“I did not expect her to stop by her supervisor’s home.”

  Cain spoke aloud as he sifted through the remains of the eleventh floor of a cheap tenement about twenty minutes from the TP building by train.

  Bernie appeared in his interface,

  “Steven Clark, 41, no dependents. His only living relatives are on the East Coast, three hours by auto.”

  “Then why can I smell a child as well as the two idiots Thompson killed?”

  Bernie’s face turned into a wide sun as he said,

  “Technically she only killed one of them, based on the evidence.”

  “That means you’ve gathered enough for a sim. Show me.”

  Cain walked through the scene displayed by his assistant.

  When Althea Thompson walked out of the apartment the first time, he stopped the image and said,

  “What made her turn around?”

  “Unknown. Trace evidence grows too scattered to identify.”

  “How certain are you she came and left?”

  “Ratios exceed 90 percent, master. I do not believe she could have anticipated an investigation to the point of leaving a false double trail. And I cannot imagine what end she would put to such a misdirection.”

  Cain nodded and resumed the simulation.

  When the two goons hired by the local TP office arrived on scene, Cain swore. He had given instructions to all teams to wait for him in these cases. But the two out-sourced contractors obviously failed to get the memo.

  Since they were dead or dying, he felt any punitive measures he might inflict would be redundant. Still, he ordered Bernie to forward a specific and threatening message to his team involved on this case. Future cases of poorly informed contractors would not happen again.

  Details of the simulation grew fuzzy. Cain watched virtual Althea shoot the first goon in the face, blasting away part of the hallway as she did. Unable to determine exactly what they said to each other in Steve’s living room, Cain fast forwarded the scene until Althea’s escape.

  Pausing and slowing her final acts as his AI assistant improvised the specifics drew Cain’s interest.

  She managed to activate one of the bombs on their cyborg goon. How she managed to keep the bomb on him and not tossed through a nearby window could only be guessed at by Cain and Bernie. But the way she ran down the hallway, firing fewer than six shots and hitting a light fuel main with each bullet confirmed the worst for Cain.

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  “Damn. She definitely activated CC-0. Keep a watch on reports of unusual violence, Bernie.”

  “Of course, Master.”

  Cain jumped out of the building at the same level as Althea, landing on the distant roof using his legs and nothing more. The metal did not even clank at the landing, these implants were too expensive for that.

  He traced her path down from the building and back over near the site of the battle. Ignoring her path up the nearby wall, Cain followed the fresher of the scent trails down to a nearby overpass. Landings and launchings came through this intersection with dense frequency.

  Emergency services had long cleaned up the mess caused by the two enhanced people fighting, but Cain followed Althea’s trail to a dead end.

  At least four separate individuals had been in the immediate area. DNA scans confirmed three of them to be criminals known for implant hijacking. But if they had gone after the executive implant in this alley, Cain’s job would already be done for him. And the alley would not be present any longer.

  “After she crawled here. Three new goons attacked, these unaffiliated with TP. Someone subdued them and carried her body off. But that someone does not have a registered DNA profile. And the trail ends here. Shit.”

  Cain leaned down close to the pavement and took a deep whiff of the concrete. Industrial and medical solvents crossed over yards of densely packed artificial nerves in his nose. And not one of them could smell Althea or her strange savior over the solvents more than a meter in every direction.

  “Bernie. Get me the name and listing for every chop shop within five miles. If they specialize in high end or illegal enhancements, even better.”

  “Of course, Cain. What next?”

  “Let’s go visit our over-eager cyborg. Maybe he has some additional information for us?”

  Bernie opened a guide line in Cain’s interface showing the shortest path to the local emergency clinic where TP had dropped off their contractor.

  “Alert the clinic that I require privacy for this interview, thanks Bernie.”

  The AI stayed silent at the presumptive gratitude. Cain trained it well.

  What remained of the unconscious goon’s body lived by the grace of tubes and wires connecting to his flesh. Cain hovered over the body and pulled his link kit from underneath this scarf. Technically this kit’s existence broke more laws and corporate regulations than his own executive implant did. But that formed the basis for his privacy need.

  And it let Cain dive directly into his cyborg’s local memory storage.

  Like the artificial simulation from his assistant, the dive let him see an AR representation of what the goon had witnessed in his last five or so conscious minutes. The little boy connected to Steven Clark surprised Cain more than anything else.

  Not one part of the scene had suggested the boy’s existence, though Cain had to concede the point that he did not walk through the entirety of the Clark apartment looking for unknown guests. Still, he should have smelled the boy’s presence as soon as he stepped into the hallway. Cain followed the goon’s memories as he pulled himself from the wreckage of the building and tried to pursue Althea.

  He found her near the kid, who was unharmed.

  Cain sighed to himself, that meant the woman had figured out how to selectively use her CC-0 implant. The fact she sent the boy away before engaging the cyborg proved it. The final scenes of the cyborg’s active memory sent chills of anticipation though Cain.

  She flashed an angry, almost offended look at the cyborg before she shot off her own arm. Nothing like disgust or horror registered in her face, just determination and annoyance. Cain grinned as he switched away from the cyborg’s active memory and turned to searching his hardware manually.

  He found what he wanted in the form of a Telepersona limbic and spinal implant. Cain issued administrative codes to those implants ordering them to purge their toxic payload after ten minutes. The cyborg’s inevitable death would register as toxic shock, a standard COD in cases like this.

  Cain whistled to himself in pleasure as he walked out of the clinic to his autocar. What had begun as a boring, standard wrap hunt turned out to be interesting.

  “Still, no need to delay the necessary. Where are you on those clinic locations, Bernie?”