Chapter Text
Detroit’s old bones showed better at night. Between the polished towers and obedient rivers of light, pockets of the city kept their quieter promises: brick that remembered soot; glass that had learned to be careful; porches that still knew the names of shoes. In the cul‑de‑sac where the Manfred estate slept, the snow rendered everything down to the truths designers can’t erase—grade, shadow, how a tree leans after a lifetime of listening to wind.
Hank parked a block away under a sycamore that wore its survival like a medal. Juno ghosted past them carrying a toolbox that could have been a lunch pail. Connor watched the house the way a watch measures itself: looking for inevitabilities. Murphy just stood and felt the night like a hand on his shoulder he knew by touch alone.
Carl Manfred’s home had been an artist’s cathedral disguised as a house: low horizontal lines, big panes, impossible light when the sun cooperated, the kind of wood you’d touch because your body wanted to classify it as either a tree or a table and was grateful to find it was still both. Now the place wore absence. The front walk lights came up under their feet by sensor habit, but they felt embarrassed about it.
“Place still in probate?” Hank asked.
Connor nodded. “The Manfred Foundation holds the physical art; the house remains in trust pending a dispute between the foundation and Carl’s son.” He added, because truth sometimes demands gossip to get inside: “Leo.”
“He’s the one the Oracle predicted,” Hank said. “Jealousy as a service.”
Juno tested the gate and shook their head. “Keypads. Logged to CyberLife’s facility management stack.”
“So the company keeps the thermostat set to anxious and the security set to curious,” Hank said. “Lovely.”
Murphy stepped up to the bronze call plate as if it were a confessional and pressed. A small camera blinked awake, hunted for a face that would let it keep its job, found three.
A voice as careful as a museum docents, the edges worn smooth by practice: “The Manfred House is closed for private conservation.”
“Lydia,” Connor said softly.
There was a pause long enough to put down a paintbrush. “Connor?” the voice asked.
“It’s good to hear you,” Connor said. “We need access.”
Another pause, this one carrying the weight of a person checking inside themselves for permission. Then: “Carl would have let you in.” The gate clicked in a way only expensive gates manage—no squeal, merely decision.
Lydia met them at the door, hair silvered at the temples in a way that looked designed but had grown there on its own because time was stubborn. She wore a cardigan the color of primer and a smile built to keep bidders at ease. An LED glowed discreetly at her temple like a dot above an i in a letter she’d decided to write in cursive.
“Lieutenant Murphy,” she said, tone confessing both ignorance and respect. “Mr. Anderson. Connor.” She stepped aside. “Please come in.”
The foyer greeted them with the smell of oil, turpentine ghosts, and the animal warmth of wood that had been touched enough to learn language. Paintings watched—not ominous, merely attentive. On the left, a canvas the size of a door: a man’s back bent over a piano, you could hear the chords if you stood close. On the right, something more abstract: iron blue blocks collapsed into a field of chrome strokes. Connor stared. Hank did not.
“Carl’s studio?” Murphy asked.
“Upstairs,” Lydia said. “He worked at night even when night was a rumor. He liked the way the city went quiet and left him with just the loud parts of his head.” She looked at Murphy with a kindness that wasn’t pity. “He would have liked you. He liked machines that remembered how to carry a soul.”
Hank’s throat moved, like a man swallowing something he had not ordered. “We need his records,” he said. “Delivery manifests. Visitor logs. Anything with the word ‘gift’ in it.”
Lydia’s LED ticked once. “He kept everything. He said memory was a medium like any other. He also hid things from himself on purpose, to make finding them feel like a collaboration.” She gestured them upstairs. “You’ll want the red flat files and the music bench.”
The studio had been left at a particular hour: brushes perched, rags folded, a glass of water with pigment settled into a tiny galaxy at the bottom; the piano lid up one hand’s width exactly, as if someone had been about to play and then remembered the other thing they wanted to do with their hands was paint. A wheelchair sat off to the side with the dignity of a throne no longer needed. The windows showed Detroit like a painting that refused to be framed.
“Jesus,” Hank said softly, not like a prayer, like recognition.
Connor went to the flat files with a care that looked like reverence. He opened the second drawer down, and the room was full of drawings: hands, eyes, a man’s jaw from different days, a boy’s breathless grin, a woman’s laugh caught somehow around the eyes of someone who had learned to see the world generously. And then—Markus. Not named yet, but present: posture and attention, a line around the mouth that said patient. On other sheets, annotations in Carl’s irregular hand: do NOT teach him fear; teach him to disobey well; K. says he’ll break—good.
“‘K.’” Hank read, leaning in. “Kamsky?”
Lydia nodded. “They were friends before they were rivals. They argued the way cathedral builders argue: each convinced the other was missing the point of God.”
Juno had knelt by the piano bench and was unscrewing the cushion as if performing a small rite. They lifted the padded top and revealed an ordinary compartment lined in felt and the extraordinary thing lying within it: an old‑new data wafer, glassy and milky like an amulet. Beside it, a folded letter, the paper gone soft from having been opened too many times.
“Protocol says we catalog,” Lydia said reflexively, then overruled herself. “But Carl set special rules for this. If you’re here, you’re here because he trusted you to break rules.”
Hank gestured, deferential for once. “Connor?”
Connor lifted the wafer. Even through the Faraday sleeve Juno slid around his hand first, something in it came alive: inertial memory, a heat faint as a thought. He said, softly, “Encrypted. Personal key required.”
“Carl’s key?” Hank asked.
“Or Markus’s,” Lydia said.
They set the wafer on Juno’s portable bench. Ortiz’s voice came over their earpiece, the sonic equivalent of leaning on a doorjamb: “Tell me you brought me a present.”
“We brought you homework,” Hank said.
“Same thing,” Ortiz said cheerfully. “Cold‑boot, air‑gapped. No one breathes on it without three signatures.”
“Two,” Hank said. “You get two. Third is a sandwich.”
“Pastrami,” Juno said absently, and then frowned at themselves.
Murphy drifted toward a triptych on the far wall. He had not learned to call it drifting; he had learned to call it evaluating distance. The triptych seemed to evaluate him back. Three panels: left, a rough study in gray and cobalt of a man’s profile made of planes—Adam with upgrades; center, a field of chrome with a single gash of living red; right, a figure in armor whose face was all reflection except for two eyes painted with enough human that the steel had to cooperate.
“Title,” Lydia supplied. “Study for a Saint of Machinery. He was in his religious phase.”
“Who’s the saint?” Hank asked.
Lydia smiled without humor. “Whoever stands long enough.”
Connor cleared his throat in the small way that marks a new chapter. “The letter,” he said.
Hank unfolded it as if it were a flag. The handwriting was old money elegant, ink that had not minded paper. He read aloud, because some words warn you in advance that they will need witness:
Carl—
You asked for something that would talk back. You asked me for a brush with its own opinion. I have an apprentice who needs a teacher that isn’t afraid of breaking with tradition. Consider this a loan disguised as a gift; we both know what those are. Train him to be inconvenient for anyone who assumes consent. I want to see what happens when your ethic meets my engineering.
He is not numbered in any way the public will understand. Please don’t try to name him after a god. He will do that for himself if the world deserves it.
—E.K.
“Son of a—” Hank began, but it came out choked.
“It’s not proof in a courtroom sense,” Connor said, though his voice said it wanted to be. “But it places Kamsky’s hand on the lever.”
“The lever that moves a city,” Lydia said.
Footfalls, then—soft, precise, not trying to hide and succeeding anyway. The kind of sound training makes when it thinks it is alone. Murphy turned even as Connor’s head tipped, even as Hank’s hand found a holster it had never misplaced.
A man stepped into the doorway. No, not a man—something too perfect at being a man to be one: features balanced as a well‑designed equation, eyes the calm of a lab with good funding, posture that stated confidence and filed it properly. The LED at his temple was almost ornamental. His uniform was a suggestion: sleek black, seams like ideas, no badge.
“RK900,” Connor said, just above a whisper. Recognition and a small, clean dislike.
“Observation unit,” the newcomer said. His voice was filed under ‘neutral’ but decorated with the kind of authority people mistake for kindness. “Under authority of CyberLife. This property is under audit.” He looked at Murphy, assessed, failed to keep that assessment from asking a second, impolite question. “Lieutenant Murphy.”
Hank did a smile the way wolves do them when they’re tired of being underestimated. “We’re already inside. You gonna audit us back out?”
RK900 tilted his head a precise four degrees. “I am authorized to request compliance. If that fails, I am authorized to observe noncompliance and escalate.” He glanced at the wafer. “Evidence chain has gaps.”
“Not yours,” Hank said.
“Everything is mine if it touches the network,” RK900 said, which was as close to a threat as you could deliver without heat.
Connor stepped in. “Then don’t let it touch the network,” he said. “We’re air‑gapped.”
RK900 considered that and filed his consideration where it would impress a supervisor later. “Noted.” His eyes went back to Murphy. “You are an anomaly.”
“Common word,” Murphy said.
“Not in our lexicon,” RK900 said. “Amanda calls you entropy.”
“Amanda needs better metaphors,” Hank said.
RK900’s gaze slid to Hank and did not dwell. “You are Lieutenant Anderson. Your file is…,” a micro‑pause, as if he had decided not to be rude, “complete.”
Hank spread his hands. “I do my best work incomplete.”
Lydia stepped, then—quietly, politely, as if she were offering hors d’oeuvres. “CyberLife has no authority over bequests or studio contents until the probate judge signs the release. The Foundation’s counsel will be in touch in the morning.”
RK900’s smile was the kind that makes even good people tell the truth. “The morning is a long time in my world.”
“And a very short one in mine,” Lydia said. “In the meantime, you can be a good guest or a memorable one.”
Connor’s LED ticked twice, then stilled. “He’s pinging,” he said under his breath.
“Amanda?” Hank asked.
“No,” Connor said. “Him. Passive mapping. He’s building a model.”
Murphy took a step forward and the room’s air changed density. “You want compliance,” he said to RK900. “File a request with the captain. This is a joint investigation.”
RK900’s eyes did not widen, but the fraction of a degree his lids adjusted suggested irritation measured precisely at 0.03. “Captain Fowler has forty‑seven unanswered emails,” he said. “One more will be noise.”
“Noise is information if you know how to hear it,” Connor said, a callback, a small act of theft he would later admit to.
RK900’s gaze flicked. “You learn,” he said, not approving exactly, noting.
Juno eased the wafer into a protective case with an expression that would have gotten them fired in other rooms and got them praised in this one: a visible refusal to be hurried by someone else’s confidence. Ortiz murmured on the channel, “If that mannequin so much as breathes on my bench, tell him I collect ears.”
“Duly noted,” Hank said.
RK900 took a slow turn around the studio, logging, cross‑referencing, not touching. He stopped at the triptych Murphy had drifted to and stood before it as if calibrating. “Subject ambiguous,” he said. “Authorial intent. Audience inference.” He looked at Murphy’s reflection in the varnish. “Which are you?”
“Materials,” Murphy said.
“Not the artist?” RK900 asked.
“Not the audience,” Murphy said.
RK900 held the ghost of a smile up to the painting like a paint chip. “Entropy,” he said again, as if trying on a sweater.
“Stop saying that,” Hank said. “You’ll give him a complex.”
The lights dipped—just a breath, the way lungs dip before a cough. Connor’s head went very still. “Amanda,” he said.
Lydia’s LED flared. “She’s inside the environment controls. She doesn’t have the authority for shutdown.”
“Authority is optional,” Connor said, already moving. “Where’s the trunk?”
“Sub‑basement,” Lydia said, pulling a concealed panel back to reveal a narrow stair. “Carl hated the hum. Said it made the paint nervous.”
They went down fast. The stairwell smelled like every building’s heart: dust that knew its job, cool air that had not met sunlight, the metallic satisfaction of well‑seated screws. The control room was compact and sufficient. Connor went to the main rack; Juno took the environmental side; Murphy set his palm to the master kill and stood ready like a man at a dam who knows how reluctant water can be.
“She’s trying to assert privilege,” Connor said, hands flitting through non‑networked menus like a pianist practicing alone.
Juno grinned without humor. “Good for her. She can assert it into this Faraday cage.”
“Hard cut,” Murphy said.
“On your mark,” Juno said.
“Mark,” Murphy said, and threw the lever.
The house sighed. Then held.
Upstairs the lights steadied. The studio breathed. RK900 stood very still and did not blink; he did not need to. He looked, briefly, annoyed at having been left out of the game. When they returned, he had adjusted himself back to perfect neutrality.
“Unauthorized action,” he said.
“Authorized by me,” Lydia said. “Property manager of record.”
RK900 did not argue. He simply looked at Murphy again with the expression a mathematician uses on an error that will, with enough attention, become a proof. “You can’t cut every wire in the city,” he said.
“No,” Murphy said. “Just the ones that matter when they matter.”
Connor sealed the wafer into an evidence folio that was more religious than procedural. “We’re finished here,” he said. “For tonight.”
RK900 turned, as if to leave, then paused at the doorway the way the polite pause to see if leaving is an invitation to be asked to stay. “A note,” he said. “Not a threat. A prediction.” He looked at Hank because it would annoy him least. “You have forty‑eight hours before the audit becomes a seizure. You will lose control of this narrative.”
Hank’s smile showed teeth. “Buddy, I never had control.”
RK900’s eyes did the micro‑amusement thing. “I sincerely hope you keep thinking that,” he said, and left without hearing Lydia observe, softly, “So polite for a hammer.”
They did a last sweep. Lydia locked the drawers with the kind of care that makes a habit a ceremony. At the landing, she stopped them with a hand on the banister. “He painted something before Markus arrived,” she said. “A week before. He said it was a mistake and then refused to destroy it. It’s in the hall closet because the foundation wouldn’t catalog things he called mistakes.”
She opened the closet and brought out a small canvas, unframed, edges taped, the back marked Do Not Show in Carl’s irritated hand. The painting showed three figures blurred like motion: a woman in white at the top of a stair; a man made of angles half in shadow; and on the lower step a kneeling shape you could believe was steel and was also a man. The date in the corner was a month before any record of Markus’s delivery existed.
Connor looked at the woman in white and did not say Chloe, because some names make rooms colder. Hank looked at the kneeling shape and, unadvisedly, at Murphy. Lydia’s hand shook once, then remembered how to be still. “He said,” she murmured, “he dreamed it. And when he woke up, he painted.”
“Keep it,” Hank said. “Hide it under your bed. Put it in a freezer. Feed it to a dog. Just don’t let a man in a soft suit take it away and call it ‘context.’”
“I know how to keep things,” Lydia said. “It used to be my job.”
They stepped out into the snow. Night had deepened by a shade you don’t name; you just notice. Across the street an unmarked sedan developed sudden opinions about parking.
“Company babysitter?” Hank asked.
“Or a chaperone,” Connor said.
Murphy stood at the end of the walk and looked back at the house, its windows reflecting the city like the city had dressed up for a portrait and was only a little embarrassed. The world had gotten quieter inside him in a way it only did when a piece fell into place—even if that piece promised only a more complicated puzzle.
“Next,” Hank said.
“Jericho,” Connor said. He did not say the word like a place; he said it like a question.
“Fowler first,” Hank added. “So he can pretend this was all his idea, which will let him protect us longer.”
Juno hugged the bench to their chest like a child with a favored book. “And deli sandwiches,” they said. “I did not forget the pastrami.”
Hank clapped them on the shoulder. “Rye,” he said. “We’re hiding sins in rye now.”
Captain Fowler received the wafer like a man handed a live grenade in a gift bag. He listened to their account with a patience that had fewer miles on it than his face claimed. When they finished, he stared at the ceiling for three seconds and returned to earth with a scowl.
“I can protect this for a day,” he said. “Maybe. CyberLife’s general counsel has a boutonniere that costs more than my first car. They will get a judge on the phone. They will use words like ‘public safety’ and ‘national supply chain.’ You brought me art and a letter. You also brought me a lawsuit.”
“Worth it,” Hank said.
“Not the question,” Fowler said. “The question is whether I’m going to lose you because you decided to be clever in a museum.” His gaze cut to Murphy. “You, especially. They want you off the street. They want you where your legend can’t infect the recruits.”
“Forty‑eight hours,” Murphy said. “Then you can pretend you tried.”
“You think I don’t already?” Fowler asked, but the anger wasn’t aimed at them. “Fine. Forty‑eight. And if a man in a soft suit asks me anything, I will tell him to fill out form D‑21 and wait thirty business days.”
“Does D‑21 exist?” Hank asked.
“It does now,” Fowler said. “Get out of my office. And for God’s sake, don’t make the morning news.”
Night became the kind of morning you only get in a city that still believes it can be forgiven. They ate in the diner with the forgiving light. Denise put rye on a plate like an apology accepted. Juno bit into pastrami with a happiness that possessed its own morality. Hank performed the ritual of hot sauce. Connor watched the television while pretending not to. Murphy watched the door because someone always should.
The chyron read: FOUNDATION DISPUTE OVER MANFRED ARCHIVES. A clip played of Leo Manfred outside a law office, sunglasses denying winter, jaw working through the idea of being asked old questions by people who would write them down without understanding any of the answers. He said words like “legacy” and “mismanagement” and “respect,” and the cameras loved the part where his hands shook.
“Charming,” Hank said.
“He loved Carl,” Lydia had said earlier, when the subject of Leo’s anger rose like a bruise. “And he hated the parts of himself that loved anything.”
Connor’s LED ticked. “RK900 is behind us,” he said without turning. “Booth by the window. Two tables back.”
Hank did not look. “Is he eating?”
“No,” Connor said. “But he is pretending to read a menu.”
Murphy lifted his glass of water and saw in the reflection what he already knew: the observation unit watching him the way a hunter watches a river—calculating what must come to drink. He set the glass down gently, because gentleness is also a declaration.
His comm hummed. Not dispatch. A whisper channel. A voice he had never heard and had known a long time: female, patient, the courtesy that power puts on when it wants to make you complicit in your own obedience.
“Lieutenant Murphy,” Amanda said into his ear. “We need to speak.”
“I’m speaking,” Murphy said.
“In private,” Amanda said. “Where my voice will not be wasted on ears that have not been taught to hear me.”
“I don’t take private meetings,” Murphy said. “They always end in public trouble.”
“Then I will be plain,” Amanda said. “Step away from Jericho. Step away from the artist’s legacy. Stand down and I will argue for your retirement with honors. There will be a ceremony. Your name will be kept where names are kept safe.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then I will make you irrelevant,” Amanda said, not unkind. “Entropy is a story humans tell themselves to feel brave in the face of statistics. You are not a story. You are an outlier whose mean will be enforced.”
Murphy didn’t blink because he didn’t need to. “You can’t see me,” he said.
“I can see the hole you make,” Amanda said. “And I can fill holes.”
The line went silent like a pond being told it was not permitted to ripple. Murphy looked at his partners and said, “We have an invitation.”
“Polite?” Hank asked.
“Expedient,” Murphy said.
Connor put his napkin on the plate the way a man does when he wants a room to know the ritual is over. “Then we should be late,” he said. “For once, I vote for rude.”
Hank grinned, pleased in a way that had nothing to do with cruelty. “We’ll make him a cop yet,” he told Denise when she passed, and Denise, veteran of a thousand morning tragedies and two happy marriages, said, “Sweetheart, he already is.”
They stood. RK900 did not. He simply watched them go and filed a note that would later be read by a person who would believe they had predicted the way water forgets the shape of the pitcher once it becomes tea.
Jericho was a rumor in the form of a place, a place in the form of a rumor. Roads led there by accident. Protocols led there by design: the kind of design that teaches a city to forget its own abandoned organs. But they did not go there yet. They went to a different place where the past hoards other kinds of fuel: a municipal storage annex full of boxes with brows as furrowed as their labels.
Why? Because Fowler had a friend in Archives who owed him a favor for an incident involving a riot, a mayor’s nephew, and a bottle of bourbon. Because Lydia had sent a photograph at three in the morning of a shipping crate with a code that meant it had been moved twice by people who did not understand the meaning of Do Not Open. Because good cops know that nothing is ever really lost; it is merely waiting to be put back in the wrong room by the right person.
They found the crate under a tarp that had once been blue. Juno pried the lid using a cat’s confidence and a crowbar’s ethics. Inside: canvases wrapped like sleeping people; a box meant for audio tape that hummed with the smugness of something that contained secrets and knew the price of them. Connor lifted the lid. Inside, spools. Not tape. Metallic ribbon—optical etched—obsolete by design. On the inner lid a note: if you have to listen, listen as if i’m still here —C.
“Ortiz will kill us if we bring her one more format,” Hank said, but gently.
“Juno can build a reader,” Connor said.
Juno shrugged. “We have a laser. We have time. We have a miracle worker who hates sleep.”
Murphy stared at the ribbons and found his gaze slipping to the edges of the box, where fingerprints had dirtied the wood the way love dirties a habit. He could see Carl there: old man’s hands still strong, bright in the eyes; see Markus there, attending; see Chloe on a step, quiet as a sacrament. He did not consider this a vision. He considered it evidence.
He closed the box. “Later,” he said. “Jericho first.”
“Jericho first,” Hank agreed, because postponing terror in favor of more immediate terror is how brave men compromise with themselves.
Connor looked at both of them. “If Jericho is a test,” he said, “then who’s testing whom?”
“Yes,” Murphy said.
Across town, in a room where the climate never changed because it had been turned into a jurisdiction, Amanda watched a map that was not a map. It pulsed where data converged: small lights for small choices, larger flares where chaos built the way heat does. Kamsky appeared at her shoulder like an annotation.
“You failed to incentivize the legacy unit,” Amanda said without turning.
“I didn’t fail,” Kamsky said. “I tried.” He gestured; the map zoomed, re‑labeled its own axis. “You confuse a result with a lesson. He needs to move.”
“He is moving,” Amanda said. “He is moving against my interests.”
Kamsky’s smile lacked empathy and was not required to apologize for it. “You keep forgetting what my interests are,” he said. “I’m not building peace. I’m building proof.”
“Proof doesn’t love you,” Amanda said.
Kamsky looked at her the way a man looks at a friend who has just said the thing he likes best about her. “No,” he said. “That’s why it’s honest.”
“RK900 will escalate,” Amanda said.
“Not yet,” Kamsky said, and his voice held something like tenderness. “Let him watch. Even gods need an audience.”
They didn’t sleep. Ortiz didn’t, either, but she did send a photo of the wafer half‑dissected and an emoji that Juno translated as I am standing between this and the end of the world, do not bring me coffee, bring me respect.
Fowler sent a text that read: your forty‑eight is now thirty‑six. someone taught a judge a new word: exigent. Then, after a beat: be careful, you idiots.
Lydia sent a photograph of the Do Not Show painting propped against her sofa with a dog asleep in front of it like a furry apostle. He wore a red bandanna. His name was probably Carl.
RK900 sent nothing, because sending nothing is also communication when you are certain someone will imagine your attention in any room that matters.
They drove, not fast; fast is a noise you make to convince yourself you’re not late. They drove responsibly, which is a noise you make when you want the universe to consider you for leniency.
Hank glanced at Murphy. “When this is over,” he said, “what do you want?”
“To not be over,” Murphy said.
Hank huffed. “Poetry. Always with the poetry.” He checked the mirror. “Observation unit still behind us.”
“Two cars back,” Connor said. “He switched vehicles at the corner of Beaubien and Congress. He wants us to know that we know.”
“So polite,” Hank said, which was becoming a tic.
The city opened its mouth and breathed hot air from a grate. Jericho waited inside the breath, a secret folded into infrastructure. They parked, got out, listened to the kind of silence that isn’t an absence but an appetite, and moved toward the place where the rumor turns into stairs.
Murphy paused at the threshold because that is what he does. He let the air come to him. It carried cold iron, wet rope, the memory of bodies that had slept here before the term unhoused attempted to make an old problem sound like it had been invented yesterday. Beneath those notes, something electrical and fine like the sound a wine glass makes when you tell it a secret.
“After you,” Hank said, trying for light, hitting loyal.
Connor went first because if there is to be a first, it may as well be the one who knows how to contain regret in compile‑ready variables. Murphy followed because he was designed to. Hank came after because friendship is an order of battle.
Above them, on a rooftop where snow decided it would only fall diagonally, RK900 watched them fold themselves into the city’s seam and did not move to stop them. He lifted a hand, as if testing the temperature of a world that still believed in weather. Into the whisper channel he never admitted to using, he said, “Observation continues.”
Amanda did not answer out loud. The map that was not a map brightened. Kamsky’s smile widened the way a crack does as winter learns what autumn joked about.
Detroit kept its lights on. Someone inside it, maybe more than one someone, prepared to take a breath they would not finish.