The fluorescent lights of the Oaktown Hospital morgue were an insult. They were a flat, buzzing, indifferent white, painting the sterile, green-tiled walls in a sickly glaze. Detective Kraven pushed through the heavy steel door, and the smell hit him like a physical blow.
It wasn't the smell of death—he was used to that. That was a coppery, organic, sweet smell. This was the smell of fighting death: a chemical-cold blast of bleach, formaldehyde, and ozone, all of it failing, spectacularly, to cover the one smell it was supposed to.
He hated the morgue.
Dr. Lena Walsh was waiting for him. She was a small, wire-thin woman with dark hair pulled back in a severe bun, and she was, in Kraven's estimation, the smartest person in the county. She was also, at this moment, drinking coffee from a "World's Best Dad" mug, a terrible sign. She never ate or drank in the autopsy bay.
"You're not going to like this, Krav," she said. Her voice was flat, echoing slightly off the tile. She didn't look at him, her gaze fixed on the stainless-steel gurney that sat, lonely, in the center of the room.
"I never like this, Lena," Kraven said, his voice a low gravel. He ran a hand through his thinning hair. He'd been running on four hours of sleep and coffee that tasted like burnt disappointment. "What've you got?"
"What've I got?" She let out a sharp, mirthless laugh. "I've got a goddamned magic trick, is what I've got."
She gestured to the gurney. The victim, the hiker, was under a stark white sheet, a simple, human-sized lump. Kraven had seen him in the woods, surrounded by the chaos of pine needles and damp earth. Here, in this sterile box, the violence felt more personal. More wrong.
"You saw him at the scene," Lena said. "You know what it looks like."
"I know what it looked like there," Kraven corrected. "I'm here for what it looks like now. What your scalpels are telling you."
Lena set her mug down with a sharp clack. "That's just it. My scalpels aren't telling me a damned thing. But his body? His body is screaming."
She grabbed the sheet and pulled it back, not with a dramatic flourish, but with an angry, efficient snap.
Kraven was a pro. He'd seen gunshot wounds, stabbings, car wrecks. He prided himself on the cold, professional distance he could put between himself and... this.
But his stomach clenched.
The hole.
In the woods, it had been an absence. Here, under the unforgiving, sterile lights, it was an impossibility.
"Okay," Kraven said, forcing his voice to stay level. "Talk to me."
"Talk to you?" Lena grabbed a steel probe from a tray, her movements jerky and furious. "What do you want me to say, Kraven? This isn't a murder. This is an... an extraction. An insult."
She wasn't scared. She was offended. This body broke the rules of her world.
"I see 'cut,' I know 'cut,'" she said, her voice rising. "A knife, a saw, even a sharpened piece of rebar... they tear tissue. They leave fibers. They leave hesitation marks, serrations, bruising from the hilt. Animal claws shred. This..." She gestured, the probe trembling in her hand. "This has no marks. None."
She leaned in, forcing him to look closer, to see what she saw. "Look at the ribs."
Kraven leaned, the chemical smell burning his nostrils. The ribs... they weren't broken. They weren't snapped or sawn. They were... warped. They bent gracefully outward, like the petals of a flower, their white, bony surfaces smooth and untouched.
"They're bent," Kraven muttered. "Like they were heated."
"Wrong!" Lena snapped. "That's what I thought. But there's no burn residue. No charring. No tissue carbonization. I ran the tests. The cells at the edge of the bone are perfectly healthy. It's as if... as if the very idea of 'hard' was told to get out of the way. They were just... softened. Bent."
She moved the probe to the edge of the cavity. "And the flesh. This is the part that's keeping me awake."
Kraven looked. The major arteries—the aorta, the pulmonary—weren't the ragged, bloody mess he expected. They were... sealed. They ended in neat, clinical, pinkish-white nubs, as if they'd been fused shut.
"A laser," Kraven offered. "Some kind of high-tech surgical laser."
"With no burn residue?" Lena shot back. "With no collateral heat damage? Kraven, look!" She tapped the probe right next to a sealed artery. "The tissue one millimeter away is perfectly normal. Uncooked. Un-traumatized. You can't do that. It violates the laws of thermal dynamics. Heat spreads. This... this didn't."
She finally stepped back, crossing her arms. She looked smaller, and angrier, than he'd ever seen her.
"The heart wasn't cut out, Kraven," she said, her voice dropping to a low, furious whisper. "It wasn't ripped out. It wasn't burned out."
She locked her dark eyes on his.
"It was... taken. It was removed. Like it was never there. Like a hand just... phased through his chest, grabbed his heart, and pulled it back out, sealing the wound on the way just by telling it to."
She was vibrating with a scientist's frustration. "This isn't pathology, Kraven. This is physics, and it's wrong. I can't tell you what the weapon was, because there is no weapon. There's no method. There is only an effect. And the effect is impossible."
Kraven stared at the hollow, perfectly clean cavity in the young man's chest. He was a man of motive, means, and opportunity. He had no motive. He had no opportunity. And the means... the means were a goddamned magic trick.
He remembered his thought from the woods.
"A harvest," he muttered.
"What?" Lena asked.
"Nothing." He pulled his gaze away, forcing his mind back to procedure. "Write it up, Lena. Write up exactly what you just told me."
"And what do I put for 'Cause of Death?'" she demanded, throwing her hands up. "'Spontaneous removal of vital organ?' 'Violation of all known medical science?' They'll laugh me out of the state."
"Put 'cardiothoracic extraction by unknown means,'" Kraven said, turning to the door. "At least it sounds official."
"Get out of here, Kraven."
He pushed the door open, but he paused, looking back. "One more thing. The other two. The drifter and the tourist. State M.E. confirmed it?"
Lena nodded, her face grim. "Identical. Down to the last impossible, fused-shut artery. This wasn't the first, Krav. And it sure as hell won't be the last."
Kraven walked out into the hospital hallway, the normal, fluorescent-lit world of visiting hours and vending machines. It felt thin. It felt like a cheap set, and he'd just seen what was behind the curtain. The chemical smell of the morgue clung to him, but all he could feel was a cold, impossible dread that was heavier, and colder, than any body.