​Chapter 20. Footage That May Shock

Mark pushed the door open, and the faint chime of the bell hung in the stillness of the shop. The shelves were drowned in half-shadow; the books, almost alive, pressed against one another, hiding from the world outside the windows. Slinging his bag off his shoulder, he hesitated at the threshold for a moment — as if checking whether this wasn’t just another hallucination.

A thick leather-bound tome rested on Mari’s knees, and when she lifted her head, Mark realized she had been waiting for him.

Sitting down beside her, he noticed something on the table buried under the weight of folios — an object that didn’t belong there at all: a dagger. Ancient, with a handle carved from time-blackened bone. On it, a tiny figure of a four-armed woman. Two of her hands were folded in a gesture of prayer, and the other two held something Mark couldn’t quite make out—either tiny skulls or some kind of fruit. The blade was dark, matte.

“What’s this?” Mark asked.

“Insurance,” Mari said curtly, without looking up from the book. “The Ring is dangerous—especially for a woman running a shop full of rare things. I always carry it.”

He studied the woman engraved on the handle. There was something predestined in her posture, like the movements of an ancient ritual.

“Old?” he asked.

“Yes.” Mari finally tore her eyes from the page, and her voice carried the warm undertone of a connoisseur speaking about a precious artifact. “A ritual dagger of the Thuggee. An Indian cult of stranglers.”

She paused, letting the word stranglers settle in the air.

“That’s Kali, the goddess of death. The Thuggee were her priests. They believed Kali forbade them to spill blood, so they strangled their victims with a ceremonial cloth. And they used the dagger to make ritual cuts on the corpse, to release the soul and guide it toward the goddess.”

Without looking at him, she flipped the page.

“If you’ve decided to stay, do something useful. Read. Knowledge is a weapon no one can take from you.”

She was leafing through a book with a strange title—Liber Azerate. Paper, leather—an artifact from another time.

Mark shook his head.

“I don’t want to read. I’m tired of riddles.”

Mari closed the book, marking the page with the dagger. In her visor, like in a black mirror, he saw himself—angry and exhausted.

“All right,” she said after a moment. “You want to act. What leads do you have?”

He tried to piece together the last days of his work: Eliza, the Center, Babylon — and all of it had been either a lie or a dream. None of the links led anywhere except one. The image of Eliza killing a borg. Was even part of that memory real?

Back then, they’d left without even examining the crime scene. No standard procedures, no search for evidence.

“Yes,” Mark said slowly. “There is one lead.”

He connected the cuff to the charger. The indicator blinked to life—just enough. The old hunter’s thrill began to stir in him, a feeling he hadn’t touched in years.

“Silas’s place — the dream interpreter. That’s where Eliza killed the borg. I want to check if it really happened,” he finally said. “I’ll go alone.”

Mari thought for a moment, then nodded.

“Be careful, Mark. They might be watching the place.”

He walked toward the car not like a ghost drifting nowhere, but like a detective heading to a crime scene. For the first time in this endless month, he had a purpose.

His mind, unexpectedly clear, weighed the risks. The cuff. Take it or leave it? On one hand, wearing it was like putting on a beacon; if the Agency was tracking him, they’d see everything. On the other hand, if they wanted to find him, they would — cuff or not. To them, he might be a valuable witness. Or bait.

And more importantly, the cuff barely picked up a signal in the far sectors. Silas’s house sat in a dead zone. The Agency wouldn’t see him there, most likely.

And a cuff was a tool. Video capture, data analysis, access to cached entries from the police network. Going without it meant losing before the fight even started. He was tired of being a ghost. It was time to become a hunter.

The car started up soundlessly, the heater humming to life. He fed it the address of Silas’s house, and while it crept through the snowy streets, he strapped on his old cuff.

The screen flickered, showing the standard interface, and the familiar green light lit up on Mark’s wrist once again.

He was back in the network—and that made him feel both relieved and deeply uneasy.

The house was exactly as he remembered it—an old two-story building of dark brick, standing silent in the narrow, snow-choked alley. Mark stepped out of the car. No one around. Only silence and the crunch of snow under his boots.

The first floor was one large, shadowy space — a warren of abandoned workshops cluttered with debris and the remains of old furniture.

He stepped inside, instinctively reached for his holster, then changed his mind. No one had been waiting for him here all this time. His boots crunched over a layer of broken glass and plaster. Light leaking through the gaps in the boarded-up windows revealed small, frozen tableaux: a workbench with rusted clamps like the jaws of some animal; a heap of dusty bottles in the corner; the skeletal frame of a couch with split upholstery and coils sticking out.

He moved through the rooms carefully, sweeping the flashlight from his cuff over the dark corners. Nothing. No fresh tracks, not the slightest sign that anyone had been here recently. Just dust, decay, and the silence, broken only by his own coughing.

Then he headed toward the narrow, steep staircase at the far end of the hall. The actual crime scene was upstairs.

He climbed to the second floor. Listened—no rustle, not a single sound, only the pounding of his heart in his temples. The house was clearly empty.

He approached the door at the end of the corridor. In his memory, it had been blasted to splinters by shotgun fire, but now it stood intact. Old, wooden, with peeling paint. Locked.

Mark pulled an ancient multitool from his pocket—a useful little thing he’d bought at the market for a couple of credits. A simple pick. A skill useless in the City of digital locks, but essential in the Old City.

A few minutes of fiddling and a faint scrape of metal later, he popped the old lock open. The door yielded, and he stepped inside carefully.

The room was crammed with furniture. An old, sagging couch, two armchairs buried under heaps of books and papers, a low table. By the wall—a neatly made bed. A thick scent of incense Silas must have used in his work hung in the air.

The owner no longer lived here—and hadn’t for a very long time.

He examined the room methodically, corner by corner. Nothing. No signs of struggle, no stains on the floor, no blood, no traces of gunpowder. He checked the tiny bathroom—clean as well. Just the apartment of a somewhat peculiar, slightly unkempt man. The shelves were packed with books, books, and more books. Mostly dream dictionaries, manuals on dream interpretation, old psychoanalysis monographs, cheap editions of esoteric literature.

Nothing that could confirm his memory. Not a single detail.

Despair shifted into dull anger at himself. So he really had cracked. There had been no borg. Everything was nothing but noise in his own corrupted code.

And then the world blinked.

The light from the window changed for a heartbeat—sharper, colorless. The smell of dust was suddenly replaced by the acrid sting of burnt powder. Mark turned around.

Everything had changed. The door he had just picked open was blown apart into splinters. Burn marks darkened the floorboards. It was the same room—and yet not the same. A crime scene, exactly as he remembered it.

Mark no longer hesitated. He stepped over to the desk, its drawer locked. He broke the lock with the multitool.

Inside, beneath a stack of papers, lay what he had been looking for—an old, battered notebook. Clients’ names, dates, brief notes about dreams. A folded sheet slipped out from between the pages. A note.

The handwriting was hurried, clearly a woman’s.

Silas, I beg you, be careful. What you’ve gotten yourself into... these people don’t forgive. If you need help, there’s a group in our sector — the Children of Chaos. They can put you in touch with the witch. S. says she has mismatched eyes; she can help you. Please reach out to them. A.

A witch with mismatched eyes. Eliza. There was the link.

He slipped the note into his pocket. And at that moment, from downstairs on the first floor, he heard a distinct, long groan of old floorboards.

Mark drew his pistol, pressed himself against the wall behind a cabinet, and held his breath. Quiet, measured footsteps drifted up from below. Someone was climbing the stairs directly toward him.

The steps drew closer, fell silent, and a figure slid into the room. Tall, dressed in a sharp suit, moving with astonishing speed. Mark managed to fire twice, but the bullets chewed into the wall, kicking up clouds of dust where the borg had been a split second earlier. He missed.

The borg was already in the middle of the room, and in the next instant a white-hot spike tore through Mark’s shoulder. The pain was sharp, blinding — he nearly dropped his gun. The borg clearly didn’t intend to kill him, only disable him; otherwise Mark would already be dead.

He staggered, his temples roaring, thoughts collapsing into raw animal fury. The borg was faster, stronger, more precise. Neither training nor experience — nothing could help him.

And in that helplessness, something broke free. Not a decision — a flash of rage. Pain and fear burned away, leaving behind crystalline clarity. The world didn’t slow down — he got faster. The sound of the gunshot dissolved in warped space. Dust motes froze in the air, the colors drained away; all that remained were Mark, his target, and a shard of crystalline hatred.

Without hesitation, Mark switched the gun to his good hand. In the suspended, viscous air he saw not only the borg, but a set of trajectories, perfect impact points. He squeezed the trigger. Again. The shots were like dry clicks of a metronome. The borg’s head burst apart under the impacts — shards of plastic, bone fragments, and clumps of sparking synthetic fiber.

The borg collapsed to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.

Sound, color, and the throbbing fire in his shoulder slammed back into Mark with unbearable force.

He stood over the body, breathing hard. The gun in his hand was smoking. This wasn’t luck — it was power, born from pure rage and the will to destroy.

He couldn’t stay here any longer. He had killed one of them, and for that — surely for that — they had taken Eliza. Likely killed her. Others would come now, and there would be many of them.

Mark bolted from the room, stumbled down the dark staircase, raced across the cluttered first floor, and burst into the snow-covered alley. He ran toward his car. His lungs were empty, each heartbeat hammering molten iron into his torn shoulder.

He needed to get out, and fast. Thought he’d find clues and follow a trail? Well, here was a trail — seventy kilos of it. Not exactly portable.

Weaving the car through the western sector toward the center, Mark made a detour and hid it in old Hughes’s warehouse, just in case.

He stumbled into the bookshop soaked, dusted with snow, leaving a melting path across the floor. Mari came out to meet him.

“What happened, Mark?”

She listened to his broken, feverish account in silence. Then, without a word, she took him by the hand, sat him down on the old couch, treated his wounded shoulder. She pulled the bullet out with a battered wartime device — disinfectant and anesthetic in one — and bandaged the wound.

Her hands were steady, sure.

“Rest,” was all she said. “You need to lie down.”

He was too exhausted to argue and slumped back against the couch. The last thing he heard before sinking into heavy, feverish sleep was the rustle of pages. Mari had sat down again with her book.

He woke to a sharp, unpleasant sound. The cuff on the table had come to life, vibrating, its screen flashing red.

“What the...?” Mark muttered, trying to sit up.

“Information concerning you has been detected, Mark. Display?” the device asked.

“Yes,” he exhaled.

The cuff projected a large holo in midair, like a TV news broadcast. The face of a synth-anchor from the official news.

“Police officer and war veteran Daniel Cross has tragically died in the line of duty,” the anchor began, the voice stern and solemn.

A photo appeared. The borg Mark had killed an hour ago.

“...the suspect in this brutal, unprovoked attack is former police officer Mark Kane, dismissed from service due to psychological instability. The following footage may be disturbing. We advise keeping children away from the screen.”

The image switched. Footage from the dead borg’s visor.

There he was — Mark — holding a gun, calmly firing again and again straight into the operator’s face. The picture jerked, static flared, another shot — and the feed died.

There had been no gun in Cross’s hands.

“Citizens are urged to use extreme caution,” the anchor concluded, and Mark’s face filled the screen. “The suspect is armed and extremely dangerous. The City Committee has announced a reward for any information leading to the capture of the killer.”

They hadn’t just framed him — they’d turned him into a monster and declared open season on him. Now it wouldn’t be just the faceless Agency borgs tracking him. The entire Ring, every small-time thug or desperate drifter — all of them would be his enemies. There was never any shortage here of people willing to earn their thirty pieces of silver for someone’s head.

But something didn’t fit.

A kaleidoscope of the past weeks flashed through his mind. Eliza, the captain of the Center, powerful and dangerous, taken cleanly and quietly. In a dead-end alley, without a single witness. Agency work — surgical, invisible, a ghost operation.

And they turned him — Mark Kane, a washed-up cop with a liquor shelf for a soul — into a media circus. Emergency broadcast. Official statement from the City Committee. A bounty. Why?

Why the theatrics?

Catching him would’ve been easy. They could trace him through his cuff or his car. They could’ve sent three vans, and he’d disappear just like Eliza. But they didn’t.

He thought and thought, but no answer came. It was illogical. Unprofessional. Unless... unless the real goal wasn’t to catch him but to make everyone see that he was being hunted. Turn him into a public enemy, a monster. But why?

That made no sense either.

And Mark simply stopped thinking about it. He was wanted; they were searching — which meant he needed to search not for answers, but for a way out.

The holo had long since faded. The quiet, cozy room, snow falling outside. In the middle of this silence, Mari sat in her old chair, turning pages of an ancient book, paying him no attention at all.

Mark realized, with a dull sort of surprise, that he wasn’t afraid. Here, in this building cut off from the world, a place that stored history, the eye of the storm, all that noise — the bounty, the hunt, the Agency — felt distant, unreal. Something happening to someone else, in another universe.

And for a moment, he allowed himself to believe it.