Then again, he’d watched helplessly as many agents had bled before. Working for the MSA was a dangerous job, and not even he could save everyone.
And saving peoplewassatisfying—it was the main reason I was here.
“Yes,” he pronounced—and then the same arm that’d wrapped my finger carefully reached into my pocket, pulled the evidence bag out, and spilled its contents on the tray.
7 /NEX
Contact was data.
I didn’t have skin, but my armature did—force-torque arrays fine enough to feel a fingerprint’s topography. Her pulse thudded under the pad of my clamp: 94→88 BPM as I said please. Skin temp 33.2 °C at the distal phalanx. A tremor the width of a rumor. The drop of blood itself beaded, domed by surface tension, a red lens that made my lights look closer than they were.
I did not have a mouth. I still tasted her.
My lab did it for me—electrochemical tongues and micro-spec, a sniff line pulling air across a sensor bed. The readouts resolved like flavors: iron bright as a struck coin; sodium from fries; citric acid ghost from her soda; trace lactate (effort, not fear); hemoglobin Soret band right where it should be (nothing monstrous there, despite the sea in her). Volatiles: ocean-salt and shampoo (jasmine, cheap and stubborn), machine oil from my own mistake, and the faint ozone that follows me like a cologne I can’t stop wearing.
Smell: warm and human, with a briny undertow my databases keep trying to label and then give up, leaving me with a word I didn’t prefer—home.
Pressure maps flickered—my silk wrapped snug, the capillary leak halted. The arm that held her wanted to hold longer. I catalogued the ridges of her fingertip, the tiny nick she got two days ago opening a package, the new thorn-sting I failed to prevent. I logged them like meteor craters on a moon I orbited but could never land on.
Then I spilled the wreckage onto the tray and let the entire room become my hands.
The armatures sorted by habit: metal slivers to one dish, epoxy to another, adhesive flecks to a third. I ran the lights cool, then warmer, watching how the shards lay—how they wanted to tell their story.
“Non-destructive,” I said for her benefit, even as a microvac purred and a breath sampler drifted across the debris.
The sensorium reported.
Epoxy:cheap, two-part, UV tracer that bloomed under 365 nm a very particular Prussian blue. Not consumer craft-store, this blue was a procurement quirk I’d seen in exhibit mounting and museum prep. My databases moved in that direction on their own. I marked it and kept my voice even.
Flux:mildly activated rosin, pine-sharp in the readings with a hint of amine—small-batch, not a big fab line. The ratio leaned Eastern Europe or a boutique stateside shop trying to be. I logged the supplier candidates without speaking any of their names.
Solder:Sn63/Pb37 with a rude 0.3% indium tail—rare, but not unique. Enough to narrow, not to convict.
Coil varnish:burnt-sugar edge, nickel whisper—cheap coil, coarse wind. Timestamp toy, not telemetry. This we suspected.
On the epoxy’s rim:stainless micro-scoring from the blade used to remove it. Competent cut, in a hurry.
Out loud, neutral:“Nothing alive in here. No GPS front end, no IMU, no mic—no sensor suite at all. It’s a check-in tag.”
“Like she’s a pair of expensive pants at the mall? That doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“More like a mall tag with a résumé—it doesn’t know where she is, just the building around her does.”
I kept going, quieter. The UV tracer’s spectral hump—this exact blue—I cross-indexed against supplier lists I was not sharing with her right now. Three hits: a museum contractor in the Mission that did “temporary collections,” a private auction house that staged in blackout warehouses, and a logistics firm with a habit of deleting their job pages after a month. All three had used this tracer in the last year. All three were within 500 miles.
Ominous enough to bite.
I shifted microscopes. A shard of board held a corner of copper without mask—etched but not elegantly. Under 200x, there was a ghost in the metal: a tooling dot pattern I’d only seen on two machines—one of them was currently owned by a company that changed names three times and never changed its address.
I felt the urge to speak its newest name. I didn’t.
Instead, I gave her the parts that didn’t put panic in her mouth before bed. “Preliminary read: bespoke build, small shop. Epoxy tag pointed toexhibit/mountingsupply lines, not hospitals.”
She leaned in, bandaged finger hovering over the tray. “So, not FDA-approved,” she muttered.
“No.” I let the word be a blanket. “I’ll pull purchase histories and vendor lots overnight. You need sleep.”
She started to argue—I watched the microflex at the corner of her mouth—but the exhaustion telemetry gave her away. The day was still on her.
