• • •

Music loud enough for the bass to dictate the rhythm of your heartbeats. Flashing neon lights pulsing between the false privacy of complete darkness and the crepuscular blue, purple and red luminescence that pertains to those minds which are most active during the night. There was a thickness in the air inside the Silver Spoon, one Mia recalled had always been there, along with those heavy scents combining across the dance floor and even in the lounges filled of tables where the more rich could spend their money on less than civilised means of entertainment.

Sweat, cologne, cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes right out of a distillery were all perfumes that invaded her nostrils while she pushed through the least active spots of the moving crowd engaged in a sort of primal dance of flesh against flesh, where everyone had some reassembling need to be touched. She had been there once: young, alone and tired of loving something blocked off from her by a screen. She had once been a student just like those she now passed, aching to feel like she belonged to something, to anything bigger than herself.

Though the club going used to be a nice distraction back when Lucien had introduced her to it, it didn't last. Sooner rather than later, coming back to her dorm feeling filthy in her own skin had clued her in that all these environments had to offer were quick and cheap fixes of pure vulgarity, similar to an actual drug. She decided since that she'd much rather pay in solitude to stick to the cleaness of her work and the reliability of her screens. There was purity in technology, one that she had scarcely ever found reflected outside of it.

Being back there felt strange.

Very little seemed to have changed in the Silver Spoon over the years, save for her, no longer throwing herself at the undulating mass of people, but rather standing aside, moving slow and watching.

Had there always been this much drug use in this place? Mia wondered, well aware normal people didn't go to nightclubs to stare and observe the things others felt all that much braver to do under the illusion of privacy the darkness conferred onto them. A single passing glance narrowed her eyes on the clouds of red smoke raised from the VIP lounges and the packets of red ice left out in the open on their round, low tables, like accessories discarded between bottles and glasses of colored drinks.

She looked away almost instantly, because if there was one thing she knew, it was that staring at addicts was a dangerous gamble with incredibly concerning odds to get her into trouble. Especially when red ice was involved. She hadn't understood it back when the news of the new drug broke out and she didn't understand it still how anyone in their right mind would take that thing which is guranteed to kill them, one way or the other.

Though the presence of red ice in the club made her uneasy, Mia knew she was quite literally too far in to back out now. She chose to distract herself by finally looking up at the android models dancing on their poles and she could have sworn they wore actual clothes back in the day. But her eyes were not deceiving her of the current situation: the androids were wearing only the glow of the neons under the onslaught of spectators staring up at them and their programmed routine of sensual and provoking moves.

Welcome to law and order, Mia thought to herself. We can program androids to be your wet dream embodied, but we draw the line at androids recording and reporting the illegal activities happening right next to them, because God forbid we invade the privacy of criminals.

So many years spent working on all these androids which could actually make a difference for the better in the world, only for the common people to most certainly remember only that which the company knew would sell the best: vice in plastic shells. Vulgarity wanted more of the same. Depravity wished to see itself into all that was pure.

Mia forced herself to look away in the same breath that she willed her fists to unclench. Focus, she told herself, the faster you find what you're looking for, the less time you'll have to spend in here.

And that seemed to be all the motivation she needed to look up above the crowd and try to spot at least the vague direction in which she should be heading to reach the bar, next to which she remembered the stairs in Rory's picture should be located. For a brief moment, she thought she had spotted some bright blue glow on top of one of the scaffolding platforms above the moving spotlights, but since after averting her eyes in order to not get blinded by the club light system, the blue spot in the dark was gone, she dismissed the elation in her heartbeat for either an optical illusion or an aggravation of her slowly growing madness since losing Connor.

Soon, she feared, she would start seeing him everywhere, not just in their car or in the corner of her eye while driving. Maybe she'll grow mad enough to see him on those scaffolding platforms, or right there with her, in the crowd, just a couple steps ahead, constantly out of her reach.

Mia didn't bother fooling herself with claiming she hadn't started walking in the direction she did because she hoped she'd meet one of these hallucinations and confirm to herself that she still remembered Connor's face without it being lifeless and destroyed. It would have been easy to excuse herself and her now chronic state of missing him, by thinking she was walking towards the bar, but it wasn't until she reached it that she knew she had accidentally chosen the right direction. Maybe her subconscious remembered the wavy path she took on drunker nights in college; that certainly made more sense than her soul's choice of believing Connor was still there, helping her move their case along.

As soon as she approached the bar, Mia made herself some room between two men drinking there and waved the bartender over. "One mojito, please," she shouted her order — shouting being the only way one could communicate in nightclubs ruled by the loudness of music aiming to overshadow the noise of the mind — for the only drink she's ever had at bars since she was of legal age to seek some alcoholic relief every once in a blue moon.

Drinking was not why Mia was there, leaning over the counter though. Ordering a drink was a short term investment to make her posture seem like she was just eager for her beverage, rather than trying to peak through the tall window fixture to the side of the bar, offering her a glimpse at the stairs she was looking for, spiraling upwards. There was an office like observation point above the bar, and a whole maintenance area a level above the nightclub client floor, where their goods got stored in the dark. If the sign on the door next to the club was to be believed, that is — 'No access'.

Sliding a bill across the counter for the drink that was dropped in front of her promptly, Mia kept looking at the door. There was an electronic security lock besides it, one that she believed she should be able to bypass with the EMP jammer she improvised with that component from Connor.

With a bit of luck, she thought, she'll find a quiet and hopefully not populated deposit upstairs. But the mere sight of those blinds pulled over the observation office's large windows gave her a bad feeling about what she was about to walk herself into.

Biting nervously onto the inside of her bottom lip, even at the cost of soon lapping her tongue over a tender spot bleeding a taste of iron into her mouth, Mia waited for the bartender to be distracted at the very opposite side of the bar before slipping away from the two men flanking her and from her untouched drink she didn't trust enough to even consider taking a swing of liquid courage from. One of the men, the one that thought in his disgusting drunkenness that she wouldn't notice him smelling her hair, turned to look after her, shouting about her drink, but she didn't look back. Counting fully on the crowd effect covering for her, she kept her back turned to the bar and dropped her shoulder to lean on the wall, right besides the door and its security implement.

Finally, with a trembling hand, Mia reached inside her jacket and grasped her improvised device, flicking its switch on for a single second. She had limited time use available on it and though getting past that lock was important, she needed to have something left in it for the possibility that one of the androids there turned out to be a deviant who knew Rory and his whereabouts.

"Yo! Your phone's broken," she heard the complaint of some guy ahead of her, trying to take a picture of his mate with a bunch of girls who looked too young to even be there, thus earning a first confirmation that her EMP worked.

Looking back, Mia confirmed that the security panel was off and the door had clicked unlocked too. She turned around as casually as she could, making sure to tuck the device back inside her jacket beforr she slipped inside the narrow space of the stairway. Though the door closed behind her, the music had barely been muffled. The only thing that had changed was that now, her singular source of light was that thin tall window through which the bar's green neons shone through.

The metal of the stairs vibrated under her feet from the bass of the songs, and she tiptoed her way past the window light to finally dive into the unexpected darkness of this path upstairs. Such a poorly lit access point to the storage told Mia all she needed to know about what to expect up there: this was most definitely a passage only the androids working in the club were expected to use, because only they could make out without bending over and feeling the edges of the stairs where the steps ended and started.

She crawled more than she walked up the circular staircase leading to the upper level, at the very least until she started making out the diffused light of that observation room above. The closer she got to it, the more she could actually distinguish several voices conversing over the still loud music vibrating through the metal beneath and around her.

Voices, Mia froze on the stairs, eyes wide at the implications of the plural that she had just acknowledged. Of course, she thought then. Of course my luck ran out after finding this lead.

Some part of her was begging her to take this as a sign to turn back. Who was she kidding anyway? Going in there without a step by step plan, expecting to find answers when even she could gather the odds were inclined towards a high probability of danger. It wasn't just madness, but pure stupidity, only Mia was well aware of all that while offering her only counter argument — she had nothing left to lose.

Without Connor, she had no chance of vindication, no chance to clear her name and go back to work, and did she even want to anymore? She had accepted a lot of things from Elijah for the sake of continuing to do what she loved doing, out of a duty to repay him for helping her out when she needed someone the most, but Mia doubted she'll ever be able to forgive or forget attempted murder, stalking and whatever privacy violation that was he was doing with building an android in her image behind her back.

Without a job, without Connor, without even a place she could call her home, all she had left was a life of looking over her shoulder and as far as she was concerned, that was no life at all.

Her heart could struggle in her chest as much as it pleased and it wouldn't change her mind, because that's the funny thing about humans — even when the brain decides death is an acceptable outcome, the body refuses to go without a fight.

Even afraid, Mia took her first careful and slow step forward.

She advanced at that slow pace until her back pressed against the decorative half-wall blocking out her view of the room. It was an open space with no door blocking her from peeking around the corner and getting the best observation angle she could on this new environment of barely any light at all.

There was very little distinguishable in there — an office desk with a computer and the only lamp in the room, an old couch that had seen better days, with a low and small coffee table, the latter of which inched towards the middle of the room. There was a wall of boxes to the side, and though she couldn't make out the stamps of destination, the stack of cardboard next to the couch yet to be put together into boxes told her it would be valuable of her to find out where those things, whatever they contained, were being sent. Checking out the computer for some security footage access would have also been useful, but none of those things Mia thought she should do were possible with a man standing next to the desk and watching as the one on the couch weighted...

Red ice, Mia immediately ducked back around the corner, in the shadow of which she felt a little safer. Shit.

"We don't have enough in stock to supplement the demand."

Mia flinched at the much clearer sound of one of the men's voice.

"Tomorrow we could start harvesting from those of us working dance floor," someone said, sounding much closer to her half-wall than she would have liked. She looked up and there it was: a shadow casted on the wall ahead of her confirming she didn't notice there was a man standing on the other side of her hiding spot.

Are they armed? Mia asked herself, as if it would have made any difference at all whether or not three men were armed. If it came down to their capabilities of handling an intruder, she was well aware even just one of them alone could have handled her, but maybe, if she had the certainty of no guns being involved, she could try her luck at some distractions, maybe even bargaining.

To not get ahead of herself with plans in that direction though, she first leant forward and peeked around the corner once more, this time squinting to see what they were wearing and if she could spot any holsters or pistols.

"Could work." While she was still watching, a fourth individual entered the room. Pale yellow light reflected off of the plastic of the two bags of red ice he brought in from what she assumed was a deposit area extending past that doorless frame in the wall leading to the darkness covered scaffolding. But more so than the sight of the drugs, Mia was shocked to see the yellow LED on that man's temple.

No, she corrected herself then. None of these are men. They are deviants.

Returning to the relative safety of her hiding spot, Mia was aware her heart rate had increased enough for her temples to drum on the rapid rhythm of her heartbeat and drown out all sound, even that of the bass still booming from the club below. Guns no longer mattered unfortunately, because if she could have tricked a man, there was no fooling a deviant without an insane amount of luck. With that in mind, she let her right hand quietly slide beneath her jacket's edge and close around the device held so close to her chest.

"West is supposed to run maintenance on us next week," one of the deviants on the other side of her half-wall spoke. "We'll get a new supply of blue blood, so we can afford working on low-power for a while."

Deviants in the red ice business, Mia thought, not denying herself neither the chill nor the disgust that came with that fact and its branching consequences. She now knew for certain that chances were, one of those deviants knew Rory and probably his whereabouts as well.

It shocked her more than it should have to find deviants willingly playing an active role in the distribution of such a vile drug, and she was ready to admit that this behavior was indeed a prime example of everything bad a human could become. Selling a part of one's self towards the destruction of someone else, for nothing but a material gain with no meaning whatsoever; yes, she thought to herself, they are mimicking the most horrible human conditions. Are they even aware they are copying the sort of behavior that would have qualified a human to lose their status as such and be instead called 'inhumane'? Mia doubted it.

Her right hand's fingers traced the ridges of the device, hoping it would feel as warm and comforting as holding Connor's hand just because she had used a piece of him to construct it — it did not.

There was no one there to hold her hand, no one there to take the choice away from her and thus spare her the burden of consequences. She was alone, own hand wrapped around a simple, but horribly loaded choice: turn back now or use the EMP for its intended purposes.

With no guarantee that she could even make it back down the stairs without a sound, much like she had no full certainty she could find a continuation of her lead for Rory by attacking those deviants and basically starting a fight that, should her EMP not work, she was bound to lose, the scales were evenly matched between her options.

The EMP should work on a range sufficient to take out all four of them, she attempted to reason with herself at least some confidence regarding her own work, but truth was, choices of this magnitude almost never worked out for her, no matter how good she felt about her appoximations and appreciations of the matter.

Nothing to lose, she ended up reminding herself instead and though her heart remained heavy and conflicted, Mia flipped the switch on the EMP and, pulling it out of her jacket, tossed it around the corner.

Her hope was that it would land in the middle of the room, or at least near it. She had seen it slide under the coffee table, but the static interference-filled screams and groans of distress from the deviants in there compelled her to look away and not actually watch the forced system reboot she was inducing upon them by overloading their systems.

Three distinctive thuds were what ultimately made her look back at the scene because that was when she knew the EMP jamming started doing its job. The deviant besides the table fell, hitting its head against the edge of the desk and leaving behind a thin trail of Thirium on its way to the ground. The android on the couch fell back, his optical units flashing pieces of internal coding until its body spasmed and fell to the side, completely still. The last and third thud belonged to the last deviant to have entered the room. It dropped face forward on the coffee table, as if it had just received an electric shock to his back ports.

Seeing the EMP do its job was delightful, but under that deviants weight, the coffee table broke and the device she built was just about fragile enough to most definitely be crushed in that mess of splinters and broken bags of drugs scattering red crystals across the floor.

"No," Mia barely whispered her vocalized defeat, not knowing that will turn out to be the only reaction she'll get to have before having a hand on the back of her jacket's collar, hoisting her across the half wall and dropping her on the ground like she had weighted nothing at all.

Before she could even fully comprehend that the fourth deviant had been lucky enough to resist until the EMP was destroyed, two strong hands wrapped around her neck and the absence of all the air that had been knocked out of her lungs at the impact with the ground made itself felt.

"Filthy human," the deviant spoke through gritted teeth, some damage clinging to its voice synthesiser enough to have glitches interfere with the sounds it made. It obviously did not use its full strength on her neck, because if it had, she would have cracked like some dry stick underneath the towering presence pinning her to the ground.

She's been there before — powerless and fragile under a force to be reckoned with, one which knew no pain, even if she tried to struggle and fight back. The luck she had had with convincing Rory not to kill her would not repeat itself and without a gun to defend herself with, she was fully at the mercy of a machine that knew not what mercy even meant.

Threats are to a code what mosquitoes are to humans: a pest. This deviant will crush her, and if it so pleases, it will take its time, watching as life left her eyes.

There was some strangely poetic irony to eventually dying at the hands of that which she adored, only this deviant above her was nothing like the comfort she found in androids and technology. It was nothing like him, and that kept her restless, kept her from accepting what was happening to her as the only way things could ever go.

I don't want to die like this, was all she could think about when her right hand, instead of clinging pointlessly to its unmoving wrists dropped down to its torso.

She's had that thought before, when her head pulsed with ache and her ears rung too loud for thoughts to come through. Back then, her hands had wrapped around an unfamiliar gun and her finger unloaded bullet after bullet in that android from Joel's farm.

This time there was no gun.

Mia's hand found the ridges of the deviant's Thirium pump regulator and, with the experience of someone fluent in android anatomy more so than androids themselves, she twisted it out through the deviant's shirt.

The reaction to the loss of contact to its regulator was instant — the deviant gasped, LED bright red on its temple after having stayed valiantly constant in its yellow while gritting its teeth and waiting to watch her die.

Since the pressure on her neck had lifted ever so slightly, Mia found the adrenaline-riddled strength to bring her other hand, until then flailing around and dragging her nails over unphased plastic, onto its shirt. She ripped it open and, while the popped buttons were still flying, she yanked the regulator out completely, tossing it as far away from her as she could.

The deviant, having most of its locomotion functions disabled or affected by the power loss, fell off of her, eyes following the missing biocomponent. It squinted for focus and, unable to rely on scanners, it begun crawling after a moment of hesitation, to retrieve that vital piece of its functioning that was missing.

She had counted on deviants being capable of imitating the humane instinct of self-preservation and her desperate measure of defense was rewarded with a moment in which Mia could finally breathe and tamper those ragged breaths of hers down as well. One sharp inhale and grimaced exhale at a time, scraping up and down her trachea, she calmed just about enough of her dizziness to look away from the ceiling and move her head to the side. Her relief had been almost entirely suspended by the sight of the deviant already having almost reached its regulator.

Unsteady on her own feet and heavily underestimating just how badly it hurt to have been thrown around like that, Mia hurried to stand. She was planning on taking full advantage of that grace period of soft system rebooting after the regulator was plugged back into its place, getting besides the deviant laid down on its back right as it stuck the piece in the round hole in its chest.

With little remorse and, thanks to her ear ringing pairing poorly with the loudness of the music below, also deaf to its panicked plea, Mia took the regulator out again only a second after it had been placed back in, this time getting up and holding it herself.

"You're going—" A cough interrupted her, her throat far too sensitive for the tone she tried to use. "You're going to tell me what I need to know," Mia compromised on the rougher, more demanding tone, bringing it down to a whisper she had hoped would not matter much in intimidation to a machine that wished so badly to continue its play pretend of livelihood. "Do you know Rory?"

The deviant did not nod.

It didn't even as much as flinch.

In fact, all it did was look at her, blissfully unaware that its faintest expression change of merely widening its eyes wouldn't fly past the head of someone who had spent more time reading the raw data of how Connor's approaches to interrogation scenarios than she had spent sleeping.

Something as small as its eyes widening was all Mia really needed to bend over regardless of her vertigo reminding her of how dizzy she still was, and taking her turn at grabbing it by its collar. The deviant was forced to be compliant due to the absence of the regulator, but just because it did not struggle against her dragging it towards the table, it didn't suddenly make it all that much easier for her. Mia reached that desk almost completely out of breath again, fact that reflected itself into how she barely stumbled against thr desk, leaving the regulator there and blindly tracing her fingers across the cables of the computer to feel the one sticking out of the right port.

Once she had the proper cable ending in her hand, as confirmed by her fingetips brushing the tip in full acceptance of the numbing properties of the electricity it carried, Mia turned back to the deviant. Though less than full functionality had made it more compliant, it did not make it return to its obedient presets — at the sight of the cable, it immediately recoiled from her touch.

"I've got three other androids in here that I can reactivate and check the memory data of at any point," Mia did not hold back from informing the deviant of its current insignificance, even though part of her was ready to admit that she was heavily bluffing and very much unwilling of taking the chance of losing this deviant's memory data. It didn't need to know that though. "If you want your regulator back before shutdown, you're going to fucking behave yourself and cooperate. You've got maybe a minute left, what's it going to be?"

The deviant's answer was to glare at her before bowing its head and deactivating the synthetic skin around its port opening to allow her access.

"Good choice," Mia praised, plugging the deviant into the computer and turning back to the desk to move the screen around. She didn't need all that many clicks to gain access to its memory data and start downloading everything recorded in the past five months directly on the device there.

"Please," the deviant muttered, voice corrupted by even more static interference than before.

It must have thought it was begging for its life and it occured to Mia then, while watching the progress bar of the download that this deviant did not know the difference between the virus and what being alive really felt like.

At the end of the day, it was just a machine, believing what its code was telling it, unaware that she had seen how life was actually supposed to look like for their kind and deviancy was far from that miraculous truth.

Notified that the memory download was complete, Mia retrieved the regulator and placed it back in the waiting hole in the middle of the deviant's chest. It was a fluid motion, done with only one hand, as her other rested near the keyboard, a single finger hovering in waiting for the proof that she was right.

As expected, the second the regulator was plugged back in and the grace period had ended, the deviant reached out to take hold of her again. Barely having to lean back, Mia pressed the button and sent the administrator key command for a total factory reset through the cables. The deviant deactivated, arms dropping limp right before its full body locked in place.

"It's better this way," she mumbled to herself, sparing just a glance down at the android while she unplugged it, before fully focusing on her screen.

There was a high chance her fix on this one android would be awfully short-lived, gaining her nothing but another machine to expect one day to seek her out with a vendetta that demands a blood payment of some sort. Too many signs seemed to point to her that there were plenty more deviants at the Silver Spoon who will not allow an android to exist amongst them with its code uncorrupted.

So much dirt, she sighed, not exactly happy to discover that for the first time since Connor was gone, she did not wish for him to be there, besides her. Mia did not want him to see how some of his kind have fallen into disgusting habits, how some had followed that hateful path she anticipated and he dismissed. There wad so much innocence and light in the way Connor thought, and none of it belonged in a place like this, where his life fuel had been turned in poison glass shattered across the floor.

While keying in the decryption algorithm for the raw data she collected, Mia decided she will use a public phone and call the cops herself on this place once she was done. An anonymous tip. She doubted the involvement of defective androids in the red ice business would make the news. In fact, she was pretty sure none of what had happened there for so long will be allowed by CyberLife to come to light. Elijah may have stepped down publicly from the helm of his company, but Mia knew him a little too well to actually believe he'd abandon his love child completely. Try as he might to claim he wanted to create life and give androids free will, she knew he enjoyed the role of the puppeteer too much to cut off such precious strings.

No, she won't hurt anybody but herself by reporting this. However, she might just save some students who don't know better the opportunity to ruin their lives, and that should be enough.

With the decryption completed, Mia was able to push those thoughts of future actions aside and instead focus on opening up the raw data files. Old habits die hard, because despite her prolonged diziness, her eyes skimmed through the text with ease and had the proof that the deviant had met with Rory jotted down on a timeline in no time.

"Shipment," she slowly read out loud the reoccuring topic of their conversation, remembering thus the boxes to the side of that very room. With little hesitation, Mia abandoned the desk to skip across the room and take the first box she could get her hands on. It was much heavier than she thought it would be, barely able to lift it, so she had to resort indyead to tilting it until she could make out the address details.

With the strange sender and receiver addresses in mind, while hardly containing a small smile that the lead had indeed ended up being sound, she returned to the computer and searched up the cargo ship supposed to make this transport of red ice possible. Having heard the deviants talk before dropping that EMP jammer on them, Mia had no trouble narrowing down the list to a single ship, supposed to depart in two days, with the box noted destination in its reported itinerary.

There was no doubt to it then, Mia knew that's where Rory had to be heading.

It crossed her mind to check the most recent ship to depart on the same route in order to appreciate whether Rory would be embarking in two days or if he was already well on his way towards the destination. However, before she could click anything at all, the screen had been shattered by a single bullet shot from the side. Another one was immediately fired and, with her hand already instinctively covering the cut left behind on her temple by a flying shard, Mia ducked down while the computer unit was also destroyed.

From the ground, next to the fallen over lamp, she looked up at the shooter. They were standing in the doorless frame, arm still extended, gun still ponted at the computer.

She could have recognized him anywhere.

His narrowed gaze when he was focused. His shiny tie clip.

And of course, if she somehow had grown blind to their memories, the bright 'RK800' written on his jacket would have explained to her rather well how she had so easily dismissed her pain to get up.

"Connor," Mia breathed out, her smile frozen before it could actually build itself up on her lips.

His eyes met hers and they were cold.

From the corner of her own eyes, she saw his arm move and soon, there was a barrel pointed her way, stopping her from focusing on his unchanged expression.

And there was the difference — even without understanding why, she would have let him kill her.

• • •

AUTHOR'S NOTE |
Been a while since I left a chapter off on a cliffhanger and it felt fitting to be on the chapter with the coolest title too 😅 reunion, but not really here 👀

Any theories? About this strange RK800? About where the red ice shipment will be heading, maybe? Would love to hear your thoughts on this one.

Also, gotta take a moment to thank my little sister for giving me the awesome concept of "hey, wouldn't it make sense that some of the deviants who hate humans willingly get into the red ice business because that drug is fatal to humans?" That really got my brain working, wheels spinning and everything. Thank youu, little sister!!!