1:39am, Thursday the 9th October, 2132.

“What a damn mess,” said a tall, Japanese man as he climbed out of his 2097 Raijin; a sleek and silver car that did not match the scruffiness of its owner. “There’s junk everywhere.”

A second person climbed out from the opposite side, a dark-skinned woman with shoulder-length teal hair and bright green eyes. “Try not to step in anything,” she said, pulling her blue leather jacket around herself to hide from the cold.

“Well at least the rain’s stopped,” the man said, looking over the dozens of abandoned stalls in the market in front of them. “Still… Can’t believe I’ve been dragged all the way down here on tonight of all nights.”

“Happy birthday,” the woman mocked. “I wish the Captain would stop splashing me with the crap he aims at you.”

“You know how it goes. Partners share the shit. Don’t like it, can always get a new one.”

“Please. Without me you wouldn’t catch a thief if he broadcast a video of himself jerking off with stolen goods.”

“That’s a vivid and slightly disturbing imagination you have there, Greaves.”

As they spoke between themselves a uniformed police officer approached them, wearing black body armour and a Katana 12 assault rifle that hung from straps across his front. “Detectives?” The officer asked, the holographic acronym for the Kanto Megapolis Police Department lit on his chest in bright white.

“Yes,” the tall man replied, reaching into his pocket and taking out his ID card to show. His partner did the same. “I’m Detective Sergeant Kato Akihiko, this is Detective Laura Greaves.”

The officer leaned in, examining Kato’s card more closely. “Is that written as a Japanese name or English?”

“Japanese,” the detective replied. “Kato’s my last name.”

The officer nodded, running a basic check as Kato spoke. “Well, ID’s check out. Follow me, please, and I hope you brought your sick bags.”

Kato and Greaves glanced at each other a moment, then followed the officer as he walked around the corner and through an automated door being held open by a yellow, police-issued frame. Once inside, they climbed three flights of stairs that were lit by searchlights on metal stands. When they reached the third floor, a forensics team in white coveralls and various armed officers were gathering evidence and patrolling.

“What happened here, officer?” Kato asked, one hand in the pocket of his dark leather trench coat, the other rubbing at the side of his head. Greaves had often berated him about that coat, telling him that it made him look antiquated and ridiculous like someone from an old noir flick. He didn’t care. As far as he was concerned everyone looked ridiculous those days, and the hardboiled sleuth was one stereotype that actually worked in his favour. Even if he wasn’t particularly tough or cynical, letting others think he was had come in handy more than once in his career.

“Just out here,” the officer said, pointing to where a second door was held open by a second yellow frame.

Kato and Greaves followed the officer again, Greaves nearly bumping into one of the forensics technicians who walked out of an open apartment, and moved along the hall until they came upon what they realized was a walkbridge that joined two buildings together like a beam.

“Holy shit,” Greaves said at the sight, while Kato only sighed. The bridge was under the cover of a temporary plastic tent to protect it from rain that had since stopped, but even that rain hadn’t been able to wash away all the blood.

The two bodies lay there in crumpled, broken positions – entirely motionless, guns still in stiffened fingers, eyes open in fear. They had deep cuts and tears across their entire bodies as though mauled by some wild beast, and their throats had been ripped out completely.

“Damn,” grumbled Kato, taking a step closer to examine them while trying to harden his stomach’s resolve. “What the hell happened here? A bear or something?”

“Private security from Naka-Sura Multinational were on patrol and heard gunshots being fired. They rushed up here to find a man standing over these two unlucky citizens, apparently covered in blood. They demanded he surrender but he wouldn’t, so they shot him and he fell over the side of the bridge,” the officer explained.

“Naka-Sura? What were they doing down here?” Asked Greaves, crouching down by one of the bodies and gently lifting a hand that held a gun.

“They own this entire district,” the officer said. “Abandoned now, been slated for deconstruction for twelve years. Now people use it to dump whatever junk they can find on top of all the shit left behind in the first place. Naka-Sura send patrols down here to stop it, and to stop scavengers, and it’s worked pretty well. People don’t often come down here anymore, so these two must have been desperate.”

“Scavengers? That what these two were doing down here?” Greaves asked.

The officer nodded. “Yeah, we think so.”

Kato walked over to the edge of the bridge, looking over it. “I don’t see a third body. Did forensics take it already?”

“That’s the thing,” said the officer, “there was no third body. We got a description from the NS guys, but they wouldn’t stick around for you two and we couldn’t exactly make them.”

“What’s the description?” Asked Kato.

“Young, maybe early to mid twenties. White-European, pale on account of the cold, dark brown hair down to the shoulders, though it was soaked from rain so it could be lighter. Thin, not real skinny, but basically no fat on him at all. Apparently, he wore a blue shirt and pants, no shoes, like the kind they use in hospitals. And obviously, he was covered in blood.”

“No weapon? No knife? These wounds can’t be made by nicely trimmed fingernails.”

“None that they saw, none that they can find. Only weapons are those guns and they were fired.”

“Fired? At what, from where?”

Greaves looked up to Kato. “This guy’s marked,” she said, flashing an ultraviolet torch over the upper arm of the body in the sleeveless jacket. In the purple light an invisible ink showed; a leopard’s head, and an R in its open mouth. “He’s a Runner.”

“Hmm,” Kato mumbled, taking out his own torch and leaning down by the second body. He tore away at the coat sleeve to reveal the same segment of the upper arm, then flashed his own torch on ultraviolet. The same symbol. “This guy’s a Runner too.”

“Runners? Aren’t they just some low-life gang from Tokyo Bay?” Asked the officer. “What the hell are they doing in Saitama?”

“Scavenging, it seems,” Kato said, lowering the body’s arm and then moving to the face – the open shocked eyes, and the blonde hair. “I know this guy, Greaves. This is Sebastian Cooper, also known as Coops. I jacked him trying to offload bootleg slicers. Check their pockets.”

Kato and Greaves began to delve carefully into the inner pockets of the dead men’s clothes, but Kato came up empty. “Nothing.”

“This guy has a slicer,” Greaves revealed, pulling it out of the sleeveless jacket. “But it’s broken. Looks like something tore through it.”

“A bullet?” Kato asked, looking over.

“No… No, more like a knife, maybe? Or a claw hammer. I’m not sure, but these things aren’t exactly made of jelly.”

“Well that’s one question answered,” Kato said as he looked up at the officer, then stood. “These guys were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Forensics did find signs of tampering with one of the door locks down the hall, but there’s nothing interesting in the apartment. We’ve scanned the place, you can hardly tell they even went in there,” the officer explained.

“Hey, sorry, officer, uh… What’s your name?” Kato asked.

“Nolan. Nolan Koerner.”

“Officer Koerner, you said shots were fired?”

“Yes,” Koerner replied, pointing down to the other end of the bridge. “At least two handgun rounds were fired, as well as a burst from a submachine gun. One of the handgun rounds hit the wall there, another ricocheted off that door and hit another wall back on this side. As far as we can tell, all of the submachine gun rounds hit the far wall too.”

Kato looked at the bullet holes. “Hm. Low spread, high accuracy. If those went through a person, there’s no way they could still be alive without some serious armour.”

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

“Kato, a third handgun round was fired based on the ammo-count on these weapons,” Greaves said, examining the guns closely. “I can’t account for that bullet, though.”

“So, these two Runners were here illegally scavenging, wrong place, wrong time. They came across someone, fired at him – and presumably missed, since he then killed them with brutal efficiency using some unknown weapon,” Kato recapped. “Naka-Sura security gets down here to find the suspect still here, covered in blood and wearing hospital clothes, then shoot him when he refuses to surrender. The force of the bullets push him over the bridge, where his body disappears.”

“Sounds about right to me,” Koerner said.

“Could be he’s augmented, some megacorp agent. Cybernetics, biotics, what have you,” Kato surmised. “Would account for the ruthless killing, which was damn quick according to the look on their faces. Even so, no-one, whether 100% natural home grown human or cyborg monstrosity with robo-nuts, is likely to survive that many rounds from a submachine gun at such short range. So, either someone’s lying, or the body was stolen, because not all the numbers add up here.”

“Kato, I found some strange liquid,” Greaves said, scraping a pale substance from the ground on a glassfibre swab.

“What is it?” Kato asked, moving closer to look at what she had.

“I don’t know, but I can’t find much more of it. Could be that it washed away in the rain, but with all the blood out here… I’m not sure. I’ll have the lab check it out,” she said, sliding the swab into a small electronic sheath that flashed twice when locked.

“Koerner, I’ll need to speak to those NS guys,” Kato told the officer, turning to face him.

“I’ll get you their ID’s,” Koerner replied, then turned around and walked back into the apartment building to speak with someone else.

“I don’t know, Kato,” Greaves said, looking out over the bridge at the eery, debris-filled streets below. “Something fuckin’ weird is going on here. I don’t like it.”

“And on my fuckin’ birthday, too,” Kato sighed, leaning on the brick wall and wishing he was back at home with his cat.

3:02am, Thursday the 9th October, 2132.

“Get back in here!” A woman shouted, leaning out over the balcony and holding closed a silk robe that barely covered her naked body.

“Can’t you leave me along for one damn night?” a man shouted back at her, then turned and marched away from the tower building to the laughing of several teenagers and low-lives hanging around on the street corner.

“That’s it, go and get drunk again! It’s nearly morning, you damn low-life, and if you don’t come back now you’re not coming back at all!”

“Kuso kurae,” the man replied, flipping her some obscene gesture as he disappeared off down the street.

The woman sighed in the silence that followed, covering her face with her hand, then she turned and walked back into her apartment. Aiden watched her from the top of a high concrete barrier built across the road, leaving the district in which he woke inaccessible. He wasn’t interested in her, though, only the clothes she had hanging from a line across her balcony, half-soaked by the earlier rain. They might not have been dry but they were men’s clothes, and they would make him far less conspicuous than his own bloodied attire.

He still wasn’t sure what had happened. He had woken on the road beneath the walk-bridge broken, yet had managed to drag himself away into the night. Each foot he crawled had knit together torn flesh and before long he was walking again, fleeing with a limp that disappeared with what remained of his pain. In the aftermath, he had expected the soldiers to search for him, to send hunting drones down through the dark alleys in which he had found himself, yet they never came.

They had lost him in a labyrinth of abandoned and decrepit streets, yet in that place of darkness and fear, he himself had been no less found. That is, until he had reached the barrier.

Aiden waited until the teenagers got bored and moved away from their corner, then pulled himself over the top of the barrier and leaped to a balcony close by. He had never been a particularly agile individual, his talent in scholarly pursuits always having come at the cost of his physical, yet now they seemed second nature to him. He didn’t understand how, or where he had learned it, yet all of a sudden he found himself climbing around the city’s architecture with the ease of a spider.

A series of balcony railings carried him to the floor like ladder rungs, then he ran across the empty street until he reached where the woman had been shouting. He immediately climbed up onto a communal waste bin, and reached up for the first of the balconies overlooking the street. He took one last look to make sure he wasn’t being watched, then he climbed up and jumped, grabbing the concrete where the woman had just been standing. He peaked up over the edge of the floor, looking through an open door to try and see she was there. The inside of the apartment was lit, the TV playing some loud movie and throwing flashing colours across the far wall, but she was nowhere to be seen.

He reached up, snatching at the clothes on the line and tucking them under his arm one by one until he almost had a full set to wear. Then the woman appeared and saw him, and in a flurry of fear and confusion she began to scream, and Aiden dropped back down to the bin with a large crash. She looked down over the balcony, waving at him and screaming, and suddenly there was a man marching at him across the street, yelling in angry Japanese.

He didn’t stop to listen. He vaulted down off the bin and tucked the clothes under his arm, then set off in a fleeing sprint down a nearly empty road. Those who lurked in the must unsocial hours watched him as he ran but he ignored them all, turning down side streets and alternate roads until he was sure he wasn’t being followed. Then he entered an alleyway and hid himself behind a wall, and squat down to push his face into his hands.

“God damnit, Aiden…” He whispered to himself. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Eventually he calmed and changed his clothes. He shoved the blue, blood-stained clothes down an old pipe and dressed himself in his new, and stepped back out on the sidewalk shivering from their damp. They weren’t much, just a red hooded sweater over dark pants, and with only black socks to cover his feet. He pulled up his hood to hide his face and then began to walk, no direction in his mind except away from where he had been.

It was quiet now, the streets almost empty. He walked beneath the glow of their tall lights and took care to avoid those he saw, cutting through side-streets or waiting until they passed him, until he was sure they weren’t following. He wasn’t even sure why he was acting so paranoid, why he was so scared of being found. Those soldiers would have stopped trying to find him by now, and there was nowhere better for a man to hide than Kanto Megapolis. Even if he was being hunted, even if somehow his paranoia had been justified, they would never actually find him.

And yet he was paranoid. But why? What had he done? Why couldn’t he remember anything?

Eventually, he found a man stumbling out of a seedy-looking bar and he paused, deciding that the bar was preferable to aimlessly wandering in soaked clothes. It made up part of the bottom of a tower that rose a hundred floors and had a lit purple sign that read Tanaka’s Bar, and he pushed his hands into his pockets, crossing the street towards it.

When he reached the door, he pushed it open with his shoulder to find himself in an old-fashioned establishment, the kind that had once been themed on the bars of the previous century but had over time come to embody those dives in earnest. It was a place for those who hated the current flavour of modernity, who found comfort in old paint and booths with seats of cigarette-stained synth-leather, who scowled at those they could no longer understand. They didn’t scowl at him.

Lone men sat at table booths around the walls, half asleep in drunken stupours or simply not caring who he was, and a row of empty stools were lined against a bar that seemed to be made of real wood. In the corner, several gambling machines buzzed and pinged with multi-coloured light, and prize-wheeled rolled on their screens with muted sounds. Some of the patrons glanced up at him, but they saw nothing but a figure as lost as they were and soon went back to their drinks.

After an unsure moment, Aiden crossed over to the bar and sat down, resting his elbows on the lacquered surface. He watched as the bartender organized the contents of a fridge-cabinet, facing away from him in silence, and he found himself watching her and wondering what he should say. She was a slim woman, perhaps a little older than he was, and wore little more than a bra and fishnet over a torso adorned with various tattoos, and a blue skirt that reached her knees.

“Nani o nomimasu ka?” She asked, then turned around to look at him. “Oh. Sorry, we don’t get many white people here. What can I get you?”

“Uh…” Aiden began, suddenly realizing he had no money. He had nothing. “Just water, please?”

“Water?” The girl asked him, staring at him in partial disbelief. She turned to the tap, pink hair swaying around her shoulders, then poured and placed his drink on the bar. As Aiden took it she watched, eyes scanning down his clothes, then cocked her head at him. “Been for a swim?”

He shook his head, but did not speak. She shrugged and turned back to the fridge, hissing something beneath her breath. “Jikan no muda.”

Aiden wasn’t fluent in Japanese, but he could understand enough to know what she thought he wouldn’t hear. Waste of time, she had called him. She wasn’t wrong. He was just like all the other men in that bar now, skulking around in the early morning for drinks; no-gooders, criminals and drunks. He was worse than them, he realized. At least they had money to pay for drinks. At least they weren’t killers.

“What’s your name?” He eventually asked, if only to strike up a conversation. He hadn’t realized just how lonely he felt, just how much he wanted someone to talk to. It was as though he hadn’t spoken to someone for years. “I’m Aiden.”

The woman looked at him, her silver eyes distrustful of his intentions. A late-shift bartender like her had to be. A dozen guys a week tried to get into her pants, and some of them couldn’t take no for an answer. “Nami,” she eventually replied. “You stink of rain and sweat, Aiden. You should take a shower.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Aiden replied. A shower would have been a god-send right then, but it wasn’t as though he could find one on the side of the street.

All of a sudden, a screen behind Nami caught his eye. It was a crude advertisement, a lewd commercial for prostitutes in bright blue and pink, but they weren’t what he found interesting. It was the time on the screen that jumped out to him, the date displayed beneath it.

3:25am, Thursday the 9th October, 2132.

Aiden felt anxiety wash over him. “I-Is that screen right?” He asked, gesturing to it.

Nami looked back and then rolled her eyes. “Probably. If all you’re here for is sex, call them and stop bothering me.”

“No, not that. I mean the time. The date.”

Nami paused and looked back at it again, then double-checked her phone. “Yeah. Why?”

“Excuse me,” Aiden said, a sudden and severe nausea driving him from his stool. He stumbled over towards the bathroom in the corner, pushing the door open and letting it slam behind him as he fell down to his knees by the nearest urinal. He retched and hurled, vomiting a thick, clear liquid down the flushing drains, then pushed himself away and slid down a cubicle door until he was helpless on the ground.

What the hell was happening?

He looked down at the space between his legs, tears welling at the corners of his eyes and falling freely down his face. Nothing was right, everything was wrong. He was scared and confused, lost in a place he didn’t know and with years of his life taken from his mind. Why couldn’t he remember anything? Where was his sister? Why couldn’t he wake up from this terrible dream?

“Damn, you’re a real mess, aren’t you?”

Aiden looked up to find Nami standing there in the doorway, and wiped his eyes on his sleeve. “I’ve had a rough night,” he admitted.

Nami stared at him a moment, then released a defeated sigh. “This goes against every single one of my survival instincts, but you clearly need help, so… My shift ends in twenty minutes. You can’t stay here in the bar, but you can come to my place. You can use my shower, call whoever you need to call. Something tells me you’re different from the assholes sitting out there, and I’m not enough of a bitch to ignore someone who’s genuinely in trouble.”

Aiden watched her carefully, but he didn’t say anything at first. Nami had to reach down and help pull him up to his feet, and it was only then that he took a deep breath and faced her. “Thank you, Nami,” he said. “You might have just saved me. I won’t forget this.”

She shrugged. “Just don’t make me regret it. I’ve got a gun and friends who look out for me.”

“Don’t worry,” he replied. “I won’t.”