Runstom motioned to the CamCap on his own head. “Detective Porter? He hasn’t connected yet.”

“What?” the speaker crackled before erupting into a sudden burst of static. “—wah—drant and look for bodies. Remember, warm or cold, make sure the med tech gets a full scan. Let’s move, people.”

Runstom looked at McManus and then Horowitz, hoping one of them would offer guidance without his asking for it. McManus ignored him, motioning to one of the med techs and then marching off. Horowitz slapped him on the shoulder. “Have a nice walk in the sweat-suit, Runny. You,” she said, pointing to a med tech. “Let’s go.”

Halsey was taking one of the other med techs into the nearby unit on the corner. Runstom looked at the remaining med tech; the one he thought was too young to be at a crime scene. She was a scrawny, pale girl with large beady eyes and thin, fidgeting fingers, and would have been a few inches taller than Runstom if not for her slouch. “Hi,” she said, sticking a cold hand into his. “I’m Roxeen.”

He shook her hand in one up-and-down motion and then pulled away. “Officer Stanford Runstom.” He shifted the weight of the jacket around, but it only seemed to make it worse. She peered at him as if he were a specimen under a microscope. “Alright, let’s go, Roxeen.”

The garden was a shambles. Ex-garden, really. All the plants had been sucked out of the ground. Half the irrigation system lay in a tangle of pipes in the middle of a nearby avenue. Somewhere in the center of the once-garden-muck was a yellowish blob.

“That’s a body,” Roxeen said, pointing to what Runstom was already looking at. “Let’s go scan it.”

He nodded, still looking at the body. They began trudging through the slimy mixture of dirt and vegetable pulp. The broken stalks and vines and mashed fruits gave off an odor that to Runstom just smelled like food, and it started to make him hungry. As they got closer to the body, his appetite vanished. The corpse was bloated and bruised. Purple and yellow flesh was only partially covered by the tatters of what was once clothing, maybe some kind of jumpsuit, uniformly gray in color.

“Looks like they got the worst of the decompression,” she said, her scanner already in hand. She stalked toward the corpse with morbid fascination.

Runstom took a step and suddenly found himself with one foot submerged in the muck. “Ah, goddammit,” he said, trying to pull his foot free. The weight of his jacket shifted and his other leg dropped, the mud reaching his knee. “Oh, come on.”

“Oh my,” Roxeen said, coming over to help him. She took his hand and pulled weakly, making no headway.

“Help me get this jacket off,” he said, struggling with one of the sleeves of his burden. “Porter’s not even here and I’m lugging this goddamn thing all over the place.”

“What’s Porter?” she asked as she helped him pull out of the sleeve.

“Detective Porter. The guy who is supposed to be watching through this goddamn camera on my head. The reason I’m dragging around an extra twenty kilos of weight here.”

They succeeded in getting the jacket off him, Roxeen pulling on it by one sleeve and falling backwards, dragging the equipment through the mud. After a few more minutes of fighting to get his feet out of the muck and fighting off her attempts to help, Runstom managed to curse and pull himself free.

A few minutes later, they were standing over the amorphous and splotched corpse. Patches of the yellowed skin were marked by uniform squares of red. Roxeen bent forward to run her scanner up and down the length of the body. “Yep,” she said with an unnecessary air of authority. “This one got the worst of it.”

She rattled off all the conditions already speculated by the lead med tech, and then some. Runstom looked up while she talked. He saw only blue-green sky. Despite the chaos surrounding them, the block was eerily calm. “The main venting doors are probably right above us somewhere. Why didn’t this guy just get sucked out onto the planet’s surface?”

“Oh yeah,” the med tech said thoughtfully as she stood up. “I think there are some kind of protective grates or something between the inner and outer doors.”

“That would explain the checkerboard effect,” he mumbled, giving the body one last look and then turning away.

“What’s a checkerboard?”

Runstom glared at the med tech. Her white face and large gray eyes were innocent and quizzical. “Forget it,” he mumbled. He’d only had his thirty-seventh birthday two months ago, but Roxeen’s alarming youth was making him feel old. Though it wasn’t entirely youth, he supposed. He tried not to let it get to him and instead looked back at the rest of the garden. “Let’s get out of this mud pit. I don’t see any more bodies.”

After slipping and sliding their way back out of the sludge, he set the jacket down on the avenue and made a meager attempt to clean it off. She wandered up and down the street looking for more residents while he cleaned. She didn’t find any, and once he got the jacket back on they set out to go house to house.

“So,” Roxeen said as they walked, pausing in that way when someone wants to broach a subject they’re not sure they should. “Where are you from, Officer Runstom?”

Runstom sighed wearily. “Do we really have to do the small talk thing right now? I’m not good at small talk.”

“Well, I was just …”

“I know you were just.” Runstom stopped and turned to face her. “It’s the green skin. Right?”

“Well,” she started, then frowned, dropping her gaze. “I’m sorry.”

“Look, you’ve got medical training, right? Don’t you understand? It’s the filters and stuff.” Runstom hated trying to explain why he was born with green skin. It was really more of a brownish-olive color, but compared to the stark white of a B-fourean like Roxeen, he was a green man. He didn’t really understand the science behind it either, and he was always trying to forget how much different it made him look from most others.

“Yes, the filters,” Roxeen said meekly. “The atmosphere combined with the radiation filters where we grow up make our skin favor different pigmentation during development.”

“Right, something like that,” Runstom mumbled, and he turned away and started walking again. “I’m space-born. You want to know where I’m from?” Roxeen didn’t answer. “Nowhere, that’s where. Born on a transport shuttle, somewhere between one ModPol outpost and another.” He trudged down the avenue and motioned her to follow him as he opened the door to the house on the corner. She stood there for a moment, clearly not content with the condensed version of his life story. She gave him a look he couldn’t quite read and then walked past him through the doorway.

He stood alone and scowled at nothing. She was just a kid, asking questions a kid would ask. Not only was she young, she was a B-fourean – a domer – living a sheltered life. He decided he’d better go easy on her and he took a deep breath.

Runstom looked up and down the avenue before following Roxeen into the residence. The whole block was a crime scene. It had to be the biggest crime scene in ModPol history, excepting incidents where entire spaceships had been destroyed, of course. He’d certainly never read about anything this big in the outpost’s library.

The first four houses shared similar scenes. Debris trailed out of the windows and doorways. Dishes, books, records, artwork, clothing, smaller pieces of furniture, and lots of unidentifiable bits of previously loved possessions. Each unit had a body, all of them dead. They all had managed to keep themselves from being sucked out of their houses, and didn’t have nearly as much of the bloat as the corpse in the garden had. The residents in those four units either died due to injury from flying debris or survived the windstorm long enough to suffocate. Only Roxeen’s scanner could tell the difference. She dutifully examined them with a morbid curiosity that made Runstom increasingly uncomfortable.