Hayden Lichfield’s life is ripped apart when he finds his father murdered in their lab, and the camera logs erased.
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Death I Gave Him by Em X. Liu, a queer sci-fi retelling of Hamlet as a locked-room thriller—out now from Solaris.
Hayden Lichfield’s life is ripped apart when he finds his father murdered in their lab, and the camera logs erased. The killer can only have been after one thing: the Sisyphus Formula the two of them developed together, which might one day reverse death itself. Hoping to lure the killer into the open, Hayden steals the research. In the process, he uncovers a recording his father made in the days before his death, and a dying wish: Avenge me…
With the lab on lockdown, Hayden is trapped with four other people—his uncle Charles, lab technician Gabriel Rasmussen, research intern Felicia Xia and their head of security, Felicia’s father Paul—one of whom must be the killer. His only sure ally is the lab’s resident artificial intelligence, Horatio, who has been his dear friend and companion since its creation. With his world collapsing, Hayden must navigate the building’s secrets, uncover his father’s lies, and push the boundaries of sanity in the pursuit of revenge.
The body is heavy.
Alone, without Felicia, the weight is strangely more to lift. Hayden heaves the trolley into the cold-room, stopping just before the walls of glass that surround all their cold tissue samples. When he eases the trolley sideways, the body rocks. An arm dangles off the side before he can steady the wheels.
Wait for two breaths, in and out. Watch it crystallize.
Hayden heaves the limb back onto its chest. His blood-soaked hand leaves a ring around the limp wrist.
It’s a stark reminder of what he’s here to do. He turns his own hand, palm up. Old blood has seeped into the furrows of his fingerprints, thick and viscous. Further down, flaking on his palm, is a darker, ruddy brown. Hayden is here for a resurrection, but there will be more blood spilled.
He wipes it all as best he can on the body’s lab coat. Red blends into red, smearing the already dirty fabric.
Once he deems his fingers clean enough, he nudges the trolley aside and pushes on the glass pane. There is a beep, then the wall slides open neatly, freezing air hissing out into the small hall. Hayden shudders as he pulls the trolley fully into the chamber.
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The Death I Gave Him
Usually, if he knows he needs to spend time here, he pulls on a heavier coat, at least some gloves, but there is no time and so he only has the same flimsy lab coat as always. But it’s not the cold that makes his hands quiver as he pulls out the vial of Sisyphus Formula and lays it out on the table. The metal clinks as he sets it down. From the drawer underneath, he pulls out cotton swabs, a scalpel, a suture kit, and the applicator designed just last month: a syringe with a smooth, metallic body and a motorized drill, its hair-thin fibreglass bit housed in a metal tip.
For a resurrection, two things must be brought back: the body, and then the mind.
For those purposes, two machines rest in the corner of the room. A modified ECMO—meant to prolong life, used here to give it—stands bursting with tubing; sitting beside it, the matching helmet meant to interface with one’s neuromapper. Hayden pulls them both over.
When all the parts to his irrational but insistent idea are assembled, he pauses.
“Are you really going through with this?” Horatio cuts in, not needing the direct link to Hayden’s own mind to figure out exactly what the plan is and always has been.
“You don’t think this is a good idea.”
“How could I?”
Hayden shrugs and presses his lips into a line. “I need to know who did it.”
“Didn’t even think to ask if he recorded it?”
“He connects his neuromapper every morning at seven when he comes in,” Hayden says stiffly. “Turns it off at night. You have nothing.”
Horatio doesn’t contest the point. “Hayden, do you have any idea how guilty you look right now?”
Hayden nearly brings his thumb up to chew before he catches sight of the dried blood that hasn’t quite flaked off yet. Rubbing the pads of his fingers together, he leans his elbows on the table. “They would believe that I could kill my own father, wouldn’t they?”
“It’s suspicious enough you didn’t immediately raise the alarm.”
“No one knows that I didn’t. What’s Paul Xia doing now?”
“Talking to your uncle.”
“You’ll tell me if he asks you anything, right?”
“Yes, but you’re aware I have to answer. Truthfully.”
“That’s fine. That’s a risk I’ll have to take. So long as the cameras aren’t recording. Are they?”
“They’re running, can’t turn that off in here. But I’m not recording. Only in here.”
Hayden stifles a laugh. “Always so paranoid, Dad,” he murmurs.
Horatio makes a muffled noise that sounds almost like a scoff. “Hayden, there’s something you’re not saying.”
“What?”
Horatio pauses, like he doesn’t want to press, but then: “Just tell me if it’s important.”
A wave of guilt crawls up his throat. Hayden closes his eyes, trying to keep the tide of emotion away from his mind: the neuromapper link is not infallible either, there is nothing impenetrable about this, he—his mouth tastes like acid and copper, bitter and thick. He flexes his arms, unsticking his stiff and cold-locked joints. The body is lying before him. Before them, because Hayden is not alone. He needs to remember that.
In front of it, there is an array of slick, shining tools, and his hands ache to hold them, use them, share the culmination of all their work.
“I want to know,” he says, because of all the lies he’s told and plans to tell, he doesn’t want to lie to Horatio. “I want to know if Sisyphus works. I want to try it.” His fingers curl in the air. Everything feels electric.
Hayden pulls out a bottle of methanol and rinses it over his palm to clean it. The quick cold as it evaporates sharpens his eyes, dries the last of his old tears. “I’ve been trying to achieve this my whole career,” he says, attention fixed on wiping down the table. “This isn’t novel; I’m only starting the first human trial a few months early.” And—Hayden bites down hard on his lip, unwilling to give the last thought breath. And if it works, he’ll have his father back. He will. Even if for a moment.
Horatio can probably feel it, this bone-deep ache. The wanting.
Hayden grabs the body’s arm before he can think better of it. The flesh refuses to yield when he touches two fingertips to the skin, so he presses down harder until it does give. And then it’s much too soft, too much without structure. Hayden rubs his thumbs over and into the muscle, inch by inch working some tenderness back into the body. With some effort, he manages to roll it so that it lies face-up.
The entire left side of its face is caved in, a weeping wound crawling across the crumpled remains of its cheekbone. Hayden’s hands are still where they’re curled around the body’s neck, fingers lightly grazing both greying skin and the cool pad of the neuromapper embedded in the spine.
The eyes are still gaping open, dried tear tracks trailing out from their corners.
“It’s not him anymore.” For a second, it sounds like Hayden’s own voice, whispering from the dark corners of his brain, but then he registers that it’s Horatio, so close he could’ve been speaking from inside instead of outside.
Hayden bows his head. “I know.”
He takes the other arm, still as gentle as he can, and lays it out flat. Dull numbness falls like a blanket over his head. The table feels miles away. But as long as he can still think, he can still work.
Reaching back, he unspools coils of tubing from the ECMO and lays it over the body.
Taking the catheter needles and cotton swabs, he wipes down the unturned forearm. A tendon stretches taut from wrist to elbow. Hayden pushes the tip of the needle against one still-swollen vein. It slides in easily—barely a dribble of blood escapes. He tapes it down.
The other catheter is for the neck, but the jugular is still split wide open.
He forces his hands to stop trembling to pick up the scalpel.
It is surprisingly easy to cut the damaged skin. Easier still to identify the rubbery artery slithering between the exposed edges of the dermis. Hayden rips the suture kit open, plucking the needled wire up with the forceps. Under his guidance, the needle pierces the broken epithelium, sinks deep into the flesh. The wire follows, sharp, quick. What leaks out of the artery is pale, tinged yellow, not nearly the rich red it should be. When it’s done, he slides the other catheter into the lumen. Hayden grits his teeth and finishes the stitching. His knots are sloppy, but there’s no one around to care.
Staring now, his eyes refuse to blink. All he sees is the shattered mosaic of his father’s cheekbone. There is no fixing this puzzle; there is too much bone, too many shards. But the ugly break helps him remember this is not the same face that lingers too brightly in his memories.
His father—no, there is nothing of his father left here. Hayden squeezes his parched eyes shut, reaches out blindly for the ECMO, and flicks the machine on.
For a long time, nothing happens. The dull whir of the centrifugal pump drones on. Thick red liquid moves through the tubes, disappearing into the mess of machinery and winding back out, but the body is still. There is, mercifully, no leakage. His own pulse pounds in his ears, discrete against the rush of the machine, a steady beat to its unstable roar.
The ECMO was built to pump blood in lieu of a heartbeat. Can a body be called a corpse anymore, when life is forced to course through its veins?
Blood is easy. It’s the brain, what makes up a person beyond the prison of their body—that’s the hard part.
That’s the point of the neuromapper. Hayden slides the neurotopographer gently over the corpse’s head. The thin band of metal rests like a crown on his father’s brow, gleaming a polished silver. As the magnet snaps into place over the embedded device in the spine, the whole circlet hums. The corpse’s skin has taken on something of a flush. There is something moving inside it now, rushing, quick.
Hayden brings out the last piece of the puzzle: the vial of Sisyphus Formula. Trapped behind glass, the yellowing liquid inside bubbles. It shimmers, little ribbons of precipitation rippling like something alive. Innocuous on the surface, but this vial houses a miracle.
He loads it into the applicator.
This time, his hands do not shake.
Two fingers to the corpse’s intact cheek, he pushes to turn the head to expose the suboccipital, where he aims the applicator. He doesn’t close his eyes as he presses down on the trigger. The drill bit whirrs, slicing through the bone, then a shuddering recoil thuds up his arm as the needle slides in. As he pushes the syringe down to unload the formula, the neurotopographer beeps a rapid trill, recognizing the influx of neurotrophins flooding his father’s cranial space, past the dura, past the arachnoid, piercing the pia and cutting through all the natural barriers the body has evolved to protect the secrets lying in the folds of white and grey matter.
When the vial is emptied, he pulls the applicator out. The skin gives a wet gasp, and Hayden pales as he smooths over the damp edges of the wound with a bandage.
“Is that it?” Horatio asks. He sounds, despite himself, as fascinated as Hayden is.
“Yeah,” he says. “Normally we’d start with reconstructive procedures or something—I don’t know, I’m not a surgeon and we hadn’t worked out our plans for the trials, but there’s no time for that, and—”
“You’re not trying to keep him alive.”
The applicator clatters from his fingers. He stares hard at his own still shaking hands, traitorous things that they are. “No,” he whispers, and he should be drowning in the guilt, but there is only an empty, sucking cavern behind his sternum. “I’m not.”
All that’s left now is to wait.
The corpse’s face is blank. Hayden wonders when it will cease being a corpse, if he will ever see it as anything but. He wonders if the carefully cultivated serum of mitogens and stem cells are working, signalling growth pathways to speed up, finding what few living cells exist and amplifying them beyond what they were ever capable of in life. And even if it did work, would they follow the course laid out by the neuromap? Could they relink the topography of his father’s brain, synapse by synapse? He wonders if there is anything left of his father in this corpse.
But no matter.
Hayden does not need his father back; he needs answers.
Before he can look away from the broken, terrified visage that he doesn’t recognize, a previously dark screen in the cold room flickers to life.
Hayden whirls around.
The lone console at the back of the room glows.
“Hello?”
It is, impossibly, his father’s voice. Not from the corpse—but through the speakers on the console.
“This is a bit odd, I confess,” the voice continues. “To be talking about one’s death before it happens, that is.”
A shadow fills the screen, the flash of a white lab coat surrounding it. Hayden is frozen. From here, the video is grainy, the details hard to make out. His father’s face is dim and blurred, but it’s still obvious when he reaches up to adjust his glasses. “I have been dreaming of dying of late,” he says, tone wry. “Perhaps this is presumptuous of me, but if you are hearing this, Hayden, it means you’ve linked up my neuromap.”
Behind, the corpse lets out a low wheeze. Hayden stands stock-still, trapped between the body and the video , both shadows of the man his father used to be.
“Needless to say,” the man in the video says with a wide, pearly smile, “I hope it works. And I’m proud of you, for trying.”
Hayden’s throat is suddenly thick. He presses his knuckles into the surface of the table to keep himself from swaying on his feet, eyes burning as he looks into the screen.
“To get down to business, if indeed I’ve gotten myself killed, you need to know how Elsinore works.” His father rolls out a map, smoothing it over the desk he is sitting at. The camera shakes as he angles it downward. It’s more of a blueprint than anything, and Hayden understands that he is looking at Elsinore’s insides.
He takes a step closer.
The blueprint is utterly strange to him—disconcertingly so. As his father keeps talking, fingers gliding over the spidering lines that make up the floorplans, he realizes that he’s never seen some of these rooms before. Phantom halls, stretching out into what he once thought was empty space. An entire room on the third floor never before known to him. Hayden stares wild-eyed around him, trying to find Horatio’s cameras as if that will resolve Elsinore back into familiarity.
But Horatio is uncharacteristically silent.
“Tread lightly,” his father warns. “Some rooms are more dangerous than others.”
By the end of it, Elsinore sounds more like a prison than a lab. Worse, a prison he doesn’t know the way out of. Hayden’s earliest and fondest memories are of the soft white glow, moments spent cradled in a reading nook, Horatio’s voice at his back, before he was ever Horatio. Giving the Elsinore Labs Operating System his own name had felt like something meaningful, when Hayden was eight years old and too desperate for a friend. Horatio feels as familiar to him as ever. Hayden wonders if Elsinore has always been bigger than Horatio , if Horatio has been as trapped as the rest of them, his consciousness held by the building’s concrete shell.
How much of this place did Hayden ever know? How much did any of them ever know?
“And,” his father says, “one last thing.” On the screen, he folds the map away. Neat, pristine corners. “There’s a lab, in the basement. I’ve kept it entirely private; it’s not on any of the maps. There should be samples of the Sisyphus Formula in there—make sure they don’t fall into the wrong hands. The room is passcode locked, labelled Supply Closet P28. Now, listen closely,” he says, leaning in. “The wrong code will fill the room with nerve gas. So—” his father shrugs good-naturedly, the corner of his mouth twitching in slight mirth—“I’m sure you don’t want to accidentally stumble into that. Everything I want to protect is in that lab. The code is five-eight-eight-two. It’s yours now, Hayden.”
His now, but never before.
Hayden’s fingernails dig into his palms, anger thrumming in the line of tension running from wrist to elbow. What else had his father hid? He wants to turn the console off; he doesn’t want to know.
But on the screen, his father falls still in the way that has always demanded Hayden’s attention. He settles his gloved hands on the table, then leans in close enough to the camera that the dim light finally illuminates his face. It looks the same as it always does—did. The wide eyes Hayden never inherited, the hard jaw he did, smiling like it’s the easiest thing in the world. From his slightly shaggy hair, pressed down by his glasses, Hayden guesses he filmed this months ago.
“I have one last request,” his father says, solemn. “If this was malicious, once you’re sure the research is safe, find who did it.
“And I hate to ask this of you, Hayden, but…” He blinks once, backlit. Mouth still curved in a soft smile. “Help me return the favour.”
The video ends.
In the sudden silence, impotence leaks into Hayden’s veins like sedative. Around him, the glass walls of the cold room warp his vision. He’s standing in a glowing box, held up on display. And for whom? To what end? What other things lurk in that bright light?
A wild impulse screams through him, loud enough that he feels it in his skull: to replay the video, press his face up to the screen, drink all his father’s secrets in before he disappears again—but before he can lunge forward, there is a clatter.
This time, Hayden spins slowly. The corpse’s arm has fallen off the table.
For an agonizing moment, there is nothing, and then the body seizes. The trolley shakes as his father jerks. Jaw dropping, mouth opening and closing in a silent gasp, still trying to draw air into collapsed lungs. Hayden scrambles to grab an oxygen mask, fitting it sloppily to his father’s face. He squeezes once, twice, trying to keep a steady rhythm against the desperate choking. His father’s eyes roll.
“No, no,” he finds himself mumbling, sensation bleeding back into his hands. Finally, they start to tremble. “No, stop.”
A sour odour floods his nostrils, overwhelming the crisp smell of alcohol. Air hisses out from between his father’s teeth.
He looks alive.
Hayden thinks: is this what he looked like before he died? Is he reliving it? How much awareness is left? How much does he see?
Does it hurt? Did it hurt?
His knees buckle, and he falls heavily down over the table. The oxygen bag still in his hands, he squeezes. His father’s face is mere inches away. Hayden is close enough to see the minute twitches in his cheeks, close enough to hear the guttural groan that the oxygen has birthed, escaping his throat. Close enough for his father to extend a hand and grasp onto Hayden’s sleeve.
He flinches so hard his elbow collides with the table with a splitting pain. The guilt of doing so is a palpable second hit, quick and furious. But no matter—his father’s arm jerks inward again, and Hayden loses his balance, crushed down into a macabre embrace against his chest. He struggles to push himself back upright, but there is an inexplicable strength in the rigid lock of his father’s muscles. The oxygen mask falls to the ground. Hayden can barely hold his head above his lab coat. Against his cheek, his father’s chest rises and falls, shallow breaths, too tachypneic to draw in anything useful, but he feels strong and solid and here.
“Dad,” Hayden manages to gasp, “please, let go.” Tears blur his vision, suddenly. They are hot and burning, sliding down his cheeks in the cold, deadened air. “Dad, please, let me up. I can’t breathe, Dad—”
His father’s grip draws even tighter, draining the last of his breath.
A harsh choke escapes the gaping mouth as his father’s lips move, smacking together as if to get words out. Hayden tightens his grip on the side of the table and drags himself forward, straining towards the long column of his father’s throat.
“Dad.” He chokes, too, as he manages to spit the word out. “What is it? You have to—you have to tell me.”
Noises, indistinguishable.
“Dad, please. I need to know. I need to know who did this to you—I need to—that’s what you wanted, remember?” His teeth grind against each other. “That’s what you wanted me to do, right?”
His father closes his mouth. His spinning eyes finally stop flitting and focus, bloodshot irises fixed directly on Hayden’s face. His hair is short, now. It doesn’t curl. “Chhhhhhhh—shhh—Chhhhhhhhhharles,” he half hisses, half mouths.
“Charles?” Hayden repeats desperately. “My uncle?”
His father’s eyes remain wide and open. “Hhhhhch—Haaay—Hhhhuh.”
“Dad,” Hayden tries. But something thick in his throat overwhelms the rest of his words.
He repeats the horrible attempt at Hayden’s name, over and over, wheezing when the air finally runs out of his lungs. Hayden wants to say something, Dad, I’m here, Dad, please, I’m right here, tell me what you wanted me to do, but he can’t find a gap in his wracking sobbing to get any of it out. All he can do is mouth around the questions: What do I do now? How do I fix this? Dad, did you really want me to kill for you? He shudders and buries his face deeper into the crumpled lab coat. He hasn’t held his father this close in years, this tight, desperate way like in his fleeting memories of childhood. All he can remember is stumbling into a lab for the first time, standing on tiptoes to peek into the microscope, his father’s warm presence at his back to guide him through it all. His soothing voice whispering instructions—open the light, brighter, brighter, yes, that’s it! Now, his world is the dark, and his own hot tears, and something warm underneath that feels like his father, still alive.
Hayden tightens his grip on his father’s shoulder and waits for it all to stop.
Eventually, it does.
Hayden comes back to himself in a daze, still half bent and pinned down. The chest his face is resting against isn’t moving anymore. His own quiet sniffles have ceased, and when he works his jaw open, breath comes back to him, soft but almost steadied. The world is a blurred mess, streaked with flashes and smears of colour and not much else.
Slowly, he extricates himself from the body. Sweat slips down his back, sticking his shirt to the skin. It’s cold. Everything is cold.
The ECMO came undone sometime during the resurrection, and a growing pool of blood is streaming from the tubing’s end. He thinks dully of cleaning it up, but only manages to summon the motivation to take a step back before it hits his shoes.
“Well,” says Horatio. “Fuck.”
The laugh that’s been lodged in Hayden’s throat finally makes its way out. Hayden rubs at his wrist, the phantom of his father’s fingers still bruising the skin, and slumps against the glass wall. “Yeah,” he says. “But it worked.”
“Did it?”
On the table, the body is still again, though one arm remains locked in a half-embrace.
But he was alive. For the briefest of moments, he was here, Hayden believes that with everything he has. “Yes,” he says. “It did. It worked. I did it.”
“Are you sure he… understood what you were asking?”
“Of course—he said my name, Horatio.” Hayden’s jaw trembles. He presses his hand to his mouth and draws a slow, stinging breath. “He knew I was here.”
“He also said your uncle’s name.”
And like that, the numbness slams down again. “He did, didn’t he? Do you think it was an accusation?”
“Do you?”
Hayden looks down. His vision clears, only enough to better see the mess he’s made of the cold-room. “I don’t know.”
“He was saying your uncle’s name for a reason.”
“What if he was calling for help?”
“Do you think he was asking for someone to come?”
Two truths loom before him. Either his uncle is the murderer, or his father was calling out to him and Hayden both in those last moments, and neither came.
“I don’t know,” Hayden says. He wants to put his father to rest and wash his hands of the whole day, go get that drink with Rasmussen after all and drown himself in easy normalcy and seaside spirits. But nothing is that simple anymore.
Horatio doesn’t answer. Hayden wonders if he’s come to his own conclusions and wants to spare him of them. His hand comes up to touch his own neuromapper, chilled and smooth. It’s infuriatingly blank, something that’s meant to link them both, but the human mind is stubbornly small, unable to hold the complexities Horatio exists in. It renders Horatio as unknowable to him as Elsinore, and that, for some reason, is the realization that makes Hayden’s knees weak all over again.
“Did you know?” Hayden asks.
“About the hidden rooms? No.”
“So you can’t see what’s there.”
Irritation sparks brightly enough through Horatio’s interface that Hayden can feel it, a spike of pain at the back of his neck. “No.”
The lights in the room flicker, only once, but the split second of darkness blooming back to light imprints a splintered chiaroscuro on Hayden’s eyelids. For a moment, Hayden is suspended within Horatio—he’s here and he’s everywhere—his senses shift, tilt—and he’s—
Your body is not a body, except you feel all of it, all at once. The footsteps in Charles’s office a steady thrum, pacing an even rhythm that fades into a metronomic background tone—tap tap tap tap—and elsewhere, the great bellows of the emergency generators heave energy into the building’s gulping maw, a rush of sensation, like a cold flood in your veins, if it felt like you had any veins at all. You have no lungs, so there is no breath, but you draw yourself together nonetheless. Charles is still pacing, like the marker of time that would be a heartbeat. You shudder, and then you are Hayden again, and Hayden stands quiet in the middle of the room, alone in his own body.
“Sorry,” Horatio says. “I’m trying to run maintenance. I don’t know what that was.”
Hayden taps his temple. “Neuromap.”
“I… didn’t know that could happen.”
There’s a shocking loneliness to being stuck inside himself. Hayden wraps his arms around his torso, briefly embodied properly, thinking only of his own senses, what it’s like to stand here, the sore burn of his chest when he breathes, nothing else. “Me neither,” he says quietly.
“I’ll… try to control it.”
“You sound more shaken up than me.”
A quiet huff, inside Hayden’s head this time. Maybe I am.
Hayden wants to smile, and then he hates himself for even having the impulse. It’s not so hard, he thinks towards Horatio, having someone else in your mind.
You don’t think it’s strange? Too revealing?
I think it’s comforting, to not be alone.
Quiet. Hayden thinks, briefly, that he sees the enormity of Horatio—all of him, the thinking parts, the parts keeping Elsinore alive—hovering against his own mind, a behemoth of information brushing up against his meagre existence. Then, the pressure eases.
The lights flicker again, and Hayden can imagine the frustration that comes with it, Horatio’s circuits fritzing like his own synapses sparking in emotion. “I can’t access those rooms,” Horatio says aloud. “It’s like they don’t even exist.”
Maybe he’s admitting something, his own limitations. Hayden lets his head fall back, condensation mingling in his hair over the chilled glass, and hates his father for forcing him to come back to reality. “Fuck him,” he mumbles.
“You don’t mean that.”
Some twitching thing shifts under Hayden’s skin, buried deep in the dermis, an emotion that can’t be named unless he rips it out. “Fuck him,” he enunciates, “but fuck me, I’m going to do it, Horatio.”
“Do what?” Horatio asks, but the edge in his voice tells Hayden he already knows.
“I need to be sure about who killed him,” Hayden says.
“Yes,” says Horatio, “and then?”
In the answering quiet, Horatio sighs, the sound like air hissing through the vents. Hayden chews on the inside of his cheek and looks upward again, comforted by the white noise. Wishes he could think the thought only and have it be understood, but he wants to give this his voice. It’s what a decision like this deserves. Dedication, full-hearted, full-blooded. His knees unlock, and he lets the wall cradle him as he looks towards the darkened console screen. Return the favour, his father said, and Hayden can hear it now in his soft-spoken voice, echoing in his head.
Kill, he’d meant.
Such a small word. It sounds easy.
“I need to design a test,” he says, instead of voicing it plain. Doesn’t know who’s listening, even now. “I want to know how Charles’ll react to my father’s voice.” The words come out easily, too. His father’s gurgle of his name hangs in the air. “Can you set up a voice emulator?”
“Of Dr Lichfield?”
“Yeah.”
“Of course.”
“Thank you,” Hayden whispers.
“Please don’t thank me,” Horatio says.
“Okay,” Hayden agrees. “Okay. I’ll just—” He jerks his head over his shoulder, knowing his time here is up. He can’t afford to linger. Anyone looking at the security cameras could see. All he can hope for is that his fellow prisoners in Elsinore are good enough to give him some sense of privacy, here, with his father’s corpse.
He starts to pile the instruments on the metal table for something to do, ready to toss in the trash, but his hand hits the suture kit, and he remembers that he still has the data card resting in his pocket. Regardless of what he has to do to find the murderer, Hayden has one priority: keep the data safe.
And he can think of only one place to hide it that no one would dare look.
He glances at his father’s body and clenches his jaw tight enough to hear the teeth creak.
“Horatio,” he says. “I need a few more moments.”
“To do what?”
“Keep it safe,” Hayden says, like a mantra. Keep it safe. Keep it away from prying hands. He pulls the lapel of his father’s lab coat back. Dragging down the shirt collar exposes a harsh mosaic of bruises, stippled against the ribs and blotching across his sternum.
He picks up the scalpel.
Excerpted from The Death I Gave Him, copyright © 2023 by Em X. Liu.
