TIME June 30th, the early hours (continuing) LOCATION Section 18 Headquarters, then the marketplace, Chuza
BACKGROUND:
Asquith’s revelation gave them plenty to sit with – a nine-hundred-year-old knight, a falsified history, and no time to unpack either before the next body turned up. After deciding against chasing Asquith into the sewers on his own business, the Agents let him go to Tol Kerria to consult his Brothers, and turned their attention to the child brought in by the Corpse Fishers.
WHAT HAPPENED
The boy was blond, drowned, and clutching a small hemispherical black object – glass, hollow, with a single hole in the underside. Needle marks clustered on one arm; burn marks marked both temples. Krusha pressed the object to the boy’s cold flesh and tried to read magic off it without luck. Raven dropped it in a beaker of water and worked a needle into the hole; Crowe appraised it as worthless on the open market. A brooch, maybe. Jewellery. Or something that had once been alive.
Sam’s autopsy called it drowning, though Krusha flagged the burn marks as possibly magical in origin rather than incidental. The boy’s last meal had been poultry and bread. Raven found what looked like ligature marks buried in the bloating around his wrists and ankles.
The jewellers in the marketplace wanted nothing to do with the object – a glass bauble, in their professional opinion, manufactured rather than cut, and more likely from clothing or furniture trim than a piece of jewellery in its own right. Walking back to the Section House empty handed, they ran into a couple pleading with Bowlohr for help – Lisa and Mark, whose six-year-old son had vanished from the orphanage they’d placed him in the night before.
For one bad moment, before Lisa got a proper look, everyone in the room seemed to be thinking the same unspoken thing – that the drowned boy down in the morgue might already be their answer. He wasn’t – and Sam had already worked out part of why he’d ended up there.
“I reckoned there wasn’t Twitch involved, well, recently anyway, as it tends to leave that spearmint odour. But it got me thinking, so I ran some blood through a test for Bumblebee. Came back positive.”
Sam, on the drowned boy
The relief that he wasn’t Caleb didn’t make what came next any easier to hear.
“He’s gone. Someone took him. Can anyone help?”
Lisa
Mark, quieter and visibly out of his depth, tried to manage her. “I’m sure these Agents have a hundred other cases, given everything going on in Chuza. Don’t get hysterical,” he said, and earned a look from his wife sharp enough to end that line of comfort on its own. Caleb, they explained, was six, red-haired, and struggled to communicate – he wouldn’t write like the other children his age, just drew circles, over and over, filling whole pages with them. They’d placed him at the orphanage hoping its staff had seen his kind of trouble before. The orphanage’s owner, Chrisjen, hadn’t even reported him missing yet, and didn’t seem to grasp why that mattered. Lisa had already checked with her sister across town.
No sign of him there either.
EXTRAS.
OPEN THREADS
- A small hollow glass sphere, recovered from a drowned boy – origin and purpose unknown.
- Caleb, six, red-haired – missing from the orphanage overnight.
- Asquith has left for Tol Kerria to consult ‘his Brothers’.