Jenn and Devin were standing in a hallway, one side of which was lined with office doors. Devin held a cardboard cup filled to the brim with coffee in his hand, while Jenn had elected to keep her hands free of anything to hold. Devin took a sip of the poison and then asked Jenn: “How are you holding up?”

“Surprisingly well,” Jenn replied. She struggled to re-member anything about what had happened to her that one day. The day her neural link was hacked, if what the doctors had told her was to be believed. Who had done so and why? She’d never know, in all likelihood. All she remembered was waking up in the infirmary and the headache that had been hammering her skull. And the smell of vomit as she spilled out whatever she could to get better.

“No nausea anymore?”

“Not notably. Just the occasional minor headache still.”

“Glad you’re getting better.”

“So am I.” But something was still gnawing on Jenn’s mind. A peculiar error that the nurse found in her neural logs. Normally, an error message would show diagnostic data to de-termine what exactly had happened to cause a neural shutdown. But the one the nurse had found – logged on the day of the incident – had displayed nothing. Nothing usable at any rate. Apparently the error data had been scrambled, and even trying to decrypt it had turned out to be a useless endeavor. As if the error message had been corrupted, which did happen some-times, albeit rarely. But something about that specific error message gave the nurse the impression the corruption in that case was intentional, not random. That might have also explain-ed why Jenn couldn’t remember anything about that day.

Evidently Devin could see all of those thoughts running through her head. “Scary, isn’t it?” he commented. “The idea of a self-corrupting error message in the neural logs.”

“Yeah. I didn’t even think that was possible.”

“Me neither. Whoever hacked your neural link must’ve been using some really advanced tech. The kind I don’t think even we have access to.”

“Definitely not something a civilian should be able to get their hands on. Whoever’s responsible has connections to the big leagues.” And that thought was exactly what scared Jenn the most.

“That much is evident.” Then Devin took another sip of his coffee and continued: “Anyway, I’m off to work. Got some paperwork needs filing.” He gave Jenn a quick pat on the shoul-der and said to her as he turned on his heels: “Stay on your feet.”

“I’ll do my best,” Jenn hollered to him as she watched him disappear behind a corner. An odd sense of emptiness, lack of direction, filled her for a moment.

Until she heard a voice calling her. Josh’s voice. She turned her gaze to his general direction, where he was motion-ing for her to come over. She obliged.

“What’s up?” Jenn inquired when she was an arm’s length away from him.

“Update to Miss Harady’s testimony,” Josh replied. “She did confess, but she also said she didn’t work alone in infil-trating DanariTek. That she was a plant.”

Jenn nodded. “I did suspect as much myself. She doesn’t seem the type to perform intentional malpractice.”

“Intentional or not, it’s a crime with a prison sentence as standard punishment.”

Jenn chuckled in response. “Ever the enforcer, aren’t you?” Then she turned slightly more serious. “Did she ID the planter?”

“Yeah. Apparently it was Koji.”

A look of shock wrote itself onto Jenn’s face. Then she looked around herself. It wasn’t until doing so that she realized where exactly in the hallway they were standing. “And you really thought it was a good idea to say that right in front of Koji’s office door?!” she hollered.

Josh looked to his side, as if only now taking account of his surroundings, and muttered the simplest, most shocking res-ponse of all: “Oops.”

“You’re making a serious accusation about a fellow of-ficer and all you can think to say is ‘oops’?!” Jenn tried and failed to keep her voice at a reasonable level. She hoped Koji was anywhere else than in his office – the walls in this part of the police department floor weren’t exactly soundproof.

“Just didn’t realize where I was standing.”

“Yes, you did. Don’t try to pretend otherwise.” Jenn was trying her damnedest to figure out what Josh was trying to do but came up with no idea. She sighed. “But if Miss Harady says it was Koji, then that means another internal investigation.” A thought occurred to her. Maybe if she suggested a meeting, Josh would gain back some of his pragmatism. So she did. “Should we have a meeting to discuss this with the team?”

“No. Keep it a secret from the team.”

Now that if anything was a shock to Jenn’s system. Josh never requested her to keep secrets.

“What’s going on, Josh?” Jenn asked with an air of im-patience. “You haven’t been like yourself at all lately. First you forget to call Momoko – which I don’t buy in the slightest, by the way – then you cancel team meetings indefinitely, and now you want me to keep a secret? What happened to make you act like this?”

Josh stared at Jenn like she had sniffed him out. Some-thing in the way his gaze shifted told her she was right. That there was something Josh had been hiding for the past week or so. And Jenn was going to find out what it was, collegial trust be damned.

After a moment of silence, Josh sighed in a manner that suggested he was about to drop a considerable weight off his shoulders. “Alright, you caught me,” he began. “Remember the night the main elevator broke down?”

“Yeah. What about it?”

“I didn’t tell you the full story. I—”

An announcement from the loudspeaker above inter-rupted Josh. “Attention, all units, we have a prisoner escaping,” it sounded. “I repeat, we have a prisoner escaping. ID: Enez Harady. Last seen heading for the emergency exit on floor 19. Orders are to retrieve and redetain.”

Josh groaned. “Can nothing about this case be simple?”

Jenn looked at him intently. She thought she recognized a hint of pride in his expression. As if he had planned something with Enez. But she chose to ignore it for now. “You’ll have time to complain later,” she hollered, already taking a tentative first step. “Let’s go get her.”

Without another word, Josh set off running behind Jenn, who was already halfway down the corridor.

“Out the way,” sounded the agitated voice of another of-ficer behind the two of them, and in the next moment, Koji breezed past them, looking particularly angry… and with his gun out.

That alone told Jenn a lot. Maybe too much. The orders were simply to recapture Enez. Use of force hadn’t been permit-ted, let alone firearms. The pieces were starting to fall into place in Jenn’s head. Josh had been right to be suspicious of him.

She stopped running and turned on her heels, making Josh almost bump into her. He managed to stop a step short. The two of them exchanged a look of acknowledgement, then Josh signaled the next destination: the main elevator. Jenn nod-ded, and they started running again.

They ran past Shinji, who tried to interrupt them: “Emer-gency exit isn’t that—”

“We know,” Jenn and Josh hollered back in unison. In the next few moments, they were in the main elevator, then in the garage, then in a hovercar.

“I told you Koji was up to no good,” Josh growled to Jenn as he drove out of the garage. “Were you not listening?”

“Okay, okay!” Jenn yelled back, her arms up in the air. “Sorry I doubted you.”

“You’ll have time to apologize later.” Josh almost soun-ded apologetic himself for no discernible reason. “Right now, we gotta catch him before he catches Miss Harady.”

“Yeah.” The tone of Jenn’s voice still carried shreds of regret for having broken Enez’s trust. “And we gotta be quick. He’s already—”

A thud on the roof of the hovercar interrupted Jenn.

“The fuck was that?” she hollered while glancing at the ceiling. Her inquiry was followed by a knock on the driver’s side window.

The face of the murderer greeted them both beyond it. But her smile didn’t look sinister. Quite the opposite, in fact, al-most warm. Jenn wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. The wo-man brought a hand up and motioned it so as to tell Josh to roll the window down.

He did.

“Howdy, partner,” she hollered primarily to Josh. I’m sorry, what?! Jenn screamed internally. She couldn’t tell what was going on anymore. It felt like everything she knew had been a carefully curated lie. Like even Josh’s honesty had be-come a currency she was short on. You’d better have a damn good explanation for this, Josh.

Jenn shot the deadliest glare she felt capable of produ-cing at him. “What’s our main suspect doing hanging off the side of our car, Josh?”

“Let the lady explain herself,” he replied with convic-tion. Then he addressed said lady: “This better be important.”

“It is important,” she replied. “I’m going to need you to stay back.”

“Stay back?!” Jenn could tell Josh didn’t like the impli-cations of the woman’s request. “For what reason?”

“Look, there’s only one way to finish this. And it’s my way. Koji’s too dangerous to be kept alive. You won’t fix him by having him brought to justice.”

“You saying you’re gonna kill him?!”

“Unfortunately, yes. I have to.”

“That wasn’t what you said to me in the elevator.” The elevator? A lightbulb went off in Jenn’s head.

“I said to leave taking care of the boss to me, didn’t I?” The woman’s expression was riddled with growing annoyance. “Your part is handling the cleanup. Those were the terms I laid out.”

Jenn felt the need to pipe in at that point. “So that’s what you weren’t telling us,” she hollered to Josh in shock.

“Not like me. I know,” Josh replied defensively. “But my hand was forced.”

“Nah, I get it. I just didn’t think you’d strike a deal with our main suspect.”

“Didn’t know who she was until it’d already been made. And you know I don’t back down on deals.”

“Yeah,” Jenn sighed, half amused, half annoyed.

Josh turned his attention back to the murderer and said to her: “Alright, we’ll hold off. You deal with Koji, I arrest you afterwards. That was the deal, right?”

“That it was.” Then the woman climbed back onto the roof of the car.

A chuckle escaped Jenn as Josh rolled the window back up. “Working this case has really brought out new sides in you,” she commented.

“Surprised?”

“I am, can’t lie.” She looked at Josh with an expression that was in the perfect middle ground between humor and seri-ousness and continued: “Just don’t be surprised if I report you to the CEO after we’re done.”

“You won’t.”

“Try me.”