem to Viv to give her any more information than she’d previously had. She had presumed that the Forex men, if actually human men, were no longer human in the way that she thought of human. She had also assumed that it was in order to live longer. How wearing someone else’s skin gave them that, she couldn’t possibly understand.
She prompted the coroner. “Things like…?”
“In short, it’s similar to a transfer of consciousness,” the Coroner said. She was still packing body pieces in a businesslike manner that would have been pleasant to watch if it weren’t for what she was packing. “They spend a good chunk of time draining and storing both blood and magic from their original bodies that will be put into a rough skeleton approximation and covered with a flesh approximate and as much of their own flesh as still remains useable. Then their mind, or soul, or whatever you would like to name it, is transferred across to the new vessel.”
Viv didn’t think she wanted to know what a flesh approximate was. She still had nightmares about what had come out of the body of the otherwise perfectly lovely cuckoo she had met in her first job for the Tea House.
“So they need the human skin to go over the top of all that?” she asked. “How long does a skin suit last?”
“If they’re well taken care of, they can last as long as fifty years,” said the coroner. “But they need maintenance, and it’s not a cheap process. Forex agents have in-house support and subsidised care, so long as they’re employed with Forex.”
“So what you’re saying,” Viv said, trying not to grimace, “is that people like Forex couldn’t possibly use Jonno’s body for anything, and that Forex themselves has no reason to be sniffing around it for any kind of usage purposes.”
“The blood is completely drained, and so is the magic. This boy wouldn’t have been able to live without either, and his body is significantly less useful without either. Someone might be able to use the pieces for certain kinds of spells with the magic or the blood still inside, but like this…”
“Only useful for eating,” Viv said, rather feebly. She had been feeling sick for quite some time, between the autopsy and the discussion, but now she just felt sort of empty and not quite solid. “So there’s no point in doing all of this, then. One or the other should have done it.”
“There’s a point if someone thought he was going to be used for a specific something after death,” the Coroner said, shrugging. “But that’s your job. I don’t know who expected someone to make use of the body after he was dead, but they evidently paid a master of the craft to kill him and ensure that it couldn’t be used. I would start there, if I were you. I’ll prepare a report for you to take to Jasper, and another one for you to actually give to him; it should be ready for you in a couple of hours.”
Still, it took the Coroner a further hour to do another sort of testing—or perhaps investigation—that Viv couldn’t really understand or see properly. She knew something was happening, but she couldn’t see how it was happening, or what exactly was happening.
Magic, probably, she thought. Luca would have been able to tell her what it was. No, he would have been exultant to tell her what it was, and probably also how it could be used in a different way to kill someone.
Viv found herself smiling, and felt faintly ashamed of herself. Jonno was dead, and the Coroner was here to make sure they had the best chance possible of finding out why he had been killed. She shouldn’t be thinking fondly of the person who had killed him—the person, moreover, who had refused to share any information with her about who had paid him, or why, to do the job.
The feeling lingered long after she saw the Coroner out so that Bazza could drive her back to the airport, and went up to the lunch room to have something to eat before she and Jonno’s remains could be driven back to the manor.
Tired, yawning, and blinking her watering eyes, Viv found herself flicking aimlessly through her phone while she waited for what the Lunch Lady had told her was a nice fat pile of French toast and a glass of pineapple juice. It wasn’t until the food was in front of her, and the first mouthful swallowed that Viv realised she’d tapped in and out of her photo app several times in a row.
“Sugar,” she said softly, to herself.
She had meant to ask Marazul to check her phone for her—to find out, if he could, exactly who or what could be capable of stealing photos from her phone without her knowledge, and without leaving any trace. Perhaps it was time to see if he was willing to do another thing for her when it came to stuff that involved Mum and Dad, too.
And somehow that, like everything else over the last day and night, had blurred together, become one, and entirely lost focus.
Viv pressed her fingers into her eyes, sighed, ate another piece of French toast, and called the number that Marazul had usefully left at the bottom of one of the emails that he had sent her. Luckily for Viv, she had been suspicious of most things technological at the Tea House when she received that email; she had memorised the number. A few days later, when she went to check her recollection of the number, it had vanished.
Hoping that she had, in fact, memorised it correctly, Viv once again exited the photo app and tapped the numbers into her phone, then laid her finger on the call button hopefully.
The phone lit, dialling, and Viv laid the phone against her ear, still relieved that she heard it ringing despite the evidence of it doing so. With a suddenness that made her heart jump, someone picked up the call.
There was silence on the other end of the phone; an expectant sort of silence that said, Yes, I am here, but you need to identify yourself first.
“Marazul?” she said cautiously. “It’s Viv.”
“Ah, Viv,” he said, in a voice with a strong Italian accent. “Your voice is exactly as I thought it would be.”
“You too,” said Viv, exhaling in relief. She hadn’t been entirely sure that he would answer, even if she had got the number right. “I need your help with something.”
“Ah, my life! I spend it around women who can think only of business and blood,” said Marazul, but his tones were completely cheerful, so Viv didn’t take it seriously. “What can I do for you?”
“Someone stole something from my phone,” Viv said. “It was something no one should have known I had, and it was definitely something they shouldn’t have been able to get off my phone.”
“Are you asking me if I did it?”
The thought didn’t seem to bother him; in fact, Viv thought that he sounded amused and almost delighted.
“No,” she said, laughing. “If I thought you had, I would have sent Luca to ask.”
“Didn’t I say it? Bloodthirsty!” Marazul said reproachfully. “You want me to look at your phone?”
“Can you look at my phone?” Viv said, her spirits lifting. She wasn’t sure exactly where Marazul was in a spatial way, but she had assumed South Korea.
“Of course! I will send someone to pick it up from the Tea House. No worries.”
That sounded so extremely Australian despite the Italian accent to the rest of Marazul’s conversation that it made Viv laugh.
“You sounded really Australian just then,” she said, to explain the laughter.
“Ah,” he said. “There is an old…friend I knew in Hobart once, when I was still in Australia. I learnt a lot from her.”
There was a sadness in his voice that Viv thought it best not to notice, or ask about. She asked instead, “How do I pay you for the work?”
It was probably better to get that out of the way before she told him what she needed him to do exactly.
“You don’t,” he said, in a grand sort of way that left Viv imagining him making a wide gesture of the same sort. “The Tea House will be charged for my time.”
“Oh. Is that legal?”
There was a cautious silence before Marazul asked, “Is that one of your Australian jokes?”
Viv stifled a laugh. “Sorry,” she said. “Don’t worry about that; I suppose I really meant to ask if Jasper will be angry about it?”
“Jasper won’t know,” said Marazul. “Unless you tell him, of course. My instructions were that I am to help certain members of the Tea House, for whatever they may need of me.”
“Doesn’t he ever ask about it?”
“Sometimes,” Marazul said. “And sometimes I answer. Sometimes, I do not. I do not think I will answer him if he asks about you. I would rather your friend not visit me—there are too many people in this house that would enjoy the experience far too much.”
This time, Viv didn’t even try to stifle her laughter. “That’s probably the first time anyone has said that about Luca!” she said. “All right, then; if you can do it, I need you to look through the—”
