• • •

9:57 PM, Eastern Docks, Detroit

Rain poured mercilessly over the rusted equipment the Detroit industrial center still used to load and unload cargo ships that made their stop there. Not even the sounds of entire curtains of rain falling on surfaces of concrete and metal alike hid the creaks of the machinery too old to be in function, a single bad rainy day away from snapping their rods and dropping the containers on one of the workers.

As he watched 'safety hazard' alerts come and go before his eyes while the perimeter below was scanned, he indulged one glance to the far left side where, in the distance of the coast, much brighter lights than some used up neons in need of a cleaning marked the zone of the docks that had been leased by CyberLife. There were no creaks there, no dirt to be splashed around by the rain and stain the bottom of containers. The pavement there had no cracks and the machines had years ahead of them that this dockside area couldn't even dream about.

However short his glance was did not prompt him to justify it. Standing atop the roof of the main building of the Eastern docks and bracing himself against the rain with nothing but holding his hands in the pockets of a rain coat plastered atop his shoulders more so to cover his Android identifiers and thus keep him hidden, and less to actually give him any sort of cover from the rain, he returned his gaze to the parking lot below. He could feel only the taps of the raindrops on his hooded head, on his covered shoulders, hear the downpour flood beneath his feet while he remained unmoving.

"I've got eyes on the target's vehicle," the newly commissioned RK800 finally reported directly into his system, LED flashing blue beneath the shadow of his hood.

313 248 317 - 50. His previous iteration had a short runtime thanks to the intervention of who he was told to have been the destroyed 47 model calling itself 'Connor', now returned thanks to a glitch in the system and running the 49 model. He didn't expect it to cause as much trouble as it did, given its defective status in the system, but Connor turned out to be an actual challenge, not exactly during their fight, where its methods of defense and attack reassembled a randomized generator's behaviour, but more so after it.

For the past two days, he's been trying to pick up his real target's trail again, but what had initially been only a human slightly above average at covering her tracks turned, with Connor's presence, into a statically impossible dive off the grid he was supposed to get to the bottom of. It seemed like a hopeless task until, earlier that evening, he intercepted a report brought up to the police station about an abandoned car fitting the description of the vehicle he knew for certain the target had used. As it was his first real lead in a while, CyberLife pulled the report out of DPD's jurisdiction and passed it through the FBI in order to get it appointed in total discretion to him.

Connor. He's been thinking a lot about his predecessor lately, about the differences between them and about the files that were still locked away from him regarding the research he knew his target had been involved in regarding the RK-series. A lot more than he would have liked, he thought about how he didn't have a name like his, he didn't have a name at all.

His system eventually responded to his report by changing his interface to the still in-testing antivirus he had installed into his programming, a feature he otherwise did not share with Connor.

"Well done," the antivirus' face, Amanda, greeted him in the space of a blank room formed within his processing unit. "Remember," she showed firmness in her words and in the way her gaze narrowed on his own projection inside his mind. "The human target is highly dangerous and in possession of a virus that can compromise any android's system, including your own."

That's all I know, he noted within his unit a detail to his on-going file. Connor had been compromised by a virus.

"She ought to be eliminated on sight," Amanda reminded him of his mission parameters. "However, the RK800 unit accompanying her must be brought back to CyberLife still functioning order. There are bits of its memory that are important to us."

"I understand," he answered, blinking himself back to the present, back to the dark night in which the rain acted on his behalf to conceal him on that rooftop. Another list of tasks appeared to him then, upon returning his optical units' focus on the vehicle below: approach the car, investigate it, and find where the targets went in the docks. They were planning on leaving Detroit that night, this much he could already assume, but he couldn't just call reinforcements to raid every ship in there and out the whole dockside on pause to find them. That's what a human would have considered as an option. He had to be better than that and actually norrow down this trail.

Earlier that day ... 6:32 AM

There was little safety to be found in Detroit for them. With delivery drones flying everywhere even in the dead of night and during the first breaths of a dawn, the city had eyes that could scarcely be avoided, an issue of privacy that was addressed too little, often by people who were otherwise too quiet compared to the big powers which benefitted most from this shameless and constant prying. Given the nature of their pursuer, the only place where they could reduce significantly their chances of having any technology detect their presence was one that neither of them expected — the church. No drones, no androids, no cameras, at least not inside the Basilica of Sainte Anne, where Mia now sat.

Seated at the end of a pew towards the middle of the church, her quietness helped her get away with keeping her earplugs in and the radio going. The device balanced on her right thigh was an old thing, a relic compared to the what current day vintage lovers liked to flaunt around in terms of wired pieces of technology, but it did its job, which was just then to simply pick up a stable enough connection for various radio stations while Mia kept flicking the frequencies periodically.

"... Detroit Police Department. Evidence has been reported missing, but we are yet to receive a public statement—" Mia changed the station again, by only a few digits on the frequency. "Last night's blackout takes the city by surprise, but there is no proof that it has been an attack—" Merely blinking away the information, she rolled the button along a couple millimeters and stopped again.

"Good morning, fellas!" The familiar radio host voice made her hand stop for a moment and her gaze lift, staring ahead at the altar while giving the channel a chance to be heard. "This is Timmy Trevor."

"This is Patrick Dale."

"And you are listening to Classic Rock." After a short break marking the end of their intro, Timmy continued, "As customary, let's start the day with a rundown of the freshest news in Michigan. Patrick?"

"Yes, Timmy," Patrick sounded delighted to start his own personal segment, the first of the day. "I miss us doing night shows here, because let me tell you, there's been quite the eventful night in Detroit. A massive blackout has been reported downtown, spanning several blocks, with the epicenter no where else but right above the Detroit Police Department central station. Rumors of a directed attack have already taken root, as sources declare evidence was reported missing. The blackout lasted for a little more than two hours, with none of the back-up power generators in the building functionally capable of preventing a full system shutdown at the precinct. We are talking security cameras, terminals, digital locks, everything offline. Heck! Even the androids were reported to have shut off during the blackout."

"Anything interesting?" Connor whispered close to Mia's ear, over the continuing rant of the radio host.

Even with her volume down as low as it was, Mia was startled to flinching by suddenly having company on her secluded spot on the pew. The shock did not last all that long though given the nature of her company and just how little she had had to get used to seeing Connor wearing anything else other than the same neat costume he's had since she's first met him. There was not a single android identifier in sight and without them, he looked more human than ever. His LED was still somewhere beneath the knitted hat he wore, as he had refused her on removing it for him, but other than that, he wore nothing that could distinguish him from a human, which was perhaps exactly the intention of his model's designers.

Alas, to avoid having his slowly growing smile turn into a tease or any out loud observation of her staring for that matter, Mia pulled on the radio's wire and removed both earplugs at the same time. "Good news is that you are not a public suspect for the blackout," she sighed out a whisper only for the two of them to hear.

"And bad news?" Connor probed, not willing to take an early victory too soon.

After a short moment of consideration that Mia filled with turning the radio off and neatly wrapping the wire around it, she looked up at him, "Bad news is that I cannot pitch the idea of having the RK800 be hired into the Secret Services right now, because our test of your undercover mission protocols was unauthorized."

"And illegal," he agreed, however not entirely immune to her well hidden praise. Humans had many ways of showing the way words affected them, but most androids were restricted in their range of physically visible signs of emotion. For Connor, with his LED now covered, the most he could do to give away the fact that he appreciated having his work acknowledged by her without outright saying it was smile, which already rested comfortably on his face now despite the night he's had, one he was already looking forward to leaving behind. The less he thought about how he had broken the law, the better.

"I'd like to think what we are doing is a small price to pay for making a case to prosecute Elijah and reveal a drug smuggling route that spreads Red Ice across our borders," Mia shrugged, finally looking ahead. Connor followed her example, allowing himself to realize he's never actually been inside a church before. "It's unfortunate that we have to use the smuggling route ourselves, but..."

"There is no other way," he continued the statement for her, knowing by now too well the line they've used to justify agreeing on this plan to begin with. It was a truth, albeit an uncomfortable truth. There were no compiled scenarios that would have turned successful other than the one they were now executing of simply playing along the role of drug smugglers. Now, thanks to last night's incursion into the precinct, they had just about enough product to hopefully buy themselves a way onto the freighter leaving the docks in less than twenty-four hours.

Currently being ahead of the schedule had however made Connor more content with leaning into his curiosity for a moment and properly look around the church, first at the rows of seats, still empty so early in the morning. "Humans come here to... pray," he noted out loud, keeping his tone relatively quiet.

"Correct," Mia approved his statement.

"Did you pray?" Connor returned his gaze to her, momentarily stunned by his own audacity to have cared more about some old wooden benches than about the visual effect of sunlight coming through stained glass and dropping patches of bright color across Mia's skin and across her hair. Right under his carefully watching eyes, he witnessed one of those visible means by which humans expressed emotions physically: her flustering over his rather blunt questions resulted in a temperature rise on the mounds of her cheeks — she was blushing, ever so slightly.

"As a matter of fact, yes," Mia shook her head before bowing it forward. She had known from the moment they agreed on this plan that her patience would be tested with cruel deja vu's linked to her blindly waiting, but that hasn't made the night go by any easier. "I have been praying," she admitted a little easier now. "That you don't get caught or wounded or destroyed. People usually pray for what is out of their control."

Connor took her hand silently, at first. "You should have more faith in your programming," he hoped a squeeze of his grip would bring her more comfort that his voiced reassurance. "I was made to accomplish my missions, not to fail."

"The other active RK800 was also made to accomplish his missions," she said. Much as she would have liked forgetting that detail making their plan a little harder to execute flawlessly to the end, it haunted the back of her mind.

10:07 PM

The Fifty mark RK800 approached the rundown vehicle, a car which has been reported stolen with a delay of thirty-six hours since the target and Connor have evaded police custody in an insignificant small town in the vicinity of Detroit. Rain poured mercilessly over the whole parking lot, but it did not obstruct in any way the capabilities of his scanners — merely walking around the car clued him in rather easily that there was no one inside the vehicle.

They abandoned the car here, the RK800 noted to his evidence files, stopping his walk at the back of the car, where his right hand grasped the handle and clicked it open.

7:40 AM

Mia stared down at the filled trunk of the car Connor had just opened. They were in the unfinished construction site for a neighborhood, an hour long walk away from the church. Slightly out of breath, she assessed everything they now had packed into three bags. Connor begun unloading them from the car one by one, starting with the backpack with the drugs taken from the police evidence room. There was an unspoken agreement between them that he'll be carrying that one, so he set it aside right by his feet before leaning back towards the trunk and retrieving the folded cold weather clothes he handed over to Mia, as he was already wearing his own.

"They should fit," Connor told her, already working in getting the bags with the supplies for the journey out as well. They've had to disassemble his old body to take inventory of what parts they had spares for, and while Mia claimed that task for herself, Connor dealt with the unpleasantness of theft to ensure that she will not starve to death during their lengthy freighter ride.

"Before you go change," he called after her once he spotted movement in the corner of his eye, thus prompting him to delay getting the last box from car's trunk and instead fish out from the side pocket of the drugs' bag a small, wrecked device she must have recognized immediately given the raised eyebrows ruling over her expression once he looked at her. "I found this amongst the evidence collected. It's of original design."

"I improvised with what I had," Mia murmured along, more interested in tucking the folded clothes inder her left arm and extending her right to take the wrecked EMP jammer. "The voice synthesiser looks mostly intact," she noted after barely a second of turning it in her hand. However, that was something Connor's scanners too had been able to tell. "I can fix it up for you and we add it to the spare parts," she offered, finally meeting his gaze.

"Actually, I was wondering if you could possibly repair it as an EMP jammer again," he presented her with a much different request than what she expected. Being an original design, he had trouble actually identifying how the jammer was supposed to be connected in its working order form, thus he was unable to perform the fixing himself.

"Should be able to," she turned the broken device over in her hand again, nodding along. "What for?"

"The other RK800."

10:08 PM

Empty. The RK800 looked down at the emptied trunk staring him back. Whatever his target has kept in there once was now nothing but a stain of evaporated Thirium only his scanners could still detect.

There was some frustration building up behind his narrowed gaze turning to a glare, a strange sensation suspended only temporarily by the unexpected sight of something more physical left behind. Trapped between the ridges of the cheap lining insde the car's trunk shone into highlight on his scanners a single coin.

It seemed irrelevant to the case, even as he picked it up and studied it up close. Save for the fact that he could tell it was an old coin first put into function more than a decade ago, he got nothing off of it, not even fingerprints.

Perhaps that was why he was slightly surprised with himself for pocketing the coin before closing the trunk instead of tossing it back inside.

That sentiment wasn't allowed to last much longer, not when the priority laid with documenting his findings: An android bled itself dry in the car's trunk. It might have been Connor's previous body.

Having spotted nothing significant in the car's backseat, the RK800 moved along swiftly to opening the door to the driver's seat. A single peek inside was enough for his scanners to pick up on four key details.

First, he noticed the recent stain of blood running deep on the back of the passenger's seat — the gunshot wound inflicted on the target, he made the connection, reminding himself immediately that being interrupted by Connor has thrown off his aim and thus the damage was far from fatal.

Second, he focused on the driver's seat where, through his optical scanners, he saw the traces of Thirium which, similarly to those in the trunk, dated back a little over a week. Around the time of my activation, he made a footnote to his observation, before focusing on the next key detail, namely the hole in the window. Nine millimeter handgun used, the RK800 identified right before dropping his gaze to the last clue, laid right on the bottom edge of the door — Thirium traces, much more scattered.

Without a need to step back he ran the reconstruction of what had happened there. Android — possibly my predecessor — got shot through the window. Damage, severe. Shutdown, imminent. He crawled his way out of the car.

The RK800 dismissed in a blink the last compiled part of the scenario, making no movement however to get himself out of the rain and step inside the car. Looking back down at the droplets on the door's bottom edge, and taking into consideration the trunk stains, he corrected his computing first, He might not have gotten out of the car immediately after being shot.

Only once his evidence ran out and there was nothing left for him to put into through his systematic computing, the newest RK800 finally stepped inside the car, sat down in the driver's seat and closed the door after him, thus deafening some of the white noise the rain has been blasting through his hearing component. The plastic of his raincoat creaked against the seat while he shifted his posture, scanning his surroundings thoroughly. Apart from his target's fingerprints revealing to him her possible enjoyment of radio-played music, he had little in there to latch observations to.

Throwing a glance to the side is what ultimately gave him something worth analyzing.

The RK800 took notice of the compartment situated before the passenger seat and his hand reached out to it almost instantly.

8:21 AM

Connor hesitated before opening the compartment ahead of the passenger seat to his right, a hesitation he was displeased enough by to combat it with clenching his jaw and forcing a command prompt into turning his hand more submissive to this demands.

He knew what he would find in there and why he was hesitant to allow so many memories to come back to him all at once, but it was necessary to get everything out of the car should his plan actually work. No amount of preparation could have helped him block out the vivid remembrance of the first time he opened up that compartment, on Officer Brady's behalf. It's been a long time since he abided by the gun restrictions laws for androids, and he couldn't deny himself the truth that he missed only the simplicity of obedience.

The first item to greet him in the compartment was the framed picture of Brady and his mother. Though he didn't know the woman, the picture captured just about all he needed to tell upon picking it up that she was a woman proud of her son.

He knew her son however. A fine policeman, once his first case shyness wore off. According to his meticulous profiling of him, one Connor could now evoke as an opinion formed, Officer Brady was a good man, someone who didn't deserve getting his car stolen like this.

With that in mind, Connor placed the framed picture inside the empty box in his lap and reached out to take the holster and the gun next. He wiped the gun of Mia's fingerprints thoroughly before setting it inside the box with the holster, hardly able to fight the thought that had momentarily took up space in his processing unit — what would Brady have thought of this undercover mission going as far as needing objectively illegal activities to be done for the sake of a greater good?

He would have understood, Connor ensured himself going through the documents in the compartment and piling them neatly inside the box. This will solve everything, he reminded himself once he could stare inside the emptied depositing space of the car. Not only reporting a smuggling network and having Elijah Kamski pay for his crimes, but also finally wrapping up the Joel Reed case.

Mia appearing in his peripheral vision by his door left open to his side pulled Connor out of his thinking and back to the present. He dutifully turned his attention to her, only to just as quickly have his eyes drop to the device she held out to him.

"All fixed and functional," she handed him the EMP jammer. "Though I must warn you, I do not know how much it's got left in it. It might not last too long once activated."

"That should do," Connor nodded and, seeing as she took interest in the box he was holding, he decided to explain himself. "Officer Brady's belongings. I can't return his car myselt, but I should at the very least ensure he gets what he stored in here." As he spoke, he noticed Mia's eyes growing a little more distant with each sounded he worded out.

"I never got to thank him for lending us his car," she mumbled on the verge of a sigh eventually, her gaze dropping from his and then moving away. "He saved us that day and I don't even know him."

Her distress was flashing an alert in his systems, one he could not dismiss without first attempting to bring her some relief the way he knew best. His left hand reached out and took a gentle hold of her wrist, a wordless permission request to slip his touch lower and take her hand into his own. "I'll write him a note," he offered then. "With his belongings. Notes are often used to express gratitude to acquaintances and work colleagues, right? Once we're back, you'll get to thank him in person."

After a good couple of seconds of silence had passed over his words and Mia was only holding onto his hand a little tighter, Connor had come to the strange conclusion that something other than this passing guilt was troubling her. "What's wrong?" He inquired, tilting his head.

"What if...?" Mia rummaged on her thoughts a little longer, making him conclude that whatever hypothetical she was about to present him with required a lot of care when choosing the right wording to describe it.

It must be something she considers important, he thought, watching tirelessly curious how her jaw tensed and relaxed, how the muscles on her neck flinched with her gulp and her chest raiser and fall across several deep breaths before she even considered herself ready to proceed.

"What if we were to not come back?"

Connor's stun before the question lasted seemingly less than she had expected, because coming only a second later, his reply made her look at him immediately. "Our current chances of success are well above the fifty percent mark," he informed her of something he thought they have established upon agreeing on their plan. Nonetheless, he hardly minded going through the facts again, as they acted rather well as a reminder for himself as well. "We are going to make it back, Mia. Once we have everything we need from Rory, we'll request transportation back and slowly, things will get back to normal."

Much to his shock, she seemed unconvinced when she nodded along, "I'll... let you do what you need to do."

Had it not been for the certainty they'll have more time to talk once on the freighter, in a setting of privacy where he could convince her to relax through methods much more likely to end up successful, Connor wouldn't have let the topic go there and then. It was only with the future in mind that he returned his attention to the EMP jammer and the now emptier compartment yet to be closed.

10:12 PM

RK800 opened the compartment in a fluid movement quickly jerked into a futile attempt to close the thing up again. An feeling lacking description overwhelmed his systems, static corrupting his field of vision and his scanning interface, prompting his processing unit with spammed audio command prompts that within the second brought his biocomponent temperature up and past the advisable limits.

A fugitive glimpse is all he caught of the device stuck to the inside of the compartment, connected by a wire to its door that he pulled open, unbeknownst of what he was going to set off. EMP, he identified, unable to tell why his lips had parted, nor what sound had been released while he turned with heavy and slowed movements to the door by his side hands flapping mostly unresponsive agains the handle.

Come on, he begged his hands to cooperate, hardly able to care anymore about explaining to himself why he'd fight this hard against the stasis inducing condition his systems were being forced into.

He could have sworn there was fog on the windshield when the door creaked open, and steam briefly coming off of him when he fell out, dropping on the puddle formed of the pavement by the still pouring rain. Each and every drop slamming on his back made itself felt and though the noise muffled the effects of the EMP jammer, the damage done wasn't being undone fast enough for him to will his hands to grip the ground beneath and crawl further from the active range of the car.

Before he knew it and well before he was ready to give up himself, his systems gave up on him, entering a soft, full reboot.

10:12 PM, Western Docks, Detroit

This is it, Mia thought to herself, bracing herself against the rain while staring up at the massive freighter they were approaching. Not too far from them, the lights of the CyberLife docks mocked the darkness in which this side of the industrial zone had to operate. Perhaps it was for the better that the yellowed neons didn't do much in lighting the loading area for the Euryalus.

"Where do you think you're going?" The worker standing by the passenger bridge and thus acting as its guard stepped in front of Connor, who had made sure to be a step ahead of her just in time. "We ain't no fancy vacation ship. You ain't crew, you ain't coming on."

Mia could smell the stench of alcohol even through the brisk wall of rain separating her from the working. Not even a wash from the Heaven's couldn't erase this man's sin, and she wondered if, without scent, Connor could still identify the man was drunk using only his scanners.

"We're here from the Silver Spoon," Connor responded to the brutish approach of the man with bluntness. If he had noticed he was drunk, he wasn't showing it any way, not even through a miniature change on his expression.

The man, on the other hand, changed his demeanor instantly, and visibly too. His mockery turned to seriousness right before their eyes, measuring the both of them from top to bottom. Mia blamed the unpredictability of the setting for the way Connor seemed to want to step full in front of her.

"Let me see it," the man demanded before she could think more about his behavior. His voice was now quiet enough that she had to struggle to hear him over the rain.

Connor set down the one bags he was carrying in hand, then removed the one he was wearing on his back, holding it out and unzipping it ever so slightly without breaking eye contact with the man. It was the latter who was forced to look down first. He took out a knife, at which point Mia was fortunately the only one to notice Connor's hand tightening their grip on the backpack, and stabbed the first Fed Ice pack to get a better look past all the packaging at the merchandise. His wide eyes and flared nostrils were telling, even to someone without optical scanners fine tuned for analysis at their disposal, but no matter the knot made of her stomach, the man blocking their way turned around, gestured for them to wait in the rain and made his way across the short bridge, opening the narrow entrance and fishing a wired phone from inside.

Zipping up the backpack again and picking up their supply bags, Connor murmured for only Mia to hear while he was eavesdropping on the conversation. "He bought our cover," he informed her immediately, fact her heart's palpitations very much appreciated. "He's talking to the captain." Just as those last words rolled off his tongue, the man gestured them to approach. "Stay close to me, alright?" Connor made sure to have Mia right behind him before stepping on the connecting bridge and surely, she thoughy, he must be joking to assume she'd want any bit of space between them given their current entourage, far from her usual picture.

As soon as they were inside and out of the rain, the guard stepped back outside. Even Connor seemed a little confused that they were being left unsupervised already, but his disbelief had been dissolved into thin air as soon as the heavy steps of a much older and wider man came down the narrow steps to their right.

"My special passengers for the ride," the man Mia could only assume was the captain of Euryalus greeted them with a toothy grin, should seven out of ten black teeth count for such a thing. "Two," he noted. "Hope our friends at the Silver Spoon are aware this is gonna cost them extra on the next shipment, yes?"

"They are aware," Connor responded immediately, keeping his composure.

"How much with you?"

"Sixty-five pounds."

"In all three bags?"

"The backpack," Connor was unalarmed by the question. "The other two concern only our contact in Greenland."

After a second of consideration, the captain nodded, "I'll tell you what, you look far more capable for this land of work than the last guy they sent."

Rory, Mia couldn't help her eyebrows raising at the alluded confirmation that the lead had been correct to its end.

"Well, save for your lady here," the captain turned his attention to her. "What's the deal? Mute?"

"She's my translator," Connor interrupted him from even thinking of taking another step past him and towards Mia. "For the transactions at the destination."

"Foreign transaction, ay?" His attention had been successfully brought back to Connor and with that, the captain had finally decided to lead them down the hallway, further into the ship. "It's good for business," he pondered out loud, more so for himself given the amount of times he had repeated that same phrase before he finally looked over his shoulder. By then, they were somewhere below the ship. Mia had lost count just how many stairs they've climbed down on. "Hope you too are ready for these next five days, ay? The last fella didn't look so good when we reached land. The cold didn't do him good, and it's colder still out there."

"We are prepared," Connor responded unphased by the backhanded attempts of the man to seed fear into them.

Finally, the captain of the freighter stopped before a door to the left, pushing it open with his foot to reveal a small room that had it not been for the dim light from the hallway, it would have been entirely plunged into darkness. There were no windows, just a small vent above the old mattress and thin blanket spread on the floor.

"We had plans to make more crew quarters down here, but our plans got canceled from above, so the room's off the books," the captain explained. "You lock it from the inside and stay here until we are into the ocean waters. We'll knock on the door when we get there. That bucket over there is for when you get sick," he pointed to the corner, then immediately next to it, to the small door, "through there, you've got a toilet. Unless the last guy's made a number on it, it should be decent. It ain't five stars in here, but you'll make it past the border checks. Guaranteed."

Five stars? Mia thought to herself, stepping after Connor forward. This looks worse than a prison cell.

"Don't make throw bodies overboard in five days, alright?" The captain laughed, watching them make the decision to step inside.

Connor was first to step inside, but Mia found herself hesitating.

We've come so far, she argued with herself, but truly all she needed to step into that dark room was to see Connor's eyes as he waited there for her.

No turning back now, Mia thought to herself.

11:12 PM, Eastern Docks, Detroit

With his LED flickering yellow, the RK800's system reboot wrapped up and returned, one by one, all his senses to him, until he could blink his eyes open and realize he was still laying down in a puddle of a docking region parking lot, next to the vehicle of his targets, most likely long gone. It was still raining and everything stuck to him some extra weight while he raised up, first on all-fours, then on his knees and finally to his feet. Registering no further malfunctions in his systems, he turned around and immediately sat back down in the driver's seat to which the door was left wide open.

He ripped the inactive EMP jammer off of the surface sticking it to the inside of the compartment and, with a quick scan,  determined it had been handmade, improvised out of a voice synthesiser issued specifically for the RK-series.

"Now you see why the target is dangerous," he could already hear Amanda's disappointed tone building up to a scolding about his lead running cold, right into a trap.

She's certainly creative, he gave his target the credit, tossing the EMP aside. Mia, he pulled her name from the file he was given on her, one otherwise incredibly thin given it claimed she's worked so many years for CyberLife, restlessly taking the least free days available, staying the most overtime she could, if the company records were to be believed.

Something's missing, he sighed himself back into the seat with that thought. Something had to be missing from his case files for the target to escape him again. Even with a fellow RK800's help, he should have been closer to getting them, but he's never felt further from success.

• • •

AUTHOR'S NOTE |   
This chapter was a lot harder to finish than it had the right to be, oh my gosh.. someone needs to stop me from deleting and rewriting scenes four times in a row, because it's mentally draining me. However, I am genuinely glad I was able to post this tonight, as promised. ( btw, won that race i mentioned yayy )

And before someone asks, yes, it's relevant we get the newer RK800's pov here, and not just because it underlines beautifully how Connor was always meant to grow into his humanity and how it was bound for him to eventually fall in love with Mia too. I have big things planned that this special chapter layout I employed here sets up.

My initial plan for this book was to finish it before my birthday, but with another half an act to go now, I believe the more realistic goal would be to finish before the middle of October.. 😅 my bad, the last chapters are pretty heavy and detailed as well, and I really don't wanna rush through and accidentally ruin things right at the end.