​Chapter 7. Follow Me

They stepped back against the wall, giving the drone room to work. The device hovered, scanning every detail: the pool of blood, fragments of bone, scattered tarot cards, the spray on the wall. The ceiling lamp flickered, bathing the room in a sickly yellow light.

First came full photo and video capture, then the collection of DNA samples, fingerprint search, bullet trajectory analysis. All strictly by protocol, without human error or emotion. Now Mark could take a proper look at Barry.

Short, stocky, around forty — he looked more like a factory worker or a small-time vendor than a detective. If Mark had seen him on the street, he’d never have guessed this man outranked him.

Barry noticed the scrutiny and gave a slight, almost patronizing smile.

“The Center doesn’t hire augs,” he said slowly. “We work in the Ring. Most days, you can’t even wear a cuff.”

He lifted his arm, showing a worn band — not a fresh Center issue, but his own old one. A veteran, then, just like Mark.

“Out here, people won’t talk to you if you’ve got a cuff on,” Barry added. “Might even get you stabbed in an alley.”

He chuckled briefly, as if he’d said something funny. The laugh was short and hollow — the kind you get when someone forgot how to laugh years ago.

Shifting his weight from foot to foot, Mark felt like he no longer belonged there. The case had passed into Center jurisdiction, and his role was over. The drone kept working methodically; Barry watched with professional calm. Mark had become a witness they’d soon send home, nothing more. He brushed off his coat and shoved his hands into his pockets.

“Am I free to go now?” he asked in a deliberately formal tone.

It came out sharper than he intended. Barry laughed again and looked at Mark with a kind of admiration — as if thinking, damn, look at this comedian here. For a second, it even seemed he respected the sarcasm. Then he realized Mark was serious. The smile vanished.

“Listen, kid,” he said. “Why do you think I’m here alone, when protocol says there should be two of us?”

Seeing Mark’s confusion, he addressed the cuff.“Show him his status, tin can.”

Mark flinched: a stranger’s voice had activated his cuff, as if that were perfectly normal. The cuff chirped and projected a holo with an ID:

Mark Kane, Detective. Center. Division C (the Ring).

The meaning didn’t land at first. A mistake? Lily and BioTech? But how, if last night had been a dream? His thoughts tangled into a tight knot, one cutting off the next. Mark felt like a background extra in someone else’s play: the drone worked, Barry stood beside him, and he — with a detective status he hadn’t asked for — could only stand there and watch. There was no joy in it. Barry smirked and winked.

“What, jumped real high from regular police, huh? Must’ve had friends in high places.”

He said it without malice, but with a hint that he already knew the answer, and what interested him wasn’t what Mark would say, but how he’d squirm.

“Come on, don’t pout, I get it,” Barry added, and that made Mark’s skin crawl even more. The tone soft, teasing — like an adult patting a child on the head.“By the way,” Barry added, checking Mark’s cuff, “the captain’ll be here soon. That’s a nice career step too, if you can grab her attention, huh?”

He winked again — calm, friendly — and Mark understood that one more second, and he’d snap.

But suddenly he saw Barry differently. The face that had seemed unremarkable a moment ago now looked heavy, greasy. Softness swelled under the skin, the cheeks sagged slightly, the lips looked a little too moist, the eyes gleamed with some internal self-satisfaction. The face of a glutton — someone who expected life to hand him everything on a platter. People like that were easy to manipulate — you only had to say the right words.

And then it vanished as suddenly as it appeared. The ordinary face, no softness, no shine. Just a cop. One of many. The anger drained, replaced by a cold certainty: it didn’t matter how a person looked or what they said — only how they were put together inside.

Heels clicked in the corridor — sharp, confident steps. In the doorway appeared a woman around thirty in a formal Center uniform: a dark-blue jacket, polished belt with a holster, a captain’s gold badge on her chest. Short black hair neatly styled, a dark visor — not sunglasses, but a tactical display with a faint shimmer.

She gave Mark a professional, uninterested glance and turned to Barry.

“What happened here? Another prostitute?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied quickly. All his previous casual swagger evaporated, replaced by exaggerated respect. “Head blown off, then filled with rounds just to make sure.”

With a small movement of her hand, she summoned the drone report, scanned the data hovering before her, and nodded — more to register the information than approve it. Then she stepped toward Mark.

“Eliza Dahmer,” she introduced herself curtly. “You must be Detective Kane. Your transfer to my division was processed yesterday.”

He recognized her the instant she walked in. He knew that black hair, that voice, those lips.

So — Eliza.

He shook her hand.

“Nice to have friends in BioTech, right, Barry?” she threw over her shoulder as she moved aside.

Barry let out a low whistle, almost under his breath:

“Well, damn... And here I thought it was through the Center.”

He no longer allowed himself to get distracted — with a frown he fussed with the interface, manually running the drone’s data through his old cuff. What an aug would have done in a second took him an eternity.

Only now did Mark notice the small green light on his own comm — a message marked private, which kept the holo from appearing. On the screen:

“Leave in one minute.”

“I think I’ll get some fresh air,” Eliza said, giving the room a disgusted look. “Revolting.”

“Of course, I’ll handle everything,” Barry assured her quickly, eyes glued to the holo.

She left the room. Mark counted a minute and followed. The corridor was empty, his steps echoing against the dirty walls. He walked toward the back exit — the same route the borg had taken an hour earlier.

In the narrow alley behind the bar, under a light rain, she was waiting. She kissed him and removed her visor.

“So you found what you were looking for, Mark?”

Her heterochromatic eyes pulled him in again, like a vortex. They walked together along the crooked alley. Stones slid underfoot, rain collecting in muddy pools.

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” he said.

“You can’t understand yet,” she replied.

“Is this... another dream? Like before? Or a simulation? Some new kind of patching? Or—”

Eliza laughed. Her laugh was dry and distant, as if she weren’t laughing at him at all, but at something she’d long known and already accepted as inevitable.

They walked across the cobblestones, and without Mark noticing, the clatter of stone underfoot shifted into the muted crunch of gravel. The alley dissolved and vanished. Around them stretched a dark, abandoned park where time itself had stopped.

Dead trees clawed at the sky with black branches, like upturned roots reaching into emptiness. The ground was brown, bare of even a blade of grass, greedily swallowing the rain without leaving puddles. The wind creaked through the dry limbs; rusty lamp posts jutted from the soil like broken bones.

The wood of the benches had long since rotted away, leaving only their cast-iron skeletons, but on the armrests faint ornaments were still visible — once elegant curls, now eaten through by rust. Mark took a closer look and made them out: serpents. Twisted, knotted together, their heads blurred by time.

Rain fell soundlessly on bare metal and dead branches. It seemed the serpents on the benches were listening to its rhythm, waiting for something. In the distance, through the fog, the outline of a bridge emerged.

“This is a dream,” Mark declared firmly and kicked the iron frame of the bench.

The metal was real — sharp pain shot through his foot and up his leg. For a moment, he thought the serpent head on the armrest twitched and gave him a hateful look through its hollow eye sockets.

Eliza laughed — this time lightly, carelessly.

“No, Mark. This isn’t a dream.”

Anger boiled in his chest — at her, at this non-dream, at his own helplessness.

“Let’s go to the bridge,” she said, taking his hand. “It’s an important place to me.”

She took his hand, and at her touch the world blurred, melted, the gravel beneath them turning into wet cobblestones. They were standing by the bar again. The red neon trembled in the puddles.

“What’s happening to you?” Eliza asked, and for the first time there was real concern in her voice. “You blacked out for a few minutes.”

Mark looked around — and the world cracked again. On the bar’s wall, where just a minute ago there had been nothing but wet plaster, now writhed the body of a giant serpent. A black shape coiled across the whole façade, the reptile’s eye burning with a venomous green glow. He blinked, his heart dropping into his stomach — and then realized it was only graffiti — disturbingly lifelike. But still — the wall had been clean before.

“Stay with me tonight,” Eliza said. “I live nearby, here in the Ring.”

There was care in her voice, but beneath it lay something else — almost a plea.

“You’re not well, Mark.”

The pleading softened into quiet certainty — not a command, not a request, but the simple knowledge that he wasn’t going to refuse. She stood so close he could feel the warmth of her breath. Red neon reflected in her eyes, and her pupils pulled him into a void where everything that had happened started to lose its shape.

Rain glistened as it slid down her dark hair and jacket. Eliza didn’t seem to notice — she stood perfectly still. Mark drew a deep breath of the cool, wet air and nodded.

“Of course.”

It was surrender — a step into something faceless, incomprehensible. At that moment, Mark understood: he was crossing another line, and he could no longer tell where the familiar world ended and where something entirely different began. Something without a name or boundaries.