It was raining. It was always raining.

The mist clung to the city like a second skin, tainted with the residue of a world that had torn itself apart. Seattle-9 had endured, its skyline a monument to survival, but the scars ran deep. Rainier’s Wrath, as locals liked to call it, left vast stretches of the South Sound unlivable. Then came the Water Riots, the Corporate Secessions, and the automated purges. The city somehow survived it all.

But survival didn’t mean safety.

Detective Hal Bishop stood over the body, his coat heavy with rain, his pulse steady despite the grisly scene in front of him. Years in homicide had carved lines into his face, a roadmap of investigations that never quite left him. He was tall but not imposing, built like someone who had spent more time taking hits than throwing them. A lifetime of bad sleep had left the faintest shadows under his eyes, and the stubble on his jaw was permanent, the kind that no razor ever seemed to get rid of.

His cybernetic left eye, an ever-present reminder of a bad case gone worse, whirred faintly as the aperture adjusted to the dim glow of the rain-soaked alley. He didn’t mind the rain; it made the city feel honest. In a world where most places had gone dry, where dust storms rolled across what used to be farmland, Seattle-9 still had rain. The air was thick with it, sometimes stinging when it hit exposed skin, but at least it was real. At least it was something left untouched… if you didn’t think too hard about what was in it.

The rain, indifferent as ever, pattered against the corpse, collecting in the deep grooves of the wounds, turning the blood into something thin and diluted. This wasn’t just violence. This was precision, control. A dismantling, not a killing.

The corpse had been mutilated with an almost mechanical efficiency, each cut placed with clinical detachment. The victim was a man somewhere in his late thirties, judging by the musculature and residual facial features which were now splayed out like a broken mannequin. His arms lay twisted at odd angles, the severed wrists bleeding into the uneven pavement, fingertips lost to whatever process had taken them. His torso was bare, his synthetic jacket peeled away as if it had been an afterthought.

The eyes had been removed, not gouged, but excised with the kind of precision that suggested specialized tools rather than brute force. The sockets were smooth, devoid of the jagged tears he’d expect from an amateur ripper. Whatever had taken them had done so with an exacting touch, the delicate optic nerves likely severed at their base before being extracted clean.

The victim's hands - if they could still be called that - were reduced to surgical stumps, the bone ends impossibly clean, as though the flesh had never been there to begin with. Blood had pooled in the cracks of the alley pavement, congealing into a dark slick that shimmered beneath the neon haze above. His throat had been slit, though not in any way that suggested a simple kill. The cut looked purposeful, measured, deep enough to silence but shallow enough to prolong. They had wanted him aware, if only for a while.

The med-drone hovered at his shoulder, its chassis branded with the Bureau of Civic Order’s sigil. It chirped as it completed its sweep, confirming what Bishop already knew:

>Unidentified male.
>Approximate age: 35-40.
>Cause of death: exsanguination.
>Estimated time: Four hours prior.
>Augment status: Non-present.

Non-present. Not missing. Not extracted.

Augments were hardly optional. Not if you wanted to function. A wrist chip for transit, an optic HUD for daily feeds, a neural mesh to keep up with corporate systems. Even street vendors and dock workers had low-grade cybernetic limbs; easier than dealing with repetitive strain injuries.

Detective Ava Kim stepped closer, careful to avoid stepping in the blood. The glow from the med-drone’s scan-light flickered across her face, catching the sharp contrast of her irises. One dark brown, the other a stormy gray-green. Not augmented. Just natural variance. A trait most people noticed, then forgot. After all, with the right aug, you could have any color eyes you wanted.

Her expression was hard to read. Sharp, but not cold. Tired, but not weary. The kind of face that had learned to keep its reactions measured, even when the world demanded something else. She wore her coat like armor, its high collar half-raised against the rain, one hand buried in a pocket while the other hovered close to her holster. A cop’s stance. Even still, there was something in the way she moved. Fluid, controlled, a fraction of a second faster than most. Like she was used to being watched. Used to being underestimated.

"This wasn’t done in the street," she said. "Whoever carved him up had time. Probably a sterile environment. You see the tissue margins? No infection, no post-op swelling. They kept him alive just long enough to finish their work."

Bishop exhaled slowly. "Then dumped him here when they were done. A message, maybe? Or just disposal?"

Something else gnawed at him. The skin around the cuts should’ve already begun breaking down, but it hadn’t. No necrosis, no discoloration. The blood had pooled, but the tissue still looked fresh. A little too fresh for a body left out in Seattle-9’s damp streets for hours. Like it hadn’t quite figured out it was dead yet.

“Bio-preservatives, you think?” Bishop asked, pointing to the still-pink flesh. “Not something most killers bother with. Especially if they’re just going to dump a body like this.”

“Could be,” Kim replied. “Maybe it helped with aug removal? Kept the bio-feedback loops intact long enough to avoid system failure?”

She adjusted her wrist display, cross-referencing with known augmentation clinics. "But if this was just about selling implants, the parts would be on the market by now. But these? They don’t exist anymore. No resale, no movement. Like they vanished the moment they left his body."

Bishop ran a gloved hand through his damp hair. "Then we’re dealing with something else entirely. Someone doesn’t just want these cybernetics removed. They want them gone."

He’d spent the better part of two decades in homicide, long enough to see every kind of butchery the city had to offer, but this was different. Too precise. Too deliberate. The Bureau of Civic Order liked to pretend the city had clawed its way back to civilization after the Collapse, but scenes like this said otherwise.

The alley stank of ozone and coolant runoff, the scent embedding itself in the back of his throat. Above, a shifting ad-panel glitched between a government mandate - Report Unauthorized Cybernetic Alterations. Safety Starts With You. - and an Azimuth Systems recruitment slogan - Human Potential, Perfected. The words bled onto the slick pavement, casting the corpse in flickering hues of green and blue. Bishop had seen too many bodies under this same glow, their faces lost in the same electric wash of corpaganda.

No eyes. No hands. No implants.

Ava Kim crouched beside the body, her own coat repelling the rain with a thin hydrophobic sheen. She was methodical, scanning the victim with quick, practiced movements. Unlike Bishop, who had spent years grinding his way through homicide, Kim had come up through Vice in the Bryn Mawr sector - smarter, faster, more adaptable. She’d spent years chasing down black-market augment dealers, underground cybernetic clinics, and the organlegging rings that thrived in the gaps between corporate patrols. She knew the underbelly of the city in ways he didn’t, and she never wasted time.

"No hesitation, no sloppiness. Whoever did this knew exactly what they were doing."

Bishop knelt, pulling a forensic scanner from his belt. The sleek device, a GenDyne Mark IV, pulsed a soft white as he ran it along the severed wrists, then up to the exposed eye sockets. "Clean cuts. No tearing, no cauterization. Not even residual nanofibers.” The Bureau’s database pinged Bishop’s wrist display. "BOCO's got nothing on our vic," he continued. "No matches."

Another ghost. Another outlier.

Kim nodded toward the glitching ad-panel above them. "You think it’s some kind of corpo experiment? We’ve seen 'em fight over proprietary bio-tech before. Wouldn’t be the first time one of their rogue divisions started skimming lowbies off the streets."

Bishop shook his head. "If a corp wanted to field-test some new biotech retrieval system, they wouldn’t be dumping bodies like this. They’d be quieter. More efficient. This? This feels like a statement. Almost like a corpo hit.”

Kim stiffened. Just for a second. Not enough for most people to notice. But Bishop did.

"I’ve seen corpo hits before," she said. Her voice was clipped. Tight. "They’re clean. Precise. Minimal clean-up. But this? This is… messy."

Bishop studied her. "Not all assassins are professionals, partner."

Kim’s fingers twitched. "The best ones are."

A beat.

Bishop hesitated. “…Kim, I-”

She turned away before he could finish. "Let’s focus on the vic."

He sighed and pulled out his scanner again. This time, he switched modes, running a secondary thermal sweep. No residual heat, no atmospheric distortions. The body had been left here after death, meaning the removal had happened somewhere else. He checked the soles of the victim’s shoes - clean. Whoever transported the body had done so in a controlled environment, not out in the open.

Bishop frowned, glancing between his scanner and the body, feeling the familiar tug of experience urging him to look deeper. Data could be manipulated, readings could be thrown, and machines had their limits. That’s where people like him came in. He toggled the scanner’s filters again. Too clean didn’t just mean a lack of dirt, it meant a lack of story. A body always told a story, and right now, this one was whispering something just outside the machine’s grasp.

"What are we missing?" he muttered, more to himself than to Kim.

Kim scanned the street, watching the passing figures, most of them hunched against the rain, faceless in the low light. "This city’s got thousands of undocumented augments walking around. It’d take a real precision op to pull this off. You don’t think-"

"I don’t think anything yet," Bishop cut in. "Not until we have more than ghosts and a handful of dead ends."

"Still. This whole thing stinks,” Kim replied, exasperated. “Someone removes a man’s hands, his eyes, every bit of traceable cyberware… but it’s not a rip-job?"

Bishop gave her a sidelong glance. "What’s your point?"

Kim exhaled, jaw tight. "I just hate it when ghosts leave no fingerprints."

Bishop almost smirked. "That a Vice saying?"

Kim didn’t answer right away. Then, quietly….

"Something like that."

Eager to drop the conversation, Kim quickly activated her own scanner. It was a modified model rigged with filters the Bureau hadn’t approved. "Hold up," she muttered, adjusting the settings. "I’ve got something weird. Trace residue… a biopolymer, maybe? Doesn’t match any standard medical-grade aug plastics."

Bishop’s brow furrowed. "So what does it match?"

She tapped through the scanner’s overlays, then frowned. "That’s the thing. The database says it doesn’t exist."

"You think they were nullified?" she asked, still scrolling through the scanner’s results.

"Nullified, reabsorbed, phased out… I don’t know,” Bishop replied. “But if this was just a black-market job, we’d see these augments resurfacing. Instead, they’re just disappearing. Someone’s taking them for a reason, but it’s not resale."

Kim hesitated for a moment before turning to her partner. "Look, I… I know a guy in Rainier Square. He might be able to tell us what this stuff is. He deals with off-books implants. The heavy kind. Illegal mods, but not full synths or anything…" Kim trailed off.

Bishop exhaled, standing. "You gotta get over it, Kim. I got a goddamn robotic eyeball swirling around my thick skull. And I know most of you Mercer flatliners don’t have the same reason as you to distrust this shit, but no-”

"No, no. It’s not that. Not exactly. Just..." She shifted her weight, folding her arms. "I haven’t seen him in a while. And last time I did, let’s just say it wasn’t exactly on friendly terms."

Bishop gave her a dry look. "You busted him, didn’t you?"

"Something like that." She adjusted her coat, avoiding his gaze. "Vice ran a raid on a chop shop he was funneling parts through. He walked. Connections in the right places. But I don’t think he’s forgiven me for burning his operation down."

Bishop snorted. "Sounds like a real sweetheart. He gonna give us trouble?"

Kim sighed. "I don’t know. Depends how much he’s had to drink. Or how much he thinks I still owe him."

Bishop rolled his shoulders. "Then let’s hope he’s feeling generous."

The rain fell harder as they left the body behind. It wouldn’t be the last.