Free Red Shadows by Mitchel Scanlon Page B

call him an asshole and tell him to go drokk himself. Granted, such a violation of inter-departmental protocol would probably earn her an official reprimand, if Weller or either of the other Judges present chose to report it. But it wasn't the risk of censure that stopped her from giving voice to the words straining at her tongue. It was the thought of Brenda Maddens, dying alone, unable to speak or scream, terrified as the blood sprayed from her slashed throat to stain the apartment walls around her. And afterwards, even as her body began to go cold, the killer wasn'tdone with her. Her eyes straying to Brenda's mutilated corpse still lying on the kitchen table nearby, Anderson was reminded of the words of one of her psi-instructors at the Academy. "We aren't like the other Judges," the instructor had told her. "All they care about is whether or not the Law has been broken. It's different when you're a Psi-Judge. Always remember: we speak for those who can no longer speak for themselves. We speak for the dead. We speak for the victim."
    We speak for the dead, Anderson told herself. She was not a religious person by nature, but it felt like a prayer. We speak for the victim. And, tonight, that means I speak for Brenda Maddens.
    "You needn't worry yourself about where my talents are most needed," she told Weller. "This is the case I was assigned to, and until I hear different from Control or Psi Division..." She paused, letting her words hang in the air for an instant before she finished the sentence.
    "I'm not going anywhere."
     
    Colours. He could see colours all around him.
    Gazing at the soulshadows of the people around him as he walked down the pedway, it seemed to William that the city was a kaleidoscope in a thousand shifting shades. He saw candy-apple greens and turquoise blues, burnt ambers and sunburst yellows. He saw earthen shades of brown, delicate hues of violet and darkest indigos. The city was a symphony in every colour imaginable. Then, there were the other colours - the colours of the mundane and humdrum physical world: the spectral orange haze of neon lights, the ink blue-black of the sky at night, the silver orb of the moon, the dirty granite grey of the rockcrete floor of the pedway beneath his feet. The contrast with the institution where William had spent the majority of his adult life could not have been more marked.
    There, the walls and furnishings had been rendered in a series of limited variations in the same nauseating and oppressive shade of bile green. Now, William was free to walk the streets of a city painted in a broader palette; a city that seemed to bleed colour from its every sweating pore, a city alive with colour. After all the wasted years of his confinement, all the years spent with his arms held close to his body by straps and buckles, his mouth drooling from the drugs the doctors used to numb his mind, he felt he had finally come home.
    Red, he saw red.
    His mouth gone suddenly dry, William spotted a glimpse of red amid the glowing sea of souls before him. At first, it seemed little bigger than a pinprick. As it grew larger, he saw it belonged to the aura of a man walking down the pedway towards him. The man was in his thirties, dressed in the current Mega-City fashions: T-shirt, drainpipe trousers, kneepads, sleeveless jacket. He was just a regular citizen out for a nighttime stroll, minding his own business. As the man drew closer, William saw that his soulshadow was a blood-red tone of vermillion, shot through with veins of cinnabar and livid scarlet.
    Red, the man was red.
    Without him even realising it, William's hand went to the knife hidden inside his coat. His fingers curled around the hilt. The man came nearer, each movement of his legs carrying him another step closer to his destruction. William felt a throbbing pain behind his eyes; a pressure in his head building toward release. His heart beat wildly within his chest. Nearer; the pain in his head was unbearable. Another