Technomancer (Unspeakable Things: Book One)

variety of sizes and soon managed to outfit me in jeans, a dress shirt, and a navy blue hoodie. The pants were a bit loose, so she handed me a belt. For shoes, I had my choice. I went with black running shoes. They looked good and wouldn’t slow me down if I needed to move fast.
    I checked my legs out, squeezing with my hands. Before I had slept and showered, they had been sore and I’d had a noticeable limp. Now, they felt fresh and only slightly stiff. I really did appear to heal fast, just as I’d told the nurse back at the sanatorium.
    “Thanks,” I told her, and I meant it.
    “It’s the least I can do,” she said.
    Holly followed me to the door. I stepped out onto a concrete walkway.
    I turned around and looked at her. “Can I come back to call on you sometime?”
    She smiled and kissed me lightly on the cheek. It felt good.
    “You can,” she said. “But don’t bring trouble, OK?”
    I shook my head. “No promises in that department.”
    I left her then and headed down the stairs. Experimentally, I took two at a time. It hurt my knees, so I slowed down and leaned on the rail. There was no reason to push things.
    I looked back at her once and saw her standing above me, bent over the rail and watching me. Then I left the courtyard and headed out onto the street.
    I pulled my hood over my hair and headed into the northern districts. People were less likely to mess with you when they couldn’t see your face. It was a bad neighborhood that had once been middle-class. Everyone I passed was either a predator or a victim—I found it easy to pick out one from the other. Each eyed me, calculating which category I was in just as I did the same to them. As we passed by one another, people invariably took a step or so to the side—a respectful acknowledgment that I didn’t look like a mark. I often did the same, signaling I wasn’t dangerous at the moment. But my silence, my hood, and my lack of expression gave the impression I
could
be dangerous under the right circumstances.
    I knew something was wrong before I reached my house. I suppose it was the smoky smell in the air. The stink grew and grew until I stopped dead on the sidewalk. My place…was gone.

I knew what my house must have looked like—even if I couldn’t remember it. Every house on the block looked more or less the same. They were all mid-1900s stucco boxes. There were rows of flip-up garage doors, blandly painted walls coated in spiderwebs, and yards full of weeds. Some yards had degenerated into pure crabgrass and dried-out trees. Others lawns had taken the final step, reverting to the purity of the desert sands from whence they’d come. Water was expensive in the city, and not everyone could afford to water their patch of land.
    My house was on the right, the third from the corner. There wasn’t much
house
left, however. Looking at the devastation, my first thought was that it must have burned down, although it looked more thoroughly destroyed than a burnt house should. All that stucco and the old brick fireplace—something should have survived. Instead, it reminded me ofa bomb crater. Only the farthest corner of the garage stood, a sooty finger of concrete and charcoaled two-by-fours.
    Getting over my shock, I walked with quiet care among the silent eddies of ash. Had I left the stove on when I’d gone to talk to Tony? Had I owned a pet that had accidentally tipped over a source of combustion? I didn’t think the answer was so mundane. It was hard to believe fate alone had dealt me such a hard blow. Call me distrustful, but this went beyond an accident or even arson. Someone had demolished my house in hopes of destroying whatever it was I had discovered. Possibly, the same somebody had tried to kill me more than once.
    As I looked around the place, I began to think maybe Dr. Meng had done me a favor by keeping me on ice at her institution. What if someone had killed Tony, but meant to kill us both? Or maybe they’d really been targeting
me
all along. I didn’t like the idea.
    I trudged around the ruins in the dark, looking for clues. When I finally found something interesting, I was greatly surprised by the nature of it.
    There was a trembling movement in the ashes. I froze, staring. I suspected it was a cat, but what kind of an idiot animal would be caught playing in this mess at midnight? Perhaps a rat, then, I thought. This faint hope propelled me to take a step closer to the shivering pile of ashes, then a second and a