The edge of the table pressed into my back. I was too geared up to take a seat. Once again, we were huddled around the small open space in Ethan’s lab. With the small, single window in the corner casting warm rays of light across the room, you would have almost thought it was cozy. The cramped square of open space was a sharp contrast to the endless unoccupied desks back in our own office.

  Lately, we’d taken to hunkering down here in favor of the loneliness and isolation of an overly large room. If you whistled in there, it would have echoed. The clutter of tech and wires around us was a comfort hard to explain. Ethan was meticulous, but he was also a pack rat. There was a litany of old devices and machines scattered around the lab. He figured he’d get around to them eventually. My guess was that he never would. Some of it was gathering dust rather indignantly. They were important once, long ago.

  “What are we waiting for?” I asked, clicking my fingernail on the table behind me.

  Ethan looked over at me with an exasperated expression.

  “You, mostly,” he said. “Are you sure you’re ready to get back at it?”

  “I was discharged, wasn’t I?” I asked, turning to Gabe to back me up.

  “Couldn’t keep her down even if you ran her over with a semi-truck,” he grinned.

  “See? So I’m fine. Can we get on with it?” I asked.

  Thinking better of it, I paused and apologized with a sigh.

  “God, I shouldn’t be giving you a hard time for worrying about me,” I sighed.

  Those two gave me a look that said it was about time I admitted it and grinned at each other. I wasn’t sure if I should let it slide, but before I could give them a hard time about it, Ethan got back to work. He flipped on a video from the phone Cassie had on her. It was noisy and low resolution, uncharacteristic of modern cameras, but the Sect of Abstantia played by their own rules, always decades behind the rest of society.

  “I didn’t know they still made cameras like that,” I said.

  “Keeps you on your toes,” Gabe said. “Never know what you don’t know.”

  Didn’t I know it? Every time we answered one question, ten more took its place. It was like playing whack-a-mole except the arcade machine got bigger and meaner every time you turned your back. All you could really do was be grateful for the answers you got and keep your eyes peeled for all the ones you didn’t have yet.

  Cassie hadn’t just gone missing; she vanished. It was purposeful. Sad. Lonely. No one wanted to go out like that without a good reason. Father Lewis disappeared from the world, trying to fade into the past and bury his grief over his mother. She didn’t want to die. She didn’t want to cease to exist either. That was what my gut was telling me. She wanted her pain to fade away. If there was shame in it, then there was something else she wanted to disappear with her. She wanted something to return to dust and ashes with her. And what was it? That was what we were here to find out.

  That was our girl, front and center, peering into the camera. The reflection of the lens in her eyes was the only thing clearly defined as the rest of her bobbed in and out of focus. While I was busy lying in a hospital bed, Ethan had dug through her phone and picked out the highlights for us to see. With the advancements in medical treatment, my left arm and my head were already good to go. My right arm would cost more to repair than replace. That shopping trip would have to wait.

  “How many?” I asked.

  “Just three,” he said.

  I would have bugged him on it, but the way he said it stopped me. There was a definitive edge to his voice. He never spoke like that if there was even a shadow of a doubt. Instead, I swallowed those thoughts and tried not to be a cynic.

  Only hints of her were visible in the darkness. The thin line of light creeping in near the floor did little to illuminate that space. Something toppled over as she moved back from the camera. A shirt caught on her head, and the clothes hanger clattered to the floor behind her. It was some sort of storage space, likely a closet.

  With one mystery down, there was another to go. She was not the only source of movement in this small space. Someone or something else was whirring faintly behind her. The figure’s small, white fingers thrummed mechanically like it was tapping against the air.

  “Is that our android?” I asked.

  “I’ve cross-referenced it already,” Ethan said. “That’s her.”

  Muffled voices leaked through the thin walls. A man and a woman were screaming. Their words were unintelligible, but their tone was worth a thousand words. It was an indignant rage, a righteous fury, and an unmistakable sense of disbelief. Their footsteps stomped closer, stopping right outside her hiding place. She desperately ducked under a pile of clothes like that would save her.

  “Can you believe that girl? And after all we’ve done for her,” the woman hissed, pulling open the door. “Get out here and answer your father!”

  Her hands groped futilely at the floor as she was dragged out by her feet. The camera’s view was obscured by her hand, but her screams weren’t.

  “Please,” she begged. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Please? Please! Can you hear yourself?” her mother said. “You should be begging for our forgiveness instead of making excuses.”

  More muffled screams and strangled sobs.

  “You brought this thing into this house!” her father shouted between blunt blows. “You run off messing around with things you have no right to mess with.”

  “I’m sorry,” she sobbed.

  “Sorry’s not going to cut it anymore,” he said.

  Cassie’s breath grew short and frantic. She scratched at the hands around her throat. Her phone clattered to the floor as she fought for breath. Suddenly, they struck the ground with a thud. The frantic screaming wasn’t hers anymore.

  “What did you do?” her mother shrieked. “You’ve killed him!”

  The camera shook as she grabbed it with her trembling hands. The pool of blood spread out on their picturesque wooden floor. The synthetic figure straightened up from her slumped posture. Red-hot blood dripped down from her hands, dripping idly on the floor. Her indignant mother was shocked into silence and unable to move. There was no further struggle, only running and desperate breaths, until the video cut out.

  “So she ran,” I said. “Couldn’t have been easy.”

  “That was a lot of blood,” Ethan said. “There’s a chance she thought he died.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Gabe said. “I wouldn’t have stuck around to find out either.”

  High tension and heated opinions often came to blows. If it wasn’t her father, then her mother would do. If it wasn’t her mother either, the android was more than willing to spill some blood. The more people you added to an equation, the more opportunity for fallout there was. Everyone in that room had their own motivations. Her parents were protecting the sanctity of their faith and the goodness of their image. The android was protecting her, its savior. Cassie, on the other hand, was just trying to survive.

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  This must have been the project she was talking about with Father Lewis, her mysterious friend she found battered and thrown away. Another red thread of fate twisting those two together. After all, there was more than one way to be broken, lost, and discarded.

  “When we stopped by to chat with her family, her father was nursing his side,” I said.

  “Yeah, the bastard was trying to clear a stump when he could barely stand,” Gabe said.

  “It would also explain why even her mother wanted you out of there,” Ethan said.

  My memories filled in where the video cut off. Her father was all but threatening us to get off his property. Her mother accused us of sticking our noses where they didn’t belong. Her little sister trailed behind us with wide, fearful eyes just to ask us if we’d bring her big sister back home. Once again, I was getting too wrapped up in the case. I cared too much. Too hard. Too fast. I burned bright, but you know what they say about candles that burn twice as bright: they burn half as long.

  As much as I loved to ruminate over the past and pull threads between unrelated strings until they made sense to me, finding patterns where there were none, there would be all the time to do that later. I swallowed back the harsh taste of grief as Ethan hovered over the controls. Gabe crossed his arms across his chest; even he was starting to feel the pressure.

  “Ready?” Ethan asked.

  “As ready as I’ll ever be,” I said.

  The display blinked and shifted. It was a dark place again, but this one was not unwelcoming. There was no sense of threat, just an eerie sense of calmness. Organic stone-like shapes reflected the pale moonlight around her. Cassie sat centered on the screen curled up in a ball of blankets, both cleaner and healthier than when we found her. Healing bruises wrapped around her neck. This must have been shortly after she ran away.

  “Are you listening?” she asked.

  The android turned to look at her. The glint from inside of its open skull gave the illusion of silver eyes watching her. Pareidolia at its finest. Humans saw faces in everything that even loosely fit the template of two eyes and a mouth. Sometimes, the mouth wasn’t even necessary. We looked at two dots on a page and felt understood.

  “Do you think I’m going to hell?” she whispered.

  The android tilted its head quizzically. If I didn’t know better, I would have said it was thinking. Maybe it was. The android was blind, but it could still see and hear in its own way. Thermoimaging would have lit up the shape of her body. The audio data we found on its hard drive was unintelligible, but in that brief moment of clarity before its memory degraded into meaningless noise, what did it hear?

  “I think I might. Would you come with me?” she asked. “If you had a soul, you could.”

  The android didn’t answer her. There was no simple answer that could fill in all the holes in that loaded question. It couldn’t speak. It couldn’t make everything make sense again. We knew from its broken body we lugged back to our lab. The speakers in its throat were torn out by force. Anything it had to say started and died in its throat. People often tried to silence those inconvenient for them.

  “Hang on,” Ethan said. “This is the last one.”

  The feed jumped forward again. Same room. Different day. Cassie looked more like how I remembered her. When we found her, she was thinner, paler, and more worn down. Her matted curly brown hair nearly covered her eyes. It must have been a while since she bathed. There wasn’t exactly a bathroom there to freshen up in.

  Back and forth. Back and forth she rocked with her hands clutched tightly around her knees.

  “She does this for hours,” he said. “We don’t need to watch all of it. Just wanted to give you an idea of what we’re dealing with.”

  Ethan pressed fast forward. Her rocking looked closer to vibrating now. Something tumbled softly out of frame as Ethan eased it back to real time. The android returned to her, and Cassie’s eyes lit up like Christmas Day.

  “You came back,” she said. “What did you get?”

  The girl was positively beaming, happily asking questions that would never be answered. It was like playing house with life-size dolls. You made both your question and your answer to pretend you were having a conversation. When both basic kindness and decency were rare commodities, you learned to manufacture reciprocity. As far as she knew, all the android had done was bring her a bit of food and water and occasionally sit by her side. She didn’t know of its escapades following her classmates around the city, reaching out in a way she had been too fearful to do herself. Was this all she thought she was worth?

  “White Rabbit, you’re the only one who understands me,” she whispered.

  “Did you hear that?” I asked. “What did she call her? Rewind it.”

  Ethan played back the video, looping it on that name. White Rabbit.

  “Sound familiar?” Gabe asked.

  I pulled out the small toy from my pocket. It held more meaning for me than for them. In fact, I suspected they had forgotten about it. Back when I picked it up, I wondered if they were just humoring me, but now it felt prophetic. It wasn’t biblical or otherworldly, just another one of those small, strange, and tiny coincidences in our lives that lined up just right to put people some time, some place in our path.

  “The android’s radiation signal was on this. Do you think it’s hers?” I asked.

  It was a sad toy. A broken thing. A forgotten thing. Things like this didn’t get second chances or do-overs. They lost the right to be loved, but Cassie might have loved it anyway. She might have loved it despite its brokenness. And if that was the case, it might belong back in her hands to love again like she never was.

  I was itching to move, but the video wasn’t over. It made me wonder why she was filming at all. Was this her way of proving she was here? Did some small part of her hope that if she left behind her story someday, someone would realize it wasn’t her fault? Or was it to convince herself? Maybe she was trying to tell herself she wasn’t alone because somewhere out there, an invisible audience was watching her, and as long as she was perceived, she existed.

  “You only come out at night,” she said.

  She leaned over to peer at White Rabbit’s face, but the android turned away from her.

  “Is it because of your face?” she whispered.

  A faint nod.

  “I don’t like my face either,” Cassie said. “I don’t look in mirrors, but down here no one has to see us. We don’t have to see ourselves either.”

  She hummed quietly to herself. The android turned back to her, cocking its head quizzically.

  “I’m happy people don’t have to look at me anymore, but sometimes I still wish they would. Isn’t that strange?” she asked with a bittersweet smile contrasting the sadness in her eyes.

  It highlighted how little she was used to people sticking around. When you’re starved for love, puddles start looking like an oasis and breadcrumbs like a feast. Even well-meaning parents could leave you constantly yearning for attunement and authenticity. Time was money, and my parents didn’t have enough to give me. When things got hard, I dealt with them on my own. She was probably always scrambling for scraps and trying to raise herself without either the knowledge or experience to get it right.

  The android didn’t speak. It never did. Its voice wasstolen, and whatever was left of its mind was a shell of what it used to be. There was only a hint of conscious thought stored away in there trying to make sense of a young girl’s anxious rambling. It was a game of telephone. Every time her words passed through her lips and made it into White Rabbit’s mind,they were a bit further away and distorted. Even inside her head, Cassie was playing telephone with herself because she smiled and said that she was happy when deep down she was dying inside.

  “I’m really glad I found you,” she said. “Because… if you’re good enough, maybe I can be too.”

  They sat in silence as she ate. Eventually, the video cut out. It felt too intimate. We were intruders.Seeing into someone’s personal moments, the deep, dark places where they bared their souls, made it far too easy to get overly attached. It was my job to look where I wasn’t meant to be. Somehow, it was getting harder to keep my distance. Maybe I wanted to mean something to these people too. Perhaps the quiet satisfaction of knowing I helped good people and put bad actors behind bars wasn’t enough for me anymore.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “That’s it,” Ethan echoed back. “I promised you three videos, didn’t I?”

  “And you delivered,” I said, crossing my arms across my chest.

  I needed time to think. I needed time to think. There was a whirlwind of thoughts swimming in my head, and I thought I could've drowned until Gabe broke the silence.

  “Didn’t want to die. Didn’t want to hurt anybody either,” he said. “Kid’s just lost.”

  She didn’t want to die. No, she wanted to be seen and accepted in all her raw and ugly truth. When the people around her failed to give her what she needed, she turned to a machine. If flesh and blood couldn’t love her the way she was meant to be loved, then she would find another way to fill that aching hole in her chest. With its cold hard steel, it was still more human than the people she called her family. So who was the real villain here?

  “She projected her hopes and dreams onto that android,” I said.

  “Couldn’t judge her. Couldn’t judge anyone. No one’s safer than that,” Gabe said.

  Everyone loved a guarantee. We molded dogs to become our ideal companions. Their wild ancestors were wolves. When dogs became domesticated, their builds became smaller. Their aggression dropped. They adapted to love without hesitation. The very structure of their faces changed to make expressions that mirrored our own. Once humans started making robotic companions, they did the same with them. We made ourselves guaranteed love so that we could always be safe.

  “She wanted someone to love her enough to stick around even when they didn’t have to,” I said.

  Now it was our turn to sit in silence. All of us needed time to process and make the pieces fit. Ethan had seen this footage before, but it was new to me and Gabe. Suddenly, our line rang. It was the hospital. Cassie had asked to speak to us, and she had something important to say.