The precinct’s parking garage was towards the back of the building. It wasn’t pretty; all plain concrete and hard edges. The only bits of color were in the faded painted lines, marked with tire tracks, in a shade of dull yellow. Our cruiser sat in the back. It was an unmarked vehicle, perfect for slipping under the radar. Unlike the cops that patrolled the city, our work often required discretion.

I slid into the passenger side. Gabe always took the wheel; he was a better driver, and I was a better shot. We’d had this arrangement for a while, and it worked for us. All the cruisers stank of stale leather and burnt coffee; Gabe liked it, but I was ambivalent. You could say that it was a feature, not a bug.

Neither of us spoke. I tapped my index finger on the passenger side door – a nervous habit I had never grown out of.

“Thanks for vouching for me today, I really needed that,” I said.

“Don't mention it. We're partners, we look out for each other,” he replied.

I grinned. There was something to be said for simplicity. Neither of us wasted time on things that didn’t need to be said. We rolled out onto the streets and headed towards Haven Heights, the area in which the victim resided. It was an area we were quite familiar with, mainly because a lot of our calls came out of it. People didn’t live there if they didn’t have to.

The ride was bumpy; these streets were riddled with potholes and lackluster patch jobs. Concrete, gravel, asphalt – whatever did the job was good enough. Once in a blue moon, we’d get misguided, angry callers to the precinct complaining about how our taxes kept going up but our quality of life kept going down. ‘The money,’ they said, ‘was clearly going somewhere.’

Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do about it; it just wasn’t our department. We only worked on cases that involved murder, death, or missing people. Politics was a whole other can of worms. Quite frankly, we were becoming a bit of an endangered species. None of us were paid very well. People in this line of work either considered it a calling or were in it for the bribe money.

The crooked sign up ahead was pockmarked with bullet holes. Clearly, it had been target practice for somebody. Turning past it, we found ourselves in the parking lot of the Citrus Grove Apartments, the name sounded refreshing, the reality was less so. If I was being especially generous, I would have said it was a nice place to live.

“Let’s try the elevator,” Gabe said.

The color on the buttons was worn away, and if not for the indentations of arrows, they would have been identical. We pressed the up button a few times; it buzzed, but it didn’t do much else. It took us a while to notice a scrap of paper by our feet. It was a handwritten note torn out of a notebook. ‘Out of Order’ it said. Classy.

“Thing’s busted,” Gabe observed.

“We’re taking the stairs then,” I sighed.

The stairs took us past the main lobby. It was a small room with bulletproof glass, shielding the person at the register from potentially unsavory company. Once we were higher up, it gave us perspective. There must have been at least a hundred units in the place all together. With that many units in a building of this size, they must have been like closets.

Coming across the first door by the stairs, we knocked on it briskly. A small, elderly woman with stringy gray hair cracked open the door and peered at us from behind her glasses. The chain lock was still hooked, denying entry. It was a good thing we had not expected to be popular.

“Good afternoon, ma’am. I am Detective Walker, and this is my partner, Detective Grant.” We flashed our badges. “We just have a few questions to ask you about a–.”

She slammed the door in our face.

“That went about as well as expected,” Gabe said.

We knocked on every door on his floor, but no one wanted to talk. All we had to show for our hard work was a lot of doors slammed in our faces and an hour less of time. Nobody liked the cops around here. Often, even the businesses and locals that depended on our protection were wary of us.

In a perfect world, we could have done more for them, but the precinct’s call center was a graveyard of dropped calls. We had more calls than we could ever answer in a lifetime and enough misconduct to make the calls we did answer worth less than they should have.

“No one wants to talk today,” Gabe observed.

“No,” I huffed. “It’s never that easy.”

“Would be nice if it was though,” he quipped.

After interviewing the other tenants turned into a dead end, we headed to room 226. It was the unit our victim, Nathan Ming, lived in. I looked forward to cracking open his front door, which was currently cordoned off with holographic caution tape – nothing our badge couldn’t solve; it vanished when we pressed it to the door.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

It was like people watching; the way people lived was written all over their homes. The organization, the items kept, the things displayed, and what was or wasn’t thrown away spoke volumes, and they were a good substitute in leu of a living man. We were looking for anything that could give us an idea of who he was and what he was up to.

Fortunately, it did not take us long to find the crime scene. The spot where he died greeted us as we walked in, front and center; there was no breathing room to be found. A rope was still hanging from the ceiling fan; the spot where his body was had telltale stains of blood and was cordoned off with markers. We got in position and sent Ethan a ping, tapping our index and middle fingers to our temples.

“Ethan,” I said. “We’re ready for you.”

“About time, I was beginning to think you forgot about me. It almost hurt my feelings,” he replied, sarcastic. “Get ready; this one is rather nasty.”

His voice came out loud and clear through our earpieces. They were linked with our Irises. It helped not to have to carry a phone – just one less item to worry about.

“That bad, huh?” Gabe asked.

“That bad,” Ethan confirmed.

Our Irises flickered and then displayed the scene before us with a mangled corpse splayed out across it. It was Nathan Ming alright. I recognized his face and build immediately. He was slumped, but sat upright, held in place by the weight of his body. I considered how many years he lost, dying the age he did. That was another thing about Volare City. People lived fast and died young.

“Looks like he hung himself,” Gabe said. “Or somebody else did it for him.”

A dark blue-purple ring lined his neck. His body was arranged in a prayer pose. The hands of his now detached arms were bound together with string in front of him. His legs, if they were still attached, would have thematically been kneeling. They laid to his sides.

The flesh closest to the connection points of his artificial limbs were bloody and mangled, like the flesh and body were fighting to be apart, it was a clear-cut case of rejection. However, rejection did not explain why they were laid out on the floor, encircling his body. Somebody had gone through the trouble of ripping off his limbs.

“Geez, what happened to him?” Gabe muttered. “Looks like those things mangled him.”

“Looks like more than that,” I added, raising my brows.

You would think that with synthetic limbs the issue of rejection would be resolved, if only it were that easy. Synthetic body parts were designed to emulate their natural counter parts as closely as possible; therefore, they connected straight to the nervous system instead of simply intercepting signals.

Occasionally, there were cases of toxic shock or malfunctions, when the body refused to accept the new replacements. With Nathan Ming, it was obviously a case of both. Without immunosuppressants, a person’s body could reject the implants, attempting to force them out of the body while the modifications themselves, could wreak havoc on the points of contact, refusing to let go. The union of flesh and metal was, after all, not always beautiful or seamless.

Ethan adjusted our view, spinning the man around. His back faced us now and three dots were burned into a triangular arrangement between his shoulder blades. An eye was seared into the center, reminiscent of the eye of God, a symbol of the holy trinity.

“I can see why a connection to radicalization is suspected,” I said. “Whoever did this went through a lot of trouble to arrange his body this way.”

“What are you thinking?” Gabe asked.

“I can’t really say,” Ethan replied. “It’s obvious that there are ritualistic elements here, but it’s too early to say if they’re authentic or a red herring. Additionally, there are no records of any specific groups using this combination of symbols in the system. At least, not yet.”

“Great, I love a challenge,” I said. “We should go over this place with a fine-tooth comb; make sure we don’t miss anything.”

“Already ahead of you,” Gabe said, walking off. Well, walking off might have been an overstatement, considering that it was only a few steps to the nearest wall. To say the space was cramped was an understatement. I was right when I called these things closets.

“If you’re taking the front I’ll take the back,” I said.

There wasn’t much to look at. The bed was barren, only covered in the essentials other than aged blood stains, likely caused by the rejection. The only noteworthy items other than the body were the proliferation of ether dispensers; they littered the floor. Nathan was apparently a junkie. However, ether usage was rampant and completely legal. Everyone in the city used; it was an open secret.

There was a small bin by the side of his bed made of mesh wire. It was filled to the brim with wadded-up gauze and small, crinkled sheets of paper, mostly receipts from Yang’s Diner. Yang’s Diner…. The name struck me. Where had I seen it before?

“Found something?” Gabe asked.

“Receipts mostly. To a Yang’s Diner…” I paused, thinking. “It just seems familiar.”

“Déjà vu?”

“Maybe,” I murmured, tossing it back in. “But I doubt takeout is going to help us.”

Gabe gave me a look. “Hey, you were staring at that thing like it smacked your mother. That’s not nothing. Let’s take it back with us and have Ethan take a look at it.”

“If you insist,” I muttered and added it to our evidence carrier. “There were quite a few receipts to the place, the guy might have been a regular. We might get some intel if we follow up on it.”

“See? What would you do without me?” he asked.

I would have said something about that, but I didn’t want to encourage him. The rest of the day was more of the same: walking around and studying anything that seemed out of place or special. After we were satisfied that we had scoured the whole place for clues, we packed up and headed back with everything worth taking.

Of particular interest was a chipped tooth. I spotted it wedged in a crack under the couch. Splatters of blood were found nearby. Clearly, he hadn’t gone down without a fight. Whether it belonged to the victim or one of our mystery men, it remained to be seen.

We submitted all the evidence when we got back to the precinct. It would take some time for it to be analyzed. I ended the day feeling both relieved and exhausted. This was what I needed; this was what I wanted; and this was what I asked for. I wasn’t about to go back and admit defeat now. Sleep came to me easily, and that night I dreamed of nothing.