Something about the way days felt had gotten me in the habit of counting them. I was carefully marking them off on my virtual calendar, writing numbers inside big red circles. Now, there were three days marked that way, three days since the funeral. You could say that I felt inverted or turned inside out. I hadn’t taken any time off at all, but I was walking on once again on new and unsteady legs, like I was out of practice.

It reminded me of when I was small, and I would steal my father’s work shoes so I could play pretend. Death and loss do strange things to you. They make the old new again. They make long healed scars into freshly open wounds. My waking life now felt strange and intangible in a way I couldn’t define.

Shortly after I arrived at the precinct, my phone rang, the metallic ring tone signaling a work call. Call me old-fashioned, but I always liked the sound rotary phones made. Maybe I longed for simpler times. People have always longed for times and places that were long past, no longer existed, or perhaps never did; I wouldn’t be the first.

“I’ve got something for you; you’re going to like it,” he said. It was Ethan, my older brother. He was the first to follow in our father’s footsteps into the field of criminal investigations. Being the younger sibling, I had to wait my turn; it was a bitter pill to swallow.

“Well, then don’t keep me waiting,” I said.

“Lana, you are as impatient as ever.”

“What can I say?” I replied. “It runs in the family.”

Ethan and I were both prone to overworking, pacing, and tapping. On particularly bad days, when we still lived together, you could hear both of us from across the house. Noah, the least neurotic of the three of us, would occasionally groan about it. He said just watching us made him anxious. The worst, according to him, was when we did it in the dark and he could have sworn the house was haunted.

“So, it does,” he agreed.

Then he paused to add Gabe to our call.

“I’ve got a lead for you,” Ethan continued. “I ID’ed your mystery woman.”

“I do like that,” I confirmed, Gabe chuckled in agreement.

Bingo. Working cases like these were like following threads. In some parts of Asia, they believe in red threads of fate. Often those threads are said to connect lovers, but it could connect anyone fated to meet. I liked to think fate worked on our side as well. That was our job, we were the ones that interpreted the strings.

“Of course you do,” he said. “Your mystery woman’s name is Willow Lee. Age twenty-six, the same age as the victim. She has a history of misdemeanors for public ether intoxication, and disorderly conflicts mostly due to loitering and confrontations with angry shopkeepers. Small scale stuff. It seems like she often shows up in plazas and squares around the downtown area and that does include the cluster of Asian shops and restaurants in unofficial Chinatown.”

“So, how do we find this lady?” Gabe asked.

“I’ve gotten the metro police department to agree to ping us next time she shows up.”

The call ended not long before the metro notified us that she was spotted in the main square. One of the shopkeepers had called in a complaint again. Normally, low priority calls like this were ignored barring grievous injury, but this time was an exception since we had a vested interest in meeting her in the flesh.

Some people ran on sight on cops, but knowing her type, we wouldn’t have to worry about that. Loudspeaker types often had to be dragged out kicking and screaming; self-importance and self-righteousness came hand in hand.

When we arrived in the bustling business plaza, she was still there, standing front and center. She was standing on a small wooden, makeshift podium. Her hazy eyes stared out into the crowd, searching but aimless. Long, dark brown hair fell to her waist, and unmistakably metallic limbs gleamed from underneath the edges of her clothing. Hyper-realistic artificial skin had been commonplace for decades; therefore, the decision to show off her chrome was by choice, not necessity.

Walking up to her, we flashed our badges.

“We’re with the VCPD, the special crimes unit,” I said. “I’m Detective Walker and my partner here is Detective Grant.” He nodded at her.

“Ma'am, are you Willow Lee?” he asked.

She stared at us for a second, clearly confused. Her unfocused eyes finally cleared and in a moment of lucidity she answered.

“I go by Willow Starlight, Starlight for short,” she said. “Lee is my dead name.”

“I see,” I said. “Would you be willing to answer a few questions for us, Miss Lee?”

This time, she was a bit faster to respond. Despite her reflexes being clearly dulled by whatever she had taken, she did not seem wholly incoherent. That was good news for us. She was no good to us if she was too inebriated to speak.

“It’s Starlight,” she corrected, this time annoyed.

“Don’t mind my partner here, Miss Starlight,” Gabe said without missing a beat. “She just misspoke a bit, no harm, no foul, right? Now, we have a few questions for you. Mind answering them for us?”

“Is there a problem with my being here?” she asked, squinting. “We haven’t done anything wrong. We have the right to free speech.”

Free speech. I believed in it too, anyone worth anything did. Unfortunately, in my line of work, it often was a headache waiting to happen whenever I came across someone who parroted it to me.

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“And who is “we” exactly?” I asked.

“Our group, we are called the Neo-Luminaries,” she said. “We help people become better, more.”

“And how do you do that?” I asked.

“We teach people how to transcend the confines of flesh. Flesh was meant to be with metal and organic with chrome. Those who follow us become better versions of themselves,” she said, smiling and looking quite self-satisfied.

I glanced at her arms. From a distance, I had already noted them, but on closer inspection, the resemblance was uncanny. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the make and model were identical to the ones we found with Nathan Ming, our victim. They were unusual in more ways than one. The first of which was that they were built for power. There was no reason for a civilian to be walking around with things like that.

“Well, that explains your shiny new arms alright,” Gabe interjected, tilting his head towards her metallic limbs. “Wouldn’t want to cover up all that chrome with a cheap imitation of the real thing, would we?”

“No, we would not,” she said. “We in the Neo-Luminaries are proud of our modified bodies. We are not ashamed to be both. To be both is to become closer to perfection.”

“I see,” I said. “That’s interesting. We believe you may know someone that shared that same view. Does the name, Nathan Ming, ring any bells?”

“Nathan Ming?” she asked. Her lip quivered, and for a moment I thought I saw fear. “We were friends. Did something happen to him?”

Bingo. I must have hit the mark again. These two were related, after all. In my mind’s eye, I could see all the threads stretching out together, and this was yet another thread to follow. Of course, if I were honest, I’d admit that I didn’t really believe in fate. It was just a nice idea, like karma or heaven. It made you feel safe. Better.

“So, you are familiar with him then?”

“Yes, we used to practice together,” she said, nodding. “He was a wonderful member of the Neo-Luminaries. We have suffered a great loss to be without him.” She bowed her head slightly and clasped her hands together in front of her in prayer. It was a grand show of mourning, but it seemed inauthentic. If I didn’t know better, I would have said that it was rehearsed.

“I’m sorry to tell you this, Miss Starlight, but your friend, Nathan Ming, has passed away. We have been investigating this case as a murder since last Friday, when he was found unresponsive in his home. Can you tell us the last time you saw him?”

“I don't know what to say,” she said. “I don't think I can help. The last time I saw him was a month ago. That was the last time he came to worship with us.”

“Can you tell us where you were on the night of Mr. Ming’s death?” I asked.

Pausing to think, she retreated inside her head. Slowly, she swayed on her feet. Back and forth. Back and forth. Perhaps it was an act of self-soothing, like a child on a rocking horse. I wondered where her head was; it was like she was in her own little world. If I were to blame anything for it, I would have blamed Ether.

“I was at a karaoke bar with my sisters,” she said, nodding.

“Can they confirm your whereabouts that night?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” she said. “We were at the Three Skies Karaoke bar. The three of us made a reservation there a week ago for Friday night. It shouldn’t be any trouble for you at all.”

Another sign. She was prepared and answered rather specifically. We had just informed her that her friend had just died, and she seemed about as disturbed as if we had told her that we had just burned her toast. The only signs of distress she exhibited seemed to be related to being questioned, not the reality of his death. I felt no true sense of longing or loss, just anxiety.

“Can you think of anyone that might have had a grudge against him?” I continued.

She averted her gaze. “No, none that I can think of. Nathan was a gentle soul, and he was a model Luminary.”

Having finished our line of questioning with Willow Lee, we left her to her own devices. We stayed for a minute and watched her from a distance. She swayed on her feet a bit more, sucking on her lips, before she held her loudspeaker back to her lips and picked up where she left off. As we made our way out of the square, a shopkeeper scowled at us from a window, clearly dissatisfied that we had not sent Willow packing.

“Not our job, buddy. Call metro if you have a problem with her,” Gabe bellowed.

The shopkeeper defeated, scowled, and retreated inside his shop. Then, Gabe turned back to me, his expression expectant. I already knew what he was thinking.

“She’s suspicious, but let’s find out more before we start pointing fingers,” I said.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “I’ve got a feeling about this one. Let’s follow this lead, might take us straight to the killer.”

“Did you see her eyes?” I asked. “It was like no one was home.”

“Could’ve been ether,” he said. “Wouldn’t surprise me. This city is crawling with Ether junkies.”

Although Ether wasn’t officially legalized until recently, no one has bothered enforcing its prohibition in decades. Even before the bill was passed, Ether bars openly lined main streets and dotted the corners of the downtown districts. Whether for better or worse, the proliferation of Ether wasn’t our problem.

“We should look into her group,” he said. “What did she call it?”

“The Neo-Luminaries,” I said. “It can’t be a coincidence. Our victim had quite a few modifications and the way they were arranged postmortem indicated more than just a healthy interest in knolling.”

“No kidding,” Gabe said. “Whoever killed our guy was some sick bastard laying it all out like that.”

Few VCPD personal bothered to take proper documentation, but I was a stickler about that sort of thing. Today, it paid off because the video I took of her included that fancy little sign by her feet. There was a QR code on her sign and I had a hunch about where it went. Opening it confirmed my suspicions, it was a server.

“There’s an address listed on their server,” I said. “Let’s start there.”

“Good thinking,” he said, inputting the address into our navigator. “We might as well check it out; we’re practically on top of it already.”

A few minutes and an underpass later, we arrived at a small, nondescript building. The lack of pomp and flare was enough to raise our eyebrows. Willow’s description of their philosophy was enough to lead us to expect all metal and hard edges, the architectural equivalent of a tesseract square. Instead, the building in front of us looked more like an abandoned shop front.

Perhaps it had been an ether bar at some point. There were telltale signs, like the faint hint of connection ports and floating chambers visible from the tinted windows. Both of which were signatures of the sensory-elevating drug Ether.

Ether rocked the scene when it came onto the market, as a hybrid indulgence, a combination of both digital and chemical pleasure, it didn’t wreck your body the way traditional hard drugs did. In short, you suffered less for the same high.

A connection to a neurochip implant as well as a physical floating chamber created the sensation of transcendence. When administered correctly, users could be in a haze for days, if not weeks, on end, happily swaying back and forth and sucking on their lips, hazy-eyed and far away. However, most just stuck to the discount version, which required nothing other than a neurochip download and an electronic inhaler.

Peering through the glass on the door, there was no sign of anyone there. However, when I turned to look away, I could had sworn that I caught a pair of eyes looking back at us. I did a double take. There was nothing there when I looked again. If anyone was here right now, they didn’t want to talk.

“Let it go, Lana,” Gabe said. “We don’t have a warrant; they don’t have to let us in.”

“I hate to admit it, Gabe, but you’re right. For now, let’s head back to the precinct,” I said. “We should at least let Ethan know what we found.”