Capt. Brian W. Manchester, No. 002

12 August 2030 

21:24, QCT

It makes no sense.

Four deaths in the past twenty-four hours throughout the Empire. Rosa counted two in Etolunia, Mateo added another right before dinnertime here in Queen's, and Arthur just announced what is, hopefully, the last one of the night from the Meadowlands. Yesterday, the total was six, marking a slight decrease. Deaths are deaths, though. The number should be zero.

Murders occur, I get it. What is so jarring, however, is the how. It's never recurrent on the cause of death. There is no specific pattern as to how the victims were killed. It ranges from multiple stab wounds to bullet wounds to asphyxiation to... rolling up a car window with someone's head in between. James had to deal with that one.

All we know is the M.

No suspects, or should I say, no individuals. This M is the only lead we have. I suspect it's some kind of group, a cult even. There haven't been terrorists of this capacity since around the time I was born. Those guys kicked everyone out of Queen's but were driven out a year later. They didn't brand their violet mark on the arms of their victims.

What's so difficult is that we can't find any survivors. No one encounters these murderers and lives to tell about it. The only thing we know for sure is that the mark was first observed upon their discovery, not prior to their disappearance.

Boiled down, this is something we must take seriously, and we are taking every measure available to put an end to these murders as soon as possible. The problem is we can't stop it. We can't predict who goes missing next, much less who is killed. So far, none of the victims have been related close enough to predict any kind of systematic method.

And then, there's Slater. The first day I saw him again, he had that mark. He remarked that he didn't know he ever had it. This adds up to the eyewitness accounts who didn't recognize any kind of brand. What doesn't click is this: how is he still alive? How come these killers haven't come for him yet? I questioned him, constantly, asking if he knew anything. All he gave me was a shrug or a shitty response.

Three knocks shake the stagnant atmosphere of my study. The lambent desk lamp clamped onto the first shelf radiates onto my investigation notes. My black dress shoes only marginally reverberate the glare from their perch on my desk. I gnaw on the end of my pen, just before realizing I had been staring at my bookshelf for no reason for the past twenty minutes.

I circle around in my chair, toward the door. Celeste has one hand around the width, with her head poked around the side.

She grins. "Your boyfriend is here." She can't help but end the statement with a brief laugh.

I sigh, swinging my feet off of my desk. I press myself out of my burgundy, leather chair and approach the door, widening the entrance for myself. I can never get enough time to make any real breakthroughs anymore. It's all the damn same.

James closes the front door behind him and regards me instantly. "Anything?"

"What do you think?"

He flutters his head back and forth. "I was hoping someone had something."

I lead those two into the kitchen, where Celeste escapes to the living room and James navigates around the table, adjacent to the back doors. I observe on as he unravels a gargantuan scroll across the eating surface, throwing a plethora of notes and documents on top of that. It's a colossal political map of the entire Empire. It appears as if he stole it out of the archives at HQ.

"Things just got worse, Brian. I don't know if you heard, but Fitz said that officers recovered three bodies out of a snow drift just west of Hopewell. All have the mark." James clicks open his pen, hovering over the Sever territory. "Anton Petrov, Vasily Pavlychev, and Anna Vanin." He recites the names without a flaw as he plots a trio of tiny dots in the district labeled Sten.

"Do they know anything else? When did this happen?" I inquire, folding my arms over my body. Of course, when I say that the woman from the Meadowlands was the last one of the day, this has to come up. Make that seven deaths.

"They figure time of death is around three days ago. The bodies were practically blue when they found them." He burrows two fingers into a small pouch beside the map and recovers three small pins. "Autopsies are being conducted right now, they say. They need time to thaw, apparently, so it could be a while."

"Damn."

"That's hardly the worst part." He leans into the dots and surgically places a pin overtop one of them. "Fitz is out. She quit."

Celeste raises her head over the room divider to us at the table. "You're kidding."

"I wish I was, kid, but she said she couldn't go on being the Colonel anymore. She told Jameson that she felt defenseless and couldn't do anything to stop the murders, so she called it a career. I wouldn't do that, but I don't blame her for feeling guilty."

"Who's the Major up there?" I shuffle my feet, examining his extra notes along the perimeter. Nothing new.

He pokes the map with the last two pins, then straightens his body again. "Kirill Orlov. First Silvolk native to be the Colonel of Sever. Great guy. He actually has at least half of a brain."

"As if you have one, James." Celeste lowers herself back into the sofa. She's not wrong. His ego knows no bounds.

I became acquainted with James MacTavish twenty years ago by a random chance. We were never supposed to meet, but it's hard to fathom a world if we hadn't. The first thing he told me about himself was his rank, as if I cared. "I'm the Sergeant of Class 7. I bet you're hardly even a grunt, fucker." That's when I relayed the fact that I was the Sergeant of Class 0. He never called me a fucker again. At least, never as anything but a joke.

It appeared that I had just met the next Thomas Beauregard, the next great leader of the Imperial Guard. Never before had the rankers seen a recruit who could recite the Creed of Honor in every tongue from all corners of Oltima. He led his class in four tests during the ranking, beginning with the island run and an all-time record that still stands. They remarked that he was the most sophisticated recruit they have laid their eyes on in years. When he was ranked first in his class, it didn't come as a surprise to anyone but himself. I recall handing him the Emperor's Seal on the day of his ceremony. So much promise in one youthful individual.

As the years transpired, James was one of the most down-to-earth men I had ever come in contact with. That all changed when he was appointed Colonel eight years ago. It's not that he never speaks to me anymore, since I happen to be his closest friend. When we do converse, he complains about the capacity at which he despises the other four officers. Arthur Jameson especially. His way of coping with the aggressive nature of the inner-circle is to assert himself as being superior to them.

James traces a line connecting the triad of darts with one within the border of Queen's, and one in Sabul, in the south. He doesn't link the others to form the triangle, but instead, takes a step away from the table. I attempt to recognize what he's proposing with this map, but my mind doesn't work the same way his does. The Queen's pin attaches itself to one outside of the Meadowlands' capital to the northeast, and that one conjoins with two dots in Etolunia-

An M.

"It has to be a coincidence, James," I contest. "You could connect any of those points and make an M. It's a reach."

"You got any ideas, smart guy? Sometimes you gotta reach to get something started." He crosses his arms, scratching his shoulder blade. "This is the third time the map has looked like this. There is no way this is just a coincidence. Whoever is doing this has a plan." He jabs his finger into the point in the center of Bluefield. "All of the recorded murders in the city can be coagulated into this spot here. It's fifty blocks east from HQ, thirty west from Woodrow line. No bodies have been recovered from any of the other districts."

"They're calculated," I gather, although I am hesitant to admit it.

"They're no strangers to this kind of thing. I perceive they're trying to get our attention."

I snort. "Huh, you think?"

He grasps his pen and leans into me. "I'm gonna stab your fucking eyes out," He mouths, landing flat back on his feet. "Yes, I think so. These guys, whoever they may be, are trying to send us a message."

"We should send out patrols to watch over these areas, maybe try to catch them after they deposit the bodies."

"Rosa already tried that. I tried that. It doesn't work, they show up anyway."

Nothing is going to work. Whoever these assassins are, they're subtle enough to practically go unnoticed. They execute their victims and are gone without a trace, but they leave a hell of a mess. They're toying with us, pushing our buttons until we finally give in, but we won't. We can't. The Empire is depending on us to stop these butchers, but we are hopeless.

I know about the Medo. They're the one who leaves the mark. That's their call-sign every time they slaughter someone. Slater is the only one that possesses it that isn't a casualty. Perhaps he is a victim in another sense, a slave to their control. One of them. I'm not going to exclude the Medo from the conversation completely.

Frigid stone walls. My face against the concrete.

James is saying something, but I hear no words. I blink.

My stomach gasping for something to consume. Screams heard through the night.

"Brian, when are we going to get out of here?"

I don't respond. The guard is down the hall.

"Brian, are you even listening to me?" James snaps his fingers centimeters in front of my nose. "God, you're old as shit."

"You're not that much younger than me, smartass."

He grouses. "I was just saying that this only started happening after you started watching over Slater. Arthur won't stop bitching about him and how stupid I am or whatever. Gill is fed up with him and his shit at this point. The OLC can't be revoked, no matter how much he wants it to."

"I still can't believe you did that."

"Yeah?" James hunkers down over the map and observes the dots left unpinned. "What can you do about it now?"

I scratch my jaw, softly pricking my fingers on tiny hairs. "Nothing. But you had to be the one who threw the idea out there. You just had to do something to get Arthur off your back. It was selfish, and you know it."

"Pathetic. You think I'd let Slater have the OLC when I could just flip Jameson off from across the room? This had nothing to do with him and I. It involved him when he started calling me biased or whatever. I wasn't biased. I told you my reasons."

"Sure, but it's still a terrible decision."

He waves me away from him. "We're done talking about this. There's nothing anyone can do now. Slater is in the ranking, probably just heading off to bed as we speak. Let it go."

Don't get me wrong, Slater is a great kid. When I met him in the interrogation room, he retained a poor attitude toward not just me, but himself as well. There was something about him that made me believe that he hated the OLC just as much as I did. I don't think he wanted to go on living for much longer. If I was in James' shoes, I would have killed him off, as devious as it sounds. He is responsible for the deaths of two Imperial Guard officers, including the one the night we took him into custody.

For us high officers in the City faction, the burden of no murder could surpass the one that occurred in late June. Major Talbot's wife, Greta, was one of Slater's victims; killed right in front of Levi and their daughter, Elizabeth. Of course, Slater doesn't revive any sort of memory of committing the crime, yet we still hold him to it. "We," excluding James.

"After everything he did to us, you had the balls to relieve him of his execution. The kid he murdered in the main hall of the Castle was only a year older than him. Does that mean nothing to you? You shook that boy's hand at the ceremony last year. He was friends with Brayden."

He scowls at me. "I said, we're done talking about this."

"What about Greta? Levi probably never even crossed your mind, did he? He's our friend, James, and you disregarded that completely. You just took his trust, balled it up, threw it in the trash, and then set the trash on fire. He might not ever come back to the Guard because of you. Did you ever think about that?"

He doesn't answer. Now, he's either thinking hard about what I just told him, or he's just ignoring me. Most times, it's the latter. This is no exception. There is only one way to steal his attention back at this point, and it's never pretty.

"Isaiah!"

His head shoots up to me. Cerulean eyes twist into hard steel. His breathing becomes weighted. "What did you just call me? Say it again."

"Don't act like you didn't hear me. Answer my questions."

"I didn't have a choice, Brian." His voice raises.

"Like hell you didn't."

"I told you my damn reasons. I shouldn't have to review these with you every time Slater screws with your self-esteem, and you start feeling insecure about yourself."

"You think I'm insecure because of Slater? I'm fucking insecure because Queen's has a shit-headed Colonel at the helm. He could be dead by now, but instead, he's amongst the future of the Imperial Guard. God knows what he could do to them! What if he kills Hal or any of the other top recruits?"

"Then I'll fucking resign! You have my word on that! He kills someone, he's dead too. That's the end of it."

James and I both inhale and release in sync. That's hardly the end of it.

"You know, Brian, I've just come to realize something."

"What's that?"

"I believed that sending Slater to you would be our best bet. You knew him when he was a child, so at least there was some kind of connection. To compare my belief with the level of faith you have in him is disheartening. You never cared about him, did you?"

I press my back against the counter, facing him. "I had faith in him. But the fact is, he'll never make it, and you know it. You couldn't seriously believe he was going to enter the immediate duty, could you? He has no shot. He and Gill are nowhere in comparison. At least he remembers killing his classmates and regrets it. Slater's attitude is going to get him in trouble."

"He will make it," James says. "He just has to-"

"What does he have to do, huh? He needs to pray for a damn miracle, that's what. Brayden isn't going to give him a spot, no matter how well he does. Stop trying to defend Slater already. It doesn't change who he is at all."

"Who he was, Brian. You told me he is a totally different person than when we first brought him in."

"Here." My finger jams into the middle-left side of my chest. I feel my pulse atop my white button-down. I tap my finger against my temple. "Not here."

Celeste rises from her seat in the living room and guides herself around into the kitchen. Her fingers tap restlessly against the screen of her phone. The light illuminates her face as she enters the dark hallway.

"Hey, Celeste, let me ask you something."

She glances up at James and I for a moment, hanging her phone in her hand by her hip. "What?"

I peer over at my young superior, still fuming from when I used his birth name. "Do you think Slater is going to be ranked?"

"Be honest," James adds.

A lull hangs in the air among the three of us. I know that she likes Slater as a friend, or maybe more. Either way, that's none of my business. I guess she's going to agree with James, displaying perhaps a tad bit of bias. That, or she only wants to disagree and argue with me. It's probably the former.

"Uh, well-"

I take a step forward. "Do you think he has a legitimate shot? Out of all those kids, do you really think he-"

"Shut up," The Colonel snaps at me. "Let her answer."

More time for pondering. I watch as her pupils rest on the bottom of the white of her eyes. She drifts a hand through her hair, allowing whatever flows to lay on top of her head. No response, just staring with the occasional blink. I hope we didn't pressure her too much. It's not as if her testament is going to alter everything. I was only curious.

Celeste starts to shuffle back to the foyer. "I mean, he could."

I place my hand on the countertop to my right, locking out my arm. "Is that yes or no?"

"It sounded like a yes to me," James concludes. "See, she gets it."

"What makes you say that? Do you honestly think he could be in the top one hundred? He has a terrible personality and a worse reputation. There's-"

"Look, Dad, I really don't want to talk about this, okay? I don't want to think about it right now." She tries to speed up her pace into the hallway, away from us. I'm trying to prove a point here, Celeste. Help me out.

"Wait, is that a yes or-"

"What don't you get?" She pivots herself toward James and I, gripping her cell phone in a strained grasp. Her teeth are pressed against one another, with her harsh breath escaping through small apertures. "I said, I don't want to talk about this. I don't know what the fuck is so difficult about that. It's not like either of you actually care about him, anyway."

James places one of his feet around the curve near the room divider. "Celeste, you know that isn't true. He's in the Imperial Guard now. He's one of us."

She extends her arm, with her index finger directed at my colleague. "You're so full of shit. You saved him for publicity reasons. You were so sick and tired of being seen as the little guy that everyone walked on, so you did this. You didn't care about how Slater was at all, or who he killed. It was anything to have the Colonels finally pay attention to you. This was all for yourself, not him."

"And you." Her attention swivels over to me. There is a crack in her voice from the final word. "Slater trusted you. He's probably going to sleep, thinking he has your total support, but I guess not. You're here, talking shit about him behind his back. You know, he was right to hate you at first. His mom was right about you. You are such a fucking prick. Both of you guys just have to believe in him."

"How could you believe in him?" I inquire sincerely.

"Well, somebody has to!" That is the breaking point. Her eyes well up and overflow onto her face in masses. She really cares about Slater.

As she turns for the stairs, I lunge ahead. "Celeste, wait." My hand hovers over her shoulder.

"Don't fucking touch me." She swings around and swats my hand away. "I'm driving over to Felicia's house. I don't know when I'll be back. Hopefully never."

"You're not going anywhere. Not with a shit attitude like that."

"Like I give a fuck."

My step-father would always allow my brother and I to carry out our own punishments and calm ourselves down when we were beyond enraged. If either of us threatened to run away from home, he'd let us. Only hours later we'd return with regret and a bit of understanding. I'm going to permit Celeste to escape to her friend's house for the night. Usually, when this happens, she's back by morning and hardly recollects anything that transpired the day before.

If only Abby was still here. I wouldn't have to feel defenseless against my own daughter. She would know how to handle this, and I could be over there in the kitchen with James, trying to refocus on the map.

Celeste holds the front door open, and glances back at James and I. "Have fun, you two. Suck each other's dicks for all I care." She slams it, scurrying down the porch steps and across the driveway. She's gone. I find myself staring ahead again.

"Hey, if you wouldn't mind joining me back in here, that would be great. We have a long night in front of us," James remarks from the kitchen.

On my way back to the table, I halt in place and look at my friend. "How would you deal with that?"

He blows out some air from his mouth and shakes his head. "God, how should I know, man? I just send my kids to their room. I can't wait until Danny is old enough to have that be a useless tact. He might just try to fight me." He smiles, reaching into his brown satchel. "Man, I wonder who she gets that from."

"It's not her mother, that's for sure."

I regret to admit that.

When James removes his hand from the interior of his bag, I just let out a laugh. In his hand is the thin end of a crystal clear bottle of golden whiskey. He swirls it around a little bit, and he laughs, too.

"Hey, man, it's whatever helps make all of this murder business go down smoother." He places the bottle on the kitchen table and starts maneuvering around the chairs near the room divider.

He may be an idiot most of the time, but the man comes prepared.

I regret to admit that, too.