The first thing you should know about Freya Elison is that she knows things.

Like how she knew that the teenage girl sitting alone on the other side of the compartment was wearing plastic headphones that didn’t actually connect to any device. Or how the man in the back row with his face stuck in his book was actually watching a soap opera. And the women yelling through her phone at her husband? She wasn’t actually angry at all, but ashamed. She was on her way from her lover.

It wasn’t that she was psychic. If you asked her, she’d tell you that she just had "adept senses" that could differentiate the slightest deviations, enabling her to hear frequencies that normally fell on deaf ears, and notice minute gestures and facial expressions that others were blind to.

That’s how she knew this train, advertised to travel at 60 miles an hour, was actually going 56.8. She stood up and grabbed the shiny silver handlebar by the exit when she had 48 seconds before she arrived at the station, 12 seconds before the train hit the brakes. She had put in ear plugs to dampen the effect of the squeal from the train attempting to halt on the tracks. When the door opened, she was first out, before the shoving masses that would soon follow.

She moved away from the crowds in the dimly lit station that smelled like a combination of spray paint and bleach. She spotted a man, around 30, leaning back against one of the graffitied walls while tinkering away on his mini-pad. One side of his violet hair curved around his eye, concluding at a point on the ridge created by his cheek bone.

He didn’t look up or seem to notice her at all as she came up beside him, so she leaned over his shoulder to see what had his undivided attention on the screen.

"Twelve down is Beowulf," she said.

"I hadn’t gotten that far yet," he said, and then he shoved the device in his back pocket.

Chris Tinney hated puzzles. He did them hoping to prove that he could be every bit as good an investigator as his partner, but when he attempted a more difficult one, it always seemed to prove the opposite. When you worked with a genius every day, it was natural to feel inadequate.

"You got new sunscreen," she said.

"It smells just like my old sunscreen."

They began to walk out of the depot, where the sun was bearing down on the sidewalk at nine in the morning. "No, it doesn’t."

Booths and market tents sprawled along the street they were walking through. The merchants were of the unranked class, never having graduated from Third School to be granted a position in the meritocracy. Essentially, this was the poor man’s business district in the small town of Lions, just forty minutes south of Chris and Freya’s precinct in East City, the capital city of the Great Commonwealth. The Commonwealth was one of five nations among an international coalition of governments that rose from the ashes of a nearly destroyed earth.

"It rained here yesterday," Freya said. She could feel the back of her shirt’s collar starting to stick to her neck. "You’ll need to reapply that sunscreen when we walk back."

"Nope," Chris said, making sure to clearly pronounce the P. "This stuff’s sweat-resistant. Top of the line. Cost me half a day’s pay but I wasn’t going to take chances after what happened with that Sapien last week."

East City, which hugged about ten miles of ocean shoreline, attracted its fair share of Sapien tourists. You could pick them out easily by the oxygen tanks they carried on their backs. One such visitor paid a visit to the hospital after he didn’t wear sunscreen for five days straight. The result was second-degree burns across his shoulders and the tourist in question being the subject of a public service announcement aimed at Sapiens who wished to expand their borders.

"They have hypersensitive skin," Freya said. "It would take you twice as long to get half the effect he did." Actually, Freya calculated that it would take Chris eight consecutive days with three hours of direct sunlight to turn his pale skin to a pinkish color. Of course, that was assuming average variables such as the weather or the color of shirt he was wearing.

She continued. "Back in their day, Sapiens never had to worry much about getting sunburnt in the middle of winter."

"What would happen if they visited in the middle of summer?" Chris asked. "Would they turn into to, like, one of those superhuman heroes they used to make those movies about?"

"They’d probably die of heat stroke before that happened."

"But what if they didn’t?"

She laughed. "And what if candy fell out of the sky?"

He shrugged with his hands in his pockets. "Well, what if candy fell out of the sky?"

She took a second to think about that. "I’d imagine it would be painful."

"Ah. An alternate dystopian universe where instead of water, it rains lollipops." She had to admit, the idea was so ridiculous that it intrigued her. "I’ll have to tell that one to my date tonight. He’s an artist."

"An artist, huh?" she said. "What happened to the woman who was chosen for the Medical Academy?"

"Apparently that Academy intentionally leaves students no time for -- what’s that thing you call it? A personal life?"

"Well then she’d fit right in with you, wouldn’t she?" She gave him a playful elbow to the abdomen and he doubled over, pretending to be in pain.

Chris and Freya’s partnership shouldn’t have worked like it did. His rejection of social expectations clashed with her desire for truth. He asked questions; she sought answers. Somehow before she met him, he’d reversed his conditioning. She found it difficult to figure him out, which was odd for her; she had no data to draw from. It wasn’t just his lack of gender preference in a mate that made him unique to her (after all, she’d known more than a few non-heterosexuals). His view on gender itself defied convention. "I’m a man, but not completely. Maybe around eighty percent, on an average day," he’d told her on their first day together.

After making it down the merchant’s street, the two of them approached a black-painted gate of steel that didn’t seem like it belonged in this neighborhood -- a gate that opened to a path leading up to a colossal ivory building with a large balcony from which one could view the entire town. Stone-faced security guards surrounded the outside of the fence that spread in a circle around the grounds of the museum, each officer no more than ten yards away from the next. Freya and Chris handed their identifications to the man who stood at the entrance.

"You guys here about the theft?" he asked.

"Yes, sir," Chris said. "Though we’re a little baffled how an intruder made it past the fence with all this security."

Freya stepped up. "Actually, he’s baffled," she said. "I’m more concerned."

"No one broke in," the guard said. His voice was a beautiful baritone -- Freya wondered why the man wasn’t an opera singer. "Whoever stole the artifacts paid to come through the front gate like all the other patrons, and left through the back."

The gate swung open and the two left the officer behind to make their way up the path to the Museum of Sapien History and Art. It stood atop the city like a light tower. The walk up was more like a hike, with what seemed like endless flights of steep and rocky stairs, most without a railing. 

"I’m beginning to understand how the Sapiens feel," Chris said, his breathing labored.

Walking was the only way to get to the building. There was no parking lot; no need. Few people in the Commonwealth were authorized to have cars and those that were had limits on how much they could drive. There were cars inside the museum, of course, but those hadn’t been operational in at least 400 years.

"Did they give you the full list of what was stolen?" Freya asked as they finally reached the end of the trek. Cool air rushed in and a small breeze blew her hair back as they entered the lobby.

Chris pulled his mini-tab out of his pocket. "Something called an--iPhone? A vinyl record, which is like a large thin disk that plays music. A bible, of course."

As Chris continued looking through the list, a thin blonde woman, with hair pulled back so tightly it must have given her a headache, marched through the foyer toward them, her heels slapping against the golden marble. She didn’t need those heels to tower over both of them, but the intended effect was multiplied. "Thank you for coming, Officers. I attempted to reach you but your department said you’d already left and I didn’t have a travel number. We have already caught the culprit, I’m afraid."

"Really?" Chris said.

The woman, who had the words "Katelyn Garden: Museum Manager" emblazoned across the bronze tag pinned to her suit jacket, nodded.  "It was two twelve-year-old boys on a dare from their friends. One managed to crawl beneath our laser alarm systems while the other, a genius in technology I’m sure, was able to override the security feed from our cameras."

"Well," Chris said, "do you have the thieves in your custody?"

"We do," Katelyn said. "But we won’t be pressing charges. The items have been returned and the boys have agreed to do some lawn work for us in restitution."

The woman was lying, Freya knew. She was talking too fast, and despite how confident she sounded (and appeared), she struggled to keep eye contact with either of them. She could have confronted her then, but Freya also knew that she was the type to double down on her story. Without evidence, they had no way of making her tell them what was really going on.

Instead, Freya gave the manager the most cheerful smile she could muster. "Thank you," she said, extending her hand. Katelyn Garden took it and offered a firm shake. "You know, I think I’d like to stay a while and look around. I haven’t been here since I was little and it’s all so fascinating."

"Of course," the woman said. "Stay as long as you’d like. No charge, since you came all the way out here for a wasted trip."

"Thank you, Ms. Garden."

Freya and Chris turned away, and they heard the echo of Katelyn Garden’s heels as she headed back to her office.

Freya leaned in toward him. Her voice was soft. "Before we leave, I need you to get the names of those two boys."

"Okay. Why?"

"Because," Freya said, looking attentively over his shoulder at the hallway Ms. Garden had escaped into, "I think they know something we should know."