• • •

In retrospective, swearing off mind probing no longer seemed like such a good idea to Connor. He had no way in changing what he had promised to Mia though, not when Officer Brady parked his car with a tyre creak across the street from their destination. He was, at the time, yet unaware of what they were about to walk themselves into.

The sun hadn't been visible all day past a thick barrier of dark clouds unwilling to shed a single drop of rain after the downpour of yesterday, but one needn't the sun to tell the time when the radio kept reminding every listener of it every ten minutes, like clockwork. It was late in the afternoon when the town's police station had been alerted by a connection in the nearest town to the north of Joel's farm that strange androids have been spotted taking refuge inside an abandoned house.

Androids were made into an unusual sighting by the one reporting their next best lead and it so seemed to Connor now that the further one travelled from Detroit, or any big city for that matter, the less were the working people interested in having androids around, the less were they prone to relying on such advanced technology. Perhaps he should heed to Brady's past commentary — maybe people truly couldn't afford androids as much as he knew they did in the city, where they were turned into a commodity, sometimes even a social standard to gaining status. It had always perplexed him the idea that Mia, for example, though she worked for CyberLife, did not own an android of her own to take care of her apartment while she's away, or wait for her home with a warm meal after a long day at the office.

This neighbouring town was not entirely different from the one he's gotten used to already, save for the fact that their main revenue looked to be revolving around a factory rather than agriculture. The streets looked the same and the downtown central area was still overlooked by an almost identical church. Another difference were the abandoned houses — the heart of the settlement was a graveyard of homes turned into skeletons of what a building was supposed to be, a picture only occasionally interrupted by new and unfinished projects of new buildings in the shape of blocks, standing out like a sore thumb.

They exited the car and faced such a skeleton of a house, an old and putrid vestige on the verge of collapse. The windows were barricaded from both the inside and the outside on the ground floor, but also the first floor of the building.

"Tell me again why we didn't let DPD handle this in full," Brady sighed, looking up with a distinct uneasiness at this ghost of a house.

"They were only interested in making a connection between Joel Reed and Officer Owens and they have only the beginning of that with those two missing androids found disassembled in the Red Ice lab," Connor explained, leading their walk across the street and towards the barbed wire surrounding the premises of the abandoned house. "You mentioned wanting to put in a good word for yourself with them," he chose to appeal to the man's ego once again. "Well, asking them to take over a murder case is not how you do that." It was easier to give this half truth rather than explain to him his current priorities and mission: DPD should under no circumstances know of the existence of the android involvement in the murder, as per company priority, and he must not, no matter what, allow the opportunity to solve a murder case slip through his fingers, should this field trial be deemed a success in the end.

Officer Brady sighed, watching Connor first asses the chain on the door locking the premises up, then identify a lot further to the side a gap cut into the barbed wire. "I just...," he held his breath for a moment, grimacing at their entryway on the property, realizing, as per Connor's immediate demonstration, how it required some crawling on the ground to get inside. "I have a bad feeling about this, pal."

Once on the other side, Connor held the patch of cut barbed wire lifted so Brady could have less of a trouble getting through, but undeniably, his full attention was already on the house, even as he could not yet scan for any signs of activity inside. As soon as Brady was through, he didn't wait for his complaining to stop before walking to the front door of the abandoned house and trying to push it open.

"Jesus, Connor!" Brady exclaimed, as hushed as he could while running to be by his side. "Wait up!" He pulled out his gun, a gun which he had finally deemed necessary to take outside of the car with him — Connor suspected seeing Joel Reed's body had scared the officer deeply, enough so to lose sleep over it, hence his dark circles underneath his eyes, but also to find it necessary to have means of protecting himself up close —, but ended up watching Connor step away from the door as soon as he got there instead.

"Something is blocking the entrance from inside," he informed his partner. "We should try around the back." He left Brady no time to object to that decision, already on his way to following the newly selected objective, studying up the covered windows. By the time he reached the backdoor, Brady was coming up around the corner. After pushing a couple times against it, Connor assessed it must have also been blocked from inside. A sigh prompted him to look to the side and spot the entrance to the basement of the house. The chain which was supposed to keep that entrance locked had been previously broken and abandoned on the ground, right besides it.

Connor climbed off the stairs to the backdoor and moved towards the basement entrance instead. His suspicions that this had been the main entry point for the deviants were immediately confirmed once he pulled on the doors and they moved with ease, save for a long creak. "This way, Officer."

"Right behind you," Officer Brady announced, following Connor down the stairs leading beneath the house, his breath lightly ragged already. Upon seeing just how dark it was down there, he fidgeted for his flashlight, thus lowering his right hand still closed around his gun. The flashlight revealed a troubling amount of dust dancing in the stationary air down there, making Brady sigh. "What's with your sudden hurry? Can't we slow down?"

"They might have seen us coming," Connor justified his rush, thus avoiding mentioning how, according to what Mia told him of deviants, it was fair to assume Joel Reed's death would not be the end of the violence, especially if the deviants are not captured and contained. It was time sensitive because they should also not be allowed to reach any android populated areas to spread the virus. Of course, there was still some part of Connor which was curious to see the end of this lead, to prove that he had been right on his assessment, no matter how dangerous that would turn out to be, however this final reason, he ignored completely.

"We would have heard them if they tried to make a break for it," Officer Brady righteously sighed, however was not allowed to further his complaints, because Connor stopped ahead of him, turned around and, with only two fingers, moved the beam of his flashlight to the left, downwards. "I'll be damned," his eyes went wide. "Are those...?"

Connor dropped to one knee besides the pile of clothes amongst which a couple had been covered in blood, including an android uniform similar to those worn by Joel's androids at the farm. In the pile were also the missing clothing items of the victim. "The blood matches Joel Reed's," Connor confirmed after a short scan, no longer than a couple of blinks. "There are faint Thirium traces on the android uniform too."

"So you were right," Officer Brady audibly gulped while Connor stood up. He turned out to be correct in the end, but there was no real satisfaction to the achievement of his skills proving to be as efficient as intended — it was merely a relief. Thus, he moved away from the pile of clothes, despite Brady remaining on the spot, staring at them. "An android did this. What's the world come to?"

"Officer," Connor called after him from a little further in the basement. When Brady turned around, he spotted the android standing in the middle of the place, looking downwards. "Over here," he gestured for some light to be brought onto the floor and, while joining beside him, he shone the flashlight's beam over what initially looked to him as graffiti.

"rA9," Officer Brady read the inscription out loud.

"Written 2709 times," Connor completed.

"A weird place for a graffiti, I admit."

"It's not graffiti, officer," he disagreed calmly. "All iterations of the word have been hand written, recently. It's compulsive writing. Shows signs of obsession. Every iteration of the word is identical, signifying android involvement. The last additions are no older than a couple of hours." Looking to the side, he moved with his foot a black marker left behind. "The android wrote the word until it ran out of ink."

"So what does it mean then, smartass? The word."

"I don't know," Connor did not shy away from admitting that. The abdunace of evidence on site simply compelled him to move on to the next clue, further to the right. "We can worry about the meaning of that later. Right now, we have bigger problems," he waited for Brady to join him to the side and finally sighed thoughtfully at the sight of three more android uniforms, one of which had been damaged purposefully in all the places were identifying markers might exist.

"There's four of them?" Officer Brady did the maths out loud. "But how can that be? Shouldn't your numbers on the amount of plastics Joel got have been exact?"

"They are exact," Connor moved away. He had promised Mia discretion on the matter of deviants, so though that meant he had to keep his partner in the dark about some key aspects of their case, he was planning on keeping true to his word to her. It was for that reason that he preferred leading the way towards the creaking stairs heading up towards the house rather than lingering for long enough down there that Brady started asking the pertinent questions on what exactly four instead of three androids really meant — deviancy was spreading.

As soon as Connor opened the door though, a single glimpse inside the house had him lock eyes with a fellow android who stopped dead in its tracks at the end of the hallway, right next to a window it seemed to be enforcing the barricade of wood on. Connor's LED may have flashed yellow, but at the sight of the officer right behind him, the LED of the deviant turned red.

Within the second, the deviant ran off, further into the house and, without hesitation, Connor ran after it. "Pursuing suspect!" He announced, right before Officer Brady could shout another confused complaint after him.

"Holy shit!" The shock of the man was heard now faintly, somewhere far behind Connor while he chased up the stairs, jumping over the balustrades twice, just to cut from the advantage the deviant had on him.

Going down the hallway upstairs, the deviant knocked over anything it could find in its way, but with the edge of precision, Connor didn't let added obstacles stand in his way for long.

It was a short chase to the very end of the house — last room, on the top floor. There was another room linked to it, but with Connor already in there with it, the deviant seemed to understand running away was a foolish endeavour.

Connor got it right where he wanted it.

He knew from Mia that deviants could not be reasoned with, but the software instability the red of its LED told him all about was undesirable too. If the deviants truly thought themselves alive, then he decided he should be able to employ the same tactics on it as he would on a human fugitive. Therefore, having stopped in the doorframe, Connor dropped his shoulders, raised his hands and stepped forward slowly with a changed demeanor.

"It's alright," he attempted to reassure it, noticing how it eyed the secondary exit while actively backing itself into an empty corner. "My name is Connor. What's your name?"

The deviant's eyes settled on looking at him, which was good progress as far as Connor was concerned. He managed to take another step forward before the quiet voice of the deviant begun answering, "I don't have one. A name." After a short once over, the deviant's LED turned yellow and it asked, eyes narrowed, "Why are you working with the police?"

Connor knew better than to answer the questions of a suspect — he was the one to ask the questions there, and that's how he was planning on getting a confession out of it without breaking his promise to Mia that he will not use mind probing as a way of solving the case, though by all means, it would have saved him a lot of time.

"He was going to sell you, so you could be disassembled for your blood," Connor retorted to stating a fact and thus taking another step forward. To his surprise, right before his eyes, the deviant broke out in tears following an awfully authentic whimper. Mia had been correct then, their imitation of human emotions had an increased fidelity, one that seemingly fooled the deviant itself too.

"Yes," the deviant barely mumbled the confirmation, but it was enough for Connor to work with.

"You found out and you were scared," he continued listing the events with an own impression of empathy which he did not harbour whatsoever. But the imitation of empathy was doing the trick — the deviant was nodding along, stabilising while Connor approached it steadily. "That's why you killed him."

"No!" The deviant looked up with his eyes wide, LED back to a deep red. "No, I didn't kill him. I..."

Connor remained unphased, after all, his calmly stated accusation was only meant to provoke such an emotional outburst from it. "You know who did," he nodded at it.

"I...," it looked away from him, but not towards either of the doors to seek escape. The deviant looked towards the ground, ashamed.

"You can talk to me," Connor reassured it, voice nearing a whisper now that he was a little closer. "I can help you. If you tell me who killed Joel Reed, I can make sure you don't get into any trouble with the police. All you have to do is trust me." It was a lie, but a believable lie, and unsurprisingly, the deviant bought into the soft cadance of his tone immediately, no better than the average human in over their heads from complicity to a crime they didn't want to be committed.

"He...," the deviant gulped, its hands clenching into fists, "he disabled our locomotion systems before transporting us to the house. We saw it happen to so many before we heard him talk on the phone." Connor made a mental note to have Brady tip the DPD about finding a second phone for Owens. "He alwayd talked about which models would be next for the sacrifice. We were on the list and I... was scared. I didn't want to die." The deviant looked up with teary eyes, "I told him we should run before Joel could send us away, but he wouldn't listen. He was so angry. Ever since that android we helped, he was always angry."

"What android?" Connor suddenly furrowed his eyebrows, finding a piece of the story that did not allign to his initial computation of what had happened. The presence of another android at the ranch could have meant that the fourth android on the run was not a victim of the virus' spread but the one who brought the deviancy at Joel's farm to begin with.

"He was lost," the deviant couldn't keep the eye contact anymore. "We let him hide in the chicken's den. But he... he made the others uneasy. When I saw my friend carry Joel out of the house, dead and bleeding everywhere, I..."

"Where are they now?" Connor pressured now, taking a step forward. The usage of the word 'friend' to describe another fellow android disturbed him, but he assumed that had everything to do with how deviants in general were a disturbing branch of his kind and less to do with word itself.

"I don't know," the deviant shook its head, its now yellow LED beginning to flicker.

"Are they coming back here?" Connor took another step forward, only three steps away from actually having the deviant cornered.

"I—"

It happened fast — seeing the LED of the deviant turn red, spotting from the corner of his eyes how a breathy Officer Brady entered the room from the side with his gun pointed forward. Connor had the time to reach to the side in an attempt to block the deviant from getting away, but he did not expect it to go into the direction of the human holding the gun.

Seeing it run straight towards Officer Brady, even as the man shot in panic a single bullet which flew right through its arm momentarily stunned Connor. The mindlessness of deviants was a shock to his systems because never before could he have phantomed seeing an android act so irrationally, so... unpredictable.

However, his shock had to be pushed aside. Having ignored the bullet hole, the deviant slammed its knee into Officer Brady's chest, knocking all air out of him, and with the strength characteristic to his series and model, it pushed him back, taking the gun right out of his hand. It pointed it down at the man, holding it with both hands, though it did not stabilize the aim against its violent shivers in the slightest.

Connor took advantage of the deviant's hesitation in pulling the trigger and slammed his shoulder into its side, moving them around until he had it pinned against the wall.

A first bullet was fired, right through Connor's torso but androids had a beautiful advantage in such situations where a real cop would have struggled: they couldn't feel pain. Another round was fired in the same area after Connor wrapped his hand around it, applying pressure on the joints of its wrist enough to cause gradual damage to its hand integrity and slowly begin to twist it.

He was on the verge of disarming the deviant when a third gunshot was fired, bullet entering his chest at an angle. Immediately after pulling the trigger at him, the deviant twisted its own hand all the way with a loud grunt, escaping Connor's grip. Instead of using its newfound advantage of a dangerous angle to shoot a round through Connor's processing unit, it hooked the barrel under its chin.

With tears streaming down its cheeks, the deviant pulled the trigger before Connor could even attempt to stop it.

Thirium splattered across the wall he held it against and he let go, blinking away the blue drops that had gotten into his eyes. He stepped away, hands uncertain of what to do.

"Holy shit," Officer Brady came through the doorway and looked down at the self-destroyed android. "Connor," he looked over to his partner as soon as he spotted he was also bleeding. His eyes were now bound to be glued to the way his white shirt had turned almost entirely blue in his abdominal area. "Are you alright?"

Connor's eyes were fixated on the deviant though, even as it now laid unmoving. "There was more it could have told us," he muttered the only regret he had about the situation. The unemotional stare momentarily turned into a frown, one which disappeared as fast at it had appeared on his features.

He was almost glad Mia wasn't home when he arrived.

Entering the house bleeding would have been far from a quiet endeavour had she been there, he was certain, and just then, he needed the silence in order to go over the events of his first encounter with a deviant. It was only in the complete quietness of reaching for the lab area of their living room that his frown returned and his frustration with himself could finally grow — He had it. He had the deviant and a miscalculation on its behaviour spiraled into utter disaster, losing his one good lead. An amateurish mistake. That's how he'd have to define that shameful moment when the deviant ran right past him while he blocked it the wrong way. For that moment, he was no better than a human and that was simply embarassing. He had to be better.

With those thoughts to keep him company, his frown only deepened, gaining a nuance of concentration now that he pulled the tools he needed nearby and could finally undo what buttons of his barely white shirt were left. He needed the fabric to be out of the way in order to deactivate the synthetic skin on his chest down to his abdomen and have a good look at the damage he had already self-diagnosed.

The three bullet holes have been bleeding Thirium heavily both in the location in the neighbouring town and in Brady's car. Now, he was bleeding all over Mia's floor.

It was paramount to extract the bullets fast, in order to focus on stopping the loss of further Thirium. He had already bren brought down to fifty percent capacity on almost all systems, but he chose nonetheless to sacrifice some of his less needed ones for the sake of increasing the Thirium flow to his processing unit.

Looking into the large lit round mirror to see what he was doing on himself, Connor opened up his abdominal area and, with a scan, identified the areas in which the bullets were stuck. He couldn't feel them there, but he could well see them. Using one of Mia's forceps from the medical kits she kept, he probed around inside his body, getting used to the decreased dexterity's downside of slowed down movements.

It wasn't nearly as hard to operate in a mirror or generally on himself, as it was to be patient with his movements as they responded to his fast firing commands with considerable delay given the continous Thirium loss. His hand slipped a little too close to his liking to his regulator once, though this wasn't even the closest of the three bullets to it.

He pulled out the Thirium drenched first bullet and, angling the mirror at the cost of staining it in some blue blood, he had to sigh at the sight of the inner walls of his thorax — they were dented and scratched. Such superficial wounds wouldn't affect his performance on the job, but they were bound to upset Mia once she inevitably spotted them.

After dropping the first bullet on her table, he computed the best approach to extracting the second one and immediately got to work. His locomotion systems were down to twenty percent efficiency already and it was starting to dawn on him that what would have been even worse than having to be seen by Mia as the failure he came to be that day, was to force her to return home to the sight of him bled out to complete shut down on her floor.

That motivated rush caused his hand to slip to the side a lot sooner than he intended it to. As a consequence, the forceps got stuck into the side of his regulator.

"Shit," Connor cursed out loud, blinking a couple of times to asses the situation. His blinking blue LED turned briefly to yellow and another couple of drops of Thirium fell off his body and onto the ground.

In that moment, when he was trying to find a way to extract the forceps without damaging his regulator only to realize it was a choice determining how much he was willing to damage it instead, the door clicked open. No sooner had Mia stepped inside the house that Connor heard something be dropped to the ground and the door pushed closed.

"Connor?"

Still dressed in her coat and still wearing her boots, Mia ran to him and he could see, under the bright white light how her eyes widened in horror at the state he was in. He didn't want to see that worry, a worry he caused by being too slow, by being nothing close to 'good enough', so he turned his head away.

"What happened?" She held onto his wrists and moved his hands aside. "Are these bullet holes? Connor—"

Even without looking at her, he could tell in the way she swallowed dryly after calling his name that she held back from scolding him.

"Sit down," she maneuvered him instead towards her chair, having assessed in their brief moment of silence that he had lost too much Thirium to be using up energy to stand up. "Don't move," Mia immediately asked of him once she started working on removing his tie, his jacket and his shirt, leaving them in a neat pile on her desk. "Wait here, I need to get you a new regulator and some Thirium. Don't touch anything."

Connor remained silent, but once Mia left his side, he felt strangely bad for not having at least looked at her properly. She was going to fix his mistakes, but he couldn't look at her? Where was the fairness in that?

Indeed, it took her very little time to return from the storage room with all she needed. She placed the boxed biocomponents stored in active fluid on her desk, and though she was sweating in her heavy coat, she first focused on setting up a Thirium bag on the hook of the thin pole she rolled closer to his chair. After extending the tubing connected to the Thirium bag, she picked up his left arm and waited only momentarily for him to deactivate his synthetic skin under her touch, opening up the plastic carcass to reveal the inner system. With an experienced precision, she connected the tubing to his main valves and only once she was certain the suction of the Thirium bag contents had started did she finally remove her coat and kick off her shoes. Unlike with Connor's clothes, she was careless with her own, tossing the two items somewhere on the ground, as far away from them as possible without turning away.

"I'm going to have to remove the damaged regulator," she let him know and without much of a hesitation, knelt in front of the chair so she'd be at the perfect height to operate on him. He noticed then that though she had spent very little time fetching the spare parts and the Thirium, she had still made time to wash her hands as they were humid approaching his remaining synthetic skin and finally, wrapping around the regulator towards the middle of his chest. She looked up at him to check on the current levels of responsiveness, then twisted the part in order to pull it out.

Immediately, Connor lost the clarity of his sight. Without a regulator to coordinate the rest of his biocomponents, everything was out of order, in complete disarray of function.

Mia knew that, so she put the damaged part aside and opened the box of the new one, placing it in swiftly. "Alright," she sighed, sitting back on her heels briefly just to wipe her right hand of his blue blood onto her shirt. Then, she immediately sat up and nudged her computer alive. "Can you please run a diagnosis?"

"Done," Connor announced mere seconds after, some of his edge returning to him now that the Thirium supply he was given started outweighing the amount he lost. He built up the courage to look at her concerned features while she read the report with fast moving eyes, rushing between the lines to understand everything. He saw her steal a glance down at the bullet he got out all on his own, but couldn't stomach witnessing the full range of reaction from her, so he turned his gaze away.

Mia minded her own busienss in silence at first. Getting up, changing his drained first Thirium bag, getting some sterile cloth to absorb some of the blue blood he was losing, and even setting up a tubed camera to get a better look inside his thorax at what she was supposed to get out of him. With a new pair of forceps, she knelt back down and fished out the second bullet. Then the third.

The silence was deafening by that point, for the both of them, but she was the first to cave in the second the imminent danger was averted and she was no longer operating on his open body. "Are you going to tell me what happened?"

"I found a deviant," Connor admitted, looking down, not even necessarily at her hands, distracting as they were, but simply down.

"The one that killed Joel Reed?" She continued working with heat to close up the plastic, even though she paled at the confirmation that he was indeed on the hunt for a deviant now. Her focus was pulled between that worry and the one about how his body would be thinner than before in the spots where he had been shot through this mending method — until she could order a new abdominal plaque for him, it was the best way to stop the bleeding and ensure his structural integrity.

"No. But it knew the killer. I... could have gotten it to talk more, but I made a mistake and it ended up destroying itself."

"Destroying itself?" Mia ran her thumb over the first bullet hole she closed, still feeling the warmth left behind by the thin flame she had to work with on him.

"It could have shot me, but it choose to shoot itself instead," he explained without a single nuance of sadness or conflict, but rather with a whole lot of frustration.

"Deviants are unpredictable," she sighed, propping her elbow on his thigh in order to work on the next bullet hole. Under this light, looking at her from above, Mia seemed incredibly tired. "You tried your best, Connor."

"I failed," he was determined to be far more critical of himself. "It won't happen again." To promise that without actually explaining his plans for the next step in the investigation was a blasphemous attempt at forming excuses, so he continued, "The deviant mentioned another android, one who wasn't from the farm. I suspect it might have been the cause of the deviancy virus spreading there."

"Another deviant?" She inquired slowly. "There aren't many places with androids around here and it's unlikely for one to find means of travel that would allow them to go undetected for far."

"I am aware," Connor agreed. "There's still a lot about this case that makes little sense. It's like I am missing something."

"The confirmed presence of more than one deviant changes a lot though," she ran her hand over the last closed wound and set aside the torch, turning it off. "I am sure CyberLife would understand if we were to retreat from a case that threatens to bring too much damage to you. You're an expensive and invaluable asset to them, even with the ability to be replaced." Mia got up with a sigh, continuing before he could argue back, "But I know you better than that." She picked up without looking away from him the cloth resting on the edge of her desk and started carefully cleaning his face of any residue Thirium stains from the deviant. By doing so, she raised her left hand to hold the side of his face, holding him still as if he would have wanted to look away again. "You aren't going to quit on a case, no matter how challenging, how dangerous or how complicated it gets. It's just not who you are."

While he was entranced by an attempt to understand how she could speak so warmly yet sound so distant and broken, Connor's eyes stopped on something on Mia's neck. Before he could get a good look and assess through a scan what he was looking at though, she moved away to gather his stained shirt and jacket off her desk. "Wait here," she asked of him immediately, walking back to the storage room to rummage for clothing replacements they should have in stock.

In her absence, Connor found the time to squeeze the last bit of Thirium out of his perfusion and stand up from the chair, careful not to step into his own spilled blood on the floor. He walked around the stain and leant against the edge of her desk. Whilist pulling the tubing out of his arm, his rendered replay of the previous moment identified on his behalf what he had seen on her neck — a bruise. Mia had a new bruise on her neck.

He watched her with a narrowed gaze once she approached with the new set of clothes. "I would like to remind you to please try to remain safe tomorrow in the field...," her cheerful voice faded away to confusion once, after helping him with his shirt, Connor's right hand remained lifted and he reached out for the side of her face. She didn't know what to think, nor what to do when she felt his fingertips brush through her hair and move it aside, back behind her ear, but once she regained just enough of her composure to notice where his eyes were looking, Mia flinched away.

The bruise was much larger than what Connor had initially spotted and it was undeniable to him just then that the cause of such a bruise could be nothing but bad news. "Someone strangled you," he stated, eyebrows furrowing down as Mia stepper back with the intention of turning around to leave. "Mia," he insisted then, grabbing hold of her arm to keep her there. "I am programmed to recognize such wounds."

"You are also programmed to focus on your mission," she turned back towards him with a glare. Connor didn't understand why she was suddenly angry with him, but he knew he shouldn't let go of her arm, so he didn't.

"You are part of my—"

"I'm not your mission, Connor," she cut him off, grasping his wrist and pulling his hand off of her. "Fact is, I could be fired tomorrow and CyberLife would find me a replacement just fine. I don't matter to this project and I do not matter to your mission. If I leave now, the project would just simply go on and you'd be fine without me."

Almost bleeding myself to a forced shut down says otherwise, he thought, but held his tongue. Mia's anger was uncharted territory — he's never seen her in this volatile state of emotion before.

"I appreciate you trying to mimic care for me, Connor, I really do. It helped us forming a good work environment here," she calmed herself down with a deep breath. "But I do have a private life outside of work and you...," she hesitated, not wanting to finish that sentence once she realized just how cruel it would sound to speak it out loud. He knew what she wanted to add to it though, it wasn't hard to tell — he wasn't part of her private life; of course, they were only work colleagues, partners in a project, he was well aware of that. "I need you to focus on what matters most to your currently set priority. Nothing more."

Connor's gaze lowered once she noted that order. He knew he should confirm he understood what she meant, but it didn't feel right to agree with Mia when she devalued herself. It didn't feel right to agree with the way she painted the situation either, because though it was correct of her to point out that his priority of focus should be the mission and therefore the task of solving the case, he was certain she should also count as a task afferent to the mission. Without her, the project would undeniably lose from its efficiency and he'd...

Connor didn't finish that thought, because what it entailed was not part of his programming — attachment.

"Mia," he called out, but did not look over his shoulder while he finished buttoning up his shirt. He listened for her steps to fall to a stop somewhere behind him before continuing, "You know you can trust me."

"You are programmed to be loyal and to want to help," she responded with a long sigh. "I know. But these are my problems. They are my responsibility to solve."

He finally looked back over his shoulder at her, the question waiting on his lips, on the verge of being asked — Can't they be my problems too?

Her eyes gave him an answer, he believed, a cold gloom cast over them with her tiredness — No, Connor. That's not how this works.

• • •

AUTHOR'S NOTE |   
I've struggled a bit with writing the finale of this first act, but I believe a chapter of this length sorta makes up for my absence from updating in general.

It's a bit of a more tense chapter. After living together for a few days, Mia and Connor finally have a dispute basically, a disagreement which sort of highlights two things right now — Mia feels extremely guilty and burdened by what's happening to her and even by the fact that she has to struggle to hide from Connor too, and he's becoming aware of some deviancy signs within him, even though he doesn't identify them as such just yet.

Next chapter will be the last of this act and trust me, things will only get more tense and packed from here on.

Any theories on what Mia got herself into before the big reveals start rolling in?