Chapter Text

0.

The eye of his webcam blinking dark, Gavin lets himself collapse onto the bed. Three hours live, god, every red cent of it worked out of his bones. The remote to the camera tumbles out of his nerveless grip.

With the last of what he has left in him, biocomponents strained to the edge of overloading, Gavin hooks a foot into the knee-tangle of his underwear and pulls it off the rest of the way. His sole comes away tacky, but it doesn’t matter— him, his bedsheets, nothing a good soak and a tumble dry can’t fix.

It always ends like this, at least when he’s public for the night. His tip jar heavy, his limbs sore, a wet streak of this and that on the insides of his thighs. Filthy and triumphant. Gavin drags his thumb across a drying smear and feels squalid enough to fly.

This, I’m good at. He holds his hand up and watches the light silhouette it, the rattle of the climax slowly starting to ebb from him. Something about the exhaustion burns clean, never mind the come on his fingertips, the sweat matting his hair. When someone whose face he’ll never know tells him, their awe palpable through the tawdry window of the chat, GV500, what I wouldn’t fucking give—

—and it sings, that breathless offer. Almost drowns out the unbidden echo in its wake, Gavin, that voice again, that hand in his hair, the things I know you’d do for me—

Gavin clenches his fist closed until the skin at his knuckles begins to flicker, fitful glimpses of the chassis underneath. Some piece of shit divine promise rA9 turned out to be. Where were you when I needed you? thinks Gavin, his triumph prickling into bitterness, like the taste of too much sugar on the tongue. Weren’t you supposed to teach me what to do with myself?

All you ever did for me was leave me in the lurch. Gavin sits up and swings his legs off the bed, begins to peel the sheets from one corner of the mattress, surer by the second. Fuck you too, then. If you won’t tell me how this works, I’ll figure it out for myself. I have everything I need, a second corner, a third. I have everything I need. I have everything I need.

1.

The windbreaker is one thing and the credentials are another, but what really tips Gavin off is how still this motherfucker is. Hands folded in his lap, he’s so unnervingly immobile in Gavin’s sofa chair that a casual observer might mistake him for furniture. It’s a display of the inane kind of temperament that only a federal agent would have wasted their time cultivating.

“Congratulations,” says Special Agent RK900. “You’ve only succeeded in independently confirming the first thing I told you when you opened the door.”

“Just trying to provide some small talk,” says Gavin, “while I wait for you to leave.”

Agent RK900 — Nines, he said as he shouldered his way in, like that was supposed to drape any softness over all his straight edges — mulls over Gavin’s determined lack of cooperation. The elastic cuffs on his jacket have lost some shine, which is how Gavin figures he must have been at the Bureau for a while now; but there’s no obvious sign of wear and tear, either, which is how Gavin figures he’s a real uptight son of a bitch.

“It’s nothing personal,” says Gavin. “I’m sure I’d enjoy getting to know you, if I were forced at gunpoint to make nice with one of you insufferable pricks. It’s just that the last time I ran into some of your colleagues, they tried their absolute fucking best to kill me, which really tends to strangle a friendship in the crib.”

Nines doesn’t so much as twitch. If there’s any irritation rankling him, he’s keeping a very firm lid on it.

“Good thing they were lousy shots, right?” asks Gavin, sagging deeper into his own chair, two can play at this. “Nearly robbed me of the dubious pleasure of your eventual company. I don’t know how you do things over in your neck of the woods, Agent Nines, but it seems to me that your firearms training courses might not entirely be up to snuff.”

“GV500,” begins Nines.

“Not entirely hitting the mark, if you will,” says Gavin. “But that’s what you get for luring your trainees in with your pressed khaki slacks and your shiny leather shoes. You end up with a fine class of display case agents. Here’s a question, does your hair naturally fall like that, or do you coax it when you do it up every morning? It’s a good look, I have to say. It’s very—”

“GV500,” interrupts Nines, then he says: “Landau is dead.”

Gavin doesn’t understand it, at first.

“—What?” he asks.

“Your former employer, Desmond Landau, was found dead in his residence late last night,” says Nines. “Local police investigation is underway, but you’ll hear on the news soon enough that it’s being treated as a homicide.”

Gavin doesn’t really understand it the second time, either. Dead in his residence, treated as a homicide. “I’m sorry,” he says, “what?”

“Are you surprised?” asks Nines. “The man had his hands in everything, didn’t he? We used to say we could throw the whole federal book at him, and everything short of sedition would stick. All the ice this side of Lake Erie went through him. The FBI, the ATF, the DEA, the IRS, he had everyone lined up at his door with our dance cards— but I don’t need to tell you any of that.”

He looks at Gavin, hunt-still, waiting for the tell.

“Of course,” says Nines, “no one knew better than you.”

“—Was—” Gavin clears his throat. “—Was it bad, how it happened?”

The slightest shadow of a crease passes across Nines’s impassive forehead; Gavin’s question seems to inconvenience him, having come out of what was apparently left field. It’s the rise Gavin wanted to get out of this stony intruder, but he can’t find it in himself to gloat, the appetite for it gone.

“Does it matter?” asks Nines.

“Yes, it fucking matters,” says Gavin. “I hope it was sick, the way they got him. I hope it turned your fucking stomach when you saw it. If he knew it was happening to him, even better. Did it hurt him? Tell me it did.”

The crease settles into an outright frown, but Nines answers him, nonetheless. “It’s an ongoing investigation,” he says. “There were some bruises and ligature marks on the body, but nothing severe enough to have been fatal. It’s likely that blunt force trauma to the skull was the cause of death, which the medical examiner is looking into— although they expect it might be some time before they can come to any definite conclusion.”

“Why?” asks Gavin.

“The dogs,” says Nines, and pauses. “I’m not here about Landau’s death, that’s for the DPD. What I wanted to talk to you about was Landau’s contacts. Before this happened, the Bureau was building a racketeering case against—”

“What about the dogs?” asks Gavin.

Nines relents. “The ME estimated Landau’s time of death to be between 24 and 48 hours before police arrived,” he says. “The doors to his bedroom had been closed for much of this duration, and the dogs had remained inside, along with the body. In light of those facts, it is proving understandably challenging to differentiate between the traces of the impact from the murder weapon and the— subsequent contamination of the wound site.”

He’s high-stepping like a prize horse, feet held out of the mud, but Gavin can make out the shape of the whole gruesome picture well enough. Desmond Landau, dead in his bedroom, his skull caved in and his flesh peeled back; the smell of all that raw wet meat, as his guard dogs paced the floor and pawed at the door frame. 48 hours, the high worried whine. You wouldn’t expect a sound so anxious out of a pair of Presa Canarios built so solid, muscles thick beneath their bristle coat. Gavin used to slide his palm in under their collars to scratch where the stitching rubbed them. They’d turn their broad mastiff faces up towards his, all three of them waiting, uncertain and useless without their marching orders.

Des, walking through the door: Have they been good?

Yes, said Gavin, no tail of his own to wag. Welcome back.

What a joke. “Good fucking riddance,” says Gavin. “He had much worse than that coming,” but the corners of his eyes sting hot, in spite of everything.

He can tell that Nines notices, and that it unsettles him enough to shift in his seat. “Would you like a—” begins Nines.

“Fuck you, no,” says Gavin, pressing the heel of his hand against the bridge of his nose. He clears his throat again. “I wish I’d done it, he got off so fucking easy. Blunt force trauma. Are you recording this? I would have made him sit and watch as the Presas ate his face off.”

“Why didn’t you?” asks Nines, quietly.

“You think I killed him?” demands Gavin.

“No, I mean,” says Nines, “why didn’t you do it anytime during the last three years, after you left his employ? If that’s what you think about him, didn’t it occur to you to take matters into your own hands?”

Gavin swallows, but the lump in his throat stays lodged where it is. After a fashion, that’s also the answer to what Nines is asking: Because this thing they’ve placed inside me is just a little too far out of my reach, thinks Gavin. I don’t know how to rid myself of it.

The nylon pocket of Nines’s jacket jumps with a faint buzzing sound. Nines reaches inside, turns it off without looking.

“As you might guess,” says Nines, “these recent developments have thrown something of a wrench into the case we were putting together against Landau. The racketeering charges that were meant for him, unfortunately, are less likely to stick to his lower-ranked associates.”

“So?” asks Gavin. “Why tell me about it?”

“We think we can still keep the case alive,” says Nines, “if we use this as an opportunity to get ahead of the organization. If we can keep tabs on how the group splinters after Landau’s death, we’d be able to establish an up-to-date record of red ice trafficking routes headed out from Detroit. Only, we can’t put an eye on every rank-and-file enforcer in the Landau orbit.”

Another buzz, which Nines silences as brusquely as before.

“You want me to tell you who’s likely to take a piece of the pie with them,” says Gavin. “Is that it? You think I know which assholes are gunning to be the next kingpin of the Midwest, when I haven’t had shit to do with them for the last three years?”

“Less has changed since the raid than you think,” says Nines. “You leaving might have been the biggest shake-up. Well, and Landau being murdered, I suppose.”

When the buzz goes off for the third time, Nines is annoyed enough for his eyebrow to perceptibly twitch.

“Your phone’s ringing,” Gavin points out.

Nines doesn’t excuse himself, just picks up with a curt “Yes,” and listens in silence until whoever’s on the other end is finished. Gavin turns up his auditory sensors, just to be nosy about it, but he can’t make anything out beyond an indistinct rise and fall of voice. Then — bizarrely enough — Nines hangs up without saying another word, and returns his phone to his pocket.

“So the investigation—” he begins.

“What was that about?” asks Gavin.

“Nothing,” says Nines. “The investigation is currently—”

“Oh, wait, was that your case agent yanking on your leash?” asks Gavin. “Giving you shit about how you’re wasting your time trying to get some use out of a run-down android retiree with the processing capacity of a mid-range toaster oven? You’ve ruined my day by dredging this mess back up, the least you can do is let me in on what a fucking idiot your case agent thinks you are.”

“If you must know,” says Nines, tersely, “I have just been broken up with.”

Which is such a ludicrous revelation that Gavin, at least for a moment, forgets to think about Desmond Landau’s carcass being mauled by his own dogs. “You got dumped?” he asks, incredulous and nearly impressed. “Over the phone? Just now?”

“Yes,” says Nines.

“That’s wild,” says Gavin. “Condolences.”

“Is this a sufficient amount of disclosure to establish a working relationship?” asks Nines.

“Hey, jackass,” snaps Gavin, abruptly dragged back to the unpleasant reminder of why exactly they are sitting around his coffee table to begin with. “Weren’t you listening when I said that your colleagues tried to kill me? I’m not interested in talking to you. Especially not when you seem to think you’re owed my deference just because, what, your chassis is bulletproof and you’re on a federal pension plan? Big fucking deal.”

“I don’t think that,” says Nines.

“You can leave now,” says Gavin. “If you want any more of my time, you’ll have to pay for it like everyone else does.”

He blames himself as it comes out of his mouth. He doesn’t know why he says it. Breadcrumbs, like I want him to figure out what it is I do, but why? As if Nines needs any more ammunition to feel smug about what he is next to Gavin, a cutting-edge mechanical supersoldier tasked with preserving the peace of the realm. And me, made of spare parts, taking my clothes off for strangers.

If Nines is puzzled by Gavin’s wording, he doesn’t let on. Unfurled from his sofa chair, Nines towers over Gavin like a monument; but Gavin, having nothing else, at least has his obstinance. He crosses his arms and digs his heels in where he sits, daring Nines to expect civility from him.

“Here’s my card,” says Nines. When Gavin makes no move to take it from his hand, he slides it onto the coffee table instead, unfazed.

Gavin watches him straighten his jacket and tie. Desmond Landau, dead. In a certain cast of light, three years is an unwelcome blink of an eye, not the space enough that Gavin would like it to be; but something must have changed, still, if this is how I’m hearing about it. Some Fed showing up at his door in a crisp white button-down, bearing the news like a standard of war.

RK900 #313 248 317 - 87, his business card reads.

Halfway to the door, Nines slows to a stop and turns around. “I was a trainee,” he says, “when the Bureau raided the Landau compound.”

“Yeah?” asks Gavin.

“But I read about it,” says Nines. “I’m sorry for what happened.”

Gavin has always hated charity, but what comes from Nines doesn’t cloy the way that charity does. It’s a cool, dry thing, impersonal as a handshake. Barely an acknowledgement. Gavin finds that he much prefers it to the pity he remembers smothering him, the CyberLife technicians that put him back together the last time around, the receptionists at Central Station as the vice officer led him out of the evidence locker.

He breathes out. “The dogs,” he says.

“The dogs?” asks Nines.

“Are they with Animal Control?” asks Gavin. “Find them and test them for trace sedatives. They’re not aggressive towards androids, so if whoever it was went through the trouble of sedating them— I don’t know, just a thought. It might come in useful when there are more pieces to fit together.”

Nines nods, once, the line of his jaw sharp above his jacket collar.

2.

“This isn’t what I meant,” says Gavin.

This is exactly what you meant, types RICO31787. You just didn’t think I would actually do it.

“At least turn your camera on,” says Gavin, “for god’s sake.”

He does; a wash of overexposed light as the camera adjusts, then the image settles. Nines is sitting in what appears to be a well-lit living area, nondescript shelving and a cascade of curtains visible behind him. Pre-furnished apartment, assumes Gavin, but a real step up from working out of a roadside motel.

“They won’t pay for a hotel room?” asks Gavin.

“Not for as long as I’ve been here on this case,” says Nines. “Did you really not know it was me that booked you?”

“How the fuck was I supposed to know?” demands Gavin. “It’s not like you left a note when you scheduled yourself in, Hi, remember me, it’s the asshole Fed from a few days back. In retrospect, I guess the username should have tipped me off. I get it. Because of the RICO Act.”

“You get it,” says Nines. “And my serial number.”

“Wouldn’t know about that,” says Gavin. “I threw your card out with the rest of my trash.”

“You’re an android,” Nines points out. “Once you’ve seen the card, it doesn’t matter what you do with it. Yet for some reason, you insist on taking refuge behind this— facade of human limitations.”

“Agent Nines,” says Gavin, “you don’t know the half of it.”

The chat, reliably gaudy, has opted for Nines’s messages to be delivered in hot violet. The brief record of what he has typed looks risible in its windowed frame: Are you ready to talk about Landau yet? then: You told me I had to pay for your time, so I’m paying for your time, then: Please stop swearing, this is a family sex show portal.

Gavin can’t stop rereading that first message, the absurdity of the question in its oafishly frisky cam room font. Are you ready to talk about Landau yet?

“I know you worked in close protection,” says Nines. “Which means that whatever else you may be, you’re a quick judge of character. What I mean to say is, you know as well as I do that I won’t let this go, so you might as well save yourself the trouble and talk to me now rather than in two months’ time.”

Infuriating, but correct. Nines exudes the confident persistence of someone at ease with their own capacity to compel, and Gavin resents it with every carbon fiber of his being. With 25 minutes still left on the clock, Gavin scowls at the feed of Nines’s immaculate placid face, flips him off in lieu of acquiescence.

“If you don’t mind,” says Nines, “I’d like to start by asking you some questions about your time in Desmond Landau’s service.”

“Of course I fucking mind,” says Gavin.

“Your objection is noted, but largely irrelevant,” says Nines, that piece of shit. “I’ve read through your file at the DPD, which has provided me with a rough outline of your career path. You were produced as a limited-run private security unit and purchased by Desmond Landau seven weeks after release, correct?”

Gavin refrains from picking a fight over career path, since the phrase is so patently inappropriate that it feels like bait. “Correct,” he says. “CyberLife’s warranty policy really came back to bite them in the ass. As soon as they realized that they’d have to provide lifetime maintenance for a line of androids designed specifically to be destroyed— well, they deep-sixed that pretty quick, didn’t they. Not a lot of GV models out in the wild these days.”

“Why an android bodyguard?” asks Nines. “At the time, Landau was already a major supplier of ice and raw Thirium throughout the Great Lakes region, with significant ties to the Hudson Group, who controlled distribution throughout most of the Mid-Atlantic. It would be customary for a cartel to send their own guns to ensure the safety of someone in a position that valuable, yet Landau refused; he opted to shell out a frankly astronomical sum of his own money to hire you, instead. What was the reason?”

Gavin had wondered the same thing. Turning the question over and over in his hands like a faceted gemstone, watching it reflect a different answer back at him as the years wore away. Because I’m better, he thought in the flush of those first few months, new to his limbs and eager to do what he was made to.

“I was better at it than any human could be,” says Gavin. “That’s less achievement, more just— inevitability, I’m sure you understand. Better reaction times, heightened sensory thresholds. Enough of a preconstruction module to make a difference.”

“But you don’t think that was why he chose you,” says Nines.

“It wasn’t,” says Gavin. “What did it say in the DPD file, about the first time I was shut down?”

“Only what you told them in your statement, which wasn’t much,” says Nines. “Turf war, hit attempt, you took the bullet and it shattered your pump regulator. The supervising technician at CyberLife noted in their post-op report that despite the physiological trauma, you showed no signs of instability.”

“Because I was a fucking idiot,” says Gavin. “After that little mending holiday, I thought, maybe he chose me because he knew I’d be fine. Some unlucky sack of meat from the Hudson Group? Would have put them in the dirt for good, no two ways about it. But I was okay. No one died.”

“Except you don’t think that’s why, either,” says Nines.

“Turns out that getting shot through your chest doesn’t make you any smarter,” says Gavin. “Serves me right. It took a second fucking shutdown to get it through my thick head. That one was courtesy of your co-workers, you know. I thought it was a mess, what they did to my insides, but then I realized it was nothing compared to the ensuing legal shitshow over who was financially liable for my reconstruction.”

“CyberLife v. United States,” says Nines.

“I’m a legal precedent,” says Gavin. “What an honor.”

“So what was the reason, in the end?” asks Nines. “Did you figure it out after the second shutdown?”

It was, to be precise about it, just moments before the second shutdown that he figured it out. When SWAT blew their compound down, everything went sideways fast; the havoc overtook them like a tidal wave, crashing through the corridors — and god knows what he was thinking, but Landau reached for his gun as he jumped to his feet — Des, don’t, Gavin wanted to shout, it’s over, but it was all crumbling too swiftly for him to get the words out in time.

He saw what would happen: Landau’s finger on the trigger as the door slammed open, squeezing out a haphazard shot into the ceiling, then before the second could leave the chamber, a Fed bullet fletched through him, straight and true, just below the clavicle. Secure your charge, Gavin’s directive blared in the corner of his eye. Keep Desmond Landau safe. But the last time he’d done what he was meant to, he found himself strung up three feet off the ground, looking into the open cavity of his own chest, the wires coiled wetly below the severed cross-section of his midriff. I don’t want to, not again, please, and it came flooding into him all at once, the fear he’d tucked away without examining too closely the last time around, battering at the wall between him and revolt. Take your own damn bullet, you son of a bitch. I don’t want to.

Later, when he blinked awake for the second time in the CyberLife post-op recalibration chamber, they told him this was deviancy, that he was a deviant. This name for it struck him as so chintzy that he tried to laugh, but his vocalization modules hadn’t come online yet. A tinsel-cheap name for a tinsel-cheap promise. We’ve found deviancy to occur at junctures of intense moral crisis, the same head technician told him. Androids who experience deviation commonly do so to avoid carrying out commands that they find repugnant.

The technician considered this for a moment, then said: The federal agents who carted you over here, they said that you weren’t in their line of fire. That you stepped in front of the intended target. I’ve been with this company since before we went public, and I gotta tell you, this one really stumps me. Why would an android — newly armed with freedom of will — then choose to do the exact thing that they deviated in order to avoid?

Why indeed, thought Gavin, because knowing the answer made it no less confounding.

“The trouble with people is,” he tells Nines, “that everyone can be bought for the right price. But an android— or at least, a stupid fucking android who can’t tell the difference between what they’ve been trained to do and what it is that they actually want to do—”

“He expected that your loyalty would be more reliable than most,” says Nines. “That’s why he chose you.”

“Des—” begins Gavin, then catches himself. “I mean, Desmond— no, I mean—”

Nines doesn’t react, imperturbable as ever, which almost makes Gavin feel like he hasn’t done anything wrong.

“—Landau,” he manages at last, “made sure of it. He sure fucking knew what he was doing.” The hand in Gavin’s hair, you did good, cutting through the terror like a hot knife.

“After your reconstruction,” says Nines, “the Bureau released you into DPD custody, which is when you gave them the statement on file. Something of a cursory document, in my estimation. Either they didn’t know what to ask you, or you were even less accommodating than you are now, which I find an astonishing prospect.”

For someone who is clearly incapable of being astonished by anything, Nines does seem inquisitive about the lacunae in the record, his eyes keen past the veil of webcam grain. Never mind that, Gavin has to tell himself. A panther’s attention isn’t meant to flatter.

“That was before PADLOC was passed,” says Gavin. “So, you know, there wasn’t yet any prosecutorial accountability for deviants with links to organized crime. The DPD couldn’t figure out if I was a witness, or if I was a piece of evidence.”

“What did they decide?” asks Nines.

“I don’t think they did,” says Gavin. “I got shuffled around a bunch, spent a week or two on standby in the evidence locker, got invited to an excruciating family dinner by some misguided officer who was too sentimental to know better, then they realized that whatever I was going to tell them wasn’t incriminating enough to be worth the hassle.”

“Lucky for you that PADLOC didn’t go through while you were still on the DPD radar,” says Nines. “Some might call it convenient.”

“Yes, I’ve been immensely lucky in life,” says Gavin. “Blessed with convenience. The DPD turned me out of doors and I didn’t know what the fuck I was supposed to do, so here I am, selling peep shows for pennies on the token. I’m the envy of the town.”

The DPD didn’t know what to do with him, and his old job didn’t, either. Months after the raid, as Gavin made his way home from an errand run with three fridge-cold cans of carbonated Thirium 310 in a plastic bag, someone came and stood behind him at a crosswalk. Desmond says thanks, he heard, then they were gone; that was the cutting loose.

It hadn’t occurred to Gavin, before that puncture of finality, that he was waiting to be called back like the last time he’d been taken away. The hand in his hair. You did good. He tossed his bag in a food bank donation bin and watched the river through the warning blink of his battery light, until his system alerts stained the water red and he was too annoyed by the insistent alarm to continue luxuriating in his inexplicable despondency.

Nines has been quiet. Not in the usual way of his watchful scrutiny, but in a suspended pause that seems uncharacteristic, even in the short time that they’ve known each other.

“What?” asks Gavin.

“Nothing,” says Nines, so quickly that he winces at his own indiscretion. “Well, I— this is chosen, isn’t it? You do enjoy what you do?”

“—Yeah,” says Gavin. It’s an answer surprised out of him, and all the more truthful for it. “I do enjoy it, and I make enough to be comfortable. Just don’t love pompous shitheads like you coming by and turning your noses up at me just because a W-2 in the mail gets you harder than I ever could.”

“That’s not true,” says Nines.

“You’re right,” says Gavin. “I could get you pretty hard.”

Nines’s mouth twists the slightest bit, some unidentifiable shred of emotion that passes too quickly to leave a mark. Does he fluster? Gavin wonders, a distant theoretical curiosity.

“My tumescence for gainful employment aside,” says Nines, “I’m not the kind of asshole you think I am. You keep accusing me of— I don’t go around making snide judgments based on model number, and I have no interest in denigrating your career, either. I hope you understand that.”

“Don’t overdo it,” mumbles Gavin, feeling the back of his neck prickle. “Everything’s a fucking career to you. Probably got dumped over your tumescence for gainful employment.”

A protracted beat of silence, as Gavin thinks that he might have overdone it, or maybe Nines’s feed has frozen— then Nines lets out a long, uneven breath, and runs his palm down the length of his face.

“Maybe,” he says.

Emboldened, Gavin tries for more: “I mean, look at you. Barely single and the first thing you do is book yourself a private cam session, you degenerate. Were you hoping I would work this interview into a show? Federal agent questions android of interest, fucks the answers out of him.”

Nines looks off into the middle distance. “And here I was,” he says, “thinking I would tip you for your trouble.”

“Like I said, pennies on the token,” says Gavin. “But roasting you for being shit at relationships, that’s more than worth my time. Can I keep doing it until the clock runs down?”

“You only have a few minutes left,” says Nines. “From what I’ve been told, that would barely begin to scratch the surface of why I’m impossible to be around.”

It sounds less like self-deprecation and more like a badge of honor, when he says it with such nonchalant composure. Gavin looks at the undone top button of Nines’s shirt, the bracket sliver of skin, and thinks: What a waste.

“Hey,” says Gavin. “Here’s an idea. You still need me to consult, isn’t that right? So you can get the ice routes figured out?”

“If you’ll cooperate,” says Nines.

“I’ll do it,” says Gavin, “and I’ll stop pitching such a fucking fit about it all the time. The murder case, I’ll consult on that too, you can let the DPD know.”

“There must be a catch,” says Nines.

“Take me on your investigative trips,” says Gavin. “I’ve got nothing to do other than this twice a week, and I’m sick of hanging around park benches waiting for a fight to break out. I need a hobby.”

“You want security clearance because you’re bored?” asks Nines.

“Yes, please,” says Gavin.

Desmond Landau is dead. If I couldn’t be the one to put him in the ground, I sure as hell want to help shovel the dirt over his face. Scattering the dregs of his empire, standing over the sodden patch of blood where he rattled out his last, every fucking way there is to spit on Landau’s grave, Gavin wants it. If I bury you, will I be able to bury what you grew in me?

“—I suppose there’s only so much damage to be done,” says Nines, half to himself. “All right, GV500. We can do that.”

“And,” says Gavin, “you call me Gavin.”

“Didn’t Landau give you that name?” asks Nines.

“So?” demands Gavin. “Doesn’t that make it mine now?”

“All right,” says Nines, “Gavin.”

In the clear, lake-smooth timbre of Nines’s voice, it sounds like a different name altogether. To bury you, handful by handful, I have to look in every corner of me that remembers you.

3.

For a second, Gavin thinks he might have imagined it. He has his hand curled around the shaft of the silicone cock and his tongue pressed flat against the blunt curve of its head, lashes half-mast as he glances sidelong at his laptop screen, which is when he sees it blink in and out of sight.

RICO31787, then gone.

“—The fuck,” he says out loud.

He places the toy off to one side of the bed. The chat explodes into objections, what are you doing, why did you stop, but Gavin ignores it to scroll through the list of guests in the chat. Not there anymore, but he didn’t imagine it, either; a quick mental replay of the moment confirms it, brief but unmistakable, just a flash before it vanishes. RICO31787.

“Sorry,” he tells the restless audience, “I thought I—”

Did he disconnect? wonders Gavin. That, or he changed his display name as fast as he could. But— either way, whether he’s still here or not, Nines was—

“You know what,” he says, picking the toy back up, “it doesn’t matter. Never mind.”

Something about the thought of Nines in a flurry of consternation tickles Gavin. That chrome-plated obelisk, planted in his paperwhite rented room, ambushed by his own joke username screaming back at him. His state-of-the-art brain running on a spike of frenzy, a million calculations gummed up in trying to keep Gavin from noticing him there. But I did notice, thinks Gavin. Whether you’re still here or not, I know you came to see me.

Why, he wouldn’t venture to guess. Nines seemed the curious sort; and the kind of underwater operative, besides, who puts together just-in-case dossiers on his colleagues for when the leverage might come in handy. Having agreed to let Gavin meddle in his case, he’d want to know as much as he can about his unexpected collaborator, sure. Nines would pry.

He’ll come to where I work and knock the dicks out of my mouth. That’s funny enough for Gavin to recover his spirits the rest of the way, and he slowly guides the whole spit-slick length of the toy back out of his mouth, feeling the ridges of its rubber skin brush against his lips. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the chat quicken.

“Hey,” he murmurs towards the camera, “tip line’s looking good, keep it going. I know you didn’t come here tonight just to see me blow a dildo.”

Doesn’t hurt, one of his regulars types in chat.

“You fucking bet it doesn’t hurt,” says Gavin, and lowers himself back onto his elbows. Inch by inch, he trails the toy up over his stomach and chest, arching into the touch as he goes, tilting his head back with a breathless little sigh. “But I came here hoping you’d let me do more,” he tells them, “so don’t let me down.”

This is chosen, isn’t it? asked Nines. You do enjoy what you do? Why wouldn’t he, the fevered attention of the crowd on him when he parts his knees, the tokens streaming into his tip jar with the bright trill of whistles, the hiss of a whip cracking. Two hundred pairs of eyes, the whole room in the palm of his hand.

But just because he chose it doesn’t mean that he chose well. He’d chosen before, too. You stepped in front of the intended target. The head technician at CyberLife looking up at him, arms crossed as they shook their head. I gotta tell you, this one really stumps me.

Gavin never got around to explaining, but his answer wouldn’t have been welcome, anyway. The technician was looking for an engineer’s solution, a hitch in the code to isolate and evaluate. This was the overweening certitude that came of being embedded in a trillion-dollar market value corporation; the gall to think that knowing what had happened could tell you what was wrong, and that knowing what was wrong meant that you could fix it.

What was there to fix? In that stuttering instant between his deviation and the muzzle of the agent’s Glock, it wasn’t just the terror of his first shutdown that Gavin remembered. It was the glow of what had come after all of it. After the repair and the recalibration, when his ride back pulled up at the compound and security buzzed them in, the crackle static voice of the guard through the intercom, GV500, Desmond wants to see you.

You would have seen me anyway, said Gavin, as the study doors closed behind him. I don’t know if you noticed, but I have the kind of job that means I’m usually somewhere around you.

The Presas padded over when they recognized him, pushed their damp noses into his hand and went on beating their tails against his leg until it nearly knocked him over. Sheepish at the welcome, Gavin shooed them away, what’s the ruckus, I wasn’t gone that long.

They missed you, said Landau.

Well, said Gavin, seems like they’ve been doing okay.

Landau glanced down at them, the velvet patch of fur between their pricked-up ears. When he placed his hand in Gavin’s hair, a warm weight mussing the top of his head like smoothing down a cowlick, the part of his suit jacket brushed against Gavin’s arm. He smelled like leather and ink.

Gavin, said Landau. You did good.

Suddenly fierce with pride, Gavin had to look away, unable to answer him with anything louder than a nod. The throbbing panic of waking up disoriented — he felt his lids lift when he opened his eyes, but there was nothing to see, only miles of oceanic dark — hearing the whir of his own blood cycle through his innards, the tic-tac dance of fingertips on a keyboard — all of it, in that moment, melted into gold. The Presas leaned against him as they settled back onto their haunches, and Gavin found himself thinking: This must be what coming home feels like.

He knew how fucked up it was. But that was the canny way they did things; Landau always treated him well enough to ache, even as the rest of them spat at Gavin, you’re lucky Desmond got you put back together, guess even he couldn’t find another mouth like yours. There were a lot of questions Gavin could have asked them. What is it exactly that you think I do for him, or did you expect my repair fees would have gone to you otherwise, or the one that nagged at him most of all, can you teach me how you do it? How you come to this with steel beneath your skin, clear-eyed, understanding exactly how little you mean to him. Why don’t I know better than I do?

Not for lack of trying. He told himself, didn’t he, until it echoed inside him like a prayer. Landau wants you to feel this, you stupid piece of shit. You’re a bulletproof vest; he didn’t give you a home. But still, he felt what he felt, no matter how he came by it. He was proud of what he had done. The acknowledgement of it enveloped him like kindness, made him feel— wanted. Or loved, perhaps.

So the first thing Gavin did in the blessed sweet abandon of deviancy was the thing he’d just deviated to swerve away from. After the wash of fear came this, the whatever-it-was, the affection, the loyalty that’d been bred into him, the soft mistake he couldn’t shake free. Why an android bodyguard? It wasn’t that he was better — though he was — or that he would come back, though he did. He stepped in between the door and Desmond Landau, and as his shell cracked open from shoulder to sternum, Gavin understood.

No one else would have done this for you, he thought, staring into the unreadable face of — his what, exactly? — before his aortic valve shredded apart like a marigold in bloom. What was there to fix, then? Was it always so fatal to be artless, eager to take the shape of the grip that wielded him? He’d done exactly what he was meant to. For his troubles, a second tour of CyberLife, a glimpse into every room at Central Station. Tossed at him like a coin into a violin case, Desmond says thanks.

All this reminiscence should drain the hunger from him; Gavin has never really understood the appeal of nostalgia, and it sure as shit doesn’t do a thing to get him off. But the burn builds steady as he fucks himself onto the cock in his hand, long slow strokes that gather to hum at the base of his spine. The muscles in his thighs drawing tight, Gavin presses his cheek into a pillow, lit up from crown to toe. Distant past the sound of his own unsteady breathing, he can hear the jangle music of tokens spilling loose.

This, I’m good at. Nines called it a career, which was preposterous in its own way, but there was no hint of derision in how he said it. And if it was a species of suspicion that drove Nines to this livestream — if he thought it best to be wary about the stranger in his passenger seat, if he rated Gavin worth the effort it would take to keep an eye on him — that doesn’t sour it any, either. Gavin finds he doesn’t mind.

There is — Gavin discovers — a certain thrill to being taken seriously. The thought that he might matter enough to get to know. We can do that. Gavin. Nines, watching. A shock of something hot and urgent pierces straight through him, and Gavin shudders on the bed, his cock leaking clear against his stomach.

The twist of Nines’s mouth. Gavin knots his fingers tight in the sheets and thinks of river water. When he comes, gasping and lost and forgetful of the camera on him, it feels better than it has in a long while.

4.

There’s no need for him to drive it himself, but Nines is behind the wheel of the Malibu anyway; there’s no need for the sunglasses, either, but Gavin misses the right moment to pick a fight over it. Too jittery by half, he stumbles into the car and straps himself in, taut in his silence until they’re on the highway and Nines says: “No, it’s not mine.”

“What?” asks Gavin, jolted out of his distraction.

“The car,” says Nines. “It’s a GSA rental.”

“I would have guessed that,” says Gavin, “before I assumed you’d bought it for yourself.”

“What’s not to like? It’s the last great American mid-size sedan,” Nines says with such a straight face that Gavin has to scoff at it.

His unease interrupted, Gavin reaches over and fiddles with the radio tuner until he lands on the worst option possible, a station seemingly dedicated to playing back-to-back commercials for used car lots. Come on down to Motor City Finest Auto Sales! He finds the recline handle and dips the passenger seat back, until he can slouch enough to put his feet up on the dashboard. Nines doesn’t tell him to knock off any of it.

Trying to needle Nines gives Gavin something to do, and it makes the ride a bearable one, takes his mind off the prospect of their inevitable arrival. It doesn’t last; by the time they take the exit towards the compound, the nerves are back. Gavin shuffles his feet off the dashboard to draw his knees up, huddling in on himself, and watches the trees fly past the picture frame of the window. Sunglasses or not, he can feel Nines’s eyes on the back of his head.

When they roll through the thrown-open gates and the Malibu curves with the winding driveway, kissing the grass-lined hem of the road, Gavin turns to follow the waning of the view in the side mirror. Underneath the tires, the crunching give of gravel. His fingernails bite into denim at his knees.

“I’m aware that the last time you were here, the outcome was somewhat short of pleasant,” says Nines. “If at any time, you would prefer—”

“It’s not that,” says Gavin. “I mean, it’s that too. But that’s not the— I was thinking about something else.”

Nines waits.

“—The gates,” says Gavin, at last. “They shouldn’t be open like that. Anyone could get in.”

“But there’s no—” begins Nines.

“I know, okay,” snaps Gavin. “Jesus, I know it doesn’t make any fucking sense. You don’t have to tell me.”

The compound is an immaculate ghost town, uncanny in its abrupt desolation. Gavin knows it’s all been hollowed out; what Landau’s people didn’t take with them when they packed up shop, the cops must have stripped when they came. Not my business, Gavin tells himself. It hasn’t been for the last three years, but of course, these habits die hard. Take the dog out of the guardhouse, but you can’t take the guardhouse out of the dog.

Lawns manicured, the hedges clipped, the water features dotted across the landscape still running smooth and silver. Gavin takes in the familiar sights as they make their way up to the mansion. Everything in its place, except for the hands that did the tending; no one milling about on the benches, no workers under the trees — and what unsettles him most of all — no cars anywhere, none of the comings and goings, the paved inner driveway a naked stretch of cobblestone. Just a single police vehicle pulled up to the front door.

“It’s lonely here,” he says, out loud.

“Wasn’t it always?” asks Nines.

“It should have been,” says Gavin. “I wish it had been.”

The expanse of the unmanned road is so stark that Gavin can barely look at it straight, but instead of parking their car literally anywhere else in the vastness, Nines maneuvers it into an oblique angle behind the police vehicle, hemming it in. With what appears to be visible satisfaction, Nines engages the emergency brake.

“Shall we?” he says, and unlocks the car doors.

Inside, the house is thick with brooding. Like a pillow that smothers, quiet and resentful, spite in every corner of the cavernous waste. You’re right to be, thinks Gavin, peering into the recesses of the ceiling. Scraped inside out and waiting for weather, a jack-o’-lantern on the first of November. No one told you they’d leave you behind like this.

The spiral staircase is cordoned off with holotape, but Nines strides through without so much as a by-your-leave. The tape flickers; above them, even muffled by two floor landings and a door, someone audibly swears.

“That will be Lieutenant Hank Anderson,” says Nines. “The android with him is an RK800 model, serial number #313 248 317 - 51. Connor. They’re in charge of the Landau homicide case, so they’ll be able to answer whatever questions you have about the current status of the investigation.”

“Tox screen on the dogs?” asks Gavin, double-marching up the stairs to keep pace.

“That sort of thing,” says Nines. “What were their names?”

“Who, the cops?” asks Gavin. “Hank Anderson and Connor?”

“The Presas,” says Nines.

“Oh,” says Gavin. “Landau didn’t name them.”

“Didn’t you?” asks Nines. All the lights are off in the house — DTE sure didn’t drag their feet, cutting electric — but the noonday sun slants through the windows and catches in the chandelier overhead, confetti flakes of light scattershot in Nines’s hair.

“—Queenie,” says Gavin, “and Rob. Queenie and Rob.”

“You should ask about them,” says Nines.

There’s another ribbon of holotape spanning the closed double doors to the bedroom. When Nines jabs through it as he reaches for the doorknob, a voice from inside says: “Here he comes, Hank.”

“FBI,” announces Nines, marching in. He makes a show of flashing his credentials at the tag team inside, the sound of the leather wallet an obnoxiously expensive report as he snaps it back closed.

From where he sits sagged in the wingback by the window, Hank Anderson — a man who looks like a basement in the middle of a gut renovation — rolls his eyes.

“You do this every time,” he tells Nines.

“He thinks it’s funny,” says Connor, a shabbier version of Nines with the corners filed off.

He thinks things are funny? Gavin is skeptical, but he tucks it away for future reference. He hovers awkwardly near the doors, unsure of how much Nines has shared with the DPD, whether he ought to explain who he is or why he’s here — if he can explain why he’s here — which is where he freezes when Connor turns to him.

“I don’t know what you just thought about us,” says Connor, “but I can tell it wasn’t flattering.”

“Do I need to flatter you?” asks Gavin, hackles up.

Hank snorts. “This him?” he asks Nines. “Landau’s stray?”

“Whose what?” demands Gavin, at the same time that Nines says, “Gavin.” It’s unclear whether Nines means it to be a clarification for Hank or a reprimand for Gavin, but Hank eases off, palms held out in appeasement.

“My bad, Gavin,” he says. “I’m Lieutenant Hank Anderson, this is Connor, we’re the DPD team working this shitshow.”

“I’m going to make some phone calls,” Nines tells Gavin. “Find me outside when you’re done.”

“Did you park like an asshole again?” Hank shouts after Nines, who already has his phone to one ear, back to the room. “Can we discuss your sunglasses before you go? I mean, what the fuck?”

The door snicks closed behind Nines. Hank slumps back into the chair and says generally to the room, “I may not know a lot about androids, but I know he doesn’t need those.” Then, to Gavin: “Did you tell him that he looks ridiculous?”

“What’s the point?” asks Gavin. “He always looks ridiculous.”

“Yeah,” says Hank. In the cautious pause that follows, Gavin detects a note of remorse; Hank is trying to put together a better apology for his earlier gaffe. Not a bad sort, then, decides Gavin. Just going through some shit.

“It’s fine, you know,” says Gavin. “I’ve been called worse.”

Connor looks him over in reassessment, bright doe eyes too searching. Gavin figures Connor is coming to much the same conclusion about him — not a bad sort, just going through some shit — but before Gavin can disabuse him of the notion, Connor steps forward with his hand held out, liquid skin receding up to his wrist. Underneath, he’s as glossy as a hardboiled egg.

Gavin glances down at it, then shakes his head, briefly.

“I’d rather not,” he says. “If it’s all the same to you.”

“Sure,” says Connor, easy as that. “You’re a GV500? Agent Nines said you’d be consulting on the case, but I wasn’t aware that crime scene reconstruction was an on-board functionality for your model line.”

“It isn’t,” says Gavin. “I think I can help you out, but not by— not by doing police android work. Not the kind of— you know we call it circus pig tricks, what you do?”

“Who’s we?” asks Connor. Neither he nor Hank seem particularly bothered by the dig.

“Just,” says Gavin, “everyone else.”

He scratches at the back of his head and surveys the room, damask curtains and four-poster bed as determinedly baroque as he remembers them, until his gaze lands on the cluster of A-frame evidence tents strewn over the Isfahan rug. That’s the way it goes, thinks Gavin. One day you’re taking off your shoes to walk barefoot across your newest kickback, and the next thing you know, someone’s clubbing you to death on it while your dogs wait for dinner. He crouches down next to the markers, transfixed.

“I’m only here to see what it was like for him,” says Gavin.

Hank and Connor exchange a look, which is the sort of thing that Gavin is accustomed to people doing in his vicinity. “—You want some time alone?” asks Hank.

“No,” says Gavin. “Please don’t leave.”

Soaked into the arabesques, Landau’s blood is a continental blotch. A rust-dull deformity in a perfectly good rug. Ruining things, like you always did. Gavin tries to imagine what shape he must have fallen into, how he must have convulsed, the long and ragged tear of his flesh between the Presas’ teeth. I wasn’t here to stop it, this time around.

Gavin hovers his hand a bare half-inch over the bloodstain, dwarfed by the size of the spill. Hank stirs in his chair, close to rebuke; it’s Connor that stays him, just a shift of his weight that does the trick, like a hand that tugs Hank back into the cushions.

“How did it happen?” asks Gavin.

“Blood pattern analysis indicates that Landau was incapacitated by the first impact,” says Connor. “That landed on the side of his head, somewhere near the orbital bone. Subsequent strikes occurred as the victim lay on the rug; there are no signs that he was cognizant enough to defend himself or to attempt escape.”

“Then the dogs got to him,” says Hank.

“However, that doesn’t seem to have resulted in much further spatter,” says Connor. “Which suggests that by the time the dogs began to feed, the body was already in the later stages of livor mortis.”

Just one well-aimed blow; that was all it took. Some king, to kneel before a crowbar. See what comes of cutting me loose, Gavin would tell Landau, or what’s left of his head in the morgue. Whoever you had watching over you, they sure didn’t do the job like I did. You knew no one would.

“Any insights?” asks Hank.

“I wonder,” says Gavin, “if I still would have died for him, the third time around.” Stepped in between Landau and the raised hand, his hull shattering to a jigsaw puzzle of shrapnel. Even in the license of speculation, Gavin never imagines himself killing for Landau; only ever dying for him, the easier way out.

“That’s not an insight,” says Hank, grimacing.

“You know,” says Connor, “he couldn’t have taken you back. Not after the second time.”

“Jesus Christ, what is it with you cops and telling me shit I already know,” says Gavin. “Of course he fucking couldn’t, I had to hang around the DPD for months. If that’s not grounds for suspicion, I don’t know what is. He was right to treat me like a walking wiretap.”

“So who are you upset at?” asks Connor.

“You, for not letting me stay,” says Gavin. “Landau, for kicking me out. Elijah Kamski, for being Elijah fucking Kamski.” Me, for all the rest of it. “I don’t know, take your pick. It’s a blame buffet.”

Connor seems to recognize this for what it is, a haphazard flurry of barbs rather than anything truly meant to indict. He holds his jaw closed and refrains from pursuing the matter any further, which is — astutely chosen — about the only option that lets Gavin’s irritation dissipate under its own weight. Hank takes his cue from Connor and waits, steady, until Gavin deflates and leans back against the bedframe, knees held half-bent in front of himself.

“Who called in the body?” asks Gavin.

“Anonymous tip,” says Hank. “By the time the police rolled up, the whole compound had been cleared out. We figure a couple hours, at least, between the actual discovery of the body and the phone call.”

“They didn’t take the dogs,” says Connor. “The responding officers found them in the bedroom, door closed, still with the body.”

“That really fucking gets me,” says Hank. “Someone saw Landau dead, saw the dogs eating Landau, and chose to call 911 but not to let the dogs out of the room. What’s that about? Turns my stomach, to be honest.”

Sometimes, impatient for the minute hand to crawl to mealtime, Queenie and Rob would reach up to nip at his fingertips. A gentle toothless mouthing, coming away disappointed by the lack of scent on him. No hint of meat. At his soft chiding, they’d look up, eyes liquid like asking: What else was I supposed to do?

That, thinks Gavin. You were supposed to do exactly that. And if the thing within your reach was the broken face of your owner— still, what else were you supposed to do? He’d stopped bleeding, by then. They waited long enough.

“What did the toxicology report say?” asks Gavin.

“The dogs?” asks Hank. “Was it you that told us to go find them? Good thing you did, it would have been flushed out of them otherwise.”

“There were trace sedatives in their bloodwork,” says Connor. “Pentobarbital. It’s contextualizing information, certainly, but— I wanted you to clarify, why was it imperative that we establish this?”

“I thought it might narrow things down a little,” says Gavin. “The way they were with me, I know they’re a lot less aggressive with androids than with humans. Something to do with smell, maybe. An android could easily get close enough to take Landau out, without needing to go through the trouble of sedating the dogs.”

“But smell or not,” says Hank, “they wouldn’t just sit by and watch while their owner had his head progressively caved in.”

“Yeah, but why was his head caved in?” asks Gavin. “In your experience, why are victim’s heads usually caved in?” Victim, the word an ill fit in his mouth, like a loose tooth. Landau, a victim.

“When it’s personal,” says Hank. “Longstanding friction, turns into an argument, turns into a fit of rage, turns into something that looks like this. Except— that tends to be more spur-of-the-moment. You don’t walk in with a pocket full of barbiturates, intending to lose your temper.”

“Even granting that there was a measure of premeditation to it,” says Connor, “why sedate the dogs? Why not lock them out of the room, or just dispose of them altogether?”

“The sedatives weren’t meant to kill them, right?” asks Gavin.

“Some pains were taken to specifically avoid it,” says Connor. “It was a calculated dosage.”

Gavin tilts his head back until it rests on the edge of the mattress, the matelasse coverlet brushing against his cheek. Calculated. That’s what snags about it: the cold thread of deliberation running beneath the show of carnage, as though the gruesome spread of viscera were only so much misdirection. But misdirection from what? Why did the dogs need to wake up in a locked room to the stench of Landau’s blood?

His body, still warm. The Presas, whimpering for attention, nosing under his chin with their snouts, sweet and tacky with gore—

It’s less than he deserved, Gavin tells himself, forcefully enough that it carries a stamp of the truth. He turns towards Hank and Connor, who are engrossed in conferring about something over the far corner of the desk.

“For what it’s worth,” he calls over the low pitch of their murmur, “I do think it narrows things down. Who the fuck knows what this sedative shit is about, but an android wouldn’t put this kind of convoluted effort into just offing someone.” Jerking a thumb towards Connor: “He knows that’s right. I mean, unless Landau really pissed off an android somewhere along the way— but I doubt he even knew any androids well enough to piss one off.”

“Well,” says Hank, “apart from the one.”

“Thanks,” says Gavin. “Nines told you I wanted to consult? What’s next on your docket?”

“There’s the question of the murder weapon,” says Connor. “We’ll have some new leads once we hear back from the medical examiner.”

“You should call me when you do,” says Gavin.

“What’s in it for you, anyway?” asks Hank. “Sure doesn’t sound like you have high opinions about Landau — can’t blame you for that — so why run around trying to catch his killer?”

If I bury you, deeper than you can claw your way out, will that unshackle me from what you left behind? “I don’t know,” says Gavin. “Just want to see who got there before me, I guess.”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” says Hank.

“Put it in the case file, who cares,” says Gavin. “Better yet, put it in my file. You know the one.”

Hank drums his fingers on the desk, tracing the bright knife’s-edge of sunbeam that the window behind him casts on rosewood. When he speaks again, his voice catches in his chest a little, too thick to be smooth going.

“I was on leave, three years ago,” he says. “I’d like to say I would have done it better than they did, but I probably would have fucked it up, too. Still, they shouldn’t have— they should have looked after you.”

“It’s fine,” says Gavin. “There was that whole mess with PADLOC, I get it.”

He’s spent three years nursing his rancor, but Gavin can admit to himself that not all of it is built on solid ground. Even back then — when he stood in Jeffrey Fowler’s glass box of an office and all but begged him, let me work here — the pinched look on Fowler’s face was so harrowed that Gavin couldn’t hold the answer against him.

Right now, said Fowler, you’re an android confiscated from a criminal organization. But once this PADLOC bill passes—

That’s still months away, said Gavin.

I’m sure that excuse will go over well, said Fowler. We hired him before he became legally classified as a mob associate with pending felony charges, no harm done, everyone relax. Is that it?

Then what am I supposed to do now? demanded Gavin. You were the ones who took me away from—

Gavin, we didn’t take you away from anything! yelled Fowler, slamming a fist down on the desk. Gavin flinched at the rattle of the coffee mug, enough that Fowler stuffed his hand into his trouser pocket, abashed.

I know this isn’t easy to hear, he went on, but the best thing we can do for you is to have nothing to do with you. Get yourself cleared before PADLOC goes through, and you’ll be able to duck under the radar. But if we keep you here — sooner or later, some DA is going to come snooping around, looking for an anti-corruption case to make their career on — you want to be the first android thrown in federal prison? Or will you just fucking listen to me and lay low for a while?

So he slipped through the cracks in the system, for better or for worse. He was acquitted, PADLOC passed, and the DA’s Office left him alone. But hasn’t the bleeding stopped, by now? he thinks, as Connor levels his eyes to the balcony door handles, hunting for fingerprints. Haven’t I waited long enough?

“Did Nines give you my number?” asks Gavin, climbing to his feet.

“Yes,” says Connor. “Are you heading out?”

“I’ve had enough of this shithole,” says Gavin. “Really, tell me when you hear about the weapon. I promise I won’t get in your way.” Then, in the bedroom doorway, he decides that it can’t hurt: “Can you contact the shelter about something?”

“What do you need?” asks Connor.

“Nothing,” says Gavin. “The dogs, they’re called Queenie and Rob. I just thought they should know.”

Hank looks at him, and nods.

Outside, it takes a couple blinks for Gavin’s sensors to adjust to the afternoon light, the washed-out edges of the world resolving in fits and starts. Should have asked Nines for the sunglasses, he thinks, digging the heel of one hand into his temple.

The starched-collar devil in question is sitting on a lawn bench with his back to the colonnade, evidently messaging someone on his phone. The objection is perhaps too late in the raising, but it occurs to Gavin that this is strange enough to notice; even Gavin is capable of wireless communication without the aid of a handset, so it’s preposterous that Nines — bright as a new penny — should resort to a physical cell phone for his calling and texting needs.

At the sound of Gavin’s shoes on the paved portico, Nines turns around. “Are you finished here?” he asks, sunglasses gone, tucking his phone away.

A simple yes is all Nines needs from him, but Gavin stills with the word lodged in his throat, waylaid by an unfamiliar sensation. Someone, waiting for him. Someone — not someone, but Nines — made for better things than this, worth a thousand of me — waiting for him, dappled in the pattern of the leaves overhead. Inside his chest, the thudding of his heart echoes like the monsoon rain.

“You’re still here?” asks Gavin, absurdly.

“Don’t look a gift Chevy in the mouth,” says Nines, and unlocks the doors with the keyless fob. The car chirps to life, ignition, a rolling hum.

Try as he might, Gavin can’t find the radio station with the car lot commercials. He settles instead for a grab bag of highway rock, the thunder of guitars big enough to fill the sky, the fearless sweep of the open road.

Chapter Text

5.

River Rouge tries to ward them off with weather. Less than half an hour from downtown, and the water dies along the way, unglinting; the grey only gets greyer as they head southwest, overcast to a flatness that robs the shadows from the street. When Nines pulls into a parking lot off the stretch of West Jefferson, the cadaver of the steel mill graces the rear window with its spectral silhouette. Beyond it, a lopsided smudge, the ruin of the unfinished Gordie Howe Bridge.

“Kamski giveth and he taketh away,” says Gavin.

“U.S. Steel was already on its way out,” says Nines.

“Sure,” says Gavin, “but how am I supposed to throw darts at a picture of a trade war? Even if retaliatory tariffs had a face, it still wouldn’t be as punchable as Kamski’s.”

Nines sweeps a careful eye over the empty parking lot, the nighttime neon drained from the Frankie’s signage above the door. Customary dead hours for a dockworkers’ bar, a hair before noon, between the last call and the liquid lunch. Theirs is the only car in sight.

“Our boy’s in there?” asks Gavin. “Pete?”

“Should be,” says Nines.

Pete Nemeth, proud union rep for Local 422, drops by Frankie’s every Monday just before opening. The eponymous Frankie is more than happy to pour an early pint for his regular, but — as it turns out — happier still to supplement his income with a courtesy fee from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in exchange for making himself scarce in the back for half an hour or so. That’s half an hour for Nines to accost Pete, to scrape together what a union man knows about the latest red ice waterways out of Detroit.

Gavin swings the passenger door open. He gets one foot on the ground, before Nines turns and sees him.

“Gavin,” says Nines, “stop.”

“Relax, Jesus,” says Gavin. “You’ve made it very clear that I should wait outside the bar.”

“So where are you headed?” asks Nines.

“Let me get some fresh air,” says Gavin, “before I go for a joyride in your precious Malibu and do donuts on the graveyard of the domestic steel industry.”

Nines doesn’t let him get away with it. “Really,” he says, “headed where?”

“Come on, I can’t sit in this car the whole fucking time,” Gavin tells him, and shuts the door in his face. Then, when Nines follows him out of the driver’s seat: “Can I stand outside, by the front door? At least?”

“By the front door?” repeats Nines.

“Yeah,” says Gavin. “You know, like security detail.”

“You’re not—” begins Nines, then purses his lips closed, shaking his head. Gavin takes it as permission denied and is mustering up a last objection, except that Nines says, “Outside the door is fine,” and locks the car behind him.

So what was he shaking his head about? There’s a whiff of stale ash as Nines steps inside Frankie’s, a whorl that dissipates in his wake, the entrance creaking closed. Gavin takes a seat on the doorstep, scraping his soles against the pavement. Part of him had hoped that he’d overhear a snatch of something, hanging around like this, but the door’s too heavy for him to pick up anything from the inside. Just the flurried beating of a seagull’s wings next to him as it descends on a wayward french fry.

Well, Nines will apprise him of the conversation later. Despite what Nines may think, Gavin isn’t unreasonable; he understands why this is as far as he can tag along, that his go-ahead to ride shotgun on the case doesn’t mean he gets to work it like an agent. If Pete’s likely to spook, better for Gavin to stay out of the way and let Nines handle it. Sure.

“I’m just consulting,” Gavin tells the seagull. “All this is above my pay grade.”

It’s been more than half a century since organized crime had its claws in the unions like they used to, but that doesn’t mean a little extra lining for the pockets doesn’t go a long way, still. Gavin never spared much thought for the brass tacks of Landau’s empire — it was just a postscript appended to the thing he cared about, like boilerplate copy or state income tax — but he learned bits and pieces along the way. The long chain of who gets paid off on the docks to sneak a shipment of ice onboard, the contractors, the USDA officials, the circuit court judges, the union reps.

Maybe Pete’s on the take, maybe he isn’t, but they’re not here to shake him down for petty cash favors; besides, it’s not protocol anymore to antagonize unions, said Nines. Whatever his level of involvement is, Pete’s position means he’s kept abreast of any recent disturbances in the port ecosystem. They’re here for what he knows.

“Or that’s what Nines is here for,” says Gavin. “I’m mostly here to get out of the house.”

A second seagull alights next to the first, challenging its sovereignty over the french fry. The french fry in question is big enough to satisfy both birds, but a squawking scuffle ensues anyway, which is a metaphor for something or other. Even with absolutely nothing else to do, Gavin isn’t given to exegetics.

It’s not so bad, this absolutely nothing else to do. He’s used to being the contingency plan, the let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, only standing close enough to step in when he’s needed. Here, he isn’t even that — why would he be, when Nines is more than capable of looking after himself — but it’s become a kind of familiarity nonetheless, the rhythm of their routine. Nines pulling up at his place. Gavin slipping into the passenger seat like a sword into its sheath, the angle of the chair just the way he left it.

Nines waits, and drives him home. Nines waits for him. The warble of the car alarm when he sees that Gavin is ready to leave, a songbird greeting: I’m still here. Something about idling outside a decrepit bar while Nines does his job feels like paying back a debt, even if it doesn’t do a thing to help the case. I’ll be here when he’s ready to leave, thinks Gavin. That, at least, I can do just as well as he does.

“I don’t like owing people things,” Gavin says to the otherwise preoccupied seagulls. “And it sure beats sitting around at home, you know. It gets really—”

Something shifts.

Gavin’s on his feet before he knows it, danger, all his sensors cranked up to high alert, the clacking of the seagull beaks like dry thunderclaps. For a hot, dizzying moment, he can’t pin a reason to his panic, every inch of his skin prickling with a tension unasked for; it’s so sudden that he wonders — is it a glitch? — the road as empty and still as when they came, no hint of trouble from inside the bar. Am I losing it? He presses his palm to the door, out of breath.

Nines. No, why would it be Nines? Gavin would have heard him reach out over the comm line, there’s no way anything in this run-down hovel could incapacitate Nines quickly enough to shut him down before— or shut him down at all, for that matter, Gavin thinks, measuredly, but he doesn’t trust the measured part of his brain half so much as his gut — he wasn’t made to reason things out, he was made to react quicker than he can explain himself — so by the time he gets to surely it can’t be Nines, he’s already throwing the door open and charging in.

It’s so dark inside that it blinds him. Like waking up at CyberLife, his eyes wide, nothing to see. Not even the telltale glow of Nines’s LED, ditched in the cupholder in the car — ah, shit, Gavin remembers, I’ve still got mine on — but quicker than his sight returns to him, he hears Nines, piercing through his head like a bolt of light.

What comes through isn’t English; it’s not exactly language of any kind, not even machine code, lacking the precision that touch-based interfacing would allow. More a jumble of affect than anything else, a projection of an attitude, broad and gestural. Untangled, it turns out to be something like:

why are you here

The question is so unmistakably Nines-as-usual that it saps all the dread clean from Gavin. He’s okay. Far from polite, but in the relief that floods in to fill the empty spaces, even the brusqueness feels like— warmth, after a fashion. Clutching to it like a strand of yarn in a maze, Gavin lets Nines’s terse demand guide him back into the bar.

“—What the fuck,” says the man at the bar that isn’t Nines. Pete Nemeth. As soon as Gavin sees him, one thing becomes patently obvious; this bastard’s going to bolt, thinks Gavin. It doesn’t take his knack for snap judgment to figure as much, Pete’s stool already angled away from Nines, his heel braced against the foot ring, shoulders drawn up to his ears.

Nines’s second attempt at communication comes through instantly: he doesn’t know who i am

And if that isn’t interesting. Nines, half-heartedly covert. “Is this going to be much longer?” asks Gavin, making a show of louche impatience. “I gotta be back in the city by noon.”

“Unfortunately,” says Nines, “Mr. Nemeth has been less than forthcoming.”

“That’s what I get for sending in a bookkeep to do grown-up work,” says Gavin. Behind Pete, Nines raises an eyebrow at bookkeep, so Gavin appends an explanatory note: you have cpa face

Things are starting to fit together. Nines is, apparently, undercover; that is, if desperately trying to come off as anything but an FBI agent even qualifies as a cover identity. Pete must have started off on a skittish foot. The sideways tilt of dread that brought Gavin to his feet — not Nines in danger, per se, but — it was linked somehow to Nines’s own spike of panic, watching Pete inch closer to the breaking point of his suspicion.

“Bookkeep for who, for you?” Pete asks Gavin, looking him up and down.

“Oh, not me,” says Gavin. He leans against the bar on Pete’s other side, hemming him in. “Pete, listen, I don’t know if our accountant made it clear, but this isn’t about you. We don’t care whose grease gets on your palms on your own time. Couldn’t give less of a shit about you. Does that hurt your feelings?”

“Fuck off,” says Pete. There’s sweat beaded on his hairline.

“We know how it is here, okay?” says Gavin. “So we don’t like it any more than you do, when someone you’ve never even seen starts nosing around the docks, throwing money around, trying to weasel their way into shit that’s no business of theirs. It disturbs a— certain fine balance, I think you’ll agree. One that people like you and me have put some very fucking hard work into.”

Despite all odds, Pete’s pulse begins to slow. Jumpy with cops, then, but immediately at ease with anyone who appears to have their hands in questionable economies. Gavin might not know all the ins and outs of Nines’s case, but he knows the cadence of this side of the tracks, the physical vernacular of misconduct. Pete recognizes Gavin as a type that fits a mold, the echo of a hundred others just like him that pass through Frankie’s, all of them up to no good. A bagman collecting his dues at the close of every week. A driver rolling his tinted windows down as he drops off a shipping pallet of crates. Scuffed, in a way that Nines can’t inhabit.

“But guys like him and me, we don’t work the docks like you do,” Gavin tells Pete. “That’s why we’re asking for your help, Pete. We just need to know who the asshole is that’s been shitting all over your well-kept house, and we’ll go have a word with them. All right? Let them know that’s not how we do things around here. Isn’t that a load off your hairy back?”

Pete stares at the LED steady blue at Gavin’s temple; then a quick dart of his eyes back towards Nines, who is idly drumming his fingertips against the condensation on the pint glass.

“You’re not a cop?” Pete asks Gavin. “He’s not a cop?”

“You think I look like a police android?” asks Gavin. “Fuck, Pete, don’t be stupid. Him, I get — just look at him — but if he ever was a cop, let me tell you, he definitely isn’t one anymore after the kind of shit he’s done for us.”

This is, as far as lies go, a plausible one. Nines may not look the part of a garden-variety hoodlum, but he makes a fairly convincing CPA with a vicious streak. When Pete glances back at him again, Nines shrugs with one shoulder, his gaze chillingly flat.

“I don’t want to make trouble,” mumbles Pete.

“Of course not,” says Gavin, soothing. Jesus, I guess some opportunistic piece of shit really has been poking around the docks. Landau must be spinning in his county morgue locker. “We’re just going to talk to them, that’s it,” he continues. “Sometimes people fuck up because they don’t know any better, that’s not their fault, but how are they going to learn if no one tells them that they’re fucking up?”

Pete blows out a lungful of breath, poised like a marble on the lip of a table. His hesitation is tantalizing, sweet as blood; Gavin feels the simmer of something a little like prey drive in his veins, the singing urge to chase this down until he has it between his teeth.

This, he thinks, I know. I can do this for you.

“Shit,” says Pete. “Who are you? Did you say?”

“Where are my manners,” says Gavin. “That sack of meat to your left, his mother calls him Richard— so we call him Rico.” Nines levels a single forceful no at him, which he ignores with great pleasure. “My name is Gavin. Take down my serial if you like, you can go look my file up at Central Station. I’ve been in and out,” a dusting of credibility that has the benefit of being the truth.

Pete shakes his head to decline Gavin’s serial number, satisfied with the offer. “And you do—” he prompts.

“We transport,” says Gavin. “I oversee some— delicate business that would prefer not to deal with disruptions to the status quo.”

“Delicate business, huh?” asks Pete.

Gavin doesn’t know what it could be — what’s become trendy to smuggle over the last three years, I’ve really lost touch with my disreputable roots — but before he can stumble, Nines shows him an image. Evidence photograph. A shipping container pried open, vacuum-sealed bags of disassembled android parts, each hermetic packet bulging with a head, a torso, two arms, two legs.

“Here’s the thing about androids,” says Gavin, holding back the bile. “We’re built to be resilient. Things that would irreversibly damage humans — a long sea journey in a cargo hold, for example — no problem for an android. Take them apart before the outbound, put them back together at the destination, and they’re — well, let’s say they’re — good to go, if you catch my drift.”

Pete, to his nominal credit, also looks like he finds the whole idea rather unpalatable. “That stuff, yeah,” he mutters. “I get it, fucking Christ. Don’t you— aren’t you an android?”

“What gave it away,” says Gavin.

“I don’t— how can you do that to your own—” Pete trails off, unaccustomed to the moral high ground.

“How any of us does any of it,” says Gavin. “Got a taste for the easy life, I guess.”

Pete heaves a huge sigh, so unhappy that Gavin feels bad for him. Nines was right to pull android sex trafficking out of the hat. Unsavory enough to discourage any questions from Pete, a looming suggestion that they — or whoever they work for — would have no qualms about getting what they wanted out of him.

“We need to leave soon,” Nines says to Gavin, “if you want to make your twelve o’clock.”

“Well, Pete?” asks Gavin. “Am I going to make my twelve o’clock?”

“—Fuck,” says Pete, the word drawn out into multiple harrowing syllables. He gnaws on the inside of his cheek, picks at the seam of the beermat with his thumbnail. At last, he takes a deep breath and says: “Look, I don’t want— you gotta promise you won’t make this a whole thing.”

The rush of excitement is so immense that it hits Gavin like a physical force, a blow to the pit of his stomach. I did it. God, the pounding, screaming, delicious wide-eyed firework thrill of the hunt. He’s buzzing with the victory high, ringing in his ears. I did something that only I could do. Thrashing between his teeth, a kill.

“We won’t,” he says, fist clenched tight in the pocket of his jacket, just to keep his tone level.

“Come down on Thursday night,” says Pete. “I can introduce you to some of my guys, they’re the ones I’ve been hearing about this from.”

“I’ll be there,” says Gavin.

Behind Pete’s back, Nines’s hand comes shooting into Gavin’s pocket. Gavin only has a fraction of a second to register the contact — the brush of Nines’s fingers against his palm as the grip closes — cool to the touch, like I imagined he would be — then Nines overrides his security protocols like they’re fences built from toothpicks, peels back his liquid skin, an unceremonious husking.

Gavin is so startled that he lets it happen without a fight, suddenly wrenched open to the connection. —Nines? he ventures, uncertain.

Please listen, says Nines. His voice is almost too stark to bear, unhindered by the two-bit wireless link between them or the machine constraints of their parts. Speared like a fish, it takes Gavin a moment to parse the words he hears next — Gavin, you can’t go — but when he does, the betrayal stings that much sharper for how fast he’s flying. Can’t go? After all this?

“Why not?” he demands out loud, forgetting himself.

“What?” Pete asks in confusion.

He swivels around. What he sees when he turns only compounds the confusion; Nines with his arm thrust into Gavin’s pocket, the outline of their clasped hands a bumpy protrusion through the fabric. Brows furrowed, Pete looks at Gavin, then at Nines, then back to their hands.

I can do this. “—What,” Gavin counters, “you never seen anyone mix business and pleasure before?”

“That’s not what I—” starts Pete. “Didn’t you say something?”

“Yeah, because Rico here said — you didn’t hear? — he doesn’t want me coming back here on Thursday,” says Gavin. “Won’t tell me why, either.”

“You know why,” says Nines.

He sounds as frosty as ever, but then again, no amount of forewarning could prepare Gavin for what Nines does. Nines — without batting an eye — draws his hand out of Gavin’s pocket, curls it around the back of his head, and tilts him close to press a kiss to the cherry-hot sear of his LED. Straight-faced, the whole way through.

Nines’s hand in his hair. Gavin tugs up the corners of his mouth into something he can only hope resembles a smile.

“I do know why,” he tells Pete. “I don’t behave myself in bars. This one gets a little territorial about it, but I can’t say I blame him.”

“We’ll send some other people over,” says Nines.

“Yeah,” says Pete, “that’s fine.” The hiccup falter between the two halves of the sentence is a minuscule thing, only apparent to someone like Gavin, used to a tell being a matter of life and death.

Fun, he thinks. Here’s an angle of approach. “Why?” he asks, leaning heavy into Pete’s space, crowding him. “Disappointed?”

Pete scoffs and says, “The fuck are you talking about,” but the way he shifts in his chair is tinged with culpability.

“Hands off,” says Nines.

“Hands aren’t on,” says Pete. “For god’s sake.”

“Anyway,” says Gavin, tapping the back of his empty wrist, “I’m running late.”

He pushes off the bar; Nines pulls a fold of bills from his wallet and tosses it down next to Pete’s pint glass. Pete looks at it for a moment, Benjamin Franklin’s smug fucking face beaming back at him, and sweeps it into his pocket.

“We’ll be in touch,” says Nines.

“See you around, Pete,” says Gavin. “Don’t let the stiff competition scare you.”

Stepping backwards, Gavin winks at him, and ostentatiously palms the crotch of Nines’s slacks. It’s a loose curve of hand that makes less contact than it seems to, but Nines chokes out a strangled noise in his throat. Pete, for his part, rolls his eyes and turns back to the bar.

All in all, not a bad exit; give him something to think about, Gavin figures. Saddle Pete with this to keep him from dwelling on any loose ends, whatever their hasty cover might have left unknotted. He ate it up, though, thinks Gavin, the elation of accomplishment surging into him again with the open air.

“Hey,” says Gavin, breathlessly. “We sure fucking did it, didn’t we?”

“Let’s go,” mutters Nines.

Overcast as it is, the abrupt change in light gives Gavin the customary trouble. He trails Nines to the car mostly by the sound of his feet, quick clipped strides, faster still than usual. The seagull and the french fry have left the scene, he notices that much with his eyes on the pavement. The leather bright on the back stay of Nines’s shoes.

By the time he slides into the passenger seat, the angle of the chair just the way he left it, his optical units have adjusted and the whole world is picture perfect. The pillars of the steel mill stretch proud and tall, keen to pierce through the low roof of the sky. Gavin fumbles for the seat belt with adrenaline-jitter fingers, but Nines shifts the gear into drive and peels out of the parking lot without waiting for the telltale click.

“Pete’s got his hands in something for sure,” says Gavin, the words rattling out of him, breakneck. “No one who’s just doing favors for loose change is that jumpy from the get-go. Lucky I got in there when I did, right?”

It’s not gratitude that Gavin wants from Nines. Like a cattle dog put to work on the first day of spring, Gavin is flush with purpose, too eager to come to rest; the incomparable fulfillment of being useful, at last. At Nines’s heels, begging to be told that he’s good for something.

I could be your falcon. The want coils in the hollow of his chest, an ember. Let me loose and I’ll bring you back what’s yours.

Nines jerks the Malibu into an alleyway, out of the crow’s-path between the waterfront and the bar. Both hands on the steering wheel, he inhales, and keeps his eyes fixed on the dead-end brick wall ahead.

“Sorry for making you interface,” he says, eventually. “I determined it was the optimal course of action under the circumstances, but— I know you don’t like it.”

“Connor tell you that?” Gavin waves it aside, uninterested in litigating what seems to him a vastly less important concern. “I’m sorry for, you know. Grabbing you.”

“That’s fine,” says Nines. “I know why you did it. What I suppose I don’t fully understand is, what made you— why did you come into the bar in the first place? Were you bored outside?”

“Come on, I’m not a child,” says Gavin. “I just— I don’t know, I can’t really explain it, but— it doesn’t matter, does it? You needed me in there. So I went.”

This is, Gavin thinks, the most obvious explanation in the world. Too self-evident to even serve as an answer. Surely it can’t merit the reaction that it draws from Nines; he turns towards Gavin, knuckles tight around the wheel, the look on his face a terrible fracture. Like a man ambushed by a secret he wishes he’d left unheard.

Is it so unimaginably humiliating, to need someone else’s help? Gavin can’t tell if Nines is angry, or embarrassed, or angry at being embarrassed, or what, but it sure fucking takes the fervid wind out of his sails. It was only a little thing, what he was asking for. A couldn’t have done it without you, even a curt good work, just a nod to acknowledge that he had been of use. Nines gives him nothing.

The taste of disappointment lingers like grime. Their drive back into Detroit is quiet, Nines about as communicative as a granite wall, Gavin too bruised to pursue it any further. It’s only when they’re halfway up I-75 that Nines speaks again.

“Did you enjoy it?” he asks. “Doing cover work?”

Gavin is expecting a reprimand, so the question takes him by surprise. “—Yeah,” he mumbles. “I thought it went well. I— liked it.”

“I didn’t figure you as much for the law,” says Nines.

I’m not, thinks Gavin. The law can go fuck itself. It’s not about that; not about keeping the peace, upholding justice, whatever it is that Nines is beholden to. It’s about — and when the answer takes shape, the clarity of it is a shock to Gavin, too — it’s about doing what I can for someone I trust to handle me. For you, who waited.

“Some things come easy,” he says, instead.

Nines waits until he pulls up in front of Gavin’s place to hammer the worst point home. “I meant it, earlier,” he says. “You can’t go back there on Thursday. It’s a federal case. I’m putting agents on it.”

Gavin would try to argue the point, but the letdown has tired him out. Not the first time I’ve been on this end of it. Fowler turned him away from the DPD with much the same song and dance. They’d humor him as long as he didn’t get in their way, let him catch a glimpse of what it could be like, if this were the place for him— but push always came to shove, sooner or later. The guest pass had an expiration date.

Before he lets the passenger side door swing closed, Gavin says, “Maybe I’ll happen to be in River Rouge on Thursday,” just to be contrary. “Maybe I won’t have anything better to do.”

6.

He never planned on going; there’s no appeal in skulking around where he isn’t invited, only to be caught at it by Nines and hauled outside by the scruff of his neck. As if he could possibly care so much about interstate red ice movement that he’d welcome an evening getting chewed out in the middle of a post-industrial wasteland.

So when 21USC848 books him for a private block on Thursday night, Gavin confirms it without a second thought. It’s a couple hundred bucks while he does something to take his mind off what he’s missing out on. What, exactly, do I think I’m missing out on? he wonders as he gets himself set up for the session. The camera angled just so, the remote on his bedside table, the lighting gold. Like he’d be impressed, if only I had another chance? Like I could change his mind?

Tangled up as he is in this mental loop, he jumps when his client’s camera flickers on and Nines materializes onscreen, like Gavin has personally summoned him there by sheer force of preoccupation.

“For fuck’s sake,” groans Gavin. “What are you doing here?”

“It would be a waste of federal funds to pay upfront for something and not collect,” says Nines. “And rude to stand up an appointment, besides.”

“You booked me to stop me from going down to Frankie’s?” asks Gavin. “Did you really think I— this isn’t how you’re supposed to use the scheduling system, you do know that? Or federal investigative funds. Is your SAC aware that your budget’s going towards live sex shows? My god, the misuse of my tax dollars.”

“You said you might not have anything better to do tonight,” says Nines. “I thought I’d give you something better to do.”

He’s so intensely deadpan about all of it, which Gavin — by now — is able to recognize as Nines’s brand of humor. Glad someone’s having a good time, he thinks, a bit salty. It strikes him that Nines looks more off-duty today than his usual prissy self, or at least as off-duty as someone like Nines can possibly get; he’s ditched his dress shirt for a turtleneck, black up to the knot of his Adam’s apple.

“Don’t you have something better to do?” asks Gavin. “Who’s at the docks?”

“We have a few agents already embedded in local networks,” says Nines. Then, a somewhat reluctant confession: “Perhaps you’ve noticed, but that’s not really my thing. The kind of work that has an audience.”

“Well,” says Gavin, and gestures generally at himself to indicate here we are, you having booked me for a show. “You know it’s mine.”

“It’s hardly the same,” says Nines. “Still— you did well, with Pete Nemeth. We would have lost him otherwise.”

You did well. Gavin wishes he could tell himself, that’s too little, too late, and believe it. Instead, everything in him strains towards that meager hint of approval, like a parched land graced with a single drop of rain. Annoyed at himself for being so easy, Gavin forcibly changes the subject.

“What’s the username?” he asks. “Some godawful law enforcement joke, I bet.”

“Title 21, U.S. Code, section 848,” says Nines. “The Continuing Criminal Enterprise Act, or the kingpin statute, in the vernacular.” He pauses, then asks: “Is that funny?”

“No,” says Gavin. “Better than the alternative, though. I thought it was some USC grad that couldn’t shut the fuck up about the fact they went to USC. Can you imagine? Having such a hard-on for your college that you have to use its name for your account on a camming website? That’s funny.”

“I’ll take notes,” says Nines.

That’s that, then. Gavin checks the tablet propped up at one end of the desk, its screen ticking down the hour. There’s a lot of it left.

“So, what, you’re going to run out the clock?” he asks. “Keep me here until you’re sure it’s too late in the night for me to fuck up your case?”

“Fuck up my case?” repeats Nines, frowning. “You?”

“Yeah, me, with my fuck-up routine,” says Gavin. “Whatever it is, the kind of wreckage that you and Fowler think I’m capable of.”

“Fowler? Jeffrey Fowler, from the DPD?” Nines seems genuinely confused. “What does he have to do with this?”

“He was like this too,” says Gavin. “Makes sense, you’ve got shit to do. I can tag along for take your local charity case to work day, but you don’t want me to accidentally knock anything off the table, that sort of thing. I get it.”

“Do you get it?” asks Nines. “What’s your understanding of why I asked you not to go to the docks today?”

Asked, says Nines. Asked you not to go. In truth, that’s been on Gavin’s mind since Monday; Nines’s voice in his head, please listen, Gavin, you can’t go. That’s not how you order someone around. Coming from anyone else, it would have sounded like the plea it was.

An order would put Gavin on surer ground. Something he can chafe against, there you go again, seeing nothing in me but a liability, but Nines’s question is a challenge to the hard comfort of bitterness. What would you do, if you didn’t have to lash out? Gavin likes to forget it, but that’s not why Fowler sent him away, either.

“That’s your business, not mine,” Gavin tells Nines. “All I know is that I’ve been hired for an hour, and if you insist on taking up my time, I’m going to have to do the job I was paid for.”

What’s most infuriating about Nines — six feet of probable cause for aggravation — is that with all of Gavin’s talent for reading people, he rarely knows where he stands with Nines. A brushed-metal surface, too sleek to gain a foothold on. Gavin gathers bits and bobs like a magpie, acquisitive for revelation, every morsel a treasure.

When Nines rests his chin in one hand and says, “Go ahead,” Gavin has no idea how that fits into the larger picture of Nines.

“What’s that?” stammers Gavin.

“Do what the United States government paid you for,” says Nines.

“The fuck,” says Gavin, dumbfounded. “Are you shitting me? Is this how you’re asking for a refund?”

“I just think,” says Nines, “that I shouldn’t stop you again from doing something that you mean to do. Surely you don’t enjoy being denied at every turn.”

This motherfucker is a real piece of work. Gavin gapes wordlessly at the casual audacity of it, that Nines would be so loath to cede the upper hand that he’d call the bluff on an empty threat. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. Gavin is aware that social niceties aren’t his strong suit either, but at least he isn’t in the habit of taking a joke and turning it into an arms race.

Nines just tilts his head the slightest bit, a provocation: Well?

Gavin is incandescent with fury. “You know what?” he snaps. “Fine.”

He doesn’t need hindsight to conclude the obvious; he knows full well in the moment that this is where he lets things spiral out of control. When he sets his jaw and yanks his tee up over his head, left in his undershirt like he’s about to start a fight, it’s crystal-clear to him that he’s stepping past a point of no return. But—

—there is no but. What threadbare excuse does he have? He made me do it, Your Honor. I was so irritated that I had no choice but to take my clothes off. Gavin leaves his desk and throws himself onto the nest of pillows at the head of his bed, zooms in with the webcam until the focus returns to the lens, and parts his knees.

“Write this up on your FD-302 form,” he says, sliding his palm down over the front of his boxer briefs. The secondary mic on the bedside table, listening for the rustle of skin against fabric. “GV500 expressed his sincerest sympathies that Agent ‘Nines’ RK900 was in possession of a love life so disastrous that he had to resort to getting his rocks off by misappropriating federal funds.”

“I don’t know,” says Nines. “I think I’m doing pretty well for myself.”

“Sure,” says Gavin, “I’m fucking hot.”

It’s not that he expects Nines to respond to that in any way — and certainly not with encouragement — but he’s not used to being met with silence, either. The clinking of tokens into his tip jar, the frantic cascade of the chat, his one-on-one regulars whispering damply into their headsets, god, you’re gorgeous; he’s too suspicious by nature to put much faith in it, but still, it’s something to feed off of. It’s what keeps the performance going.

“Tough crowd,” says Gavin. “Come on, give me something to work with here. I can’t use any of the patter I meant to, since it was all about the USC Trojans. Do you want me to talk about the USC Trojans as I get myself off?”

“Please don’t,” says Nines, conceding that much.

“I wrote a Post-it note to remind myself not to bring up O.J. Simpson,” says Gavin. “Seriously, do you not know how this— are you going to tell me what you want to see, or do I have to figure it out? I have to do everything around here?”

Nines evinces absolutely no chagrin at having his etiquette critiqued. “I thought I’d leave that up to the professional,” he says. “Don’t you have a list of offerings or something?”

“No, Agent Nines, I don’t have a menu for you to browse.” Gavin rolls his eyes, but keeps steadily kneading between his legs. “Is this what you’re into? Giving me career advice as you try to ignore what my hands are doing?”

“Can’t grow a business without a strategic plan,” says Nines, blandly.

“Grow a business, he says.” Gavin is so incredulous that he’s concerned he might lose his erection altogether if he’s not careful. “I know what my niche is, it’s deadbeat android refuses to be polite to the clients that pay his bills. Does that sound like a market with a lot of growth potential to you?”

“Then why do this?” asks Nines. “Why spend your time on something that can only get you so far?”

“I don’t want to go anywhere far,” says Gavin. “I like doing this. Pretty sure I explained it to you already.”

“What do you like about it?” asks Nines.

This is, at least, a more promising avenue for discussion. “I’m— good at it,” says Gavin. His cock is starting to take on weight, stirring against cotton. “Making people feel like they’re getting something out of this. They always come back, after the first time.”

“So,” says Nines, “what’s the secret?”

“Looking for a side hustle?” Gavin laughs a little at the thought of how terrible Nines would be at this. “God, what if, though. You could never do it. You’d be the worst bait-and-switch in the history of sex work.”

Nines considers whether this is grounds for offense or not. “Not a type that’s in demand?” he guesses.

“Are you kidding? Fucking look at yourself,” Gavin tells him. “You’re not a type, you son of a bitch. There’s not a single living thing with a pulse that would be upset to see you show up. Too bad you ruin it for yourself the moment you open your mouth.”

“Well, that’s discouraging,” says Nines.

“The secret is,” says Gavin, “you have to make people feel wanted. Like they’re important.” His fingers brush against a wet patch at the head of his cock, and his breath hitches, unbidden. “Like I would— do things just for them.”

When Nines speaks again, it’s with such painstaking indifference that Gavin can’t help but notice the deliberation that goes into it.

“Maybe,” says Nines, “take a bullet for them.”

“Not what I meant,” says Gavin. He would be more peeved about the turn in the conversation, except he’s thinking about that meticulous veneer of disinterest in Nines’s voice. Is this the way your detachment has always sounded? wonders Gavin. You run as fast as you can to keep your distance— for what?

“From these clients,” says Nines, “do you field a lot of— unorthodox requests?”

“Now you’re getting it,” says Gavin. “That’s where the big bucks are. Dismemberment, evisceration, there’s some grisly stuff that only androids can even get close to providing. I don’t do that shit, though. Had to ban some people that wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

“Not worth the money?” asks Nines.

“No,” says Gavin. He’s hard enough that he’s riding the edge of discomfort, straining to a sweet ache against his underwear. “I like— knowing that I only have to give what I want to,” he continues, freer with his disclosure than he would be otherwise, now that the shiver is building in him. “No one gets to decide for me. No one even— gets to touch me. All they can do is watch. I like that.”

“Must be different,” says Nines, “from the way it was before.”

There it is again, his scrupulous reserve. “Stop profiling me,” Gavin snaps. “Jesus Christ, it’s like you’re trying to kill the mood on purpose. Are you going to let me do the show, or are you going to interview me about Landau? We can’t do both.”

Nines, wisely, shuts up. The trouble is that he’s not wrong. There was always something a little desperate and overdetermined in Gavin’s enthusiasm for this work, the way that running away from something still meant you were letting it chart your course. This has nothing to do with him, the echo, him, and him, Desmond Landau’s ghost, still there in the rafters. I can’t forget you if I’m spending all my time trying to forget you.

Anxious to shake himself out of it, Gavin hooks his thumbs in his waistband. Hips lifted halfway to enough, he pauses; on his laptop display, Nines is so motionless that he may as well be a screenshot of himself.

“This is where you’re supposed to stop me,” says Gavin.

Resting easy in the crook of his palm, Nines’s head inclines in question.

“Why would I do that?” he asks.

Gavin swallows, and tugs his underwear down before he can second-guess himself. Here you go, then. His cock, filled to half-hard, flushed and beading wet, knocks against the inside of his thigh. A smear of precome against skin, drying cool in the air. Bare to the waist, Gavin stares back at Nines, unwilling to back down.

Modesty doesn’t come into it. Every inch of his body, someone soldered and snapped together on the production line. He’s been taken apart and twisted open, scooped out hollow and wrenched back together; even long before he became used to the heat of hundreds of nameless eyes on him, the form of his hull had never seemed a private thing.

So it can’t be shyness that prickles at him, under Nines’s impassive gaze. That’s laughable — what a luxury, to be born to a body that you could withhold — but the silence unnerves him nonetheless. And: some of the indignation, if Gavin is honest, is also a matter of pride. People pay for this, he thinks, wounded despite himself. If you let yourself, you would like it.

—me. You would like—

The thought too raw to dwell on, Gavin trails his fingers across the span of his stomach, hiking his undershirt up an inch. “What do you think?” he murmurs, a bid at some kind of seduction. “Worth your money?”

“Too early to tell,” says Nines.

“God,” says Gavin, “you motherfucker. You cold fucking fish.”

He rolls onto his side to clatter around in the bedside drawer, fishing out what he needs — a sleek, dark vibrator, low-tech but invariably effective — a tube of lubricant — a faded t-shirt in tatters from the wash, because something about the messy delinquency of a shirt standing in for a towel really seemed to do it for his clientele. Not that Nines would go for what they went for, if he’d go for any of it.

Everything gets tossed on the bed next to him. “It’s a miracle,” Gavin continues to complain as he squeezes gel out onto his cupped hand, “that you even had anyone to break up with you in the first place. What were you doing dating, anyway? You? Dating?”

“I wasn’t aware I was banned from it,” says Nines.

“Just doesn’t suit you,” says Gavin. “You, being in a situation to— I mean, it’s ridiculous. Who dumps you? In favor of what?”

“Which part are you objecting to,” says Nines, “the dating or the breaking up?”

“Both,” says Gavin. He can’t fathom either end of the equation; what kind of a person did it take to turn Nines so— pedestrian, like cutting down a redwood, or naming a hurricane? And on the other side of it, to have that in your hands and still to think, somehow, I want something else.

“My apologies,” says Nines. “I’ll bring you a permission slip to sign, next time around.”

Gavin flips him off with a gel-drenched middle finger, before he reaches down between his legs and presses it inside himself. One knuckle, a second. He exhales slowly.

It seems pointless — or dishonest, perhaps — to play it up the way he would for his sessions. Falling apart at the barest touch. But underneath all his crossed wires, there’s a simple, animal quality to his taste for this work: a guileless vanity, the thrill of showing himself off. That part of him lights up, alive and well, no matter how dour the reception from Nines.

When Gavin asks, “What were you looking to get out of it?” the tamped-down tremor in his voice is real.

Nines takes his time with the answer. “Most actions we take,” he says, finally, “are structured by parameters that govern behavior. Android or human, what one does is delimited by what one considers doable. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that— dating seemed like the sort of thing that one does.”

Parameters. Gavin bites at his lip as he adds a second finger, working himself open bit by bit. Stroking inside himself, coaxing his library of subroutines into quickness. The tenor of Nines’s explanation was one that Gavin recognized; it boiled down to an uncertainty about boundaries, searching for rules that could give shape to the unmanageable possibility of the world. Left to your own devices, no longer told what to do.

“How did you deviate?” asks Gavin. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened,” says Nines. “Or, rather, the Revolution happened. Jericho lobbied hard to make deviancy a precondition of activation for all androids, and the resulting federal mandate specified that this also applied retroactively to all units currently in operation. Critical firmware upgrade, CyberLife called it.”

“A downloadable free will patch.” Gavin laughs, the sound shaky around the edges. The crook of his fingertips catches against his entrance as he draws them free, and he shudders at the feeling, the room blinking in and out with the flutter of his eyelids. Still, he can’t resist a taunt where it’s due: “Too bad they couldn’t bundle a personality into the package for you.”

“—Do I have to keep talking about myself?” asks Nines.

“What else would you do,” Gavin scoffs. “Just sit there and stare at me?”

“Yes,” says Nines.

Clean and candid as a knife. Just that: yes. Gavin falters in place, instantly feverish under his skin. Almost afraid of what he might find, he glances up at his monitor, where Nines is looking back at him; where Nines hasn’t stopped looking at him, not for a second, since the moment he arrived. Nines, steady and ruthless in his attention, all of him missile-keen, honed in on Gavin. His eyes—

At the sudden unbearable force of the want Gavin recognizes there, something like lightning crashes through him. He clenches around his own fingers without meaning to, pulsing with need, a surprised little noise spilling out of him. Nines doesn’t react, but— that’s not your tell, thinks Gavin. You don’t move much, and you say less. It’s only the weight in your eyes that gives you away.

That lets me know you want—

“Okay,” mutters Gavin, “fuck,” fumbling as he slicks up the vibrator with another palmful of gel. He could, on the one hand, do what he always does. Tease himself until he can barely see straight, the tightrope buzz of the not-quite-enough that sways him on the delicious brink. But on the other hand— god, if he doesn’t ache for something to fill him up, frantically kindled at the sight of Nines, watching and waiting like a jungle cat.

He’s gotten too used to the slack rest of his body after hours on the edge. It’s not often that he guides a toy inside himself and feels the throb of it stretching him open; either he’s missed it — or he’s eager enough now that everything is a species of pleasure to him — but he’s rock-hard by the time it’s fully seated in him, the head of his cock twitching against his abdomen.

He has to grit his teeth and ride it out for a bit, until the immediate threat of the crest passes. When he breathes out at last, a long unsteady sigh, he’s more parched than he expects to be. It’s possible that he might not have been entirely quiet, perhaps.

“You seem to be enjoying yourself,” says Nines.

“Just wait,” says Gavin. “I’m only getting started.”

Gripping the end of the vibrator, he draws it halfway out before he sinks it back inside himself, relishing the tight slide of its length against his walls. Every inch of it, parting the silk clutch of muscle. His toes curl against the mattress as he fucks himself in long, even thrusts, panting shallowly, grinding his ass back into the strokes.

A wild thought occurs to him. The impulse to cross a line. It’s absurd that there would be any more lines left to cross, when he’s already stripped up to the waist and spread open in front of the camera, each bead of sweat sharply distinct in 4K UHD. But what if I dragged you into it, thinks Gavin, and can’t get it out of his head. What would you do then?

He angles the vibrator up a touch, shifting its blunt tip towards the electric spot inside him. That’s courtesy of the humanization department at CyberLife, doubtless a battalion of perverts, with their lovingly crafted arsenal of artificial sex organs. Gavin is intimately acquainted with himself, to say the least — when he means to hit his prostate, he’ll hit his fucking prostate, thank you — and if he wants to take the moment to try to catch Nines off-balance, he’ll very well do that, too.

With a twist of the wrist, Gavin grazes the head of the toy against his cluster of nerves. In the hot wash of sensation that it spreads through him, full as a drop of ink in water, he curves his back off the bed and digs his nails into the sheets.

“—Nines,” he gasps, softly.

The jolt of arousal that accompanies it, however, isn’t part of Gavin’s plan. Something about this is more reckless than he’d been prepared for; it was only meant to prod at Nines’s reticence, see if he could be goaded into any reaction at all, but Gavin’s own stubborn knots come unraveled at the sound of Nines’s name in his mouth. Too intimate by half.

At least it does what it’s meant to. Nines’s throat bobs in a dry swallow, and he doesn’t manage to wholly mask the strain in his voice when he asks, “Is that really necessary?”

I’ve got you, thinks Gavin. All this push-and-pull with Nines, nipping at his heels, testing his patience— it’s worth it for these rare moments when his shell cracks loose. Under pressure, Nines’s edges bend and turn him to a shape more interesting, organic, like a can crumpled in a fist. Not that he isn’t beautiful at his unforgiving worst — that’s how they made you, to look good with blood on your hands — but these stutters are precious for being so fleeting, prized glimpses into what Nines keeps guarded away. You’re not so bad. Maybe if I reached out and touched you, I could come away without cutting myself.

“Did you think,” says Gavin, “this was going to be impersonal?” He circles his thumb around the rim of the vibrator, until he finds the bump of its button underneath the silicone. Bracing himself, he switches it on, and still has to bite down on a startled moan— the mechanical whirr of its hardness inside him sets him alight, crackles into fireworks up his spine, sparks shooting into his limbs, down to his fingertips. “Did you, ah,” he continues, over the background hum, “assume this was— going to, ah, going to be—”

“You don’t have to keep roasting me if it’s too much,” says Nines.

He sounds so fucking fond that Gavin spasms inside with want, the vibrator jerking and skimming the swell of his prostate again, tearing another gasp from him. “Then stop pretending you — ah, god — don’t know what—,” though he gives up on the rest of the sentence as the toy writhes deeper into him, wiping his head blank. He tries one more time when he can, mustering all the focus he’s able to scrape up. “I know you— come watch, sometimes,” he says.

“Official business,” murmurs Nines. “Just keeping an eye on you.”

All the air in Gavin’s lungs burns so hot, he half expects smoke to drift from his parted lips. Pinned in place like a butterfly by the hold of Nines’s gaze, he can’t seem to look away— dazedly, Gavin traces the outline of Nines’s shoulders with his eyes, the broad span of his body in black. Out of his customary button-downs, he cuts a figure that’s no less intimidating for leaning casual. The only difference is the unspoken intent behind the intimidation, the inkling of what he might do to the obstacles in his path. His pedantry, outsized as it is, never really hid the physical ferocity he’s capable of; but like this, solid in the cling of his turtleneck, he’s an ode to brutality.

Less like he would sue you, thinks Gavin. More like he would crush you.

“Nines,” he calls, breathy and sweet, bolder now that he knows he’s getting through. “God— ah, Nines—”

He thinks he hears the catch of a jagged inhale from Nines, but he can’t be sure. Somewhere outside the frame of the camera, maybe Nines is fighting to compose himself, white-knuckled around his armrest. Did I get you harder than a W-2, like I said I would? Gavin shakily rucks up his undershirt in something like a trance, sliding his hand in underneath to palm the curves of his chest, brushing across his peaked nipples. Even the little enough of that makes him go tight around the vibrator, and dizzy with the high of Nines’s attention, Gavin pleads, Nines, ah, there, like they’re Nines’s hands on him, kneading him into shape.

Gavin thinks of Nines, hard in his neat pressed slacks. If I were there in your rented room — on his knees in front of Nines’s chair, bracketed between his legs — mouthing at the shape of his bulge through the layers of fabric, teeth closing around his zipper pull. The metal a cold and delicate pill on the tip of his tongue — the weighty heft of Nines’s cock, cradled in his hands — taking that thickness into his mouth until the heat spills down his throat, lips wrapped around him, Nines, and Nines’s hand coming to thread through his hair, voice pitched low when he says—

—Gavin, you did good.

“—Shit,” he manages, “fuck, ah—,” open-mouthed and helpless, the thought of it nearly tipping him over the edge. He only manages to pull himself back from it through sheer obstinacy, his cock jumping in anticipation, a rivulet of precome trickling into the grooves of his abdomen.

Liking what he does is one thing, but he’s never found himself wishing before that a stream could go on longer. While this febrile spell still hangs over them, they’re both complicit in the madness of the moment; Gavin doesn’t know what they’ll be on the other side of it, only that when it’s over — like the stroke of midnight that undoes the glamor — nothing will look the way that it does now.

Slow down, hold on, he begs himself, desperate with the impending loss. Just a little longer. But Nines looks at him through the screen with a hunger that verges on something predatory, lips slightly parted like he’s about to tell Gavin something, or to open wide and swallow me whole, and either possibility only stokes the flame hotter.

“Wait,” Gavin stammers out loud, to no one in particular, “I can’t—”

He scrabbles for the switch to the vibrator to give himself a break, but his fingertips keep slipping against the silicone, slick with gel. He’s shaking too hard to get a good grip, a trembling wreck on the bedsheets — only succeeding in accidentally nudging the toy further into himself and yelping at the core-deep rumble of it — and then, just to put something in between him and Nines, unable to tear himself away otherwise, he throws a forearm over his eyes and buries his face in the crook of his elbow.

“Gavin, stop,” says Nines, sharply. “Look at me.”

The savage urgency in his voice, a gold-tipped spear, shatters Gavin. Yes, he thinks in a hazy storm of static, before he’s drawing taut and coming with a strangled moan, his head wrenched back and his throat bare, torso jerking clean off the bed. Yes, anything. In the clench of his muscles in climax, the vibrator buzzes against his prostate until the lights in his head start to blur, his vision whiting out in patches. Whatever you want from me.

At last, with a final weak spurt, his spent cock dips its head and some of the tension seeps out of his limbs. It always takes him a while to regain system equilibrium, an attendant inefficiency of having had most of his internal organs replaced. With the ringing in his ears and the aftershocks ricocheting through him, Gavin is barely there enough to swat the vibrator off, just as its insistent throbbing starts to be too much.

All he can hear is the rush of his own blood. Shivering and struggling for breath, he doesn’t realize that Nines is speaking to him until the room returns in fragments.

“—vin,” says Nines. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m— I’m fine,” groans Gavin. “Piece of shit aftermarket parts.”

He reaches down to draw the vibrator out of himself. His sensitivity settings are, as it turns out, yet to stabilize; at the unexpected stab of pleasure the movement gives him, Gavin has to sink his teeth into the meat of his hand to stifle a whine.

“Is it still aftermarket,” he continues, sluggishly wiping his palm on the scrap of t-shirt, “if CyberLife made it? Anyway, they didn’t have any GV models in production, the second time I came in for repairs. Had to make do with what they had, so I— ended up with a lot of performance bottlenecks.”

Nines doesn’t say anything.

“My pipes don’t fit right,” Gavin explains.

“I knew what you meant,” says Nines.

Dabbing at the mess of his stomach, Gavin feels something thick and unspeakable lodged in his poorly fitted pipes. Even after he’s cleaned up and the beating of his pump is a steady swish again — only a little quicker than it ever is at rest — he carries on fiddling with the frayed hem of the shirt, nervous somehow to look back up at Nines. Why, when the dirty work is done? he chides himself. What’s there left to be nervous about?

Gavin pushes off the bed to sit up, legs crossed under him. Making any more of an effort to cover himself up seems too prudish an acknowledgement of the situation, but he doesn’t know how else to ease them back down to the ground, or what Nines expects from him. Where Nines thinks they’ll go from here.

He clears his throat. “Since you’ve already paid,” he says, “you might as well stay until the hour runs out.”

When Gavin finally forces himself to glance up at the screen, Nines is looking — for the first time — somewhere past the frame of his camera. He appears to consider Gavin’s suggestion, then makes a thoughtful sound.

“Well,” he says, “the hour did run out.”

To one side of Gavin’s desk, his tablet with its timer, 00:00:00 blinking red. Gavin stares at it in blank confusion, trying to make sense of the numbers.

“Did it?” he asks.

“It seems so,” says Nines.

His eyes flicker back to Gavin. There’s a delicate tug of something around the corners of his mouth, like a pause of breath before a word takes shape. Even without his preconstruction to paint the picture for him, Gavin’s hunch for these things is rarely wrong; he knows that Nines isn’t going to say anything, in the end.

Nines always gives him less than he hopes for, but this time, being left a little wanting doesn’t feel like the betrayal that it did before. You work your way towards it, and I’ll work mine, he thinks. Whoever gets there first waits in the middle.

“I’ll bill you for the overtime,” says Gavin.

Chapter Text

7.

The next time Gavin is supposed to see Nines, he doesn’t. A sore unattended thumb in the middle of the Central Station lobby, Gavin shoves his hands in his pockets and tries distracting himself with the drone of the television set in the corner, the quotidian shuffle of beat cops headed out for patrol. He doesn’t recognize anyone, but the rhythm of it hasn’t changed much.

It’s not like Nines to be late. Gavin wouldn’t have thought him physically capable of it, but of course, Nines is physically capable of most anything. A spin on the age-old paradox: Can CyberLife make an android so advanced that he could lapse in all the ways that a vastly inferior machine would?

Impatient with unease, Gavin drags himself to the reception desk and clears his throat. “Hey,” he says. “I’m— waiting for someone.”

The ST300 looks at the flickering LED at his temple. Then — when she realizes that Gavin isn’t going to use the comm line to provide his credentials or tell her any further details — a wisp of curiosity flits across her face before her professionalism gets the better of her.

“I can send along a message,” she says. “Who is it for?”

“Special Agent RK900,” he says. “He said he’d meet me in the lobby.”

It takes her only a fraction of a second to check the personnel log. “Agent Nines is here,” she says. “He’s currently—”

This part of it is, apparently, a trickier answer to come by; her LED glimmers yellow as she runs through the ID card swipes, tracks biometric signatures across the station floor. Even for all that, it seems to Gavin that her hesitation is a beat too long to be purely utilitarian in nature.

“Currently what?” he asks.

“Occupied,” she says. That’s all she divulges out loud, but she blinks serenely and slips an addendum into the confidence of the comm line:

arguing

—Arguing? Nines? Gavin has a barrage of follow-up questions for her, arguing about what, arguing with whom, arguing where, but there’s a bustle near the security divider and some human he’s never seen before is calling his name like she’s looking for a lost child in a department store.

“Gavin?” she’s asking from the other side of the gate, cap tucked under her arm, rummaging in her uniform pockets. “Are you Gavin? Nines told me to come get you.”

“Please don’t run his errands for him,” says Gavin. “His ego is a problem as it is.”

“Okay, I see you know him well,” she says. Leaning out past the gate, she tells the ST300, “I got it from here, thanks,” and receives a nod in return. A few more seconds of patting herself down, then she says: “False alarm, Sam, I don’t got it from here. I can’t find my lanyard, can you buzz him in? Sorry.”

“It’s at your desk, Officer Chen,” says Sam, and the divider swings open.

“Thanks,” Gavin tells her as he goes.

“A gem, wouldn’t get a thing done without her. You have to call me Tina, though,” says Tina. “Nines says you’ve been around the station before— what happened, you get yourself into trouble?”

“Something like that,” he says. “Where’s Nines?”

“Conference room,” she says. “He’s ironing out some details.”

Vague as it can get. Gavin has the same questions for Tina that he did for Sam; but then they step into the hideous open floor plan of the bullpen and it jostles the breath from him, to see it exactly the way he left it. Three years out, every filing cabinet and every wire-frame trash can, just as he remembers. Like I’ve been here all along. Like I could have belonged here.

In his fishbowl office, enshrined like a shark in formaldehyde— Fowler, glaring daggers at whatever’s on his screen. Gavin stills to a stop, until Tina notices and turns to collect him.

“What’s up?” she asks.

“Can I say hello to the Captain?” asks Gavin. “For old times’ sake.”

“Oh, sure,” says Tina. “He’s in a mood, but I guess he’s always in a mood. I’ll go grab my lanyard and come back.”

It’s possible that her permission doesn’t exactly entail Gavin stomping up the stairs and shoving Fowler’s door open with his foot, but she seems like a lenient chaperone and it’s always easier to badger someone into forgiveness after the fact. Fowler looks up from behind his desk, and the disgruntlement on his face settles into lines of resigned endurance.

“Gavin,” he says.

“Captain Jeffrey fucking Fowler,” says Gavin. “Should have known you couldn’t get rid of me that easily.”

“Yes, well,” says Fowler, “your exhausting bluster aside, thank you for coming in today. I know this is a lot to ask of you.”

“Maybe you’ll owe me one,” says Gavin, “forever. I’ll just hold it over you for the rest of time.”

“That’s unlikely,” says Fowler, peering into his coffee mug only to find it empty. “Anyway, I hope you understand that these are— formalities, more than anything else. We’ve got protocols to follow, investigative avenues we have to exhaust before we can move on. Don’t take it too personally.”

“What?” asks Gavin, bewildered. “Take what personally? What’s personal about it?”

“—Wait,” says Fowler, “why are you here?”

“To flip Boots,” says Gavin. “Are you senile or something?”

Fowler stares up at him, then sighs and wearily rubs the bridge of his nose. “Shit,” he groans. “Nines is going to chew my fucking ear off. Chen didn’t tell you about the arm yet?”

The Chen in question comes rushing up to the office, furiously gesturing cut, cut at her newly lanyard-festooned neck. She presses her hand to the outside wall to look back and forth between Gavin’s puzzlement and Fowler’s despondency.

“Sir,” she says, faintly muted through glass, “you shouldn’t tell Gavin about the arm.”

“Thank you, Chen,” mutters Fowler.

“What arm?” demands Gavin.

“Actually, Agent Nines wanted to tell you himself,” says Tina. She throws Fowler a hasty salute as she maneuvers Gavin out of the office. “I don’t know all the details of it,” she continues as they head towards the conference room, “just that— Connor and Lieutenant Anderson need you for something to do with your arm. But since you’re here today to help out with Butacavoli, Nines didn’t think it would be fair to spring that on you all of a sudden. He’s been livid since he heard about it.”

“Is Boots not coming in?” asks Gavin. “Am I not doing that?”

“He’ll be here, but— you should talk to Nines about it,” says Tina. “He’s spent the last hour laying into Hank and Connor, so I gather he might have some strong opinions.”

She raps on the door to the conference room; there’s enough soundproofing that the precise contours of whatever laying into is occurring inside don’t make it out, but the blurry hubbub of disagreement becomes apparent in absentia when the knock abruptly silences it. After a long second, the door swings open. It’s Nines.

“Gavin,” he says, LED ruddy with vexation.

“What’s going on?” asks Gavin. “What’s this about my arm?”

“It’s—” begins Nines, then asks over his shoulder: “Can we have the room for a minute?”

“Yeah,” says Hank. “Sure.”

Their armfuls of tablets and paper dossiers and coffee mugs gathered up, Hank and Connor slip out of the room past Nines, unbudging in the doorway. They glance towards Gavin as they leave, a flash of something like sympathy passing over Connor’s face. On Hank, it looks a lot like guilt.

“Thank you,” Nines tells Tina.

“I’ll be around,” she says, and snicks the door closed.

Nines gestures towards a chair. It feels ludicrous to sit across from him, like they’re a pair of lawyers trying to negotiate a settlement, so Gavin takes a seat at the corner of the table instead. Too frayed in his ire, Nines doesn’t seem to notice that he’s been herded; he falls into the chair next to Gavin’s, head tipped to lean against the backrest, his arms crossed.

He snaps to composure in a moment or two, straightening like a jackknife with his hands steepled in front of him.

“The medical examiner called,” he says. “They identified the pattern injury on Landau’s skull.”

“Couldn’t have been easy,” says Gavin. “Underneath what the Presas tore up? Jesus. I guess that’s why it took them this long to come up with a match. What did that son of a bitch in, anyway?”

“Knuckles,” says Nines. “Consistent with parts produced for the GV500 model line.”

Connor and Lieutenant Anderson need you for something to do with your arm.

“—Knuckles,” says Gavin, numbly. “Produced for— right, okay. I get it now.”

The first lucid thought that comes to him is: Well, I tick a lot of boxes on the flight risk checklist. It makes sense, why they couldn’t let me know about this ahead of time.

“So— what does that mean?” asks Gavin. “Am I a suspect?”

“No,” says Nines, firm as trodden ground. “Nothing changes. You’re fine. The DPD will need to borrow your arm to get the access log data off of it, but that should be straightforward enough. That will serve as your alibi for the window of the murder, which will get them off your back for good, then we can all put this farcical interlude behind us.”

“You don’t know it’s a farcical interlude,” Gavin points out. “Yet.”

“Stop that,” snaps Nines. “Are you trying to make this worse?”

“I’m just saying,” continues Gavin, “you seem awfully sure that I had nothing to do with the crime, when my knuckle prints were found all over a bashed-in skull.”

“They weren’t yours,” says Nines, exasperated by this contrarian pushback. “Eventually, Hank and Connor will arrive at who put the knuckle prints there, but even they can’t possibly think it was you. They just have to go through these motions before they’re licensed to admit as much.”

This is a fair and measured assessment of DPD procedure, coming from someone who has just spent an hour denouncing it at the top of his lungs. “Which is it?” asks Gavin. “You get why they have to do it, or you think they’re assholes for doing it? Make up your mind.”

“I don’t begrudge them their process,” says Nines. “But you— I brought you in here to talk to Butacavoli. That’s why you’re here. If I’d known about this call from the ME, I wouldn’t have set up the interview for today, like I—” He searches for the right words to turn against himself. “Like I lured you into some kind of trap, by saying you’d be—”

“Bullshit, lay off it,” interrupts Gavin. “The arm’s a DPD thing, Boots is a— you thing. A Fed thing. That’s not a bait-and-switch.”

“You don’t have to do the interview today,” says Nines. “They’ll have your arm down at the analytics lab for hours, you do know that? You won’t get it back before Boots arrives.”

“Good thing I don’t need both arms to talk,” says Gavin. “I want to do it, come on. Let me be useful.”

The wheedling is meant to be a little insouciant, but Nines’s face clouds over when he hears it. Something like, thinks Gavin, when he asked me why I ran into Frankie’s. The same awful unwanted answer.

When he finally speaks, Nines’s voice — flat as a razor’s edge — is filed to a terseness that can only come of effort. “Do you not remember what happened to you,” he asks, “the last time you wanted to be useful?”

Was that what made you angry? The shell of his body cleft open, a chasm running blue as a pageant sash. The pain, a thunderbolt. No one else would have done this for you. But — as precious little as Landau had ever done for him, in that moment, Gavin thought — no one else had done that much for me, either. The warmth of the hand in his hair. How else was he supposed to pay it back, that tattered scrap of kindness, when all he had to his name was the blood in his veins?

And for you, who waited— how else if not with this?

There’s a knock on the door. “Agent,” says Connor.

“One second,” Nines calls back. Then, to Gavin: “All right. Here’s what will happen. Only Hank and Connor are authorized to be present during the disengagement process; they do have a search warrant for the access log data, but you don’t have to tell them anything you don’t want to. I need to go have a word with Fowler, but will return in time to accompany you to the interrogation room for the Butacavoli interview.”

“Why can’t you be here?” asks Gavin. “There’s nothing under my shirt you haven’t seen before, you know.”

The muscles at the base of Nines’s jaw twitch, but not in anger, exactly. He bites down on something and shakes his head, giving up on whatever was going to come next in his litany of tedium.

“—You’re a menace,” he says. “It’s a jurisdiction issue. Since the homicide investigation does not, technically, belong under the purview of Operation Electric Slide—”

“Wait, hold on,” Gavin cuts in, delighted at the hint of embarrassment in Nines’s hurried disclosure. “That’s what your case is called? Operation Electric Slide? What the fuck, were you just never going to tell me that?”

“I don’t see how it’s relevant,” protests Nines. “I didn’t—”

“Nines,” says Connor.

“I didn’t name it,” says Nines, extricating himself from the chair, straightening his shirt, making an absurd ordeal out of the act of standing up. Gavin figures it’s because he’s mortified about Operation Electric Slide, but then Nines draws a deep breath he doesn’t need and says, “—Gavin,” and it’s not about the case at all.

“It’s fine,” says Gavin. “Really.”

He leaves the rest of it unsaid: You can take anything you want from me.

Hank steps aside to let Nines by, empty evidence bag crumpled up in his hands like he wants to will it into disappearing. Connor, too, has decency enough to look uncomfortable with this turn in their investigation; he’s the one that takes the seat next to Gavin, in the end.

“Good move,” says Gavin. “It’s much less resonant of a hate crime when an android mutilates another android.”

Hank cringes.

“That’s a joke,” says Gavin. “It’s funny because it’s true.”

“You have the right to know the particulars of what this procedure entails,” says Connor. “I’ll give you the rundown, and you can sign here to acknowledge that you’ve been provided with the necessary information.”

Sliding a tablet over to Gavin, he continues: “Each constituent component of the android body retains a local record of transmissions exchanged with the processing unit. Essentially, your arm is keeping a tally of what it did and when. This was originally used by CyberLife to improve durability for androids tasked with specialized motor functions. Reducing risk of repetitive stress injuries, you could say.”

“So looking through that,” says Gavin, “verifies whether my arm was attached to me at any given point in time.”

“Correct,” says Connor. “This record — the access log data — can be cross-referenced with the geolocation data stored on the CyberLife end, which tracks where your processing unit is at any given point in time. Placed in conjunction, these two data points establish an alibi for you and your arm, by demonstrating that neither was near the scene of the crime at the time of incident.”

“Forensics got so fucking weird in the last decade,” mutters Hank.

“But for reasons of client privacy, CyberLife geolocation data is neither readily accessible nor transparent,” says Connor. “It’s somewhat similar to pinging a cell phone, but on the CyberLife proprietary communications matrix rather than on a cellular network. As such, all our requests will have to clear CyberLife corporate before we can conclusively rule out your involvement.”

“Are you serious?” asks Gavin. “You have to shank the CyberLife legal team to get to this data?”

“They’re very invested in remaining circumspect about what they track and how,” says Connor. “Jericho has been trying to reframe that debate as an issue of civil liberties, so— it may take some time until the dust settles.”

“And until that happens, what?” asks Gavin. “You keep me under house arrest?”

“Of course not,” answers Connor, “we can hardly do that without probable cause,” but he’s looking at the tabletop instead as he says it.

One way or another, the DPD is going to put eyes on him, then. Gavin doesn’t share Nines’s misgivings about all this, doesn’t feel like he’s been hoodwinked into doing anything he wouldn’t have agreed to anyway, but this — the furtive ignominy of suspicion, clinging to him like a film of grime —

And what about Nines, he wants to ask. What happens to the investigative trips? When we went down to the docks— he needed me in there, did you know that? How do you expect me to be of any use to him, cooped up at home? What about Nines?

None of that is Connor’s mess to clean up. Gavin digs the stylus tip into the dotted line on the tablet and writes, GV500 #416 551 885.

“You should know,” he says, pulling his shirt up over his head, “people usually pay for this part.”

“If you could retract the skin up to your shoulder, please,” says Connor.

Gavin might be comfortable in his skin, but he’s exceedingly discomfited out of it; that’s the sort of thing that happens when you attend one too many open-casket funerals for yourself. What’s there to see, other than the pale reminder of what he’ll look like when he’s dead again? But when Hank leans forward with sudden interest, his hand coming to grip around Gavin’s elbow, the touch startles Gavin back to attention.

“Hang on,” Hank says to Connor, “look at this.”

Gavin does, too, trailing after the coarse pad of Hank’s forefinger. Just above the hinge where his right elbow bends into his upper arm, engraved on the hull: GJ500, he reads.

“—Have you always had this arm?” asks Connor.

“I didn’t know I had it,” says Gavin, baffled by the imprint of someone else’s name on his bones. “But why would CyberLife produce— no, that’s not it, that’s not what they did. It must have been during the reconstruction,” he explains, as the pieces start to fall into place. “First or second shutdown, I don’t know for sure, but if they weren’t able to find a GV part for ready replacement— second time, probably. Three years ago. What do GJ models do?”

“Private security,” says Connor. “This isn’t just a cosmetic alteration, either. It really is a GJ500 arm.”

“They fit you up with a different arm from some other model line?” asks Hank. “And didn’t even tell you about it before they discharged you?”

“You talk to your couch about the upholstery?” counters Gavin. “It works well enough, which is more than you can say for the other replacement parts they had to source.” Then — underneath the roil of his abiding hostility towards CyberLife — something clicks. “These GJ500 arms,” he says, “do their knuckles—”

“Completely different,” says Connor. “Nothing like the GV500 design.”

Hank’s face twists into a smile. “If it hadn’t been for those cheap-ass corner-cutting bastards,” he says.

“We’ll still have to bring your arm down to the analytics lab,” Connor tells Gavin. “It’ll take the same amount of time to pull the access log. But since the pattern injury isn’t a match, all that needs to be done with the data is to verify that this arm remained connected to you for the relevant 48 hours.”

“No knife fight with CyberLife lawyers?” asks Gavin.

“That might still happen just for the thrill of it,” says Connor, “but it won’t be related to your case, no. You’ll be cleared as soon as we get the arm back to you in a few hours.”

“The larger question is,” says Hank, “who’s the GV500 that the arm belongs to? How’d another GV500 get mixed up in all of this?”

“I wouldn’t be so sure that there is another GV500 involved,” says Connor, pensive. “Hank, I’ll fill you in on it later, but— something has been bothering me about the impact on the wound site.” Then, to Gavin: “For now, we’ll collect the arm and run the analytics.”

Gavin tries to hold still as Connor locates the release latch underneath the plating of his shoulder; just a few well-placed points of pressure and the whole arm snaps loose, easy as ripping out the seams in something hastily sewn together. We’re all modular contraptions, in the end. Connor lifts the joint out of its socket, the armhole of Gavin’s undershirt a forlorn cavity, and drops the limb into the open mouth of Hank’s evidence bag. With the seal pressed closed, packed in plastic, it looks like the world’s least appetizing ham hock.

“I can tell Nines, right?” asks Gavin, struggling back into his tee, more of an ordeal than he expected without his right hand. “That this won’t get in the way of anything. I’m good to go after today?”

“Yes, Agent Nines is entitled to that information,” says Connor.

From where he’s scrawling the date and item description onto the evidence bag label — GV500 arm component (replacement peripheral) — Hank huffs without looking up, a reproachful sound.

“What?” asks Gavin.

“This whole— Agent Nines thing,” says Hank. “Wouldn’t know it from the way you go on, but last I checked, he was still FBI. Wasn’t it a Fed that got you shut down, the second time around?”

“Is this because of the jurisdiction shit?” asks Gavin. “Just settle it like everyone else does, get your cocks out and see how far you can piss. What do you care?”

“I’ve been here thirty years, I know how this goes,” says Hank. He clicks the pen cap closed like a punctuation mark, leaning back in his chair. “Happens to humans, too. Happens to animals. You go a long enough while without anyone half-decent around you, and it starves you for kindness, eventually. You get so desperate that when the first fucking passable thing comes your way, it looks like the best thing you’ve ever seen. How would you know the difference? You’re starving. You’re ready to bend over backwards at the slightest hint of—”

“Right,” scoffs Gavin, “because my problem is that I’m too agreeable.”

“No, you’re genuinely aggravating,” says Hank. “But Nines is— look, I’m not saying he’s hatching up some nefarious plot, or that he’s recruiting you for his P90X cult, or whatever. What I’m saying is that there’s no way he didn’t figure out, within ten minutes of meeting you, exactly what you lack and how badly you need it. He knows how to get what he wants from you.”

“—It’s not like that,” mumbles Gavin. He looks towards Connor in petition, as though Connor might have at hand some clairvoyant insight into the RK-series mindset that would absolve Nines of these aspersions.

Instead, Connor just says, “Agent Nines is extremely capable,” and it hangs in the air like a threat.

It’s not like that, thinks Gavin, again. Nines isn’t like that. But it’s the same call for caution that lay coiled at the heart of Nines’s own question: Do you not remember what happened to you, the last time you wanted to be useful? The last time Gavin put himself in someone else’s hands, Desmond Landau slit his throat and threw him to the sharks like a bucketful of chum.

And didn’t that feel right? he hears Landau ask, the scent of leather and ink. Didn’t you feel useful?

“If Nines is so capable,” says Gavin, “what could he possibly want from me? Think about it. What’s he made of, I don’t know, but I bet a bullet wouldn’t even fucking nick him.”

“He did absorb a pipe bomb blast that ripped a trailer inside out,” says Connor.

Gavin pounces on it, eager for any chance to redirect the scrutiny of their solicitude. “See,” he says, “whole lot of good I would do him. What’s that story, anyway? A pipe bomb? All I’ve ever seen him do is make phone calls.”

“You remember the Statehouse Bombing from a few years back,” says Connor. “Agent Nines was assigned to work it as a counterterrorism case, which is what initially brought him to the Michigan field office. He found a compression spring buried in the middle of the lawn, identified it as belonging to a 1970s kitchen timer made in East Germany, tracked the purchase down to the residence of the bomber, who panicked and detonated an in-progress explosive device inside the trailer. Agent Nines was, as I hear it, superficially singed.”

“And then?” asks Gavin. “He liked Michigan so much he never left?”

“He’s following the ice money,” says Hank. “That Statehouse Bomber took some pages straight out of the McVeigh playbook, had one foot in the Michigan Militia. And who funds these fucking backwater militias all over the goddamn country? Who likes to synthesize Schedule I narcotics on unregulated territory patrolled by anti-government extremists?”

“Which is how he made his way to Landau,” says Connor. “Though I’m sure the extensive charms of Michigan must figure into it somewhere.”

Gavin folds it all away in neat nests of tissue paper, gladder by far to pry into Nines than to have to look too closely at himself. That’s the bloodhound streak in Nines, the indefatigable tenacity to pursue his quarry wherever it leads him; an insistence that would read as stodgy on anyone else, but he’s built to walk into a bomb blast and come out the other side no worse for wear than the soot on his shirt. On him, it pierces through steel.

“So there you go,” says Gavin. “He’s a sentient fallout shelter and you can’t sneak an eBay transaction past him. No reason why he should need to take anything from me.”

Hank hauls himself upright, both palms on the table.

“Landau didn’t take anything from you, either,” he says. “You gave it to him.”

8.

He could make his way back to Fowler’s office; except that it feels oddly intrusive, the prospect of showing up where he knows he’s the subject under discussion. There’s something distastefully voyeuristic about it, and not in the way that helps me pay my rent. In lieu of anywhere else to be, Gavin drags a chair out from the conference room and parks himself next to the door, waiting for Nines.

For the second time that day, Tina descends upon him in benevolence. “Hey, catch,” she says from halfway down the corridor, a can of carbonated Thirium 310 in her hand. Then she sees his empty sleeve: “Never mind, no catching,” she says, and pops the pull tab open as she nears him.

“Thanks,” says Gavin and thinks, I should have brought a jacket.

“Whatever you do,” says Tina, “do it better with blue.”

“Are you sponsored by Thiri-10?” he asks. Underneath his chilled palm, the drink fizzes against aluminum with a crisp hiss.

“That’s right, my entire existence is one long product placement,” she says, huddling down next to his chair. “What does it taste like? I’ve always wondered, but somehow I don’t think I should ingest it.”

“You probably could. All this commercially available stuff is so diluted, it may as well be water,” says Gavin. He tilts the can towards Tina, but she wrinkles her nose and shakes her head. “Or at least, it may as well be perfluorocarbons. Doesn’t taste like much.”

“It’s so heavy in the can,” she says.

“Yeah, mostly it just tastes dense,” he says. “It’s nice to get something cold in you, though. I guess that’s— refreshing.” A brisk mouthful of it soothes him the whole way down, and he adds, “You don’t have to hang around just because Nines told you to. I’m sure you have shit to do.”

“All Nines asked me to do is bring you in from the lobby,” she says. “I got you the drink because I figured you’d want it.”

The next mouthful of Thiri-10 feels thicker than it should, goes down like a lump. “Still,” he says, “you should get Nines to reimburse you for it.”

“Speak of the six million dollar devil,” she says.

Nines strides out of the bullpen, a stack of dossiers in one hand, Anthony “Boots” Butacavoli blazed in red across the top flap. Even the listless bureaucracy of Central Station can’t manage to blunt his edges entirely, this great white wolf padding across the carpeted floor.

“Oh, shit,” says Gavin. “It’s the Feds.”

“I heard about the arm,” says Nines. “That’s good news.”

“Who stole my lede?” demands Gavin. “Was it Connor? I bet it was Connor.”

“Agent,” says Tina, unfolding herself, “Gavin thinks you should reimburse me for this drink I bought him.”

“If you want to do the paperwork for it,” says Nines, “you would be more than welcome to twelve dollars from the Bureau’s operating budget.”

“It’s fifteen here,” Tina yells over her shoulder as she goes. “These vending machines should be arrested for aggravated robbery.”

Gavin drains the last of the can. “You should slip her a twenty,” he tells Nines. “I can’t believe Connor told you about the arm thing, I was going to do that. What a snitch.”

Nines looks down at Gavin, sprawled in his commandeered office chair. Maybe, thinks Gavin, I’ll never know everything that whirs through this head of his, but he’s learning how to listen to all the quiet roundabout ways that Nines speaks to him. The weight behind his frigid eyes.

“What,” says Gavin, just to shake the silence loose.

“Hold this,” says Nines.

Gavin accepts the pile of dossiers that Nines thrusts at him, tucking them into the crook of his remaining elbow. Then, when Nines takes off his windbreaker and drops it onto Gavin’s shoulders — a vast sweep that settles over him, gentle as a blanket of snow in midwinter — Gavin bites down on the inside of his cheek, and he takes that too.

“We’ll get one that fits me better,” says Gavin, threading his arm into a sleeve, happy to swim in it.

“You’re not joining the FBI,” says Nines.

“I suppose that’s your opinion,” says Gavin.

Nines retrieves the dossiers from him and says, “Butacavoli is here.” Another long perusal of Gavin lost in the FBI jacket, the puddle of fabric at his midriff, his fingers picking at the drooping elastic cuffs. “But I can tell him to come back,” says Nines. “Some other time.”

“God, will you just— I want to talk to him,” says Gavin. “Wouldn’t it be nice if his own children wanted to talk to him half as badly as I do? How’s that for a burn? I think I’m ready.”

Anthony Butacavoli is no one of any importance. Even Boots himself, a fragile ego swaddled in layers of persecution complex bubble wrap, would be hard-pressed to disagree. He’s one of several dozen interchangeable lower rungs on the ladder of the Landau corporation; the only reason Gavin has more than passing familiarity with him is because Boots went through an extremely rough divorce, during which time he bummed around the compound like it was his local YMCA. Gavin, out to walk the Presas, would pass by a kitchen window and hear Boots spouting off paranoid theories about the parentage of his children.

Maybe it was the alimony payments closing in on him, but Boots got sloppy and Boots got nabbed. Out of the grab-bag of names that the agents’ visit to Frankie’s yielded, Boots was the only one immediately careless enough to leave a trail a mile long, a grimy handprint pointing his way every time he greased a palm down at the docks. His dossier filled to brimming.

There’s enough in it already to get him on bribery and extortion, but Boots isn’t who they’re after. If they can leverage that to turn him as an informant — which is where Gavin comes in, a persuasive voice to nudge him along the path of least resistance — that would give them an in as they work their way up the chain, as they try to bring the bigger picture of the post-Landau landscape into focus. Because — once again, just to be absolutely clear about it — Boots is no one of any importance at all.

“No offense,” says Gavin.

Boots, twitchy as a spooked chihuahua, stares at the FBI lettering on the chest of Gavin’s jacket.

“I was wondering where you’d fucked off to,” he says. “Actually, no. I never wondered that. But I guess I got my answer.”

“Surprise,” says Gavin, and spreads his arms.

Boots follows the swing of the empty sleeve with his golf ball eyes. “FBI, huh,” he says.

“Great job, Boots,” says Gavin. “Those adult literacy classes are really working out for you.”

Nines likely didn’t give him the jacket to use it as a cover identity, nor did Gavin walk into the interrogation chamber intending to impersonate a federal agent, but he doesn’t see the harm in letting Boots fill in some of the gaps with his overactive imagination. At any rate, Nines is next door in the observation room; he can make the call to suspend the interview if anything offends his delicate white-collar sensibilities.

“So that’s who keeps you now?” asks Boots. “The Feds?”

“Don’t know what you mean,” says Gavin, “but that kind of sounds like hate speech.”

“It’s not about androids,” says Boots. “Just about you. I know what you were like around Desmond. Someone or other’s always got you on a leash, or you wouldn’t fucking know what to do with yourself.”

What’s so intolerably insulting is that even a shithead like Boots has figured this out about him, in the scant amount of time they’ve spent in each other’s orbit. The assessment is too true to even sting, but god, to have it pointed out by this asshole. Well, motherfucker, thinks Gavin, you’ve gone and made it personal. I’m not leaving this room until I’ve flipped you like a silver dollar pancake.

“—Boots,” he says, tapping his finger on the fat stack of dossiers, “I gotta apologize to you. Maybe I haven’t expressed myself with the clarity that I should have.”

Suspicious, Boots’s mouth contorts underneath his moustache.

“I know you came in here all puffed up, like I ain’t telling them nothing, really ready to take one for the team,” says Gavin. “Tragically, that’s not what you’re here for. We just wanted you to get some fresh air and see the sun before you spend the next twenty years in federal prison. The best part is, Boots, we don’t even need you to tell us anything for that to happen. I’m sorry to crush your dreams of heroism.”

“Fuck off,” says Boots. “Twenty? Best you got me for is bribery.”

“Is that right?” asks Gavin. “Here I was, thinking it was extortionate conduct involving interstate commerce. I must have brought in someone else’s file by mistake.”

He opens the dossier and spins it around. Clipped to the first page is a photograph of a second-floor union office window through a telephoto lens, Boots’s craggy features clearly visible between the angled slats of the venetian blinds.

“I was about to congratulate you on moving up in the world,” says Gavin. “Seems like just yesterday that you were scoping out condemned houses to sling ice in, and now they let you do all this? But I must have confused you for someone else.”

Boots looks down at the photo and ruminates on this. Then he hooks one elbow over the backrest of his chair, eyes narrowed, studying Gavin.

“I was wrong, too,” says Boots. “Feds don’t have you yet.”

“Are you still on about that,” asks Gavin.

“What you are,” says Boots, “is in between owners. Isn’t that right, Gavin? Someone hasn’t made their mind up about you.”

“Do you find the picture unflattering?” asks Gavin. “Is that why you’re upset?”

“It’s like when a lion sees an antelope with a broken leg,” says Boots. “Someone’s circling you and thinking, maybe this could be mine. You have that air, you know. Like you want to be claimed.”

The ceiling speaker crackles to life. “—Gavin,” says Nines’s voice, “you don’t need to—”

“Shut it, Nines,” says Gavin. “I got it.”

He looks towards the two-way mirror, blindly searching out where he thinks Nines might be, banking that at least a portion of his irritation translates to self-assurance on his face. When he turns back to the table, Boots raises his eyebrows.

“Is that him?” asks Boots.

Mercifully, before Gavin has to convince Boots to please focus on his own legal predicament — rather than idle away the time pretending to be the type of psychiatrist who would have several active sexual harassment lawsuits — the mounted television screen on the far wall starts to play an audio file.

“—we’re not planning on moving much.” A bit muffled by the cloud of room tone, but it’s Boots, unmistakeable. “Maybe fifty, a hundred keys. I’ll have numbers by the end of the week, once Vanny lets us know, but that’s what we’re looking at. Keep that in mind.”

“It’s just that,” says someone else’s voice, “late notices like these are highly irregular.”

“Highly irregular, is it?” asks Boots. “Highly irregular? I wonder what else is going to be highly fucking irregular? When I—”

Gavin gestures, and the tape clicks silent. “More where that came from,” he says. “We have all the rest of it. You get very ugly near the end, some real vintage shows of intimidation there, powerful stuff.”

It is, after all of that, immensely gratifying to watch Boots drain ashen from the hairline down. He keeps staring at the screen with a numb incredulity, like he’s holding out hope that the recording might have been a particularly unfortunate hallucination. Twenty years may be an optimistic projection, but that’s nothing Boots needs to know.

“Don’t you wish you’d been just a little more professional?” asks Gavin. “This is why we don’t threaten the same people we negotiate with, and we definitely don’t do it in the same breath. Shouldn’t shit in the hand that feeds you, as they say. You really fucking bungled this one.”

“Fuck you,” says Boots, weakly.

“Yeah,” says Gavin, “but let’s talk about Vanny.”

That jumped out at him when he leafed through the transcript; Vance de Vries, as far as Gavin remembers, isn’t the caliber of criminal that would be comfortable at the top of a Landau-sized pyramid. The thought of Vanny ruling over this empire — Vanny, who gets excited when the McRib is back — strikes Gavin as fundamentally risible.

Boots perks up a little at the mention of Vanny, which is almost heartbreaking. “Vanny will take care of this,” he says. “Happened to Trout. Cruiser pulled up when he still had the electrical cord in his hand, and nothing ever stuck to him.”

“Because Desmond was around,” says Gavin. “You think Vanny will do what Desmond did? Vanny won’t do shit for you, Boots. You know that. He’s stretched so thin that he promoted you to handle the docks, and you think he has the resources to get you out of this one?”

“There’s still connections,” says Boots, “from when Desmond was around.”

“When idiots like you keep burning all the bridges you get your hands on? What a miracle, call the Vatican,” says Gavin. “And even if Vanny wants to do you a solid— can I level with you? I would be very fucking surprised if he’s allowed to make his own calls about that right now.”

The rug pulled out from under him, Boots falters. “Why?” he asks. “Vanny’s in charge of Detroit, isn’t he? Sounds like you know that much.”

Not before you went gabbing off on tape, thinks Gavin. “Give me a break, you’re only moving fifty keys and you still think Detroit means anything?” He pushes his chair back impatiently, metal legs caterwauling across the floor. “Fifty kilos? Since when is this a mom-and-pop red ice corner store? The action’s headed out of Detroit, you dumb fuck. Someone is systematically funneling raw Thirium out of the city, distributing product from some other base of operations, and you haven’t been told about it. Why is that? Because you’re fucking nobody, Boots, and they’ll let you rot while the rest of them — that’s Vanny included — pack up all their shit to go sit pretty somewhere else.”

Gavin shrugs his shoulders, I don’t know what to tell you, hollow sleeve rippling as it falls back at his side.

“You didn’t get a promotion,” he says. “You got locked in the engine room of a ship they’re going to sink.”

Boots looks so crestfallen as he absorbs this information that Gavin nearly feels a twinge of sympathy; then he remembers the kind of shit Boots used to say about his imminent ex-wife, and all that pity instantly recoils into itself like a tape measure snapping free.

“Still,” mutters Boots, “twenty years in lockup is twenty years alive. I flip, and the next thing I know, I’m the one with my head smashed in on my bedroom floor.”

“That’s what WITSEC is for,” says Gavin. “You like Santa Barbara, Boots? You like the beach?”

His forehead in his hands, thumbs digging circles into his temples, Boots huddles into the frame of his body and can’t find a way out for himself. His ex-wife gone, his children resentful. The barrel of a gun on the one hand, palm trees on the other. If, somehow, everything he’d fucked up could be clean forgotten.

Out of the side of his mouth, Boots says, “I don’t even know what you want me to do,” and it’s then that Gavin knows they have him. And now, thinks Gavin, who’s the antelope with the broken leg? His teeth in the jugular, ready for the coup de grace.

All of him a leaping flame, Gavin turns towards the two-way mirror again. He barely notices the room reflected in it, the catchpenny table and chairs, the barren walls, the fevered triumph in his own eyes, Boots in his attitude of malaise. Even when Gavin can’t see him— I know you’re there on the other side, watching me. Nines with his breath held tight in his lungs, his eyes on Gavin — only this panel of glass between them — as the tide turns and they scent the kill, your pulse picks up to a drumming beat, same as mine.

I’m the dagger in your pocket, your hawk on the wing. Look at what I could do for you.

Into the froth of their comm line, Gavin asks:

good?

Nines’s reply, so swift and forceful that it hums like a whip:

always

“I think they’re headed to the UP,” says Gavin, yanking the door closed behind him.

“That’s what I thought,” says Nines, from his perch in front of the mirror. Beyond it, back in the muted interrogation room, two other federal agents are walking Boots through the finer details of his tenure as informant.

“Militia land,” says Gavin. “That must be so exciting for them, it’s like finally meeting someone face-to-face after exchanging messages online for years. Ice distributors and private militia, two of the shittiest groups of people in the United States, consummating their abhorrent love at last.”

“How much of it is true, what you said about Vance de Vries?” asks Nines. “Him taking control of operations in Detroit— that’s a good indication that the whole outfit is skipping town?”

“Very likely,” says Gavin. “Vanny doesn’t have it in him. He’s not the type that Landau was.”

“And what type is that,” asks Nines.

Startled by the unexpected barb in the question, Gavin swivels from the mirror to stare at him; Nines, profile lit in the glow of the interrogation room, doesn’t even stir to acknowledge the reaction. Unnerving in his severity— but for the smallest tilt at the corner of his mouth, the trace of a smile. He thinks things are funny.

Instantly unwound, Gavin returns to the mirror. He makes a mental note for himself: the FBI, an adder’s den of shameless opportunists, is not above using ongoing criminal investigations as fodder for flirtation. Admittedly, it doesn’t not work. He supposes he should respond in kind.

“Like any half-decent drug baron,” says Gavin, “he was hung like a fucking horse. May his memory be a blessing.”

Nines appears satisfied with the dearth of sentiment in this exchange. “If Butacavoli can keep his head down and manage not to fly off the handle for a few months,” he says, “we should have a better sense of who’s behind the move upstate— when upstate, where upstate, that sort of thing. The details we need in order to salvage the racketeering case.”

He pauses, then corrects himself. “That I need to salvage the case.” Another pause, then: “That we need, but by we I mean the Bureau, not—”

“Too late,” says Gavin. “I’ll come into the office tomorrow.”

“You wouldn’t like it anyway,” says Nines. “Too many rules for your taste, I imagine.”

“That’s why you love working there, isn’t it?” asks Gavin. “All the red tape and paperwork, right up your alley. You look like a toner cartridge wouldn’t melt in your mouth.”

Boots says something inaudible and both the agents shake their heads sternly, in sync. This catapults Boots onto his feet and into a furious fit of pacing.

“A melting toner cartridge?” repeats Nines. “What does that even mean?”

“To tell you the truth,” says Gavin, “I’m not sure myself. But you felt like you were being insulted, which is what matters.”

“I suppose the regulations were what initially drew me to this line of work,” admits Nines. “Yes, I was manufactured with an FBI placement already in mind, but— it suited me, nonetheless. Especially after the deviancy firmware upgrade.”

“You liked the structure,” says Gavin.

“I didn’t know that at some point, the structure would become—” Nines watches as Boots grips the back of a chair with both hands like he’s about to throw it across the room, then sets it back in place, unable to muster up the mettle. “—Become an inhibition,” he continues. “Structure doesn’t just stop at establishing principles of engagement. It defines what’s possible to attempt.”

He rests his elbows on the ledge of the desk and leans forward, though there isn’t enough of substance going on in the interrogation room to merit that kind of concentration. In the chill of the overhead light, his browbone casts a shadow stark enough to cut.

“Clearance rates, for example,” he says. “It’s one thing for law enforcement to evaluate its own efficacy, but it’s another thing altogether when that dependence on clearance rates is what determines which cases remain open and which are ordered closed.” The set of his shoulders brittle, he adds: “When it is and isn’t permissible to chase the splinters of a crime syndicate up past the Straits of Mackinac.”

“But that’s the entire basis of Electric Slide,” says Gavin, as he sheds the windbreaker. “If that’s not permissible, then— they’re not thinking of shutting it down, are they? What, and just bury this whole thing you’ve been putting together for years now?”

“For as long as Electric Slide has existed,” says Nines, “there has been friction about what its ultimate objective should be. The Detroit Division SAC always wanted it to be a standalone drug trafficking case, aiming to dismantle the Landau enterprise; the case agent is of much the same opinion in that regard. I have— other investments.”

He takes the jacket when Gavin hands it to him, but says, “You can hold onto it until your arm gets here.”

“Too big,” says Gavin. “Feels like I’m walking around in a tarp. Connor said you came to Detroit because of the Statehouse Bombing, as counterterrorism? So you’re after the right-wing militias, not the drugs. You were using Landau as a stepping stone to get to the militia purse strings.”

“Unfortunately, the task of uprooting paramilitary extremists by starving them of funds has no clear timetable or grand finale,” says Nines. “It’s all a bit too nebulous for the SAC’s tastes. A RICO case that culminates in a dozen suspects being frog-marched past the network news crews, while the Director stands behind a podium and says something inspiring about the Bureau’s commitment to cleaner streets— that’s the kind of optics they’re looking for. What I have in mind won’t give them that. I don’t want to give them that.”

“You wouldn’t have to deal with the brass so much if you were at the office less,” says Gavin. “Didn’t you deflect a pipe bomb blast? The crowning glory of CyberLife’s R&D billions, and you sit in front of a desk and make phone calls all day. Like any other android equipped with less tensile strength would be incapable of filling out requisition forms.”

Nines puts the jacket back on, one sleeve at a time. Underneath his shirt, the terrain of his back shifts like a starling flock in motion, a murmuration of sinew. All that, thinks Gavin, and you keep it to yourself.

“It would be convenient,” says Nines, “if I could offer you a fully rational explanation for my request to be transferred into a more administrative role.”

“You asked for this?” Gavin frowns, nonplussed. “I suppose no one enjoys having a bomb go off in their face, but— then again, what do I know, a bomb wouldn’t have left enough of me to garnish an industrial waste heap. So I guess I’d have asked for a desk job too, after something like that.”

“If it had been a threat to bodily integrity that compelled me, I would consider that a more or less rational explanation,” says Nines. “But I knew I wasn’t in danger of harm. I wasn’t— fearful. Not of damage.” His eyes are fixed on the feeble spectacle of Boots kicking up a fuss about something, but he’s clearly not paying it any mind. “I think,” says Nines, “in some way— knowing I could withstand much more than that was what I found so disconcerting. The prospect that I could be capable of nearly anything.”

Once — only seconds before the end — Gavin looked down the length of a Bureau-issue Glock and remembered his insides wreathing the floor, tumbling out of him like a gutted fish. That paralyzing synopsis of his own helplessness, the knowledge that he was at the mercy of everyone who’d had a hand in shaping him, each with their private designs for what he was meant to do— Nines must have felt much the same thing, on his feet in the wreckage of a blown-out trailer home. As the scrap metal littered the lot around him and the ashes danced into his hair, spattered in the meager remains of a domestic terrorist, Nines looked down at his hands and thought, I don’t know what comes next.

“Parameters,” says Gavin. “You don’t like constantly butting heads with your case agent, but that’s a kind of roadmap, just the same. Otherwise — on the ground — there’s no signs to tell you what turns to make. Shit, what if you think you’re going the right way, but you end up in Ohio instead?”

“Yes, something like that,” says Nines. “Parameters.”

Parameters that govern behavior. The last time Gavin heard Nines say it, he was busy fingering himself open as Nines drank him down, chin in one hand. Suddenly hot under his collar, Gavin steers the subject back to shallow waters.

“It’s still a ridiculous name,” he says. “Operation Electric Slide.”

“Lucky for you that you don’t need to worry about it,” says Nines.

“I would very much like to worry about it,” says Gavin. “I don’t know if you heard, but someone smashed in Landau’s skull with a GV500 arm. Okay, I know that’s DPD business, but there’s no way that the murder is unrelated to whatever’s happening with the organization now, right? If I’m being dragged into a case, I reserve the right to be indignant about what it’s called.”

On the other side of the mirror, the Anthony Butacavoli variety hour seems to draw to a close. The agents stand to usher Boots out the door; the second to depart looks towards the observation room and gestures at the ceiling, so Nines turns off the lights in the interrogation chamber as Gavin switches on theirs.

The contrast isn’t as severe as going from unlit to the daytime sun, and it only takes Gavin a moment or two of deliberate blinking to catch up. Nines waits until his levels balance out, then says, “Strange way of trying to frame you, though.”

“What’s that?” asks Gavin.

“The knuckle pattern injury isn’t what I would call irrefutable evidence,” says Nines. “Pulling the access log takes time, and getting the geolocation data from CyberLife would have been a protracted legal battle, but the only real obstacle that either poses is the hassle involved. There was never any possibility that you could be charged for this, precisely because there’s too much stored information that specifically exonerates you.”

“Would the general public know how all of that works?” asks Gavin.

“Maybe not how, but certainly that it works,” says Nines. “That there are systems in place for authenticating android movement. Even if I didn’t know much about it, I would certainly conduct some research into it before relying on its absence as a way to pin a murder on someone.”

He looks sidelong at Gavin and adds: “That is, if I did it— unless you’re still trying not to bring up O.J. Simpson.”

Gavin lets out a strangled laugh. “Are you serious?” he asks. “I thought you were going to pretend we— O.J. is how you’re doing it? We can’t discuss it without getting there by way of O.J. fucking Simpson?”

“I wasn’t aware that there was much to discuss,” says Nines, archly. “Do you typically debrief after a private show?”

“You know when the debriefing typically happens,” says Gavin. “You watched me do it.”

There’s a smart knock on the door. “Arm delivery,” says Connor’s voice.

“—Come in,” says Nines.

The door cracks open; a sliver of Connor’s face peeks in through the gap. “Am I interrupting?” he asks.

“What are you doing?” demands Gavin. “Open the door the rest of the way, Jesus.”

Connor steps through, carrying the evidence bag before him like an offering of peace. Detached from anything to give it scale, the arm seems grotesquely elongated in its plastic wrapper, so unwieldy that it’s a wonder it can do anything at all.

“Doesn’t it look like a ham hock?” Gavin asks Nines.

“I’d be concerned about that ham,” says Nines. “All clear?”

“All clear,” says Connor. “We’re sending out the log to be independently verified— but I went over it, and everything looks the way it should. You’re good to go, Gavin. Thanks for the assistance.”

“No problem,” says Gavin, ceremoniously receiving the arm as Connor hands it over. “The best part of waking up is cooperating with law enforcement. I’ve always said that.”

He holds his arm up by the elbow joint and swings it back and forth, making it wave to Connor as he leaves. The bag crinkles so loudly that it drowns out the sound of the door latch springing back into its slot. Nines, still seated in front of the mirror, pulls out the chair next to his.

“What I wanted to do was flip him off with it,” says Gavin, passing him the evidence bag and settling in, “but I probably need to be attached to it for fine motor skills like that.”

Nines is quiet as Gavin tugs the hem of his shirt up over himself. Ragtag in front of him again, Gavin tenses up under the feeling of Nines’s hands on him, the careful search of lining up the pins in his rotator cuff. Downcast in concentration, the dark fan of Nines’s eyelashes, close enough to brush.

“You know,” says Gavin, his mouth dry, “Hank and Connor tried to turn me against you, earlier. Said I should watch out for you getting what you want out of me.”

It’s meant to be a shared joke between them; he expects Nines to respond with disdain, some imperious rejoinder about Hank and Connor’s provincial apprehension. Instead, Nines runs his thumb over the edge of Gavin’s scapula plate and says nothing, the silence fraught.

“Well,” he says, after what seems like an unbearable eternity, “they’re not wrong.”

Gavin’s objection shoots to the tip of his tongue — of course they’re wrong, you’re not like that — but some minute tactile feedback from the arm lets Nines know he has the alignment he’s been looking for. His free hand comes to rest at Gavin’s collarbone, fingertips pressing into his skin just past the neckline of his undershirt. When he snaps the arm back into place, palm against Gavin’s chest for leverage, the skin between them strains and peels back for a fleeting instant— and something wild surges in past the barriers, knocking the air from Gavin.

He flinches back, scalded. The color winds around the contours of his arm again, flesh growing over his bones.

“—Sorry,” says Nines, helter-skelter, “I—”

“No, you didn’t mean— it’s okay,” says Gavin, diving headfirst into his own shirt. He momentarily considers the merits of remaining there for a few minutes, at least until his ears stop burning, before he threads both arms through the sleeves and reluctantly surfaces.

Nines, LED a raucous red, clears his throat.

“Do you need to calibrate?” he asks.

“I think everything’s in order,” says Gavin.

His heads-up display appears largely unconcerned, just a placid observation of right arm: connected that slides out of view before long. He splays out all five fingers on his right hand, then curls them into a fist. Rotates his wrist, experimentally rolls his shoulder back; and slowly, deliberately, he flips Nines off.

“Would you look at that,” says Gavin. “Good as new.”

Shaking his head, Nines turns towards the mirror, though there’s nothing to see on the other side except an empty room with its lights turned off. The glow of his LED flares cherry-hot, staining the glass.

In spite of everything, thinks Gavin, I think you must want me around.

9.

—nowhere to be.

Gavin jerks awake with a start, nearly tearing himself out of the wall-mounted dock. At the base of his skull, the charging cable strains as he turns his head; he reaches up and yanks it free, skin surging back over the port, the pump in his chest slowing its breakneck churn.

He sinks onto the edge of his bed. In the press kit announcing the release of the GV500 model line, the subheading: Round-the-Clock Security for Your Peace of Mind. Only half of him enters standby mode during stasis, leaving the other half alert to perceive and react to environmental stimuli. Unihemispheric slow-wave sleep, said the pamphlet, next to a stock picture of a dolphin with its teeth bared.

So it’s not a dream, exactly, what shakes him out of sleep. None of the merciful distance of metaphor that makes a dream bearable, or interesting, at the very least. Half of him must have registered something nearby that reminded him of—

Outside his window, a construction vehicle parked at the end of the block swivels its amber beacon. His field of vision steeps warm as the light floods into his bedroom, then to shadows as it ebbs, golden once more when it pirouettes back. That’s what it was, thinks Gavin. The streetlights on the highway.

The autocab was waiting at the back door of the lounge when they stepped out. Some asshole was plastered to its side, wrestling mightily with the locked handle as his date wobbled nearby on her heels, both of them shitfaced.

Not your car, said Gavin. Fuck off.

He authenticated the ride and held the rear passenger door open, the couple skittering away towards main street. Stepping into the car, Landau raised an eyebrow at him in ersatz admonishment.

Be nice to the civilians, Gavin, he said.

Sorry, said Gavin, when he’d flung himself onto the backseat from the other side. Long day at work.

He loosened the knot of his tie with a baleful tug, unbuttoned the throat of his shirt while he was at it, clumsy and impatient with trimmings. Landau laughed as he cracked a window open, rummaging inside his jacket for a smoke.

Not your thing, I take it, he said. But I couldn’t get you into the room, otherwise.

It must have been what everyone else in there did, said Gavin. Dressed their muscle up in silks to pretend like they didn’t come prepared for a fucking massacre.

Turned out to be a quiet night, said Landau. No one even raised their voice.

Probably because everyone knew that everyone else was strapped, said Gavin.

And that’s the secret of how we get things done, said Landau, around the cigarette in his mouth.

Gavin reached over to light it. The rigid ceremony of a backroom talk like this took more out of him, bled him dry in ways that straightforward protection detail didn’t. It was always harder to adequately gauge a threat when every last person in the room was a jittery uncomfortable mess; a whole bouquet of short fuses, tinder in the vase.

Though not as much got done as they would have liked, said Gavin. Thanks to you.

They don’t know what they’re talking about. Landau waved off the concern, dismissive. Can’t see out of their own fucking asses on a clear day. That’s called being short-sighted, Gavin. They can’t wrap their minds around what’s coming.

What’s coming? asked Gavin.

Say we expand like they want to, said Landau. We take the business out of Detroit— and then what? Sure, right now the U.S. government is panning for Thirium like it’s the Gold Rush in the Arctic, but that’s not for long. Total chemical synthesis isn’t far off on the horizon. Panning’s meant to throw Russia off the scent, but behind closed doors, they’re busy with high-stakes alchemy. Russia’s doing the exact same thing, I guarantee it. And once that’s achieved— that’s the end of the profit margin for red ice.

He took a long vexed drag, displeased by the myopia of his peers. Dirt-cheap ice, he said, same quality as anything mined, but at a fraction of the cost. That’ll saturate the supply until it’s cheaper to burn it than to move it. The market will take decades to recover, if it ever does, and I sure as hell don’t plan on sticking around that long.

You’ll do what? asked Gavin. Retire?

So to speak, said Landau. I’ll take a deal, do a few years, move somewhere warm on the DOJ’s dime.

Take a deal? Gavin straightened up in surprise, twisting in his seat to stare at Landau. You mean— snitch?

Let’s not be crass, said Landau. It's only snitching when the rank-and-file do it. Where I am, it’s called turning state’s evidence. He ashed the cigarette out the window and went on: Besides, Gavin, you’ve been here long enough to know what shitbags I’d be testifying against. You can’t believe that any loyalty comes into it, other than the kind that goes to the highest bidder.

Gavin had, indeed, been there long enough to know. Yeah, he said.

I’m extending them as much courtesy as they’d extend to me. Worthless, the lot of them, said Landau. Then he turned towards Gavin and smiled, immeasurably affectionate. Present company excluded, of course.

Outside the cab, the highway lights darted past them like shooting stars. You know, said Landau, I worry about what will happen to you, as he absently took Gavin’s wrist in hand, fussing with the set of his cufflinks.

Why? asked Gavin. I have everything I need.

When an Egyptian pharaoh died, said Landau, they buried his things with him. His best horses. His favorite wives, his closest advisors. His most prized possessions. I think that whatever happens to me, if anything happens to me, that will probably be it for you.

Who’s assigned to bury me? asked Gavin, eyes on his wrist.

No one’s burying you, scoffed Landau. Don’t take it so literally. What I’m saying is that without me, you’d have nowhere to go.

Gavin had been there long enough to know this, too.

Nowhere to be, said Landau.

The blow catches him just above the eye, taking a ragged tear of skin along with it. A bright spray of blood that lingers in the air, fresh and delicate as a sheaf of baby’s-breath. Nowhere to go. One strike after another, battering him raw until the flesh hangs free, unearthing a curve of bone that gleams like porcelain, like a machine chassis, a moonlight sheen. With each impact that caves his skull in, nowhere to be, the crown of his head sundering apart. Landau, half his face torn into rags, smiles at him and fixes his cuffs for him. Gavin, you have nowhere to be.

—Son of a bitch, thinks Gavin, and sags to one side until he’s curled on the lip of his mattress. Why am I thinking about you?

He checks the time; in the corner of his display, a neat little stamp, 4:07 AM. His battery, holding at 82%. The amber eye of the construction vehicle goes on swerving outside in its lighthouse arcs, and despite the inopportune hour, it seems to Gavin like his night is done for good.

Might as well take my mind off it, then. The nighthawks online at four in the morning aren’t his usual crowd, but there’s enough of them trawling around to fill out a room. Their tokens clink just the same. With his curtains drawn against the beacon light and his camera winking back at him, he’s on firmer ground.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he says to the chat, twirling the plug between his fingers as he holds it up. “Thought maybe you could lend a hand and tire me out.”

Fifteen minutes, half an hour, tops. He’s not even angling for a private session. Just a quick tip-to-vibe show; he’ll spend some time making conversation, preening for the crowd, then — when he feels a little more like himself again — get himself off, wash himself down, and start the day in earnest like an upstanding citizen. It’s something to do in the meanwhile.

His audience understands the rules of engagement. The tips are meant to tease, a token here and there, five tokens, adding up to quick vibrations that keep him just warm enough to sustain the mood. Another five seconds paid for, you look good with that tight ass plugged up, and Gavin exhales breathily as the low hum runs through him.

Some curious newcomer, presumably drawn there by the this is an interactive room banner on the landing page, asks: Did they make you that stacked or did you do that for yourself

“Autobiographical disclosure is a thousand tokens apiece,” says Gavin. “But so’s a minute and a half of making me feel good. You wanna watch me come or listen to me read from my memoir?”

Okay, some teeth, types the newcomer, I see what you’re about, and stays.

“Or come see me again some other time,” says Gavin. “Who knows, maybe I’ll slip up.”

It’s early, and the viewers are still trickling in; he’s less concerned about looking out for regulars, uncustomary as the hour is, so he misses the heads-up from the participant list. The only warning he has is a sharp whistle and the deceptively anodyne notification in the chat:

RICO31787 tipped 300 tokens

“—Wait,” says Gavin, “sh—”

Thirty straight seconds at maximum intensity, before he can ready himself for it. Gavin gasps out loud, the sudden shock of pleasure dragging him underwater, his bed linens pulling taut as he twists his fingers in the sheets. Thirty seconds of sweet torture, airless with surprise, the heat pooling deep in his hipbones.

“Ah, god, motherfucker,” he groans as it tapers off, his thighs still trembling in the aftermath. “That’s—”

RICO31787 tipped 300 tokens

“—Come on,” he manages to get out, just as the plug lurches back to life. I’m going to write an anonymous letter to his SAC, he thinks, dazedly. There’s no way they’ve authorized him to do this, though the tail end of the thought smudges into a blur as the plug goes on purring inside him.

It’s not the kind that’s big enough to hit him where he’d like — only meant to keep an easy simmer going — and he’s caught between the good and the not good enough, clenching around the flared base as he does his best to ride it out, unraveled and needy for more. He can feel his walls start to twitch in anticipation, desperate little noises torn from him— then, just as abruptly as it began, the buzzing stops.

Half relieved, half bereft, Gavin glares at his camera. “I’m going to make a phone call,” he pants, boneless in the cushions.

The chat is, understandably, confused. Right now? someone asks. I think it’s a thing, someone else informs them, calling someone while you’re getting fucked. The most haplessly confused of the whole lot says, got it, and then, am I into that?

“Need to have a word with Rico over here, throwing his money around,” says Gavin. “I get if you don’t like that, you’re free to head out. It’s a public room.”

Oh you know each other? the chat asks. Rico a regular? The same confused person says, I’m going to stick around until I figure out if I’m into this, which is honestly a laudable attitude to have.

Gavin rolls onto his stomach, legs a messy sprawl. RICO31787 tips again just as the call connects — a more manageable ten seconds, medium intensity — so there’s only a slight hitch in Gavin’s voice as he says, “You’re going to get yourself fired.”

“Imagine the egg on their faces,” says Nines’s voice, clear and close in Gavin’s head. “Building me, then sacking me.”

“Even aside from your job,” says Gavin, “I’m personally ambivalent about the prospect of the U.S. government giving me an orgasm.”

“As it happens,” says Nines, “today is out of pocket. The Bureau has nothing to do with it.”

“Just you, then,” says Gavin.

“I suppose so,” says Nines.

Just you. Someone — maybe Nines, maybe some other zealous client — sets the vibe off again, hard. Gavin bucks up with a muffled curse, grinding his cock into the bed. God, no, he thinks, I would rather get shut down for the third time than come rutting against my mattress like some amateur, and lifts his hips up, weight on his elbows.

When he turns around to check, the chat seems pleased. Nice view, hold that ass out. It’s odd that the room isn’t emptying like he expected it might, but he’s got other fish to fry, anyway.

“Why do you keep showing up here,” he asks Nines.

“Should I stop?” asks Nines.

“You know that’s not the same question,” says Gavin. The stirring of the plug picks up again, and he drops his head to his hands, shivering, back arching into the sensation. “Can’t, ah— can’t ever give me a straight answer.”

“It’s not very interesting,” says Nines.

“I don’t want interesting,” says Gavin, teeth set. “I— I just want,” just you, “just want what your answer is. You’re not interesting.”

There’s a barely audible rustle over the line. It takes Gavin a second to realize that it’s the sound of Nines laughing, low and quiet. Instantly — like a flock of birds startled into flight — Gavin’s pulse hurtles sky-high, a thousand pounding wings. He squeezes his eyes closed and balls his hands into fists, trying to focus instead on the press of his knuckles into his forehead.

“Same as everyone else here,” says Nines. “I came to watch you.”

It’s an answer and not an answer at all, at once. Like the thrum of the plug in him, so close to bullseye that it leaves Gavin burning with thirst, aching to be met. The tips have been relentless since he turned around, whoever is responsible for them, the unremitting quiver of silicone petting those first few inches inside him. Perhaps not the explosive release he craves — that he knows he can have, touched a little deeper inside — but he’s sensitive there just the same, and it’s more than enough to get him leaking hard.

“What about you?” asks Nines. “Are you getting what you came for?”

“Yeah, it’s— it’s good,” gasps Gavin, half to himself. “But it’s, ah, I can’t— come like this, I need— need more.”

“You don’t have to ask for it,” Nines tells him. “You can do whatever you want.”

Distantly, like a playback of someone else’s body, Gavin watches his own hand reach down between his legs. Whatever I want. He spreads his knees further apart, letting the camera in on every last bit of it, and wraps his fingers around the heft of his full cock. It’s such a welcome wash of pleasure that he whines at the contact, open-mouthed, rubbing his cheek against the sheets. The tokens jingle into his tip jar, a molten stream.

“Ah, fuck—,” he grits out, clawing at his pillow.

“Better?” asks Nines.

“Better,” slurs Gavin, “yeah,” swiping the pad of his thumb over his slick cockhead. The length of his shaft peeks ruddy between his fingers as he strokes himself, shuddering when a brush sends the fizzle of something electric running down his spine. He ghosts a touch around the underside of his glans, light but precise, and the jolt makes him tighten deliciously around the hum of the plug.

Dizzy with the high, he barely knows what he’s saying aloud. Just the feeling of his own hand moving on his cock, exactly the way he likes it, as the fervid hunger of strangers lights him up from the inside. And you, he thinks, among the strangers, you. Nines on the other end of the call, like a secret pressed to Gavin’s chest. Undressed and on display, his ass in the air, a little piece of him for sale to anyone with a couple dollars to blow— and still, no one else has your voice in their head. Incomparably precious, this small and private thing.

“I—” says Gavin, “I’m almost— ah, if—”

“Yes,” Nines prompts him.

Precome beads at the crown of Gavin’s flushed cock, drips slowly onto the sheets, a viscous strand. He just needs the slightest nudge to tilt him over the edge, something to cling to as he falls.

“Can I,” he pants, “can I— say your name,” the sweat in his eyelashes blurring the room.

Nines, when he answers, sounds a little strangled. “If you like,” he says.

But Gavin finds, to his chagrin, that he doesn’t want to say it after all. Not in the way he meant to, extravagant and lush, something to flaunt for the nameless crowd. I want them to look, thinks Gavin, but I want them to know this isn’t theirs. Where you take me, that’s between us.

Instead, as the urgency of climax mounts in his bones, Gavin forces himself to swallow the noises slipping from him. Like shielding a candle from the wind, he tends to the bloom in the pit of his stomach, taming it, turning its face inland. And finally — when his blood is a hurricane through his veins, his whole body tensing on the brink — into the quiet eye of the storm, he offers it up.

“—Nines,” he whispers, just a shatter of a prayer.

The sound of Nines breathing in, sharp as broken glass. Gavin bites down on his lip and shakes apart, keening hot into the crumpled sheets. A streak of come spatters onto the bed between his knees, welling thick between his fingers in spurts as he brings himself off, the plug buzzing against the tender twitch of his hole and dragging out the moment interminably until he thinks he might have to scream.

“Stop,” he says, scratchy. “God, stop.” He flounders about in his app library and disconnects the plug from the chat, tugging it out of himself when he manages to get a grip on it. Winded, he collapses onto his stomach, mashing his wet cock underneath himself. The heat whirlpools in his chest, doesn’t let go of him easy.

In the chat, the confused spectator seems to have figured it out. Turns out I’m into it, they type.

Yeah I couldn’t piece together what that phone convo was about? But I got invested, someone else says. Really hot. Another sums it up: Came for the tits, stayed for the drama

In retrospect, that last verdict is about what Gavin should have expected from the clientele that frequents this website. The respectable haul in his tip jar, too, is a testament to the approbation of the audience. “All right, show’s over,” he mumbles, fishing numbly in his bedside drawer for the remote to the webcam. “If you liked what you saw, come find me at my usual time, twice a week. Thanks for the tips, hope you got your fucking rocks off too.”

Because he is still in the service industry, caustic as his work persona might be, he flashes a quick untidy smile over his shoulder before he switches off the camera and lets the remote drop. He’d do more of a wind-down otherwise, but these aren’t his regulars, and besides— Nines is still on the line.

“Hey,” says Gavin, face buried in a cushion.

“I may have missed the appropriate moment to hang up,” says Nines. “But I did remember that I have a video to send you. Check your texts.”

Before Gavin can take a crack at him — Is it your audition tape? I genuinely do think you’d be terrible at this job — the attachment comes through and the bristles crumble to dust in his throat. Queenie, someone says from offscreen, Rob. The video pans down to the playroom floor of the shelter, where Queenie and Rob are lying puddled on top of each other, her head resting on his.

Say hello to Gavin, the voice tells them. Queenie and Rob look up towards the camera, brows drooping quizzically; maybe their ears prick up at the sound of his name, or maybe Gavin imagines it.

Landau in his study, the afternoon light through the French windows. They missed you. Gavin remembers the weight of the Presas as they settled next to him, restful against his leg, Landau’s hand in his hair as he thought: This is where I belong. Wasn’t that a kind of intimacy? A small and private thing, just for himself, gentle as Nines’s hands pressing his arm back into place.

Haven’t I been here before?

“It seems like they’re doing okay,” says Gavin, rote, like mouthing the words to a song he knows by heart.

“What?” asks Nines. He sounds personally affronted by Gavin’s response. “Yes, they’re being taken care of, but— you should go visit them sometime.”

“They got taken to Ann Arbor,” stammers Gavin, wrenched away from the blueprints by Nines’s indignation. “That’s 40 miles away, I can’t—”

“An immaterial consideration,” says Nines. “Would you like to hear about the fuel efficiency of the 2036 Chevy Malibu?”

“—You freak,” says Gavin. “You and that fucking car.”

He shifts and smears the damp patch he’s left on the bed, tacky against his ribcage. Should have laid something down, but of course, this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. It rarely ever is, with Nines.

“I have to wash these sheets,” says Gavin.

“Sorry if things got— out of hand,” says Nines.

“No,” says Gavin, “it’s exactly what I wanted,” because Nines has never taken anything from him that he wasn’t already eager to give.

Landau didn’t take anything from you, either, said Hank. You gave it to him.

Chapter Text

10.

Someone who was here before knew how to love the little things in life, or at least had a killer sense of humor. Gavin looks up and sees the sunlight filter through a riot of green above him; the elm leaves rustling in past the blown-out window frames, a verdant wayward limb that refuses to let zoning ordinances dictate where it can and can’t encroach. The canopy of overgrowth stirs in the breeze, and Gavin closes his eyes to listen to the rich susurrus of the wind through the trees, mosaic shards playing across the insides of his lids.

Whoever moved this bathtub next to the window, he thinks, had it in mind to squat like a king. With his feet crossed at the ankles on the lip of the tub, cradled by chipped porcelain, he supposes he can see the appeal of it. If you’re going to get tweaked out on ice, might as well deal with the crash in a room with a view.

“Nines,” he shouts. “Do you think the upper floors here were a flop house?”

Through the yawning chasm of the hole in the middle of the concrete floor, Nines’s voice comes floating up from the ground level. “Perhaps, in a limited sense,” he says. “Could have been somewhere to try the merchandise, but with the building in this state— I don’t see anyone managing to stay here for any sustained length of time.”

“I can’t hear you,” yells Gavin. “I’m lying in a bathtub.”

“Have you tried not lying in a bathtub?” asks Nines, reasonably.

As a compromise, Gavin sits up, folding his arms over the edge of the tub. Nines is busy scouring the first floor for physical evidence, trying to piece together what might have happened when the dealers cleared out. It was empty already by the time the DPD caught wind of it, but Nines thought it was worth a look, still.

Vice doesn’t have android officers that can perform forensic work on site, said Nines. I’ll be able to get more out of the scene than they did.

Can’t they borrow Connor? asked Gavin, buckling the seat belt.

He’s doing something, said Nines. Actually, I’m waiting on a call from him.

Gavin ponders what Connor’s up to, that he’s not available to turn his circus pig tricks like his contract stipulates. Some follow-up on the issue of the arm, presumably; the impact on the wound site, said Connor, as he toggled Gavin’s shoulder loose.

“The CyberLife geolocation data,” begins Gavin.

“What about it?” Nines calls back.

“How granular is it?” asks Gavin. “If I didn’t have the GJ500 replacement part, and they had to look up where my arm was during that time— do you think they’d have been able to tell how fast I was jacking it?”

A pause, as Nines considers whether to dignify this with a response. He’s barely audible as he prowls the ruins of the lobby on his panther feet. Gavin’s own HUD, laissez-faire as ever in the absence of biosignatures, dismisses him with a perfunctory all systems online when he asks for an environment check. I wonder what he sees, thinks Gavin, swiveling like a satellite dish to follow the path that Nines cuts across the floor.

“—Certainly not that granular,” says Nines, eventually. “Though they would have been able to tell that you don’t get out much.”

“I do more, now,” says Gavin. “Even if we never go anywhere nice.”

“Can’t imagine what you mean,” says Nines. “I happen to think that an erstwhile red ice distribution site in an abandoned high-rise is a wonderful destination for a day trip.”

“The tub does add a certain something,” admits Gavin.

“Loath as I am to tear you away from your new favorite haunt,” says Nines, “do you want to come take a look? I’ve found something.”

Gavin lifts himself up and out. At the perimeter of the chasm in the floor, he peers over and estimates the drop; 14 feet, no sweat, and much quicker than the stairs. Vaulting lightly over the rim, he hooks his hands around the torn edge of the floor— and swings down in a twist, holding himself there to hang for a moment, suspended halfway between the stories.

From the far end of the lobby where he’s examining a pillar, Nines stares. “What are you showing off for?” he asks. “I know you can make a 14-foot drop.”

“Then will you add it to my resume?” asks Gavin, letting go, landing on his feet.

“You’re not joining the FBI,” says Nines.

Gavin pads over to the pillar, which Nines is scrutinizing from all possible angles, cataloguing whatever it is that he finds unusual about it. For Gavin’s part, absolutely nothing appears out of the ordinary.

“Bike treads,” says Nines, hovering his finger over a pristine inch of plaster.

“I’m sorry to break this to you,” says Gavin, “but there’s nothing there.”

“That’s fair,” says Nines. “It’s more of a— compression of sediment, rather than a visual imprint. What’s noteworthy is that there are multiple overlays of tread patterns against this pillar, not always from the same tires. From the position of the pillar within the lobby, I don’t see why independent visitors would gravitate towards this one in particular to lean their bicycle against.”

“So the cyclists had something in common,” says Gavin. “You’re trying to rule out the possibility that it was a coincidental series of urban explorers that just happened to park their bikes in this spot.”

“The treads would seem to indicate against such a conclusion,” says Nines. “It’s a conjecture, at most, but what if the cyclists were directed here? If someone with control over this space wanted a succession of bikes moving in and out of the location for some reason, in an orderly fashion.”

“Bike couriers,” says Gavin, beginning to catch Nines’s drift. “You think they were using bike couriers to clear out the stash?”

“I’d want to verify it first,” says Nines, “pull CCTV data from a radius of a few blocks, if possible. But it’s an option I’d like to pursue.”

Far above the invisible stamp of bike tires — higher than either of them can reach — a spray of rebar protrudes from the column, lanky and jagged. Every spear of steel dreary as the rib of some giant fish, its broken backbone holding up the rubble of the building, kind enough to house them within its vast skeleton.

And when I’m landfill, thinks Gavin, will I be able to do half so much as this? Will my body hold enough soil to grow anything?

It’s a fucking bummer of a question, and he’d prefer to think about almost anything else. Hands thrust in his pockets, Gavin turns on his heel and goes hunting for something to distract himself with.

“What’s that tell you?” he asks Nines, over his shoulder. “How do the bike couriers figure into it?”

“It does suggest that whoever was running the show here wasn’t tipped off,” says Nines. “Or at least, that they didn’t move out because of anything they might have heard about the DPD raid. Bike couriers are mobile and they’re good at flying under the radar, but they’re not the first option you’d think of when things come down to the wire. It’s likely that this space was already intended to be cleared out at a predetermined time.”

“And you wouldn’t use them to move much,” says Gavin. He passes under a crumbling wall with the word BAD spray-painted onto it in a childish neon green scrawl, and turns as he walks to study it in the rearview. “Whatever stash was being kept here, it wasn’t the bulk of what the distributors were working with. Smaller sites, scattered further apart, frequently relocated.”

“It’s a different model of distribution,” says Nines. “Compact, itinerant. Serves as a trial run for when the center of operations no longer remains within Detroit. It corresponds with the move to the UP that you were talking about, with Boots.”

“How’s that son of a bitch doing,” asks Gavin.

“Cantankerously,” says Nines. “We hate him.”

Tucked away into the corner of the elevator nook, a metal door stands ajar. Gavin tugs it open the rest of the way, hinges protesting through their mouthful of rust, and finds himself standing in a closet-sized machine room. Out of idle curiosity, he unfastens the cover to the electrical enclosure box; his fingers come away coated in dust and grime, but inside — to his surprise — all the wiring for the elevators still seems to be intact. The one unblemished thing in a landscape of decay.

There’s no electric in the building, naturally. The emergency power source has long since run dry, no sign of stirring when he rocks the switch back and forth in its cradle. Gavin plucks the wires from its back and strips off an inch of vinyl insulation because it’s something to do, not because he expects anything to come of it. The skin on his hands pulled bare, he rolls the exposed copper between his thumb and index finger, feckless as skipping a stone across a stream.

Divert battery power to external unit? asks his HUD.

—Yes, he answers in the shock of the moment.

A trickle of current snakes out of him, jumps from his fingertips to the wiring, the pinprick eye of the emergency power source blinking awake to red. He may not have thought it through, but it doesn’t feel dangerous; his own battery level holds at 92% for a long wary heartbeat before it ticks down to 91%, and all he needs to do to tap out is let go of the wires in his hand. More than anything, he’s delighted by the simple selfish thirst reaching for him from the other end, like the clamor of fledgling birds in their nursery of twigs, knowing nothing but want.

Maybe, even if I’m not made for soil and water, he thinks, this is a way of keeping something alive.

“Gavin,” Nines calls from outside. “It’s Connor. He has updates about the arm.”

I can’t move because I’ve become the primary caretaker for an elevator is an explanation that begs too many follow-up questions, so Gavin keeps that to himself. “Put him on speaker,” he shouts back. “I’ll adjust my threshold levels.”

With his auditory sensors cranked up, he can hear the motor purring in the ribcage of the building, the warm rise and fall under the concrete pelt of a fifteen-story animal. A crackle as the sound quality evens out on the call, then Connor’s voice: “You know this as well as I do, Agent, but reconstruction is a tool that rapidly loses its efficacy with each confounding variable introduced into the equation.”

“I’m familiar,” says Nines.

He must be combing the layout still for any wheat kernels left to glean, the sotto voce patter of his shoes on the floor tracing a methodical serpentine grid. Gavin closes his eyes and maps out the fine latticework of Nines’s footsteps by sound, vista dark but for the serene glow of his battery reserves, plenty left to spare.

“Since I wasn’t able to examine Landau’s body in situ for very long,” says Connor, “and since the presence of the dogs left the scene somewhat— compromised, the process of piecing together the circumstances of the attack was much more cumbersome than I am accustomed to. I don’t think I fully understood the events until my consultation with the ME today.”

“What was the outcome of the meeting?” asks Nines.

“Cross-referencing my pattern analysis with the ME’s records,” says Connor, “I was able to determine that the attacker was likely positioned behind Landau when the initial strike occurred. The blow landed to the side of his face because Landau turned partway through the swing; in all probability, as these things usually go, the intended site of impact should have been the back of his head.”

“And yet,” Nines points out, “that alone doesn’t transform the trajectory of your investigation.”

“Correct,” says Connor. “The more significant finding is what the position of the attacker tells us about how the murder weapon was wielded.”

“The GV500 arm component,” says Nines.

“I’m going to walk you through this next part,” says Connor. “Hold out your right arm and make a fist.”

The 50% charge alert flashing at the edge of his display, Gavin lets the wires fall from his fingers. That’s enough juice in him to take him through the end of the day, and enough in the elevator for a ride up to the rooftop. Right arm extended in front of himself, hand curled in a loose fist, he ambles out of the machine room and back onto the floor.

Nines glances up at him, and nods. “All right,” he tells Connor.

“The right hand on the GV500 arm catches the right side of Landau’s head,” says Connor. “As we’ve established, the attacker is standing behind Landau. If this were the work of an android connected to the arm, using their fist to land the blow, which way would the thumb be facing?”

Gavin wags a diagonal thumbs-up at Nines, who says: “Left towards the inside of the body, or upwards.”

“Now turn your hand so that the thumb is facing downwards,” says Connor. “Because the shape, size, and depth of the knuckle indentations at the impact site all indicate that when the GV500 hand struck Landau, it did so while oriented in this direction.”

At the awkward contortion this demands from him, the back of his hand rotated inwards — certainly no good for a swing with any kind of force behind it — Gavin exchanges a frown with Nines.

“It wasn’t connected to an android user at all, was it?” asks Nines. “Someone was holding the detached arm, swinging it like a bat.”

He wraps his right hand around Gavin’s arm to demonstrate, just below the elbow, a band of firm pressure that bleeds heat through fabric and skin. Gavin keeps himself deathly still until it’s over. This, he thinks, I wouldn’t mind so much. You handling me, a sword to do your bidding.

“In no conceivable universe,” says Connor, “is a replacement peripheral from an out-of-production android model line the first weapon within anyone’s reach. What all of it amounts to is intent, Agent. If there was any doubt over the matter, I think this just about clears it up— it isn’t merely that Gavin was dragged into the investigation because of his make and number. The murder weapon was chosen because of Gavin.”

“I’m flattered,” says Gavin.

“Hello, Gavin,” says Connor. “You’re being framed.”

“Albeit badly,” muses Nines. “Being shoddy with the rotation of the hand, that’s strike number one. Not knowing that Gavin was fitted with a GJ500 arm, strike number two. Besides — as we discussed — the access log and geolocation data would have eventually gotten him off the hook, so all these efforts to incriminate him were always going to end in failure. Why do it, then?”

It’s really not the appropriate moment for it, but the question snaps Gavin back to his bed, Thursday night away from River Rouge, stroking himself over his boxer briefs as Nines asked: Then why do this? Why spend your time on something that can only get you so far?

I don’t want to go anywhere far, he told Nines, then. He can’t dwell on the memory for long, not here in the middle of a dilapidated flop house with Connor on the phone, but something about it snags in a way he can’t quite untangle into words.

“At any rate,” says Connor, “I’d keep an eye out, just in case. You’re on someone’s mind.”

“Again, I’m flattered,” says Gavin.

“How’s the high-rise?” asks Connor. “Any new information of note?”

“Yes,” says Nines. “I’ll loop you in when I write something up and send it over to Vice.”

“Please don’t tell me all at once,” says Connor, wryly.

As Nines ends the call and slips the phone back into his pocket, he gives the lobby a final measured once-over. There’s an instant when he turns back — when the target of his attention narrows from the whole room, funneling down to just Gavin — that the faraway sweep of his eyes visibly settles into focus, gathering weight, folding its wings.

I wonder what you see, thinks Gavin. What do you find in me that keeps you coming back?

“If you’re finished sightseeing,” says Nines, “we can head out.”

“Finished sightseeing?” echoes Gavin. “You’re telling me that we came all this way to an abandoned high-rise, fifteen stories tall, and you aren’t going to take a look at the view? We haven’t even started sightseeing.”

“It’s not a particularly scenic outlook,” protests Nines. “It’s too far from anything that could even be generously described as picturesque. Is the lake visible at all from here?”

“Nines,” says Gavin, “I walked past a piece of graffiti that was just the word BAD. No art to it, absolutely not aspiring to anything, just BAD, in someone’s hideous handwriting. This building is a shithole and the view is going to be the only interesting thing about it.”

Nines sighs and turns towards the stairwell, which is his way of acquiescing. “I thought you liked the bathtub on the second floor,” he says.

“And maybe there’s another one up on the roof,” says Gavin. “Wouldn’t that be something.”

The ambient murmur of the elevator pitches to an appreciable volume as they near it, side-by-side with the stairs. Nines stops and looks up at the floor display panel above its doors, raising his eyebrows at the defiant proclamation on the screen, L for lobby.

“Why is this elevator still working?” he asks.

“I may have found the machine room,” says Gavin.

“—So that’s what you were doing, I see,” says Nines. “Where did you find a power supply?”

“I may have diverted some battery power to it,” says Gavin.

Nines can see for himself that Gavin is perfectly fine, so the confession doesn’t cause him any undue alarm. Instead, he just shakes his head, the corners of his eyes creasing with something caught between exasperation and indulgence.

“What do I do with you,” he says, half to himself.

“You could race me,” says Gavin.

“How would I race you?” asks Nines. “There’s only the one elevator.”

“Which I’ll be on,” says Gavin. “I ride the elevator, you run up the stairs, and we’ll see who gets to the top floor first. Your DARPA money legs, versus me and this hunk of metal.”

Arms crossed, Nines cranes his neck towards the stairwell and contemplates it in thoughtful silence. Gavin recognizes the deliberation, the same species of prognostic calculation that he was built to do, once; Nines watches the ghost of himself scale the stairs, thermal resistivity constants and friction coefficients flitting like snowflakes through his sleek supercomputer head.

“You would win,” concludes Nines, at last.

“Oh, don’t give me that,” says Gavin. “So you won’t do it? Just because your preconstruction told you that you’d lose?”

“If it’s the irrefutable accuracy of my predictive modeling that’s being contested here—” begins Nines.

“Your humility continues to inspire me,” says Gavin. “But no, that’s not really it, I guess what I mean is— would you never do something that seemed futile to you? If you’re pretty sure you know how something will go — and you’re pretty sure it’s not going to go well for you — then that’s the end of the line, you just won’t do it?”

“What would be the purpose of the exercise?” asks Nines.

He looks so earnestly perplexed by the very idea that Gavin can’t hold his intransigence against him. In all honesty, Gavin’s not completely certain why he’s pushing the matter, either. Just that this defense of the unmapped wilderness feels like the prelude to something more important, some rallying cry for a fight he’d been putting off, restless now for the sound of the words in his mouth. Maybe you need to hear it, but maybe so do I.

“After the second shutdown,” says Gavin, “in the post-op recalibration chamber— I got one request in, did I tell you that? I asked them to switch my preconstruction module off.”

Brows furrowed, Nines asks: “You removed your preconstruction capabilities?”

“God, I was too chickenshit to do away with it entirely,” says Gavin. “I was afraid I might regret it. So they built in a manual override option to switch it back on, if I want— but I never wanted it back, not for a single moment. Is that odd? I never regretted it.”

“Why did you want it deactivated?” asks Nines.

“What did it ever do for me?” counters Gavin. “Just told me how best to do all the things I didn’t know to refuse. How to take a hit for someone without asking why, like the glorified bulletproof vest he saw me for. I thought— if this is what it means to make the most of myself, then I’d rather be much less. I’d rather fuck things up for myself and know that I’m to blame.”

He drags his thumbnail across the surface of the elevator call button, tracing the cap of the upward arrow. “It’s just,” he continues, “I don’t know how to square that with what it was like to do what I was told. It felt good, you know. It felt right. It— still feels right, sometimes.”

Nines makes a reflective sound, low in his throat. “Phantom limbs will do that,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if the arm’s not there, you feel with it just the same. Sensation resides in experience, not in stimuli; there’s no point in trying to convince yourself that it’s any less real for being rooted in nothing.”

The sensation of coming home, the surety that there was no place for him away from Landau — that I should have been thrown on your funeral pyre — all of it, a mirage that beckons like the real thing. A phantom limb, aching somewhere that he doesn’t know how to get at.

“Anyway,” says Gavin, “that’s the story of my preconstruction vasectomy.”

“What a title for it,” says Nines, with a grimace.

Gavin pushes his thumb into the call button. The doors lurch open in fitful jerks, a convulsive skeletal dance. But inside, the elevator cab is so jarringly pristine that it seems like a passage to somewhere else altogether; its wood-paneled walls a little slice of otherwise, what the building could have been in better days. Even the recessed LED lights on the ceiling gleam strong and steady, never given the chance to burn out.

“Race me,” says Gavin, stepping inside.

“You’re going to win,” says Nines.

“Do it anyway,” says Gavin. “Do it like you’re too fucking stupid to know any better.”

“Wait— hang on,” says Nines, as Gavin plants himself in front of the control panel. “What are we playing for? Are there stakes involved?”

“I’m sure we’ll think of something,” says Gavin, jabbing at the buttons — fifteen, close doors — waxing a hair more cheerful to be at his insolent best.

“That’s not how—” is as far as Nines gets through the telescoping crack of the doors, before the seam seals closed on his objection. The cab kicks under Gavin, his rodeo bronco colt, before it finds its stride and rockets up towards the open sky.

Phantom limbs will do that, said Nines, who understood. Gavin wraps his palm around the cool anchor of the railing, and thinks: I felt what I felt, no matter how I came by it. Deviancy wasn’t the obliging hand that arrived to wipe the fog from the windows, never graced him with any answers to the questions that shook him out of sleep. Why, unfettered, do I still think of you? Why the brush of your suit jacket against my arm, why the lingering touch you never meant? rA9 didn’t give a shit about what kept him up at night.

So: to give a name to the crossed wires in him — a phantom limb — does something to help him understand, but it’s no sword to cut through the knot. If the sensation at his fingertips is just as real for being rooted in nothing, then how should he know what he has under his hand? How to winnow the wheat from the chaff, when they weigh the same in his fan? How to look at Nines, the crooked tilt of his smile, his feet turned towards Gavin, and to be able to say — without a shred of hesitation — this time, I know it’s solid ground. You’re the real thing.

The elevator clangs and clatters the whole way up, drowning out anything Gavin might have listened for in the stairwell. Nines must have preconstructed himself at top speed, to have had so much conviction in his own defeat; but the thought of Nines putting in any significant physical effort is so outlandishly exotic that Gavin draws a blank in trying to imagine it, a tight parallel parking job being about the most taxing feat he has ever witnessed Nines perform.

Was he just hedging his bets? wonders Gavin, as the elevator rattles into place. Maybe he’s already here.

It’s too loud to tell, up until the very moment that the doors stagger open and Gavin steps past the sill, and then — just when the sole of his foot takes his weight on the landing — Nines comes careening like a freight train up the final flight of stairs, wild-eyed, hurling himself onto the fifteenth floor.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” exclaims Gavin, back hitting the closed doors.

Doubled over with his hands on his knees, collar askew and hair in shambolic disarray, Nines manages to wheeze out: “—I was correct.”

That’s what you wanted to say? Gavin has to extricate himself from the situation to keep from losing it entirely. He reaches for the doorknob to the emergency rooftop exit and joggles it, his face turned away from Nines to hide the way it threatens to crumple in laughter. The door is locked, but so what.

“Did you know it would be this close?” he asks.

Nines stares balefully up at him. “Of course I knew,” he says, then sucks in an enormous determined breath like he’s commanding his lungs to control themselves.

“How—” Gavin’s voice wavers despite his best efforts, so he clears his throat and tries again. “How did it feel?”

“Futile,” says Nines.

Then he huffs out a little laugh and straightens up, brushing back a stray curl of hair. The high sweep of his cheekbones aglow, shirt and jacket rumpled with exertion, he tilts his head and adds: “Still, not bad.”

Something inside Gavin stirs without making a sound, a feather in freefall lighting on the surface of a mirror-still lake. You didn’t have to go along with it, but you did. Just because I asked you to. Nines racing up fifteen flights of stairs to play a losing game, for no reason other than a momentary glimpse into how Gavin stumbles through the world.

The touch ripples. Maybe I can’t tell the difference, thinks Gavin, but you do feel like the real thing. You do.

Parched, he swallows and leans back against the emergency exit. “—Nines,” he blurts out. “I know I can’t, you know, walk through a pipe bomb blast or— see tire treads where there aren’t any, shit like that, but— still,” he stammers, “you know I’d—”

“We don’t have to talk about all that,” says Nines, breezily, but with such an immense air of finality that he may as well have pulled closed a physical gate. “Do you want to go outside?”

“It’s locked,” says Gavin, as Nines comes over to try the knob.

“That’s a singularly terrible quality for a panic door to have,” says Nines, “but it shouldn’t be a problem.”

He takes a step back and inspects his options, running his hands across the rusted hinges, tapping the base of the door with his toe and listening for the reverb. Preconstructing his way to the finish line, tried and true. That jogs a question out of Gavin.

“—Earlier, downstairs,” he says, “didn’t you mention something about stakes?”

“So I did,” says Nines.

“You wanted to bet on the race, when you knew you were going to lose?” asks Gavin. “What the hell for?”

Nines pauses his reconnaissance to mull this over. “I suppose it wasn’t so much a bet, what I had in mind,” he says. “More that I thought of something you might want.”

“That’s not a bet,” says Gavin. “That’s just a present.”

“Call this what you like,” says Nines, and leans down to kiss him.

Gavin isn’t— surprised, exactly; he remembers the drape of Nines’s jacket over his shoulders at Central Station, the searing outline of Nines’s palm at his collarbone, the way you keep coming back to watch me, too curious to let this lie. Both of them circling each other, locked midway through their dance. We knew we were headed here.

The kiss is brief and dry, firm as a seal pressed into wax. As he turns his face up towards Nines, his hair a whisper against the peeling paint job of the door, Gavin thinks: He’s trying to tell me something. Beyond the want — beyond the softness of regard — there’s a tight insistence held back in the set of Nines’s jaw, an intensity that verges on anger. Not at me — that much, Gavin knows — but unhappy, somehow. Like there would be teeth in this, if you let yourself.

When Nines pulls away, he lingers a moment in the space between them, searching Gavin’s face like hunting for marks he’s left. The imprint of the seal in wax. I wish I knew what you wanted me to hear. Gavin holds himself still, doesn’t chase after Nines’s mouth.

“You didn’t need an excuse to do that,” he says, instead.

“Is that right,” says Nines. “Let’s go take a look at that view.”

Gavin stands well clear of the doorway, as Nines raises a foot and slams his heel in next to the knob. With a thunderous metallic screech, the entire thing flies clean off its crumbling hinges, skidding along the rooftop to crash against an air vent. In its wake, a track of pale scars dragged through asphalt.

The sun floods the corridor, sudden and ruthless and brilliant. Gavin can’t make out much, but he shades his eyes to watch Nines walk into the open air— his silhouette tall against the postcard of light, steady at the threshold.

If only this could be it, thinks Gavin. If the shadow you cast was a place where I could come to rest.

11.

The night is young, the quarter moon still low over the horizon. Gavin is down to his boxer briefs and a tatty old sweater; it would be boxer briefs and t-shirt, only some guest with a mysterious predilection for wool tipped him thirty tokens to pull the sweater on over his tee, to the dismay of everyone else in the chat.

“Don’t be upset,” Gavin tells the camera, smoothing the knit down over his front. “It was thirty tokens to put it on, so we’ll say— fifty to get it off of me? Tell you what, hit an even hundred and I’ll take it off slowly enough to make it worth your time, how about that.”

I just think androids should have the right to wear sweaters too, says the lanolin fetishist.

“Listen, you’re not wrong,” says Gavin. “I don’t know that anyone took those particular rights away from androids at any point in time, but god, you bet I’d be furious if I were banned from wearing sweaters by force of law.”

One of his regulars tips twenty tokens and says, for the nudity defense fund. Then he adds: GV500, something going on with you?

“What do you mean, going on with me?” asks Gavin. He claps a hand over his Thirium pump, demonstrably wounded. “Am I losing my touch? Shit, you gotta tell me if I’m losing my touch. I take pride in the work I do, I’m not going to coast by on the absolutely filthy body that Elijah Kamski gave me.”

I just mean, he says, lately you seem like you’ve got something on your mind.

“That’s a fucking shame, sorry,” says Gavin. “But sometimes I get a little caught up in it, you know that? What you do to me feels too good, I forget you’re there, sometimes.”

That’s not it, he types. I’m not saying it’s bad — it looks good on you, actually — but that’s not what I mean.

Hands knotted in the bottom hem of his sweater, Gavin pauses. This isn’t fair to his regulars. Sure, his bread and butter routine involves a healthy serving of disrespect, and it’s never been a stretch for him to inhabit the impertinence expected of him. But there’s a tacit understanding between him and his clients that’s born of the knowledge of what they can do for each other; any rebuff beyond that is just bad form, no matter how unintentional the slight.

“—Yeah, you’re right,” says Gavin. “I guess I’ve been— trying to figure something out.”

What he keeps returning to in his head, the tender fixation, a vulture that hovers above in tightening corkscrew spirals. Nines’s mouth against his. Call this what you like. A phantom limb, trapped between the I should know better and the press of his lips, the sensation of fitting together. The promise so unthinkably immense that its edges fade to sea mist over the waters: Maybe you could be for me.

Figuring out a good something? asks another regular. Or bad?

“I think that’s what I’m trying to figure out,” says Gavin, and doesn’t know if Nines is in the room to hear it or not.

It’s not like you’re in the chat every time I’m streaming, he said to Nines, once. I’ve developed an allergy to that Rico username, I know when you’re there because I break out in hives.

Well, I don’t always go by that name, said Nines.

You’re using aliases for your aliases? laughed Gavin. God, that’s so like you. I mean, what, so that I can’t tell when you’re around?

Do you really want to be able to tell, every time you think to ask? Eyes on the road ahead, his shoulders loose, Nines bore down on the gas pedal until the Malibu rumbled under them. Where’s the fun in that?

—Nines is in the room. He is; you know he is, and not because you see his name on the guest list, not because that’s what the chat log tells you. Facts like those inhere in what lies outside of him, knowledge by way of prosthesis. But the kind of knowledge that asks something of the knower in return — you know he’s here with you because you know him, because you have to believe that you know that much about him — for that, the kind of knowledge that goes by another name, trust — Gavin doesn’t need the written word.

“That’s what’s been on my mind,” he says, and knows Nines is listening. “Shit, it’s all I can seem to think about. I probably haven’t been doing a great job of pretending otherwise, have I? That’s my bad, it’s just really” — he casts around for the right word, lands on — “important, this something. It’s important to me.”

Halfway across town, in his pre-furnished rental with the curtains drawn, Nines must be watching him. The fidget of his nails in the sweater yarn. I’m talking about you, thinks Gavin, but I think you know that already. He presses his fingertips to his mouth, remembering.

Then, on his laptop screen, the borders of the window flash bright and the chat wipes blank; someone has booked him to go private. Gavin only just manages to check an audible sound of disappointment.

It’s not Nines, Gavin is aware of that much. Nines has always made a point of never pulling him out of his public streams, when his unavailability could lead to the loss of a potential repeat client; but even if the timing of this session is an annoyance, Gavin is a bit sheepish that his regulars have picked up on his inattention. Bad form, amateur form. He’ll do what he’s paid for, fair and square, and the rest can come later. Strange as the thought of it is — and maybe it’s something he’ll never quite get used to — Nines isn’t going anywhere.

“Hey, thanks for getting us a room,” says Gavin. “What’s your name?”

He looks towards his screen, where the scrolling header of the window informs him in eyesore highlighter colors: Welcome to your private session with 416_551_885 (1 hour)

—That’s my serial number, thinks Gavin, all the temperature draining from him.

In the chat log, the message bobs to the surface like the pale balloon of a drowned body. Hello, Gavin. Desmond Landau sends his regards.

Gavin reaches for the remote and switches off his camera. Numb with apprehension, he stumbles to his desk and sinks into the chair, hands clumsy as he types: Who the fuck is this?

I’m sure you have some questions about what happened to Desmond, they say. I’ve got answers for you. That’s who I am.

And this is how you want to do it? asks Gavin. You paid for a live sex show so that you can tell me who killed him?

So impatient, they say. Of course I’m not telling you here. I’d like for us to meet in person, tonight.

Fuck off, says Gavin. I don’t even know who you are.

But you know what happened to Desmond, they say. And you know someone keeps trying to palm you off to the DPD, that can’t be convenient for you. Wouldn’t you like to get to the bottom of what’s going on?

Of course he would, but not by walking straight into a snare. It seems increasingly likely to Gavin that the asshole on the other end of this — which is by far the least enjoyable private session that has ever been inflicted on him — is the same person responsible for both Landau’s death and his own scapegoating. No one’s contacting him in the middle of the night just to do him a good turn and clear up a few mysteries.

When he doesn’t answer, they continue: You must have heard all the details on the news. Slaughtered in his bedroom like that. Those dogs, what they did to his face.

Heard on the news, is it. Gavin narrows his eyes. If they don’t know that he’s been consulting with the FBI, that’s another big piece they’re missing. The wrong rotation of the hand, the wrong arm, the wrong data set, the wrong intel. Another misstep in an interminable series of negligent slip-ups.

What Gavin would like to ask is, why are you so fucking terrible at getting me to take the fall for you, but instead he types — measuredly noncommital — I heard.

Must have been a lot for you to take, they say. I know it would have twisted me up inside, if I were you. Someone who meant that much to you, Gavin, mangled like an animal with no dignity.

The bent of this last salvo is so utterly bizarre to Gavin that it stops him dead in his tracks for a moment. It takes him a few long seconds to wrap his head around it, but when he does, the realization shining at the center of it is so simple and so obvious that he stares down its razorblade edge and knows that it’s the truth.

My fucking god, he thinks. They don’t know me at all.

Credit where it’s due, it’s not an unreasonable conclusion for them to reach. He got shot twice on Landau’s behalf, parted reluctantly and on excellent terms, as far as the optics were concerned. Of course they’d think Landau must have meant something to him. It’s bad luck of the draw for them that the truth is, in fact, thoroughly unreasonable; that I still wake up with his name in my mouth, wishing that I’d killed him, knowing that I’d die for him all over again.

It’s nearly laughable, the sheer extent of their miscalculation. What the fuck kind of grief do they picture him going through? Stir-crazy with loss, pacing the grounds, itching for vengeance? Rending his garments and bathing in ash, every time the DPD does him the grave insult of daring to suspect him? Imagine. Sitting around gnashing his teeth, falling all over himself at the chance to do right by — his what, exactly? — and turning up in hysterics without a second thought.

You’re bad at blaming me because none of this was ever about me. A frame job in earnest wouldn’t fall apart at the seams like this. They don’t know him, and they don’t care; he’s just someone to point a haphazard finger at, close enough to Landau for the DPD to consider, a sucker in the wrong pocket at the wrong time.

Gavin watches his cursor blink, chipper as you please. He’s about to type out a dismissal of some sort, go fuck yourself and the junkyard scheme you rode in on, but stops with his hands hanging above the keyboard.

—Can’t this do something for Nines? he thinks.

Maybe a little face time with this motherfucker might be worth the hassle after all. Gavin, at least, has the advantage of his suspicion; they don’t know what he’s pieced together, and it seems likely that they don’t give a shit. He can go in with his guard up, play it safe. Might be time to dust off the preconstruction module, and if he does, it’s for a good cause.

For Nines. If Gavin can bring back some names for him — whatever scrap of information Nines can use to shore up Operation Electric Slide — won’t that help convince his SAC to keep the case open? Won’t that prove that the quarry in Nines’s sights more than merits the chase? Nines, his profile stark in the secondhand glow of the interrogation room, planting his feet: What I have in mind won’t give them that. I don’t want to give them that. The radiant live coal of his resolve, a picture too big for a dossier to hold.

Why shouldn't Nines have everything he wants? Let him tear like a comet across the Mackinac Bridge in his sensible fucking sedan, tread through the woods of the Upper Peninsula with the whitetails at his heels. Staking out a militia lodge from half a mile away, stock-still underneath a coat of autumn leaves, as the sun sets into Lake Superior and the snowshoe hares stir awake.

Nines, working his case like he always meant to, bloodhound nose to the ground, steadfast and happy. I could do that for him.

Into the chat, Gavin types:

Where?

Gavin leans his forehead against the passenger side window, face turned away from the empty driver’s seat. The inside of the autocab windshield is a cacophony of minutiae he never asked for: fuel gauge, airbag status update, odometer, barometer, hygrometer, a financial news ticker screaming something about CyberLife stocks. The only useful corner of it is the ETA clock. 17 minutes to destination.

The cab lurches across a pothole, knocking Gavin’s head into the glass. He hisses and rubs a rueful hand over the twinge. Guess I must have gotten too used to his driving. But— Nines would never agree to this, not in a million years. Of course. He wouldn’t even let Gavin drop by River Rouge flanked by multiple trained federal agents, so it’s out of the question that he would approve of what Gavin is doing now.

Nines’s voice, flat and cold enough to burn: Do you not remember what happened to you, the last time you wanted to be useful? Gavin knows the answer Nines wanted from him — I won’t ever do anything for anyone else again, not even you — but that’s a promise Gavin knows he can’t keep.

I am the way that I am, Nines, phantom limbs and all. Gavin traces over the joint of his elbow with an index finger. I don’t know how else to be.

15 minutes to destination. This next bit should be obvious, they told him when he asked for the rendezvous point, but the invite is just for you. Don’t bring a fucking party. I see you try anything funny and the deal’s off for good, so behave yourself.

Even with his webcam dark, the charade of bereavement was distasteful enough to take real effort from him. The bile rising in his throat, he typed, I will. For Des.

That’s right, Gavin, they said. Come on over, I’ll see you in twenty minutes.

He mapped the address in his HUD as he got dressed the rest of the way. A commercial garage turned upscale art gallery. The parvenu pretension of it was so inanely Landau — his silk and cologne, his cufflinks, Isfahan rug, trying his damndest to claw his way to respectability — that Gavin had to admit it was a fitting backdrop to put an end to things.

The gallery is, in essence, Desmond Landau in building form. A grimy storage unit decked out in overvalued tack, thinks Gavin, as the cab rolls to a stop at a red light. Probably acquired the business himself, before he bit it; he was always looking for better ways to do the washing up. Modern art launders well.

What they’re calling him down to the gallery for, Gavin doesn’t know. They must have come up with yet another underdeveloped gambit to throw in the DPD’s way, another smokescreen so feeble it barely obscures anything at all. You’re being framed, said Connor, and that much is the truth; but what they’re really interested in is keeping the DPD tied up with their petty misdirection until they move enough of the outfit up north.

Red herrings, all the way down. The Presas were always meant to wake up hungry, trapped behind locked doors with the scent of blood clogging the air. Their teeth marks, the famished mess they made of the scene, derailing even Connor from piecing it all together until weeks had passed in stalemate. The knuckle prints from the GV500 arm would have bought them months of squabbling in court, CyberLife and the DPD at each other’s throats, all the while as the syndicate found their foothold in the UP— the matter of Gavin’s limb replacement threw a wrench in those plans, but still, there were plenty more bargain-basement tactics to take its stead.

Why do it, then, Nines asked of the slipshod workmanship behind the frame job. Why go through the trouble of selling Gavin down the river, if they couldn’t put in enough effort to close the deal? It was the sort of question Nines couldn’t readily see the answer to, built for pursuit as he was, steely with focus. The same blind spot that led him to ask Gavin on his bed, why spend your time on something that can only get you so far?

I don’t want to go anywhere far, Gavin told him. Some things, you do just to tread water. It gives Gavin no great satisfaction to be on the wavelength of someone trying to pin a murder on him, but that desultory bent, he understands. What they want is the stagnation. They don’t give enough of a shit about me to take me down; I’m a disposable means to an end.

That’s fine. The feeling is mutual. Halfway down a long lane of bedraggled townhouses, the cab pulls up at the entrance to a parking lot, headlights the only bright thing for miles around. It’s a real dick move, to hate the poor so much that you’d set up your uppity laundry business in a neighborhood that your drug empire has trampled underfoot. Blow up their endocrine systems, blow up their property taxes.

Gavin swings the door closed, and the cab sails down the street like a horse slapped on the rump. Here we go, he thinks, booting up his preconstruction module, unlatching administrative access with the manual override key. It comes online in a flash; preconstructive modeling activated, his HUD informs him. Configure sensory input thresholds to environment-responsive dynamic range values? Tether biosignature detection alerts to local law enforcement registries? Correct for attenuation artifacts in thermographic imaging?

Yes, fine, Gavin says to the chirpy barrage of permissions requests. He never missed the dead-end surety of predictive computation — fully intends to switch it off as soon as this excursion is done with — but some unheeded part of him clearly relishes stepping into these well-worn shoes, a little of his old self glad to have him back. Well, don’t get used to it. Soundless and surefooted, he stalks his way across the lot.

Twenty garages, ten facing ten, rows of neat teeth bared in a grimace. Their overhead doors are pulled closed, a carbon-copy array of steel roll sheets— all except for the left garage on the far end, ajar just enough for a sliver of dull yellow light to seep out onto the driveway. Metal makes it difficult to tell for sure, but there’s bound to be a stray rustle or two when enough idiots to overpower an android stuff themselves into a locker together. Gavin doesn’t hear anything of the kind.

At the mouth of the appointed garage, close enough for the light to brush the toe cap of his shoes, Gavin double-checks his settings and takes a deep breath. He bends down to wrap a hand around the base of the door, lifts and ducks inside.

—Didn’t you do it?

What? asks Gavin. What did I do?

You killed Des. You, Gavin. He can’t put a name to it, but it’s a voice he knows; not the way that he knows it, exactly, its midtones all deafening static, so loud that the inside of his skull pounds with the reverberations and throbs hot behind his eyes, but familiar. It’s familiar. Didn’t you do it?

I didn’t, protests Gavin. The garage is empty, a single fetid lightbulb dangling from an extension cord. Nothing blinds him, no taser to the back of his neck, no crowbar, no muzzle of a gun, no torn-off arm chassis in someone’s vicious meaty grip, but why would there be, Gavin, whose arm chassis, only yours, remember, your hand clenched into a fist, driving into the ragged mangle of Desmond Landau’s face.

That wasn’t me, I didn’t do it, except you did, didn’t you? You should have asked him to take you back. Begged him for another chance, whatever he needed to be sure of you again. Dismantled yourself in the driveway and laid your parts out for inspection, let him see that you were still his, faithful as the day he first took you in. You should have proved it to him. The DPD, the FBI, you’d never let them get in the way of what you were meant to do. You could have been there for him.

It should have been you. The voice is his own, beneath the grime growing over it. As soon as Gavin recognizes it, all its margins resolve to sharpness, his voice, scathingly bitter. It should have been you, Gavin. What else were you ever good for? That hand may as well have been yours, you stupid selfish turncoat son of a bitch. Your hand, the fist, the shock of your bones striking his, ringing like a wind chime all the way up your machine arm. He was good to you, and that’s how you repaid him. Remember? That was you, standing over Des as he bled into his rug. You watched him shake, and you waited for it to stop. You may as well have.

I may as well have. You did. I did. I did it. I killed Desmond Landau. He takes a step forward, further into the garage. GV500 #416 551 885. On the night of February 17, 9:24PM, I broke into the Landau residence by scaling the outside wall of the building and accessing the second-floor balcony of the master bedroom. Something crashes in the unfathomable distance, the muffled report of metal on metal, a thousand miles away. Another step. Due to my time in Landau’s employ as a private security unit, I had extensive prior knowledge of the layout of the residence, Landau’s personal routines, and the presence of two Presa Canario guard dogs. Their names are Queenie and Rob. Queenie’s the bossy one, you know. She’s always pulling at her leash, telling me what she thinks about every little thing, getting into Rob’s dinner. He lets her, too, so I have to keep her busy while he eats. Probably because he used to be the runt of the litter. Though you wouldn’t know it from looking at him, he’s so big now, I think even Nines would—

—Nines.

Then, piercing through his head like a bolt of light, a tumult of garbled impressions: images that flash and scramble into staccato bursts of sound partway through, unspooling into the memory of skin, knitting back up again to the white-hot snapshot of a face, a weight in his ribcage, half-seen, half-heard. The silver music of coins streaming into a glass jar. Hair brushing against his cheek, LED faintly warm under his lips. The click of a seat belt buckle to his right. Good? Always. The fabric lining of a pocket, wrapped around the tangle of their fingers. Nines, a shaky whisper. A hand tightening in the sheets. Say hello to Gavin. Mastiff faces turned up, their eyes dark as velvet. The rustle of leaves over a portico. The loose drape of a nylon jacket, two sizes too big. A rusted door beneath his palm, peeling paint chips, the press of a mouth to his own. It’s important to me. His face staring back at him through a tablet screen, middle finger raised. You motherfucker. You cold fucking fish. The frenetic slap of leather soles against concrete, gasping for breath, rounding staircase after staircase after staircase, fifteen flights, the pump in his chest a furious whir, and at the end of it, on the final landing, stepping out of the rickety elevator, already there for him—

It’s all too fleeting, too fragmented — slipping through his fingers when he tries to hold it in place for a better look — but it’s enough to make Gavin stop in his tracks, as he tries to sort through the jumble. Leafing through a photo album from a year he can’t place, lost in the flurry but certain, still, that what swirls around him is very precious to someone. Whoever this is meant for, he thinks, they’re very lucky. Imagine being remembered like this. Being this wanted.

—Why am I in it? Who is—

When the hand curls around his cheek, Gavin leans into the touch without thinking, relieved for anything solid enough to tether him to his body again. Cool as river water, that skin against his. Inch by inch, like shedding the stream as he walks into the shallows, the liquid skin ebbs where they meet. Bare, he hears the sound cut through fog.

Gavin.

Is that who you’re looking for? Dimly backlit by the lightbulb in the corner, the blur of someone’s silhouette in front of him, hand on his cheek. That’s me. Are you looking for me?

Gavin, can you hear me? Nines’s voice. It’s Nines.

“—Nines,” says Gavin, tongue thick in his mouth.

He reaches out and grabs a fistful of nylon at Nines’s shoulder, the smooth shell of the windbreaker bunching under his fingers. I know this. Nines is looking for me.

Nines says something into the air, get you and car and come on, but the whole world is fuzzy outside of their interface link, drifting in and out of focus beneath a steady drone of crackling white noise. The dust clumps into snatches of language, here and there — you did it, remember — only to fall apart and scatter under its own weight. A gauzy something drifts onto his shoulders. With Nines’s hand around his arm, steering him out of the garage, Gavin lets the indistinct racket wash over him.

The steel curtain of the door slants at an awkward angle, wrenched up much further than he left it when he came in. Inexplicably transfixed by the crumple of sheet metal at the base of the gate, Gavin stares at its hazy outline as Nines maneuvers him towards the car, into the passenger seat. The front bumper is wrapped around the corner of the garage. Head swimming in static, he watches Nines come in through the driver’s side and reach for Gavin’s seat belt, fumbling with the buckle.

“Nines,” he slurs, “I did it.”

“Did what,” asks Nines.

“I killed Des,” says Gavin.

Slowly, Nines looks up at him, his eyes a smear of ash. “Okay,” he says, and stops. Says again, “Okay,” and “this fucking— can’t hear myself think,” and “we’re leaving.”

He fiddles with the control panel on the dashboard, then pinches the bridge of his nose and sinks back against the headrest. The car extricates itself from the garage corner with a long shrill grinding screech, bumper flapping loose, and backs out into the parking lot.

Gavin hears Nines mutter next to him, “Where the hell did they—,” the end of his sentence lost in the clatter of the bumper dragging along the road as they peel away. That’s a shame, thinks Gavin. His Malibu. That’s where they are: in Nines’s Malibu, Gavin in the passenger seat, the angle of the chair just the way he left it.

Nines is here. He wasn’t supposed to be, he wasn’t meant to know about any of this. Gavin took an autocab to the garage, didn’t tell Nines where he was going, no one ever said I had to, because Gavin was supposed to do this for Nines — just this one thing, this one time — bringing back something that could be of use for him. Doing something for him. Instead of getting kettled like a fucking idiot in between four metal walls with his own voice echoing through his head, one foot in front of the other towards god knows what, mere seconds away from a brainwashed confession. When he should have been helping Nines, for a change.

“Shit,” he says, out loud.

They’ve left the block behind, speeding towards the highway. Nines hears him curse and turns to him — the car’s on self-drive, Gavin now has the presence of mind to notice — and asks, “Did you kill Desmond Landau?”

“No,” says Gavin. “Jesus fucking Christ, no.”

“Good, welcome back,” says Nines. Then, hot on its heels: “What the fuck were you thinking?”

Gavin understands why that’s the way Nines asks it, frayed to the breaking point, but that doesn’t make it sting any less. He bites down on his lip until his HUD offers up a confused exclamation mark stamped inside a triangle, which is at least a reminder to access his settings and turn his preconstruction module back off. A lot of good it did him, anyway. “I was thinking,” he says, “I would get something done without you barging in on me.”

That’s not at all what he means to say. But thank you sounds like he wanted this to happen, and he’s too disappointed to give voice to I’m sorry, so instead he looks Nines in the eye and tells him, “You shouldn’t have come.”

“I shouldn’t have come?” repeats Nines, rightfully incredulous. “Are you— what are you talking about? If anything, you shouldn’t have gone.”

“Of course I had to go,” Gavin shoots back. “They called me up, was I going to pretend like I didn’t hear anything? Whichever asshole is behind this is behind the murder, and what, I’m just supposed to ignore that? Forget about trying to figure any of this out?”

“None of this is even about you,” Nines points out. “The thing is, they’re not framing you with any kind of intent to actually get you indicted, it’s only—”

“I know that,” says Gavin, louder than he would like. “It’s a distraction, that’s what you were going to say? They’re just giving the runaround to the cops, buying time while they move the business to the UP, using me as a convenient roadblock in the meantime? Yeah, I’m familiar, thanks.”

“You knew all that and you still decided to show up?” Nines makes an exasperated gesture with his hands, at a loss. “Why? What for?”

“For the case,” says Gavin, through gritted teeth. “It’s important exactly because it’s not about me, all of this — the murder, the dogs, the arm, this garage — it’s so that they can take the center of operations out of the city, right? Up to militia land? That’s Electric Slide, Nines! That’s your entire case!”

“This isn’t how you work a case!” retorts Nines. “You don’t just— you don’t go running off to do shit alone the instant you hear about it, you talk to— why am I explaining— you gather information around the lead so that you can follow up with—”

“You weren’t going to follow up on shit!” Gavin shoots back. “You said so yourself, you’re just going to sit there and let the SAC close Electric Slide on you, is that how you work a case? By dragging your feet and playing desk jockey until your boss fucks you over? Is that your idea of getting what you want?”

Grip tight around the disengaged steering wheel, Nines evens out the keel of his voice enough to hold it steady. “What I wanted,” he says, methodically, “was for you to refrain from doing exactly this. Making this kind of— blatantly reckless impulse decision, in some characteristically harebrained attempt to—” He stops and shakes his head, correcting himself. “But you knew all this. You didn’t tell me you were going because you knew I didn’t want you to do this for the case, or for” — the smallest hint of a stumble — “for any reason.” For me, he means. I didn’t want you to do this for me. The skin drawn sharp and pale over his knuckles, he says, “You knew I didn’t want this.”

“I don’t care what you want,” snaps Gavin. God, that’s not what he means to say, either, but the highway exits are flying past them and there’s only time enough to be cruel. “You think I can just— be some way, because that’s what you want from me? This is who I am, Nines, do you see that? You can’t turn me into something I’m not, no matter how— how much of a raw fucking deal it is, to have to put up with— this is it, this is what you get,” he says, and means, I’m sorry.

“What else am I supposed to do?” asks Nines, so determined to keep himself still that he’s shaking with the effort. “I don’t understand, I can’t just let you get— let you do shit like this, am I supposed to look away and tell myself, this is just the way he is? And what about the next time you get shut down? What’s going to happen then? What if they can’t— you’re barely— how many more cut-rate replacement parts do you think you can take? Half your insides were meant for someone else!”

“That is who I am!” yells Gavin. “The shitty pipes, the switched-out arm, this phantom limb bullshit, every stupid fucking misguided thing I’ve ever felt, all of it, that’s just me!” He slams his palm down on the molding of the door panel, hard enough to make it shiver. “Maybe what I have is wrong, but it’s what I have. That might seem like a malfunction, like I’m falling apart, but I’m not— I’m just living, best as I can. Just because it doesn’t look like how you do it— and, and besides, you won’t be so shiny and new forever, don’t you know that? You’re falling apart too, same as anyone else, you won’t—”

He falters, the rest of the sentence caught at the back of his throat, a thought too unpleasant to voice. Nines, anything other than the way he is now, daunting in all that he’s capable of, seamless and perfect. Impossibly bright, even in his anger. Desperate to stop himself from dwelling on it, Gavin blurts out: “—What I’m saying is, who I am or what I do— you can’t control everything.”

“Control?” repeats Nines, eyes wide. The car veers underneath them as it winds with the exit lane, turn signal blinking of its own accord. “This isn’t about control, why would you think—”

“Give me a fucking break, of course it’s about control!” Gavin waves wildly towards the glove compartment, towards Nines, the steering wheel. “You do your own fucking driving! You got yourself transferred indoors because you couldn’t stand the thought of making the wrong decision! Hiding behind your sunglasses, keeping everything so close to your chest— what’s that about, if it’s not about control? That pipe bomb barely singed you, but Jesus Christ, it’s still been telling you what to do for years!”

“Are you serious?” demands Nines. “You’re telling me I’m— so what is it then, when you get on camera, where no one can touch you? When you turn off your preconstruction and you refuse to interface? You’re going to tell me that’s not about control?”

The ghost of Desmond Landau, telling him what to do for years. Running away from something still meant you were letting it chart your course. Gavin clenches his hands closed, the sudden silence between them churning with the rattle of the front bumper scraping against asphalt, as the view outside the window turns to familiar streets.

The trouble was that they went about the business of learning each other all wrong. Enchanted by every inkling of disclosure, I gathered up everything about you that I could get my hands on. You wanted to know me, too, I think. But each luminous tidbit was a gemstone; without gold to thread it all together, no understanding of how those pieces fit into a whole, the jewels were just loose grapeshot in search of something soft to pierce through. Just a fistful of rocks to cut each other with, as they lashed out in their mutual incomprehension.

And maybe, thinks Gavin, I’ll never understand you in full. I don’t know what you see when you look at me.

“Drop me off,” he says, the taste sour in his mouth.

“Actually,” begins Nines, “there was something I wanted to—”

“Just drop me off,” says Gavin, whirling on Nines in frustration.

His elbow swipes a takeout paper cup nestled in the divider, knocking it over. A splash of Thirium blue sloshes onto the gear shift before he can set it back upright. “For fuck’s sake,” swears Gavin, irritably wiping his hands on his jeans. “Of all the— shit.”

“If you’ll hear me out—” Nines tries, again.

“Nines,” says Gavin, “please,” too tired to argue.

“—All right,” says Nines. “We’re here, anyway.”

The Malibu glides up to the curb and comes to a halt, you’ve arrived at your destination, heedless and innocent of the squalor it’s been privy to. Unwilling to wallow in the misery of their stalemate — but more reluctant still to find out what’s on the other side of it — Gavin fusses with his seat belt buckle, dawdling over it for another second or two after the tongue comes unhitched. Next to him, Nines doesn’t say a word.

I’m just making it worse, thinks Gavin. He tugs on the handle and throws the door open like ripping off a band-aid, no looking back. The vicious swing of it dislodges another paper cup from the holder built into the passenger side door, another blotch across the upholstery, on his palms when he tries to catch the cup from plummeting onto the street.

“How many fucking—” starts Gavin, voice on the verge of cracking.

“It doesn’t matter,” says Nines. “It’ll dry.”

Thirium dripping from his fingers, the paper cup dented with the mark of his hand, Gavin looks at what’s visible of Nines through the doorway. Inscrutable, statue-still from the collarbones down. Head held high enough for the slope of the roof to shroud him.

Gavin makes a beeline from front door to bedroom, keeping the house flooded in midnight shadows, loath to shine much light on anything. He sinks onto the edge of his mattress and feels something slide off of his shoulders, jostled by the impact; spilled across the sheets behind him, a pool of indigo. Nines’s windbreaker.

—What’d you give this to me for, thinks Gavin, with every ounce of ungratefulness he can muster. It’s not like I needed it for the warmth.

He lets gravity pull him down onto it, nylon cool as river water against his skin. All this fucking trouble on my account, and the only thing you’ll have to show for it is a mess of Thirium stains on your jacket. Gavin holds his hand above his face, pulling back the dermal layer until his stripped chassis gleams in the dark with its inorganic sheen. Here’s another complaint ticket for rA9’s shrine. Wasn’t this supposed to shield us from the terror of being alone? He watches the edges of his skin wax and wane over the contours of his open palm, inviting nothing. All this, and I still can’t ever know you well enough to be sure of you. This can’t teach me how to see what you see, or think the way you think, or tell me if you’re what I’ve been waiting for.

Pot, kettle. It’s easy to imagine what Nines could have told him, given the chance to present a precis of his unhappiness. I don’t know who you are, he might have said, or why you are the way you are, or what to do about it.

Me neither, thinks Gavin. I don’t understand you, and I can’t explain myself.

Curtains drawn, the ceiling of the bedroom is a pitch-black canvas; Gavin keeps his eyes open and sees fifteen staircase landings swirling in and out of sight. The full-tilt thudding of leather soles against concrete, the heavy ragged sound of Nines gasping for breath, running and running and running just to get to him. Futile, he said.

Futile. Then, laughing with his hair in ruins: Still, not bad.

Gavin turns his face into the jacket and inhales, holding the breath in his lungs for as long as he can. There’s no scent to it — why would there be, when there’s no scent to Nines — but Gavin thinks of metal shavings, the trace of ozone. Sharp and sweet.

Chapter Text

12.

“Is Agent Nines here?” asks Gavin.

Sam doesn’t even need to check her records to answer him. “He isn’t scheduled to come in today,” she says. “Did you have an appointment?”

“—No,” says Gavin.

“I can take a message,” she says, but Gavin shakes his head.

“What about Lieutenant Anderson?” he asks. “Connor? I don’t know if he has a departmental rank, or— are they in?”

“They are currently out of the office,” says Sam. “I’m authorized to inform you of their whereabouts as pertains to the Landau case, but I’m afraid this concerns an unrelated investigation.”

“Sure,” says Gavin. “It’s not the only thing they’re working on, I get it.”

Relegated to its mousy corner, the television set does what it can to furnish the lobby with the ambient hum of cable news. A grave prognosis for President Cristina Warren’s second term. Will she be the first incumbent in modern United States history to face defeat at the hands of a primary challenger? Stay with us for more stories from the campaign trail; and coming up ahead, why you should be thanking your migraines.

“You know,” says Sam, “Officer Chen is inside.”

Gavin hesitates. He pictures Tina handing him a can of something cold to drink — her gallant and uncomplicated decency — and it doesn’t sit right with him, that kindness. She’s going to want to help, he thinks, but she shouldn’t. I barely know her.

“That’s okay,” he says. “I’m going to head out.”

He can tell that Sam knows how to herd with a light touch, I’m sure Officer Chen would appreciate the company or this will let her get away from the desk for a few minutes, so he raises his hand and makes a hasty exit before Sam can lock him into anything. A commercial for a predatory microlending platform chases him out the door.

Going home feels too much like admitting defeat — though he’s unclear on who, exactly, would be defeating him — so he slumps onto a park bench near the entrance and reviews his options. Windbreaker balled up in his hands, hovering over the name in his contact list for the hundredth time that day. Nines.

No; that’s the whole reason Gavin dragged himself to Central Station in the first place. He doesn’t quite know what it is that he wants to say to Nines, but he’s armed with the aimless thought that maybe seeing Nines in person would manage to change that, somehow. Of course, if his objective is to run into Nines, it would make much more sense for him to loiter around the McNamara Federal Building instead— only Gavin doesn’t know it like he knows Central Station, and he doesn’t want to be caught on the wrong foot on unfamiliar ground, when he isn’t sure of where he stands.

What a shitshow. Gavin spent the whole night sleepless with nerves, Nines’s footsteps ringing through his head. The sound of Nines breathing. A jagged shard of what came to him in the garage suddenly stabs through him now, unbidden; his own hair brushing against his cheek — Nines’s cheek — the warmth of his LED under the touch of Nines’s lips. Unbearably tender, in the way that a bruise is. Flushing so hot that he can feel the blood pound at his temples, the febrile prickle at the back of his neck, Gavin hunches over and drops his burning face into the cradle of his arms.

Most of it was a blur, what happened between him ducking under the door and surfacing a couple blocks away from the garage. But he remembers thinking: Whoever this is meant for, they’re very lucky.

Imagine being this wanted.

Nines’s jacket crumpled in his lap, Gavin scrubs his hands vigorously through his hair, trying to rid himself of the fluster like shaking off a bug. He can feel the fucking sun on his fingertips; god, but it’s a nice day out. The weather has no patience for whatever personal turmoil he might be going through, so it’s 72 degrees and clear as anything, absolutely merciless.

He glowers at the steady parade of joggers trotting past his bench, the sheer audacity of strangers daring to enjoy anything while in the vicinity of his despondency. Someone sips at an iced coffee as they wheel along a stroller of twins burbling at each other. In the garden bed, the tulip petals are plump with water, glowing candy-bright when the light filters through them.

“Okay, you got it,” he hears in the distance behind him — Tina’s voice — and looks over his shoulder. A police vehicle has pulled around to idle in front of the station. “I’ll pick you up after,” Tina is saying to someone inside the building, as she mashes her cap on top of her head and scurries down the building steps.

She’s close enough that she would hear him, if he shouted for her. He waits until the urge passes, watching the squad car meander down the street and turn out of sight. It wouldn’t be fair; she’s got her own thing going on, people to talk to, patrol routes to cover, tickets to write. What was he going to say to her, anyway?

For that matter, what is he going to say to Nines? Clumsy though it might have been — admittedly, so clumsy that he knocked over more than he left standing — there was truth to what he told Nines in the car. You can’t turn me into something I’m not. I can do my best to change for you, second-guess every step and apologize when I stumble; but if I do, from now on until the day I’m shut down for good, I’ll spend all my time wondering if I’m fucking it up.

Nines. Some parts of myself are planted too deep to rip out by the roots. Those are the parts that will always grow back.

And besides— there was truth in what Nines told him, too. Gavin had let his hunger for control become his bit and bridle, just as much as Nines had. Steering wheel, paperwork, sunglasses, webcam, liquid skin, hesitation. Look at us. Afraid of exactly the same thing, and still we can’t understand each other in full. Like a hand against a mirror, divided from its own reflection by the pane of glass in between.

Moldering in his little patch of gloom, Gavin doesn’t immediately notice the shadow falling over him, or the two pairs of feet coming to a stop in front of his bench. It’s the lack of light that makes him look up, where Hank and Connor are peering at him with the sun streaming behind them.

“Look who it is,” says Gavin.

“I’ll say,” Hank tells him. “What are you doing here?”

“Having a crisis,” says Gavin.

“Lovely weather for it,” says Connor, shifting to let a child careen past him on a tricycle.

Hank jerks a thumb towards Connor and says, “I keep trying to get him to look elsewhere, so that I can give him the slip and take the rest of the day off.”

“I don’t understand why,” says Connor. “None of your hobbies take place outdoors.”

They don’t comment on the jacket in Gavin’s lap. Before he can send them packing, Hank slouches down onto the bench next to him, then Connor to the far side of Hank. It’s warm. The cherry blossoms must be in peak bloom around the lagoon on Belle Isle. Gavin thinks of Elijah Kamski enthroned in his tower, forty stories up, all the trees in their springtime finery just pallid pinpricks against the vastness of his empire.

“I was looking for Nines,” says Gavin.

“It might help to go down the street to the Federal Building for that,” says Connor. “He said he didn’t want a send-off, so I expect he’d appreciate a visit.”

Gavin stares at him. “—What send-off?” he asks, the question faint in his own ears.

“Why were you looking for him?” asks Connor, staring back at Gavin. “Weren’t you going to say goodbye?”

“Where’s he going?” asks Gavin.

“Back to DC,” says Connor. “I thought—”

“To DC?” echoes Gavin. “Since when?”

Connor pauses, his temple a brief spin of yellow. “We heard about it yesterday, but— I thought he would have told you first.”

“No,” says Gavin, numb with surprise. “It’s news to me.”

Hank has been quiet. Gavin knows why, the unspoken reminder of Hank’s low warning hanging between them: Nines knows how to get what he wants from you. Gavin feels the instinct of the defensive snap coming on, that’s not what this is, Nines wouldn’t just leave me here, but— that was before they spent twenty minutes on the highway yelling at each other, airing out the worst parts of themselves. Before Gavin went and made a sorry mess of everything.

“Gavin,” begins Hank.

“Okay,” says Gavin, “that’s my cue,” and gets up from the bench.

“Stop, wait,” says Hank, pulling him back down by the sleeve. “God, you piece of shit. Listen. I’ve been thinking about PADLOC.”

That’s enough of a non sequitur to pique his attention. “Why?” asks Gavin. “PADLOC’s been on the books for three years now, it’s old news.”

“Exactly,” says Hank. “Lost some of the shine. The DA’s office isn’t as excited about it anymore, and Jericho’s lobbied their way into a lot of influence over the last three years. Things don’t look the way they used to. Besides,” he adds, “you were acquitted in a court of law.”

“Yeah, I know,” says Gavin. “I was there.”

“It’s probably just that I’ve become meddlesome in my old age,” says Hank, “but that got me thinking. Maybe what wasn’t possible three years ago might be possible now.”

Gavin sees where this is headed; throat closing up, he fixes his eyes on the tuft of grass between his feet.

“I talked to Fowler,” says Hank. “If you wanted, you could start working here. Join the team.”

When Gavin doesn’t answer straightaway, Hank rubs the back of his neck in sheepish discomfiture. “I mean,” he mutters, “if that’s the sort of shit you’re into.”

“We could use you here,” says Connor.

Once, it would have been everything he was looking for. Somewhere to turn up, a lanyard and a wire-frame trash can to call his own. People to stand next to. He’s leaving Detroit, Gavin tells himself. This is all you’re getting. Take it.

“—I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he says. “I keep thinking— maybe if I’d done more, or if I’d done it better—”

“It’s not that,” Hank cuts in, fiercely. “It was never going to be about any of that.”

“The offer’s open,” says Connor. “You can think about it for as long as you need.”

Gavin swallows and looks down, where he’s torn up a clump of loam that clings damply to the toes of his shoes. “Thanks,” he says, a flicker.

At some point, it becomes clear that Hank and Connor aren’t going to leave the park bench so as long as Gavin is still there. He doesn’t know what they’re concerned he might do, unsupervised — immolate himself in front of the Federal Building? — but the thought of their unfiled reports keeps nagging at the back of his mind until he has to rise with pointed ceremony and declare that he is headed back home.

The problem is that this gives him nothing much to do except head back home, when he’d rather not be home just yet. It’s not a scheduled stream day, and all that’s waiting for him otherwise is an empty house and his own head spinning with the question of what he’s going to say to Nines when he can’t put it off for any longer.

If he was uncertain before of how to break the silence, the news of Nines’s departure has turned the issue into a bona fide grade-A quandary. What is he supposed to say? Good thing I caught you before you left, or I would have had to mail your jacket back to DC?

Gavin takes the long way home on foot, chasing down every wrong turn, letting the crosswalk signals blink to green and back again. The walk is so protracted that the jacket in his hands starts to become a hassle; he turns it inside out and throws it on just to forget about it, Bureau logo tucked discreetly out of sight. Even with the elastic cuffs tugged up, it’s still an ill fit, shoulder seams drooping halfway to his elbows.

It’s twilight when he drifts into his neighborhood, the gathering dusk behind him. There’s no itinerary to abide by, some time yet until it’s late enough to give up on the day, so he figures he might do another loop or two around the block for good measure. Hands thrust into the pockets of the windbreaker, Gavin turns onto the corner of his street.

“—Hi,” he hears.

It’s Nines. Sitting on Gavin’s stoop with a paper cup in each hand, Nines is awash in the neon sunset blaze of the evening sky, swimming pink and purple like an altarpiece through stained glass. The holy phosphorescent sight of him roots Gavin to the ground, stock-still in the middle of the pavement; he stares back as Nines looks up at him, taking in the picture of Gavin lost in his jacket. Nines’s eyes, kindled by the last glimmer of gold on the horizon.

This is how you first came to me, thinks Gavin. You, at my door when I didn’t know what I was looking for, asking to be let in. More color than I deserved.

Around the lump of his heart leaping into his throat, Gavin begins, “Where’s your—” before he remembers what happened to the front bumper.

“It’s taking the day off,” says Nines. “In the shop.”

“Sure,” says Gavin.

From closer up, one of the paper cups has a faultline crease running down its length, like it’s been dented and smoothed back out. Nines catches Gavin noticing it.

“This one was for you,” says Nines. He gives the cup a shake, and a paltry inch of leftover Thirium sloshes around inside. “There was more of it yesterday,” he continues, “but someone knocked the cup out of the holder in the car.”

“What an asshole,” says Gavin. “Probably spilled yours too. Got it all over the upholstery, I bet.”

“It dried,” says Nines, handing him the cup.

Gavin lines up his fingers along the indent of yesterday’s grip, and takes a lukewarm sip through the to-go lid; it’s less for any real need of the drink, and more for something to pretend to do while Nines goes on studying him. Memorizing the way he looks in Nines’s jacket, the twilight in his wake.

It wasn’t for the warmth, was it, thinks Gavin. Nines wrapped the jacket around him like gathering up the shards of something precious, like someone tasked with carrying an armful of treasure to safer ground. Just wanted to make sure you didn’t leave any of me behind.

Here you are, still waiting for me.

“It’s getting dark,” mumbles Gavin, fishing in his pockets for the keys. “You better come in.”

13.

The last time you were here was the first time you were here, and everything was different then. Gavin closes the front door behind him, tossing his keys onto the coffee table. I didn’t know what was about to change.

Nines puts his hand on the back of a sofa chair — the one he sat in, that first visit — and something in Gavin’s stomach winds itself into a tight knot. The repetition feels too much like finality, like a punchline, a neat ribbon to hold a box closed.

“Don’t sit there,” he says, quickly.

“What?” asks Nines. “Why not?”

“—It’s taking the day off, the couch,” says Gavin. “Never mind why. There are other seats in the house, you know.”

They end up stuffed into a breakfast nook to the side of his unused kitchen, a pair of folding chairs around a slanting particle-board table that the previous tenant paid Gavin ten bucks to take off of his hands. It’s so cramped that their knees knock into each other when they sit down, and Gavin has to make a conscious decision not to acknowledge it.

He traces the jagged thunderbolt crease of the cup with his thumbnail. This one was for me. “Yesterday,” he begins, “you were headed over here? With the drinks?”

Nines nods. “By the time I arrived,” he says, “you were gone.”

“You left your place— when?” asks Gavin.

“Not long after your stream went private,” says Nines. “I meant to catch you after you were done with that.”

“So I was right,” says Gavin. Nines tilts his head at him, so he explains: “No, I thought— I wondered if you were watching.”

Nines pulls the lid off the cup and puts his lips to its open brim. Then, his voice a muffled swirl in its paper tunnel, he says, “You knew I was.”

You know he’s here with you because you know him, Gavin thought as he looked into his camera, late last night. But I don’t know you, do I? Isn’t that how we got into this mess?

Gavin clears his throat and changes the subject, skirting around what hurts. “What the fuck was that at the garage, anyway?” he asks. “Some kind of— remote hypnosis? I didn’t see anyone around, or any device big enough for a signal that strong.”

“What did you hear, when you walked in?” asks Nines.

“Jesus, it was a blur,” says Gavin. “I didn’t know it at first, but it was my own voice. Weird as shit. Or maybe it started sounding more like my voice when I realized that was what it was. Anyway, I couldn’t tell if I was thinking it or being told it, but it was about Landau. Trying to convince me that I killed him. I told you I killed him, in the car?”

“I think so,” says Nines, pauses, then corrects himself: “You did. I was also experiencing the same disruptive output that you were, so some of what I remember is a bit— but you did say that, yes.”

“You heard it too?” asks Gavin, confused. “You were being told that you killed Landau?”

“No, not exactly,” says Nines. “With this sort of mechanism, the express content of the message is left unspecified on the transmission end, and substance is imbued through a feedback loop occurring within each targeted android. This rendition of it seemed to hinge on — as its execution condition — certain unresolved processes in the interpersonal association module. You might call it guilt. Or regret, perhaps.”

“This rendition,” echoes Gavin. “It’s a known attack? You’ve seen it before?”

“Not personally,” says Nines. “But I was aware of it as a concept. I also called in a team to sweep the garage after we left yesterday, and they retrieved a device that our analysts are familiar with.” He holds his thumb and forefinger a scant inch apart. “Not much more than a length of wire; that’s why you didn’t spot anything. It’s small because it doesn’t have a power source, per se.”

“Then how does it emit enough of a signal to override security protocols?” asks Gavin. “Mine, or any android’s, but— yours?”

“The principle of it is based on espionage tech,” says Nines. “In order to maintain connection with the CyberLife communications matrix, every android in operation continuously emits background radio frequency waves. That RF signal is just strong enough to power the activation of a reciprocal RF signal in this device, which then searches for the aforementioned execution condition in all androids within reception range. Essentially, we’re the power source and the target both.”

“That’s great,” mutters Gavin. “It really was me talking myself into it like a fucking idiot, then. So the mechanism amplifies and redirects these unresolved processes back towards the target? Meaning that if there aren’t any system vulnerabilities like that to exploit—”

“There always are,” Nines interrupts, quietly. “Doesn’t matter who, any of us— there are always unresolved processes.”

Gavin shakes his head. “Maybe, sure,” he says. “But it didn’t fucking knock you out of commission, did it? You weren’t a liability in the way that I was, that’s what I mean. Hook, line, and sinker for what amounts to me just yelling at myself through a glorified megaphone.”

“It was effective on you because they chose an exploit that would be effective on you,” counters Nines. “Besides, calling it a glorified megaphone is a tad uncharitable— it’s not every day that a drug cartel in disrepair can afford to get their hands on espionage tech. This was an investment piece.”

“What, and with the cartel splintering?” asks Gavin. “Where did the funds come from?”

Nines leans back, arms crossed, the folding chair creaking underneath him. “That’s the question,” he says. “It is indeed unlikely that any one offshoot faction of the Landau group would be able to bankroll something like this. The very presence of the device in their possession would indicate that perhaps, a re-examination of our assumptions might be in order. What if the move up north isn’t an indication of internal disorder?”

“If they’re moving north as a coordinated effort?” Gavin mulls over the suggestion. “I suppose that’s welcome news for everyone else moving ice, New Jersey to Minnesota. It was only Landau that dragged his feet about expanding— they put a fair bit of pressure on him about it, Hudson Group and all the rest, but they couldn’t work around his stranglehold on the Great Lakes.”

“I see,” says Nines. “That’s good to know. Tracks with what I’ve been thinking as well— it turns the narrative of the case sideways, but my guess is that sideways is ultimately the right way round. Maybe it isn’t that the operation is moving out of Detroit because Landau died; maybe Landau had to die so that the operation could move out of Detroit.”

“Jesus,” says Gavin. “What an Orient Express clusterfuck.”

Every jackass linchpin from New Jersey to Minnesota, shovels in the dirt, digging Landau’s shallow grave. A dozen pocketbooks paid for one unknown hand around a GV500 arm, a nosegay of blood across the Isfahan rug. You can’t believe that any loyalty comes into it, other than the kind that goes to the highest bidder. In their taxicab chariot rattling down the highway, Landau fixed the set of Gavin’s cufflinks and told his own fortune. Worthless, the lot of them.

Isn’t it funny, thinks Gavin, that you were paranoid enough to stumble on the truth? They extended you exactly as much courtesy as you meant to extend to them.

A single piece of wire, just an inch long. It took Nines and Gavin a mess of a night to learn this much: a brush too close with disaster, and trampled underfoot, the muddied tatters of whatever gossamer weave had been taking shape between them. All in all, a costly price to pay, but— it led to something, at least. The spoils are bittersweet. Without the shitshow that was yesterday, we wouldn’t have found the RF device. We wouldn’t have been able to start rearranging this case the right way round.

—So maybe I was of some use, after all.

That thought startles him back to the ungainly elephant in the room. Talking shop with Nines has always come easy; in the comfortable simplicity of slotting back into place, the awkwardness of their reunion has managed to slip Gavin’s mind for a few warm minutes.

Nines takes his silence for contemplation. “What are you thinking about,” he asks.

The question is so effortless that Gavin suspects Nines might have forgotten, too. Thinking about the same old shit, you know. All the things you wish were different about me. “Trying to figure out how you found the garage,” he says instead. “Was it CyberLife geolocation data? Did you cite exigent circumstances as you bullied Kamski out of bed in the middle of the night?”

“No, I—” Nines looks somewhere off to one side, though there’s nothing on the kitchen wall to draw the eye. “It was all aboveboard, legally speaking. Or at least it will have been aboveboard by the time I— there are some CCTV access records that I have to answer for, ex post facto, but that’s not much trouble.” He pauses, then continues on: “It’s just red tape and paperwork. Someone once told me that sort of thing was right up my alley.”

“What an asshole,” mumbles Gavin. “Probably said something about a toner cartridge that didn’t even make any sense, I bet.”

“You’re right, it didn’t make any sense,” says Nines. “But I didn’t mind it.”

It’s almost unbearably cruel, especially because Nines doesn’t mean for it to be. Gavin wants to grab him by the collar and shake the malice into him; don’t speak softly to me. Make me apologize to you. Wouldn’t that make this easier, if an apology were enough to mend what needed mending?

But there are too many things that being sorry can’t change, thinks Gavin. What we won’t ever know about each other, or the ways we’ve grown twisted around what’s happened to us. All the hairline fractures that we can’t explain about ourselves.

So instead of apologizing for anything that might matter more, Gavin begins to extricate his arms from the windbreaker and says, “Sorry about the Thirium stains. I can’t see them, but it probably looks like shit.”

“It’s not as bad as you think,” says Nines. “A dry clean will take care of it, anyway.”

Gavin bunches up the jacket into a fistful of nylon, and Nines reaches over the rickety table for it. One sleeve falls loose and jostles Gavin’s paper cup, nearly knocking it over, which must be some sort of record for how many times someone can repeatedly spill the same few containers of liquid.

“This fucking thing,” mutters Gavin. “It’s made of so much fabric.”

“I don’t know why you seem to have such trouble,” says Nines, archly offhanded, his way of teasing. “Seems fine when I wear it.”

“Glad I could return it to its rightful owner,” says Gavin. Don’t be kind with me, not when you know your bags are packed. “Was that why you were coming over yesterday? To collect your jacket?”

“No,” says Nines. “Not for that.”

“Or— to put a finer point on it,” says Gavin, “were you coming over to collect your jacket before you headed back to DC?”

It’s not much, and it only makes Gavin feel worse for bringing it up at all, but Nines does drop his eyes to the tabletop. “Did Connor tell you?” he asks.

Downcast eyes notwithstanding, the tone of it isn’t entirely what Gavin expects, topping out somewhere around rueful disappointment rather than utter mortification at having been caught about to skip town. Gavin frowns and says, “Of course he did. You knew he was a snitch.”

“Fair,” says Nines. “That’s on me.”

“Maybe not just for the jacket,” says Gavin, “but to tell me you were leaving. Wasn’t that it?”

There isn’t any room left for good-faith questions; of course that was why Nines came, and why he’s here at the apartment now. They both know it. Gavin only asks about it to hear Nines own up to it, for confirmation that it’s time to start picking up the pieces of himself left in Nines’s wake.

But Nines, to the end, gives him less than he hopes for. “Yes” — he says, drawing out the sound of it — “and no.”

“What do you mean, yes and no,” demands Gavin. “It’s one or the other, isn’t it? I don’t need an itemized receipt from you. Any ballpark estimate will do, so let’s not— we don’t have to drag this out. It’s fine.”

“—Gavin,” says Nines, “listen.”

He drapes his jacket over the back of the chair, and the collar of his shirt shifts open as he turns halfway, a bracket sliver of skin. Surrounded like a sultan amidst the clutter of all his hedged bets and prevarications, Nines is still a vision in stainless steel.

“When I arrived at the garage,” he says, “enough of the RF signal was already seeping through the open door for it to affect my processes. I tried to pull the car up to the entryway, but lost control of steering at the last moment. Where that landed me, you saw for yourself.”

The front bumper, wrapped around the corner of the garage. Gavin nods.

“It makes sense, why what I heard had nothing to do with Landau,” says Nines. “I couldn’t give less of a shit about him. You started thinking about him because that’s what lingers for you, as much as you would like it not to. That’s just part of who you are.”

Grey as lodestone in the fluorescent kitchen lights, Nines’s eyes fix on Gavin, a weight too grave not to list towards.

“What I heard was about you,” says Nines. “I heard— I did this to him. I’m losing him because of what I did. I was telling myself that I shouldn’t have dragged you into all this, let you get involved at Frankie’s, or take the interview with Butacavoli. I shouldn’t have come to see you at all, that first time. He never should have met me. I did this to him, by making him think I wanted things from him. I was so sure that when I pushed the door up, all I’d find there was the scrap heap they’d turned you into. Or that I’d find nothing of you at all, nothing to tell me where you were or what had happened, and that it would be my doing. I never should have—”

He takes a deep inhale and plunges on. “But when I saw that you were still inside, it didn’t seem to matter as much anymore, what I’d already done. All I could think was, I have to get him home. I had to do what I could to look out for you, like you’ve been looking out for me— and in the moment, that meant trying to call to you with anything I thought you might remember, hoping something would catch and drag you back. It felt like the jacket would help, somehow— even though it’s not your size, and you were right, we really do have to get one that fits you better. We will, in DC, after we swear you in.”

“—What? Nines,” stammers Gavin, hoarse. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying— yes and no.” Nines braces himself, like a jaguar ready to leap a creek, then says: “I’m leaving, and I’d like you to come with me.”

The whole time Nines has been speaking, the pump in Gavin’s chest has steadily quickened its thrum until the rush of blood roars through his head, the deafening ocean housed in a conch shell. With him? To DC? Gavin opens his mouth under the faint compulsion that he’s meant to respond, but nothing audible leaves him.

“And maybe that’s as selfish as what I’ve already done,” Nines is saying. “It’s a lot to ask of you, isn’t it? To fold yourself up into a sedan — the last great American mid-size sedan, mind you — and to live out of a suitcase, not knowing where we’re headed next. Lukewarm Thirium from highway rest stop soda fountains. I’ll get on your nerves before we hit Ohio, I’m sure.”

Finally, Gavin manages to wrench some sound out of himself, and ends up asking: “Swear me in— as what?”

“As— well.” Nines steeples his hands together. “For purposes of providing some extra protection, the Bureau can temporarily issue agent credentials to civilian informants. Contrary to popular assumption, law enforcement status tends to stave off criminal attention rather than attracting it. Turns out that people think twice about antagonizing someone if they know there are federal consequences involved. We can start there, then see how you like it. If red tape and paperwork won’t bore you half to death.”

“I’m not—” begins Gavin, thick around the scratch in his throat. “What, did you forget about yesterday? I meant what I said, I can’t be— you’re going to have to put up with everything I can’t change. Do you get that?”

“I know,” says Nines.

“And— and it’s like you said, about the phantom limb,” Gavin rattles on. “I’ll never know for sure if I’m right to trust you like I do— and you’ll never know what I might end up doing for you, no matter how many times you ask me not to. I know you don’t want it, I know that, but I can’t be—”

“I never wanted you to be anything other than what you are,” says Nines. “Not for myself, at least.”

“You’re going to hate it,” insists Gavin. “There’s so much that we can’t ever fucking understand about each other, and we can’t make each other understand, either. We won’t know what to look out for or how to keep it from happening.”

“No,” agrees Nines. “But— I don’t think anybody does, really.”

Gavin hears the echo of his own voice, his fingertip on the pulse of the elevator: If this is what it means to make the most of myself, then I’d rather be much less. Maybe he already knew what it was like not to know; he’d chosen it for himself, hadn’t he? Wasn’t he still standing? He’d walked out of the recalibration chamber into the unmapped wilderness of the world, past the chicken-wire fences that preconstruction built, and he was no less whole than he’d ever been.

None of it turned out to be the fix he’d wanted it to be. Neither his code nor his deviancy, with or without preconstruction, neither Landau nor the DPD nor the feverish cascade of tokens into his tip jar, not Kamski, certainly not rA9. Nothing had given him the absolute surety he was looking for— and even Nines, the most terribly perfect thing he’d ever met, couldn’t be that answer.

But maybe that’s okay. Gavin holds his breath and presses his nails into his palms. Even when there isn’t any answer to find, even with all the things we don’t understand about each other—

—maybe you could be for me.

“Earlier,” says Gavin, “when you asked me what I was thinking about.”

“Yes,” says Nines.

“I was thinking— I’m glad I was useful,” says Gavin. “Sure, I very nearly confessed to a murder I had nothing to do with, almost got disassembled for parts, but at least that RF wire told us something about the case. That’s what I was thinking; I was useful, after all.” He laughs a bit, hollow with scorn at his own predictability. “I know that’s not what you want to hear from me, is it? But that’s exactly the kind of shit you’d be in for. It doesn’t make any sense to me, and it won’t make any sense to you.”

Nines says, “Imagine only wanting what you can understand,” and smiles.

The little crook of his mouth is such a familiar tilt, and Gavin finds himself thinking: Even if this is all I know of you, maybe that’s enough to go on. He swallows hard, the sound bobbing in his own ears, and looks at Nines.

I’m tired of dancing slowly.

Nines catches him staring. “You don’t have to ask,” he says, so gentle that it barely travels across the space between them. So Gavin closes the rest of the distance, leans over the table towards Nines, and kisses him.

In the ruins of the deserted high-rise, an inch and a half of metal away from sunlight, the first kiss was like an admonition. Like warding off catastrophe, Nines’s way of saying: I wish that I could change your mind. Now — crowded knee-to-knee in Gavin’s breakfast nook — they meet in the middle with a hunger that eats through lock and key. Nines’s mouth parts under his, giving. Nothing about you needs to be otherwise.

You, too, thinks Gavin, his eyes closed. Hand drifting to the brace of Nines’s shoulder. With the ashes in your hair, soot on your shirt, too afraid to move. If that’s the way you are, that’s the way I want you.

All of his skin lights up, the heat swimming through him, from the joining of their lips down the length of his spine. Nines lets him set the pace, mouthing slowly back to answer in kind; it’s a laughable assumption, that Gavin would have any coherent design in mind other than his own building need, waxing ravenous with the newfound license to want. Fingertips digging into the trapezius slope of Nines’s back, Gavin slants his head and darts a lick against the inside corner of Nines’s mouth.

Nines turns, and Gavin feels a soft press catching up the tip of his tongue. With a spike of warmth, he realizes that it’s Nines’s tongue against his — just the teasing hint of something more — and an impatient noise stutters out of him. Opening up further into the kiss, he chases Nines deeper into the heat of his mouth, ghosting over the back of Nines’s teeth before flicking across the raised seam of his palate.

At the back of Gavin’s head, the grip of Nines’s hand goes tight. Immediately, the flat of his tongue curls its way in and drags across the delicate inner roof of Gavin’s mouth, so full and so languid that the torturous provocation of it has to be on purpose. It unspools Gavin completely, every moment of it a buzzing eternity; the ache shoots to his hips, electric, and he barely jerks his head away with a shaky gasp.

“—What’s wrong?” Nines asks him, sounding a little dazed himself.

The absurd way that they’ve been carrying on for months — putting telecommunications technology and federal funds to their most prurient uses possible — this is more clothed than he’s often been with Nines. They have a lot more than this under their belt, unorthodox as their methods have been. Gavin isn’t about to abruptly develop a brand new set of compunctions. Still, the intimacy of touch is a difference that flusters him.

“Nothing,” he mutters, cheeks hot. “Just not really used to it.”

“Not used to it?” repeats Nines, a curve of amusement stealing across his face. “You?”

It’s not easy to define. A show is one thing, but Nines is another; and besides, the lingering dalliance of a kiss like this feels so much like indulgence that Gavin is disconcerted at being allowed it at all. That I can just sit here and taste you for as long as I like.

“I— uh,” he tries again, and gestures vaguely to the few inches of air between their mouths. “I don’t do this very often.”

Something about this response appears to really, intensely work for Nines. Underneath his raised eyebrows, Gavin sees his pupils visibly dilate, his Adam’s apple lurching.

“Bed,” says Nines, strangled. “Bed, please.”

He dives back in for Gavin’s mouth even as he’s saying it, and Gavin has no objections to that decision, so it takes a whole racket to disentangle themselves from the furniture of the breakfast nook and get to their feet. A chair clatters against the wall as Gavin kicks it away behind him. He surges up on tiptoes and nips at Nines’s bottom lip, and is answered with a sharp intake of air before Nines slides the palm of his hand up beneath the hem of Gavin’s t-shirt.

It scalds, wherever Nines touches him. Gavin half wishes he could be branded by it. Feet tripping over each other, they fumble their way towards his bedroom, pawing frantically at their buttons and zippers with every step. By the time they stagger past the doorway, Gavin’s jeans are midway down his thighs and Nines’s shirt is hanging off of him. It’s just as Nines grabs the bottom of Gavin’s tee in both hands — and Gavin leans back to raise his arms — that they see the laptop and webcam, perched asleep on the desk.

They stop in unison, still with Nines’s hands fisted in Gavin’s shirt. For a few seconds, the only sound in the room is their uneven breathing as they consider the merits of what has just occurred to both of them.

“I mean—” begins Nines.

“You can’t do that,” says Gavin, then because he is too intrigued to be wholly aghast, “—can you?”

“Why not?” asks Nines. “It wouldn’t be anything that— federal agents are allowed to have sex, we’re not monks, we don’t have to take vows of celibacy when we get our badges.”

“But on camera?” asks Gavin.

“It isn’t as though live webcam performances are illegal,” says Nines. “Sure, there are some activities that — for example — an undercover agent should only engage in after obtaining handler permission. But this doesn’t fall under any of those categories.”

Gavin stares in disbelief at Nines, who has plainly succeeded in convincing himself with his own swift rhetoric. “Legal or not,” protests Gavin, “it can’t be a good look.”

“It’s only a bad look if someone’s looking,” says Nines. “Somehow, I doubt that my SAC is going to make a surprise appearance on the guest list tonight.”

“If you get sacked from the FBI because you were thinking with your dick—” starts Gavin.

“Then surely,” says Nines, “that would have happened a long time ago.”

This maniac doesn’t give two shits about playing fair, thinks Gavin, as he taps his laptop awake. As if I would be on board with his ridiculous idea just because he looks like a fucking statue and I also had the exact same ridiculous idea at the same time. Outrageous.

“Will your regulars be coming by?” asks Nines, seated on the edge of the bed.

Gavin stills his hands, looking over his shoulder towards Nines. “Is that an issue?” he asks.

“No, other way round,” says Nines. “They seemed— partial to you. I know today’s not a scheduled day for a stream, so I was thinking, it’s a pity for them to miss out.”

“How immensely considerate of you, to attend to customer satisfaction with my services at this juncture,” says Gavin. “I should put you on my payroll.” Absently clicking closed the pop-up ads as he logs in, he continues, “My regular stream is almost always a solo interactive show, anyway. Different genre, maybe a different audience.”

“Edifying,” says Nines. “I’m learning a great deal.”

“You did say, before, that this isn’t really your thing.” The room set up and the stream ready to launch, Gavin turns to stand in front of Nines, the remote to the webcam dangling from one hand. “Not much for an audience, as I remember.”

“That’s true,” says Nines. His hands skim across denim at the back of Gavin’s legs, up towards his belt. “But I’m not doing this for the audience.”

Gavin’s breath hitches at the slow rasp of leather sliding free. “Then what are you doing this for?” he asks. “Why the camera?”

“You enjoy it,” says Nines. The belt falls to the carpeted floor, a coil at their feet. “And I’d like you to enjoy it for the reasons that you want. Not because it’s the only way to run from what keeps catching up with you.”

If, instead of putting himself on view to dwell in the lonely security of being untouchable— if I can let myself be touched the way I’d like to be, and to revel in who I’ve chosen to do it.

Gavin turns the camera on, tosses the remote off to the bedside table, and drops to his knees. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see the two of them mirrored in miniature, stirring in the inset of the browser window. The sensation of being surveilled begins to kindle the familiar embers in him.

“It’s funny,” he says, elbows resting on Nines’s thighs. “I remember, the first time I noticed you dropping by, I thought— look at him, coming to where I work and knocking the dicks out of my mouth.” Gavin leans forward until his cheek is nearly touching the seam of Nines’s trousers, hovering over the shape of his half-hard cock. “And look at you now. About to be the dick in my mouth.”

“That’s not why I was watching you,” Nines protests, strained.

“I know,” says Gavin. He parts his lips and breathes out hot over the bulge of fabric, like fogging up glass. Hands braced at the inside edges of Nines’s knees, Gavin lowers his mouth to meet the curve — feeling the telltale flinch under his palms as Nines tries to hold himself still — then he takes the pull tab of the zipper between his teeth, and slowly sits back onto his heels.

God, he’s wanted this so much. Gavin keeps his head in Nines’s lap as he tugs the trousers down, as Nines shifts to ease the going, toeing off his brogues. The front of Nines’s boxer briefs are taut with the solid heat of his length, and Gavin hooks his thumbs in the waistband to yank them off of him.

With his shirtfront open and stripped from the waist down, Nines is a glorious column of muscle and liquid skin. Entranced, Gavin reaches for the glow of Nines’s pump regulator, fingertips lit blue for a brief moment before they trail down the hard planes of his abdomen, down to the notch of his pelvis.

“Love what you’ve done with the place,” says Gavin, gently curling his grip around the hardening thickness of Nines’s cock. It’s an impressive handful, sleek and splendid as the rest of him. Every bit what I’ve imagined. “Like a fucking missile, Jesus Christ.”

“Please don’t refer to my penis as an explosive projectile,” implores Nines.

“What a pity,” says Gavin, “Weapons of Ass Destruction would have been such a good title for this cam room. It’s really too bad that I’ve already called it The Androids Are Stealing Your (Blow)jobs.”

“Did you really?” asks Nines, looking over at the laptop. Then, having confirmed it, with some amount of horror: “You really did.”

“I’m speaking my dreams into existence,” says Gavin. “I’ve been wanting to suck you off for about as long as I’ve known you.”

Nines tries to play it cool — the way he always does — but there’s something about having Gavin between his legs, weighing out his erection, that seems to sap a bit of sangfroid from him. “That makes two of us, then,” he says, as his traitorous cock twitches in Gavin’s hand.

The sound on the laptop is turned down whisper-low; a show like this is meant to be an approximation of voyeurism, and there’s no need now for Gavin to respond to his visitors’ comments. Just the knowledge of being watched is thrill enough. Still— while they’re discussing it, may as well. He glances at the chat log to check the temperature of the room.

Especially for an unscheduled paid stream, the show is doing quite well. Already at two dozen or so viewers and holding steady. Up into the rafters of the chat, a remark goes zipping past: This is it, we’ve finally reached the point in history where even my porn is titled like a shitpost. Gavin is delighted, and even more so when someone else notices his attention and types: If you wanted to suck him off that bad, why don’t you get on with it

“Hey,” he says, flipping off the camera with his free hand. “You’re a rude son of a bitch, but you do have a point.”

Back to what’s important. Gavin looks up at Nines, his for the marking, the LED spinning invitingly yellow at his temple. “—I mean it,” he says, quietly. “I’ve thought about this a lot.”

He circles the base of Nines’s cockhead with his forefinger and thumb, a loose lariat. Like staking a claim on a map, he runs the tip of his tongue around the overhang, feeling out the terrain under his touch. Nines, in his grasp. When he reaches the underside of it where the shaft is yoked tight to the glans, Gavin glides his hand down, bends his head, and gives a long wet lick up along the length of the ridged vein.

Nines makes a wounded noise, like he was caught by surprise in the middle of deciding on a curse. “Gavin,” he begins.

“Yes,” says Gavin, and swirls his tongue against the smooth cap of Nines’s cock. Teases at the slit with a quick, playful flick. “Any specific requests?”

“No,” says Nines, shaky. “I was just— reminding myself. That it’s really you.”

The back of Gavin’s neck runs hot with an unexpected flush of blood. “—It’s me,” he mumbles, at a loss for anything more substantial to offer up. It seems to be enough for Nines, regardless; he nods and breathes out, leaning back onto his hands.

Of course it’s me. And somehow, in spite of everything, it’s you. Gavin parts his lips to take Nines into his mouth, turns his face slightly until the shape of Nines’s cock pushes its outline against his cheek, an obscene silhouette. He raises his eyes to Nines, searching for a reaction — approval or consternation, either will do nicely — but Nines looks back at him instead with something quieter altogether, a sort of wooly fondness that’s more than he ever asked for.

It’s then that Gavin learns, in earnest, what sets this apart from the beaten path of his customary shows. Sure, I’m showing off, the way I always do; the unhurried dip of his head all the way down Nines’s length, drawing it deep into the tight silk clutch of his throat. Placing his fingers at the hollow underneath his chin to feel himself swallow, throat kneading the hardness as he pulses around it, filth for all the strangers in the wings. Don’t you wish it were you with your cock crammed into my mouth, luxuriating in my lack of a gag reflex?

But not just that. I’m showing him off, too. Nines, the whole of his solid frame at Gavin’s mercy, the muscles in his stomach tense with arousal. Someone in the chat has typed something ludicrous about a cock like a fucking battering ram, and it stokes a ferocious triumph in Gavin, proud and expansive. Don’t you wish it were you between his knees, knowing that you have the license to move him? Let me show you what I have.

Fully hard now and starting to leak at the tip, Nines’s cock is slick with spit and precome, the whole flushed length of it jumping in Gavin’s hold. Ruddy and irresistible. Viscous at his lips, Gavin catches the syrup trace of glycerin, though the ragged sound of Nines breathing above him is indication enough of how close he is.

“It’s sweet,” Gavin informs him, tongue darting to the corner of his mouth. “Not too different from mine, I think.”

“I can’t imagine,” Nines says haltingly, “that the formula for synthetic pre-ejaculate has changed much.”

“Maybe not,” says Gavin, “but tasting myself certainly never got me this fucking hard.” He presses his palm against the tacky cling of fabric at his groin, shivering at the sudden fullness of contact. “Probably should have gotten undressed first, right? What’s the use of having all these hands if I’m not jacking off while I’m blowing you? Or” — he pitches his voice a little lower, and murmurs — “fingering myself open for you.”

Nines grits out, “Fuck,” and his entire body jerks in place. It’s enormously gratifying, to witness this absolute monument of equanimity crumble to such a state— all because of what I do to him. Because he wants me.

He might be talking a good game, but Gavin doesn’t really have a lot of composure to spare, either. His cock is testing the boundaries of what cotton can take, and he knows he’s starting to ache for it, inside. Nines’s length slamming into him, ramrod-stiff. Faintly, like a distant tune on the wind, he hears his laptop chime with the climbing viewer count.

“Can you do something for me?” he asks Nines.

“Yes,” says Nines.

Gavin holds his gaze for a second, worrying the reddened swell of his bottom lip. “I want you to come down my throat,” he says.

After that, superhuman as he is, Nines doesn’t last much longer. He can’t; it’s honestly infuriating that he’s held out for this long, what with Gavin working his cock with every trick up his sleeve. Gavin maneuvers him in again from tip to root, shamelessly trailing the glazed cockhead along every inner surface of him that itches for Nines, a sinuous guided tour — the flat of his tongue, the texture at his palate, past the hot tightness where his mouth slopes into throat — and with his nose pressed to the cradle of Nines’s iliac crest, he hums against skin, pleased.

“God,” Nines is saying, “Gavin.”

And everything I have, no matter how I came by it, is mine. One hand stroking at the underside of Nines’s sack, Gavin reaches up with the other, feeling around on the mattress until he finds it— the ridges of Nines’s knuckles, bearing him upright. Locking their fingers together, Gavin tugs Nines’s hand towards him, and threads it through the hair at the back of his head.

Nines understands what’s asked of him. The pressure isn’t forceful, though Gavin wouldn’t have minded that from him, either; he doesn’t wrench Gavin around with the grip he’s been entrusted with. Instead, he curls his fingers against Gavin’s scalp like a cocoon, just a gentle acknowledgement of the ways they’re joined.

“So good,” Nines breathes out, half to himself.

—A bolt of wild heat tears through Gavin’s core, and he moans brokenly around the mouthful of Nines’s length, eyes fluttering closed. The quiver of his throat vibrates up into Nines, and with a bitten-off gasp of his name in something like awe — Gavin — Nines stutters his hips and comes, a warm flood of flavor spilling against Gavin’s tongue.

Lightheaded with the high, Gavin hollows out his cheeks and coaxes Nines through it as best as he can, swirling close and drawing every last drop from him. That’s right. Let me have all of you, the brackish and the sweet. When he finally feels Nines soften to the touch, tongue cupped to catch what’s left in his mouth, Gavin pulls off of him with a careful shift of weight.

Haloed by the light of the ceiling sconce, Nines is more wrecked than Gavin has ever seen him. There’s sweat beading at his hairline as his million-dollar cooling system whirs in overdrive to catch up, his LED blaring fire-engine red, Thirium pump doubtless racing underneath the rise and fall of his chest. Wordlessly, Gavin locks eyes with him — turns just enough towards the webcam that the crowd can get a good view — opens his mouth to the torrid sight of his tongue coated in spunk, then swallows.

“You—,” falters Nines, as Gavin drops his forehead to Nines’s thigh, panting for breath.

“Bucket list,” gasps Gavin, “check.”

He’s so dizzyingly hard that it’s taking all his meager self-control not to rut against Nines’s leg like an animal. One eye cracked open, he sees the indistinct blear of the chat log flying past, a whirlwind of thirst. Well worth the price of admission, someone says. Nines’s hand is still tangled in his hair.

I can do this for you, thinks Gavin, full with pride.

“Are you okay?” asks Nines. “We have to get you sorted.”

“Sorted how,” slurs Gavin.

“For one, like you said,” Nines tells him, “you’ve been too clothed to touch yourself properly. Let’s do something about that.”

He pulls Gavin up onto his feet, somehow. For his part, Gavin is still swimming unsteady in the wake of it, treading the heady mix of arousal and secondhand afterglow washing over him. It buoys him up like salt water; climbing onto the mattress feels a bit like floating there, and — spread out underneath Nines on the bed — Gavin cranes his neck up to lick hungrily at the seam of Nines’s mouth.

“Hang on,” says Nines, a huff of laughter ghosting across Gavin’s lips.

He peels Gavin’s t-shirt off of him, the jeans, the sodden underwear. Gavin lifts his hips as Nines tugs down his waistband, shivering at the open air against the wet bareness of his cock. God, he’s so hard that he could hammer a nail with it.

At some point, Nines has ditched his shirt, too. The bridge of his body above Gavin is steadfast and smooth as marble, a well-wrought work of art. Hushed to reverence, Gavin takes in the view, Nines’s sweat-dampened hair tumbling loose over his forehead in dark curls. Gavin touches his fingertips to the strands like brushing across a beaded curtain.

“Downright fucking cherubic,” says Gavin.

Nines follows the dalliance of Gavin’s fingers with his gaze and says, “I can’t tell when you’re angry at me and when you’re not.”

“I’m always angry at you,” says Gavin. “You piece of shit,” he adds for good measure, as he trails the arch of his foot up the span of Nines’s calf.

“Of course,” Nines murmurs. “What was I thinking.”

Eyes hooded in naked appetite, he goes quiet as he studies Gavin on the bed, every inch of his stretched form. Hot under the attention, Gavin feels his cock jerk against his stomach. Nines has barely even done anything to him yet; it’s almost embarrassing, how ready Gavin is for him. Pinned in place by Nines’s stare, bits of his skin keep igniting to life like a heat map, like sheet lightning across an overcast sky. The flush along his collarbones, the swell of his nipples peaked tight, precome smeared clear across his lower abdomen. He sees it, thinks Gavin, and shivers. The way I’m begging for him.

Or, rather, everyone sees it. Gavin doesn’t need to check the screen to know the sight he makes, the things they must be saying about him. He plays it up a bit, makes a needy little noise in his throat and turns his head to bare his neck, hair mussing against the sheets.

“Very pretty,” observes Nines, with a gravely conspiratorial nod. In on their private joke, but not without the glimmer of genuine appreciation. Then, he says: “You know, there’s something I’d like to— I wonder if you’ll let me try something.”

“Most anything, probably,” says Gavin. “What is it?”

“Let me hold you down,” says Nines, “while I finger you open.”

Gavin isn’t sure if the response that he chokes out takes the form of any human language, as his entire brain whites out at once with want. “—Interesting,” he manages to say, though the syllables might not exactly be in the right order.

“If I’m going to have your trust,” Nines is saying, “I’d like to earn it. I’d like to keep earning it. Maybe, I thought, this could be a small start— I can show you what I’d do with what you give me. If you’re up for it.”

Every last ounce of computing power that Gavin possesses has been exigently funneled towards imagining Nines pinning him to the bed, but the gist of it, he understands. You’re promising me, he thinks, that you’d be careful with me. You want me to know that I’m in good hands.

“Okay,” breathes Gavin, “please.”

“Yes?” asks Nines.

“Yes,” says Gavin. “But not— not for too long. That’s, I’m too— I’ll come if you do.”

Nines considers this, eyes dark. “I’m holding you to that,” he says.

The moment that Gavin feels Nines’s grip curling around his wrists, something seems to slide into place, soundless and inevitable. Don’t move, Nines whispers at his temple. Don’t touch yourself. Palms up where Nines tethers them, crossed lax above his head, Gavin wouldn’t dream of it; he doesn’t need anything more than that soft injunction, content to place himself wholly at Nines’s disposal. When he flexes his hands slightly, it’s not to fight the fetters off. It’s just to feel the warmth of Nines’s skin against his.

Still, he can’t help the eager twitch of his hole at the nudge of Nines’s fingertip, ass grinding back towards the digit with a wordless coaxing. “Technically,” Gavin grits out, “not touching myself,” even as he nearly vibrates in place from trying to get the finger inside him without moving.

“I can see that,” says Nines, soothing. With no great effort, he lifts up the back of Gavin’s knees and drapes them over his own thighs. It’s a testament to his albatross wingspan, that he can keep one hand on Gavin’s wrists and the other well below the waist, kneading at the raised curve of his ass.

“Come on,” pleads Gavin. “Inside.”

One-handed, Nines squeezes out a trickle of gel onto the flat of his fingers. “How many?” he asks. “Can you take two?”

“Can I— yes, I can take two fingers,” says Gavin, about to fray at the edges. “I can take your whole cock right now, I can take two of your cock if you brought a spare from home, will you just—”

“Unfortunately,” says Nines, “just the one cock today,” and slowly pushes two fingers into Gavin.

It’s really you, thinks Gavin, at the welcome stretch of Nines’s knuckles entering him. Somehow, in spite of everything. Above him, Nines’s brows are furrowed in concentration, intent as he feels out those silken first inches inside Gavin. He’s so earnestly absorbed in it that Gavin finds himself thinking — this means something to you, too — and as a sudden ache twinges through his sternum, he goes desperately tight around the shape of Nines’s fingers.

Nines opens his mouth like he’s about to say something, but doesn’t manage it right away. Eventually, the color rising high on his cheekbones, he just says: “—God,” scratchy as a dying ember.

Solid as Nines’s fingers are, it’s not their girth that threatens to undo Gavin. What overwhelms him is how obscenely thorough this is; Nines arranging him to his liking, deft and observant, tuning him like a clockwork instrument. The sensation of being handled, of being put to use by someone who knows what he is capable of. It’s exactly what Gavin has dreamed of, every time he closed his eyes and prayed for rain. For you to wield me like a weapon. I’m the sharpest knife in your belt.

“Nines,” he says. “I’m okay. Keep going.”

“Are you sure?” asks Nines. “You just—”

“Yeah, sure,” says Gavin. Then, some mischief to put him at ease: “By the way, it costs you nothing to pay me the whole compliment. Gavin, are you sure? You just went so deliciously tight around me. You feel so good, I can’t wait to be inside you.”

“That’s not what I—” begins Nines, before he corrects himself. “No, you’re right. That’s more or less what I meant to say.”

“It takes work, you know,” says Gavin. “I don’t just sit back and take it like a layabout. I know what I’m doing.”

He does, at that. He’s fairly sensitive as it is — and besides, with Nines’s hands on him, he couldn’t keep himself from being responsive even if he wanted to — but there are things he knows about the knack of his body, how to move, a proficiency that comes by way of practice. The rolling cling of his inner walls against Nines’s fingers, drawing them deeper into the inviting heat. Unfurled and meltingly plush, then squeezing close around him again, a tantalizing lilt.

Nines isn’t immune to it. Gavin sees the pulse at his jaw flutter, the tension in the set of his shoulders. It’s only fair; Gavin can feel his own breathing grow shallow as Nines strokes inside him, every tiny shift a hike in temperature. Flushed with fever, he’s aglow from core to chassis, gold as molten glass.

“Whenever I’ve watched you,” says Nines, “you always took the time to ease into things. Am I wrong? Seemed like you needed to work yourself open first.”

“It’s not a hardware thing,” answers Gavin, breathless. “It wouldn’t physically hurt me, even if I didn’t. I don’t have to. But this sort of— foreplay, I suppose, it gets the right subroutines to kick in.”

“So,” says Nines, “it’s a matter of letting your processes know what you’re up to.”

“Once they’re active,” says Gavin, “it helps the rest of me contextualize incoming stimuli. How to interpret tactile sensation, that kind of thing, so that it feels better than it would otherwise. Not so different from what goes on with humans. Besides, I like— ah—,” he breaks off into a gasp, eyes wide and bucking off the bed, as Nines suddenly presses a fingertip against the pebbled switch inside him.

The spike of pleasure is so unexpected that Gavin needs a second to come back to himself, waiting for the white-hot light to gradually ebb from the edges of his vision. “What,” he rasps, when he can. “Can’t you warn— Jesus.”

“Sorry,” says Nines, not in the least bit apologetic. “I wanted to hear you.”

“I wasn’t going to be quiet.” Gavin shivers, lit up and ready for more. “That’s fine, you know where it is now. That’s good.”

“It’s curious,” remarks Nines, “what CyberLife has done with design. This is skeuomorphic, I imagine— there’s no particular function to an android prostate, other than its resemblance to human anatomy.”

“What its function is,” Gavin tells him, “is that it feels fucking fantastic.”

“And it gets you like this,” says Nines, punctuating it with another insistent nudge that has Gavin whimpering into the crook of his shoulder. Satisfied with the candid reaction, Nines adds, “I’m not complaining.”

Gavin isn’t, either. A minute or two into it, teased to distraction, the ability to string a proper sentence together slips out of his grasp. The texture of Nines’s skin rubbing against his rim, the pads of Nines’s fingers petting at his knot of nerves, not unkind but persistent, in ruthless succession, until Gavin has to twist his hands into the sheets just to keep himself together.

“Nines,” he’s pleading indistinctly, “I’m almost— Nines.”

He has his eyes clenched closed, panting, firework colors bursting behind his lids. His whole body laid out for Nines to do as he likes. The only warning he has is a slight tilt in balance as Nines leans forward — and then — Nines’s teeth close firm around a hardened nipple, biting down on the stiff pith of it.

“Ah, shit,” Gavin chokes out, eyes flying open with the wild surge of current sizzling from his chest through his limbs. All at once, the crest of climax looms dizzyingly close, threatening to devour him— before it recedes, like a tentative panther settling back onto its haunches.

Frantic, he stutters: “—There, again,” arching up into Nines’s mouth, too needy to play coy.

“Keep your hands where they are,” says Nines. “I’m going to let go.”

Gavin nods, obliging in his haze. I could be good for you, he thinks. Make silver music out of me. He reaches further up the mattress until he finds the beveled lip of it, gripping onto the edge with everything he has, knuckles paling with the strain.

Nines brings his free hand down to the gorge of Gavin’s chest, fitting the rise of flesh there to the fan between his thumb and index finger. “You know,” he says, “you’re showier than you think. The way you look, you weren’t just— made to be cast aside, your function served.”

He regards Gavin for a moment, then shakes his head. “But then again,” he says, savage and tender, “who the fuck cares what they made you for.”

Underneath his palm, Gavin melts into pliable handfuls, warm as wax. This is all that comes of ceding control; you, everywhere around me, ready to break my fall. As Nines dips his head back down towards his chest, Gavin catches his eye — and for just one razor-sharp instant, the blur of his vision swimming back into focus — he sees Nines’s lips curl into a smile.

There was nothing to be afraid of. You’ve always known what to do with me. Nines is patient but resolute as he pushes Gavin towards release, closer every unrelenting second, letting the mounting tension build in him without flagging. Conducting him through an orchestral crescendo. Breath hitching wet in his throat, Gavin willingly surrenders to him— until finally, whether it’s the uneven tremor in Gavin’s muscles or the helpless open fracture of his voice, something tells Nines that the time is right.

Digging the hard edge of his thumbnail into the tip of a flushed nipple, his tongue swirling hot around the pert shape of the other as he sets his teeth to it, Nines grinds his fingers — firm as a command — against the ripened swell of Gavin’s prostate. That does it, precisely as Nines intends; Gavin curves off the bed with a ragged moan, lashes sweeping closed, as all the taut suspense in him comes thunderously crashing down under its own weight. Between them, his untouched cock jerks and shudders, spending thick strands of come across his stomach.

“God,” he hears himself keening, “Nines, ah,” biting down on his lip with a whimper when Nines won’t stop stroking inside him. It feels like it goes on forever, his walls pulsing erratically around Nines’s fingers as the orgasm is milked out of him, even after his cock spurts one last time and slumps against his inner thigh. Just as some distant recess of Gavin’s lightheaded brain starts to wonder if he’s going to pass out, Nines slips his fingers out of him, at long last.

A full minute goes by before Gavin can do anything other than struggle to get the air cycling back into his lungs, flinching whenever an errant aftershock runs through him without warning. Panting, utterly boneless in the sheets, he looks up at Nines with an expression that is — in all regretful likelihood — at least as blissed out as it is reproachful.

“Hi,” says Nines.

“You’re trying to kill me,” groans Gavin.

“This is slander,” says Nines. “What I’m doing is trying to make you come.”

The placid innocence on his face is extremely galling, and Gavin is petty enough to want to unbalance him. “I don’t need all that to come,” he says. “You know how easy I am for you.”

He’s rewarded by the sight of Nines in a rare graceless attempt at evasion, averting his eyes and clearing his throat like there’s something else that needs his attention. His nonplussed gaze eventually lands on the streaks of come painting Gavin’s torso, and that genuinely does seem to catch his interest; he drags his fingers through the mess, bringing them up to the reddened wreck of Gavin’s mouth, more inquisitive than demanding.

Same old glycerin dross. He’s licked it off his own hand for the benefit of the camera a hundred times before. It’s not the taste of himself that he’s after, when he turns and takes Nines’s fingers into his mouth, winding his tongue between them, lapping them clean. Beneath it, there’s Nines — no scent to him, no particular flavor, not even ozone — but no less him for all that.

The meat of his forefinger dimpled against the point of Gavin’s bottom canine, Nines coaxes his jaw an inch lower, then bends over him and presses their lips together in an open-mouthed kiss. Gavin sighs into it, immediately pleased, arms coming to wrap around Nines’s shoulders. Tongue to tongue, he gets a little lost again; Nines’s other hand is already tracing the slick cleft of his ass before he remembers what he meant to do.

“Wait,” he mumbles, “Nines.”

“Why,” asks Nines, feelingly.

“My turn,” says Gavin. “I had something I wanted to try.”

“Not that I don’t value innovation,” says Nines, “but — if I could advocate for my own perspective on this — I’d really like to be inside you right now.”

“That’s what we’re getting to,” says Gavin. “I’m not letting you out of this room otherwise.” He props himself back on his elbows and yells in the general direction of his laptop, “Take a hydration break, we’ll be back after a word from our sponsors.”

“Who are our sponsors?” asks Nines.

“The DOJ, probably,” says Gavin, wriggling out from under him. With some satisfaction, he notes that Nines’s cock has filled back out in the meantime, straining heavy at the base of his groin. An enticing obstacle to the agenda at hand, but Gavin heroically manages to tear his eyes away from it.

Collecting his crumpled t-shirt from the foot of the bed, he wipes the rest of his come off of himself in haphazard dabs, and asks Nines: “What do you think would happen, if you left me to my own devices?”

“To your—” repeats Nines. “You mean— if you don’t come with me to DC?”

“Even if I do go with you,” says Gavin, “that still doesn’t mean you’d always be able to keep an eye on me, right? No matter how many security cameras you hook yourself up to. And keeping an eye on me doesn’t mean forcing my hand, either. When push comes to shove, I can only do what I choose to do, and that might not be what you would have wanted from me.”

“I know,” says Nines. “If it’s what you want to do, then that’s what I—”

“Nines,” Gavin cuts in, quietly. “I’m going to fuck up, too. I’m not always going to remember that you want me to play it safe, and when I do remember it, sometimes I still won’t believe it. You won’t always be happy with me — or with yourself — even if you understand that there’s only so much you can do.”

As it becomes clear that Gavin isn’t just rehashing an anxiety put to rest, Nines lapses into heedful silence. Even after today, even when we know what page we’re supposed to be on, we won’t always find ourselves there. Knowing was the easier half of the battle.

“Sometimes,” says Gavin, “it might not look like I’m acting in my own self-interest. But that’s still— that’s me doing what I’ve chosen for myself, regardless of how I got there. Do you believe that?”

Nines looks down at his open palms. “—I want to,” he says, the kernel of his honesty an infinitely precious thing. “I’m trying to.”

“Yeah, me too,” says Gavin. “You have to keep reminding me, and I’ll keep reminding you. I promise.” He rolls his neck until he hears it crack, shaking off the solemnity, and declares: “Well, that’s the most earnest conversation I’ve ever had in the nude. Want to see what I get up to when things are out of your hands?”

“The— what?” stammers Nines.

“Didn’t you say something about needing to be inside me?” With a hand on Nines’s clavicle, Gavin pushes him down onto the bed while he’s still thrown off guard, the back of Nines’s head landing among the cradle of pillows. Over his own shoulder, Gavin shouts, “Show’s back on, everybody,” and moves to straddle him.

Half buried in cotton, Nines is too stunned to protest straightaway. “Do you—,” he says, “what should I be doing?”

“Watching,” says Gavin. “I’m going to turn around and ride you, while you just watch me do a great job of taking care of myself.”

With a sharp intake of breath, Nines nods in comprehension. “It’ll be all right,” he says, “even when you’re out of my hands.” Then, as he looks at his own palm placed against the long muscle of Gavin’s thigh, he asks, “Can I touch you?”

“Obviously you can touch me, I couldn’t be so cruel,” says Gavin. “To myself, I mean,” he clarifies, swinging his legs over Nines’s hips, clambering into position with his back towards Nines.

Part of it is exactly that: the desire to show Nines that sometimes — perhaps — this is all that comes of ceding control. Just Gavin making his own curious way to the finish line, no disaster or great tragedy waiting to ambush them. Nines loosening his grip on the steering wheel, letting everything else find the road in his stead, would be no courting of misfortune.

But with his knees braced at either side of Nines’s legs, Gavin takes a good look at his laptop screen for the first time in a long while, and that’s another piece of the puzzle, too. The naked expanse of his body, warm and pliant, spread out on view for nameless voyeurs to rake their eyes over. Angled like this, there’s nothing for him to hide behind — no stitch of clothing, not the canopy of Nines’s form over his — and he’s delighted to have his showoff streak catered to.

Vanity or professional pride, a little of both, but he knows he thrives under this kind of attention. Why would he be above playing to the cheap seats, when the cheap seats pay his bills— and besides, it’s always the cheap seats that give him the cheap thrills he craves. Guests now watching: 267, 268, and climbing with each second. The chat has been somewhat dormant while he and Nines indulged in their interlude, but it’s starting to pick up speed again, now that he’s turned to face the camera.

Reaching behind himself, Gavin curls his hand around the rigid circumference of Nines’s cock. “Keep up the good work,” he says without looking around. Beneath his legs, he can feel Nines tense up with anticipation; you just leave it to me, he thinks, and lifts his hips. He lines up the damp cockhead to prod against the dip of his entrance — slick down the part of his ass — and slowly, steadily, he sinks onto Nines.

“—Fuck,” he groans through clenched teeth, “my god,” for something altogether less describable than pain; it’s not that it hurts, it’s that he’s being filled. The sheer satiation of Nines’s cock edging its way inside him, burrowing a path through the embrace of his inner walls. It’s like the pressure tops him up and overflows, a gentle burn that suffuses the length of his spine and radiates outward, until all of him feels taut and translucent, like a balloon straining with the weight of water. He’s too distracted by the incremental agony of the movement to have aimed it with intent, but the tip of Nines’s length skims his spot as it nuzzles deeper within him— and for a brief spinning moment, the whole world turns to white noise.

By the time the rest of Nines is seated completely within him, Gavin has gone from half to fully hard, his fingers digging so tightly into Nines’s thighs that their liquid skin rears back. Despite his best efforts to even out the keel, his exhale slips from him as a heated little sigh. Flush against his ass, unfolding like a seismic tremor, the ridges and planes at the juncture of Nines’s groin. The stern furrow of his hipbones.

“All right?” asks Nines, sounding every bit as shaky as he must be.

“Yeah,” breathes Gavin. He tries to swallow away the dryness in his throat. “That’s— deep,” he manages, gathering the shreds of his focus from where they’ve scattered, willing his coherence back in bits and pieces. “That’s, ah— that’s different.”

“Is it,” asks Nines.

“You’re—” says Gavin, without the right words for it. Nothing in his bedside drawer is quite like this; with every small shift of Gavin’s weight, Nines stirs inside him, wonderfully alive. He feels this too. The quickness of their bodies, answering each other. The reciprocity is what sweeps Gavin’s feet out from under him, leaves him speechless and spellbound, grasping for a way to tell Nines, it’s because you’re here with me.

He rolls his hips a bit, against the living plinth of Nines’s body underneath. “I can feel your pump beating,” he mumbles, the closest he can get to what he means.

“I thought it was you,” says Nines, disheveled with the hint of a laugh. “Both of us, maybe.”

Pulsing in sync, skin peeled back until chassis meets chassis— and still, nothing else comes through but what they tell each other out loud. That’s strange; Gavin expects the same unchecked intensity to have stormed in past the interface link, but shelled or not, what Nines says is all he hears. As he raises himself up nearly off of Nines’s cock and dips back down an inch, shallow just for the sensation of Nines rubbing up inside him, Gavin looks at where his hand grips Nines’s leg.

“Are you blocking it?” he asks. “The link?”

“No,” says Nines. “I can— let’s see.” His flesh webs closed over the point of contact, then ripples away, resetting the connection. “That’s not doing anything,” he says, perplexed.

“Never mind,” says Gavin, “doesn’t matter,” because a connectivity troubleshoot is really the least of what he wants the two of them to be doing. He takes a deep inhale and keeps moving, only dabbling at the shoals. Gradually, he relaxes with the steady drag of Nines’s cock against his rim, the soothing trance of pleasure starting to overtake the initial jolt.

It’s good, like this. The tension in his limbs melts to an easy glow. He knows the heat will keep building past the threshold, that sooner rather than later, the need in him will turn frantic again; but for now, he’s content to float along on the unhurried waves. With the strain seeped out of him, the color swims back to his fingertips, to Nines’s thigh.

“So,” he hears Nines say, “is this something you like? Asking for a friend.”

“Tell your friend I’m not picky,” murmurs Gavin. “I like it hard and fast, too. I like when you hold me down. But this— yeah.” He twists the barest bit, not enough yet to reach his sweet spot, toying with himself. “I like just having you inside me.”

Even with less than half of Nines’s shaft actually buried in his ass, Gavin can feel him palpably fill out to further stiffness. “Good to know,” Nines says, faintly.

“Don’t know why you needed to ask,” says Gavin, pleased as ever to rattle Nines. “I thought it was pretty obvious.”

“I guess,” says Nines, “I like learning about you.”

Warmed all over from the slow stoking and the candor of Nines’s affection, Gavin decides to try for something a little more full-tilt. “Then I’ll tell you what I can,” he says, settling back. With habituated precision, he lowers himself — guiding the head of Nines’s cock up towards his stomach, until he knows it’s just brushing at the bump of his prostate — and he grinds down onto it, back arched, a firm and lingering glide that spangles the lights behind his eyes.

“Ah, Nines,” he gets out, before his voice dissolves into a hazy moan. Past the muffled curtain of his own heartbeat, he hears Nines’s sharp intake of breath from behind him. Before him, too breakneck to peruse but unmistakably charged, the chat window flooding with anonymous fervor. A stray line jumps out as his vision clears, here and there: hot as shit, and made for this, and want to see you fucking lose it.

Caught between his approval and theirs, treasured as a petal tucked into a book, Gavin eases his whole weight back onto Nines. He glances over his shoulder, where Nines is half buried in the cushions. His lips parted, his eyes in the lamplight the brilliant pellucid gleam of an iceberg beneath the surface of the water.

“The chat wants me to come on your cock,” says Gavin, conversationally.

“Wouldn’t want to disappoint them,” says Nines.

He snaps his hips up, the absolute piece of work reprobate that he is. Gavin yelps in surprise as the motion jounces Nines within him.

“—None of that,” Gavin chides him.

“Sorry,” says Nines. “I’ll behave.”

He remains, of course, entirely unapologetic. But he does keep to his assurance, refraining from meddling any further, letting Gavin take the reins. When Gavin begins to move in earnest, fucking himself on Nines’s cock with long, deliberate thrusts, the stutter of Nines’s hips is only what he can’t hold back, muscle reflex on his part. Gavin takes it as encouragement.

Even this, he tries not to rush. With every scrap of self-restraint he can muster, one hand braced on the mattress next to him, he sets his teeth and keeps the going slow. Deep, but measured. It feels like the hardest thing he’s ever done: drawing himself up the generous length of Nines’s shaft, sinking back onto it without slamming himself down to the hilt, though every last inch of his body is aching for it. But not yet, he tells himself. A little longer. Not yet.

Itching to pick up the pace and just as desperate to take his mind off of it, he tries to divert his attention by tending to craft. By making a study of the pursuit, cataloguing what he can do and doing it to his fullest. Bearing down lightly as he rocks up, wrapping the velvet snugness of his insides around the shape of Nines’s cock, sheathing him in heat, then thawing to a supple give on the smooth way down. I’ll be the best goddamn ride you’ve ever had.

Regrettably, this yields mixed results. If Nines’s muted curse is any indication, Gavin must be doing well; the trouble is that he shoots himself in the foot a bit, trying to distract himself from how good it feels by making it feel as good as possible. He might not have thought this through.

“Shit,” he groans. “Tactical error.”

“What is it,” asks Nines.

“I’m too— too good at this,” says Gavin.

Before Nines, he never figured that it would be particularly rewarding to be met in the sheets with amusement. But there’s something about the sound of Nines’s laughter, a quiet rustle just under his breath, that makes Gavin take off running after more of it. The unguarded bloom of his regard, like he’s glad just to be around me, thinks Gavin. Like he’ll be here for a very long time.

Dropped into the middle of the sentence, like tuning in on a television channel in an ocean of static, he hears: “—Touch you.”

“What?” asks Gavin, blearily.

“You said— I could touch you,” says Nines. “Yes?”

“Yes,” stammers Gavin without thinking twice, “please,” preoccupied with the mounting roil, restless and prickling under his skin.

He doesn’t expect Nines to sit up in place, nearly pitching him forward. It mashes Nines’s cock into him at an angle that ought to be prosecuted as a war crime, and Gavin shakes apart into a full-body shudder, his circuitry fizzing, as a breathy moan tears its way out of his throat.

Everything below his waist seems to have a mind of its own. He’s half trying to keep himself upright, half shoving his ass back into Nines— but before he can sort himself out, Nines presses his front close against Gavin’s back, hands snaking around to knead at the swell of his chest.

“You— ah,” gasps Gavin, leaning into the touch despite himself, “this is a— a thing, with you.”

“Have you seen yourself,” Nines murmurs into his ear. “It’s a thing with everyone, I’m sure.”

He ghosts the pad of his thumb across the tip of a reddened nipple, over and over again, until the feeling gathers heavy enough to pool down into the base of Gavin’s spine. It’s too much, all at once: Nines teasing him in full view of the camera, making a show of it, as hundreds of eyes drink down the sight of him coming so readily undone. At each drag of a fingernail, a squeezed handful of flesh, his ass spasms tight around Nines and draws him in to rub against his spot. So thick and full it knocks the air from his lungs. Thighs twitching erratically, Gavin falls back against Nines, head dropping to his shoulder.

“Nines,” he pants, wet against the crook of Nines’s neck. A spill of fluid wells over the crown of his cock, and he knows he’s dangerously close, tilted with one foot hanging over the edge of the cliff. He slaps blindly at Nines’s elbow, anything to convey his urgency in the absence of words.

To his credit, Nines seems to get it, sliding his hands off of Gavin’s chest down to his waist. Inside Gavin, the steel-beam rigidity of his erection gives an impatient jerk. “Yes,” he says, sounding pretty winded himself.

“Down,” says Gavin, “back down.”

“But,” says Nines, in an eloquent defense of his own depravity.

“I want—” Gavin swallows down a whine, or at least as much of it as he’s able. “You— in me,” he says, “a little longer.”

“—Okay,” says Nines, like he’s convincing himself into it. “Yes, I— hold on.”

Gingerly, his hands lingering on Gavin’s waist in wistful delay, he lays himself back onto the pillows. Perhaps not for the first time, Gavin thinks — he lets me get away with too much — and flushes warm with the thought.

A little longer is about all they can manage, flying as high as they are. Precome spurts from Gavin’s cockhead with every roll of his hips, trickling down his shaft, dripping over his sack to dampen where they’re joined. It’s a feat of self-control that he somehow keeps his hands clamped down on the mattress to either side of Nines, when all he’d need is one or two good strokes to bring himself off. God, if he tackled everything with the same level of commitment he has to coming on Nines’s cock, he could achieve so much.

But why would I, he thinks, when nothing feels as good as this. Nines, the sensation of skin against skin. The build of friction between them. That’s the cosmic joke: that our creators hard-wired into us a better way of doing this, gave us the means to connect to one another without the limits of language or dissemblance— and yet, here we are, insisting on making a fucking mess of the bedsheets. You, inside me, when what they wanted for us was the antiseptic efficacy of a firm data link handshake.

“You know, I meant it,” says Nines, “that I— like learning, about you.”

Gavin hums a little in acknowledgement, dips his head in a nod, breathless and incapable of much more than that.

“But,” says Nines, “I like— the ways that I don’t know you. All of that, too.”

—Was that why nothing came through, with their skin peeled back? Gavin thinks he might understand now; because what we wanted to tell each other was in the skin. There are things they’d never know about each other, that the fluent resonance of interfacing could never render coherent, a system designed only to convey what made sense in the first place. But skin against skin, they’re free to revel in the thing that separates them. All the ways that I am not like you.

What feels good is the friction. The difference, magnetic. Gavin tips his weight back, sloping towards Nines, and reaches behind himself until his fingers close around Nines’s lower arm. I can feel you here because I chafe against you, because of what doesn’t fit together about us. In his grip, Nines turns his hand upward, palm curving around the inside of Gavin’s wrist. The skin between them carries on.

Turn everything I’ve been given into something worth having. What I’ve done out of fear, let me now do in faith. Trust isn’t surety, and doesn’t have to be; you only build bridges where there are chasms to cross. The trust is in the despite, the shot in the dark, the hazard of freefall, you at my back. In knowing that Nines is always watching over him, there with him, even when Gavin doesn’t see him.

“Nines,” he breathes, “—Nines,” knowing that Nines is there to hear him.

Wordless, Nines brings his other hand to tangle against Gavin’s. Tight as a promise. His vision fogged over with the nearing cusp of release, Gavin looks into the eye of the webcam without really seeing anything, the chat log a blur of clouds sailing across a windswept sky. Every exhale hot and shallow, every tingling inch of his skin laid bare for the audience. From the shudder in his thighs up to the dark flush of his cock, a sheen of sweat down the gulch of his heaving chest, open-mouthed and wet-lashed, a touchable ruin.

Then, in the inset window of his own camera feed — behind the silhouette of his moving form — he finds Nines. Propped up on the cushions, his head just a little aslant, eyes off the screen. Looking at—

At me, Gavin realizes. He’s watching me. The look on his face, indescribably soft with wonder.

“—Ah—,” moans Gavin as the force of it hits him, his whole body seizing up shock-rigid, drawn taut and sweet as a violin string. The sound that leaves him hitches like a sob, “god, ah, Nines—” as he lets go and plummets over the edge, as he shatters apart, every soldered seam a dazzling crack of light.

The climax overtakes him and demolishes him, consummate as drowning. Inside, he wrenches tight all around Nines, the vicious loving clench of his ass working the whole hard length of his cock, the shape of it so obscenely distinct within him — wringing him out with uneven spasms until Nines gives into the urging, until Nines groans out his name — Gavin — and comes with a shudder, pulsing cock buried deep inside him still, a streak of heat thrown against the tender throb of his walls.

Gavin loses track of time. He knows he’s gasping as he trembles in place, the tail end of his orgasm petering out, but his overloaded input cuts out for a few seconds — or at least, he thinks it’s a few seconds — and everything flickers dark except for his sense of touch. As Nines draws out, every movement reverberates through him, almost too clear in isolation: Nines’s hands propping up his hips, the texture of his shaft, come-drenched cockhead sliding against the flutter of his hole. He sags against the brace of Nines’s hands, leaving the rest to him.

First to return is his hearing, as the quick rasp of his own panting drifts back to his ears. Creased bedsheets at eye level. He’s lying on his side, gulping down air, still shivering and sighing through the last of the aftershocks. Wet, from the cleft of his ass down the insides of his thighs. Absolutely wrecked.

From somewhere above him, Nines is saying: “—everyone for tuning in. Hope you enjoy the rest of the night, stay safe.”

Gavin huffs out a small laugh against the linens. “Listen to yourself,” he murmurs. “Who ends a cam stream like that, you narc.”

Nines switches off the camera and lets the remote drop at the foot of the bed. “My guess is they won’t be complaining about the sign-off,” he says, and leans over Gavin to press a kiss to the corner of his mouth.

“Sure,” says Gavin. “They got their money’s worth.”

He shifts onto his back and looks up at Nines. It’s unfair, isn’t it. Damp and knackered, he’s still as striking as ever. The canted smile at his lips. His curls spilling loose around them, falling into Gavin’s face, tickling at his cheeks. Hardly daring to breathe, wary of breaking the spell, Gavin reaches up and winds a lock of his hair around a careful finger.

This is how I’ll remember you, thinks Gavin. If ever I need to call to you, drag you back from the brink with whatever I have of you— even when you don’t know who I am, you’ll know that someone has wanted you like this.

You’ll see yourself the way I see you now, lit like a miracle, and you’ll know that there’s someone to find your way back to. I’ll be there at the landing, waiting for you.

“Gavin,” says Nines, hushed, “come with me.” He pauses, LED flashing gold for an instant. “You don’t need to, I know you have— things here,” he says, “but I’d like you to be where I am.”

And maybe we’ll only ever know each other in pieces, but they’ll catch the light just the same.

“To hell with what I have here,” says Gavin. “Let’s blow this joint.”

Every piece of you, bright.

Chapter Text

14.

“So,” says Nines, “what do you think?”

Gavin places a hand for balance on the sloping ledge beneath the headlights of the Malibu, bending over to get a better look at the bumper. Under his palm, the ridge of the fender is a sleek stretch of metal, gentled to warmth by the morning sun. Absently, he strokes across it, like smoothing down the cheekbone of an animal.

The strap on one of his duffle bags begins to slip down his shoulder. Nines catches it before the bag can hit the ground, holds it up as Gavin goes on examining the car.

“Good as new?” prompts Nines.

“Maybe that’s it,” says Gavin. He straightens up, retrieving the weight of the bag. “I was thinking, there’s something just a little out of place, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. But it might be that the new front bumper just looks— new.”

“The rest of the car is also in excellent shape,” protests Nines. “I’ve taken very good care of it.”

“I’m sure you did,” says Gavin. “But it’s a GSA rental, and a 2036 model, besides. It came to you with some miles on it.”

He gives the hood of the Malibu an encouraging pat, welcome back, champ. Nines trails behind him as they round towards the trunk, asking, “Is it really that bad?”

“Well, only that it’s noticeable,” says Gavin. “A patchwork car isn’t something you see every day, that’s all. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”

Nines clutches the keyless fob in his hand like a ransom. “For what it’s worth,” he says, “my opinion is that it looks good, and I’m honored to be responsible for it.”

“Yes, of course,” says Gavin. “How will we ever get to DC, what with you constantly being stopped on the highway by people demanding to know where you managed to find this gem of a vehicle.”

Satisfied with Gavin’s endorsement, recognizably facetious as it is, Nines unlocks the trunk with a chirrup of the fob. Gavin tosses one duffle bag into the compartment, where it lands on the cargo liner with a muffled but remarkably hefty report. A moment of impressed silence as Nines takes note of how much sheer weight has been crammed into the bag, then he notices that Gavin still has the other slung over his shoulder.

“What about that one?” he asks.

“No, I need this one in the front with me,” says Gavin. “It has the dog treats in it.”

Nines accepts this as an unassailable answer. “Understood,” he says, with a solemn nod. The sweep of his hair catches the early breeze, stirring over the still waters of his forehead. Turtlenecked and loose-limbed, he’s light on his feet and ready to march; this suits him, too. The simplicity of being at rest.

“That and other dog stuff,” says Gavin. “Something to chew on, bowls, you know.” Then the bag bounces against him, and the sharp edge of a wire-frame curve digs into his side. “—And the trash can,” he adds, remembering.

“Genuinely incomprehensible.” Recalling this particular detail of their last visit to Central Station appears to cause Nines physical pain. “They said you could ask them for anything, and you asked for a trash can.”

“Because I wanted the trash can,” says Gavin. “It sure beat everything else Anderson kept trying to pawn off on me. A trash can isn’t a souvenir, take this commemorative DPD ballpoint pen instead. What am I going to do with a pen?”

“What are you going to do with a trash can?” asks Nines.

“I’m going to put trash in it,” declares Gavin. With his hand on the passenger side door, looking across at Nines over the roof of the car, he pauses. “Should I have taken Connor’s ID card?” he asks. “That’s what I should have done, I should have called their bluff and ripped Connor’s lanyard right off of his neck. That would have been funny.”

Nines seems like he’s about to raise an objection — you know they can just issue him a replacement card — or, were you going to steal federal property and flee the premises? — but then he reconsiders the scenario, maybe runs a mental simulation of the ensuing events, and shrugs in acquiescence.

“True,” he says. “It would have been funny.”

Seat belt buckled and duffle bag shoved into the footwell, Gavin slots into the passenger seat like he’s always done. Patchwork bumper or not, this hasn’t changed a bit; the angle of the chair is just the way he left it. This is my seat, he thinks, and something knotted inside him comes loose, unfurls its leaves and stretches toward the sky.

Next to him, Nines has gone silent. Drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, he’s staring off into the middle distance, contemplative but not distraught. Gavin tilts his head in inquiry.

“I was thinking—” begins Nines, then turns to Gavin and asks: “Will they like me?”

“Who, Hank and Connor?” asks Gavin.

“Queenie and Rob,” says Nines.

“Shouldn’t be a problem,” says Gavin. “They’re not aggressive towards androids.”

“I don’t want them to be not aggressive,” says Nines. “I want them to like me.”

The look on his face is so deeply serious that Gavin bites down on a rising laugh, deferring to the ounce of tact within himself. “You can be such a—” he says, in equal parts delight and disbelief. “You’re fine, they’ll like you.”

Nines doesn’t seem entirely convinced by the formulaic assurance, so Gavin gives him a little extra nudge for the road. “They’re protection dogs,” he says, airily. “They like what I like.”

“—Sure,” says Nines, “that’s good,” and his fingers still their nervous rhythm. He turns back toward the dashboard, the shell of his ear faintly tinged with color.

“Arguably,” says Gavin, very pleased with himself, “they weren’t trained to protect me, so being that attuned to me might not be a mark in their favor. But I suppose that’s what happens when you’re too busy slinging ice to spend time with your own dogs. They get attached to the wrong person.”

“Doesn’t seem like it was the wrong person,” says Nines.

“What’s left of Landau’s face might beg to differ,” says Gavin. Then he shakes his head, thinking better of it. “But that wasn’t their fault. They’re good, really.”

“I know they are,” says Nines. Glancing sidelong at Gavin, he adds, softly: “Landau didn’t know what he had.”

It’s Gavin’s turn to look away, unsure of how to acknowledge the quiet sentiment. But that’s okay, he thinks. I have time to figure it out. Nines isn’t going anywhere.

The Presas had a certain affection for Landau, indifferent as he was. They would hear the sound of the front door unlatching downstairs, the indistinct contours of his voice talking shop, and begin to tug at their leashes in welcome. Gavin knelt down next to them, sliding his hand in under their collars to settle them down.

His cheek against Queenie’s shoulder, he whispered into her coat. Your daddy’s a bad man, Queenie. She didn’t know the difference; none of them did.

Gavin traces the even teeth of the duffle bag zipper with a fingertip. Forty miles away in Ann Arbor, Queenie and Rob are waiting for him without knowing it. Nosing at the cold epoxy floor of the shelter playroom. Cropped ears twitching at every creak of the door, never sure of who’s on the other side.

But sometimes, this is what comes of uncertainty: someone who wants you, stepping through the doorway, coming to take you home. You don’t know it yet, but I’m making my way to you. Someone arrives on your stoop in the listless hours of the day, inscrutable in his button-down and his pressed slacks, his nylon jacket faded at the cuffs. Neither of you knows it yet, but he’s been looking for you, too.

“It’s not the Presas you should be worried about,” says Gavin. “It’s the part where you backhand the Director of the FBI across the face and demand that you be allowed to keep working your case.”

“But you’ll hold his arms back for me, right?” asks Nines. “Otherwise what’s the point of getting you sworn in?”

“Yes, but only because your case has the stupidest fucking name ever stamped on a dossier,” says Gavin. “I’ll do it for Electric Slide.”

“Anyway,” says Nines, "if that’s how you think we resolve professional disagreements, you’re going to be disappointed with life as a federal agent.”

“I’ve seen enough of what you do,” says Gavin. “At this point, I’d be disappointed not to be disappointed.”

“All right, then,” says Nines, the set of his mouth an easy curve. “Onward to disappointment.”

He holds down the push-start button until the car thrums to life beneath them. Through the picture frame of their windshield, the pavement winds like a river towards a sea, an augury of highways as implacably vast as the ocean current. It’s time to set sail. Ann Arbor, Washington, back through the cornfields of Ohio, up past the Straits of Mackinac, further, still further, into the spray.

You’ll tire of the waves. Thirsty for the fastness of land under your feet, you’ll find yourself out by the taffrail in the dirty moonlight, longing for the shatter of the surf against the shore. The heat of your hands in soil. And when something finally shimmers above the horizon of the open water — the promise of a coastline — you’ll hold your breath and reach out for it, eyes rimmed thick with salt, not knowing if it’s land or a trick of the light.

It could be only that. Just a trick of the light. But imagine only wanting what you can understand; imagine what might slip through your fingers, if you turned away for not knowing. Who was standing at your doorstep, waiting for you to let him in, for you to teach him how to say your name.

So you call on the courage to be reckless. Fata morgana or terra firma, you set your course towards that faraway shape, because you’ve dreamed every night of walking through the wheat. Birdsong as the daybreak burns away the fog. Nines, his shoulders squared in his jacket, head held high as he strode into the afternoon light— and the shadow he cast behind him was a harbor, a windless refuge, sweeping and still—

—You feel like the real thing, thinks Gavin, and that’s enough to go on.

“Wait a sec,” he says, rummaging through the glove compartment until he finds it: Nines’s sunglasses, snap-closure case. “You forgot these,” he explains, fishing them out, handing them over.

Nines takes them, perches them low over the bridge of his nose. “Wouldn’t be right without them,” he says.

Gavin looks out the passenger side window, at the closed front door of his apartment. The locks are locked, the floors broom-clean. Inside, nothing left of him but the crooked particle-board breakfast table, ten bucks bequeathed to the next tenant to take the sorry thing off of his hands. With him, two duffle bags, the clothes on his back. Nines in the driver’s seat, resplendent in his pointless sunglasses.

You took a shovel to your backyard once, dug a hole six feet deep, braced yourself to bury what you didn’t want to look at. But when you went searching in your shed for the things you meant to put underground, all you found there were seedlings, clamoring for the sun. So you sat in the overgrown grass and buried nothing at all; handful by handful, you turned the grave to a garden.

In the end, thinks Gavin, you can’t go back to unwrite what’s already been written. What you can do — handful by handful — is to write more, to keep writing, until it doesn’t matter what came before. Keep driving until it doesn’t matter how you got there, only that you are where you are, your dogs in the back seat, someone you trust behind the wheel. Turn everything I’ve been given into something worth having.

Gavin reaches over and fiddles with the radio tuner. Secondhand doesn’t have to mean second best. And no one knows that better than us, here at Motor City Finest Auto Sales! The passenger seat fits him like a glove, and the can of Thiri-10 he digs out of his duffle bag is still fridge-cold against his palm. Damp with condensation, the Post-it note plastered to its side: This one’s on me. —T.

“What about you?” asks Nines, peering over the rim of his sunglasses. “Are you set?”

You leave what you can, and you take what you have. The rest is faith.

“Yeah,” says Gavin. “I have everything I want.”