Down These Strange Streets (George R.R. Martin) (Kitty Norville 6.50)

But for some reason, the first round of implants didn’t put a complete halt to the birthing program. If it had, we’d be a lot fewer of us, and we’d all be the same age.

About a year after the embryo theft, the first of us were born. About a month after that, the government caught on that something weird was going on. And from there . . . well, by the time I was eighteen, the courts had decided that I was a citizen.

Once I’d had some work done, I could pass. I could even sleep with women without them freaking out, since I’d had what my client delicately called The Surgery (although I was still sterile, like all the others). And in the eight years I’d had my PI shingle out, I’d had only one SalaMan client, and he came in my door by accident.

So as you can guess, I wasn’t exactly happy about Ms. Savoy.

I JERKED OPEN MY DESK DRAWER AND TOOK OUT THE BOTTLE AND TWO shot glasses, filling both to the top. I tossed mine down and filled it up again. To my surprise, Ms. Savoy picked hers up and swallowed half of it without a blink.

Maybe she wasn’t quite as prim as she looked.

“Okay, so your brother Harry’s gone missing,” I said, bringing us back to the subject at hand. “Have you filed a missing-person report?”

“Yes, although the police really weren’t interested.”

“They told you that he’s a grown man, he can go away if he wants, I know.” My license meant that I had to pay attention to the rules of what a PI could and couldn’t do. I had a buddy in the department, but I didn’t like to ask Frank for too many favors. “You say your brother’s a guy who’s not at all interested in passing. You think that’s related to his disappearance?”

“One has to wonder,” she said. I had to agree, “one” did—every year or so there’d be another set of headlines about a SalaMan who pushed a Salaphobe’s buttons and got himself beat up, or worse.

“Yeah, activism can be a dangerous hobby. What was he into when he disappeared?”

“He had a friend, a woman, who—”

“A fr

iend, or a good friend?” I interrupted.

“I think they were serious, but I’m not certain. I only met Eileen a couple of times, but he liked her a lot. And then about six weeks ago she just up and vanished. She texted him—not even a phone call—to say she couldn’t take it and she was going home. When he went to her apartment, most of her stuff was there but she wasn’t. He was convinced something happened to her. He’s been trying to find her—that’s her name on the list, right above his. And now he’s missing, too.”

Harry’s was the handwritten name at the bottom of the printed list.

“Who are the others?”

“I’m not altogether certain, but I think they’re all people like us.” I wished she’d stop putting it that way. “I found that piece of paper in Harry’s desk drawer two days ago. It was on the top, so I thought it might be something he was working on, a meeting or an article or something. And I recognized two of the names—other than Eileen’s, of course. Imogen and Barbara were girls I’d been to college with. So I tried to find them, to see if Harry had been in touch. But they were missing, too. Both of them.”

I had to agree, the odds of coincidence here were pretty thin.

So I took her check, and I got to work.

BROTHER HARRY HAD A THIRD-FLOOR APARTMENT IN A TIRED PART OF town near the water, which address alone would’ve made me wonder about him. And when I walked in, using the key his sister had given me, I’d have known for sure: The air was so moist the paint was coming off the walls, and you could smell the mildew despite the scrubbers. Which told me Harry had the kind of skin that needed to be damp. Humidity was one reason so many of his kind—okay, my kind—lived in San Francisco. (That, and the city’s hey-it’s-your-business attitude.) Which in turn was one reason I lived in Oakland where, being dryer and hotter, people didn’t automatically wonder if you were One of Them.

I stood in the neat little two-bedroom, listening to the low hum of the two opposing machines—one to make the air wet, the other to battle the effects of damp—and waited for the place to tell me about Harry. He was a tidy guy, I could see that. He liked bare floors and simple furniture, and color on the walls. Not too many books, but then, books didn’t like humidity, so that was hardly unusual.

More interesting, the place had been searched. So carefully that, unless you’d done a lot of cautious searches yourself, you wouldn’t have noticed it. And even I might not’ve caught on if the sun hadn’t been out, or if Harry liked sunlight a little less.

It gave me pause, for a minute. But in the end, I was here with the permission of the owner’s sister, and anyway, my presence was sure to be on a camera somewhere in the neighborhood. So I went ahead with my search, keeping an eye out for bugs, but either the guy who’d searched the place was sharper when it came to planting surveillance than he was at putting back the vases on dusty surfaces, or there weren’t any.

My client’s brother liked damp, but he also liked light, which was unusual, considering the sensitivity of most SalaMan eyes. His walls were painted a bright white, the bulbs in his lamps were full strength, and the thin curtains over the windows were designed to keep out eyes rather than glare. Moving to the kitchen, I could see he was a cook, with a bunch of Asian-style pans and spices, more knives than I’d seen outside a French bistro, and an espresso machine the size of a small car. His refrigerator’s sell-by dates didn’t narrow down his departure a whole lot, although I didn’t spot anything that was actually expired.

And his willingness to embrace the amphibious side of his heritage stopped well short of his palate—you wouldn’t believe the things some of his—of our—kind tried putting on their plates.

Or maybe you would.

His closet had a suitcase in it. His bathroom had a toothbrush, electric razor, and zip-up traveling bag in a drawer. The little closet near the front door had an overcoat, a raincoat, and a leather jacket, and its only bare hangers were half-hidden by occupied ones. All of which suggested that when Harry went out, he didn’t expect to be gone long.

I pressed a couple of buttons on the espresso machine, took the cup of black sludge that resulted over to Harry’s desk, and settled down to the drawers.

The first thing I saw was a box of bullets. It was sitting next to a tin of oil and a cleaning rag. The box was half empty. I got up and went to look for all the likely places to hide a handgun: bedside table, behind the toilet, in the flour canister. No gun.