People all yearn for connection and belonging; that’s why if you really want to make someone suffer, these are what you take away. The very ability to experience pain was hardwired into the framework of our existence. Pain begets pleasure, and pleasure begets pain. Those endlessly winding neural pathways hidden away deep inside our heads light up like fireworks every time it hurts. Social rejection. Injury. It doesn’t really matter; the truth is that emotional and physical pain are simply two sides of the same coin. Ying and yang. Dark and light. You cannot separate one from the other, and anyone foolish enough to try will be sorely disappointed.

I flexed my hands, clenching and extending my fingers over and over. They felt almost identical, both left and right, even though only one of them was mine. The other, synthetic, was a cruel reminder of the way I lost my arm. The memories of it still kept me up at night. The way it was torn from my shoulder was broken, grisly, and ugly. It was a reminder that there were no greater beasts than our fellow men.

In the corner of my consciousness, I thought I heard my name.

“Lana… Lana, are you listening?” Ethan asked.

His voice cut through my thoughts, and my focus snapped back to reality. I saw the edges of concern forming in his eyes, narrowed behind his glasses.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Back it up a bit; I’ll catch up.”

Ethan sighed and shook his head before getting back to it, his fingers flying across the keyboard. A list of details appeared on the holo-screen: Cassie’s last known locations, marked by the grainy photos of her Ethan had pulled from surveillance footage. Together, they dotted a map highlighting key areas of interest.

“This is what we’ve got so far,” Ethan said. “It’s incomplete, but the last confirmed sighting of her was at 5:45 PM around the corner of Mother Teresa’s Food Pantry. Considering it’s been nearly three weeks, any notable witness testimony is likely a dead end.”

“You want us to go pay him a visit,” I observed, fidgeting. “Not a problem.”

Ethan stayed quiet. Gabe cleared his throat and leaned back against the wall. I could read between the lines.

“No,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “You want Gabe to go pay him a visit… without me.”

Ethan’s eyes remained fixed on me while Gabe shifted and whistled. I could feel the wariness coming off him in waves.

“Sit this one out,” he said. “You’re not thinking straight.”

“I’m fine,” I scoffed. “If I took time off whenever I had a bad day, I’d never get anything done at all. Relax. You don’t need to play big brother right now.”

I jerked my head towards Gabe.

“Why don’t we ask Gabe what he thinks?”

Gabe glanced between us, running his hand over the stubble along his jaw. With an easy smile, he furrowed his brows and shrugged.

“She’s tough as nails,” he said. “It’s not gonna be a problem. A shot of coffee, and she’ll be running circles around us in no time.”

“It’s not that I think you can’t handle it, Lana,” Ethan sighed. “but something about the priest is riling you up. It could get ugly… I don’t have to tell you that, do I?”

He thought I was falling apart. Hell, maybe everyone did. And quite frankly, I was sick of it—sick of the way they watched me like a hawk, waiting for the cracks to blow, waiting for the moment I’d finally shatter and scatter all my broken pieces across the floor. My skin prickled at the thought of them swooping in to clean up my mess. I still had my pride. I’d handle myself.

“Worry about yourself,” I snapped back. “Gabe, let’s go.”

“Wait!” Ethan called out, but I was already out the door.

“You sure you want to leave like that?” Gabe asked, catching up to me.

“I’ve done worse,” I quipped. “Let’s just get this over with.”

***

Outside, the fresh air felt cool on my skin. I turned to Gabe.

“So, what’s up first? Coffee?”

“Yeah, how about that little place down that corner street?”

“You mean the one that made you sick?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. They make it strong enough to kill a man.”

I paused.

“You know what, fuck it. I’ll take two.”

Gabe laughed, and then we were on our way in the cruiser. Two coffees, later and I was so wired up, I couldn’t doze off if I wanted to. I flexed my synthetic hand, my fingers curling into a fist before relaxing. My mind wandered briefly, but I shoved the memory aside. Focus.

Ethan’s voice cut in over the Iris.

“Careful, if you keep rushing out like that, it’s going to hurt my feelings.”

“It’d take more than that to bruise your ego,” I quipped. “You got something good for us?”

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

“Not yet,” he sighed. “I’ll run a background check on the priest. See if there’s anything that stands out.”

He cut the call, and not long after, we were back on the church’s familiar doorstep. As we stepped inside, the stillness was broken only by the echo of our footsteps. It was a place of peace, a sanctuary that stood still while the rest of the world whizzed on by.

Father Lewis was speaking with a parishioner near when we spotted him. The woman gave us a brief glance before offering Father Lewis a parting smile before turning to leave and making her way down the aisle. He turned to greet us as the church’s door closed behind her.

“Detectives,” he said. “What brings you back here today? Have you found her?”

His brows furrowed as he spoke.

“Not yet,” I said. “But you don’t need to worry; we’ve been combing the city for her,” I said.

“Got a few leads too,” Gabe chimed in.

“We have a surveillance photo from the last time Cassie dropped by here; as far as we know, that was her last confirmed location. Working on that assumption, that would make you the last person who saw her.”

Father Lewis’s eyes widened. Either he didn’t know, or he was putting on a good show. He’d have to take up acting if his priesthood ever fell through.

“We’re going to need you to think real hard about what she said to you the last time you saw her.”

“The last time I saw her… She didn’t say much at all, but she was in a good mood.”

“Was that typical of her?” I asked.

“No,” he admitted, furrowing his brows again. “She was not a happy child.”

He stuffed his hands in his pockets, a nervous habit, maybe. He abruptly withdrew one hand with his fingers curled around something small. Resting on his palm was a metallic fragment, jagged and delicate. It looked like it had broken off an electronic device.

“This has been in my pocket for months,” he murmured, turning it over in his hand.

“Any idea what it is?” I asked.

A piece of the fragment caught the light; it looked almost beautiful.

“Not in the slightest,” he admitted. “I found it on the ground after one of her visits. She was always tinkering with something. I was going to offer it to her when she came back, but it entirely slipped my mind. It must have been through quite a few wash cycles by now. Hopefully, it can still be of use to you,” he said, offering it to us.

“We should bag it up and get the thing back to Ethan,” Gabe said. “Bet he could tell us what the damn thing is.”

I nodded as Father Lewis handed the piece to Gabe.

"We stopped by the kid's place earlier," Gabe said. "Ran into some talkative kids. They mentioned Cassie followed you around a lot. Sounded like there might be more to it."

His face blanched like the wind had been knocked out of him.

“I’ve heard the rumors,” he said, his gaze dropping to the floor. “There was nothing between us. The group doesn’t trust us, even with the aid we provide. It’s our differences in faith.”

“No good deed goes unpunished,” I muttered.

A moment of silence hung between us before Ethan’s voice came in over the Iris.

“Got something,” he said. “Father Lewis has a history. Let me break it down for you.”

Some dated articles popped up on our feed—reports on the quarantine zone, the war, and the aftermath of an airstrike. Broken buildings perched atop sinking land, fenced off with barbed wire. Each article hinted at a traumatic past.

“Local celebrity twenty years back. Remember the war?”

“Sure,” I said. “Who wouldn’t?”

“Well, he was the first dead man to walk out of the quarantine zone.”

The quarantine zone was the aftermath of an infamous airstrike on Volare City during the war. You didn’t need to be there to know what it did to people. Maybe I didn’t remember it, but my parents did, and they weren’t the only ones. I was born right on the coattails of history in the making.

“You don’t mean…” I said. “He’s that Victor Lewis?”

“Yeah, you got it; that’s the one. A bomb dropped on his house, took out the attic. He made it, but his mother didn’t; only one of them was hiding in the basement when the bombs fell. He was just a kid, and it broke him,” Ethan said.

“Even I know what happened after that,” Gabe chimed in. “The poor bastard snuck out of the hospital and held out for seventeen years in his bombed-out house. The guy was practically dead to the world, another body count for the books. Police found him seventeen years later, inconsolable and starving in a grocery store, said his food ran out. The rest is history.”

I was still a kid when it was all over the news. Everybody wanted to know what was going through his head, but then there were others, and those other survivors were far more talkative. He got his fifteen minutes of fame and vanished. Takes a lot more than that to hold people’s attention when this city’s pride and joy was distraction. There wasn’t a better place to be to forget everything for a while.

Father Lewis frowned and creased his brows.

“I suppose I still have a reputation,” he mumbled.

“A lesser man than you would have leveraged your fame for status and money,” I observed.

“I am just a simple man; I have everything I need,” he said, gesturing around him. “After coming back to society… Everything was too loud…”

Loud. Yeah, I could agree with that. The noise would be one of the first things you’d notice if you came from the dead. There was a struggle to hear your own thoughts over the din of people, advertisements, construction, and traffic. Volare City never slept.

“The asceticism of the priesthood must suit you well,” I said, suddenly feeling like an intruder. “Thank you for your honesty.”

After we left the church, the outside world seemed even louder than before.

“Do you believe him?” I asked.

Gabe stopped in his tracks and turned to me.

“I’ve got a gut feeling,” he said. “The guy’s got a lot of baggage, but he doesn’t seem like he’s hiding anything.”

I glanced back at the church. Places like this still felt heavy to me. There was a time that I lived by what priests and an all-loving, omnipotent god told me. But I stopped believing that ancient, often arbitrary rules could save me if I saved up enough “good girl” points. It was my mother who was faithful, and when she passed, I drifted away from the church too. Two anchors, one stone. I’ve been searching for my own way North since then.

“Yeah,” I sighed. “I think so too.”

Back in the cruiser, I withdrew into my own mind. In this line of work, a healthy degree of dissociation was necessary to stay objective, and I’d always been willing to do whatever it took. If that meant snipping, cutting, or tearing, I did it—just like the good girl I was. Sever the threads holding everything together. Watch the pieces drift apart, then shove them down. Bury them deep, in a place even I wouldn’t dare to search.

No, I didn’t care. I couldn’t. This was just another one of the countless cases I’d worked on over the years. I’d seen it all – crooks who perfected their polished facades with specially crafted smiles to hide dark secrets behind closed doors, suckers who made devastating mistakes in the heat of passion, good people who paid the price, and the kind of cruelty that bought you a ticket straight to hell.

Most people with my job got jaded; I did too, but there was still a place inside me that wanted to believe in the good in people. I didn’t know Father Lewis well, but I saw myself in his eyes. The urge to leave it all behind, to run away, hit me hard. I’d had those thoughts before. Dark thoughts that crossed my mind time and time again. Whether it was weakness or just human nature, I wanted to be free from my obligations that never let up or ever let me catch my breath.

At the center of it all, though, was Cassie. Everything came back to that girl. Cassie was a kid, vulnerable and helpless, and I’d been that way once too. We all have, haven’t we? Every adult was once a child at the mercy of the world, stumbling through problems with the clumsiness of youth, inexperience, and the naivety of a heart that hadn’t yet been stained black. I missed that girl – the one I used to be.