Chapter 7

It was Saturday, Aiden's first day off since he'd started working at Horizons. Running the prison and teaching the business class kept him busy, leaving him with virtually no free time and only a few hours of sleep a night. Today was the day he'd planned to clear that accumulated debt, but his body had other ideas, pulling him out of dreams he didn't remember before artificial sunlight even touched Sinhle.

His mind kept replaying his encounter with Darren Howe in the corridor, the way those indigo eyes crinkled in the corners when he'd laughed at something Nyle had said, and no matter how hard Aiden tried not to think about them or the glances he kept intercepting during class, he simply couldn't chase away the thoughts.

Darren Howe surprised him. He'd expected someone more unhinged, someone violent and aggressive, yet what he'd stumbled upon was a charismatic man with an impish smile and a playboy attitude. He smiled, he chatted with the rest. The mismatch between reality and expectation threw Aiden off and that wasn't even counting the intelligence Darren Howe seemed to possess if his answers in class were any indication. His file, which Aiden had finally gotten his hands on yesterday, supported that too, revealing Darren had undertaken the Special Forces training in Intelligence. Wherein lay the problem. Despite the strenuous psychological checks and evaluation in place prior to enlisting, the system hadn't even flagged him for any mental deviations.

Aiden already felt the beginnings of a headache. He groaned, curling in a ball on one side of the bed. It was way too early for this at 6 a.m, the morning still hours away. At least here on Europa and on some part of Earth, because the Standard Solar Time ensured everyone everywhere followed the same twenty-four-hour format. The moment humans had spread beyond Earth, the time zones had been abolished for a single one that disregarded whether it was actually day or night. Overall, it had made things easier and removed the need to work out what time it was on every station or planet, even if people had, allegedly, struggled at first.

Rolling to his other side, Aiden tried again to fall asleep. But his mind didn't cooperate, didn't let him off the hook, circling back to the other thing that was urging him to get up.

The video from Claudia's autopsy.

Aiden's stomach filled with nerves, squeezing in on itself. After that first night, he'd had no time to watch the recording again. He was too tired when he came back from work to do more than grab a bite, shower and collapse in bed, and the few times he'd tried to sit down and study the video, his anxiety had spiked, preventing him from being able to focus. Part of the reason was the long hours, but worse was the amount of work he actually had to do while trying to figure out the best way to approach Darren Howe. He had to be careful and not make it too obvious, because one wrong step could raise red flags with Management he simply couldn't afford.

Aiden tried to fall back asleep for another fifteen minutes, but eventually gave up altogether. Despite the clock showing just before six thirty on his first day off, he got up and took a shower. Once he'd woken himself up with lukewarm water, he fished out the yellow pack of prescription supplements and anxiety meds that he kept on the second shelf in the compartment above the sink. He popped two pills in his mouth. They helped with the lightheadedness almost immediately, though he continued frowning as he realized he'd been getting it daily since his last meeting with PI Deverson.

Sighing, Aiden padded out of his bathroom and tossed some clothes on. The flaring anxiety he was experiencing lately was at fault for his increased need for meds. While he'd gotten decent at dealing with it over the years, the discovery of the autopsy recording and his proximity to Claudia's murderer seemed to ignore that progress. They'd revived some part of him still capable of experiencing emotions and feelings the way normal people did, and that was the last thing he needed right now when he should be focusing on his goal and nothing else.

Dejection spreading through him, Aiden settled in the lounge with his laptop and a mug of coffee. Ten minutes later, he finally cleared his mind, loaded up the autopsy, and pressed play. He did his best not to give into the anger, the one he always had to deal with whenever he thought about Claudia's untimely death, and this time it was a little harder to rein it in because he knew what he was about to see. But he managed anyway, driven by the need for answers two years overdue.

Like before, he noticed nothing amiss during the first and second playbacks. From the third one onward, he began examining every frame in isolation, but when that didn't yield any results either, he took a step back and refocused on the bigger picture again.

"The coroner's assistant starts the recording," Aiden narrated to himself as he played the video again. He watched the assistant walk in, then the exchange between him and the coroner as the interactive controls popped up on the screen.

Shifting to dynamic 3D view of the room, he inspected it and the procedure from all angles while listening to the examination. He tried not to think about Claudia's body too much, though every time his eyes veered to her face, his heart broke. His chest hurt, feeling as if it had been stabbed by a dozen knives, but he ignored that too as best as he could and narrowed his focus to the room. Nothing stood out yet again, no clue anywhere to be found. The police and the coroner hadn't missed anything.

"Bag the body. I'll go sort out the report," the coroner told his assistant at the end of the video, just before it stopped, leaving Aiden alone in the interactive 3D lab space.

The coroner's name was Nicolas Smith as per the signature on the medical report and Aiden vaguely remembered a conversation between the two of them on that day he had stormed the morgue only to find out from Marcus that Claudia had already been cremated. Smith had calmly explained to Aiden that he couldn't see the recording or the full report without prior approval from the authorities… which he had never gotten.

Aiden stared blankly at the familiar room, recounting his conversation with Marcus from that day.

"What were you thinking?" Claudia's father said, his tone chiding.

Aiden shivered, the current of cool air from the vents raising his hackles. "Why didn't you say you had her cremated?"

Marcus sighed in the same way Claudia did when she was exasperated. "I was going to. Later today, in fact. As soon as I had the funeral arrangements done. I know it hurts, Aiden. But what you are doing… doesn't help anyone. What happened to her, to both of you, is not something anyone should ever have to go through, but, for your own sake, you need to start thinking about moving on. The way you have been these past weeks… I'm worried about you. It pains me to se—"

Marcus' phone rang with a notification then, cutting him off, and a second later Aiden's one followed. They both looked at each other and then Aiden shifted his attention to the message he'd received from the police.

His world spun and he had to hold onto the edge of the examination table as his breathing turned frantic and shallow. Hot and cold warred inside his bones.

"Marcus…" he said, his voice shaky and breathless.

Marcus' eyes cut to Aiden, his expression showing a hint of a reaction Aiden couldn't quite read.

"They caught him, Aiden," Marcus said, squeezing the phone so tight his knuckles went white. "They caught Claudia's killer."

Aiden gasped, rubbing his chest. At the mercy of a shiver, he remembered how eerie the morgue lab had felt when he'd arrived there, how empty but haunted even after the news. The low hum of the air vents had been the only sound to disrupt the quietness around as he and Marcus had stared at each other, bringing forth an unsettling cold into his bones he could still recall to this day.

As Aiden restarted the video again, he found himself reliving his visit and feeling an immense sense of relief that modern recording equipment had noise canceling. It was a silly thing, perhaps an unintended fixation, but the vents' subtle whirring noise from that day had kept playing in his head and prevented him from falling asleep on countless nights.

Aiden watched the last few minutes, his eyes following Dr. Smith as he turned around to walk out of the lab through a keycard-controlled metal door. His assistant remained motionless by the body and then disappeared altogether at the end of the playback. Aiden stared at the empty room with tall white walls, powered down equipment and tools, silver lockers and… He squinted at the screen, his heart jumping.

There wasnot even a single vent. And there had definitely been a vent when he visited the morgue.

Frowning at the screen, he spun the room's 3D model around, checking the spot above the door and then the rest of the walls from every possible angle. No vents.

A twinge of adrenaline made Aiden's heart rate spike. His fingers tingled, the architect side of him filling with confusion. In a morgue lab, temperature, humidity and air-circulation were paramount, so why weren't there any vents in the room from the recording?

When he'd visited in person, there had been one. He didn't know why his mind remembered this particular detail. Maybe it had been that chill in his bones from the air circulation when Marcus had told him about Claudia's cremation, but now he couldn't unsee the white grilles that had been right there, above the door, but weren't present in the video.

But that just couldn't be right.

"This makes no sense…"

The next two hours Aiden spent looking up any of the building's public blueprints he could find online, as well as scouring through a heap of documents for various renovations sponsored by generous donors and university alumni. Nothing indicated the morgue had even a single lab without access to the air-circulation systems and so Aiden picked up the phone and contacted the Lecart Morgue, asking the receptionist about it. The man was a little confused, but handled the request professionally, assuring him that the Lecart Morgue most definitely adhered to all regulations.

Aiden frowned at the proof of the opposite on his screen.

What the Hell was going on? Where did this discrepancy come from?

Soon, it became obvious that Aiden wasn't going to figure this out from his couch. Were his memories shaky? But he'd confirmed with the morgue's receptionist… Then what about the video? Maybe the university had had a room like that back then and the receptionist just didn't know about it… It could be that or it could be something else, but at any rate, one thing was clear: he had to go to Mars and visit the morgue himself.

Aiden contemplated calling PI Deverson, but since he had another day off and could simply go and check if there was any reason to even get the PI involved, he decided to postpone that phone call. He had just about enough time to make the trip happen without having to book extra leave from Horizons, so grabbing his backpack, he got himself a ticket for the earliest shuttle to Mars, hoping that when he next set foot on the prison station, he would be one step closer to solving the mystery of Claudia's murder.

Bribing the intern at the Lecart Morgue was relatively easy. After he let Aiden check the lab to confirm the vent was in fact there, a stack of cash convinced him to pull up the 3D visualizations of the room from the day of Claudia's autopsy as well as that from a week before and after. His heart rate spiked when they didn't match, even if he'd expected it.

Pushing against the sense that something wasn't right, he took a photo of the two layouts and dropped another wad of money, so the receptionist would show him the full autopsy report. Not the redacted version available to the public, but the actual document that remained classified even two years after her death.

The first part was the same, announcing the time of death and listing the cause. February 8th, 2103. Gunshot to the chest. Images from the video surfaced to his mind, but he stuffed them down and inspected the rest of the document, snapping another photo when he found what he was looking for—the name of the officer who'd brought the body to the morgue.

Patrick Cleveland.

There was a familiar ring to it, but Aiden's memories from the time were a little fuzzy. If he had to guess, Cleveland was someone from the first response team.

Looking the name up on his way back to the hotel got him a phone number. Mars' dark streets told him it was way too late to call now though, so he postponed it until the morning, messaging PI Deverson with the update so he could run a background check on Cleveland first thing tomorrow.

When Aiden arrived at his hotel, he sat on the balcony and just watched the skyline, finding in it so many similarities to what he remembered of Earth, though also not missing that red tinge that accompanied anything and everything here, no matter the time of day. The magtrain passed on its rail just to the left of the hotel and as his attention focused on its sleek chrome form, he decided that the next time he had a reason to visit the red planet, he was going to ride the train and see how far the development of Atlan had progressed.