In the minute that it took for the police to arrive, Whitney peeled off her boots and socks, stretching her toes with fingerlike dexterity, sat on the floor with her back to her workbench, and pulled her VR helmet over her head. She booted it up, and just like that, she was gone.

Mentally gone, entirely. I'd played some consoles at friends' houses back in my youth, so I'd experienced the casual end of the VR market, and in the brief moments I'd work Karu's visor, I was reminded of just how crazy neural interface tech could be...how it understood and reacted to thoughts so fast you felt like your mind was being read.

Even if, with Karu specifically, it seemed mostly to be very confused and wrong about how interested I was in her boobs. Clearly a bug.

But this rig, like all of Whitney's custom stuff, seemed like something else. Normally, there was sort of a conscious level of VR interaction...what I'd experienced felt like, well, what it was. You'd feel like yourself looking through a helmet into another world, which would tickle your senses but was still something you'd be playing consciously. Whitney, she just popped the helmet on and was out like a light, all traces of consciousness gone. Full neural uplink. She wasn't even here anymore. Crazy.

I didn't know what her plans were for when the cops came, but mine was to hide. As soon as she was out, I skipped over to the shower and let myself in, where I sensed Tem sitting in a corner.

"Doesn't your butt hurt, sitting on tile all day?" I asked her.

"I'm s-sorry. S-s-should I not?"

I shook my head. "You do realize that pain is your body's way of telling you to stop doing something."

"I didn't realize it was a problem for you. I'm s-s-sorry."

"Whatever, look...right now, Micaiah just showed up and was murdered out back. The police are coming and you and I need to hide."

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I saw my hands disappearing into the air in front of me.

"Um, yeah, thanks. But I think we might also want to go outside. Not a lot of room in here to avoid bumping into them. I don't want to leave Whitney but…" I sighed. "She's an adult, she's not going to get in trouble," I reassured myself. "Pick up anything that might hint we've been here, and let's go wait in the parking lot."

"I am good at waiting!" Tem's voice echoed cheerily in the shower, and I gave her an invisible, and therefore ineffective smile, and we headed out.

It was only a matter of seconds between us exiting the building and the police pulling up, one car, followed shortly by a second, the police splitting up between heading inside and fanning out around the area. I kept Tem close by as I followed the officers to the crime scene, which they immediately cordoned off.

I bet I'd left biologicals, and finger and footprints, probably ruining their investigation and painting myself as a suspect, but what the hell, I was about to have shadow ops and hunters chasing me down, what did I care about the police?

I watched for a while as they carefully documented the scene, and then went back to the front where another couple vehicles had appeared, and there seemed to be some field station, a large fortress of a van with one side all the way open and an operator inside in front of a sea of holos, listening intently to her comms as she coordinated the situation and catalogued evidence.

A solidly built man exited from the shop, making a beeline for the post. As he approached, the woman spun her chair to face him.

"Any progress?" she asked.

"The woman's unresponsive, completely uplinked to her VR. We're afraid that unplugging her risks short-term neurological damage which could render any testimony she gives inadmissible."

"Why the hell would she call us if she was just going to disappear," the operator fumed. "I mean, I know she just found a body before dinner, and that's nobody's idea of a good time, but she could stand to make our job a little easier."

"You're telling me. Should we plan to leave an officer here to bring her in once she's out?"

"The crime scene could take a few hours anyway. We'll make the call when we're close to wrapping up."

"Sounds good."

At least I wasn't missing anything going on inside, but I had to agree with the officers that Whitney's behavior wasn't exactly helpful.

I couldn't blame her though. As cool and put-together as she appeared, and whatever I thought of her, it unnerved me a bit to see her going to pieces over the body. I knew, cognitively, that I was an outlier when it came to this stuff...that most people had never taken a life, or seen a corpse, or felt that burning metallic tang in the air of too much spilt blood. But I was also surrounded by outliers. The P-Force, Cosette, Karu, Saga, AEGIS...all as bombproof as they came. Even Lia, despite my efforts to shield her from this kind of thing. So it was a kind of painful reality check to see someone I respected, someone older, with their shit together, who just...wasn't equipped to deal with the stuff I dealt with regularly.

This woman who had built a quarter of an exosuit out of scraps, for fun apparently...when it came to calling the cops and talking to them about what she'd experienced and heard...she'd just run away. Escaped into another world so she wouldn't have to face this one. It was hard, and it was sad.

And it was my fault that Micaiah had been here at all. I wasn't about to start blaming myself for his death, there was an assassin out there for that. But it was certainly only me who was encroaching this world onto Whitney's.

"We've documented the scene and are searching the body now," one holo reported out to the operator. "Possible robbery motive...though the wallet is still here, it had been rifled through and dumped in a bush behind the scene. Credits not taken. But...the victim had no mobile on them, but we did find a mobile stylus in his breast pocket."

"Killed just for his mobile?"

"We have an ID on the vic...and you're not going to like this."

"Hit me," she said.

"One Lieutenant Colonel Micaiah Teryn, Intelligence Division, XPCA."

"Goddamn."

"You said it sir."

"Well, they'll be ten different turns up our asses over this case, so make damn sure we're all crossing our T's and dotting our I's, everybody. Let's do this by the books. Leave nothing unchecked, leave nothing to chance, leave nothing unaccounted-for."

"Sir!" replied all the holo-comms at once.

She pulled off her comms and stepped out of the chair to talk to an officer with a goatee loitering nearby. "I'm going to call the captain and get him up to date, before the XPCA show up at his desk and kill the old man with a heart attack. Keep them coordinated."

"Sir," he replied, as she walked away with her mobile in-hand.

The first officer who'd come out, the solidly-built man walked over to talk to Goatee, who was taking up the operator station. "You think she did it?" he asked.

"Who?"

"The VR woman."

"I don't get paid to speculate. We find evidence and testimony, and the prosecutors do the rest."

Solidly-Built smiled. "Yeah, sure, but it's not like we're the ones making any decisions in the courtroom, so a little speculating doesn't hurt. Not like there's much to do until she pops out of VR anyway."

"Yeah, not much to do at all," Goatee responded with a sarcastic wave at the entire operations van he was seated in.

"Way I see it, woman lives alone, she's clearly got a few screws loose judging from the way she lives...she's got a bed and shower in there, hidden in the piles of crap. Hears some guy creeping around and pow."

"Yep, bet you just cracked the case. Never mind the fact she had a shock prod on her hip, not a firearm," Goatee replied. I liked that guy.

"Trust me, I dated a geek once. She was all VR and mobile and quiet and sweet, until one day, pow, pure psycho."

"You ever date any girls that don't go 'pure psycho'?"

"One or two of the more boring ones."

"Yeah, okay. Just wondering if it's you, or your taste in women."

"Trust me buddy, I wish she's not a suspect as much as anyone here. You want to guess how many evidence bags we're gonna go through rooting through all the shit she's got in there? And then the forensics guys are gonna hate us for months when they have to sort all this stuff. Although some of them might be into it. You seen the girl down in second forensics unit?"

"I thought you didn't like geeky girls. Pure psycho?"

"Usually, yeah, but she's got something...something else. You know what I mean?"

"Mental stability? Razor intellect? Self-awareness?"

"Nah…" He traced his hands through the air curvaceously. "Hips."

Goatee just shook his head.

I wandered off at this, just keeping an eye on things, though mostly staying near the operations van, which seemed to be where the action was and where I could keep an ear on everything else going on. The female sergeant came back but seemed content to let Goatee man the op while she oversaw things, and fortunately her presence seemed to be anathema to Solidly-Built running his mouth.

It wasn't until close to fifty minutes, after they'd long moved the body away and were taking biological samples that something happened. Goatee got a call which seemed very important on one of the comms and listened to it through an earpiece. He flagged over the sergeant afterwards.

"You'll want to see this," he said.

"We just ran biologicals indicating the presence of an unknown male," she interrupted. "Brown hair, fingerprint on one of the bullets. Might be our suspect. But what've you got for me?"

"He might not be. We got an anonymous message sent in with a video. Shows our VR missus POV as she finds the body."

I watched with growing horror over the sergeant's shoulder as the entire scene played out in front of me again, from Whitney's perspective. At first, it just seemed bad, putting me at the scene and then disappearing, and then I realized, if Whitney tried to cover for me at all, she'd be in a heap of shit.

And then it got real bad. I mentioned Dragon, I mentioned the shadow ops and hunters who might be after me, the Defiant, I even name-dropped Tem on accident.

"Okay," Sarge said when the holo finished and I was cringing my way into implosion. Why had she sent them that vid? "Who the hell is this guy, and how have we not found him yet?"

"She never mentions him by name, the whole holovid," Goatee said with a frown, skipping through it. "We have her record up, but she's listed as living alone and having no close friends or relatives."

"So she's just out for a friendly stroll with a stranger who's a forensics hobbyist and they stumble on a body and he vanishes, while she locks herself in VR? And then what, sends us this vid from virtual space? Something here stinks."

"I know that guy," Solidly-Built said. "I never forget a face."

"Friend of yours?" she asked him.

"No...something else," he thought. And every agonizing second he spent thinking, I felt my heart sink lower and lower in my chest.

Was there anything I could do? I already felt damned. As it stood, Whitney was going to get dragged in and interrogated brutally, both by the police and XPCA probably. There'd be a huge uproar, and the XPCA would come out in force after me, the only logical thing for them to do when the officer tracking me down makes a trip out here and then winds up dead behind the building where I'm discovered to be hiding. And depending on how loud that winds up being, the Defiant might run again…

This whole unmitigated disaster. It felt like everything was just falling apart around me, all because of this one vid, and I didn't even know why she took it or sent it in.

It put me on such a short clock, and I was already trying to match the speed of an international assassin. Now I had the police and XPCA to deal with again, too.

My mobile rang, and I panic-flailed to silence it as the officers looked around wondering who among them it belonged to. Fortunately I was familiar with the device well enough to be able to reject the call and mute it even while my fingers and the mobile were invisible, but holy hell, that wasn't the heart attack I needed right now.

They were checking Micaiah's car now, querying XPCA records for me, and a hazmat team had shown up to clean up the back of the building. And then another incoming call came in for them and when I saw who it was and how she looked, my heart crushed ever smaller.

"Colonel Cosette Dawn, Strike Division, XPCA," she introduced herself, looking and sounding like absolute shit. Her skin was simultaneously too tight and too loose, there were dark circles under her eyes, and her brown hair seemed almost wilted under her floppy black cap. Regardless, she gave the camera a crisp salute and stared into it with determination. "I have received notification that you've been querying about Athan 'Chariot' Ashton?"

"If that's who we're looking for. This guy?" Sarge replied, sending over a still from the vid.

Cosette frowned. "When was this taken? Where is this?"

"An hour ago, Beaverton, Oregon."

"Oregon? God damn it. You find that little shit and tell him--" Cosette snapped. She seemed to catch herself and her next words were void of anger, just pitifully sad. "...tell him...he promised."

I did not think it was possible for my heart to fall further, but that moment proved me wrong. I felt so heavy and wrong, so much just...exuded misery...like all of the miserable misunderstandings of the world were pouring out of that holo and slamming me straight in the chest. I wanted to tear off Tem's invisibility and scream to Cosette, I hadn't betrayed her, hadn't betrayed the XPCA, I was still doing everything I could for everyone.

"Promised what?" Sarge asked.

"Never mind. Just find him. Or...hmm...don't. If he's turned against us, it might be a very dangerous situation. Who's this now?"

I turned to see who Cosette was referring to and saw Whitney being brought up, thankfully not in cuffs, but an escorting officer was carrying her shock prod for her.

"Just a witness," Sarge said. "We are taking her into custody. As you were saying?"

"I was saying...do not pursue Chariot...Athan, that is. If he's turned, and is behind Colonel Teryn's death...he might not hesitate to continue using lethal force. And he can be very lethal indeed. It'd be best not to provoke him, until we have sufficient forces in the area."

"You're wrong," Whitney said, warningly, and immediately her escort began pulling her away by the shoulders, but stopped at a gesture from Sarge. "I've seen him, he's a good person."

"You think so?" Cosette said, with obvious hope. "What makes you think that, miss?"

"He's...I don't know. Today's been kind of an ordeal and I don't have my head altogether straight. He's the one who told me to contact the police, knowing it'd bring this investigation out here. But even when he knew the XPCA would be coming, he sat and comforted me. He took the time to tell me what I needed to hear. He's not a killer...well, he might be, but he's not a monster. He's got a good heart, I think. Whatever you think he did that's so wrong, I bet you're mistaken. It's not much, I admit, but it was enough to convince me."

Cosette scrutinized Whitney for a moment and then laughed. "Chariot, you sly dog. What is it about you?"

"It's not like that!" Whitney yelled, reddening as now she had to be held back. "I'm serious!"

"Calm down miss. I'm just amused that you've become an expert on Chariot in the short time we've lost him. You two must be very close."

"He's told me enough, and done enough that I believe in what he's told me. That's all."

"And that's all it takes? You have no lingering skepticism or see any ulterior motives?"

"No. He seems like a very honest and straightforward guy. If he says something, I'll believe it unless I have reason not to."

Cosette gave a wry smile and shook her head. "You don't even know the first thing, do you? I'd be interested to know if your opinion changes after this."

"After what? After what? Are you going to torture me?"

Cosette laughed, even as the sergeant seemed to bristle at the suggestion. "No, I'm just sending over the info you queried earlier. Take a good look at line seven."

The sergeant obediently pulled up the doc and I saw my own face, same picture on my XPCA ID. My personal information was all there, name, DOB...I skimmed to line seven.

Status: Exhuman. Alive.

Whitney gaped at the screen, her fire and vigor in yelling at some officer on a screen withering with every line she read, detailing my powers and history in the broadest of summaries.

"You're lying," she said. "This is a trick to get me to confess something. You want me to hate him, that's why you're saying this."

"Miss, be reasonable. We don't have any reason to fabricate a profile on him and you know it. Believe it or don't, that's up to you. But just think about it and I think you'll agree it makes sense."

She stopped and did think. And as she did, what was left of her seemed to extinguish. Finally, after long moments, she hung off of the policeman holding her rather than pulling against him.

"Still think he's totally honest?" Cosette asked. "I know I may sound callous but...I am genuinely curious. I have a vested interest in this boy."

Whitney mumbled and shook her head. "I want to go back in," she said.

"What?" Cosette asked.

"VR," Sarge clarified. "She was in there forever when we found her, and now she wants to go back." Sarge gave her an apologetic smile. "But we can't allow that. We need you alert for questioning and testimony, not half in some other place."

"No," Whitney argued, but it wasn't more than a whisper now. "No. Let me in, please."

"Sorry miss," Sarge said as she brought Whitney over to a car and opened the back door for her. "I'm afraid you're going to have to face the real world today."