Clean: A Mindspace Investigations Novel Read Online Free

edges of the death with them for a few steps before it dissipated. But the smear wasn’t there.
    Instead, the Mindspace puckered. Just a little pucker. And it was
good
to have a certified Guild education, because I knew what that meant.
    Now I only had to explain it to Cherabino.

CHAPTER 2
    Sergeant Branen was the head of Homicide and Cherabino’s boss, a short forty-something man with overstyled hair and an air of confidence that made you want to trust him immediately. This made me dislike him on principle. He didn’t understand what I did and didn’t feel he needed to—but he did believe in results, and the conflict made for interesting meetings.
    Branen was also one of only three people in the department who could get me fired at any time. It was my goal in life—at least in front of him—to be twice as useful as annoying.
    “So,” he said after the second time I’d gone through what I’d found in the scene. “There was a…pucker in…Mindspace. What exactly does that mean?” He smiled his habitual smile, his eyes tired. His tiny beige office was almost too neat, his battered desk and guest chairs scrupulously clean.
    “It’s very rare,” I said, carefully neutral. “Like I said, it’s a small aberration in the fabric of Mindspace, a hiccup in the ghost, if you want to put it that way.”
    Branen looked pained. It wasn’t a good look on him. “You want to fight the Guild for jurisdiction and data…because you found a hiccup?”
    “Not exactly.” Although let’s be honest; I’d fight the Guild for a lot less. In this case, though, I just wantedsome information from them. Nothing for Branen to get so worked up over. Just information.
    Cherabino noticed my attention flagging. “Does it work with the fish-tank analogy?”
    “Um, maybe?” The downside to Cherabino’s sharp mind was that she got insufferably grumpy until she understood what was going on. Back in the beginning, she’d pumped me for weeks about the telepathy before I’d given her a good-enough analogy to get her off my case. She just didn’t understand Mindspace—no matter how eloquently I tried to explain it—so I’d had to get creative. Don’t ask me why the fish tank made her happy; it just did, so I used it a lot.
    “I’m waiting,” Branen said.
    “Okay,” I began. “Imagine the world is a fish tank. One of those huge, multigallon monstrous fish tanks they have in ritzy offices. Better yet, picture the alley as a fish tank. You have sand on the bottom, and a definite ceiling, maybe even a sand castle or two, some coral. It’s a nice place. There’s all sorts of fish in it—you and Cherabino and half the world are shiny orange goldfish, Guild telepaths are those monster Japanese goldfish—what do you call them?—and you have a couple rogue bottom-feeders. So you’re going along, doing your goldfish thing, until one of the goldfish discovers an Ability.”
    Branen sighed. “How is this helping me?”
    “I’m getting to it. Now, what happens if one of the goldfish goes quantum and pops over to the other side of the tank?” I stopped, then explained, “He teleports.” Cherabino seemed to be following okay; she wasn’t asking her usual slew of questions. “Two things happen. The water’s going to shoot out in a little explosion where he pops in, because now you have, say, an inch cubed of goldfish mass where there didn’t used to beany, and the water has to move out of the way very suddenly. It’s kinda messy, though, and it’s hard to identify that’s what it was if you weren’t there at the time. But the other thing that’s going to happen is on the other side, where he started out. Suddenly, the water has the same-sized hole where the goldfish used to be, right? So it rushes in. But the water thing’s only an analogy—the way it works in Mindspace, the water moves weird, slow like honey, and what you’re left with is a little area where the water is less dense, and comes to a weird little pucker