Chapter 154: Uninvolved Family

In Courtspire City, a public-safety organization existed. It was known as the Civic Measure Service or the CMS, as people liked to call it often. Usually, the CMS was the one that’d take the first statements from witnesses after a specific incident.

They took control of the scene before anyone could really talk about what had just happened. Several officers went straight toward the two men Dario and Kellan were still holding down. The rest of them spread around the vehicle lane and started moving people away.

‘These people must be their version of police officers on Earth,’ Marek thought while watching them work. ‘Or investigators too, maybe? Something like that.’

Nobody around them seemed confused about what the officers did. They didn’t close the entire plaza either, only the section where the fight happened, while witnesses were told to stay nearby.

Marek stepped aside when one of them approached Irial. She still had the bag against her chest, and he caught himself looking again before forcing his eyes elsewhere. Somebody was eventually going to notice.

Another officer approached minutes later and asked for identification, so Marek pulled the Standing Card from his pocket and handed it over.

“Newton Machiavelli?” the officer asked.

“Yes.”

The man checked something on his device and gave the card back. He didn’t pause at the lack of House affiliation or suddenly decide Marek required another review because he existed outside the Twelve.

Marek slipped the card back into his pocket. The Service was already doing better than the Civil Standing Center.

Most of the questions were simple. Where had he been standing when the incident started? When did he first notice Irial? Which man attacked him? Did he see the driver clearly?

Marek answered whatever he remembered. He hadn’t seen much of the driver because he’d been busy with the men outside, while Rafe had watched the road for most of the fight.

“What happened after you got the woman away from the vehicle?” the officer asked.

Marek glanced toward the two restrained men. “One of them tried to run when the driver escaped. Dario caught him again, and a little later, the other one tried to grab Irial’s bag. He wasn’t going for her anymore. He went straight for the bag.”

The man entered something into his device before asking whether Marek had seen inside the bag or whether Irial had told him anything. Marek answered no to both.

They spent several more minutes going through the fight. Marek explained how he pulled Irial away but left Spatial Parallax out of it. Explaining how he’d used Space to follow the changing relationship between the man’s wrist around Irial’s arm and the edge of the open vehicle door would only make the statement longer and change nothing about what the kidnappers had done.

Once the officer finished, Marek was told to stay in the plaza until the initial reports were completed.

The others were still dealing with their own statements. Kellan was talking to another officer nearby, while Dario stood several meters away explaining almost the same fight with enough hand movement that Marek briefly wondered whether the officer was getting a statement or a demonstration. Eren had been asked about the boundary he created to move civilians away from the lane. Nadia remained near the family she’d helped during the fight, and Rafe was speaking with two officers while pointing toward the road the escaping vehicle had taken.

Silas, meanwhile, was looking at something on the pavement.

Marek noticed him near the curb beside one of the CMS officers. A small damaged device lay several meters from where Dario had grabbed the first man, and Silas only pointed toward it instead of touching anything. The officer put something over his hand before picking it up.

“Was that theirs?” Marek asked as he walked closer.

Silas nodded. “Probably fell during the fight.”

Marek looked at it anyway. One side of the casing had cracked open, exposing pieces he couldn’t identify. Some looked too specific to belong inside an ordinary communicator.

The officer called someone else over. Their conversation became technical quickly enough that Marek relied on the Tongue Script more than usual, although understanding the words didn’t help much with the device itself.

One of the officers pointed toward the damaged section. “This looks like environmental-monitoring equipment.”

Marek knew that term because his father had worked around government sanitation and environmental systems on Earth. Meridian had also appeared in air-quality equipment, analyzers, and other systems Marek barely cared about before Day 367 gave him a reason to remember them.

He looked at the broken device again. It didn’t resemble anything he remembered from Tomas’s work, but they weren’t on Earth either.

Courtspire had environmental systems of its own. A city this large obviously needed somebody to monitor air, water, sanitation, and whatever else came with keeping it functioning.

Marek wasn’t about to connect every machine that measured something environmental to his father just because Tomas once worked in the same general field.

The place where Silas found this one made it harder to ignore. Marek had spent hours searching records for Tomas and getting almost nowhere. Later that same day, a damaged piece of environmental-monitoring equipment had appeared near where one of Irial’s kidnappers had been fighting. It might have belonged to them or it might not have, and he had no way of knowing yet.

Silas glanced at him. “You’ve seen something like that before?”

“Not that device,” Marek said. “Just the type of equipment. My dad worked with environmental-monitoring systems back on Earth.”

Silas returned his attention to the officers without asking anything else. Marek honestly preferred it that way for the moment. One familiar type of equipment wasn’t enough to connect the thing to Tomas.

Across the plaza, Irial was still giving her statement. She’d been moved beside one of the stalls where the noise was lower. Someone from the Service had given her something cold for her arm, which had already started bruising where one of the men held her earlier. The bag was beside her now instead of against her chest, though one hand stayed close to the strap while another officer spoke with her.

Marek could hear most of the conversation from where he stood, although a few words disappeared whenever people passed between them.

“You said you don’t know either of the men we detained,” the officer said. “What about the driver or the vehicle? Have you seen any of them before today?”

Irial shook her head. “No. I was heading toward the transit entrance when they approached me. I thought they were going to ask me something at first, but one of them grabbed my arm before I could move away. I don’t know the driver either, and I don’t remember seeing that vehicle before.”

The officer entered something into his device before asking whether anyone had approached her recently in a way that made her uncomfortable. He also asked about anyone following her, contacting her repeatedly, asking about her work, or trying to find out where she normally traveled.

Irial didn’t answer right away.

“Not that I can think of,” she said after a while. “I mean… nothing I would’ve considered serious.”

She’d answered everything else faster, so Marek kept listening.

The officer asked several more questions, some of which Marek couldn’t hear through the noise. He considered moving closer and decided not to. That would make it difficult to pretend he wasn’t being nosy.

A little later, the officer brought up the bag.

“The men had already lost control of you, but according to several witnesses, one of them still tried to recover this. Is there anything inside that somebody might want badly enough to attack you for?”

Irial lowered her eyes toward it. “Mostly work documents. Records, copies of reports, things I was supposed to bring home and organize.”

The officer asked what kind of records she meant.

“Administrative ones.”

He asked whether anything inside was confidential, and Irial answered, “Not exactly.”

“Anything that could cause trouble for somebody if another person read it?”

Her fingers tightened slightly around the strap. “I don’t know. I haven’t gone through everything yet.”

Marek found that part harder to believe. He could accept that Irial genuinely didn’t know the men who attacked her, but he’d watched what happened once taking her was no longer possible. One man shouted for the bag, and the other went after it even with Kellan and everyone else still there.

Whatever they thought was inside mattered enough for them to risk getting caught.

The officer moved on to where Irial had been before arriving at Lantern Plaza and whether anybody knew she’d be carrying the documents. She answered most of those questions without much trouble, but whenever the conversation returned to the bag or the people connected to her work, her answers became less specific.

Eventually, the officer asked whether anyone close to her might also be in danger.

“My family isn’t involved.”

Irial answered before he’d even finished.

Marek looked toward her again. The officer hadn’t mentioned her family. He’d only asked about somebody close to her, and the way Irial tightened her hold on the bag afterward made it seem like she’d realized what she said too late.

The officer didn’t point it out. “If you’re worried someone might go after your relatives, we need to know. You don’t have to explain everything here, but I need enough information to decide whether we should send someone to check on them or take other precautions.”

“I don’t want them dragged into this,” Irial said. “They don’t know anything about what happened today, and I want it to stay that way.”

The officer gave her a moment before answering. “Then give me something I can work with. You were attacked in the middle of Lantern Plaza, and one of those men still tried to recover your bag after they had already lost control of you. If this wasn’t random, we need to understand what caused it.”

Irial lowered her eyes toward the bag and stayed quiet while the plaza kept moving around them. Officers continued talking to witnesses and people passed through the areas that were never closed.

Several seconds passed before she finally answered. “I can’t explain it.”