California Bones by Greg van Eekhout Page A

pinned below the sketch. One of them of them was a group shot taken at a backyard party. A red pen circle had been drawn around a woman holding a piece of cake on a plate. There was some resemblance to the narrow-faced man in the sketch. The skin tone. The eyes.
    Max edged closer to the corkboard, sniffed, perhaps instinctively, and turned away in dejection.
    “You don’t recognize her, do you?” said the memoratician.
    “No,” Gabriel admitted. “Should I?”
    “That’s Messalina Sigilo. Born in Northern California.”
    “Illegal immigrant?”
    “No, she came over legally during the Pax Monterey, but there are notes in her file about suspicions of espionage. Never confirmed. It’s believed she tried to return to the Northern Kingdom ten years ago. She didn’t make it. And her son, Daniel, was killed during the crossing. This is all in her file. I’ve sent everything relevant up to your office.”
    “Thank you. And what about the man?” Gabriel pointed to the other photo, a formal portrait of a gray-haired Anglo, mid-forties. He did look familiar.
    “That’s Sebastian Blackland.”
    “Blackland. The osteomancer?”
    “One of the Ministry’s top R&D men,” said the memoratician. “An intimate of the highest echelons. Married to Messalina Sigilo. He was taken in the Third Correction.”
    Nothing unusual about that. Few high-level osteomancers survived the Hierarch’s purges.
    “What’s their connection to my sint holo suspect?”
    “They’re his parents,” said the memoratician.
    “So the boy who died when Sigilo was crossing the border, Daniel … that was my suspect’s brother?”
    “No, they only had one child.” The memoratician withdrew another photo out of his file. It was a grainy blowup of a boy, sitting on the edge of a palm planter, balancing a piece of cake on a paper plate. “This is a zoom from the Sigilo picture. We use over seventy different measurements of shape and proportion for facial recognition. It’s Daniel Blackland, age six. And this,” he said, indicating the apothecary’s sketch, “is him at age twenty-two. Daniel Blackland. Son of a spy, son of an osteomancer, presumed dead, but, apparently, still alive in Los Angeles.”

 
    TEN
    Emma set a chip the size of a postage stamp on the conference table. “A fossilized scale from a Draconis colombi. That’s a Colombian dragon, or firedrake, for you nonmagicians.” She winked at Jo, Moth, and Cassandra, who stood around the table. “This is the first significant osteomantic obstacle we’ll be facing. Harder than steel-reinforced concrete. Pressure-rated to over seventy-two hundred pounds per square inch. A six-thousand-degree acetylene torch won’t even give it a rash.”
    Daniel picked up the scale, shocked at its heft. No bigger than his thumbnail, it must have weighed five pounds. He dropped it on the table with a thunk .
    “This is just a sample sliver I smuggled from the catacombs,” Emma said. “The vault door below Cross and Carsson’s is made of this, and it’s two feet thick.”
    Most heists were actually just strong-arm robberies. Walk into a jewelry store with guns drawn, holler a lot, in and out in a few minutes. Even an elaborate job, like the Kent depository, the biggest cash robbery in the history of the United Kingdom, was essentially just a tiger kidnapping: Abduct the manager and the manager’s family and hold them at gunpoint until the manager gives you access to bales of money. Daniel’s personal favorite heist was the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum job in Boston, in which the robbers disguised themselves as cops and convinced the security guards to let them in. They’d worn fake mustaches. Fake mustaches! How could you not love it?
    Fake mustaches, however, would not get them into the Ossuary.
    “So how do we breach it?” Cassandra said, squinting at the scale chip.
    “Seps venom is the only thing I know that burns through firedrake,” Emma said.
    Daniel had never worked with seps,