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The worst part of summer in Brackton wasn't the heat. In a northern state the summers tended to be mild, and the wind from the ocean helped keep things mild. The worst part was that the hot summer air baked and spoiled the stench of rotten fish and mixed it with the reek of garbage and a million and a half living people packed into one city.

Make that a million and a half minus one.

The body had been dumped on the tracks. Unfortunately it hadn't been found before the train found it first, scattering bits of charred bones and who knows what else over a wide radius. The best scent seekers were combing the gravel yard and doing what they could to gather everything.

Kryst crouched on the section of track where the body had been placed. There were bits of plastic and burnt clothing stuck to the tracks. The remains had probably been placed in a garbage bag and left here under the hopes that a train would smash it. Clever, but in some ways it was amateurishly clever.

On television, people crafted relics in ways that looked neat and tidy on camera. But the actual process was long, difficult, and left you with a very arduous mess to clean up. It was not easy to make a body vanish. Few people had access to an industrial furnace or proper supplies. There were not many places you could covertly bury something in the city either.

Plus there was the fact that there had been two murders at this point. Did someone suddenly need more than one relic or had they ruined their first attempt? There was a piece of this puzzle missing and Kryst needed to find it.

A quick glance of the area showed fences and locked gates. Unless there was a gap in security somewhere that meant that whomever used the yards as a dumping ground had access. Of course the yard employed about a thousand people at any given time, so that didn't narrow things down all that much.

Ten years of serving and you could detach yourself a little. After a parade of bodies you stopped seeing them as bodies. But when a child was killed it all came crashing back into focus. Kryst thumbed the pendant on his neck. Bennet, his relic donor, had kids too. If he had been alive to see this he would have been enraged. He would have pushed the sniffers to scour every square inch of the scene, pestered every last person who might have seen or heard anything at all, and then would have sat at his desk with his giant coffee mug making phone calls, harassing forensics, and analyzing every scrap of data until something clicked.

Cadets were taught that donating yourself for a relic was like donating an organ. It was just a piece of you that went to use after you had departed. But officers often spoke of having that feeling of old comrades hovering just over their shoulder watching them. Some would speak of bits of insight or ideas that never would have occurred to them just popping into their heads. Realistically there couldn't be anything to it. When a person was dead that was it. Kryst had been an atheist ever since his trip to Bombay. Not to mention it was hard to look at the scattered remains of a child and still hold any kind of faith in a grand plan or a higher power.

But he was still carrying a piece of a cop that was better than Kryst could ever hope to be, and that was motivation enough to get his ass in gear and try to make this stop at the trainyard his last.

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Copic marker and gelpen on canvasboard.