I looked around in the darkness, already starting to shiver. It had rained while I’d been on the train, and puddles were scattered around the platform; not enough to flood the place, but enough that the wind blowing off the stone was freezing cold. I looked around and tried to figure out what to do. Okay, so I was a Keeper—sort of—and I was investigating a crime scene. What was I supposed to do?
I’d come here with vague plans of finding witnesses, but as I looked around it became clear that that wasn’t going to work. In the few minutes I’d been standing at the station I hadn’t seen another living soul, and if there were any construction workers still on site I couldn’t see them. Instead I focused on my magesight, trying to sense magic. Stone beneath me, cold and immobile, chill air whistling around, the silent menace of the electrical rails and wires. Nothing powerful enough to tell me anything. Spells can leave residue, but it takes repetition and time—one-off magical events have to be extraordinarily powerful to stick around. Nothing like that here.
I walked up and down the platform, trying different angles, hoping to get lucky. I didn’t. Another passenger arrived and waited on the platform as I walked up and down it. A train arrived. She got on; one other person got off. I kept searching. The wind got colder, and so did I.
My nose and ears were starting to go numb. Times like this make me wish I were a fire or an ice mage. I took out my phone and called Caldera; it rang for what felt like much too long before Caldera picked up. “Hey.”
“Hi,” I said. “Look, seeing as this is my first solo job and all, mind giving me some pointers?”
“Just a sec,” Caldera said. There was a lot of noise in the background, voices and glasses clinking. Wherever Caldera was, it sounded warm, comfortable, and a much nicer place to be than here. “Didn’t catch that, say again?”
I took a breath, restraining the urge to hate her. “What the hell am I supposed to be doing here?”
“You’re at the station?”
“It’s cold, wet, and empty, and there’s sod-all to find.”
“Magesight?”
“Comes up blank. Look, you know about this stuff. What do you do when you’re sent out somewhere where there’s nothing to see?”
“You got the report, didn’t you?”
A train pulled up at the platform in a swell of light and noise. The doors opened with a hiss and I edged closer, hoping the air from inside would be a little warmer. It didn’t help much. “It just says ‘investigate.’”
“Hey, you’re a diviner. You’re supposed to be good at this.”
“Oh, sure.” The doors shut and the train pulled away, accelerating into the darkness. I walked after it, heading up the platform. “I’ll use my divination and look into the future. Hey, you know what, I’m seeing the future right now. If I stand here and wait, then in three minutes a train’s going to come. And after that, another train’s going to come. Here, I’ll let you guess what’s going to happen afterwards. I’ll give you a hint—there’s a train.”
“Hey, can you hear that?”
“What?”
“It’s the sound of me playing the world’s tiniest violin.”
“Yeah, laugh it up, you’re not the one freezing your balls off. Why didn’t they send a time mage?”
“You know how many incidents we get called out to per day?” Caldera asked. “Have a guess. Then have a guess how many time mages we’ve got on retainer.”
I was silent. “Here’s another question,” Caldera said. “You think you’re the first guy who’s noticed that some of the jobs we get sent on probably aren’t going to accomplish much?”
“No.”
“You have to search an empty station,” Caldera said. “Given what usually happens when you’re around, you ought to be happy.”
“It’s still a shit job.”
“This is not even close to what our really shit jobs look like. Now, are you going to do the work or are you going to keep being a whiny little bitch?”
I sighed. “Fine.”
“Because I’m not running out there to hold your hand.”
“I get it.”
“Besides, I’ve got a pint waiting for me and it’s nice and warm in here.”
“I hate you so much.”
“Sucks to be you. Later.” Caldera hung up. I glared at my phone and shoved it into my pocket. Another gust of freezing wind swept across the platform; the air was damp and even without my magic, my London upbringing was telling me it was going to rain again soon.
I had another try at finding a witness, but after fifteen minutes of searching I was forced to give up. The closest guy I could find was one lonely security guard still on duty at the construction site, bundled up in a booth with a space heater. He was several minutes away, had no line of sight to the platform, and from his body language didn’t seem to be interested in anything except trying not to freeze. It was theoretically possible that some other construction workers had been on site when whatever-it-was had happened, but if they had they hadn’t called 999, and I had absolutely no idea how I would find the right individuals out of an indeterminate-but-almost-certainly-large number of construction workers who (a) had gone home for the night, (b) would probably be disinclined to talk to me, and (c) were unlikely to have seen anything useful in the first place.
In the end I was forced to fall back on my divination, which was ironic given that I’d just been complaining at Caldera about how useless it was. But while divination isn’t really designed for CSI work, there are a few tricks you can pull which kind of do the same thing. In particular, it’s good for searching. If you’ve already decided to search an area, you skim through the possible futures of yourself doing the search and look for ones in which you find something. It’s not all that reliable, mainly because it’s hard to tell the difference at a casual glance between “future in which you find something useful” and “future in which you find something that looks useful but turns out on closer inspection to be irrelevant or worthless.” But it beats turning over rocks with your bare hands.
I was right on the edge of calling it off when something caught my attention. The wind had grown even colder, my ears had gone numb, and the first spots of a new rain shower had started to fall. I was towards the north end of the platform, and most of the futures I could see led to nothing but damp and frustration—but beyond the platform was a future that was different. The end of the platform was fenced off with a big sign on the gate reading Danger: High Voltage—No Admittance Beyond This Point. I pushed the gate open and walked down the ramp between the sets of railway lines, tufts of scrubby grass growing between piled gravel.
The thing (whatever it was) was lying in the midst of the damp stones. It was small and spherical, about the size and shape of a marble. But it had a trace of magic—just a tiny, tiny trace—and now that I was closer I could sense something from it. A weak one-shot, or a very weak focus. If my magesight hadn’t been better than most mages’, I’d never have noticed it.
I picked the thing up—it felt like a marble too—then straightened and looked around. Spitting rain was falling onto the railway lines around me, the drops briefly visible in the orange glow of the station lights. If there was anything else here, I couldn’t find it.