Please see our Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.

Kess stepped through the scrolling yellow police holo, rubbing her bagged eyes. The latest victim was male, mid-forties, sprawled in a small dark pool of blood turning to slush in the winter air. His belly had been rent open with short, savage strokes.

“Another inverse stabbing,” Barbier said, holding up a red-smeared evidence bag. “What a lucky cop you are, Kess. First month on the job and you get a serial killer with bioprinting expertise and a flair for brutality.”

The murder weapon was still wriggling, a razor-sharp corkscrew of bone animated by muscular cilia. Judging by the size, it had been growing inside the victim’s abdomen for at least a week before it slashed him apart from the inside out.

“Grown from the vic’s own DNA again?” Kess asked.

Barbier nodded. “No immune response that way,” he said. “And no gene sequences we can trace to a seller. Total custom job.” He scratched his nose with his thumbnail. “With this kind of know-how, the perp could easily have picked a heart-attack, or kidney failure, or any of a hundred subtler ways to kill someone. Instead, they went over-the-top theatrical.”

“Messy usually means personal.” Kess stared down at the contorted purple face. “Does he have any connections to the other two victims?”

Barbier snorted. “Agonizing death. That’s about it.”

• • • •

The melatonin and meditation apps weren’t doing shit, so after two sleepless hours on the bare mattress, Kess decided to get up and work. She slid on her ocs and the faces of the three vics bloomed into the digital air: Declan Shields, Alex Hogger, and now Gregory Souza.

All male, all local, but moving in vastly different social circles. Shields had been a retired doctor, Hogger an under-employed bot mechanic, and Souza a chartered accountant. The perp had chosen all three of them for evisceration, but why?

The station AI was scraping data from the vics’ social media, searching for links, movement patterns, a possible place all three of them had left their DNA for convenient harvesting. No breakthroughs so far, but when Kess pulled up the summary she did notice something.

Only Hogger had been noisy about his politics, but all three men were a deep shade of red. Pulse thudding, Kess re-opened the scan of the murder weapon, studying not the viciously sharp bone but the knot of muscle that propelled it.

It looked almost like a tiny fist.

• • • •

Professor Ariana Sonya was waiting when Kess showed up; Kess saw her in the sleet-streaked window. The house let Kess inside and directed her up the stairs to the study. From up close, the professor was gaunt, sickly, swallowed by a mustard yellow sweater and dwarfed by the bioprinter beside her.

“Morning,” she said.

“Morning,” Kess said.

The professor’s bloodshot eyes were full of old anguish, calcified anguish, the kind that kept Kess up most nights. She wondered how long it had taken Sonya to select the vics: Gregory Souza, who’d anonymously donated to abortion clinic protests and blockades all his life, Alex Hogger, who’d attended them and also impregnated two separate underage girls in his younger days, Declan Shields, who’d refused to operate on a pregnant woman even as sepsis set in, losing his license but gaining a fortune in political following.

Maybe it was as simple as the fact they all liked the same massage parlor, where plenty of DNA got left behind and drinks were easy to spike with tiny spore-like embryo pouches. Kess knew she should have put it together a lot sooner. She blamed sleep deprivation.

“I can drive you to the station to make your confession,” she said. “Someone will come to get the bioprinter. Sweep the house.”

Sonya glanced over at the softly whispering machine, its carbon filaments and incubation pods. “They were some of my best work, those knives,” she said. “Puts tweaking bone density and eye color to shame.”

Kess hesitated. “You’re under no obligation to talk to me until we get to the station,” she said. “But I had a friend. She died in a car accident last year.” She had to force the words out. “Driving cross-country, through the night, to get over the right state line.”

“Everybody knows somebody.” Sonya’s voice was exhausted. “Let’s go, detective. We both have a long day ahead of us.”

Kess followed her perp past the bioprinter, down the stairs, toward the waiting car. The sky was gray as scattered ash.