Page 13 of Star-Born Anomaly
Not my orders. Don’t ask questions.
Carver concentrated on the next cut and watched how the two sides meshed together while listening to the drips slow.
The old man twitched as his wounds healed, and stared at Carver, unrelenting, while the regenerator buzzed between them.
“Maybe you can help him?”
Carver didn’t ask. Didn’t want to know.
Not my assignment.
“Maybe you’re not as bad as what they want you to believe.”
And maybe it was all a test. Carver wouldn’t put it past the CORE to have some sort of loyalty task he had to pass, or be terminated by another agent the next day.
But something told him this wasn’t that.
He healed the last of the cuts on the old man’s chest, dropped the regenerator on the deck, then leaned into his space until their faces were only a centimeter apart. With a flick of his thumb, he turned on the laser scalpel, then held it close to the man’s eye.
Archibald barely flinched, even though Carver could feel the heat from the tool just as much as the old man would.
“You’re strong, I’ll give you that,” Carver said, hating the hint of desperation leaking through his voice. “You don’t have to prove anything, but I can’t leave until I have that number.”
They stared at each other, the scalpel humming between them, the old man’s gaze jumping between Carver’s eyes, searching. A look of understanding, of resignation, swept over his features.
“Twelve. But you’ll never find them all.” Then the old man moved quicker than Carver would have thought possible while being suspended by bleeding wrists.
Archibald lurched forward, right into the path of the laser scalpel, impaling his face against the heat of the tool. Carver dodged, but not fast enough, trying to pull the device away. The old man’s scream tore between them, followed by the scent of burnt flesh. The laser sank into his cheekbone, then his eye, before Carver could retreat far enough.
The scalpel had done a lot of damage, but not enough to kill him, and the old man let out garbled shouts of pain. Carver stepped close, grabbed his white hair, and tilted his head for the killing blow—one swipe across his throat.
Silence enveloped the room in the next instant, punctuated by Carver’s fast inhales.What the fuck was that?
Carver’s grip flexed on the scalpel. He took a deep breath as he stared at the hanging body, the bulk swaying gently back and forth.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
This was sloppy. He didn’t have the time to make it look like a suicide now. That meant it would look like a murder.
Murders meant questions. And questions made his superiors twitchy.
His chest rose and fell like he’d just done laps around the station. This felt like his first kill, messy and filled with too much emotion.
Emotions get you terminated.
Carver shut everything down inside him and focused on what needed to be done. First, he swapped out the tainted plastic for a clean sheet, taking the bloody one to the reclamation chute and shoving it inside to be incinerated.
Then he cut the body down from the overhead, removing all trace of the ties he’d used. He picked up the regenerator from the deck and used it to heal the cuts on the old man’s wrists. That he had to do. Murder was one thing. Torture was another.
Maybe the cleaner could play this off as a crime of passion if the man had a girlfriend or something, but it wasn’t likely with the way Archibald had been talking about his late wife.
Using a cloth from his case, he wiped the blood off the body as best he could, but there was a lot on his pants. He removed those too.
Hefting the dead weight over his shoulder, Carver carried the man to his quarters and laid him out on the bed before covering him in blankets.
Lastly came Carver’s clothes. He peeled off the flight-suit and swapped it for business garb before tossing the blood-tainted items intoreclamation as well. Then he hit the destroy and recycle button before returning to the main living space.
With one last glance over his shoulder toward the bedroom, he picked up his case to leave, then hesitated. Usually, he would reconnect to the grid at this point and send all his recordings and data to his superiors, but that agitated feeling traveled over his skin again.
