Unhinged
Per the NCPD, under no circumstances should anyone approach the Remnant known as the Dark One.
The Guild has rescinded their partnership with this individual and invoked Containment procedures.
Stay safe, New Chicago, and call your local Guild member if you feel as though your life might be in danger.
Ican’t look away from the bloodied tile floor. Something about it feels wrong. Chunks of what might be my scalp look worse in the afternoon sun provided by the torn open curtains. The entire scene feels surreal.
The living room is trashed. My television lies shattered from a boot-sized hole. The couch is overturned, with the stuffing sliced out of every cushion. My kitchen’s counters are covered in my appliances, and the drawers are all pulled out.
And my knife block is still empty.
Stepping over the dried pool of blood, I make my way to my bedroom which also looks decimated.
I should feel something. I want to feel something.
I reach down and pluck Mary’s note from where it sits under the bed itself. My cloak and mask were thankfully stashed away before the police had gotten here.
The note feels heavy in my hand.
Vengeance.
That was what Mary wrote. That now was the time for vengeance, not sorrow—that could come later.
I peel off my bloodied shirt and toss it into the trashcan. My skin looks washed out contrasted with the dark red. The side of my head and hair are matted with dried blood, but the skin around the splash point is flawless.
The bathroom looks as if it was ransacked by a feral animal, but I manage to find soap and shampoo in the chaos. With the water running, I scrub off my body, gingerly palpating spots that feel tender without any physical marks.
My shoulder itself feels wrong. I hadn’t noticed in the events of this morning, but it feels disconnected. Like someone else’s phantom limb.
I glare down at my flexed hand only to notice something around my ankle.
Kneeling, I roll the thick cord between two fingers. It’s looped through a charm with a symbol I don’t recognize. Almost like a skull pattern but if it were merged with an old hourglass.
I try to pull at the connector, but it doesn’t budge. Even with the exceptional strength I have as a Remnant, the damn thing stays clasped.
“Fuck it,” I grumble, standing. Random charm bracelets alone won’t kill me.
Probably.
I don’t bother looking in the mirror as I get dressed. I slide on my black garments and tighten on the heavier armored vest around my chest. The black cloak sits snugly around my neck and my helmet’s display boots quickly.
“Membership rescinded, effective immediately,” I whisper, reading the message that had come in from the Guild only an hour ago. “What fucking membership?”
I had never been an official member of their little group.
I look up my secret identity on the dNet and can’t help the sigh of exasperation. No one has reported on my civilian identity, but the Dark One is everywhere. Every message board. Every news site.
Not Omen, though. Just me.
Now is the time for vengeance.
I slip the paper into my jacket pocket. Right against my left breast. For some reason, it feels like the only thing I need from this apartment. None of this stuff means anything. This apartment had only ever been temporary solace from the horrors outside.
And now it just feels like a violation.
Another act of othering. Another decision made for me. Made about me. Made against me.
With a final look at the living, I step into the darkness. The movement is never instant. Distance, while trivial, had always added a delay. The spirits aren’t here, either. They never have access to this place, even though it’s made entirely of shadow.
The rooftop overlooking the NCPD building is abandoned as I perch at the ledge. I had never thought about breaking into the building before today. I had never really needed to. The morgue had been easy enough, but I doubt the higher ups cared all that much about protecting dead bodies.
Homicide, though, might be protected like some of the more important places were in Nye Verden. Even though magic itself doesn't exist, it has never stopped the utilitarian Remnants from figuring out ways to counter those of their kind.
It was why anti-Remnant tech existed, after all.
I’ve never found it in me to be upset with them. Like the rest of us, they're only doing what they can to continue to be useful. So, they won't become another victim.
With a quick thought, I step backwards into the shadows created by the afternoon light.
And, to my surprise, her office appears. The bullpen sits on the other side of the closed door and windows with blinds drawn.
In the darkness, the spirits return in a frenzy. It’s like the last few nights had just been a warmup for this. For something like an intrusion between the worlds.
“Why don’t you just storm in there and demand answers?” I hear one whisper. They don’t show themselves, but their voice is just beside me.
“Because I don’t want to get shot,” I hiss.
“Again,” another chips in.
Oh, they’ve got jokes now.
The bullpen is busy. Officers that I don’t recognize move about the space. I see Bellick sitting at one of the open desks, his ear to a phone tucked against his shoulder. Across from him sits McRoberts, equally busy with something in front of him.
If they’d been frazzled before, they both look downright manic now.
My gaze catches on the billboard propped against the wall beside the entrance.
Across the top, “Remnant Killer” is written in a tidy scrawl. And on it are three pictures.
Mara Anders, Malachi Blackwood, and her.
There’s a handful of figures, data, and some pictures of the other two corpses. The bodies I’d seen just this morning.
But none of her. None of the one that no longer has the bionic arm.
Images flash through my mind and I feel the shadows respond. Something falls over in the closed office, but there’s so much activity outside that no one notices.
The windows along the private office vibrate against my hands as the darkness pushes against them. A fast pace, thrumming beat matches the rapid tick of my heart.
An officer glances toward the office with a curious expression before returning to the file in his hand.
“They’ll catch you,” a voice whispers somewhere behind me.
“I’d like to see them try,” I grit out, my breaths coming in gasps.
One breath. Then two.
Clouding darkness that had begun to spread across my vision recedes as my heart rate regains a more normal rhythm. I force my attention to return to the evidence board.
The title of “Suspects” sits beside the victim photos.
And there’s only one.
Me.
Not even Omen. Not even the other Remnant that I know, for a fact, Bellick and McRoberts are aware of. I shift to peer closer through the window, but movement catches my eye.
Bellick strides towards her office, his attention on the dPad in his hands. With nowhere else to hide, I move to the corner opposite of the door and wait. It swings open and Bellick reaches for the light switch.
On instinct, I flood the space with darkness. A tendril closes the door behind Bellick, and, to the others, it looks as if the room is still unoccupied.
A tentacle wraps itself around Bellick’s torso, the dPad flies from his hands, landing a few feet from me. Another flash of darkness covers his mouth, jaw, and lower half of his head. He drifts into the air, his feet a few inches off the ground.
Bellick’s eyes flick around the room, the earlier mania now full-on panic. When he finds me in the corner, all struggling ceases.
“Bellick,” I say, voice deeper from the mask.
I bend down and pick up the dPad.
“You’re looking for me, I hear?” I ask, knowing he can’t answer.
The information is fairly basic. A synopsis of the current case handed over to Remnant Crimes after the attack last night. Nothing new here that I didn’t already know. But the tablet itself does contain the NCPD registry and other case files.
I glance up to Bellick, his eyes now full of rage—or maybe hate.
“If you try to yell or call for help, I will tear out your spine. They will never catch me, and you will be dead. Your wife won’t even be able to recognize you.”
Slowly the layer around his mouth slides down and merges with the growing tendrils around his torso.
“You’re a fucking murderer,” he hisses, apparently not questioning how I know he’s married.
“I am, but not hers,” I say, then gesturing at him with the tablet. “Is this all you have on this case?”
“You think I’ll help you?”
“I think you hate Remnants so much that you’ll do anything to pin this murder on the easiest solution. I think you’re a dirty cop with an inferiority complex.”
“I’ll fucking—” his voice rises too much for my liking. The wrap reaffixes itself to his head and we drop through the shadows coating the room.
The darkening sky greets us atop the roof of a building across from the main NCPD entrance. I step from the shadows and Bellick follows behind, body still suspended in the inky binding.
The wrapping slowly lowers again, and I can’t hide the grin in my voice as I say, “try that again and I will kill you, Bellick.”
“That’s all we have,” Bellick huffs, voice much less confident and angry. “De Luca had mostly paper files, but we don’t have access to them.”
I wave the tablet at him. “What’s the password?”
His glare is fiery as his jaw ticks.
“If I have to ask again, I’ll remove a vertebra from your spine.”
A blade of darkness presses into his upper neck. Blood beads at its edge before he grunts in submission and rattles off a sequence of numbers. I load the data into my mask’s display before nodding.
“And you don’t know where these paper files are?”
He shakes his head mutely.
“So, you have nothing. Not only do you have nothing, but you’re tying her death to two other deaths that have no connection besides being committed by a Remnant.”
“How do you—” Bellick begins, but I hold up a finger. He lets out a squeak of pain when the bindings around him tighten.
“And then you decided to arrest and nearly kill an innocent woman this morning who had nothing to do with the murder. All because she, too, is a Remnant.”
“That bitch is not innocent,” he snarls, pain evident in the bulging veins. “And how do you know any of that?”
“Because I’m better at my job than you.”
I bring him closer and reach my hand through the darkness to find his phone and service weapon. They both clatter off the rooftop.
“You’ll fucking burn for this, Remnant,” he grits out.
“In hell?” I laugh out, making sure there aren’t any weapons hidden on his body. “Look around you, Bellick. This is hell. We’re just waiting for the Devil himself to arrive.”
I tuck his tablet into the shadow space and turn to look back at the detective.
“Any last words?”
“You said—” the fear in his eyes is palpable as his body begins to hover backwards, now at least a foot past the edge.
Killing him would be so damned easy. The spirits gathering in the artificial, swirling darkness on the rooftop whisper their delight in the idea. Another to join their ranks.
Another soul to haunt me.
“Fuck,” I grunt, roughly slamming him into the ground at my feet where he lays motionless. Unconscious, but unfortunately alive.
A sickening crack reverberates when I level a kick at his ribs. Maybe he’ll die of internal bleeding if I’m lucky.
I step back into her office, the light still off and room otherwise unoccupied. Those files have to be here. She never took work home—it was one of her “things.”
Bellick would have tried the desk. So, she would have kept them somewhere else. Somewhere that only she would know about. I scan the rest of the office, trying to figure out why she’d felt it necessary to hide the files at all.
What has she learned in the time between the attack in the alley and now?
Then I see it. I see the framed photo of her unit before her injury. Before Omen.
The photo looks as if it’s from a different world. A different timeline where everything hadn’t gone so fucking wrong. She stands at the front, surrounded by the other Ursa Major forces. Decimated infrastructure and a desolate wasteland puts the photo somewhere out in the New Chicagoan Badlands.
My eyes find her face again. Younger. Eyes filled with something like pride. The honest woman whose entire outlook on life had yet to change. Had yet to sour.
Proud. Strong. Alive.
It’s difficult to breathe. So fucking hard to get air. I squeeze my eyes shut and focus on anything but the photo. My display blurs as my throat tightens.
The portrait lands across the room, glass shattering and probably making way too much noise when it collides with something else.
Behind it is a safe. An old safe from before the Second Disruption—one that works on levers and gears rather than Affliction and electronics.
Shouts echo from beyond the darkness and feel hands pushing at the shield. Then a bullet. This one normal and lead, but the next one won’t be.
Gripping the front of the safe, I tear it from the wall. It comes out easily, taking drywall with it. Tendrils seep between the creases of the steel front and that, too, pops off with ease.
Inside is a file folder. Just one.
I grab it and tuck it into the shadow space before falling into the shadows around me. Shouts and yells cut off as the portal closes.