It was raining. It was always raining.

Detective Hal Bishop leaned against the railing of his apartment’s balcony, watching the neon haze of Seattle-9 bleed through the downpour. The city pulsed, alive with movement, oblivious to the bodies it left behind. Traffic blurred into streaks of white and red, holo-ads flickered against rain-slicked glass, and the low hum of drones cut through the midnight hush.

The air smelled like burnt ozone and distant exhaust, heavy with the weight of a city too stubborn to stop. Somewhere in the distance, sirens wailed. Brief, sharp, already fading. Someone else’s problem. For now, at least.

His cigarette burned low, embers flickering in the wet wind. The taste of tar and memory clung to the back of his throat.

The Horizon Biotek case was closed. Officially, anyway.

The Bureau had cleaned house. The bodies were tagged and bagged. The facility was swept. Reports were filed, sealed, buried. Some names disappeared from the system entirely. Zeroes in a database. Just missing fields and blank values, where people used to be.

The cover-up ran deep, but BOCO had enough to justify a public crackdown. Another black-site violation. Unauthorized research. A breach of ethical standards. The press got a neatly packaged scandal, the corpos got a slap on the wrist, and the city moved on.

Nobody asked the real questions.

Nobody wanted the real answers.

Kim was gone.

Not dead. Not missing. Just… elsewhere. She’d filed for leave within hours of their reinstatement. Packed light. Walked away. No explanations, no goodbyes. Maybe back to Mercer Island. Maybe somewhere quieter. She hadn’t said, and Bishop hadn’t asked. Some things you don’t chase.

But Bishop was back to work. New cases. New bodies. The machine kept turning. The ghosts kept piling up.

But this one lingered. The empty tanks. The erased files. The names buried in the logs.

He exhaled slowly, staring at the skyline. The Bureau had cleared him. No suspensions, no disciplinary hearings. The official line was simple. Detectives Bishop and Kim acted in the interest of public safety. That’s what the reports said. But Bishop had spent too many years reading between the lines.

Someone wanted this case buried.

Horizon Biotek was gone. The people behind it? Still out there. Still pulling strings. Still running the same old games in the dark.

His terminal pulsed softly. Case updates. A handful of new open files.

One caught his eye. Fresh. Less than six hours old.

A body found in Redmond. Mutilated. Hands removed. Eyes excised with surgical precision.

Bishop reached for his terminal, fingers hovering over the secure BOCO line. A quick call. A check-in. Just to see.

Before he could dial, the screen flickered.

Static.

A single incoming message, bouncing through dead servers and wiped relays. No sender. No trace.

Just six words.

> What was I meant to do?

Bishop stared at it for a long time.

The rain drummed against the balcony. The cigarette burned to the filter.

He closed the terminal.

And lit another.