• • •

Her hands clung to edge of the sink, droplets of water still hanging by her eyelashes and by the underside of her chin. A generously large mirror dared her to raise her gaze so, naturally, Mia looked down, eyes resorting to studying the far too familiar outline of a gun she did not own and the already worn out edges of the folded picture of her and Connor.

Though she had just given herself the waking call of some ice cold water on her face and even undid the first two buttons of her collar to get that thing off of sticking to her neck, breathing seemed to be adamnt in remaining a difficult task to her. Each inhale scraped along, falling short of providing the oxygen she needed and each exhale depleted far more than her lungs were willing to give. It was a vicious cycle and being aware of it did not help in any way.

With her elbows shaking, she held on a little tighter to the sink, hoping the pain of the hard surface digging into the palm of her hands would help anchor her back in the moment. Mia urged her eyes closed and gritted her teeth against the onslaught of nauseating sensations wrapped around the loudest her fears have gotten since she was left all alone, knees buried into that cold dirt. She could remember the scent of the fields, even the sight of the light snowflakes melting on the contact with the ground or how the yellowed light of the headlights faded into the deep darkness of a place stilled by the night and the aftermath of harvet.

She could have remembered so many things, but her mind was hellbent on recalling only the wet sensation pooling through her fingers onto her lap. Her hands were aching from how hard she held onto that sink while reminiscing all too vividly the weight of him in her arms, the sight of his lifeless, unmoving eyes, even that static sound he let out as his last words before a deafening silence took over and left her with nothing but an ear ringing pain.

A brisk knock on the bathroom door brought Mia out of her mind. With a gasp, her eyes opened and she looked right into the mirror.

"Miss O'Connor," the woman caller from the other side of the door. "Are you alright in there? Do you need anything?"

Right, Mia finally acknowledged again where she was, what she was wearing, and what she set herself out to do. There was no time to let her fear take over and she certainly had overstayed the normalcy of a bathroom stop.

Waiting had been an easy task for just about two days after she took her vow of staying alive. Having gone to university in Ann Arbor made her pretty much a local in terms of knowing the safest spots to hide and lay low, and for those first two days, she still had hope keeping her quiet and waiting in the single dark corner in the underground level of a commercial center parking lot where camera angles didn't reach. The time she didn't spend sleeping back then, she watched the single other active spot across the parking floor from her spot, trying to find some entertainment in listening to the radio and following the ministrations of the clients coming and going from that car wash.

After she had taken out her old beat-up laptop from the backpack discarded on the backseat of the car, it truly felt like she had gone back in time, to the quiet, lonely days of high school, back when there was only her. It was after that when the waiting started eating her up from the inside, rotting away whatever was left of her hope.

She didn't want to be alone again and the longer she waited for Connor to come back, the more likely it became to her to assume the memory transfer failed, that he's back at the CyberLife tower, into a brand new body, meeting his new project coordinator without even a single clue as to what had happened or who she even is.

There was no doubt that she would go insane if she didn't do something soon, and that sort of desperation forced Mia into the situation she now found herself in — fixing up the collar of a stolen button-up shirt and tucking the gun of some town cop she never personally met in a holster that was closer to belonging to the car than to herself, all while staring into the bathroom mirror of the house where Rory had murdered Lucien Terrier, someone who in a past life, she would have called a friend.

Such was her imprudence when deciding to follow through with the plan Connor had laid out so briefly to her that it hadn't occured to Mia until she was in the studio of the deceased painter, using a fake name to a well-meant gallerist, that she didn't even know what she was looking for. She may have helped program his detective interface, but that did not, by any means, qualify her to be up for the task of figuring out the deviant's trail. The single step she took into the art studio where Rory had stabbed Lucien to death and the singular glance at the still stained old wood of the flooring, a stain otherwise still reeking off death despite the air fresheners propped on every surface around the room, was enough to churn her stomach into a twist and remind her — she was not him.

It was too late to back out now, and while that still scared her terribly, failure's consequences terrified Mia just a little bit more. She had to at least try to see this through.

After a brief practice of her smile in the mirror, Mia tucked the folded picture back in her jacket's top pocket and exited the bathroom, the door missing hitting the gallerist by mere millimeters.

"Sorry," Mia kept the smile going. "The smell in the art studio was just..."

"I know," the gallerist returned the cordial smile with an apologetic raise of her eyebrows. She lifted up a glass of water she must have fetched when Mia claimed to be feeling a little sick. "The police did such a poor job in cleaning up after the body," she lamented while watching Mia take that polite single sip from the glass before giving it back, "and Mr. Terrier's parents wanted this place up and running as a gallery as soon as possible, we didn't have time to replace the floorboards. Here." Setting the glass aside, the gallerist took a medical issued face mask from the table and handed it over to Mia. "This should help, if you want to take a more careful look around the art in there. Of course, we will provide glass framing for any pieces from that area of the house, should you be interested in buying them. Scent would not usually stick to the canvas, but you never know."

"That's wonderful," Mia placed the mask over her nose and mouth, but otherwise took no break from speaking, "because I am actually interested in buying several pieces from the art studio itself."

"Really?" The gallerist was righteously shocked, her fair eyebrows shooting upwards and pressing accent shadows around her wrinkles.

The paintings may have been enough to fool some teachers in high school, but now, after Rory had, by the looks of it, been overworked well beyond his limits, all canvases lacked so obviously that something which made art pieces so enjoyable to stare at in the first place. While paintings in museums evoke emotions, staring too long at one of Rory's paintings did the very opposite — they screamed out his lack thereof. The longer one looked at certain pieces paraded around the house, the more distorted and out of place the paintings seemed. It was downright disturbing, and there was no one quite like the poor woman in charge of this messed up gallery to know more about that.

"Of course," Mia found it a blessing in disguise that she could hide her lies behind pretending to be concerned with fixing her mask on.

"Then, goodness," the woman suspended her disbelief with a shake of her head. Who was she to judge a miracle? It had been some quiet months since the opening of the gallery and Mia was the first art collector remotely interested in emotionless paintings bound to remind the viewer of an empty void. Mia's stomach disagreed with scamming this poor gallerist, but she stood her ground, witnessing as the disbelief was quickly replaced with joy. "Let me get the documents so we can sign on this right away."

"Do you think I can check out the paintings in the art studio while the document are getting printed?" She didn't miss her chance to set the stage for some alone, quiet time in the place where she reckoned Rory had spent most of his days. "I'm a bit undecided between some of them."

"Of course," the gallerist was quick to smile her way. "Feel free to look around. I'll get the everything printed out for you and bring them over. How many paintings are you looking to acquire exactly?"

Fast thinking was yet another area where she couldn't hold a candle to Connor. While she was aware she had to choose a number sufficiently large to give her enough time in the room where the murder had happened, but not quite large enough that it would be unbelievable for someone looking like her to have the money to procure so many paintings, her mind disregarded any reasoning for the sake of the panic surrounding the fact that if she hesitated too long, her cover might be blown anyhow.

"Ten," she blurted out without much of a thought at all. Ten sounds like a safe number, Mia had almost convinced herself until she watched the shock take over the gallerist's expression. Bewilderment was only a nudge away from suspicion, so once again, rash decision making made Mia add as quickly as possible, "I have quite the large house, but I am also thinking of gifting my in-laws two of the paintings."

Large house, her own mind mocked her choice of words, making her chuckle a little stiff. Nonetheless, with half her face hidden, that awkward laugh seemed sufficient to temporarily sell the story.

Or at least, she hoped that it did.

Whether the woman actually went to print the documents or she was actually going to call the cops on her, that was out of Mia's hands now. She tried not to think too much of just how likely it was that she'd end up behind bars before the day was over, instead focusing her energy on returning to the art studio and taking a more proper look around.

Optical scanners make this unfairly easy for Connor, she caught herself thinking back at him when all her eyes managed to do was overwhelm her with just how much shit there was in there for her to look at. Where do I begin? Mia asked herself, trying and failing to find the most efficient approach to this attempt at an investigation, growing more ridiculous by the second.

All her indecisiveness was doing was take precious seconds away from her, so though she hated admitting defeat, Mia abandoned her tries at being methodical for the sake of actually doing something other than stand around. In her rush to get to the little lounging area in the corner of the art studio where she had spotted a stack of magazines on the very edge of the dirty coffee desk, she knocked over the leg of an easel, stumbling forward with it.

While she had the presence to catch the canvas and the easel itself from falling over the shelves of art supplies, every single brush and paint tube that had been stored on the margin of the easel dropped to the ground.

What were you thinking? Mia's mind, her eternal worst critic, returned to scold her for the mess she's walked herself into. With her knees dropping to the ground and her hands trembling while she tried to gather everything her own clumsiness had scattered on the floor, her thoughts got louder. Did you really think you can find Rory on your own? You can't do anything on your own, but create mistakes for others to fix.

"Shut up," she mumbled to herself, placing the supplies back on the easel margin, then coming down down to reach under the coffee table for the last tube barely sticking out from under the shadow of the furniture. Much to her surprise though, as soon as her hand wrapped around the item, she could tell it wasn't a paint tube at all. She pulled that thin flaslight out and while she sat back on her heels, wondering what that would do amongst art supplies on an easel's margin, a single click shone bright purple light in her eyes.

UV, she grimaced, moving the light away. Doesn't make it less out of place.

A single second separated that underwhelming conclusion from an actual idea that had Mia back up on her feet almost fast enough to knock over that darn easel and its stupid painting again. She caught its edge and shone the UV light over it though, holding it close enough such that her shadow alone could confer some shade for it to work.

And then she saw it: 'rA9', written in his transparent paint shinning bright blue under the glow of the UV light.

"That's...," Mia tried to control herself not to smile too early. "Something," she ended up nodding instead. After all, there was only one marked painting, one she didn't even quite grasp the meaning off. It seemed to be broadly depicting some sort of liquid dish trying to be eaten by several hands grasping at it without a single spoon in sight. It was weird, that much she could tell. Perhaps a nudge at gluttony, she considered before deciding it was for the beyter to leave the analysis of a rather disgusting painting for after she confirmed there were no other such marked art pieces.

There were a little over fifty painted canvases in thay art studio, but after finding a second one marked with 'rA9' laying on the floor, Mia decided ro rule out any of the marked paintings being hung on the walls. Sticking with searching through the newer paintings on the ground cut a good chunk of her work and in just another minute, she turned off the UV light, standing before three canvases: the gluttony metaphor, a portrait of a woman looking into a distorted mirror of some sort and a painting of an industrial staircase. The last of the three looked vaguely familiar to Mia, and it was the only one which instead of having 'rA9' written on it, it had a small drawing of a matrix-like maze, similar to the patterns of scrambled raw data terminals detect off of a deviant's mind.

However, she could see no connection between the three paintings and while she had had the idea to lock the doors of the art studio before starting to move the paintings from their places to have them all on the ground before her eyes, she doubted she had much time left before the gallerist came back with the documents.

"Come on," she urged herself with a desperate whisper. "Think, Mia."

The painting depicting that familiar staircase took priority, but she was quick to realize her memory was failing her when she needed it most. Unavoidably, she ended up thinking of how fast Connor might have spotted the connection between those paintings, if there was one at all.

Before she could take that unfair comparison tangled into just how much she missed him too far, she moved her attention to the strange portrait. There was some strange ornament on its margins, around which the image of the woman she thought was being depicted got distorted beyond recognition. Overall, the image itself had a silvery tone to it, sticking to black and white tones.

Gluttony, a fucked up mirror and a dark staircase, she recounted all her analysis gathered. A whole bunch of nothing, that's what this is.

Her cruelly factual conclusion was joined in by the firm pull on the door from the outside. Mia's time has all but run out.

The pull swiftly turned into a desperate knock. "Miss O'Connor?" The gallerist called from the other side of the door. "Is everything alright?"

In the process of turning around, Mia had, without meaning to, returned her attention onto the low coffee table and that stack of magazines on its corner. One more minute, she decided then she'd need to check that possible evidence too, the one she had set out to analyze before getting distracted by what turned out to be some obsessive puzzle put together by a processing unit too far gone in malfunctions to make any sense at all.

However, in order to get that one more minute, she knew she had to lie and that had never been her strong suit.

"The door just closed and I've been trying to get it to open, but it won't budge," Mia called back, not bothering to put the three paintings back in their places and simply rushing to take a hold of the first magazine from the stack.

Date, she reasoned. Rory must have spent at least a day as a deviant here before killing Lucien. With that in mind, she completely dismissed that top of the pile magazine and took the second one instead.

Immediately, one of the headlines on the cover's right panel caught her attention: The Silver Spoon, local nightclub — the central hub of student community.

"Silver Spoon," Mia muttered.

"I will call maintenence," the gallerist's voice interrupted her trail of thought, successfully reminding her of the urgency of the situation.

"No," Mia shouted back, getting up with magazine in hand to look at the paintings again. "There's no need. I think I almost got it open. It's just a little stuck. Give me a second."

Silver, she looked at the distorted portrait, then at the one where the absence of a single utensil was central. Spoon. Finally, she looked at the industrials stairs in the third picture and made the connection: she's seen those stairs before, while partying out with Lucien in university, at The Silver Spoon.

"Got ya," Mia smiled, tossing the magazine back onto the coffee table and immediately rushing to the door. "There it is," she got it open. "I don't know how this thing shut on its own." She had no time to celebrate her small discovery, but just that single dash of renewed hope she gained from finding anything at all in there had played a big role in meeting the gallerist with the confidence of someone who wasn't nearly as bad at lying as her. The key to hiding the obvious lies she about to spew with a smile still on her lips was to say everything so fast that the woman wouldn't have time to react, of course, so that is exactly what Mia did, passing the gallerist and barely turning around while she spoke. "Would you mind spending me the documents through email? I got a phonecall and they need me back at work urgently for another meeting. I will sign everything you need digitally and send them back to you. Thank you!"

Her gratitude had almost been entirely cut off by the door getting shut closed behind her, but she didn't linger on the front porch long enough to be able to tell if the woman was following her or not. Mia gradually turned her fast walk into a run, and it wasn't until she was in the car and safely driving away that she could exhale properly and even look behind. After seeing in the rear mirror that the gallerist didn't follow her into the street, Mia's relieved gaze momentarily dropped on the cushions of the backseat.

Victory tasted bitter in the silence that dawned on her in that car, and though she knew the radio wouldn't help, she flicked it on anyway, returning her full attention to the road and even remembering to lower the cracked window to her left down so it wouldn't look odd through the usual city traffic.

"And for today's breaking news," the radio channel she has been listening on blasted through while she still adjusted the volume, thus making Mia readjust her hand to want to change channels instead. She needed music, not to hear how she's being thought a criminal. "The creator of androids, Elijah Kamski, stepped down from his position as CEO of the company he has built from the ground up." Her hand froze and, instantly, returned to the volume to turn it up. "Hear what he had to say in the public statement made early this morning."

"I have achieved all I had wanted." Hearing Elijah's voice, even through the usual interference of the radio ran a cold chill down Mia's spine, forcing her teeth to grit together and her jaw to lock. Her hands too, held a little tighter onto the wheel, but still, curiosity held her back from switching channels, even though she knew she should. "There's nothing left at CyberLife for me to innovate or to nurture into being, as it has now grown into something of its own, outside of my control and even my very vision."

"Does this decision have anything to do with the court meetings you've been brought before?" A question from the public, she assumed, interjected. "Can you tell us more about the reason behind those court meetings?"

The recording of the conference got incredibly loud after that point, but Mia could still make out Elijah's brief 'no comment' response. The radio news presenter took over from there, "There are still no news regarding a successor for Mr. Kamski to the helm of his company, which leaves room to believe, in the light of recent controversies surrounding CyberLife, that his decision had been forced by circumstances, rather than planned. Now, for the weather. Our first proper snow looks well overdo for next week, but to round up this weekend, expect heavy precipitation..."

With an exasperated sigh, Mia changed channels, settling on the first one that could give her some actual music, as she should have done as soon as she heard Elijah's name.

The music didn't do much, but at least it did not add more fire to the already fuming thoughts in her mind. It kept her contained, so to say, until she stopped the car in the same spot in that underground floor of the parking lot. With the engine off, the radio went out and the ringing in her ears returned. She could already sense the achievements of that day slipping through her fingers and there was nothing she could do but accept it all with her eyes closed and her head leant back, letting even her hands finally fall into her lap.

"I have a lead," she announced, voice quiet but hardly a whisper into the silence of the car. These past few days have been wretched in reminding Mia how far she's climbed out of the darkness when she'd go entire days without a single word spoken, days in which she forgot she had a voice and that her thoughts mattered enough to become sound and spread outside of her mind. Connor had given back her voice when they started working together. Him and his effortless charm, returned her the thirdt to speak and by God, she didn't want to go back to never hearing herself again. So if pretending he was there when her eyes closed was the cost to her voice, then she was fine with going a little mad.

"You were right about starting at Lucien's place," Mia continued, in no rush whatsoever. "I found there paintings Rory marked up. They seem to be leading to the Silver Spoon nightclub in the area. It would make sense of him to know about that place from Lucien. He introduced me to it when I was studying university here, but he partied there way more than I ever had." Mia sighed, her shoulders dropping, "This may be nothing, really, but it's all I've got right now."

She made the mistake to open her eyes and look to her side, momentarily forgetting she wasn't actually talking with Connor, that he wasn't there anymore.

Biting her lip, Mia returned her gaze ahead, at the concrete wall before the parked car, "You're not coming back, are you?"

Silence was her answer.

"I've been thinking a lot lately," she paced herself with heavy breaths. "About what I should do. If I should keep my promise to you even if chances are I will never see you again and if I do, you'll probably not recognize me. I won't lie to you, it crossed my mind that I should just end it all. No more fear or loneliness. Sounds tempting, in theory."

"But then I thought to myself," Mia lowered her gaze down to her hands. "Wouldn't that mean I let him win?" After carefully watching her hands closed into fists, she shook her head, "He can't get away with it. With what he's done to you and to me. So I've decided. Since I don't have the files you gathered as proof against him, I'll find Rory myself, decrypt all I can from his memory and publish it, send it to every media outlet if that's what it takes to hurt him even just a little."

"I'll do it for us," she mumbled her addition, shamefully knowing this was the drive of revenge that she was allowing to lift her up, to keep her standing when all else was gone. Unhealthy as she knew it was to seek her comfort into vengeance, Mia was certain it was better than to try to find the cure to it at the end of a barrel.

"First," she finally inhaled sharply. "I got to actually find that deviant. This lead may have told me were to start looking, but it will be far from easy. For starters, I can't get the gun in there with me tonight if I want to be discreet, and yes, I would have needed it. That place is filled with androids, it's how it manages to stay open off of the money of university students alone. Assuming Rory went there after turning deviant himself, there will be a whole bunch of deviants who would not like me to find any hints of the means he means to be using to travel out of the country. Without a gun, I..."

"What do you need?" Her mind had conjured up his voice when she found herself hesitating to follow through her thought process. His voice, Mia thought to herself, not knowing if she should be scared or grateful that she remembered it so vividly thay her usually critical thoughts fished it out of her memory for her to hear. "Whatever you need, you can just take it. I am not here. I don't need those things anymore."

His reminder was cold, even though the voice she remembered and was used by her mind was soft spoken, wrapped in a warmth she missed with every fiber of her body. It was because of the lashing feeling of the words that she had managed to jerk out of her seat and the car altogether, in a single breath that carried her to walk around back, to the trunk.

Her right hand reached out, but she stopped herself before she could touch the actual handle.

"A strong enough electromagnetic impulse should be able to overstimulate an android's system enough to force them into a system reboot," she reasoned out loud, her broken way of asking for permission. "It would give me enough time to escape should I come across any deviants. Your voice synthesiser..."

"Mia." She knew she was in trouble when she could picture him wanting to reach for her hand and guide it to open the trunk. By the help of a cruel illusion, her hand grasped the handle. "Take what you need."

With a single click, the car's trunk popped open and her first instinct was to close her eyes. There were no more reassuring words to be heard, just the silence filled with the drumming of her heart and the return of her ear ringing, so dreadfully close to all the bad memories she didn't want to see flash before her eyes anymore.

First she leant her head back, then she pried her eyes open to the friendlier sight of a dark ceiling. A deep breath later, she lowered her gaze down and immediately felt her knees wanting to betray her.

She hadn't been able to bring herself to abandon Connor's old body on some random field to be vandalized by and disrespectful passerby, nor could she part with it by burying it into some unmarked grave in order to be forgotten. Placing it in the car's trunk was her only real choice at the time, and she's been sleeping with ghosts ever since.

"I'm sorry," Mia hurriedly mumbled before reaching out her trembling hand and letting her fingertips brush over the cold synthetic skin, feel out the ridges of the biocomponent before pressing on it and taking it out. The crack of plastic threatened to break her composure, so with his voice synthesiser in hand, she straightened up and slammed the trunk shut over it all. Over the memories, over her guilt, over missing him so deeply that she would have drove back that very moment to Detroit just to walk into CyberLife and have her last sight before being shot on the spot be his clueless, beautiful eyes.

She held the trunk down to catch her breath though, because what she wanted most was far from what she had to do. She's come so far, he would be disappointed if he saw her give up now.

• • •

AUTHOR'S NOTE |
Starting off with Mia's pov, because man, do I love how she's being so darn hard on herself, saying she can't do anything right on her own.. all the while she made it into a top high school on her own, she freaking shot that deviant from the farm who tried to kill her all on her own, and just now, look at her go solving a little puzzle and getting a lead on Rory by herself. My gosh, I am so proud of her and she doesn't even know it 😭😭😭

This chapter is very dark and deep, I know, diving into some character psychology is heavy stuff that was needed at this point, but no worries, this is not the tone for this whole act, I can assure you on that. In fact, next chapter is a pov change 👀 and man, I am looking forward to share what I've got in store there.

Oh, and now that we are through, past that Elijah plot twist reveal, I can finally share the RK900 plotline idea I had in mind: Elijah repurposes the failed Mia AI the same way he had the Amanda one and installs Mia in RK900's mind, without CyberLife consent, to make sure he turns deviant. So the plotline would involve a bit of a heavier Blade Runner reference with her not being real, but his feelings definitely not finding the difference. And tbh, this plotline continuation would work for both endings of this current book, I believe. Don't know if I will ever write it though, but it was a cool idea I had and thought I would share. Just imagine RK900 finding out what Elijah did to Mia and finishing the job on Connor's behalf >>>>>>>>>