Two deaths and a side trip later only pointed us more towards Mercy, but knowing who your target was didn’t tell you how to find them or what they were after. The way in which we knew her was also nebulous at best. It was safe to say that Mercy wasn’t her real name. All of Zenith’s followers gained a new moniker in exchange for their devotion. Her real identity was still a secret. She was a ghost, and our city was full of those already.

  A snapping sound pulled me back to reality. Black ink ran down my hand, leaving behind an empty plastic shell. I released the remnants of my pen, and it clattered into the waste bin unceremoniously. That was the third one this week.

  “I need to get this arm recalibrated,” I sighed. “It’s like I don’t know my own strength anymore.”

  “You could get new skin too while you’re at it,” Ethan said.

  “I could,” I muttered.

  Deep inside, I knew I wouldn’t, at least not yet. It was hard to explain. In some ways it was resignation, but in others it was the refusal to hide or pretend anymore. Somewhere in the middle was probably the truth, and I’d find my way there sooner or later, but right now we had bigger fish to fry. Mercy was still loose somewhere in this city, taunting us with cryptic messages and dead bodies scattered along the way.

  “She’s not running,” I said. “She’s practically begging us to find her.”

  “Think she wants to get caught?” Gabe asked.

  “Who knows?” I groaned, rubbing my head. “Any luck, Ethan?”

  “Not yet, we don’t have much on her appearance or identity. For all we know, she could still be updating as we speak,” Ethan said.

  The trade of bodies in this city was no secret. People swapped out their limbs for strength, their senses for acuity, and their faces for beauty. Augmentations in other areas weren’t off the table either. For the right price, you could be walking out of a clinic with all new curves, utterly unrecognizable to anyone who ever loved you. Oh, but wouldn’t the boys be happy?

  Every substitution left less reason to hold onto what was already there. Bit by bit, Mercy became less of who she was and more of an abstraction. Hypothetically, she could have already been finished augmenting herself by the last time we saw her in that underground station screaming and growling like an animal, but she didn’t give me the impression of someone who only went halfway. Just like the Ship of Theseus, she would stretch the idea of how far you could push the original and still call it the same thing.

  “Great, more good news,” I sighed. “Is keeping tabs on clinics an option?”

  “We’re spread too thin to hunt down every underground clinic,” Ethan said. “We need a different angle.”

  Everyone and their mother dabbled in something these days. Most of them kept to less invasive procedures, but many clinics lied about what they really offered, and it wasn’t that hard to find someone willing to do something for the right price. We’d need to stay out of aimless speculation, or we’d be stuck spinning our wheels in the air, going nowhere fast.

  “Let’s shelve this for now,” I said. “What about the autopsies?”

  “Now, that I can do,” Ethan said.

  Ethan’s hands flew over the keys, sending the projector in the center of the lab whirring to life. Our dead men, Renner and Miller, were rendered in lines of light. Glowing life-sized bodies slowly rotated in space before us. Renner hung upside down from the driver’s seat just as we found him, but the car itself was made transparent, leaving our line of sight clear. Miller, on the other hand, lay peacefully on his side, save for his bindings and caved-in face, almost sleeping and unquestionably dead.

  “Let’s start with Renner,” Ethan said. “Notice anything?”

  Blood pooled beneath him, flowing down the sides of his arms and trickling off his fingertips. Much like Miller, his hands were also bound, but unlike Miller, his face was intact. However, they were originally obscured from view by the airbags. Considering airbags were designed to deploy on impact, it didn’t seem meaningful at the time. If anything, I suspected that our killer could have found inspiration from him rather than the other way around. She was making it up as she went and pretending it was a plan.

  “That’s a lot of blood for a dead guy. Poor bastard was alive for a while,” Gabe said.

  “Look at his wrists,” Ethan said.

  He cut away the rest of the body and enhanced Millar’s hands. The skin along his wrists was unblemished. There were no signs of a struggle. No one would just lie there and patiently die of their own volition. The only reason he wouldn’t have fought his bindings was if he was either unconscious or dead.

  “Ok, so before or after?” I asked.

  “Before his death, but after the collision,” Ethan said. “He died within an hour of impact.”

  “Bled out pretty fast,” Gabe said. “No way they just stumbled in on him like that.”

  This time Ethan highlighted the gash along his neck. It was cut too cleanly to be caused by shrapnel. That kind of precision came with intention. The pieces were starting to come together now. This wasn’t a case of someone repurposing an unfortunate event. We were looking at somebody’s pet project.

  “Okay, so she gets him to crash because she needs to know when to show up, but when she does, she finds he’s not dead,” I said.

  “She finished the job,” Gabe muttered, rubbing the stubble along his chin. “Tied up his hands. Left him to hang there.”

  “That’s my take on it too,” Ethan said. “Somebody changed his route days ago.”

  “I think that brings up more questions than it answers,” I sighed. “What about Miller?”

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Ethan enhanced his wrists in the same way. I sighed in relief he didn’t do the same with the face. I didn’t need to see that again. Once was more than enough.

  “Same pattern, no signs of struggle and death from blunt force trauma,” Ethan said. “The main difference is–“

  I cut him off.

  “The face,” I said, gritting my teeth.

  Maybe I should have taken Gabe up on his offer not to look. My imagination was sharper than most. I didn’t leave things behind when I took my eyes off of them. They lived on in my mind days, weeks, or months after. In the worst cases, I could still see them years after the fact, like they had happened yesterday. I prayed this wouldn’t be one of them.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll get them,” Gabe said, clapping me on the back.

  Gabe always had that same carefree aura that made you feel like everything would work out somehow. A nagging feeling came up in my chest. The holographic models differed in one key way from the ones made of flesh and blood. It was how they could always snap right back into place while the other had to force a smile. We confronted pain, loss, and suffering every day in the line of duty. How much of his demeanor was a persona for our sake or a shield for himself?

  “I still can’t see what she gets out of this,” I said, biting my lip.

  “No one does something for nothing,” Ethan said. “She put that pamphlet in his hands. It was a message. There’s something she’s after.”

  “She wanted us to check out her old stomping grounds and get to know the place,” Gabe said. “Real comfy. Bet you she was there before.”

  That didn’t sound right to me. There was no affection for the place implied in how she carried out the murder. It was neither kind nor beautiful. The eerie sense of gentleness nestled in with the brutality wasn’t affection. If anything, the murder seemed more impulse paired with rationality. She was telegraphing her innocence. As long as she wasn’t completely harmless then it wasn’t cruel. She was sparing him from something, loneliness maybe.

  “She could have worked there,” I said. “Those augmentations didn’t come cheap, and Zenith wasn’t breathing enough to foot the bill anymore.”

  “That’s an angle I was favoring too,” Ethan said. “But I checked all the current and previous employees, and no one stood out to me. There was also no one named Mercy.”

  “Of course not,” I muttered. “It couldn’t be that easy.”

  Mercy was dying to be taken seriously. She nearly killed me out of disgust because she couldn’t stand being thought of as a joke. I sure as hell wasn’t laughing then, and I wasn’t now either. Even while grappling with her on the ground, I never once thought of her as harmless or pitiful. Chaotic? Sure, but not harmless. The entire event was blurry to me, washed out, whited out, and crossed out with a nice ballpoint pen. Throw in a highlighter to emphasize what was no longer there.

  “I should have gotten a better look at her face,” I murmured. “Even if I couldn’t remember, my Iris would have caught it for me.”

  “Don’t do that, Lana,” Ethan said. “Don’t question yourself. What’s done is done. The only way is forward.”

  I crushed my eyes shut and focused on my breathing. He was right, of course; kicking myself while I was down wasn’t going to do us any favors. I didn’t need a pity party; I needed a lead. Even if I did see her, that version of her might have been too heavily modified to be recognizable anyway.

  “We could check everyone those two frequented,” I said.

  “Their booking logs… Now there’s an idea,” Ethan said, thoughtfully. “I’ll get on it, but it might take a while.”

  “I thought you already went through it,” I said, scrunching my brows together. “How did you narrow it down to Silas and Vera otherwise?”

  “Well, yes and no,” he said. “I did go through their booking histories and pinpoint those two, but it was too fast. There wasn’t much to work with.”

  “You’re thinking someone wiped them?” Gabe asked.

  Ethan nodded once and got back to work.

  “I’m going to keep looking for the missing data,” Ethan said. “If I’m right, the answer is in there somewhere.”

  Finding out her real identity would be a huge breakthrough, but it wouldn’t be enough to know who she was. In all likelihood, she already shed her old life like a caterpillar sheds its cocoon and metamorphosed. Now she was something far stranger and more deadly. She wouldn’t likely be associating with anyone she used to know, living anywhere she used to be, or using the name she was given at birth. Everything down to her body was slowly giving way. She was a woman running from herself, and we needed to catch her before she did more damage.

  The first man had his face obscured. The second man had his face painstakingly removed. Mercy wore a mask. What was a face other than a symbol of perception and identity? We used our eyes to see the world. We used our mouths to scream into it. We screamed to make sure someone knew we were there. We screamed to make sure someone looked our way and saw us, really saw us, right through the distorted mirror of stereotypes and societal biases and down deep into our core. All of it said, “Witness me. Tell me I exist.”

  “She didn’t remove his face to hide his identity,” I said. “This isn’t about evidence. She’s just screaming into the void.”

  “Hiding his face wouldn’t have worked anyway. Everything else around him told us who he was,” Ethan said. “There’s more there than pragmatics. It’s symbolism all the way down.”

  “She’s not thinking straight, so don’t think straight either,” Gabe said. “You gotta be a little nuts to catch a killer. Get down on all fours and run. That’s how you’ll get her.”

  Gabe was right. We weren’t going to get her by being rational. There wasn’t a clear logic to her actions or motivations. We needed to be as disorganized and impulsive as she was to get in her head. Thinking back, when we faced her in the underground, she appeared to us as an animal, snarling, moving without the guise of decency, and running entirely on instinct. We weren’t communicating with her higher mind. We were communicating with something that formed before language.

  “You’re right, we have to get out of our heads and into our bodies,” I muttered.

  One step forward and two steps back. There wasn’t anything I was worse at than being in this meat sack I called my own. People looked at it and called it “Lana.” I tried not to look at it at all most days, especially not since I got the arm, but there was no use trying to run from fate. I was stuck with myself whether or not I liked it, so I might as well get comfortable and learn to like it too.

  “A beer could help with that,” Gabe grinned.

  “If that’s an offer, I’m going to have to take you up on that,” I sighed.

  The longer I worked, the more my job took over my life. I’d been trying to answer who I was as a woman since my father died, and I was both closer and further away than ever. I couldn’t just keep doing what I always did. Steeling myself and powering through it was eroding me bit by bit, and I didn’t want to know what I’d be left with when there was nothing else left. Something had to change. You know what they call doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result: insanity.

  “I’ll let Noah know,” Ethan said. “He’s been dying to show us something. He says it’s a surprise.”

  There he went again, deciding things on his own. I could have called him out on it, but this time I didn’t really mind. It was true that I hadn’t seen them both in the same room since that dinner party where we all blew up on each other. It would be nice to get a chance to smooth things over and feel normal for a change.

  “Oh boy, I love surprises,” I said. “Just let me have it then; I’m not going to turn down a good time.”