Mira swiped through the evidence files on her holo panels, each one casting a ghostly blue glow across her face. The cramped loft above The Analog bar hummed with the sound of cooling fans and data processing. Three days of sleepless digging since losing the data stick to Halcyon's hunter had unearthed what she needed: footage of executives discussing their "premium experiences," the same XBDs linked to the disappearances Silas was investigating, with Halcyon's silver circle logo clearly visible in the background.

  "Got you, you fraggers," she whispered, executing the authentication protocols for the fifth time. The software confirmed: unaltered footage, genuine timestamps. Her story was taking shape, but she needed more.

  She needed Silas.

  Memories of their last collaboration flickered through her mind. Six months ago, he'd slipped her internal MPD files on Captain Vega's payoff scheme with black market implant dealers. The evidence had broken her story wide open, sent three officers to prison. Silas had risked everything for that leak, his career, his reputation within the force. She still remembered his words: "Some things matter more than a badge." Their unlikely alliance had only strengthened since.

  And now she was asking him to do it again.

  Mira launched her secure comms, bouncing the signal through seventeen different nodes before it reached Silas's private channel.

  Meet tonight. The usual spot. Evidence verification complete. Need your insights on the players.

  She encrypted the message with their shared key and sent it into the digital void. The verification program chimed its completion. Her Halcyon footage was certified authentic. A small victory, but she'd take it. In her world, even seeing wasn't believing anymore, not with neural manipulations and deepfakes flooding the feeds. Verification wasn't just procedure, it was survival.

  Mira laid out her field kit on the scarred metal table, inspecting each item. Her modified recording implant needed calibration; she adjusted the sensitivity with practiced fingers. Next came the specialized watermarking software that would establish a flawless chain of custody for any evidence she gathered. She loaded it onto two separate data shards, one for use, one for backup.

  Her wrist computer pinged with an incoming message. Silas.

  Confirmed. 22:00. Location under third bridge. Come alone.

  She smiled. Always so dramatic, her detective.

  A soft knock at her door interrupted her preparations. Three quick taps, pause, two more, Kei's signature.

  "It's unlocked," she called.

  The maintenance kid darted inside, all gangly limbs and nervous energy. At fifteen, Kei already knew more about the Grid's infrastructure than most techs twice his age.

  "Brought those power cells you wanted," he said, dropping a small pack on her table. "And something else you might want to hear."

  Mira raised an eyebrow, not looking up from her calibrations. "Last time your 'something' cost me fifty creds for intel I already had."

  "This is different," Kei whispered. "Corporate stuff. Bad business."

  "I'm listening."

  "Corporate drones all over South Grid today. Not the usual patrols either, search patterns." Kei shoved his hands in his pockets. "And there's weird activity around that BioNex facility on Sector Six. Nobody going in or out for two days, but the power consumption's through the roof."

  Mira pulled up her map of the Grid, marking the location. "Good intel. You sure about this?"

  Kei nodded. "My cousin works maintenance on the power grid. Says they're pulling three times normal usage."

  She transferred a hundred credits to his account. "Keep your eyes open. Anything else feels off, you ping me."

  "Always do." He grinned, then slipped out as quietly as he'd arrived.

  Mira turned back to her evidence wall, organizing her questions for Silas. If BioNex was involved with Halcyon, that opened a whole new angle for her investigation.

  The decision crystallized: she'd check out BioNex before meeting Silas. Mira activated her loft's additional countermeasures: proximity sensors, signal jammers, and a basic AI that would monitor for intrusion.

  She also set up her deadman's switch, if she didn't return to deactivate it within twenty four hours, her entire investigation would automatically publish to three separate news outlets and seven underground channels. Insurance.

  Before leaving, she paused at her evidence wall, eyes lingering on the faces of the victims. Five confirmed dead in Halcyon's braindance harvesting operations. Five lives reduced to entertainment for the wealthy. She trembled as she touched the image of a young woman, barely twenty, found with her neural ports burned out. Lian. That was her name, not just another victim statistic. The girl's features mirrored those of Mira's childhood friend from the Lower Grid refugee camp who'd disappeared years ago chasing quick cash. Same determined eyes, same dreams of escaping poverty. This wasn't just a story, it burned personal now.

  "I'm getting them," she promised, her whisper carrying more weight than a shout, fingers curling into fists at her sides. "And I'm making sure everyone knows what they did to you."

  A quick check of police scanners and public feeds showed normal activity near BioNex. Nothing suspicious. Perfect cover for whatever they were hiding.

  South Grid pulsed with its nighttime rhythm as Mira navigated the undercity. Neon signs cast multicolored shadows across rain slick streets. Vendors hawked synth noodles and black market tech from makeshift stalls. Music blared from basement clubs, bass so deep it vibrated through the concrete.

  She kept to the edges, melding into the crowds. A nod to the street preacher on the corner who doubled as her eyes when she needed them. A quick handshake with the ramen seller who'd once tipped her off about a police raid.

  Her wrist computer vibrated, unauthorized scan detected. Mira scanned her surroundings, spotting a security drone hovering near a corporate storefront. Just routine Grid surveillance. She adjusted her jacket collar to block her face from its cameras and kept moving.

  Near the market district, she spotted Dez, a veteran info broker who'd been working these streets since before she was born.

  "Journalist," he acknowledged with a nod. "Hunting stories again?"

  "Always." She slipped him fifty credits. "BioNex. What's the word?"

  Dez's cybernetic eye whirred as he focused on her. "Closed door meetings all week. Big transport left their loading dock yesterday, unmarked. Word is they're running some kind of neural trial that corporate doesn't want documented."

  That lined up with what Anya Sharma had told her about experimental braindance tech. Another piece fitting into place.

  From her perch on a maintenance catwalk slick with condensation, Mira studied BioNex's side entrance through her camera's enhanced optics. Corporate minimalism in gunmetal gray, the public face of Project Lazarus, if Anya's intel was solid. Where death became commodified data.

  She'd add this to her evidence pile. Not a smoking gun, but another thread in the tapestry she was weaving around Halcyon. Tina Chen had been investigating BioNex too, before vanishing last month. Now Mira carried both their bylines in her head, a story that someone was killing to keep quiet.

  Time to head back and prepare for her meeting with Silas. As she navigated the back alleys toward her loft, her commlink displayed unusual network traffic, data packets swarming her personal firewall.

  Mira paused to check her surroundings, the hairs on her neck rising. A puddle at her feet reflected the dim streetlight and revealed what shouldn't be there, a small blinking light on her jacket's hem. A tracker. The neon stained puddle now seemed like a betrayal, the closest thing to a mirror in this part of the Grid exposing what she'd failed to notice.

  She strode onward, scanning her surroundings through reflective surfaces. Two figures in corporate security uniforms had appeared at the intersection ahead, their movements too coordinated to be coincidence. A third stood by a vendor stall, hand hovering near a concealed weapon.

  She'd take the long way home, cutting through the signal jamming fields near the old subway tunnels. The route would add forty minutes but lose both the tracker and the tails.

  The game had escalated. Her heartbeat quickened as adrenaline flooded her system, the familiar rush of dangerous stories, but this time with a sharper edge. She wasn't just hunting anymore. She was being hunted. And unlike her prey, Halcyon wouldn't bother with questions first.

  Silas scrutinized Mira's encrypted message for the third time. Blue terminal light cast harsh shadows across his sparse apartment. Six months, and their secure channel still held: no breaches, no traces. Like the woman herself: reliable, precise, untraceable.

  Verified evidence ready for his review at their usual meeting spot. Typical Mira, direct, no unnecessary details. The timestamp showed she'd transmitted it ninety minutes ago. His fingers suspended over the keyboard, hesitant to commit to a response. Six months since he'd slipped her the Captain Vega files, evidence of departmental payoffs that wouldn't see proper channels. Six months of careful exchanges, coded messages, and the occasional face-to-face that left him more alive than anything inside the precinct walls.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  "Some things matter more than a badge," he'd told her that night at The Static, voice low beneath the thrum of synth music and the chatter of off-duty cops. She'd studied him with those sharp eyes, weighing his worth against the risk he represented. Then she'd taken the data shard without touching his fingers and disappeared into the crowd.

  What they had wasn't friendship. Wasn't partnership either. Something unnamed but essential in a city designed to isolate. Professional boundaries that blurred into hazardous territory. He'd denied it to himself for months, this pull toward her that transcended professional advantage. In the Sprawl, attachment was liability, the first rule of survival. Yet here he was, risking everything at her call, finding rare authenticity in their dangerous connection.

  The precinct watched him now. Internal Affairs had called him in twice, no charges yet, but enough for whispers in the bullpen. Enough for Jace's sideways glances and the captain's "random" case reassignments keeping him away from corporate interests. One more misstep would cost more than his badge.

  Silas minimized Mira's message and pulled up the MPD database. Before responding, he needed to check Halcyon's history with loose ends. His credentials unlocked restricted files, and he cross-referenced known Halcyon Array operations with missing persons reports from the past eighteen months.

  The pattern emerges, stark as arterial spray.

  Teresa Chen, data journalist, went dark three weeks after publishing partial Halcyon financials. Last seen entering an AR salon in the South Grid. Case status: open, inactive.

  Marcus Webb, former Halcyon programmer, found wandering the Underlevels with catastrophic neural damage, unable to form new memories or recall specific details about his former employer. Current location: Mercy Psychiatric, permanent ward.

  Dex Liang, information broker, body discovered floating in a maintenance canal, unusual neural degradation noted in preliminary autopsy.

  Silas opened Liang's file and recoiled as he scrolled through the coroner's images. There it was, a small silver circle etched near the neural port at the base of Liang's skull. Inside the circle, a horizontal line bisected by three vertical marks.

  Halcyon's signature. Their threat etched into flesh.

  The case notes revealed Liang's investigation had been reassigned twice before being buried. No suspects. No follow-up. Just another body in the Sprawl's endless tally.

  Silas dragged his palms across his face, registering the stubble of too many late shifts. These cases connected to the disappearances he'd been tracking, people who'd gotten too close to whatever Halcyon constructed beneath their entertainment empire. If Mira had evidence solid enough to warrant an emergency meeting, she'd painted a target on her back.

  He tried Jace's secure channel, received only an automated response. A quick check of the duty roster showed his partner listed as "special assignment," no details, no timeline. Unusual. Concerning.

  The cold synthetic coffee burned his throat with bitter chemicals as Silas weighed his options. A year ago, he would have logged Mira's contact immediately, following protocol exactly. But he'd seen too much since then. Protocol had failed Teresa Chen. Failed Dex Liang. Corruption had infiltrated the proper channels he once trusted, and he couldn't be the officer who looked away again.

  "Drek," Silas muttered, decision made. He tapped out a response: On my way. —S

  He checked his service weapon, loaded with standard-issue rounds, and secured a backup pistol at his ankle. The secondary neural firewall activated with a familiar pressure behind his eyes, first sharp, then cooling as it settled into place. Not department standard, but necessary since the Rivera incident, when he'd learned thoughts themselves weren't always private.

  Before leaving, he programmed an emergency data packet: case files, connections, his own logs, set to release to three separate secure channels if he didn't enter a cancellation code by 0300 hours. Insurance. Evidence. Legacy.

  "Some things do matter more than a badge," he whispered to the empty room, acknowledging what he'd been avoiding: Mira mattered beyond the case files they shared.

  The Sprawl engulfed him in its endless twilight as he exited his apartment building through the service corridor, bypassing the lobby's facial recognition. Neon cut through drizzle, casting prismatic reflections on rain-slicked streets. Synthetic food aromas mixed with the metallic tang of rain as advertising drones hummed in the darkness, the city's restless pulse beating in time with his own. He ducked his head to evade the cameras he couldn't avoid.

  He activated a standard counter-surveillance pattern, his ocular implant highlighting security blind spots in faint blue outlines as he moved between them. The neural mapper, though restricted to Tactical units, calculated optimal paths through the crowds, bypassing camera coverage.

  Near the entertainment district, where neon-bright promises masked darker transactions, Kei, a street kid who traded him occasional scraps of intelligence, materialized from the shadows, the city's living warning system.

  "Heavy drone activity tonight, Detective," Kei whispered as they matched pace. "Corporate patterns, not MPD. Someone's hunting." The kid vanished before Silas could respond.

  The third bridge loomed ahead, its underside a patchwork of shadows and forgotten spaces. Silas approached from the east, scanning for unusual patterns. There, a surveillance drone hovering just outside normal patrol routes, its lights dimmed to ghostly traces. Its movement pattern betrayed calculated precision, the relentless focus of a hunter. As Silas watched, a second drone joined it, hovering to dominate the bridge's southern approach: a coordinated net closing in. Halcyon had moved beyond suspicion to certainty.

  Silas slipped his hand inside his jacket, fingers brushing his weapon as he moved into position. Midnight approached, and with it, the certainty that whatever Mira had found was worth killing for.

  Silas hunched over his desk, committing the schematics to memory as shadows played across his face. Three entry points, two emergency exits, a maze of server corridors: the abandoned data center in South Grid was both perfect for a covert meeting and dangerously ambush-friendly. Tonight, his life and Mira's might depend on these details.

  He checked his service weapon, the weight familiar in his hand. The interface in his temple hummed with a fresh diagnostic scan, status indicators flickering green across his peripheral vision. Everything operational. His fingers skimmed across his backup dataspike with its matte-black connector pins, the department-issue encrypted comm unit, and the pocket-sized signal jammer that could block surveillance in a twenty-meter radius.

  Calculated risks versus potential breakthrough. The equation ran through his mind for the hundredth time. If Mira's intel was right, tonight could crack open the entire Halcyon operation. If she was wrong or if they were compromised...

  His thought process froze as a shadow fell across his desk.

  "Planning a field trip tonight, Virek?"

  Silas's hand jerked away from his gear. Jace Renn stood there, arms folded, expression unreadable in the low emergency lighting of the nearly empty bullpen.

  "Just catching up on backlog," Silas lied, closing the schematics with a casual swipe. "Thought everyone had gone home."

  "Everyone with something to go home to," Jace replied. He glanced at the service weapon Silas hadn't quite managed to conceal. "That looks like field prep, not paperwork."

  Silas maintained eye contact. "Never hurts to be ready."

  "No," Jace agreed sharply, the response immediate. "Let's talk in the lockup. More private."

  The corridors of the MPD Cybercrime Division stretched empty before them, their footsteps echoing against metal flooring. Emergency lighting cast alternating pools of blue-white illumination and shadow. Through the windows, rain streaked down in digital patterns, refracting the city's neon glow.

  Jace moved with practiced efficiency, disabling surveillance nodes with quick taps of his wrist unit. Silas noted his partner's movements: precise, economical, nothing wasted. His own stride stiffened in comparison, mechanical, telegraphing his intentions.

  The evidence lockup smelled of ozone and dust. Jace sealed the door with a pneumatic hiss, activating a signal scrambler that bathed the room in soft red light. The scrambler's subsonic pulse set Silas's back teeth aching; absolute privacy extracted its physical toll.

  "Seven years ago," Jace began without preamble, "I had an informant. Ella Kwan. Corporate analyst who stumbled onto something in Nexus-Meridian's data vaults." His voice remained steady, but Silas detected the slight tightening around his eyes. "Extraction protocols similar to what you're setting up tonight."

  Silas didn't bother denying it. "What happened?"

  "She trusted me. That should have been enough." Jace's fingers drummed once against the metal table. "We had a secure channel, triple-encrypted. Private meeting location off-grid. By the book."

  "But?"

  "But someone was listening anyway. They were waiting when she arrived." Jace stared through the rain-slicked window. "Found her neural port excavated. Clean work. Professional. They took her implant, her backup data, everything she'd stored."

  A chill slithered through Silas despite the room's warmth. "And the intel?"

  "Never surfaced. Neither did the killers." Jace's features hardened. "She collected antique music boxes. Had one in her pocket when they found her. Still playing when the cleanup crew arrived."

  The personal detail hit Silas harder than the gruesome specifics. His throat tightened. This transcended a cautionary tale; it emerged as a confession. He thought of Mira, of the small collection of physical books she kept despite their impracticality, a detail he shouldn't know from their strictly professional exchanges, but somehow did. The cold weight settling in his stomach wasn't just concern for an informant. Six months of encrypted communications had built something he couldn't categorize in his orderly mind.

  Jace reached inside his jacket and produced a matte black commlink unlike any MPD-issue equipment Silas had seen.

  "Ghostline comm. Bounces through seventeen proxies, hardware encryption at the source. Can't be traced back to MPD networks." Jace held it out. "Department doesn't need to know everything we do to get results."

  Silas hesitated. Taking it crossed a line, accepting help outside protocol, creating a connection that couldn't be explained in a report.

  "Sometimes protocol gets people killed," Jace said, reading his hesitation.

  Silas took the commlink. It felt heavier than its size suggested, dense with implications.

  "I'll be three blocks north of your meeting point," Jace continued. "You won't see me, but I'll see you." He tapped the commlink in Silas's hand. "If things go sideways, trigger the emergency pulse. Code phrase on comms is 'weather report.'" His eyes held an intensity that made Silas wonder, was this a lifeline, or something else?

  "Why are you doing this?" Silas asked, studying his partner's face for any tell, any hint of an agenda beyond professional courtesy.

  "Because I've seen this pattern before." Jace's voice dropped. "Someone accessed your secure terminal logs yesterday, after hours. High-level credentials." He met Silas's eyes. "Just remember, some wounds don't leave a mark until it's too late."

  For 1.3 seconds, his neural implant logging the duration, Jace's composure fractured. A micro-expression that registered as anomalous against his partner's baseline facial patterns but defied classification. Concern without the typical eyebrow tension? Guilt missing its characteristic swallow? The deviation vanished behind Jace's recalibrated mask before Silas could extract meaning.

  They left separately. Silas pocketed the ghostline comm with measured care. The ghostline comm radiated both protection and threat from his pocket, insignificant in weight but massive in implications. Department regulations classified unauthorized comms as a level-three violation, termination-worthy. Yet here he was, accepting it, another unrecorded violation. Invisible strings pulled him off-course.

  As he walked through the rain-slicked MPD parking structure, his neural interface flagged two active surveillance cameras tracking his movement. Standard procedure, except his security clearance should have registered him as a digital ghost, present but unrecorded. Tonight, those red tracking icons felt like corporate eyes behind police hardware, the distinction between public protection and private interest dissolving with each step.

  As he slid into his vehicle, Silas pictured Mira at their rendezvous point, already pacing. His neural interface pulled up their last three meeting logs: each time she'd arrived early, run perimeter scans, exposed herself to detection. The same recklessness that made her valuable as an informant now threatened everything. And tonight, with Halcyon actively hunting, those habits could prove fatal.

  Either way, he was out of time to question it. The meeting was set. Mira was waiting. And somewhere in the digital shadows of Mirage Sprawl, the truth about Halcyon Array hung just out of reach, a prize worth dying for, if they weren't careful.