A row of antique street lamps—not too bright, so as to maintain the ambiance of the precinct—cast dim pools of reflected light from the wet sidewalks. Faint sounds of laughter drifted through the night, interspersed with farewells as a few late-nighters took advantage of the break in the weather.

The peace shattered as something slammed at terminal velocity into the pavement, impacting with such force as to pound a dent several centimeters into the plascrete surface.

For a moment, silence.

A nearby patron rose to her feet and peered over the restaurant railing towards the source of the disturbance. For a brief moment she stood motionless, and then raised both hands to her face.

A piercing scream shattered the peaceful mall.

Officer Callon Follet, post-sergeant of the Attika Guarda, peered down at the ruin. The sheer force of impact left little recognizable of what had once been a human soul, perhaps a young woman. The corpse was crushed almost beyond recognition, every bone broken, the skin pulverized and gore spattered for several meters around. A dark, congealing mass pooled in the depression created by the fall.

Follet raised his eyes towards the face of the adjacent skyscraper, the tallest building on the planet. It soared to over a thousand meters, and due to the height most of the windows were incapable of opening sufficiently for a body to pass through. Only at the top was exit possible, from any one of a dozen penthouse floors each with a private balcony open to the air, or from one of several sky-car pads at the summit.

Those high places all featured safety-glass barriers around the outer perimeters, but anyone could scramble over given determination and something to climb on. An acknowledged safety hazard, they existed only because the owner of the monolith all but owned the city. He got what he wanted. He was untouchable.

The sergeant stared up into the darkness and swiped a few stray drips of moisture from his face as a trauma arbeiter, white and reflective in the dim light, exited a nearby ground-unit and glided across to the scene of the incident. It paused for a moment beside the remains, opened a hatch on its side and extended small probes.

“You know what I need,” Follet said.

The drone acknowledged in a disturbingly human voice and extended a probe into the congealing blood. Dropping the sample into a liquid-filled vial, it gave a shake and waited until the liquid turned bright blue.

“Hellfire, sir. Exceptionally high concentration, death inevitable. More information will be available following a detailed examination.”

Follet nodded and turned his attention to the diminutive figure standing a few meters behind him. His new partner, junior officer Abigail Renner, was fresh from the academy. Tonight was her first on the job, her first call to her first incident.

What a goddamned, awful mess, he thought. “Sorry to throw this at you on your first trip out. We try to ease newbie's in, but this is just ... unexpected, that's all.”

The girl did not reply, her attention fixed on the ruin on the pavement.

“Hellfire,” Follet said, “is the nastiest addictive drug we've encountered on the circuit. Damned stuff shows up more every month and we have no clue where it comes from.”

His partner did not respond. Since their first meeting she had shown none of the first-day nerves so typical of raw recruits. At the station she had presented as cool, calm, aware of her circumstances and confident in her abilities, but now she resembled a child in a strange and hostile environment.

Shock, perhaps?

Of medium height—Follet guessed about one-fifty-five centimeters—the blue-black Guarda uniform made her appear smaller than in reality. With her dark-brown hair tucked under a standard issue peaked cap she looked younger, more boyish, than her twenty standard years. She could almost be his daughter. Her green eyes glanced up at him briefly before returning to the scene on the pavement.

“The trouble with this stuff,” Follet continued, “is the small doses. The common form is tiny grains, like highly processed sugar. One tenth of a gram gives you a thrill the like of which you've never experienced before: extreme ecstasy, a feeling of being the ruler of the world and so on. With luck, you can have your high and get away with it. Two tenths and you get an even more unbelievable trip, and become addicted for life with no chance of a cure.”

Abbie Renner nodded, her eyes still glued to the body.

“A third of a gram and you're as good as dead. It starts with an overpowering sense of dizziness, other-worldliness and heightened awareness, then superiority, and you think anything is possible. If you're near water you decide you can breathe under it and you drown. You can walk through fire and not burn. High up and you can fly, and...”—Follet returned his gaze to the victim, now in the process of being scraped into a carry-case by the arbeiter—“...you get an irresistible urge to do just that. Then you die.”

He turned back to his young protégée. She had not spoken since their arrival and had not moved closer to the body. Follet observed her more closely and realized her lack of response was not shock as he had at first assumed. The look in those eyes was one of intense anger.

Damp from the moisture in the air, her face showed little of the confusion and revulsion expected of a raw recruit exposed to such horror on her first night out. This young woman stood firm, stolid despite her young years and diminutive appearance, her brow furrowed, her jaw set and her gaze locked on the scene.

“But you're aware of all that, aren't you? I'm not telling you a damned thing you haven't heard before.”

Renner gave a curt nod and exhaled forcefully, as if she had been holding her breath.

“You alright? You can handle this. Take another breath and tell me what you know about this stuff.”

The young officer took a slow breath in and then breathed out again with a long, protracted sigh. “It's why I joined the Guarda,” she said. “My brother died from the drug two years ago, when I was eighteen. He was one of the first, they told us. Took too much and tried to stop a speeding maglev by standing in front of it with his hands up. It couldn't stop fast enough. I decided then to join the force and track down whoever is responsible for his getting the drug.”

Follet studied his young sidekick; for a raw recruit she had one heck of an agenda. He knew little about her other than the information on her data sheet, but she impressed him as a woman of intelligence and resourcefulness. A powerful, unrelenting determination lurked behind that angelic, heart-shaped face. This young lady came with a purpose.

“You’re aware they set up a special division to deal with this problem? Have you considered applying?”

“Yes. I applied from the academy but I was told to come back when I had a year or two of experience. They don't take graduates until they prove they can stomach the work.”

Follet turned and looked again at the black stained depression in the plascrete, all that remained now the arbeiter had finished its work.

“I can understand that.”