“Lieutenant.”

  Koshi jumped and spun about to find Director Xing just beside him. The other two officers with him were far more vocal as they leapt back, recognizing the intruder in time to refrain from metalbending. The lieutenant stared hard at the man for a moment, to make sure that he wasn’t seeing an apparition.

  “Uh, Mr. Xing. You’re up late.”

  He shifted his gaze to the quiet streets behind Xing. Even with the poor illumination, Koshi was sure that he’d notice a man sneaking up, however brown and black his attire might be colored. One patrolman was far less subtle about it, rubbing his eyes as he warily stared at the estate walls that bracketed the streets.

  The media director shrugged. “I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to sate my curiosity.” He then nodded to the blockaded Itiro estate behind Koshi. “I’m heartened to see that the police are still investigating the scene.”

  “Yes…um, it’s protocol.”

  Xing’s nod and reply that followed felt too smooth, too…rehearsed. “That’s good to know. And I suppose that you’re not at liberty to brief the public about the progress of your investigation?”

  Is that why he’s here? “Sorry, sir, but we cannot disclose any details about the case yet.” The words flowed out of Koshi like a mantra by now, having used that sentence or some variation of it when dealing with the press.

  “Completely understandable.” There was something in the director’s reply that caused Koshi some wariness. “I’m just taking a look around. Old habits, you see.”

  Koshi couldn’t help quirk an eyebrow up at that. “Old?” The director was younger than him!

  But then he remembered Xing’s previous profession.

  “I had my share of dealing with security. Avatar Korra was a high value target, you see.”

  That was no surprise. Or so the lieutenant thought until the officer beside him leaned in a little with interest. “Who’d try to kill the Avatar?”

  The young man gave a faint smile. “Not necessarily kill, but there are people out there who see the Avatar as a source of power.”

  “Kidnap the Avatar?” Koshi asked in disbelief.

  “It’s a reckless, dangerous idea, but here in Republic City there are people who believe that the reasonable thing to do when being oppressed by benders is to jump straight to violence and terrorism, so I suppose it’s not that unbelievable.”

  The policemen shared looks, and then acquiesced the point with shrugs and nods.

  Xing glanced around the gloomy street for a moment before giving them a short nod. “Anyway, I’ve distracted you from your tasks for long enough.”

  Koshi couldn’t help but turn around at that, but he found the other teams still at their posts or patrolling the perimeter of the estate. No signs of trouble.

  He turned back, and found the director smirking a little at the reaction. Amusement, or approval?

  “If I may offer some possibly redundant advice, lieutenant?” Koshi kept silent but slightly inclined his head. “Check under the floorboards, or between the walls. For some reason things easily slip into the nooks and crannies.”

  “Even choppers?” one patrolman remarked dryly, earning a shrug from Xing.

  “You’d be surprised at what you can find sometimes.”

  There was something in that tone.

  Much later, when dawn peeked, Koshi decided to apply that little tip to satisfy the nagging in his head. He led a team to carefully tear away the wallpaper and floorboards within the Itiro estate, to find…nothing.

  Nothing that initially looked out of place, anyway.

  There were patches of dried blood that leaked through the cracks, some stray hair and coins, dead bugs and vermin, but no hidden compartments or weapon caches. There was nothing in the walls, or under the floors. Nothing but scraps and spider rat nests.

  Koshi was about to call off the whole operation when he came to a realization.

  There was nothing in the walls, or under the floors. Nothing but dead bugs and vermin. He hadn’t seen or heard a single spider rat or centiroach skittering away when the walls and floors were pried open.

  That had to mean something, right?

  *****

  The day had barely begun and the signboard only just flipped when Xing entered the clinic, and Kilin immediately tensed up as she felt the unmistakable air of trouble around him. The young man was dressed down in a plain jacket, shirt, and pants, all in rather drab browns and greys. Oh, the clothes still had the sheen of silk and fine threads, but there was none of the gaudy embroidery that many of the rich, hot headed youths liked to go for. He could pass for a dockyard overseer going to his first invitational ball.

  Either the lad didn’t let his meteoric rise in station get to him - good for him if that’s the case - or he was being nondescript for a reason that might cause Kilin headaches.

  Considering how he was ignoring the counter and walking straight at her, the old healer braced herself for a migraine as she put on a businesslike smile.

  “Director Xing, good morning. How can I help you this early in the day?”

  “Ma’am,” he greeted back with a cordial nod. “Could I have a moment of your discretion?”

  She really hated that phrasing. That’s the sort of thing that dragged her to tend to roughed up triad or noble ‘guests’, or desperately save leaking triad captains who accidentally ran into pointed things repeatedly.

  “Is this about birth control?” she asked hopefully, but the smirk he gave her snuffed any optimism she had left.

  “Could we talk in private?” Xing asked again without acknowledging her question. Kilin sighed, gave a knowing look to her staff to keep business running, and then ushered the young director into her office.

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  “So,” she said, after the door was locked and Kilin was seated behind her desk, “what’s this about?”

  “How knowledgeable are you with poisons?”

  Kilin raised an eyebrow.

  “I’ve not poisoned anyone, nor will I be doing so anytime soon,” he assured her without dropping his deadpan expression.

  The healer quietly resolved to hike the consultation fees before letting out a sigh. “I have training on the typical suspects, but I also have…experience in dealing with more novel cases.”

  A small smile crept onto Xing’s face. “Could you learn anything from the dead?”

  Her eyebrow shot up again, and in her mind she raised her fee by a bit more. “That depends on what sort of poison we’re dealing with, and how long it’s been.”

  “I see…” And then he slowly approached Kilin’s desk, and with a straight face reached into his jacket to deposit a handful of dead bugs onto it. Centiroaches, damselhoppers, pill crickets…. Kilin stared at the scattered pile of small curled husks for a second, before a couple of stiff spider rats fell into view and thudded onto her desk.

  “And what, pray tell, are these?”

  “The dead.”

  Kilin stared at the director for several long seconds. Spirits, he was truly serious about this. The wafting stench didn’t phase her, but the sense that she might be dealing with a madman did.

  She stared back down at the dead vermin. “You’re looking for pest control.”

  “I’m quite sure that pest control would not leave as many people as bugs and rats dead.”

  Kilin looked back up at Xing again, and he shook his head before she could ask. “I think it’s safer you remain oblivious to the greater facts. Especially if this guess of mine has merit.”

  It took a few seconds before she finally leaned back into her seat with a loud, resigned sigh. This was going to be like the damned Agni Kai and Red Monsoons again…

  “How sure are you that the bugs are related to the rats?” she finally asked.

  “I found them in the kitchen. The spider rats had fallen out of their nests, the damselhoppers I picked were all in mid-leap, as you can see…”

  Kilin frowned at the grotesque evidence and noted the oddities as Xing pointed them out to her.

  All the damsel hoppers did have their legs stretched out, as if they’d been frozen in the middle of a jump.

  The spider rats were curled up in agony, their eight claws clenching onto tufts of webbing that suggested that they spasmed and fell off before they could curl up in the safety of their nests.

  There was a centiroach wrapped around a large pill cricket, clearly having died mid-snack.

  Whatever hit these pests, it hit them quickly.

  Maybe the boy was right to be suspicious.

  “If it’s hitting all of these things, it’s clearly not ingested…” Kilin muttered. “But something this strong would have to be sprayed, and I’m not seeing any residue…”

  The healer absently reached for a drawer to grab a couple of acupuncture pins, and then carefully prodded at the bugs. Scraping the chitin provided nothing unusual, so she moved onto the spider rats for a more familiar anatomy.

  Kilin’s hands hovered over a dead rodent for a second before she remembered what she was dealing with, and she rummaged through another drawer for a pair of gloves. The clammy and uncomfortable rubber ones given as a sample by Yuanhua Pharmaceuticals before the Healing Integrity Act killed off non-bending medicine.

  After flexing her fingers to get used to the tight, clingy sensation around her hands, Kilin grabbed one spider rat and gave it a cursory squint without putting her face too close, as much as a precaution as to keep the shadow of her head from obscuring her view.

  “I don’t know if these critters foam at the mouth like we do with certain poisons, but…”

  Kilin tilted the rodent in various angles and prodded various spots with an acupuncture pin before smirking with some triumph.

  “See inside the mouth? I’m no exterminator, but I’m pretty sure spider rats don’t have black streaks like that.”

  “Signs of poisoning?”

  “One of the more obvious and universal ones for anything with blood,” she murmured as a scalpel appeared in her hand. “We’re looking at something that gets absorbed into the flesh and corrupts the blood. There’s a few things that can do this kind of damage, so…”

  She pressed the small corpse onto her desk, and then made an incision from the chin of the spider rat down to its guts. Numbed to the smell (honestly, nothing could ever beat the foulness of trying to save a Triple Threat deputy as he shat himself to death), Kilin barely blinked as she pried open the wound and added more cuts to its innards.

  “Huh, that’s interesting.”

  The spider rat’s throat and lungs were stained black, but its heart was shriveled up like it was caught in a painful spasm.

  “It confirms your initial diagnosis,” Xing commented.

  Kilin gave a distracted nod as she cut and scraped at the organs. Then she repeated the procedure on the other rodent.

  “It does, but you don’t usually see this sort of concentration. This sort of thing is usually used in slow, small doses. You ever heard the stories of black veins and coughing blood? Yeah, it’s like that. But here the poison hit so hard that it wrenched their hearts before it had the chance to spread far. Then again, these rats are smaller, so it probably was a near instant kill… But they’re supposed to have good noses, yet they were still taking deep breaths if their lungs are anything to go by.”

  “So there’s little warning of the poison’s presence.”

  She hummed an affirmative as she flicked a finger over to a barrel by the door, and bended a small orb of water over to her desk. Now knowing what to find, Kilin dropped the water onto the bugs and, with a waggle of her fingers, swirled the currents and its contents around violently.

  The water bubbled white at first, but then slowly but surely darkened with pollution as whatever’s left in the guts of the bugs were flushed out.

  With a jerk of her finger, the tainted fluid floated up into a neat orb again, and Kilin sent a burst of chi to freeze it solid. It fell onto the desk with a sharp thunk, and the healer glanced at Xing.

  “I’ll have to rent an apothecary’s lab to distill and isolate the stuff, assuming that it’s inside,” she explained, though she was far from skeptical about the results now. “You said that the poison has people as victims as well?”

  Xing gave a slight bow in gratitude. “Thank you, Madam. I strongly suspect that the poison has claimed multiple victims, yes.”

  “Suspect?” Kilin swore she was beginning to strain a muscle as her eyebrow went up. She gestured to the dissected spider rat. “Just ask for an autopsy, the healer in charge wouldn’t miss something so obvious.”

  Xing smirked one-sidedly, and the unease she felt when he stepped into the clinic earlier returned. “Only if there is nothing about the bodies to distract from that.”

  She stared at the director in silence as memories of triad cases surfaced. “What, the poisoned victims were pulled from a fire? Or injected with booze and thrown off buildings?” Yeah, she could see that happening, especially if there’s outside pressure to quickly close an ‘obvious’ case…

  “Or if the bodies were horribly mutilated,” he added softly.

  “Mutila-” Kilin froze, and her eyes went wide as she glanced down at the dead vermin on her desk for a stunned second before staring back at Xing again.

  “Where did you-” She stopped herself, and shook her head. “No. You’re right, I don’t want to know.”

  The young man gave a nod with a wan smile to go along with it. “Could I bother you for a discreet report about this?”

  “I… Yeah, sure. There’ll be extra charges though. Hazard pay.”

  He nodded again. “Completely understandable. How long do you think it’ll take?”

  Kilin glanced down at the frozen ball of potential toxins on her desk. “Hmm… A week at most. Maybe add a couple of days to get into specifics.”

  “Then if I do not come back to you in two weeks about this, please send the copies to Councilman Tenzin and Chief Lin, along with your speculations on why I had this report made.”

  She couldn’t stop the concern that showed on her face. “If it’s dangerous-”

  “I will, of course, not get in the way of the authorities, or seek to cause trouble with vigilante justice.” The grin he flashed this time was confident, amused even. “But running parallel with the authorities, and keeping track of trouble though…”

  “Like I said, I don’t want to know,” Kilin harrumphed with finality as she rose from her desk and went for the door. “For the sake of discretion, we were just talking about birth control, alright?”

  “Hypothetical birth control,” Xing added. “Learning about them before I…commit.”

  “Sure, sure. If anyone asks, you’re an overthinking prude who’s too scared of dealing with offspring to stick it in your girlfriend. Want me to throw in worries about your performance?”

  The director only inclined his head as she opened the door. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “You can thank me in yuans.”

  And Xing did, by writing a cheque (after he thoroughly washed his hands, of course) that really showed his gratitude for the consultation service. The kid really knew how to spend his money in where it mattered. Kilin struck out the thought of adding performance woes to his cover story.

  “I’ll come by next week?”

  “You better. Don’t get into any…sticky situations, alright?”

  “Nothing beyond light petting,” he assured her, which, considering what he’d brought to Kilin today, left her with quite the opposite effect.