Same old desk. Same old dusty, half-broken tech. We were back in the Lieutenant’s office again. We might’ve gotten away with working on a personal project, but we still had to report our results. The ugly, ugly truth that pulled everything into motion and the poor souls who got stuck in it somewhere along the way were casualties in the beast of this city.

  Just like before with my father’s funeral and the countless cases we’d worked on before, life just kept on churning. Today we saved a girl and brought a pair of abusers to justice. Tomorrow there would be another and another and another. In reality, there could have been hundreds surviving in similar homes we would never get to.

  At the end of the day, all we could do was save the ones we could and present it all in data. Pretty little charts and bullet points spelled out entire lives and lined up new futures for all those involved. We were slicing up a young girl’s life and setting it out on a table for display. We were negotiating what she would get and what her parents would have to pay for. It felt far too neat and tidy for something so devastating. It always did.

  Lately, the clinical nature of my work had been getting harder for me, but the Lieutenant was never phased. She was as stoic and stately as ever. An ideal candidate for her role. It was why she lasted so long, working long after the age of retirement. I used to look up to her. Now, I didn’t know what to think, but I was getting sick of the way she treated people. We weren’t numbers on a spreadsheet.

  “We haven’t seen you around lately,” I said.

  “Did something come up?” Gabe asked.

  “Budget cuts,” she said, pushing up the glasses on the bridge of her nose. “I can’t be everywhere at once.”

  More budget cuts, huh? So much for my yearly bonus. What was there even left to gut at this point? Our department was a liminal space. The long off-white halls stretched on and on without a soul in sight. Long ago were the days when this place felt like it was really going somewhere. Back when my father used to work here, the towering precinct was inspirational instead of some uncanny place where people are supposed to be. Now the size only highlighted how empty and understaffed it was.

  “What’s going to happen to Cassie?” I asked.

  “Don’t ask, Walker. It’s better not to know,” she said.

  The only reason not to know was to keep my distance. I was supposed to be professional, emotionless, and a perfect little robot for a perfect little machine. A problem with that was brewing. I was sick of being told not to get attached. I was human. Flesh and blood. God forgive me if I feel and act like one too.

  “That’s not going to cut it anymore,” I said. “I want to know.”

  “Focus on what you have to do,” she said. “Anything else doesn’t concern you.”

  “Like hell it doesn’t,” I said.

  Gabe and Ethan bristled at that too. We all cared. The last two weeks were dedicated to her. It wasn’t just about doing Noah a favor or getting to the answer. The satisfaction of holding the truth in our hands paled in comparison to the meaningfulness of saving a life. What good would it do to find and save the girl if we didn’t get to know if she’d make it out the other side? The only one in this room who didn’t care if this girl lived or died was Lieutenant Blackwood.

  “Need I remind you, Walker, you don’t get paid to care,” she said. “Don’t forget what you’re here for.”

  “I’m sick of pretending I don’t care. Tell me what I want to know,” I said.

  “Your disposition grows worse every day,” she sighed. “But if you need to know, someone has offered to adopt both the girls. Does that satisfy you?”

  “It does,” I said.

  For once I actually got a straight answer.

  “I never should have let you take this case,” she said. “It was a waste of resources, and now you’ve gotten sentimental.”

  So much for savoring my victory. I should have known that good things never come easy.

  “Was it worth it?” she asked. “All that money and manpower for just one girl?”

  “Every penny,” I said. “I’d do it again.”

  There was no hesitation. No reluctance. No gray areas. I knew this deep down in my soul.

  “Fool,” she said. “Don’t waste time on unnecessary things. You need to be realistic.”

  “Sometimes it pays to be irrational,” I said.

  She would have given me a mouthful, but Ethan chimed in.

  “We aren’t machines built for efficiency, Lieutenant,” he said. “I should know. They are my specialty.”

  “So they are,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “I’ll leave her in your hands then.”

  I had some things to say about that, but I wasn’t willing to throw my job away. At least, not yet. Sometimes I had a mind to tell her what I really thought, toss my badge on the table, and walk out that door. For now, I’d settle on leaving it at that.

  We left those doors behind, and they slammed shut behind us. The cold, hard click of the lock fell back into place. That was my cue because there was something I was itching to do.

  “I need to get back in the lab,” I said. “The android. I need to see it again.”

  He scrunched his brows together like he had a feeling I was spiraling. I needed a hint. I needed to know why I still couldn’t put this case away and file it as solved in my head. The pieces were there, but the positioning and context were missing. They were flipped left side up, right side down, and floating meaninglessly in space.

  “Are you alright?” Ethan asked.

  “No, I’m not,” I said. “That’s why I need to see it again.”

  They gave each other a look and nodded.

  “It’s a good thing you told me now,” he said. “A few more days and we’d have passed it on.”

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  Our job was to find the girl and figure out what happened to her, and we did. Hold your applause. As far as our department was concerned, the case was over. Any remaining loose threads were someone else’s problem. It wasn’t our job to figure out where our mystery friend came from or how she ended up in that junkyard. Unanswered questions were always piling up. Even when we came through, there would always be something left over for someone else to clean up.

  Soon enough, we were back in the lab again. This time we weren’t huddled around his monitors or screens. We made it straight to the back, where the android was still lying on the cold, hard examination table. Due to her inorganic nature, she looked almost alive. She was an almost corpse. Death would not discolor her skin or cause her form to decay. Zenith’s corpse gave me a similar feeling just a few months ago. Time was like Ouroboros biting its own tail — cyclical.

  “What are you looking for?” Ethan asked.

  “Not much left to look at,” Gabe said. “We went over it pretty good.”

  “I’ll know it when I see it,” I said.

  Call it intuition, but I had a feeling that I’d find it. Times like these called for an open mind. I used to hammer through problems without a right or wrong answer, laying down facts and logic as I went. I was an engineer manufacturing my own emotions and building stories around why I had them, but the approach always failed when I didn’t know what I was looking for. Instead, times like this called me to rely on my feelings and feel all the fucked-up shit I pointedly looked away from through distractions and hard work.

  “Want us to guess?” Ethan asked.

  “Why not?” I grumbled. “I’d consult with a magic eight ball at this point.”

  She looked like Sleeping Beauty, but she wasn’t sleeping, and no prince would come. Not this time. Real life wasn’t a fairy tale. There wasn’t always a happy ending. Tragedies weren’t always foreshadowing. Sometimes when things went sideways, that was where they stayed — dirty, ugly, and rotting.

  Ethan and Gabe took places beside me. With the three of us standing there, staring down at a corpse almost human, almost alive, and not quite sleeping, I felt a sense of purpose sweep over me. It was up to us to decide what her death meant. Androids didn’t die the way people did. There was always a chance that their parts could be salvaged and made into another. Depending on your philosophy, that new being could either be a continuation of the same consciousness or a new one entirely.

  “Do you think they really die?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” Ethan murmured. “But is that really what you came here for?”

  I smiled bitterly and looked down at my broken arm. I’d put off repairing it before, but there was no way I could leave it alone now. It was smashed to bits. None of the joints moved anymore. At this point, it was just a heavy, mangled accessory I dragged along with me.

  “Who knows?” I whispered. “Maybe not.”

  “I think you saw something in the kid,” Gabe offered.

  I looked up at him, urging him to go on.

  “Kinda looked like you way back when. Saw a picture once,” he said.

  Suddenly, he looked away. Maybe he was scared of bringing up old wounds. He was considerate to a fault at times. I didn’t talk much about my childhood. Some memories were better left to rot. There was only one time he could have seen a photo of me. It was back on that tiny park bench in front of that pathetic excuse of a duck pond. I remembered it like it was yesterday. That was when he was passed on the photo Ethan gave him because we weren’t brave enough to face the issue head-on ourselves.

  “I don’t know how I missed that,” I muttered.

  “It’s because she doesn’t look that much like you,” Ethan said. “We knew exactly what you looked like. Gabe only has a half memory of a photo he saw once. Squint a bit, and the details start to line up.”

  He had a point. Through a blur, the two of us didn’t look that different, but up close we weren’t anything alike. I knew exactly how I kept my hair, how tall I was, the way I held myself, and the subtle quirks in my smile. She was wrong in so many ways. Her hair didn’t fall right. She didn’t have my very real, childlike awkwardness. Judging by her height, she should have had gaps in her smile from where her adult teeth hadn’t grown in yet. Beyond the scratches and dents, the missing upper half of her face obscured where she should have had my eyes.

  I felt my weight shift as I leaned forward. I braced myself with my hands planted firmly on the table. Long tendrils of messy hair fell from my shoulders and hung around my face. For a moment, my eyes were also obscured in the dark. The answer seemed so obvious once it was staring me in the face.

  “Same broken arm,” I muttered. “But the rest…”

  “The rest is just a machine pretending to be human,” Ethan said.

  “Not any different from anyone else then, is she?” I muttered.

  They didn’t answer, but they didn’t need to. We all knew what I was talking about. This wasn’t the first time I’d brought up feeling like a cog in a machine, and it wouldn’t be the last either.

  “How’s your shoulder?” Ethan whispered.

  “Doing better than my arm,” I said, knocking on it with my knuckles. “Don’t worry. I’ll get it replaced soon enough.”

  I didn’t want to derail the conversation when there were more important things to say. My shoulder was fine. The soreness was gone and my mobility was back, but below my shoulder it wasn’t all me anymore. My body was a collaboration with God and science at this point. I wasn’t going to fight it anymore. We learn to become who we have to be.

  “Did you tell Noah?” I asked.

  “Yeah, he’s relieved the girl is safe,” Ethan said. “He thinks we’re heroes.”

  “Heroes, huh?” I asked. “Sometimes I’m not so sure myself.”

  Weariness washed over me. I never slept as well as I wanted to. At least, I’d started eating better again, and my clothes weren’t as loose as they used to be, but there were still bags under my eyes. Every day I felt more like myself, but every night I was still haunted with dreams of what never was or would be.

  “I’ve had dreams about the android,” I said.

  Ethan looked like he had something to say about not being kept in the loop, but I beat him to it.

  “I didn’t tell Gabe either,” I said.

  I didn’t always tell Ethan everything I told Gabe. Gabe was easy. He didn’t judge or hover the way Ethan did. Ethan was only four years older than me. When we were growing up, it was a pretty big number. These days? It didn’t mean a thing, but part of our dynamic never grew out of the big brother and little sister mold. Part of it was our mother dying young. Part of it was Ethan being a busybody. Who could say what did it more?

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Ethan asked.

  “Mostly, I didn’t want you to worry,” I sighed. “You’d think I was losing my mind.”

  “That bad?” Gabe asked.

  “Depends on your perspective,” I said. “I had one last night, but it was different this time.”

  It was about time I caught them up on the dreams. They kept me tossing and turning late at night, and in the early morning hours, I could have sworn that they were burned into my eyes. I could see the swirling black blooming through the white sludge with every step I took. The fall into the black abyss still made me catch my breath. Deep down into the dark was always that small figure hunched inside a circle of light. She looked at me with eyes she didn’t have and told me a message she never completed.

  “How?” Ethan asked.

  “The girl finally finished her message about the one truth in all the world,” I said.

  I paused.

  “What was it?” Ethan asked.

  “I’m not alone,” I said.

  She always cut off after the first word, but those final two words she uttered last night completely changed the meaning of what she said. I had imagined fear, hopelessness, and danger where her silence left off, but with just two words, it had become a message of hope.

  “No shit,” Gabe grinned. “You’ve got us.”

  “And don’t forget it,” Ethan said.

  “I won’t,” I said.

  That was a promise and this time I was going to keep it. I had people were there for me. With my mother’s disapproval and my father’s busy schedule, attention was a rare commodity in our house. I learned to cope by overachieving and never needing anything. I was a giver. I never wanted to take. The reality of existence is that no one can exist in isolation. Being connected to others means having them care about you. Counter-intuitively, it can be more selfish to withhold yourself from them and go it all alone. No one wants to helplessly stand by and watch you slowly kill yourself.

  The last few months were hard, even by my standards, but the truth was that I’d been soldiering through more than I could handle for quite a long time. Every time I told myself I was fine, but every time I was worn down just a little bit more. It was a death by a thousand cuts. Somewhere along the way, I forgot who I was and the fundamental truth that I was never meant to stand alone. Maybe, in the end, I was the woman with half a face after all.

  The second arc is now complete! You might be wondering, what's next? Don't worry, I have big plans.