Page 15 of From the Noblest Motives
Dr. Parma tipped her head in acknowledgment. "True for enough people to have the act passed. There have been voices speaking out against it, of course, but not as many as we'd hoped. In the end, it barely passed, by two votes, but the numbers don't matter. It did pass."
"We can't just leave him there." Blaze's muffled voice shook with raw agony.
No. We can't.Damien understood his horror, his anguish. The thought of Shudder in jail went beyond worrying about someone they cared about. It was a crime against nature to lock someone like Shudder away, like putting a kestrel in a canary cage.
"To answer your original question, yes, I have a Guild attorney looking at the case." Dr. Parma's usual calm even had a thread of worry running through it. "She does think the alleged vids of Shudder look suspicious. We have a tech expert taking them apart. There is a possibility of a mistrial."
Damien puzzled over that a moment. "Doesn't the Guild see Shudder as a criminal? Why would they help?"
"He's still a variant. Even if he's guilty of vandalism, the Guild can't stand by and allow a wrongful conviction of murder to stand. Especially in today's dangerous political climate." She shook her head. "The Free Shudder protests have already started. The cities are drought-stricken prairies waiting for a spark. I've asked Sledge to be the face for the official Guild response today, since there absolutely must be one."
"His own words?" Damien cringed at the thought. Sledge could certainly be charming, but this wouldn't be a good time for his usual casual style with the press.
"I drafted a statement with our PR staff." Dr. Parma glanced at the house display above the stove. "About now. Pardon me a moment. I do need to watch this."
The holo projection in the center of the kitchen island flickered to life and showed first a restless crowd of reporters, then a podium with the Guild's DNA helix symbol. Sledge took his place, looming, shoulders nearly twice as wide as the podium itself. His variant-enhanced strength meant that he could have tossed four reporters at once across the square, but he still looked ill at ease, tugging at the high collar of his jacket. The black of his dress uniform shone, seeming almost liquid in its shifting reflections, while the gold braid and buttons glinted in the camera lights. Asbesta stood to his left, Putty to his right, the three heroes most associated with emergency rescues, the best choice to distance the Guild from criminal variants.
Sledge set a tablet on the podium, took a deliberate, careful grip on the edges, and glanced up at the gathered media folks. "Good afternoon, everyone. The Guild has prepared a statement. I—we will not be taking questions at this time."
That slip. Other press conferences Damien had watched usually involved a much more relaxed Sledge—serious but personable. Maybe reading someone else's statement was new for him.
Another glance down, back up, then finally Sledge focused on the tablet rather than the reporters and began to read. "The arrest and sentencing today of variant outsider activist, Shudder McKenzie, marks a disturbing and discouraging setback for variant rights. With the ink on the passage of the Horace Act not yet dry, the judicial system rushed Mr. McKenzie's case through the system as its initial test of new legislation. The Guild feels that dangerous precedence has been set."
Sledge went on to talk about how time for proper investigation had been ignored, how the right to counsel had been only met to the barest degree, and how this could affect future criminal trials for variants. He made a few minor flubs in the reading, and stumbled over words likedraconicandirretrievablebut otherwise managed smoothly enough.
Despite the warning that there would be no questions, the reporters still shouted after Sledge as he left the podium, though the shouting seemed mostly ritual, as it soon died down, and the image shifted to the news anchor talking about some of Shudder's more memorable protests.
Blaze heaved a shuddering sigh and sat up, wiping at his eyes. "I should've stayed with him. Kept the idiot out of trouble."
"So they could arrest you, too?" Damien leaned their foreheads together. "Besides, feeling guilty about everything is my job."
The huff might have been some sort of laugh as Blaze ran both hands back through the copper fire of his hair. "So what now?"
"Right now, we let the lawyers do their work." Dr. Parma waved Damien back to his seat. "I know it's worrisome, but you know where Shudder is. He's being housed and fed, and from the little I know about San Judas Tadeo, it's a minimal-contact facility, so he's as safe as he can be from other inmates. We can't do anything for him today." She made a come-on gesture with both hands. "Show me the footage from the site."
"Don't know what you think you're gonna see, Doc." Blaze grumbled but pulled his phone from his pocket. "It's tons of rain, and me and Damien wandering around like lost puppies."
"Fresh eyes." Dr, Parma plucked Blaze's phone from his hand and transferred the vids to her house system. "And numerous filter options."
Damien turned this over a bit and finally admitted, "I don't understand."
"This is most likely a futile exercise," Dr. Parma murmured in a distracted fashion as she scrolled through options on her display. "But there are materials and methods that could block even your talent. It's on the unlikely side, but, for example, they could have gone underground."
Fascinated, Damien watched the scene on the vid from Blaze's camera play over and over—the torrential rain, himself trying with increasing frustration to locate the trails again—while Dr. Parma applied filter after filter. The first flicker caught Damien's eye when she reached a series of light spectrum filters.
"Wait." He pointed to the spot in the vid to the left of vid-Damien. "Did you see it? Go back, please."
The vid jumped back. Replayed. The flicker amid the sheets of rain repeated. Dr. Parma tried a different wavelength filter. The flicker… changed. Through three more filters, the flicker persisted in maddening hints and lines, never quite resolving into anything recognizable.
Finally, she began to combine filters in carefully chosen groupings. The flickers began to expand into a single image—a face, a hologram of a person from the shoulders up. When the image came into focus and Dr. Parma stopped the vid, Damien gasped and stumbled back as if someone had kicked him in the chest.
"Twitch?" Blaze's hand was on his shoulder, though his voice sounded terribly distant. "What's wrong?"
The hologram, hidden by the rain, was of a lovely young woman with brown hair and dark eyes. Damien blinked back tears and managed to choke out, "That's my mother."
4
FIRE AND EARTH
