Page 49 of Broken Princess

“Fair,” he grunts out after a few moments. “Look, I don’t know where that all came from, but… just… look after her.”

That’s all he says before an uncomfortable silence settles over us. There’s only five minutes to our destination, and every one of them is awkward as fuck.

It didn’t take long to get the body in the incinerator, and Benedict seems to be catharting the fuck out of his mood by blowing up various small sheds throughout the property. He’ll be a while, so I take out my phone and pull up my message thread with Aurora. I slowly scroll back through the messages from the last few days and as I’m reading, my phone buzzes, making me jump while the screen flicks to the new incoming message.

Hummingbird:

Soooo…

Another one pops up almost immediately.

Hummingbird:

Last night…

Three dots. No dots. Three dots again.

Hummingbird:

…please respond and select option

a) was fun

b) was a mistake

or c) never happened

I laugh out loud. Only Aurora could inject so much of her personality into her texts.

But then I realise she’s giving me an out, and I hate that. It wasn’t a mistake, I don’t regret it and I can’t wish it never happened. She’s worth so much more than that.

a) was fun.

I’m sorry we didn’t have time to talk this morning.

Hummingbird:

No worries, I’m sorry you woke up alone. I needed coffee, and I didn’t want to wake you.

You don’t need to apologise. I understand how out of hand your caffeine addiction is in the mornings.

Will you be there when we get back?

Hummingbird:

We’re heading out in ten. Talk later?

Count on it, hummingbird.

Shit. I was hoping to be back before they head out to see Manny and Stefano. Bodies never burn as quick as you think they will. Guess it’s time to track down our resident fire-starter. As I’m setting off across the back of the industrial factory yard towards the perimeter when another alert comes through. Expecting to receive another message from Aurora, I’m surprised to see an alert from the subroutine I have monitoring the local police channels.

MurderBot:

ALERT > John Doe

If any murder victim matches Isabella’s autopsy results in these categories, I’m notified. Age, sex, location, unusual or ritualistic marks, etcetera. I click to open and see that we have another body with ‘unusual markings from an unidentified weapon’. I need to get back to my laptop and see what I can uncover in the Medical Examiners digital files. I need to know what these marks look like.

My criteria are broad, and I’ve received thousands of these alerts in the years we’ve been investigating. These leads rarely end up going anywhere, but it’s unprecedented to have two bodies with “unusual markings” discovered within days of each other.

---