Day in, day out. Same shit, different day. Get up, go into work. Drive up and down the ghettos. Try to make the place a bit nicer, friendlier. Get strangled by red tape instead. Shoot some gangbanger or scavver that managed to sneak past the security checkpoints. File an incident report. Get yelled at by the Chief for having the audacity to try and de-escalate the situation. Can't even remember how long it's been since Ames left. A month? Two months? Too long.

I wake up on the couch, trying to shake the rust out of my shoulders. The house is in shambles, with the floor being more of my discarded dirty clothes than the carpet below. I'll get to washing those when I'm not so fucking tired. Ugh. Why the hell haven't the lights turned on? Where the fuck are my smokes?

I push myself off the couch, running a hand down my face as I stumble for the bathroom. I don't remember the mirror being cracked. Wait. I must've done that when I was drinking a few nights back. Fuck.

The lights still aren't on. I reach for the manual switch and flick it up and down a few times. Nothing.

I run my hand down my face again. I'm way too fucking hungover for this. Back out to the living area, nearly tripping on my discarded work pants in the process. My communicator chirps out, projecting several AROs.

Looks like I forgot to pay my electric bill.

And my water bill.

And I've missed at least six other recurring payments.

Fuck this, I'll just get dressed and shower at the station.

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Back at my desk. Managing to find and wear one last clean shirt isn't much of a consolation. My chair keeps creaking whenever I lean back wrong. How the hell are new swivel chairs not even in the budget?

I pull out my communicator and keep my head down. Don't want to risk eye contact with Teixeira. She's been getting more and more brazen by the day, ever since… Ah, screw it. Let's just look at the sports feeds.

A stack of papers being slapped onto my desk snaps me back to attention. I should be surprised that Bobrovnikov snuck up on me, considering he's been walking with a hobble for the past month while they try to rebuild his cyberleg. A few scavvers managed to sneak in from the Slag with military-grade equipment and nearly took his leg off with an anti-materiel rifle.

“Hey, Kid. How you holdin' up? Heard about the bad news. Just didn't have time to catch up with you, what with, y'know.” He reaches over to pat me on the shoulder. Despite him having a pair of hands that could casually crush a bowling ball, this somehow feels reassuring.

“I could be your leg, Bobrovnikov.” I manage to force a laugh despite it all. If it was anyone else in the department, I'd have told them to go fuck themselves. This just hasn't been my week. Scratch that, make that a couple of years.

“You wanna go and get some drinks after your shift? My shrink used to tell me the best way to handle this kinda crap was to let it all out.”

Last thing I want to do is talk about her. I've got an overflowing stack of work on my desk, and getting absolutely blitzed is just gonna be another fucking headache on top of the one I already have. I didn't even have enough time to shave this morning.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“Maybe another night, big guy. I'm gonna be stuck working overtime with all the crap they've got on my desk.” I point to the untidy mess around my faux-wood desk. The unkempt pile isn't that much different from all the other desks around mine. Work's been piling up to the high heavens and morale is equally freefalling in the other direction. “With my luck, they'll send me out to find where all the fucking unicorns have gone.”

“Kid, you'd better knock on wood after sayin' that.” He pats me on the shoulder again, still keeping a big ass grin plastered on his face the entire time. I don't get how he keeps this up. He's been here twice as long as me, and he doesn't even seem remotely ground down.

“Hate this city,” I mutter. He pats me on the shoulder again and hobbles off to deliver the rest of the dockets for the evening.

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I figure my best option is to loiter in my squad car as I go over my assignment for the evening. It'll save me from having to pretend that I actually want to be inside that smokey as hell office. At least the parking garage's lights have rhyme and reason to their buzzing and blinking, versus the lightbulbs in the precinct exploding randomly due to faulty wiring.

I thumb through the sheets of the usual protocols and otherwise, wondering why the hell we're still using dead trees as a medium when we've had more environmentally friendly methods for the better part of a century.

Bodyguard detail. Nothing out of the norm. Alongside a few other guys that have been around for a couple of years. Thankfully, no McNamara, who has been a consistent pain in the ass for the past ten years. Nothing seems to stick to the bozo, whether it's shooting civvies or stealing shit out of evidence, but I'm not about to go on a diatribe about that.

The thing outside of the norm is how fucking long this assignment docket is. It'd be a double-sided sheet on the best of days, but this thing is over a dozen pages. I flip over it, doing my best to do better than skim through it. The thought of having to put more effort than cruising around to bust a few voltheads or telling a group of teenagers to stop breaking noise ordinance is actually making me tired.

I pause my page-flipping. Something's not right. Corporate management-type looking for a detail, which is the normal part. Most of the lower management aren't assigned their own in-house security, so they shop it out to the local law enforcement. The fact that this guy, Geschke, is upper management for Donehal Architectural? This is way out of place. Especially with Donehal being a subsidiary of Krieger. The guy should be surrounded by corpsec in the shiniest of chrome, the thickest of body armor and the heaviest of firepower on a near twenty-four-seven basis. I don't think he'd be able to take a shit without six suits in the stall with him. I flip open my communicator and thumb through my work-related messages, trying to figure what the hell is up with this.

Unsurprisingly, there's nothing about this in my inbox. I sigh loudly and let my forehead rest on the steering wheel. I should get suited up before we move out. In my unenthused rush to get out of the car, my hand slips over my communicator and I accidentally play one of the many unopened voice messages.

“Let me know the next time you're doing overtime, Luc. Precinct's pretty empty on—”

I slap my hand down on the device, cutting off Teixeira's voice. That is the second to last thing I need right now. I've already got some silver-spoon-in-mouth asshole to babysit tonight, and I can't afford to sit there all night getting distracted over Teixeira's advances. Don't even know why she's doing this. Though, it could be something to think about instead of zoning out while—

I halt that train of thought to thumb through the sheets. Heinrich Geschke. Yeah. While Heinrich Geschke is going to some sort of dinner party. That last conversation with Ames plays back in my mind. Really is fighting for what I fucking believe in, isn't it. I remember rattling the cage so Gods-damned much when I joined up that the Chief threatened to have me strung up by my pant leg on a bi-daily basis. “Company policy, not your friggen moral compass,” he used to tell me.

Now the only fight I've got left in me is my Zeno Adjudicator. It's definitely not standard issue, and that's the way I like it. I'm surprised they haven't shitcanned me for having a personal carry for this long, considering that we're only supposed to be carrying the standard issue Mahler M9 as our sidearm while we're on duty. I spin the cylinder a few times before sighing and looking up into the sunvisor's mirror.

As unkempt as the first day on the job, except I look like I've been through the wringer a few times too many. I'm still not going to shave.

They don't pay me enough to shave.