I pushed aside the curtains with my good hand. They fluttered from the artificial breeze streaming in from the edges of the windowsill, giving an illusion of the outdoors. To my chagrin, the windows themselves could not actually be opened.

The hospital gave me a bird’s eye view from the center of the city, but I was looking at it with new eyes. The last time I stood on my balcony, I felt small, nearly insignificant in a sea of people who I would never meet, and likely never save, but tonight I was lucky to be alive. The light emanating from the city blurred the edges of the piercing buildings with the night sky.

The streams of headlights speeding past the illuminated billboards and neon lights almost made it feel like you could soar, just like its name, “Volare,” suggested. It was common for naïve and starry-eyed youths to make their way here seeking the dream that it’s sparkling lights sold. Occasionally, they’d even make it, but, inevitably, most of them would end up heartbroken with their dreams gone up in smoke, just like vapor clouds.

A dull pain throbbed in my right shoulder. The surgery was a success; they said I was an ideal patient who would fully recover as long as I took a daily dose of immunosuppressants for the next few weeks. All that was left was to leave it to God. Time and fate were not my domain, no matter how much I have tried to control them.

The pain killers were wearing off now, and the weight I felt in my head was gone. I would have been celebrating, if it wasn’t just one problem being replaced by another; the pain in my shoulder had come back as well. Advances in medicine rolled out every year, but they had yet to design an arm as lightweight as the flesh and blood equivalent. To make matters worse, my new arm would have to remain in a sling for some time. Doctor’s orders.

There was a knock on the door behind me and I turned to my bedside table to buzz them in. To my surprise, Ethan walked through the door.

“You’re out of bed,” he said, frowning.

“Hate to break it to you,” I said. “But I lost my arm, not my leg.”

“Fair enough,” he said and walked over beside me.

My artificial fingers were peeking out from the edge of the sling. They looked almost identical to the ones I had lost; the craftsmanship was impeccable, but they didn’t feel like mine, at least not yet. Everything still felt like a fever dream, like I was just playing the role of a patient in a hospital to pass the time, humoring someone else’s idea of entertainment.

I shrugged, but it was lopsided. We stood there, grinning sheepishly at each other with the absurdity of it all. He looked better this time, like he might even have had a good night of sleep. His hair wasn’t a mess either; this time it was neatly swept to the side. That was the Ethan I knew, not the man I saw last time, the one I barely recognized.

Another knock came from the door and a button press later Gabe joined us in the small room as well. The door slid closed behind him.

“How does it feel?” Ethan asked.

I ran the edge of the sling between my new fingers. The joints felt stiff, and the texture of the fabric felt wrong to me the same way an old friend with a new face might.

“I’ll just have to get used to it,” I said, shrugging again. “I’ve been through worse.”

“You sure about that?” Gabe asked, arching an eyebrow.

Ethan took a step back to make room for him. Gabe clapped me on my good shoulder before settling against the wall by the window. The three of us were faintly illuminated by the city’s lights creeping in from the window. I was quietly appreciative that they hadn’t expected me to hit the lights. I found a sense of comfort in darkness, and I hid from the light when the world became too much for me.

“I thought visiting hours were over,” I said.

“Lieutenant Blackwood pulled some strings for us,” Ethan said.

“Careful,” I said. “If she keeps this up, I might actually think she cares.”

The three of us chuckled together.

“Nah, she’s working us like dogs,” Gabe said. “We’re still on the clock.”

I grinned while Ethan pulled out the holographic disc from his pocket. I’d been dying to see all the nitty-gritty details – the culmination of all our hard work. One click later, a yellow beam was rendering headshots of the five luminaries. They fanned out, rotating slowly around an axis, their faces passing us one by one.

“The higher-ups wanted this case closed and done with as soon as possible, so we’ve been getting some help from the other departments,” Ethan said.

“It must have been something to see all those empty desks filled. I’m almost sad I wasn’t there to see it.”

Our precinct was a dead zone; we walked through empty halls just to get to a room filled with rows of empty desks. It felt like staring at lost potential. There were once over two dozen people in our department, but we’ve never seen it that way; that was back in its heyday. Over the years, it was whittled down to just the two of us, with nothing other than Gabe’s drinking bird toy bobbing its head up and down to keep us company.

“You should have seen it,” he said. “The minute we bagged him the precinct went into overdrive, but we had help from the other departments too.”

“Been nice if we had that kind of help before,” I groaned.

Gabe huffed in agreement.

Right to business, Ethan swiped his hand to the right. The hologram shifted to show a young boy. He was small for his age, thin, frail, and fragile. It was difficult to believe that this young boy would one day become the man we knew as Zenith, the one that looked like stretched taffy with metallic limbs far too long for his body. A list of medical conditions, treatments, and dates scrolled up to the side like a credits reel.

“Don’t worry about the medical jargon,” Ethan said. “This is all you need to know.”

Sliding his fingers through the air, he highlighted a section of text beginning with the term “muscular dystrophy.” I’d heard of it before; it was an ugly disease. Those afflicted with it tend to waste away. Even at his young age, the effects were already visible on his face. With his gaunt appearance, his eyes seemed too large and his cheekbones too prominent.

“The kid was sick, practically lived at the hospital,” Gabe said.

“Zenith, or rather, Dylan Hearst, had quite a few medical procedures, including a decent chunk of the augmentation he later made his signature,” Ethan said.

The next clip showed an older boy somewhere in his teens. This time, his arms were visibly metallic, although they were mostly hidden beneath the sleeves of his shirt. He was standing off to the side of a field while the other boys played. He was holding himself quite stiffly, and when he turned to face the camera, his eyes were empty.

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

“It’s not easy being a teenager,” I observed. “Even less so when you stick out like a sore thumb.”

“No, it’s not,” Ethan agreed. “Dylan was often bullied or shunned by his peers. I found pages of complaints from his mother in the school system spanning from petty theft to assault.”

“Did he do anything to provoke them?” I asked.

“No, not as far as I can tell,” Ethan said. “He was just different.”

The following clip showed Dylan Hearst as a young man. He still looked strangely ordinary; perhaps it would take time for him to decide to augment his height with those extended limbs. His clothes were plain and ironed freshly enough to cut yourself on the edges. I suppose he was going for an image of professionalism, but his ranting had a jittery sharpness to it that couldn’t be hidden by a nice set of clothes.

“The world is ugly and corrupted,” he said. “But we can fix it. The answer is so simple; the masses are just too stupid to see it! We can eradicate all the evil from the world – all the evil that makes people petty, ugly, and dull. They- they hated me before. They beat me, they stole my stuff, and it left me wondering what I did wrong, but then I realized something. It was because they were jealous. It was because I was better than them. They hated me because I made them realize what freaks they were, and I’m going to show all of them that I’m closer to perfection than they ever will be.”

This younger version of Zenith wasn’t as coy. No, he was young and arrogant, and he wore it on his face like a badge of honor. He had the eyes of a madman, and his hands looked like he was trying to choke someone who wasn’t there. It must have taken some time to develop the persona of the gentle shepherd he sold to his guests the night we showed up for their open night. This was his true face. This was the version of him that came out when he lashed out at us. This was the face that was honest.

Zenith documented every aspect of his life. For a man who was meant to be a ghost, he did exactly the opposite of fly under the radar. The records showed that there are instances of his father stepping in to prevent him, his illegitimate son, from attracting unwanted attention, going back as far as twenty years. It must have been a rebellion for him. He wanted to be seen and acknowledged.

“He made his suffering into something twisted and noble,” I observed.

“Yeah,” Gabe agreed. “Poor bastard had a few screws loose.”

Another swipe later, and the holographic disc shifted to a three-dimensional model of his body lying on the coroner’s table. This time he was pale and lifeless, his clothing replaced by a loose white cloth draped over it. Small cubes floated around him, connected to his body by thin threads of light. Each cube displayed a point of interest, and labels hung underneath them.

Starting at his head, there were already three very invasive modifications: his eyes were replaced with cybernetic ocular implants, his skull was reinforced with metal, and a network of semi-fluid structures were threaded through his brain like a crown.

Moving down to his torso, both his nipples and belly button were removed. He appeared as smooth and inorganic as a doll. Towards the back, his spine was reinforced with steel. Finally, his limbs were completely replaced by the model with the hollows in their palms. The stigmata-like holes were singed at the edges from those last shots he took by my head that night.

“How old was he?” I asked.

“Twenty-seven,” Ethan answered.

“Then he was just young enough to feel bulletproof and just old enough to do something stupid with it,” I groaned. “What a waste.”

I tapped on a cube, displaying his eyes. It bounced with my touch and expanded to show a close-up of his face. He had died with them wide open. In contrast to his body, his eyes were still full of life; death had merely been an inconvenience to them. However, they were left vacant without a driver to command them. I was struck by how young he looked. At twenty-seven, he hadn’t even lived half of an expected lifespan yet.

“He should have gotten his life together and told his dad to go to hell. It would have been more of a middle finger than whatever this was,” I said, gesturing towards the model of his body.

This city ate its youth and spat them back out, bloody, broken, and screaming. Nepotism was worth more than hard work, and troubled kids flew under the radar. I wondered how much crime could have been prevented if the city took care of its people instead of letting them eat themselves.

“Nathan was targeted for trying to leave the group,” I said. “What else do we have on him?”

The holographic disc shifted to show a page from the Bible. The edge had been painstakingly cut, with how clean the edges were. In the center, there was a singular verse stained in wine – the blood of Christ. It read – “2 Corinthians 5:6-8 - So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.” Below the verse was a meticulous drawing of a disassembled body burned into the paper. A noose led down to the neck of the crumpled form.

“Zenith judged Nathan guilty of blasphemy after he rejected his modifications. He saw it like rejection,” Ethan said. “He wanted to take back his gifts that Nathan no longer deserved.”

“We should have thrown the guy in prison,” Gabe said. “It wasn’t right he got to parade around so long in his little one-man circus.”

We had a moment of silence as we contemplated what we already knew. He had been allowed to prey on the disadvantaged and vulnerable people he found for years, with nobody to stop him. The only thing that led to his downfall in the end was his own hubris. Without him handing us a decorated corpse, he might have never been brought to justice.

“Then there’s just one thing left to wrap up isn’t there?” I asked, more of a statement than a question.

Ethan grinned and continued where he left off – Nathan Ming, our murder victim.

“During our briefing, we skipped over his family. There’s a reason for that. This case was handed to us from the grunts when they realized it was above their paygrade. The file they gave us came with a note about his family. Specifically, that he hadn’t seen them in years – enough years to matter.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Who knows? The records aren’t there,” Ethan groaned. “The best we could do was track down a few domestic violence reports, but not much came of them.”

“And the body?” I asked.

“We called them,” Gabe said, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “Offered them his body. Told us they didn’t want it. The poor bastard got cremated and scattered with all the other unclaimed bodies.”

I knew the place, Evergreen Gardens. The name was misleading; there was nothing evergreen about it. It was a pitiful, small clearing full of yellow, sunbaked grass. I’m not one to believe in gods or spirits, but I swore that would be where the dead would walk the earth, crying out for heaven.

“What about the others?” I asked.

“Willow’s family came for her,” Ethan answered. “We didn’t expect her parents to show, their relationship was also rocky, but, unlike Nathan’s parents, they all came in tow and wept when the coroner pulled back the sheet to show them her face. They held her a proper burial too. Some are luckier than others.”

“The other two didn’t have anyone to collect either,” Gabe said. “Must had had it rough.”

“He exploited people looking for somewhere to belong,” I said, gritting my teeth. “People who were lonely, poor, and desperate.”

Ethan looked away for a moment, gazing out the window. Then he tilted his head to the side and murmured a low hum.

“It’s frustrating, isn’t it? He might as well have been wearing a sign on his chest flashing guilt in neon letters,” Ethan said. “Once we got our hands on his hard drives there was nothing to it. He filmed the whole thing. The three of them got Nathan to let them in and once the door closed behind them it was all over. Nathan got in a few good swings and knocked a tooth loose, but he didn’t stand a chance. Zenith stood back, just watching while the other two went at it. And once he was down, they hung him from the ceiling fan, watched him die, and dismembered his corpse.”

“It was right there… It was right there the whole time,” I cried, and this time my tears fell from my eyes, leaving wet streaks down my cheeks.

“We save who we can, Lana,” Ethan said, turning back to look at me. “We’ve already done what we could; now we just have to live with it.”

The three of us were silent again for a moment. Gabe rubbed the back of his head before letting his arm fall back down by his side. He gave me a knowing gaze, saying more without words than some men could with a thousand. I ran my hand through my hair, bunching it into a mess behind my head, pulling hard enough to hurt.

“What now?” I asked, not meeting his gaze.

“Well,” he said, grinning sheepishly, before crossing his arms and shifting his weight to his other foot. “Ella said if I don't take some time off work, she'll tie me to a chair and call it in for me.”

Ella was Ethan’s wife and was a good woman. In fact, she might have been a saint. Despite our family’s trademark obsessions and bullheaded tendency to work ourselves to death, she stood by him all these years, through thick and thin, till death do they part.

“You're going to have to find out what relaxing is, do you think you'll survive?” I quipped.

“I suppose we’ll find out,” he said.