It’s been a few days since Lieutenant Blackwood read us the riot act and we’ve been in a standstill since then. As per his lawyer’s request, a warrant was properly requested to continue investigating the backend of their server. Unfortunately for us, our request was currently trapped in pending hell, the place where applications went to die.

It was infuriating. There was no question that we had found our man. Everything about him set off blaring sirens. The least of which was that he had practically admitted it already. If we had our way, he’d already be sitting behind bars awaiting trial. Zenith must have been someone with awfully special connections.

“What can we do?” I asked.

We were huddled together in the break room. All three of us looked a bit worse for wear. Ethan in particular had taken it quite hard, unlike us, he normally kept his hands clean, and this was the first time he had been reprimanded so harshly. Gabe and I, on the other hand, favored efficiency over following the rules to the letter. You could say we weren’t above coloring outside the lines when push came to shove.

“Hard to say,” he replied. “I can’t believe it’s come to this. Now we’re down a day and back where we started from.” He swallowed hard, rubbing his temples.

“Hey, don’t take it personally,” Gabe said. “Most of the time the higher ups would have let something like this slide. A warrant for a little thing like this would have been a no-brainer. If he was just some guy, we wouldn’t have even gotten a slap on the wrist.”

“You’re not wrong,” Ethan agreed. “In the past few days, we’ve built up quite a pile of evidence and it hasn’t done us any good. If anything, the higher ups seem more frustrated now than before.”

Pulling out the small disc from his pocket, he flicked the projector screen to the server both our departments shared. Then, mouth still full, he half-heartedly scrolled to the bottom. Lines of data were blurring past our eyes.

“What is this?” I asked.

“The results of my hard work,” he said. “I matched that tooth you found using dental records yesterday. It belonged to a man named Joseph Garcia. Fortunately, he was in quite a lot of their public videos. I don’t need to wait for a warrant to process those. It didn’t take the software long to match them.”

Then he clicked on a new tab. Photos of hair strands, neatly tagged, were side by side; one of which was the exact same shade of brown as Zenith’s hair. The other strands were an assortment of shades and thicknesses. Not all of them would be related to our case, but I noticed a few black and blonde strands that could have easily belonged to the two other men in the group.

“If we could get samples from the other members, we could place them at the scene of the crime,” he said. “It’d be no trouble at all to link them with some hair sample analysis. However, getting those samples would require getting our warrant approved which takes us back to our problem.”

“What about bringing Garcia in?” I asked.

“Nah,” Gabe said. “That guy would just throw his man under the bus and get off Scot-free. Then he’d start up again somewhere else. New name, new problem. If we’re going to bring him in, we need to bring all of them in at the same time.”

“I agree,” Ethan said. “If it comes down to it, getting at least one or two of them is better than nothing, but for now we should focus on catching the one in charge. It’s just a matter of figuring out what to do next.”

That was the problem with being the good guy, the one that didn’t want to get his hands dirty. When everyone else was playing nasty tricks, it put you at a disadvantage. Trying to play by the rules was like fighting with your hand tied behind your back.

“Any luck on identifying our mystery man?” I asked.

“Not yet,” he said. “But I’m getting close. There is something I haven’t tried yet.”

He stuffed his mouth with another bite, lazily chewing as he entered commands into his holoscreen.

“I was originally using all of the videos, but Zenith’s appearance has clearly been modified over time. The facial recognition software has been having a field day, spitting up error messages left and right,” he grumbled. “If I go back to the first photos and images, I might be able to match it to images of him when he still had his natural face. That would be our best bet to track down his true identity.”

“Is there anything else the software can zero in on?” I asked.

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“Well,” Ethan said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “All of the most recent videos were filmed at their altar, but some of the earliest ones were filmed elsewhere. If we could narrow down any of those locations it could be the lead we’re looking for.”

Gabe had been suspiciously quiet, keeping his mouth shut and eating his fill, but I knew this slop wasn’t worth that level of concentration. Suddenly, he looked up and gestured at the screen.

“I took a look at the server last night,” he said. “Might be a long shot, but I thought I recognized my old campus in one of them.”

He sent us two images. One was a still from a video featuring a young Zenith and the other was an old selfie of Gabe. He looked noticeably younger here with a mischievous grin on his face. An ether drive and inhaler were in his hands opposite his buddy holding the camera.

“I had a bit of fun with Ether back in my college days,” he said. “Just the discount stuff; I couldn’t afford the whole Ether chamber treatment. Probably better that way anyway, the hard stuff is a hell of a habit to kick.”

“Wait,” I said. “You know this place, Gabe?”

“Yeah,” he said. “There was a good place to get juiced up in the back of one of the old buildings on campus. The whole thing was boarded up and falling apart, no one went back there unless they were planning to get in a little trouble.”

“You’re saying that he might be an alumnus of Penteract University?” Ethan asked.

Gabe nodded, back to his food.

“I’ll run him against all the students that went there in the year the video was taken,” Ethan said. “That might just do the trick.”

After lunch, our punishment files were waiting for us. Cleaning duties were what you got when you pissed off the higher ups. We were assigned the absolute mess that passed for documentation in the last five years. The fact that we had this dumped on us in the middle of an investigation wasn’t lost on us either. They were trying to slow us down.

Rubbing my forehead, I closed my eyes, my head drooped. Suddenly, the desk was looking rather comfortable. I laid down to rest for just a moment, but before I knew it, my fatigue caught up to me.

Figures made of light, the same ones from Neo-Luminaries’ animation, were dancing in front of me. They beckoned me forwards and I followed them. Soon we were tipping over into a free fall. The chill of the ether chamber made me shiver.

It felt like we fell for ages. I thought we might never reach the bottom, but then we did, and it was a thick and viscous fluid that softened our fall. I felt wires connect with the back of my neck and snake throughout my body, ending in my fingertips.

My companions unraveled, their skin coming off in undulating sheets and wings sprouted from their backs as their arms embraced me. The fluid began to drag me under; I was being consumed whole and I felt warm and safe like an infant in the womb. Then there was ringing, and I was back at my desk.

“What is it?” I gasped, quick to answer the call.

“What’s wrong?” Ethan asked. “You’re out of breath.”

I reached behind my neck to feel for ports that weren't there.

“It’s nothing,” I lied, eager to move on. “Did you find something?”

I put the call on speaker; Gabe would want to be a part of this too.

“Yeah, I think I got him,” Ethan said. “It’s an almost perfect match. Height, build, gait, all of it. His medical history is extensive, and it gave him away. The guy was sickly, and he’s had a lot of work done over the years. Gabe was right on the money. He is, in fact, a Penteract University alumnus.”

“Nice going, Gabe,” I said. “If you keep this up, we might actually catch this guy.”

“I have my moments.” he quipped. “Try not to get too impressed.”

Ethan transferred us the files. We were looking at the true face of Zenith now, and he was nearly unrecognizable. The Zenith we saw was smooth, soft, and plastic. By contrast, the man in the photo was gaunt with slightly drooping features that seemed far too large for his face.

“His name is Dylan Hearst, and he is the son of Arthur Hearst, the president of Polar Water Industries, the sole supplier of water for all of Volare City,” Ethan said. “It’s big money. If I had to guess, I’d bet his father has been funding all the Neo-Luminaries’ activities up until now. I’d also wager that the lawyer came on his father’s behest.”

“Yeah, that would do it,” Gabe huffed. “His dad is probably rolling in it; a guy like that could pay for all of his son’s extracurriculars and still have enough loose change left over to put a lot of pressure on the higher ups.”

“You’re telling me he’s untouchable,” I said.

“Not quite,” Ethan answered. “What I’m saying is that we’re going to have to be careful and play it by ear. This isn’t a man that will go down easy.”

I wasn’t an idealist anymore. I knew when not to put my faith in the system and it seemed like the longer I worked in law enforcement, the more frequent that became.

“Do you think he knows what his son has been up to?” I asked.

“I doubt it,” Ethan said. “Dylan was the child from an affair, you’re too young to remember, but it was a huge scandal. Tabloids had him front and center with his head covered in a blanket; his mom tried to protect him from the press. From what I gather, his father didn’t do much of anything outside of paying child support.”

“So, you’re saying he’s a deadbeat?” I asked.

“Basically,” Ethan said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s just been throwing money at the problem all these years, trying to keep his little secret under wraps. Dylan was everywhere and then he was nowhere at all. His father bailed him out this time, but now that Dylan has been suspected of murder, it might change things.”

Running the Neo-Luminaries couldn’t be cheap. On top of their building, which was a retrofitted Ether Bar, there were also the bills for all his adherents’ modifications. Considering how cramped and rundown Nathan Ming’s apartment was, it was safe to say that he could not have paid for them himself. I suspected that was true for the other three too.

“If daddy cuts him off, he’s going to get desperate,” Gabe said. “We should keep an eye on him, make sure he doesn’t do anything drastic.”

“I get the feeling Zenith will make a move soon. It’s only a matter of time and we are going to be waiting for him when he does,” Ethan said.