Blood Obsidian

Issue 29

The unbearable weight of waiting ... - Part 5

The area of Market Town had seen better days. A long time ago, for certain, but now the place held some of the most impoverished and declining areas of the city. A place where slum lords still ruled and the people took to crime for the privilege of simply having enough money to eat. Caitlyn had never come here before. Not once. The place terrified her, but here she was, sat on a roof, looking down at a building that looked marginally better off than its neighbours.

Here, Kyle sat, looking through a small monocular scope he had retrieved from the cuff of his gauntlet. How the thing held so many different objects, Caitlyn couldn't guess. Some miniaturisation technology? Careful packing. She had checked her own, similar gauntlets and had found nothing.

"I thought you were going to teach me detectiving." She wasn't certain that was a word, but it did the job. "So far we've punched people and swung around like idiots."

"What do you see?" He handed the scope to her without looking, before leaning on the brick parapet, resting his chin on his hands. "Everything is relevant, you only have to see the little things that most people would miss."

Caitlyn looked through the scope and then turned it around to look through the correct end. Starting from the bottom, the steps leading up to the door of the brownstone, the door itself, travelling from window to window. Most of those windows were in darkness. Others, the lights switched off as she watched, or on. There were plants in tubs hanging from the sills, curtains tucked back, or half-closed. It looked as normal as an apartment building should.

As she looked at the roof, she saw a skylight for the topmost apartment, gravel upon the roof's surface. Smoke stacks that were largely unused these days. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary and she began to feel a little frustrated. Kyle had obviously brought her here for a reason, but she couldn't see it. She began to feel a little stupid and she knew for certain she wasn't.

"I don't know what I'm looking for. It just ... wait." She looked back at one of the windows and then, straight away, looked to another. "It's a pattern. The lights in the apartments are switching off and on in a pattern. And, there, on the roof, there's like a series of disturbed patches, but not from feet. More like, uh, grooves?"

"Good work. It's fake. The whole thing. No-one lives there." He turned away from looking across to the other building and sat back against the parapet, taking out his phone. "I tracked where the video came from, it passed through nearly twenty different, public servers around the world, but I managed to find the tiniest, blink-and-you'll-miss-it connection and it led here. More work revealed that this place had, up until recently, been almost derelict. Now there's enough electricity pumping in there to power several server farms."

Caitlyn looked again. There was no way that much electricity was used to light the place. Those curtains she could see looked new. The plants were almost uniform in their sizes, freshly planted. The skylight, if Caitlyn looked carefully, had some kind of pneumatic pistons on the inside. To open it? That's what she could only assume. It all left her wondering why, however.

All of this to create a fake video of her saying truly nasty things about her best friend. The villain, Fiend, had said they were going to destroy Caitlyn's life, but this seemed a little petty. Childish, even. She almost wished the villain would simply attack her and have done with it, rather than ruin the lives of those around her. It also brought up what the point of planting the term papers was. Again, a little low-key for the revenge Fiend had sworn. But revenge for what, Caitlyn couldn't imagine.

"So, we stake the place out? Sit watching for the bad guy to come back?" She handed Kyle his scope back and felt her stomach rumble. "I wish I'd brought sandwiches and coffee."