It was a strange environment. They called everyone but Campbell by first names, and even he had a nickname. She wasn’t sure she could take it if they insisted on calling her Clarisse, and she was not letting them call her Claire in the office, even if Dryden put up with nicknames. ‘Theo’. His subordinates called him Theo.

Despite the cluttered office, Campbell set Claire up efficiently. She signed the forms to register as a legal Dalgerran Tracer under the command of Theodore Dryden (her teachers would die of shock if they knew), paired a small pane of glass to the team so they could contact her when she was off shift, and was assigned her own desk and coffee mug.

Her first day was almost coming to an uneventful finish when Dryden stood up, dropping his friendly persona and showing the first bit of professionalism she’d seen today.

“We’ve got a body in the bat arbor,” Dryden said, standing up. “Abigail, is Linn's car charged?”

Stephanson was up in an instant.

“Yup! I’ll go get her.”

It was good Abigail Stephanson had already been shoved into being their utility caster. Claire spent a lot of her career pushed to the back to charge cars and lights. Instead, she allowed herself to be crammed into Miller’s vehicle.

It was a nice car, but not big enough for all four of them to fit comfortably. Claire kept her face calm, but it put her on edge, having Stephanson wedged up against her arm. She didn’t like being touched at the best of times, but the constant buzz of Stephanson’s magic made it worse.

She had never liked physical contact, but it had gotten worse in her time traveling. She needed to get used to it. She distracted herself feeling the glass core powering the car slowly burn down. It was good quality, higher quality than the car looked. Could that be intentional?

Dryden kept checking the glass he’d taken from his desk. When it finally lit up with a message, his brow furrowed. Stephanson leaned forward to the front seat to peer over his shoulder.

“What is it?”

“They’ve identified him.” Dryden pushed back his hair. “This is going to be worse than we thought. The victim’s been identified as Caspian Handfellow. He’s the son of a successful merchant.”

“Well,” Stephenson said softly, “shit. Half the city’s gonna be up our ass, huh?”

“Yeah. He was young too. We’ll be tripping over reporters the second this gets out..” Dryden grumbled.

Claire hummed. That sort of thing hadn’t occurred to her. Back home, reporters had been another arm over the government. They never showed up for themselves, just printed the story her team’s liaison passed them. ‘Dealing with reporters’ involved trying to convince the liaison that the truth was printable. It hadn’t even occurred to her that a free press meant she’d have to learn how to interact with them during investigations.

It was a bit exciting. She should be annoyed. She could already imagine the ways an irresponsible journalist could get an innocent suspect attacked or draw civilians to a crime, but it was so wonderfully Dalgan to have that problem.

“What’s the protocol for reporters? I’m afraid I’m not experienced with them.”

Linn Miller flashed her a grin in the rearview mirror.

“Just don’t talk to them and you’ll be fine. Cam’s in charge of our official statements. The good ones know how not to cause too much trouble, and the vultures are easy to scare.”

“She says that, but she talks to them a lot,” Stephanson added. “She likes to talk about gross medical stuff until they get creeped out. What did that guy call you?”

“The grim butcher of this otherwise respectable team,” Linn recited proudly, “whose fascination with the macabre leaves proper citizens to question who should be allowed to handle such sensitive cases.”

“It’s really best to say ‘no statement’,” Dryden said, though it was unclear if he was talking to Claire or Miller.

The car had to pull over at the edge of the arbor. Claire had tried to explore the whole city, but hadn’t found much to see here. The caves were closed to the public, and the trees were just… an overpruned forest. She’d spent enough time in forests for a lifetime. As far as she could tell, the arbor was mostly a place for teenagers to sneak off and get their first tongue action. Thankfully the bats weren’t out yet. She’d never tell, but Claire couldn’t get used to the sheer size of them. Bats should be winged rodents, not the size of a small hound.

A woman in black and gold church robes met them at the arbor’s entrance to take them to the corpse. The sun was already low, and the arbor was quiet. Even if the bats weren’t out, the crickets had started to sing. The woman led them through the main park in silence, over to where a gate separated the carefully manicured public area from the wild growth of the nature preserve. The woman from the church opened a small gate, and they followed the groundskeeping path towards the caves.

The body was about thirty feet in, not even close to the caves. It lay just a few feet off the path, placed carefully in the long grass. Thankfully, it had only been there a few hours, so there was no rot to deal with. On the other hand, a fresh corpse made it a bit harder not to think about the person it had been a few hours ago. That was no good at this point. This man was nobody to her, and the people who loved him didn’t need another mourner, they needed a tracer.

He wore rough clothes, not fitting of the high class boy described, but his soft hands and well groomed hair made it obvious the clothes were not his usual.

Still, he didn’t look pampered anymore. There were deep, gruesome, precise burns across his neck and chest. There was no sign of a struggle. The grass wasn’t pressed down. Caspian lay in it like he had stopped off the trail to rest.

Claire took a deep breath and felt for what was in the air. Ignore the energy flowing from Stephanson and the church escort, ignore the stray traces of old magic, focus on the crime scene, focus on the body.

Caspian tried his hand at life magic, mostly plant manipulation, but a recent touch of trying purification and healing. He’d never had much magic used on him, just a touch of healing here and there.

The burns, however, stood out starkly. Looking at them, she had to choke back down her emotions. With her eyes, she’d assumed he’d been slashed with something, perhaps in the heat of an argument, but that wasn’t the story the wounds told.

“This is a weird place to leave a body,” Dryden said, crouching down to look. “Putting it back here implies they were trying to hide it, but they left it where it could be easily found. Maybe he was killed somewhere near here. No blood, but the wounds look cauterized, so-”

“He wasn’t killed here,” Claire said, then swallowed her embarrassment when she realized she’d cut him off. “Sir.”

“Mmm?” Dryden asked, not seeming too annoyed at being interrupted.

“These wounds were made recently and slowly. I’d guess each one took about fifteen minutes. With that much use, I’d be able to feel it in the air if it had been anywhere within a mile or two.”

There was something else in the wounds, a magical trace that wasn’t fire or Caspian, but she couldn’t quite identify it.

“Tortured and dumped then?” MIller asked, kneeling next to the body and inspecting the wrists. Her tone was harsh, but she manipulated the hand gently as a parent checking a child’s fever.

“That would be my first guess,” Dryden said, looking close. “Abigail, you help Linn get the body to the car. Looking into the family will have to wait until morning, but there’s plenty we can do now. Let’s go see what Cam has for us.”

Stephanson and Miller went back to the car to get a body-bag and stretcher and Claire knelt down next to the body. Trying to feel out that bit of odd magical energy would be easier in the morgue, but traveling with Birch had instilled a few habits in her. Even at her last job, she’d been taught to pray for the dead.

In Avairne, you’d say ‘You have worked hard and served well, may you find rest.’. Here it was… something about a wheel, but the blessing that came to mind was neither of those.

“We mourn the loss of the present, we mourn the loss of the futures you will not have. To those that should have grieved you but will never know you, let us show them kindness in your name. To those that took your future, may we bring them justice in your honor.”

She resisted the impulse to brush back his hair or close his eyes. Linn wouldn’t want other people touching the body.

“I don’t recognize that prayer,” Dryden said. She nearly jumped. She’d forgotten she wasn’t alone.

“You speak Vayish?” she asked.

“Only a small, but I understand more than speak.” His accent was rough, clearly mostly from books, but it still brought half a smile to her face.

“It didn’t feel right to use an Avairnian prayer here. It’s a Salfari prayer.”

“Salfari? I haven’t heard of it.”

“You wouldn’t have. Salfet got absorbed into the defiled lands a few years ago. I’ve never been there myself,” Claire clarified before Dryden could draw any tragic conclusions, “I worked with a Salfari priest for a bit.”

She could feel him analyzing her and refused to look at him. She stood up and stretched, then stood in silence until the other two got back.

Claire was a bit worried about riding back with the corpse, but Miller’s car turned out to be designed to operate as an inconspicuous hearse. Stephenson and Miller zipped the body into a bag and put it into the car’s spacious, sealed trunk.

Claire spent the car-ride back trying to feel out any hint of the fire magic she’d felt on Caspian’s body. It gave an interesting snapshot of the city, but it mostly just gave her a headache.

The magic here was so dense. Every city was overwhelming, but Saint’s Landing was one of the most magically saturated cities she’d ever felt. Most cities were built as far away from defiled lands as possible, but Saint’s Landing was built right on the edge of them. It was a constant, distant scream on her senses; a city of life and noise and then, just to the west, an endless stretch of corrupted magic that sat in her senses like a grain of sand under her tongue.

Defiled lands meant the church and military both needed a presence here, fighting back both caliga and the slow creep of corrupted glass growing across the landscape. It seemed like everywhere she went, she could feel somebody who’d trained in some sort of casting or another.

Glass was everywhere. In most of the city, glass was purified, melted down, and forged into everything from car chips to cold-boxes to window panes. In the poorer areas, it wasn’t even purified, just used as a cheap construction material, the sturdiness making it worth the risk of drawing caliga and shades. Glass Town, south of the city wall, sparkled purple with the tainted glass built into every house and shop.

At least she couldn’t sense the body in the back. It means the seal on the trunk was put down properly, and the trace won’t get corrupted on the drive.

She tilted back her head and closed her eyes. No use burning through her energy now. She’d need it in the lab.

*

Linn liked that morgues made people uncomfortable. It kept them out.

An autopsy was a conversation. Somebody had stolen Caspain Handfellow’s voice, but he still had a story to tell, and she had the power to find it. That’s why she’d never seen her morgue as grisly. Killing a person was grisly, what she did here was something quiet and important.

Other people’s disgust with her work just protected the place. Even Theo barely came down here. Cam and Abigail couldn’t even handle seeing bodies in the field. Abigail would do some of the lifting, but Linn saw her look away until the body was bagged.

Clarisse clearly had no such compunction. She sat on a counter, watching the autopsy with cold interest. It was damn creepy. Linn knew that was a bit hypocritical. Plenty of people found her creepy, but she knew herself. She knew why it didn’t bother her, and, at the end of the day, bodies should bother people. It was a core human impulse.

It was hard not to bring Clarisse’s home country into it. It wasn’t like she thought everyone in Avairne was born evil; she wasn’t an idiot. On the other hand, this woman had served that government for… when did they start training? Like 15? It would have been well over a decade, maybe even two decades. What had she done, to get eyes that cold?

Caspian’s body was throwing Linn off too. He had very obvious burns, but, as far as she could tell, the cause of death was blood loss. Burns could kill by blood loss, but these wounds were cauterized shut. If not for the low blood volume, Linn would assume Caspian had died when his esophagus was damaged. The clothes weren’t bloodied, and there was no sign of any other wounds.

Clarisse got down from the counter and peered at the corpse. She had uncomfortably light footsteps.

“Is it alright if I touch the wound?”

Well, at least she’d asked first instead of just sticking her hand in. One of the tracer’s they’d hired for a case had done that once.

“Why?”

“There’s another type of magic in the wound, but I haven’t been able to identify it. I was hoping for a closer look.”

“Go ahead, just be careful and- Saints, put on gloves!”

“I’d prefer not to, if that’s alright. Direct contact is best.”

It was bad practice and unsanitary, but Clarisse was a tracer, not a mortician. Linn couldn’t reasonably obstruct somebody else’s work.

“Wash your hands first,” she said instead.

Linn watched intently as Clarisse put her hands into the incision on the chest with no hint of squeamishness, though there was no glee in her eyes either. She was focused and, looking carefully, a bit tired. Was it just a long shift on her first day, or was she burning through her magic?

After a few minutes, Clarisse stepped back with a nod.

“Thank you. I believe I’ve gotten all I’m going to get. The original magical trace is badly damaged.”

“Does the trace line up with the burns?” Linn asked.

“It does. Why?”

Okay, concerns aside, it was fucking great to have a decent tracer on the team.

“This wasn’t torture. He died of blood loss. These match slashing wounds, right? I think whoever did this changed the clothes and burned him post mortem to cover both the original injuries and the magical trace.”

Clarisse blinked, then refocused on Caspian.

“In that case, whoever did this wasn’t powerful at all. Even if they wanted to minimize damage, anyone half experienced with fire could have burnt away the evidence in a minute or two and hid the physical injuries better. Somebody was in over their head.”

“That’s good. Sloppy killers are always easier to catch. Come on, let’s fill in Theo.”