The bathhouse ran on residual heat from the building’s old cooling system. The steam was free, and the visibility was about four feet in any direction. Rourke found Skink by following the sound of ice against glass.
He was in the far pool, submerged to the chest, a small wooden tray floating in front of him with a glass of something that wasn’t water. The fidget spinner sat still.
On the wall above him, barely visible through accumulated steam, a laminated sign read:
SOAK ORGANI — NLY. — —NOT RESPONSIBLE—CORROSSION
Rourke looked at it. Then looked again.
“Sit down,” said Skink. “You’re making me tired.”
Rourke sat on the bench at the edge. He looked at the water like a bar he wasn’t going into.
“So,” said Skink.
Rourke told him. The music latency. The bartender. The booth. The tremolo guitar coming through the wall and what happened after.
Skink listened without interrupting.
“She danced,” he said finally.
“Yes.”
“And you—”
“In the vicinity of dancing.”
Skink drank. The tray drifted slightly. He steadied it with one finger. “What’s her name?”
“Elira.”
“What’s next?”
Rourke looked at the wall where the sign had given up its last syllable.
“She said she knows how to find me.”
Skink took a long drink. He set the glass back on the floating tray with the care of someone who’d done the math.
“You’re mostly metal,” Rourke said. “You know there’s a sign.”
“Mostly ain’t the same as only,” said Skink, without looking up.
The steam rolled through. Somewhere in the pipes, something ticked.
The municipal records annex was open four days a week, and this wasn’t one of them. Rourke came back the next morning with a request slip already filled out, which saved him nothing — the clerk with thick-framed glasses retyped it into a terminal one field at a time, checking each entry against the slip like the two might disagree.
Sector 9 maintenance contracts came back as microfiche. Six years of procurement, four contractors, the usual churn. He read at the machine by the window because the other machine ate the film.
The pattern took two hours to be a pattern. A procurement code — PRC-0553-K — appeared in the substation contracts eleven times over six years, attached to four different contractor names. Same code, same line-item amount, rotating letterhead. Vendors change. Codes retire with them. This one didn’t.
He requested the vendor registration for all four. Three came back with the same registered agent, and the fourth had been dissolved and reregistered under a name that shared its filing address with the first three.
The address was on Tyrell.
The transit platform was two stops of standing. A synthetic ahead of Rourke tapped the reader and got yellow. Tapped again. Yellow. The gate took him on the third try, and nobody in the line said anything, including Rourke.
The address on Tyrell was municipal — six stories of glass panel and metal frame from the era when the city built its offices transparent on purpose. Half the panels had gone cloudy at the seams where the gaskets failed. Two on the third floor were plexi, mismatched, newer. Rust had found the joints.
The wind was doing something ahead of rain. The sky had the metallic look. Loose panels moved in their frames, not all at the same rate.
The front doors were glass too. One stood off the latch. Not forced — the strike plate was clean. Rourke looked at the gap and the floor inside it: dust, and a path through the dust, recent.
No lights. No HVAC hum. Somewhere above, paper lifted and settled with the drafts. A metal blind tapped against a frame at intervals that never quite repeated.
The lobby directory listed eleven tenants for forty offices. Three of the eleven were the same notary under different names. The elevator had an OUT OF SERVICE sign old enough that someone had done a crossword on it. Rourke took the stairs. The handrail was loose at the second-floor landing and again at the fifth, the same bolt pattern, the same missing bolt.
The report was where the codes said it would be, which was the first wrong thing about it. Box 40-C, third floor, filed under the contractor and not the deceased.
Two copies. Same incident number, same signature, same block lettering in the summary field. The dates at the bottom were eleven days apart.
Rourke read the older one first. Industrial accident, Sector 9 substation, one fatality:
VEER, HARLAN J.
The newer copy said the same thing. It omitted the witness paragraph.
He photographed both, put them back in the wrong order he’d found them in, and sat for a moment on a box marked ROUTING — 2041 that held someone’s winter coat.
The stairwell door opened onto a corridor of glass-walled offices, built for oversight, every desk once visible to every other. No lights past the landing. The blind tapped somewhere ahead, off-tempo.
The third door on the left stood open the width of a hand.
He went in. Not carefully. He’d noticed a long time ago that he didn’t slow down for rooms like this, and had filed the observation without examining it.
Click.
Fluorescents, one bank at a time, back to front. Bureaucratic white.
Elira stood near a conference table bolted to the floor. Behind her, a city seal half-peeled off the wall. The man from the alley was zip-tied to an office chair at the wrists and ankles. Neck tattoo rising out of a stained collar, hair buzzed on the sides with a flop of it forward, wet-combed. The chair had casters. He’d worked it maybe a foot toward the door before giving up; the carpet grooves said so.
“I was wondering if you’d show up,” she said.
The man looked from her to Rourke and did not look back.
“I ain’t did nothing to nobody’s grid,” he said.
“Who said anything about grid?” said Rourke.
“The routing jobs. That’s maintenance. Subcontract work.” He shifted against the ties. “It’s all under the contract — ya know, the one Veer signed off.”
Outside, the wind picked up. One cracked panel vibrated harder than the others.
Rourke blinked.
The lights flickered — or they didn’t. The interval didn’t file cleanly.
Elira did not move closer.
“What contract?” Rourke said.
The man was looking at him now with a different arithmetic. He leaned back as far as the ties allowed.
“You don’t even know what Veer built,” he said. “Do you.”
The blind tapped. The panel settled. Somewhere below them, the front door moved on its hinge, latched nothing, and went quiet.
The shop had a customer when Rourke came in — a courier model up on the lift, one leg open at the calf, the owner standing beside it with the posture of a man being billed.
“Told you,” Skink said, not looking up from the leg. “Registered part, three days, warranty. Off-grid part, three weeks, no warranty, costs double.” He turned a fitting with the drill finger, slow. “Grid don’t miss you till you miss the grid.”
The owner paid for the registered part.
Rourke waited until the lift was empty. Skink wiped the drill on a rag that made it dirtier and got a beer from the mini-fridge that had a biohazard sticker older than the beer.
“So,” Skink said.
Rourke told him. The building on Tyrell. The report with two dates. The man in the chair, the contract, the name.
Skink was quiet the length of a full swallow.
“Forty-C,” he said. “Contractor filing. Somebody kept the paper where the audit would look last.” He said it the way a man reads his own handwriting.
“The shooter’s still open,” Rourke said. “She doesn’t know either.”
“The bounty hunter doesn’t know.” Skink set the beer down. “That bother you more or less?”
Rourke considered this.
“More,” he said.
“Yeah.” Skink picked the fidget spinner off the bench and set it going.
The suburb had been poured all at once, ten years back, and then left running. The sidewalks were clean and the seams had never been patched because nothing had cracked them. Subscription drones worked the lawns in slow rows. The HOA sign at the entrance had bleached to the color of weak tea, but it stood straight.
Her house matched the row — modular build, same year as the incident. The doorbell camera was a discontinued model. The window tint didn’t match itself; one pane had gone through a recall cycle and the others hadn’t. By the door, a charging port wore a retrofit adapter, aftermarket, clean.
She opened the door halfway.
Her eyes found him a fraction late. The gestures were like that too — correct, complete, and a beat behind, every time.
“Good afternoon,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting anyone. I don’t have anyone scheduled.”
Rourke said the name.
She searched.
“I don’t have that name,” she said.
He gave her the date instead.
The pause was different this time. Shorter.
“There was a traffic hold,” she said. “Emergency lights. A system override notification.”
“And then?”
“Then my verification status changed.”
“Did you see the victim?”
“I saw a crowd. I saw a barrier. I was told to stay behind it.” She said it the way she’d say a bus schedule. “I was en route to a pickup. The delay was forty minutes. I logged it.”
The kitchen behind her was clean. Meals prepped in labeled containers, dated in a column. A schedule board on the wall, current, updated in a neat hand, tracking charge cycles and filter changes for one occupant. A cooling unit ran somewhere with a bearing starting to go. A paper receipt was taped to the wall beside the board — parts and labor, marked PAID, the tape yellowed at the corners.
Rourke kept his eyes on the receipt.
“The status change,” he said. “Did they give a reason?”
“No reason was required.” Another beat. “You learn what still runs.”
He thanked her. She stayed in the doorway while he walked back down the poured sidewalk, and he heard the door close behind him — one motion, complete.
At Home with AI 
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