MARKERS UNKNOWN, Speculative Fiction Thriller

[O.E. Soderberg]

MARKERS UNKNOWN, Speculative Fiction Thriller

Opening Pages—Introduces protagonist, antagonist, setting, tone, and foreshadows the primary crisis and conflict.

 

ONE

Present Time. Colorado Springs Police Station. South Interrogation Room.

That bastard cuffed me to the table and left the room, but we both know my petty theft isn’t what the FBI is after.

In the harsh overhead lighting, I pull hard against the restraints in a continuous succession of aggressive tugs until I draw my own blood. The minute the warm, wet sensation meets the cold air of this unwelcoming environment, I cease all fighting. This is what I was after—not freedom, blood.

Looking down, I study the small drops of liquid beading to the surface of my skin. We all bleed red is the saying, but I’m wondering what that even means at this point. The scars on my arm make a little more sense now that I can remember the tubes running between our bodies. Somehow—call it a good Samaritan, call it altruistic abandonment—I’d been spared years ago. Mine may be a sad fucking existence, but I exist.

After everything I’ve learned in the last forty-eight hours, it’s as if I can see the particles that make up my blood. Human cells that are all determined by genetics, one gene inherited from each parent. But that’s assuming, the person came to be using good old-fashioned sex. That’s not where I came from, and it’s the very reason the FBI has gotten involved.

Footsteps sound behind the door before it swings open with a scratching sound. Special Agent Max Baker steps inside with a demeanor that hints at his calculated intent. His eyes roam my body, from the top of my head, down my face, and settle to where my hands are secured to the center bar of the table. He sees the blood I’ve drawn to the surface and seems to analyze it in the same way I had been. His jaw works as he dips into his front pocket and removes a set of keys. I imagine an apology sits on the tip of his tongue, but he doesn’t let it slip.

This is his domain. He’s walked every step of this case. His investigation began over a year ago. There was a whistleblower inside the pharmaceutical giant, Lander Medical. This informant was a young scientist with a budding career. After only a couple months of preparing transfusions for the general public, he began to doubt that the product Lander touted as being on the cusp of reversing aging for the general population wasn’t made up of something nefarious. He filed a report with the FBI, but remained working in the lab. He’s now serving as an informant to the special agent standing before me.

Max’s investigation led to the discovery that a different hemoglobin was being mixed into Lander’s product. It carries human DNA but doesn’t have any of the usual markers. Across all the labs in the United States, only one person in the last three decades has been on record to have a blood type masked of any markers. A random girl working as a bartender at the base of the ski slope of Cooper Mountain in Colorado. She was only a little over an hour away from the Lander Medical Compounding Lab. That was too fucking close for the FBI to ignore.

The blood drips down the outer side of my forearm. I know it’s just a collection of proteins, metabolites, ions, and other substances drifting around in water. For other people, that’s the whole truth, but for me, there’s something else beneath the surface. I examine it further like if I look hard enough, I’ll be able see what got me here, what makes me that one girl on record.

Our eyes lock as Agent Baker takes my hand in his. Neither of us blink as the chain between the restraints falls to the table. I’m freed, but for some reason, his touch on me feels more restrictive than the silver cuffs ever had. Running his whole palm down my arm, he leaves behind a smear of red.

Taking two steps back, he wipes his hand on a pant leg that is already soaked in blood that I know isn’t his or mine. Swallowing hard against the lump forming in the back of my throat, I try to push the image of a man falling from a bridge less than two hours ago from my mind.

I focus on Max, to the power imbalance between us. It’s strange seeing him out of his usual dress. He’s not even wearing his badge, just jeans and a bullet proof vest over a dirty t-shirt. He’s unshaven, hair disheveled. I’ve seen him look like this before, but that was in my bed, never on the job. During sex, I’d been the one in control. Now? I worry it may be him. But he’s as off his game as I am. He’s as shaken up about what’s transpired today as me. Gone is the agent who caught me snooping around the Lander Medical facility fifteen months ago. Gone is the man who’s been following me since. 

Pulling out the chair, he slides it across the linoleum floor by its back two legs and takes the seat across from me. He’s silent, like we’re strangers, like he may hate me as much as I hate him in this moment, like we’re both blaming the other for what happened today. But there’s more behind his hard stare. The way he’s looking at me now implies he thinks he knows everything he needs about the girl sitting in front of him. He couldn’t be more wrong.

Max’s eyes sweep around the space, taking in the interrogation room the same way I had done when he first left me in here. It’s cold and empty like a hospital, just not as sterile. I have a sneaking suspicion that he’s attempting to push that same image of a man falling to his death to some hidden corner in his mind, but he plays it off like he’s searching for a clock. Finding nothing on the walls, he settles on raising his wrist to check his watch. Then, two dark forearms rest on the lip of the table, and two cold eyes meet mine.

“Look,” he says. “I’m about to tell you everything that happened on my end. I need you to tell me everything that was happening on yours. We need him to understand we’re not the bad guys here, Quinn.”

I can’t tell if I’m going to laugh or cry. Everything that was happening? This fucking asshole should realize it’s a little late for that. People are dead. He’s had months to share this information and only now is he willing to come clean. Not because he should have from the very beginning, no, because we’d better get our stories straight on the events over the past forty-eight hours. Max needs to form a united front to get Russell Drake on the record or this special agent will be the one to shoulder the blame.

He’s absorbing every inch of my body language, following my eye movements, and reading into all of my involuntary tells. Truth is seeping out through the cracks in my armor. I was his responsibility, and I went rogue. A post-mortem can’t change that fact or why I snapped in the first place. Did I do this? Are these people dead because I couldn’t wait? That’s a truth I can’t harbor. What choice did I have? Max didn’t help me before. We wouldn’t be here, like this, if he had. The fight between personal culpability and blaming him must be painted on my face because Max sucks in a breath to say something more.

I cut him off. “This is why everything was stalled, isn’t it? You knew about him.”

A smile cuts across his face. One I’d been tricked into thinking was devastatingly handsome but have come to realize is condescending in the best light. Here under the neon bulbs of the Colorado Springs police station, it’s nothing but vicious. “You didn’t sign up for this because of him,” he reminds me as if that means anything now. As if that’s what I’m even implying.

“I didn’t sign up for this at all,” I correct. “You approached me. I had no choice but to help.”

He doesn’t reply. Just mouths that last word as he leans back, sucking in a deep breath and pressing his eyes closed. He can mock it all he wants. But my help transitioning from him to myself. My help spiraling into this fucking mess is on his betrayal—not mine. And I want an answer on how deep it goes, Agent Baker.

Pulling my body over the table, I lean in.

“When did you know?” I don’t recognize the ice in my voice. I want to blame him for everything and one small layer beneath that, it’s almost as if I’m begging him to lie to me. Free me from this guilt.

A raw flicker of pain fire behind his irises. With one blink, it’s gone. A brief flash of the man I’d come to know only to watch his face return to the emotionless void he’s offering. A stark contrast from the man I may have said I was falling in love with.

“I can’t tell you that,” he says.

“We’re way past confidential. Don’t feed me that bullshit. When did you know?”

Now it’s his turn to lean in. He creeps toward my cold glare, using every inch that he closes between us to build courage for whatever lie he’ll tell me next.

“Through satellite imagery. We knew someone was with Theodore. A second POI.”

“POI,” I mock. Even when telling the truth, he can’t help but lace it behind the sterile formalities they’re trained to use. Code names and acronyms designed to do nothing more than help stomach the manipulation and tyranny they bestow upon innocent people. “He’s a fucking person, don’t abbreviate it. And I’m not talking about him. When did you know I wouldn’t be finding my sister?”

“Quinn, as much as I’d love to dive into finger pointing right now like, oh, I don’t know — the fact that you were plotting a fucking rescue mission behind my back. Or how about your pilot friend and the longstanding vendetta with Lander Medical you’d conveniently never told me about?”

His words land like a slap to the face.

Max has never acknowledged my pilot friend, Sean, or our foul play before. I knew that he knew. Whether before or after I figured out my insignificant crime wasn’t what the FBI was following, I can’t say. If pillow talk with him has taught me anything, it’s that Max Baker lives strictly by the code of on the record and off the record. He’d told me more than he ever should have, but I guess I hadn’t anticipated the freedom in that philosophy could go both ways.

If I had, maybe this wouldn’t have spiraled so far past complicated. Getting deep into the nature of what the FBI wanted with an orphan bartender was nothing more than self preservation. I’d like to think of it as self sacrifice for Sean. We’d assumed we’d been caught.

We were two stupid kids who aged out of the Leadville, Colorado foster care system, set up on a work program through Cooper Mountain. But four months later, Lander Medical put in a bid for the community owned ski slope, and next thing we knew, the program we’d been surviving on was disbanded.

It’s that very truth that reinforces what I already know in this moment. I’m not the thief this agent sees right now. I’m not the criminal my past actions portray. I won’t apologize for any of it. What other choice did Sean and I have? We were survivors before we were ever vigilantes. Nothing can change that truth—not the past five years of skimming funds from Lander Medical’s investments in the Valley, not the past two years working with this agent, and not even the past forty-eight hours can strip that away—no matter what has been learned and lost.

We. Were. Surviving.

Sometimes that looked like a day of honest work. Other times, it looked like this.

Max becomes amused by my silence, like this is only a game, and he’s already won. It’s no surprise when he licks his lips and redistributes the tension by whispering a single statement to keep us on track. “You were in this for your sister.”

The mention of my sister sends a burning acid pain through my extremities. A bolt of electricity, seeking the nearest exit point.

“A sister wasn’t even on my radar until you came in and fucked with my head,” I say, unloading the building pressure.

He wants truth, there it is. He ruined me. Before the great Special Agent Max Baker came into my life, I hadn’t even known I had a sister. With every new off the record reveal, new memories were forced to surface. I’ve been haunted by flashbacks and remembering being used for human testing wasn’t even the worst part. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t alone, or at least I hadn’t always been. I remembered a vague image of a father, but also someone else. Someone who wasn’t just a sibling, but a sister whose body and mind I still feel connected to. When I focus on the reflection in my memories, I can vividly see us together. Two identical little girls—twins.

“Don’t get it twisted, Max,” I say. “I was waking up in cold sweats and vomiting because every night when I’d close my eyes, I was forced to flip through the family photo album I never knew I had. You used my past against me.”

“I wasn’t the one who did this to you,” he says.

All I can see is the face of the man who betrayed me. It’s funny, all that time in the foster care system, even the time since Sean and I aged out, I always felt sorry for myself. But this bastard has rewritten the story. It no longer feels like abandonment when staying would have meant I’d still be used as the lab rat for Lander Medical.

I drop my head to the table and look up at Max through my brow. “Do I even have a fucking sister?”

He reaches out and takes my hand in his with an expression that says my pain is his pain, but he doesn’t answer. For all the rules Max claims to follow, I still question why he only breaks the ones that hurt me. Anything he knows that may set me free seems to remain locked behind a rule he’s suddenly unwilling to compromise. But what the FBI was really investigating in Lander’s testing, my blood, the origin of the scars running down my arms? That information seemed to slip from his tongue. I didn’t fucking snap, he bent me until I broke. That’s on him.

I tried to do this his way. I confided in both Max and Sean about these flashbacks. The sister, the past I’d never known coming into light. I’d begged Max to help move things along, help figure out what’s happening to me. While Sean only grew angrier with Lander Medical, Max always insisted I hold back. But sitting here in this room, gathering information, is exactly why I couldn’t stand around and wait for the FBI. My life is the product of what waiting on government organizations looks like. Red tape. Paperwork. Warrants. It all takes too long.

This is taking too long. Two days ago, I was convinced my sister was still alive. It was an instinct only twins can know. I felt it in my bones that an extension of me was alive beyond the Lander facility gate. So yeah, I decided to break into the compound on my own. Because of this slow fucking process. And with every minute that is passing, that instinct is becoming less and less, and now, I think Russell Drake was right when he said she had never been there.

I wrench my hand free from Max’s touch. “What do you know?” I can’t tell if I’m begging or accusing. Whether I’m asking if he’s known about her all along, or if he knows I’ll never find her.

He gives me another non-answer. “This is a line of work that can blur the border between right and wrong. I won’t try to justify every decision only that you trust me that I’ve done everything I can to ensure those decisions have a mean that leans toward justice.”

“Is that what happened back there? Justice?”

“What are you implying?” he asks with a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders. He knows exactly what I’m implying. The unasked question of Did you push him off the bridge? lingers. And just when his facade of calm seems to falter, he shakes his head with that same vicious smile. “I guess I can’t blame you.”

I let out a breath. I don’t even know why I care what he did at the end. What’s done is done. I set all of this in motion. The guilt crawls back to the surface.

“What now, Max?” I say, hearing the fear in my voice, hoping he doesn’t notice.

He slides a device between us and leans in. “We tell them everything.” He pushes the record button.

“Start at the gate. What do you remember?”