Page 1 of Remnants: Disruption
Chapter 1
Broken
Four A.M. October 22nd, 1030 A.D.
Of the most dangerous city-states that remain in Nye Verden, the war zone that is New Chicago is only matched by the lawlessness of the Western Alliance.
President Moira White, an interview from 1020 A.D.
Imust admit, the body looks fucking gnarly.
With the head bent at a weird, unnatural angle, it’s a wonder that the rest of it doesn’t look like wall-flung-spaghetti.
Christ, that was an inside thought.
I glance up from the twisted corpse and over to Persephone De Luca, lieutenant and lead homicide detective of the New Chicago Police Department. She looks thoroughly distracted by the brass talking at her.
At. Not with.
Grunting, I flick my attention back to the mangled man. He’s relatively nondescript. A general white guy with close cut hair. His glasses are quite literally jammed onto his face. The rest of him is hard to differentiate because his body looks as if it were thrown from a great height.
Yeah. Thrown.
I glance up to the overcast New Chicagoan sky. It being cloudy isn’t the issue so much as the fact that the nearest building is, in fact, one of the commercial districts’ skyscrapers.
Which means this man’s death is probably a murder; likely by a Remnant. And that means my job is about to get a lot harder.
I glance back at Percy again. She’s smiling the way she does where her nose crinkles. Clearly whatever the man had said was funny enough that she could pretend to laugh at it.
Then her amber eyes flick to mine. And, as her gaze pins me that way it does, she frowns—as if reading everything.
She holds a hand up to the man who looks mildly affronted that a woman might dare interrupt him but isn’t stupid enough to say anything to her about it.
“What’d you find?” she asks, kneeling beside me.
For a moment, it all feels right. The cool air. The smell of the Affliction-powered engines whirring around us. The way Percy looks at me, as if I might be important to her.
Then I glance down at the body by my feet and remember that I am, indeed, an idiot.
“I think he was thrown,” I say, pointing at the wall behind him and then the way his face has caved in. “As in not from a building but from a hand.”
She quirks a dark eyebrow at me. A silent urge to continue.
I point up above us. “If someone fell from up there, they’d be a grease stain. As it is, he’s not exactly in the best shape, but he’s recognizable.”
Percy follows my finger, then looks back down at the body.
“Have you read him?” she asks the next obvious question.
I let out a snort, happy to know that despite the taboo, Percy still values me—if just for the powers alone.
With a gloved hand, I reach out to the man’s back, careful not to disrupt anything else.
Then—
Darkness erupts around me. As if the light of reality is turned off, I’m left in the ether. Alone. Standing on nothingness and seeing into the forevermore.
And nothing happens. The vacuum of reality shifts—which is odd given there’s no basis for up or down. Violent stabbing of pain erupts behind my eyes as I collide with something hard and cold.
