Zero Sum excerpt

There was an eerie, unsettling feeling to the place that had nothing to do with it being a funeral home. I looked around and tuned in, walking a circle around the cars and letting my eyes relax, my gift for detail open up to the world. There was a row of steel freezers against the far wall, fridges where they stored bodies before taking them to the embalming room. There was a small office, unlocked and open, that had rows of screens with camera feeds on them, and an elevator used to transport a body and its attending staff to the upstairs floors. Well, to the second floor: it only had one button. There were stairs, too: a narrow, steep stairwell behind an unlocked door that I opened. I looked up inside. They went straight to the second floor, too.

“So where do we go to get this computer information Talya wants? Upstairs?”

Possibly? But… no. I swung back, nose twitching, and found my eyes drawn back to the freezers. There was something odd about them, a break in the pattern. There were three freezers, and each had three vertical rows of cadaver trays. I saw the shadowed lines of each door, the brightness of the buttons, and the negative space around them more than I did the freezers themselves… but it was the sound which led me over. Or more accurately, the absence of it.

Zane said something, but his words were an unformed blob of color as I focused in on my senses. Curiously, I touched the handles of the pull-out trays. The rightmost fridge had a fine hum that buzzed my fingertips through my gloves, making them twitch spasmodically; the center one did not. The center and the left-hand freezers weren’t humming, even though they had live lights and appeared to be on.

“What are you doing?”

“Facade,” I grunted, pressing the button locks and tugging on the tray handles. None of the middle three trays opened. When I tried the left-hand ones, yanking on the middle left handle caused all three to shift slightly. Turning one or the other locks on or off didn’t result in anything opening. I was vaguely aware of Zane drifting over to join me as I peered over and around the switches and buttons.

“You looking for something?”

Annoyed, I waved him away with a hand as I tracked the faint glint of fingerprints on the burnished steel, the way the white fluorescent light was twisted by the tracks of oil left by countless hands. Cops wore gloves by default, but their hands simply smeared the grease from the sweaty fingers of those who didn’t… and with a couple of mishaps, I was able to figure out the sequence. 

“Locker one’s ‘Occupied’ alert on, lock button left on ‘Lock’; middle locker unlocked, no Occupied light, lower locker’s light on, unlocked,  temperature lowered to…” I tapped the temperature button, watching the digital display as we went from 72 degrees to the 60s, 50s, 40s. I put with my ear to the door and listened to the way the faint electronic whine from inside changed as I skipped through the 40s, getting loudest around 42. When I found the right percentage, there was a deep ‘clunk from inside the false meat locker. “42.5 degrees.”

“No shit.” Zane watched on from behind me with folded arms. “Stupid question. Why didn’t you bust the lock with magic?”

I swung the heavy steel door open, revealing a mobius strip-like trigger ward that encircled a small device in the center, an unremarkable beige box with folded wires protruding from neatly drilled holes at the base of it. “That. I don’t know what it does, and I don’t want to find out.”

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Zero Sum is almost finished! I've been quiet because I've been... well, to be honest, I've been beating myself up over this book a lot. But we're nearly there!