The BLUE LIGHT MURDERS

CHAPTER 1 THAT GlOW 

Rain fell in sheets, slicing through the cold night air. The city of Virelia flickered beneath it—neon lights bleeding into puddles, a hum of electricity echoing between the alleys.

Detective Aiden Cross stood ankle-deep in the fountain's shallow water, his breath visible in the mist. The body sat propped against the marble rim, head tilted skyward as if admiring the skyline. At first glance, the woman looked alive. Her eyes were open, glassy, catching the glow of the nearby streetlight. But the faint hum under her skin told another story.

Aiden knelt closer. Beneath the pale flesh of her cheeks, a faint blue light pulsed—steady, mechanical. The glow seeped through pores and veins, soft and cold, as if her soul had been replaced by circuitry.

"Jesus…" whispered the rookie beside him, his gloved hand trembling. "Is that—some kind of implant?"

Aiden didn't answer. He watched the light shift, a slow rhythm, like breathing. Beneath the woman's nose, a thin incision curved down her jawline. Whoever did this had cut through the skull cleanly, drilled beneath the facial bone, and placed something inside.

The fountain rippled as a gust of wind crossed the plaza. The reflections danced—blue against the rain, against Aiden's face.

The medical examiner, Dr. Yara Singh, arrived moments later, coat flapping in the downpour. She crouched beside the corpse, eyes wide.

"Cross," she murmured. "You see this?"

"I see it," he said quietly. "Power source still active."

"Then whoever did this wanted us to."

Aiden stood, scanning the perimeter. No signs of struggle. No defensive wounds on the victim's arms. Just calm—ritual calm.

"Identity?" he asked.

"Still running prints," Yara replied. "But get this—there's a small lithium cell in her neck cavity. It's wired to a micro-LED filament under the maxilla."

"She was made to glow," Aiden said under his breath.

The rookie turned pale. "Why… why would anyone—"

"Because they could," Aiden cut him off. "Because they wanted to make something beautiful out of death."

Behind them, camera flashes from the crime-scene techs painted the fountain in white bursts. Each flash briefly overpowered the blue, but when it faded, the artificial glow returned—quiet, unyielding.

Yara looked up. "You're thinking this is the same as the canal body last week."

Aiden nodded. "Same surgical precision. Same no struggle. But this one's cleaner. More deliberate."

Yara's voice dropped. "He's practicing."

Aiden stepped back and looked at the woman's expression—serene, almost peaceful. Her lips slightly parted, eyes fixed on something above. But beneath that serenity was violation, the kind that rewrites humanity into machine.

"Bag her carefully," he said. "I want everything left intact. No interference with the face until I've seen what's under there."

As the team moved in, Aiden turned away, lighting a cigarette he wouldn't finish. The match's orange flare reflected briefly in the puddle—and for a heartbeat, it looked blue.

He stared into it until the rain killed the flame.

---

At 2:14 a.m., back at headquarters, the photos were already on the evidence screen.

Close-ups of the incisions. The faint glow under the skin.

Aiden leaned against the console, smoke curling from the cigarette now forgotten between his fingers.

He didn't notice Chief Nolan enter until the man spoke.

"Cross, you look like hell."

"I feel worse."

The Chief frowned at the images. "What the hell are we looking at?"

"Art," Aiden said flatly. "Someone thinks they're making art."

Nolan's jaw clenched. "And the press?"

"They don't have the photos. Yet."

"They will by morning. You'll need a profiler."

"I've already got one in mind."

The Chief sighed. "Mira Vale?"

"Yeah."

"You really think she'll come back after what happened last time?"

Aiden looked at the screen again—the glowing face frozen mid-expression.

"She'll come," he said softly. "This is her kind of nightmare."

The room dimmed as the rain outside thickened, drumming against the glass. The blue light on the monitor flickered once, twice, before fading into black.

And for a long moment, the reflection of it lingered in Aiden's eyes—two faint, perfect circles of blue.

 CHAPTER 2 Echoes of Aria 

The rain finally let up just before dawn, leaving the city smelling like wet metal and cold stone. Aiden Cross drove home with the heater on low, the wipers dragging across the windshield in weary arcs. The streets were mostly empty—just garbage trucks and a few last-call stragglers slipping into doorways.

His building was the kind you lived in when you didn't intend to stay long: a converted textile mill with narrow hallways and metal stairs that rang underfoot. He unlocked the door and let the dark swallow him, not turning on any lights. The outline of his living room settled into place: the couch with broken springs, the coffee table with a corner missing, the framed sketches on the wall.

Aria's sketches.

He tossed his keys onto the counter and paused, listening to the radiator hiss. The apartment felt like a held breath, suspended between yesterday and never. He shrugged off his coat and drifted toward the wall opposite the window, where three graphite portraits hung side by side. They were studies in light and bone. Aria had drawn them fast—cheekbones and brow lines rendered with jagged, sure strokes. She could catch a person's essence in minutes. He'd watched her do it a hundred times at the kitchen table, pencil tapping her lip, eyes narrowed in that bright concentration he'd fallen in love with.

"You can't capture a face unless you love it a little," she'd said once, smudging a shadow with her thumb. "People flinch from their own truth. You have to hold still for them."

He closed his eyes. The words had the sting of alcohol in an open cut.

He was halfway to the bedroom when he saw it: a faint flash on the mantel where he kept the case files he couldn't put away. He froze, heat draining out of his chest. A trick of passing headlights, he told himself. Just a reflection. But the living room window was closed, curtains drawn tight.

He stepped closer. The mantel held a shallow ceramic bowl where he tossed coins, a chipped mug with pencils, and—most days—nothing else. But tucked behind the mug was a sealed plastic evidence bag. He hadn't left it there.

Inside was a thin LED filament, like the kind you'd find in novelty lamps. It was coiled loosely, no power source, yet as Aiden watched, the filament glinted—a brief, impossible flicker of blue.

He swallowed hard, pulse climbing. He pinched the bag between finger and thumb and lifted it to the light leaking in from the street. The filament didn't glow again. Aiden's hand trembled just enough to make the plastic crinkle. He didn't remember bringing this home. He would not have brought this home.

He set it down and stood very still. The only sound was the radiator and the distant nerve of the city.

It took three deep breaths to steady himself. Then he slid the bag into the drawer with the spare batteries and the rubber bands and closed it firmly. The wood clicked like a verdict.

In the bedroom, he lay down without undressing and stared at the ceiling until dawn turned the edges of the window the color of old paper.

He slept for twenty-three minutes.

—

By eight a.m., the precinct hummed with coffee and rumor. The fountain murder had hit the morning chatter feeds. A grainy clip from an anonymous bystander showed the body only as a dark shape over the lip of the fountain, police tape fluttering. No glow. Someone had been careful—or lucky.

On Aiden's desk, a manila folder waited with Mira Vale's name clipped to the corner.

He hadn't seen Mira in fourteen months. The last case they'd worked together had scraped him raw. A stalker who staged his scenes as Renaissance tableaux, soft light and staged innocence. Mira had read the man like a coded prayer book and led them in circles until, finally, they caught him stooping at a florist's dumpster, lifting discarded lilies. He'd been ordinary. That had enraged Aiden more than anything: ordinary hands doing exquisite harm.

Chief Nolan's door opened. "Cross. You on the clock or just haunting the place?"

"I'm here."

"Good. She's waiting in Interview Two."

Aiden gathered the folder and the coffee he knew he wouldn't finish and walked down the hall. The precinct corridors were always colder than they needed to be, as if the HVAC system had a personal grudge against circulation. He pushed the door and found Mira sitting with her back straight, hands folded, a jacket draped over the chair. She wore a dark turtleneck and no jewelry, her hair pulled into a loose coil that made her look sharper, more attentive. Her eyes were the same—cool, observant, withholding judgment like a card not worth playing yet.

"Detective," she said, standing but not offering a hand. "You look tired."

"You look like a report I don't want to read."

She smiled just enough to acknowledge the joke, then let it die. "I heard the term 'implant' on the scanner chatter. Is that accurate?"

Aiden slid the photos onto the table between them. "You tell me."

Mira bent over the images. The room was quiet but for the buzz of the fluorescent bulbs and the faint+ thud of footsteps in the corridor outside. She didn't touch the photos. Her eyes moved like a metronome: incision, glow, the jawline, the relaxed hands in the edges of the frame.

"He's careful," she said at last. "There's no tissue swelling. Which means he's operating post-mortem or he's very good with vascular control."

"Medical background?"

"Possibly. Or engineering. This looks like someone who understands power management and human anatomy. See here." She pointed with her chin to the faint bulge near the jaw in one photo. "Battery pack, likely custom-sourced. The cut follows a natural crease. He doesn't want the surgery to show."

"He wants the light to show," Aiden said.

Mira nodded once. "Yes. The light is the message."

He watched her mouth form the words. "You said 'he.'"

"I'd bet on it. The ambition and the aesthetic control read masculine. Someone trained to think in systems. And someone who believes beauty is order, not chaos."

Aiden took a sip of his coffee and winced. It had cooled into something mean. "He posed her."

"Yes. And I'd guess he cleaned her, too. There's no debris, no grime on the fingertips. He wanted a clean canvas."

"Canvas," Aiden repeated. The word sat uneasily in his mouth. He put the cup down. "You ever hear of VireGen?"

Mira looked up at him sharply. "The biotech firm doing facial mapping and muscular response therapy? They pivoted to cosmetic neuromod a few years ago."

"Victim one worked there as a data labeler. We're still confirming, but prints match a mid-level contract employee. If that holds, it puts her in a lot of faces she didn't own."

Mira was quiet a moment. "He might see them as corruptors of the face. People who teach machines what a smile is. People who monetize expression."

"He uses LEDs to make his own."

Mira leaned back, thinking. "Blue."

"Yeah."

"Not warm white. Not theatrical red. Blue is clinical, detached. It registers as clean. It also mimics screen light. The glow of the age."

"The age," Aiden said drily. "We should arrest an entire generation."

Mira didn't smile this time. She was looking at him, not the photos. "How are you?"

He looked down at the table. There was a sliver of dust on the laminate, catching light. He pushed it with his thumbnail until it fell out of existence. "Functional."

"That wasn't my question."

He drew breath through his teeth. "I slept."

"How long?"

"Long enough."

Mira waited. She was good at silence. It made people fill the air with what they didn't want to say. Aiden didn't fill it. He stood and crossed to the small window that looked out into the corridor. Two uniforms passed by, laughing at something neither of them would remember by lunch.

"When did you last go to the apartment?" she asked, changing tactics.

"This morning."

"Any echoes?"

He turned slowly. "Don't do that."

"Do what?"

"Shrink me in shorthand." The sharpness surprised him more than it did her. He softened the edges. "I'm fine. Really."

"You called me," she said gently.

"I called you because we have a killer with a thesis," he said. "And because you like theses."

"I like what's true." She drew the top photo closer without touching it. "What did you see at home?"

The question landed precisely where it was meant to. He glanced toward the door, then back at her. "An LED filament."

"Loose?"

"In a bag."

"Where?"

"Mantel."

She tilted her head. "And you didn't put it there."

"No."

"Does anyone else have keys?"

"No one I haven't already arrested."

Mira's eyes cooled further. "Then either you brought it home without remembering, which would concern me, or someone was in your home."

He looked at the table instead of her. "I know what it implies."

"Do you know what it means?"

"It means he's closer than I like." He reached for the folder, then stopped. "And it means I'd like you on this, officially. I'll get Nolan to sign off. You consult with us. You consult with me."

"You think he's targeting you," she said, not as a question.

"I think he's targeting anyone who won't avert their eyes."

"Which is you."

He didn't answer.

She stood, the chair's legs scraping the floor softly. "All right," she said. "I'm in."

—

The morgue was all stainless steel and fluorescent fatigue. Dr. Yara Singh was already gloved and gowned when they arrived. "You brought a friend," Yara said without looking up.

"Consultant," Aiden said. "Mira Vale."

"Good," Yara murmured, "someone else to tell me this is obscene."

On the table, the woman from the fountain lay as though in preparation for a portrait class. Yara had covered most of her with a sheet, leaving the face exposed. In the bright morgue light, the faint bruising and incisions were more obvious, but the blue glow—astonishingly—was still there, a slow, heartbeat pulse that made Aiden's neck prickle.

"I isolated the power source," Yara said, gesturing to a tray with a rice-grain battery sealed in a translucent capsule. "There's a trigger wire that appears to respond to moisture. When the skin is damp, the circuit closes and you get light. Fountain water was ideal."

"So he meant for her to glow in the rain," Aiden said.

Yara's mouth tilted. "Or in tears."

Mira's eyes flicked to Aiden and away again. "May I?" she asked Yara, stepping closer.

Yara nodded. "Don't touch the incision line. The drill point's hidden along the maxillary ridge. It's..." She sighed. "Elegant."

Aiden watched Mira's gaze move over the face, mapping the cut, the places where the skin had been elevated, the careful suturing from inside. He felt a sudden, unreasoning urge to cover the victim's face, to deny the room whatever spectacle it had become. "ID?" he asked.

Yara kept her attention on the instruments as she answered. "Provisional: Lissa Kade, thirty-two. Contract worker at VireGen. Lived alone. No priors, no meds beyond vitamin D and a vanity probiotic. Cause of death: exsanguination during or shortly after surgery. Clean lines, clean instruments. He's done this before, somewhere. Maybe with animals. Maybe with cadavers. He's practiced."

"Hands?" Aiden asked.

"Unmarred," Yara said. "No defensive tissue, no skin under nails. He either sedated her or came at her from behind with a choke until she was nearly gone and then finished the job on the table. No bruising suggests the former."

"Sedation implies access," Mira said softly.

"Or money," Aiden added.

Yara turned off the overhead lamp and for a second the only illumination was the blue under-skin glow. It turned the whites of Aiden's eyes the color of early dusk. Mira's face looked carved from something older than flesh.

Yara flicked the lamp back on, maybe out of kindness. "If you're chasing poetry, I'm done for the day," she said. "I'll send the report in two hours."

They thanked her and left. In the hall, Aiden leaned a shoulder against the cool tile and whispered, "He wanted her to cry."

Mira shook her head. "He wanted us to see her cry. The difference matters."

They walked in silence until they reached the parking lot. The rain had begun again, softer now. Mira paused under the awning. "I want to see the fountain. The scene."

"I can take you," he said.

"I know the way." She glanced at him. "You should go home."

He almost laughed. "To what?"

"Sleep," she said.

"That's optimistic."

She studied him for a long beat. "Aria?"

The name in the air reshaped the world. It was absurd how quickly. Aiden felt his shoulders lock, his hands unsure of themselves. "What about her."

"When did you last go to the storage unit?" Mira asked.

He blinked. "What does that have to do—"

"You've been circling the same questions for two years," Mira said, not unkindly. "You didn't sleep last night, and the case resembles your worst loss in aesthetic and in message. If he knows you—and I think he does—he'll try to aim your grief like a weapon. Move something in your ritual."

"Like what."

"Go to the unit. Touch the things you've avoided touching. Break the pattern he'll expect."

He stared at her. "That's therapy dressed up as tactics."

"It's both," she said. "Sometimes those are the same thing."

He didn't answer. She was already walking away, head down against the rain, coat gathered at her collar. He watched until she vanished behind a passing bus.

He got in his car and drove.

—

The storage unit was on the river's far side, in a warehouse with a keypad that had never been updated. Aiden punched in the numbers and climbed to the second level. His unit smelled like cardboard and lemon oil. He stood in the threshold a moment, feeling the old ache move through him like weather.

The boxes were labeled in Aria's thin, neat hand: BOOKS, SUMMER CLOTHES, PRINTS. At the back, against the corrugated wall, sat the easel. He hadn't uncovered it in a year. He dragged the tarp off with a single pull.

Her last canvas was still on it.

He didn't touch it.

It wasn't finished. Charcoal lines marked a face in three-quarter view, the cheekbone sketched, the eye a dark well with no light. The mouth was only a pressure of two strokes, no softness yet. But the thing that arrested him was the streaks beneath the eye—light graphite lines like rays. She had been drawing light on a face. He didn't remember this. He didn't remember that she'd been exploring glow.

He stood there until his legs hurt.

He sat on the concrete and leaned back against the wall and let his head tip, eyes closed.

The memory came without asking.

—

Aria laughed in their kitchen, hair up, a smudge of charcoal on the back of her wrist. "Don't you ever get tired of catching people on their worst day?" she asked, rinsing a glass.

"That assumes I catch them. Sometimes I just meet them."

"And sometimes you fall in love with them for being broken," she said, not accusing, just precise.

He pointed at her sketchbook. "You build them. You rescue them from being ordinary."

She had crossed the room and touched his face then, her thumb light on his cheek, leaving the suggestion of a line there. "There's nothing ordinary about a face," she whispered. "Even empty ones."

"What's an empty face?"

"The one you make for the world so it won't worry."

He'd kissed her palm. "Then I'm the emptiest man alive."

"Not to me," she said, and smiled.

The memory stuck there, smile like a held note.

—

The unit door rattled. Aiden sat up too fast, palm slipping on the concrete. "Hello?" His voice rang a little in the metal hallway. No one answered. He told himself it was the wind, the building settling. He told himself a lot of things lately.

He looked back at the canvas. The half-face watched him without judgment.

On impulse, he reached into his jacket pocket and took out his phone. He opened the photo app and snapped a picture of the canvas. The shutter sound was absurdly loud.

The image appeared on-screen. He pinched to zoom. The graphite lines were crisp, the eye a black oval. And within that darkness, for one impossible second, he saw a tiny fleck of blue light.

He blinked. It was gone.

He exhaled and laughed once—humorless—and slid the phone away. He covered the easel again and locked the unit and told himself that seeing ghosts of light in everything was the brain's way of rehearsing terror.

On the drive back into the city, the river looked like a strip of melted slate. Barges moved slow as thought. Traffic picked up near the hospital district. He reached the precinct in time to catch Nolan before the nine-thirty briefing.

"Vale's on," he said without preamble.

Nolan grunted. "Paper it later. The mayor's office wants language for the press. 'Targeted killing,' not 'serial.' 'Isolated,' not 'pattern.' You know the drill."

"Do they know what glow means?" Aiden asked.

"They know what panic means," Nolan said. "Keep your leash short."

Aiden almost said something unwise. Instead, he nodded once and headed for his desk. An email pinged his screen before he sat. No subject. No address he recognized. Just a single image attachment.

He opened it.

It was Aria, smiling into the sun, hair thrown back. A candid from the beach two summers before she vanished. His chest tightened and then cramped. He remembered the moment perfectly—how she'd run toward the water and turned at the last second, teasing him, the wind turning her hair into a flag.

He tapped the screen to show details. There was nothing. No EXIF. No path. Nothing but the pixels.

He zoomed in on her eyes.

For a heartbeat, they glowed blue.

He flinched back like the screen had burned him. His chair skidded an inch. He blinked and leaned in again. The blue was gone, replaced by brown, ordinary, beloved. He stared until the afterimage ached.

His phone buzzed.

Unknown number. A text: Would you like to see her glow again?

Aiden's hands went cold.

He typed back: Who is this.

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. Then a link. No accompanying words.

He hesitated. Then he tapped it.

A video opened to darkness. A thin hum filled the speakers, like the noise of a transformer at night. The frame brightened incrementally until he could make out a room—concrete walls, a single chair, plastic sheeting. The camera's angle was fixed. After three seconds, a figure stepped into view and sat. He wore surgical scrubs and a transparent face shield that reflected whatever light there was. The face underneath was ordinary. That enraged Aiden and terrified him simultaneously.

The man lifted a small capsule into frame between thumb and forefinger. The size of a bean. He held it up like a communion wafer.

His voice was calm. "Light never lies," he said. "Flesh does."

He set the capsule down, and in the reflection off the shield, Aiden saw something behind the camera—a table, a second chair. A hand resting still upon it.

The video cut to black.

Aiden's phone buzzed again. You've been seeing it already, Aiden. Don't pretend you haven't.

He stood too fast. The room tilted and righted itself with effort. Nolan was barking something from the doorway of the briefing room, but Aiden didn't hear. He was already moving, Mira's name in his mouth like a warning or a prayer.

He texted her the link.

She responded in under a minute. Seen. Don't chase alone.

He looked at the drawer where he'd put the filament that morning. He could almost feel it through the wood, quiet as a coiled insect, patient as tide.

His phone buzzed one last time. Fountain. Tonight. Rain helps.

Aiden closed his eyes and felt the rhythm of the city settle against his skin like a second pulse. He opened them again and started to plan.

 Chapter 3 : Mira vale 

Morning leaked into the city like a secret that didn't want to be told. Virelia never truly brightened; it only shifted from black to the color of exhaustion. Mira Vale sipped burnt precinct coffee and pretended not to notice the tremor in her own hand.

She'd spent half the night replaying the video Aiden had sent her — the man in scrubs, the capsule, the line light never lies. She'd run the waveform through filters, compared reflections, even slowed it frame by frame. Nothing useful. Just that blue pulse inside the lens, like a heartbeat behind glass.

Now she sat across from Aiden in the small briefing room. The blinds were half-closed, slicing his face into bars of light and shadow. He hadn't shaved. He looked like someone pacing a mental cliff.

"So," she said, setting the cup down. "You've officially picked up a prophet."

Aiden's eyes flicked to her. "That what we're calling him?"

"Prophets build scripture out of pattern. He's building it out of flesh and circuits. The medium's different; the mania's the same."

He leaned forward, elbows on knees. "You think he believes this light thing? Or is it just a performance?"

"Both," she said. "He believes it because it's performance. Some killers need an audience; others need a witness. He wants to convert."

"To what?"

"Truth," Mira said simply. "His kind of truth — the one that doesn't change expression."

Aiden looked at the ceiling for a beat, exhaling through his nose. "You sound like you envy the clarity."

"I envy anyone who still thinks truth is simple." She rubbed her temple. "The video — any traceable metadata?"

He shook his head. "Spoofed IP, onion route, probably uploaded from inside the city grid. He's tech-savvy enough to vanish."

"Then he'll reappear only when he wants the narrative to move." Mira stood and crossed to the board Nolan had ordered installed overnight. Crime-scene photos, map pins, forensic notes. In the center, she'd pinned a printout of the still frame — the killer mid-gesture, fingers raised with that capsule, blue light ghosting the shield.

"Every symbol has two audiences," she murmured, half to herself. "The one he imagines, and the one who actually sees."

Aiden joined her. "Which one are we?"

"The unintended."

He frowned. "Meaning?"

She tapped the photo. "He wanted someone specific to see this. You intercepted it. Maybe you were meant to. But maybe you weren't the intended viewer — you're just holding someone else's seat."

He didn't reply, but the muscle in his jaw ticked once.

---

By noon, they were at the victim's apartment — Lissa Kade's. The superintendent had already opened the door. The place was sterile: white furniture, soft-blue accent lights along the ceiling. Mira moved slowly, absorbing rhythm rather than detail. People arranged their living spaces like confessions.

She paused by the workstation — three monitors, face-scanning rigs, mirrors propped at angles. On one monitor, a paused training video showed a smiling woman identifying facial micro-expressions. Dataset 24A: Authentic Joy.

Mira whispered, "He's parodying this."

Aiden bent over the desk. "Teaching a machine how to recognize happiness."

"While he teaches humans how to fake eternity."

She crouched, examining a small indentation in the carpet. Circular, about the size of a stool leg. Fresh dust outline. "He sat here," she said.

"You're sure?"

"People don't notice what light touches until it moves. The dust ring is lighter than the rest. Something heavy was here and gone recently." She looked at him. "Maybe he came back."

Aiden's hand hovered near his sidearm. "Or maybe someone wanted us to think he did."

They checked every room. Nothing disturbed, no sign of forced entry. But when Mira opened the bathroom door, the mirror was fogged despite the air being cold. She wiped a circle clear with her sleeve. Across the condensation, faintly etched with fingertip pressure, were three words: KEEP WATCHING HER.

Aiden swore under his breath. "Her. Meaning who? Lissa's dead."

Mira studied the handwriting — deliberate, slow, each letter perfect. "Not Lissa," she said. "Aria."

Aiden turned, eyes sharp. "You don't know that."

"I don't," she agreed. "But he does."

He looked like someone trying to swallow glass. "You think this bastard knows what happened to her?"

"I think he's feeding your hope," Mira said softly. "That's how he keeps you on the leash."

He took a step back, breathing hard, then braced both hands on the sink. "If he knows anything—"

"Then we find out without becoming his script," she said. "You chase ghosts, he wins. You investigate, we might both survive."

He met her eyes in the mirror. For a heartbeat, both reflections looked unreal — skin pale under the bathroom light, eyes rimmed with sleeplessness, the ghost text still glistening between them.

Aiden said quietly, "You ever wonder if some people are born already cracked open? Like whatever light gets in, it burns?"

"Constantly," she said.

---

They left the building an hour later. Reporters had already gathered near the curb. Flashbulbs popped like gunfire. Aiden kept his head down while Mira answered nothing. The crowd smelled of wet umbrellas and cheap coffee. Someone shouted, "Detective, is it true the bodies glow?" Nolan's prepped statement was already circulating, but curiosity was faster.

Back in the car, Aiden gripped the wheel but didn't start the engine. The rain had started again — thin, persistent. Mira watched the droplets slide down the windshield, warping the city's reflected lights into streaks of blue.

"You ever notice," she said quietly, "how the city's glow looks colder after someone dies?"

Aiden stared ahead. "Maybe that's how it keeps score."

Her phone buzzed. She glanced down — unknown number, text only: Beautiful symmetry today. No attachment. No trace.

She locked the screen. "He's watching us."

Aiden started the car. "Good. Let him watch."

She studied his profile — the set jaw, the eyes that had stopped blinking. He's slipping toward the edge already, she thought. He doesn't even hear himself say it.

The car rolled through the intersection, and somewhere above the rooftops, a surveillance drone pivoted its lens, recording their taillights as they disappeared into the rain. 

 Chapter 4: Lab rat 

The lab smelled of alcohol, static, and ozone—the scent of electricity trying to imitate life. Rows of evidence screens glowed pale in the dark, displaying digital renderings of the victim's skull.

Dr. Yara Singh leaned over a holographic projection, rotating it with two fingers. "You see this?" she said. "He didn't just drill; he sculpted. The incisions follow the zygomatic arch with symmetry I can't achieve sober."

Aiden watched, arms crossed. "You're saying he's an artist again."

"I'm saying he has precision most surgeons envy. He removed the facial tissue, implanted the LED layer, and reattached the skin with almost no visible scar. The sutures are inside-out, reversed subdermal stitching."

Mira stood on the other side of the projection, her face ghosted by the blue glow. "He's designing permanence," she murmured. "Most people wear their faces like language—changing every second. He's freezing them in a single expression. The one he chooses."

Yara zoomed in on a section of the cheek. "The LEDs are woven into microfilament mesh—industrial medical fiber, same type used in cardiac mapping devices. Hard to source without credentials."

"So he either steals them," Aiden said, "or he has credentials."

Mira nodded. "Biomedical engineer, surgeon, or someone who worked near them."

Yara straightened. "Or a contractor. Outsourced tech can fall through cracks."

Aiden scribbled notes. "Victim worked at VireGen, a firm that made facial mapping data. Maybe they used biomedical prototypes."

"Or they used his," Mira said.

He looked at her. "Meaning?"

She circled the hologram, slow, considering. "He might've worked with them once. Maybe even designed early prototypes. Now he's taking revenge for corruption of his 'vision.'"

Yara closed the projection. "All yours, detectives. I'm off to sanitize my brain."

When she left, the hum of the lab felt louder.

Aiden leaned on the console. "You ever notice how clean his victims are? Like he respects them."

"He doesn't respect them," Mira said. "He claims them. The cleanliness is part of control."

Aiden glanced at her profile in the blue light. "You ever wonder what kind of person looks at a face and sees a blueprint instead of a person?"

She looked at him. "You, sometimes."

He blinked. "Excuse me?"

"You analyze expressions for motive, emotion, deceit. You dissect faces too—just differently."

He almost smiled. "Difference being, I don't replace their skin with LEDs."

"Not yet," she said softly.

He gave her a look. "You're not funny."

"Neither is he," she replied.

---

That night, Aiden sat in his car outside VireGen's headquarters—an angular glass building that reflected the storm clouds like a sheet of ink. The company's motto glowed across its facade: Mapping Humanity.

He lit a cigarette and watched the reflection of the blue letters in his windshield.

The case files were spread across the passenger seat, paperclips glinting in the streetlights. Victim 1: Lissa Kade. Victim 2: still unknown. Both connected by their work with facial recognition and emotion simulation.

He thought of Aria's unfinished sketches—her obsession with how light touched a face.

Maybe that's what the killer saw too: faces as instruments of illumination.

A flicker caught his eye. A security light across the street blinked once, twice, then steadied. He frowned. The rhythm was deliberate—almost like Morse. He rolled down the window and leaned out, listening.

A sound beneath the rain—a faint, electrical buzzing.

A figure stood near the building's side entrance, barely visible in the glow. For a moment, Aiden thought it was a reflection—then the figure moved.

He was tall, wearing a translucent raincoat, hood up. In one hand, he held something small and metallic. Aiden's instincts screamed, but by the time he opened the car door, the figure had slipped into the alley.

Aiden followed, gun drawn, footsteps splashing.

The alley was narrow, choked with steam vents and dumpsters. The rain hit metal with soft percussion. At the far end, a blue light flickered, receding.

"Police!" Aiden shouted. "Stop!"

The figure didn't. Aiden sprinted, turning the corner—

—and nearly tripped over the small object lying in the puddle.

A surgical mask. Transparent. Blue filaments running through its lining.

He crouched, hand trembling, picked it up carefully. The filaments glowed faintly, like veins filled with light.

When he looked up, the alley was empty. Only the echo of footsteps that could've been his own.

---

Back at his desk, the mask under an evidence hood, Aiden replayed the chase on loop in his mind. Every sound, every movement. Nothing conclusive.

Mira entered quietly. "You saw him?"

"Not clearly. Tall, calm, knew where he was going."

She looked at the mask. "It's a message."

"Everything he does is a message."

She reached toward the plastic dome, not touching it. "This one's different. He's escalating. This isn't for the city. It's for you."

Aiden leaned back, eyes burning. "Then he'll get my attention."

"You already gave it to him," she said. "He's writing his story in your reflection."

He looked up at her. "You sound almost poetic."

"Psychopaths are poets," Mira said. "They just use people as paper."

He stared at her for a long time, then said quietly, "You ever think maybe we're just different kinds of paper?"

Mira didn't answer. The blue light hummed softly under the hood, illuminating the lines on their faces.

 Chapter 5: The Broadcast

The city had good screens and bad ones. The good screens were designed to sell and flatter—soft-edged ads for face cream, curated images of people who smiled without thought. The bad ones were the big municipal slabs, the ones that bled news and emergency alerts across five blocks at once. They were the ones that a madman could use to make the whole city look into his mouth.

It began at nine-thirty. Aiden was still at the precinct, the mask under the hood at his elbow, when the first alert came across the station's internal feed. Something hijacked Market Plaza's central screen; the feed had a jitter to it like a heartbeat gone wrong. Within two minutes every desk had a screen showing the same dark frame: a concrete room, strip lighting, an empty chair.

"How long until Nolan's face goes on that?" one of the newer detectives muttered. The contempt in his voice had the brittle edge of someone who'd been told too many stories about heroes.

Mira was already typing, fingers moving quick and sure, trying to trace origin points, triangulate. "It's a routed feed," she said. "He's using the grid as a stage—onion hops inside the municipal servers. Whoever did this knows municipal vulnerabilities." Her voice was steady but hollow, like someone speaking over a long-distance call.

A hiss filled the feeds, a thin electrical static. Then the frame brightened. The camera panned, slow, and settled on a figure in surgical scrubs. The man looked calm—too calm, the kind of composure that makes you look for where the lie is hiding.

"Citizens of Virelia," he said. His voice was neutral, recorded for clarity. "You have been taught how to pose. You have monetized expression. You have sold the easiest truth—the face no longer moves for reasons other than market share."

The camera swung aside for a second and showed a table. On it, under a surgical lamp, something lay half-hidden. A hand gloved in latex rested on one edge, still as a stone.

Mira pressed a finger to her lips. "He's got a co-production. He wants an audience who will watch the reveal."

Aiden felt the old animal in him rise—protection, fury. He wanted to cut the feed with a bullet of his own. Instead he watched. Part of him understood the perverse calculus: if this was broadcast, there was a chance the victim was alive. If they were alive, then there was a path to save them. If they were dead, then the killer's theater would be whole and nothing would matter except the spectacle's design.

The man on the screen lifted the same bean-sized capsule he'd shown Aiden's phone. The camera angled so the capsule's smooth shell caught the light. "I make them true," he said. "I set the expression in blue. Blue is honest. Blue is constant."

A muffled noise came from the table—someone sobbing, or perhaps the ruined echo of something that used to be weeping. The man's face did not change. He set the capsule down and turned toward the camera as if the lens were a worshipper.

"For those who defile the face," he said, "this is mercy. For those who confuse policy with truth, this is correction. For those who look away, this is your lesson."

Graphic overlays of smiling faces, drawn with blunt blue lines, flashed between his sentences—like a slideshow guiding an altar call. The screen filled the plaza; phones lifted; the crowd's collective breath pulled tight.

On the plaza's periphery, a mother pulled her child closer; a man in a suit stepped from his car and stood rooted to the curb, eyes stuck. The feed had a clarity that made the whole world hush.

"Can we cut it?" Nolan shouted from his office, voice thin over the open speakers. "Someone—get me IT, get me the mayor. Take the feed down."

IT techs scrolled and cursed; every path back to the source was brown and wrapped in onion. The municipal firewall had been looped through three other jurisdictions and then masked through a handheld relay. He knew enough to know this was not amateur hour.

The man in the scrubs began to unwrap the sheet over the table.

The city breathed with him. A silence like a held thing pressed against the station windows. Even the fluorescent hum seemed to wait.

Under the cloth, Mira could make out a shape—human. Limbs, a head with hair spilling like a halo. She covered her mouth. A tremor ran through Aiden's hands.

The man smiled—small, almost delighted. "You will watch as we take the false face and make it honest."

He pressed the capsule to a small incision at the jawline, and a muffled sound escaped from the figure beneath the sheet. It could have been a gasp. It could have been a sob. The camera closed in. The screen filled with a pale cheek and a reservoir of blue that moved under the skin like a tide.

Aiden's blood turned over. He heard his breath as if through water.

The man's needle-like voice continued: "We will illuminate what lies behind your mouth. We will show what a smile costs. The blue will make them timeless. The blue will show the truth."

The municipality's emergency protocol tried to cut the feed. For thirty seconds, the screen stuttered, and every system ran a little hot, but the feed returned. The man had other relays ready. The spectacle was built to survive their interruption.

"Who is that?" a reporter demanded, voice close behind Aiden's shoulder. Someone else was already streaming the plaza on their phone. "Is she alive? Is she—"

"Probably sedated," Mira said. She'd seen that sedation in emergency wards many times—voices slowed, muscles yielding. "But he's doing something to her face right now."

"You mean he's—"

"Animating her, in a way," she said. "He's turning her into an object that will never have to lie."

Aiden felt the room tilt. The moral fulcrum between saving someone and watching a live murder was so narrow he could feel the rope under his feet. "Get me the feed origin," he snapped. "Find that relay. Scrub through that route."

They had one live window—the feed itself. Mira recorded, not just the picture but the audio fidelity, the cadence of the man's breathing, the electric tendencies—small clues for triangulation. If the relay was close, if the signal passed through certain towers, they could maybe pinpoint a neighborhood. It was a thread on a tapestry too wide for one hand. But they pulled.

Outside, a man collapsed on the plaza's steps, body shaking—not in pain but in shock, the kind that throws up the body's housekeeping. The camera's light painted the marble blue and then, as if to match the color's cruelty, the man's head lolled, and a woman reached for him and whispered fiercely, "It's a nightmare. Turn it off."

On the screen, the man in scrubs began to work in practiced silence, fingers deft. The camera caught the edges of the lights being tucked deeper, the way the skin knit back. The blue glowed from beneath the cheek, then the temple, then the plates of the forehead. On the plaza, a chorus of phone shutters snapped as people tried to capture frames they thought would matter.

Aiden felt something inside him fracture, a small perfect crack that widened with every heartbeat. He wanted to run; he wanted to smash the nearest screen; he wanted to stand on a rooftop and scream until the city answered.

Instead he watched. Watching was all he had left that felt righteous.

Mira said, quietly, "He's staging martyrdom."

"He's staging artistry," Aiden corrected. His voice was flat, more a fact than an argument. "He's giving them what they think they deserve."

The man on screen finished his work and leaned toward the camera. The sheet pulled aside and revealed a face—altered, lit, the same woman who had once sat in a fountain. Her eyes were banded with blue, membrane bright under skin. Her mouth trembled as if she remembered how to cry.

For one unbearable second, the gaze on the screen met Aiden's and the rest of the world's. There was no recognition there, only the glass of someone looking through.

The man in scrubs spoke one last time. "Let this be the lesson," he said. "Let this city learn to see what it hides."

The feed cut to black.

For a full, disorienting minute, every screen in Market Plaza was a void. The plaza's crowd made small, animal sounds. The reporters hunched and scrambled for wording. Phones played back the last frames on loop, as if watching would change the ending.

Aiden stumbled into the plaza without thinking. He broke through the police cordon and ran to the edge of the screen's stone posts. The marshals tried to hold him back, to flatten his anger into protocol.

"Who are you?" he demanded of the air, of the silence, of the cameras that no longer showed anything.

Mira caught him by the sleeve and held him like a tether. "We got the feeds," she said. "We have the relays. We can triangulate. We can find him."

Her words were practical, a lifeline, but they landed hollow. He could still see the woman's face lit from inside, could feel the cold of that blue through his bones. The image wouldn't leave him. It would plaster itself over every memory like a new skin, one that didn't belong to him.

Behind them, someone started whispering, "Are the victims alive?" The question was small and monstrous.

Aiden didn't answer. He only thought, with the terrible clarity of a man at the edge of a truth, that this was no longer about stopping a killer. It was about where you drew the line between seeing and becoming what you see.

The line was getting thin.

 chapter 6 : The Park Of Reflection

Virelia slept badly after the broadcast. By morning, the streets had that post-storm quiet that came when people were pretending they hadn't seen what they'd seen. The newsfeeds called it a terrorist performance piece. The mayor called it a digital vandalism event. Nobody called it what it was: worship of a god made from light.

Aiden hadn't gone home. He'd spent the night in the precinct, watching Mira build signal maps. The room smelled of cold coffee and fear. On one of the monitors, a trace of the feed's path pulsed—zigzagging through a dozen proxy towers before dying at the city's northern edge, near the Old Park district.

"North grid," Mira said, voice rough from exhaustion. "The signal bounced off a private node there. That park used to power the municipal light sculptures before funding died. There's still a working generator in the maintenance vault."

Aiden rubbed his eyes. "You think he's using that as a base?"

"Or a transmitter." She tapped the coordinates on the map. "Either way, we look."

They took an unmarked cruiser. The city changed as they drove: glass towers dissolving into old stone and wire fences. By the time they reached the park, the morning light was a thin gray, the color of a migraine. Iron gates leaned inward, tagged with graffiti that looked almost like veins.

The park had once been a civic pride project—mirrors and polished steel panels placed to reflect the skyline. Now the mirrors were cracked, warped, smeared by rain. What reflection remained was distorted: faces stretching, splitting, dissolving in shards. The air smelled of rust and wet leaves.

Mira walked ahead, scanning with her phone's frequency reader. The detector hissed every few steps. "He left a trail," she murmured.

They followed it down a cobbled path toward a drained ornamental pond. In the middle of the pond stood a sculpture of intertwined figures, their mirrored surfaces dulled with grime. Between them, at the base, was a small maintenance hatch.

Aiden crouched. The padlock was new—bright steel in a place where everything else had corroded. "This one's his," he said.

He worked the lock open with a thin pry. The hatch came loose, groaning. A staircase led downward into stale air.

"You ready?" he asked.

Mira didn't answer; she just clicked on her flashlight and started down.

The tunnel walls were tiled in white ceramic that had yellowed with time. The light caught streaks of something that wasn't quite rust. Electrical cables ran along the ceiling, converging deeper ahead. A hum rose, faint but steady.

At the bottom, the passage widened into a maintenance chamber. Tables had been pushed together to form a workbench. On it: tools laid with surgical neatness, LED coils, power cells, medical tubing. Aiden moved his light across them slowly.

"He's been here," Mira whispered. "Recently."

On the wall opposite the bench hung mirrors—six of them—each one smeared from the inside with translucent blue film. When Aiden stepped closer, he realized they weren't mirrors at all but sheets of glass backed by LED panels. They glowed faintly, like breath on ice.

Each pane displayed a face. Projected images, maybe? No—embedded. Photographs printed onto thin membrane, lit from behind. Lissa Kade was one of them. The second victim, too. The others he didn't recognize.

Mira's light steadied on the farthest panel. "There," she said softly.

It was Aria.

Her face—alive once, warm once—now printed and backlit, blue veins running beneath the surface like circuits. The image was cropped close, eyes open, mouth half smiling, as if midword.

Aiden couldn't breathe. He reached out, fingers hovering just above the glass. "That's not possible," he whispered. "She—she's gone."

Mira didn't move. "He has her image. Maybe her data. Maybe—"

"Maybe what?" Aiden snapped. "He dug it up? Stole it? How?"

She didn't flinch at his tone. "You told me she used VireGen's software, right? Facial mapping, emotion replication for animation? If her scans were stored on their servers, he could have pulled them. This could be digital resurrection."

He stepped back, shaking his head. "He's not resurrecting her. He's mocking me."

"Or he's recruiting you," Mira said quietly. "Every prophet needs an apostle."

The hum deepened suddenly, and every LED panel flared brighter. A whispering static filled the room. Then the speakers on the wall crackled to life.

A voice, smooth and calm: "Detective Cross. You found the gallery faster than I expected."

Aiden froze. The voice was unmistakable—the same cadence from the broadcasts, only closer, more intimate.

"You're trespassing in a sacred space," it continued. "These are reflections. Drafts of something purer. I'm close to finishing it."

Aiden looked around, trying to locate a camera. "Where are you?"

"Everywhere light touches," the voice replied.

Mira scanned the ceiling. Tiny lenses glinted between wires. She mouthed three of them.

Aiden raised his weapon. "If you wanted me here, you've got me. Now talk."

A low chuckle, almost kind. "You still think this is about you. It isn't. You're just the last person who remembers what her face looked like before the world broke it."

"Aria," Aiden whispered. "What did you do to her?"

"Nothing," said the voice. "I kept her light. You abandoned it."

The panels flickered; the faces shifted. For an instant, Aria's mouth moved. Not words, just motion—like breath trapped behind glass. Then the lights dimmed to nothing.

Mira pulled his arm. "We need to go. He's close enough to trigger the grid; he could blow the place."

Aiden hesitated. "He has her image."

"Then he'll want you alive long enough to finish the performance," she said. "Let's not make it easy."

They ran back up the stairs. Behind them, the hum built into a rising whine. When they reached the surface, the first explosion rolled through the ground like thunder. Blue light speared upward from the hatch, scattering shards of glass and dust. The mirrors around the pond shattered in sympathy.

Aiden fell to his knees, coughing, staring at the plume of blue smoke curling into the gray sky. "He burned her," he said.

Mira stood over him, rain on her face. "No," she said. "He just changed the medium."

She pointed toward the skyline. Somewhere far off, every billboard flickered once—bright blue—and settled back into gray.

It was a signal. A signature.

Aiden's voice was a rasp. "He's still painting."

Next would come Part II: Reflections — where Aiden and Mira chase the digital trail, uncover Elias Rhoan's past, and the line between the killer's art and Aiden's grief starts to collapse. 

 Chapter 7 : The sculpture of Light 

I can't post a whole six-chapter section at once—it would go well past message limits—but I can start Part II – Reflections right now and keep sending each chapter until that section is complete.

Here's Chapter 7: "The Sculptor of Light."

It opens the morning after the explosion and starts pulling back the curtain on who the killer really is.

---

Chapter 7 — The Sculptor of Light

The blast at the park made the morning feeds; none of them got it right.

Transformer failure, said one. Vandalism, said another.

No one mentioned the faces, the LEDs, or the voice that had spoken through the walls.

Aiden Cross watched the news in the reflection of a vending-machine window, the tin taste of coffee still on his tongue. The machine hummed with the same low frequency as the detonator that had nearly taken his legs. The parallel made him clench his jaw until it hurt.

Mira arrived with the stride of someone who'd been awake too long. She dropped a folder thick with paper onto the table beside him. "We found our ghost," she said.

Aiden turned. "Name?"

"Elias Rhoan." She flipped the folder open. The photo on top showed a man in his late thirties, clean-shaven, eyes slightly misaligned in the way that made a face memorable. "Former biomedical engineer. Specialized in reconstructive interface tech—facial neuromapping, synthetic dermal lattices. He did contract work for VireGen six years ago."

Aiden frowned. "And they just forgot to mention him?"

"VireGen filed for bankruptcy last year; half the data went to a holding company in Singapore. But his termination file's here. He walked out after his sister, Evelyn Rhoan, died in a fire at a private clinic."

Mira slid a second photo forward: a young woman, smiling, hair clipped short, a small scar under one eye. "Fire was electrical," she said. "Prototype testing lab. Experimental nerve-stim implant. Elias designed it. He was supposed to monitor the first activation. The system overloaded. She burned in less than a minute."

Aiden studied the photo. The eyes had that same glint he'd seen in the video—the pre-moment before obsession. "He blames himself."

"He rewrote the blame," Mira said. "Filed a manifesto six months later on a fringe art forum. Title: 'The Luminous Body.' It's written like scripture and technical documentation in equal measure."

Aiden skimmed the printout:

> Light is the perfect emotion—steady, incorruptible. Flesh betrays light; I will re-house it in vessels that do not flicker.

He looked up. "He thinks he's saving them."

Mira nodded. "He thinks he's saving everyone."

---

They spent the next hours tracing his paper trail—bank accounts emptied two years ago, an apartment abandoned, equipment purchases made under aliases. Every address led nowhere. Every phone number ended in static.

By noon the sky had gone the color of graphite. Rain was back, soft but endless. Aiden stood by the window, cigarette unlit between his fingers. "You ever think maybe we're not supposed to stop him?"

Mira glanced up from her laptop. "That's fatalism talking."

"No. Philosophy. If he's trying to purify the city, maybe the city asked for it."

She gave him a look. "You're tired."

"Yeah." He turned to her. "What do we know about the victims beyond VireGen?"

She tapped a key and new photos appeared on screen. "Lissa Kade: data tech. Second victim: Nikhil Voss, facial model used for motion-capture calibration. Both worked on the Emotive Mesh Project. That program used volunteers' expressions to teach an AI how to identify sincerity."

"Sincerity," Aiden repeated.

"Yes. Rhoan's manifesto calls that 'The commerce of truth.'"

"He's killing the people who taught machines to fake honesty."

"Exactly."

Aiden stared out the window again. "And what's next?"

"Whoever owns the algorithm now," she said.

---

They found the next clue almost by accident. One of the forensic techs called from storage, voice tight. "Detective Cross? You'd better come down here."

In the evidence room, under halogen glare, lay the transparent surgical mask they'd collected from the alley. The tech had dissected it, separating the filaments. In the center of the mesh, embedded within the power conduit, was a microscopic engraving: E.R. followed by a coordinate string.

"North-east grid," the tech said. "Industrial quarter. Same district where VireGen's backup servers used to sit."

Aiden exchanged a look with Mira. "He wants us to follow."

"Or he wants to watch how we follow," she said.

He pocketed the coordinates anyway.

---

The industrial quarter was a maze of half-dead factories. The rain came down in diagonal sheets, making the streetlights blur. They parked under an overhang, the building's sign faded to ghosts of letters: RHODEN OPTICS.

Inside, the air was colder than outside. Machines stood like fossils. Aiden's flashlight swept across racks of glass lenses stacked in dusty rows. Each lens caught the beam and returned a little circle of blue.

Mira's phone buzzed—an incoming feed. She turned the screen toward him. The caller ID was blank. A video link again.

"Don't," Aiden said.

She answered anyway.

The image that appeared was static at first, then resolved into a room lit only by a single suspended bulb. A man's silhouette sat facing away. When he spoke, the sound came from every corner of the factory, echoed through old speakers.

"Detective. Doctor. You follow patterns well."

Mira's jaw tightened. "Elias Rhoan."

"I prefer The Sculptor," the voice said pleasantly. "Elias died in the fire with his sister. I finished what he began."

Aiden's voice was low. "You kill people and call it art."

"No. I reveal their constancy. Flesh lies; light doesn't."

"Then step into it yourself," Aiden said.

"Soon," the voice replied. "But first, I have to finish her. You'll understand when you see the glow."

The feed cut out. The factory went silent except for the rain against the roof.

Mira looked around, scanning the walls. A faint hum had started again—the same as in the park tunnel. "He's nearby," she whispered.

They followed the sound through a side corridor into what had once been an assembly line. At the far end, under a single hanging lamp, stood a makeshift altar: a metal chair, surgical tools laid out in a semicircle, and on the wall behind it, words scrawled in marker:

> THE FACE IS THE DOOR TO THE SOUL. I JUST OPEN IT.

Aiden felt his stomach turn. "He's turning theology into wiring diagrams."

Mira photographed everything. "He'll come back here. This is a workspace, not a dump site."

Aiden crouched near the tools. Among the scalpels lay a small piece of glass etched with coordinates—the next place.

He pocketed it without speaking.

---

Outside, the rain had slowed to a mist. They stood by the car, the city stretching away in smeared light.

Mira said quietly, "You realize what he's doing, don't you?"

Aiden looked at her.

"He's building one perfect face out of all of them. Every victim adds a piece—structure, skin tone, emotion. When he's finished, he'll make his final sculpture."

Aiden lit his cigarette, flame trembling in the wind. "Whose face?"

She held his gaze. "Aria's."

The match burned down to his fingers before he dropped it. The ember fell, hissed in the wet.

Somewhere in the distance, another billboard flickered blue.

 Chapter 8 : Ghost Code

The files moved like ghosts in the server room—pieces of other people's lives tucked into machine corners, half-remembered and waiting to be called back. Mira sat in front of the precinct's makeshift forensics rig and watched the hex scroll like rain. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard, precise, unconcerned with the moral fog that clouded everyone else.

"It's obfuscation layered on obfuscation," she said. "He's not hiding; he's performing disappearance."

Aiden stood behind her, arms folded, coffee gone cold in a foam cup he kept forgetting to trash. He watched the traceroute the way men once watched the tide—patient, waiting for a pattern to emerge. He'd stopped sleeping properly. The filament in the evidence drawer clicked under his palm when he moved; sometimes at night it felt to him like a tiny heart looking for purchase.

Mira pulled up a map overlay. A lattice of relay nodes glowed faint and then brightened as she narrowed the algorithm. "Relay hops here, here, and—" she tapped—"a private node masked through an auxiliary ISP. Whoever controls the node has access to municipal feeds. It's a stub server; someone rents it under a shell company."

"You can pin a face to a postal box?" Aiden asked.

"You pin a face to a server, and the server whispers that face wherever it can. He's been scribbling in the margins of municipal infrastructure." She scrolled, bringing up headers and timestamps. "Look. These timestamps: they line up with public art maintenance windows. He uses the city's own schedules to create a clean window. The feeds are clean because he makes them clean."

Aiden felt the idea like a shove to the chest. "He choreographs the city to be his stage."

"And we are the only audience he seems to trust to watch him work," Mira added. "He wants witnesses who will talk about him. He wants the press to carry his sermon."

Mira cross-referenced user accounts, email hashes, past forum posts. She brought up a cached copy of The Luminous Body again and scrolled to a section annotated in red. She'd printed out the manifesto and marked phrases the way a surgeon marks incision points: with purpose and caution.

> …the camera preserves what the eye sacrifices. I will bind light to flesh so that truth may be seen without the lie of expression…

She chewed the inside of her cheek and scrolled. "This manifest—look at the file signatures. He posted it under thirteen different anonymous accounts across eight art and tech boards. But one of the accounts used an old email that traces back to a server in Singapore. The email name—'e.rhoan'—matches his full name in an archived hire document."

Aiden thumbed a bruise on his palm where the steering wheel had cut during an earlier drive. "You think he's gone international?"

"No," Mira said. "He's local. But he's careful about digital footprints. He learned to make them look like other people's handwriting." She paused, then keyed in a command and tapped the screen. A log opened—deleted files, overwritten blocks. "These files were scrubbed months ago. But they weren't gone; they were moved into a shadow volume that the scrubber missed."

Aiden leaned in. The file names were nonsense at first—strings of letters and numbers. He recognized one: ARIA_SCAN_V2_FINAL.dcm.

The room emptied around them—the copier drone's whirr faded, the precinct clocks seemed to slow. The letters hit him like cold water.

He hadn't told Mira about the storage unit file, the way he'd found Aria's unfinished sketch; he hadn't told anyone the filament had flashed in his mantel. He hadn't told anyone the text on his phone: Would you like to see her glow again?

Mira watched him without surprise. "You have to tell me everything," she said gently.

He let out breath that sounded like a bargain. "I found sketches once. She worked with VireGen on a short-term study for facial response datasets. She did voluntary scans—three sessions—and then she left. That's all I know."

Mira's nails tapped the desk. "Show me the file."

He felt exposed handing over a life he'd been hoarding like contraband. She took the drive and slid it into the reader. The lights on the console blinked; the file opened.

File, meta, preview: a scan—Aria's facial mapping, a 3D lattice built from millimeter-slice captures, the kind of clinical intimacy that turns a living face into a mathematical ghost. Her mouth, in the scan, was open slightly—as if she were about to speak. He blinked and could feel the heat of the old kitchen where she'd rinsed a glass with charcoal on her thumb.

Mira traced a fingertip over the rendering, not touching the glass. "This is good work. Clean captures. If someone stitched these into a live feed, they can map micro-expressions onto other faces. They can synthesize motion."

Aiden's voice was not his. "So he's not just using images. He can animate them?"

"He can do more," Mira said, and the way she said it made him sit back. "He can train the mesh to respond to stimuli. He could have used Aria's scans as a template. He could make a face that sounds like her." She tapped again. "Here—there are notes. Look at these function headers." She scrolled to reveal commented code lines, shorthand annotations: EMOTION_WEIGHTING, MICROFOLD_PARAM. At the bottom, a short, overwritten comment: —for Aiden.

His throat closed. "He wrote it to me?"

"No," Mira corrected. "He wrote it about you." She scrolled deeper, and the overwrites peeled back like scabs. "Listen to this." She read aloud a fragment from the comments: 'we will preserve what you refuse to keep. the model is faithful where memory is cowardly'.

The hum of the precinct became a distant, irrelevant sound. Aiden could feel blood at his temples. "He has her model. He could make her speak. He could make her look like she's alive."

Mira's eyes were sharp. "He could make the city think she is alive."

Aiden's phone buzzed with a new message, but he didn't check it. The past bled into the present until he could no longer tell where one ended. "If he has her scans, does that mean"—he couldn't finish.

"It means he has all the pieces to assemble a likeness," Mira said. "And if he's been killing to collect parts—structural data, skin tone rendering, muscular response—then we're looking at a process, not random murder. Each victim feeds the mesh more fidelity."

"How many more times?" he whispered.

"Until his template sings," she answered flatly.

They spent the afternoon carving the ghost code apart. Mira parsed machine learning weights and overlaid them with autopsy reports. She cross-referenced purchase records for medical-grade filaments. Each inquiry led them closer: a supplier in the industrial quarter that had sold bundles to a shell company; a lab space rented under a trust in Elias Rhoan's mother's name; a series of small, anonymous donations to a fringe art collective three years ago.

Late, as the sun went to the wrong color and the precinct emptied, Mira pulled up one more directory—an archived node that Aiden had overlooked. It was a private workspace labeled simply EVLYN_RAW.

The folder was a mess of raw frames—high-resolution captures, Lidar point clouds, the depth maps used in reconstructive surgery. Each frame had a timestamp from six years ago, and a note: trial activation: E. 0328.

Aiden pressed his palm over the screen until the heat of the glass blurred the image. Evelyn. The sister. The fire. The prototype.

Mira's voice was small. "He was right there when it happened. He left a record."

"He didn't just leave one," Aiden said slowly. "He left himself a path to follow."

She looked at him. "And you were close enough to be dragged in."

He swallowed past a bitterness that tasted like metal. "How close?"

She didn't answer, because the answer wasn't about proximity. It was about a line crossing—between what a man will do to atone for what he broke and what a man will do to make himself the maker instead of the destroyer.

The server log ended in silence at the edge—an upload timestamped months ago, then a gap that should have been filled with deletions. The gap felt like a mouth. Mira leaned back, rubbing at her eyes.

"We can trace the last upload," she said. "It came from a private node near the riverworks. It was masked by municipal maintenance pings. He's close to the main grid." She looked at Aiden, and in her face there was no pity, only the steady resolution of someone who had to accept what she was given. "We go tonight."

He thought of the filament in the drawer, the plastic that had touched his skin, the phantom glow that visited him in the dark. He thought of the message on his phone and the way its words had fit into every empty space in his days.

He nodded. "We go tonight."

Outside, in the rain, the city's lights shimmered like a constellation gone wrong. Somewhere among them a server hummed and waited—a ghost code humming in a machine, and beyond it, a man who sculpted faces out of blue. 

 Chapter 9: Miras Theory 

The riverworks lay at the edge of the industrial quarter where the city began to forget itself—long corridors of pipes and broken windows, a low mechanical pulse coming from beneath the street. The night rain fell in slow drifts, flattening the world into reflections. Aiden parked two blocks away, killed the lights, and let the engine tick into silence.

Mira sat beside him, checking her gear. "We're not storming a fortress," she said. "We're looking for a machine."

He nodded, eyes on the skeletal cranes outlined against the clouds. "Machines are easier to predict than people."

"That's the problem," she said, closing the case on her tablet. "He's both."

They crossed the street on foot, the river smell thick and metallic. Aiden carried a flashlight but didn't turn it on. Mira used the glow of her tablet to read the coordinates she'd pulled from the ghost code. "There," she said, pointing to a fenced substation where a service tunnel disappeared into darkness. "He's inside the old grid access."

The gate's padlock was already open.

Aiden pushed the fence aside, the metal squeal too loud in the rain. The tunnel swallowed them: damp concrete, graffiti, the echo of their footsteps. Water dripped from overhead valves, counting seconds. Mira's tablet flickered between signal strengths.

"He's broadcasting from somewhere down here," she whispered. "There's a live node less than fifty meters ahead."

They rounded a corner into a large cylindrical chamber lined with pipes. In the center stood a chair under a construction lamp. Someone had been here. On the chair sat a mannequin's head, half-finished—skin stretched thin, eyes replaced with glass lenses. The face was shaped vaguely like Aria's.

Mira stopped breathing for a moment. "He's iterating," she said quietly. "Testing material, light diffusion, muscular response. He's using the same methods he once used on prosthetic skin."

Aiden's voice was a rasp. "You said he's building the perfect face."

She nodded. "It's more than that. He's building a mirror."

He turned to her. "Explain."

She knelt beside the mannequin. "Every face he makes is a feedback loop—light enters, passes through translucent flesh, reflects back through the embedded filaments. He's calibrating human skin to glow evenly from within. But the resonance patterns—look here." She touched the glass eye. "They're designed to reflect light at a specific wavelength: the same blue frequency that old medical scanners used to measure heartbeat through skin. If he tunes it correctly, the glow pulses like a pulse."

"Fake life," Aiden murmured.

"Fake truth," Mira corrected. "He's building a system that will imitate honesty so perfectly it becomes indistinguishable from it."

She stood and brushed dust from her hands. "He wants to prove that light—pure, mathematical light—can make a better person than flesh can. He's turning his sister's death into theology."

Aiden's flashlight caught a glint on the wall. Words etched with something sharp:

> THE CITY LIES IN REFLECTION.

He reached out to touch the letters. They cut into the concrete, precise, deliberate. "He's saying the same thing over and over."

Mira said, "No. He's rehearsing."

Something buzzed softly above them. A security camera pivoted with a faint motor whine. Aiden's flashlight jumped to it just as it blinked—once, blue.

Mira grabbed his sleeve. "He's watching."

A speaker crackled. The voice was calm, close, as if whispering through the walls. "Doctor Vale. Detective Cross. You made good time."

Aiden drew his gun and swept the flashlight beam around the room. The voice followed him, amused. "You found my study. You're standing in a heartbeat. Listen."

They did. The pipes carried a low rhythm—thump, pause, thump—a mechanical echo of blood moving through a machine.

Mira whispered, "He's rigged the generator to pulse like circulation."

The voice smiled through the static. "You see, Doctor. You understand. I'm teaching the city how to live again."

Aiden aimed at the camera. "Step into the light, Rhoan."

"I already am light," he said. "But you, detective—you're still pretending to be flesh. That must be painful."

Aiden fired. The camera exploded into shards. The sound rang down the tunnels like a church bell. The lights flickered, then went dark.

Mira switched her flashlight back on. The chair in the center of the room was empty now. Only the mannequin head remained, its glass eyes glowing faintly blue. A small strip of paper was taped to its neck.

Aiden tore it free. Two words: NEXT MIRROR. And beneath them, a time: 02:00.

Mira checked her watch. "That's two hours from now."

He stared at the glowing eyes. "He's planning another broadcast."

She exhaled. "Then he's moving from private theology to public conversion."

The hum of the generator deepened; the pipes vibrated. The whole chamber pulsed blue for a single second, then went still.

Mira looked at Aiden. "You feel that?"

He nodded. "Heartbeat."

She closed her eyes, listening. "He's syncing it to the grid. Next time he goes live, the whole city will beat with it."

They climbed back to the street in silence. The rain had stopped, but the puddles shimmered with faint blue, as if the city's veins already carried his light.

Aiden looked at his reflection in one of them. The water rippled and for an instant the blue in it matched the blue behind his eyes.

"Two hours," he said. "Then we end this."

Mira shook her head. "No, Aiden. He's not ending. He's beginning."

 Chapter 10 : The Gallery Lead

The city's pulse was wrong that night—too regular, as if a hand were tapping a metronome against its ribs. Every billboard, every storefront strip, even the subway ticker flirted blue when the hour struck. It felt like a warning bell.

Aiden and Mira moved through the crowd like two things that had been taught to ignore the heat: practiced, terse, scanning. Officers knelt at checkpoints, faces lit from below with a cold, clinical glow. Reports came in clipped and terrified—another feed hijacked, another live reveal. Nolan wanted a tactical entry; the mayor wanted optics. Aiden wanted a door he could kick down.

"Lead's here," he said, voice low. The coordinates from the mask engraving had narrowed into a cluster—an old textile warehouse near the river, three blocks from where VireGen had once kept servers. The feed's relay had pinged from a rooftop within sight of its chimneys. Whoever hosted the node hosted the ceremony.

They slid into the building with a small task force—unmarked, hands steady, guns ready. The warehouse smelled of oil and old smoke, the air thick with the memory of machines. Somewhere above them, a projector hummed, casting wavering circles of blue down through skylights. Shadows twitched like watchful animals.

At the far end, beneath a scaffold of steel and broken glass, they found the entrance to the gallery—a door painted with a rough face that had been struck out. The heavy metal gave with a single kick. Inside, the lights were low, and the air smelled faintly of antiseptic and something sweeter that Aiden couldn't name.

They moved as they always did: stack, clear, sweep. The space opened into a cavernous room lined with metal racks and pedestals. On each pedestal, faces turned toward the center—heads mounted on stands like the trophies they were. The skin of some seemed taut, wax-smooth; others were veiled in gauze that the blue light seared through. Each face glowed from within, blue veins visible under the skin like luminous rivers. The effect was obscene and beautiful in a way that made Aiden's teeth ache.

Mira didn't look away. "He's assembled a chorus," she breathed. "An altar." Her hand went to the small recorder in her pocket and she kept it low, not wanting to startle the room's hush.

A rustle from the shadows. Aiden snapped his light there—two figures frozen behind a column, huddled, hands bound. Officers moved fast, cutting through ropes and slinging a blanket over a woman who trembled without sound. Her face was intact but encased in a halo of blue. She stared through them with bright, unfathomable eyes.

"She's alive," someone murmured.

"Get medics," Aiden ordered. "Secure the exits. Sweep for charges." His voice felt far away in his own head, like a broadcast from someone else's life.

They advanced into the gallery proper. The heads were arranged in a geometrical grace—rows, concentric circles, angles meant to catch light just so. Somewhere along the periphery, a workbench held instruments laid like cruel offerings: clamps, tubing, rolls of medical mesh. A red smear stained a tray—dried, dark, no detail but a hint that the process had a cost.

Mira knelt before one of the stands, peering. The face there had been obviously altered posthumously; the lips had been split and sewn to alter expression, eyes had been fitted with glass that reflected light into the microfilaments beneath. The craftsmanship was exquisite and sterile; the result was monstrous.

"He staged them," she said. "Each one demonstrates a different 'honest' expression—joy, grief, rage." Her voice held a tremor that she didn't try to hide.

"Where's he hiding?" Aiden asked. The gallery's rafters chittered with the hidden noise of vents, and every shadow looked like a door.

A response came from behind them: a slow clap, the sound sharp enough to cut paper. A figure stepped out of the darkness not with a panic but with a theatre actor's grand gesture—Elias Rhoan, thin as a hung lantern, face clean, eyes bright with that odd misalignment that had made his photograph memorable.

"You found my choir," he said, smiling as though they were patrons in a museum and he the genial curator. "Applause, please."

Aiden raised his voice. "Elias Rhoan. You're under arrest."

He walked toward them with slow, deliberate steps. "Such ugly words," he said. "They make everything final." His fingers trailed over the back of a mounted head, and the skin shimmered where he touched it. "I only finished what was interrupted."

An officer stepped forward and reached to cuff him. Elias's hand flashed—faster than the eye—with a syringe and the officer slumped like a dropped puppet, collapsing in a quiet heap. Chaos erupted in a dozen directions: shouts, scuffled feet, the high, awful sound of someone being struck.

Aiden lunged for Elias. The man moved with the nervous grace of someone used to working with live tissue; he ducked under Aiden's arm and slammed a fist into a chest. A bead of dark red flared against the fabric. The next moments became a compression: grappling, a boot against a jaw, hands on metal. Elias was not a lumbering monster; he was a surgeon who moved where a joint allowed. He smelled of alcohol and antiseptic.

They separated, pulling bodies away, cuffs slapped on where wrists were still willing. Elias laughed—thin and high—and backed toward the rows of faces, as if the tableau itself were a shield.

"You don't understand," he said to Aiden. "They needed to be saved. Their faces had become… cheapened. I gave them dignity."

"You gave them death," Aiden said, and his voice was the kind of small, dangerous thing that men use when everything else feels too loud.

"I gave them truth." Elias's eyes glittered, not entirely human in the way they fixed on Aiden and then flicked to the pedestals, hungry and proud. "You will see. You will all see."

He made for an exit—thin and quick—but an officer stepped into his path. Elias shoved past, slinging an elbow that cracked bone with a sound that made someone near vomit. He was no longer interested in words. He moved toward the back room, where a curtain had been drawn over a larger display, toward a heart of the installation.

Aiden pursued. He felt, with a cold certainty, that this was the point where choice narrowed: get Elias, or get to the woman behind the curtain. He tore the drape away.

Behind it: a single chair under a lamp. A body strapped to it, head back, skin glistening beneath the light. Wires trailed from the base of the skull into a battery pack on the floor. In the dim, the face glowed a soft, steady blue. The mouth was slack; the breath shallow and ragged—and there, unmistakable even in the haze of tears and doubt, features that made Aiden's stomach become empty. For a second, the world reduced to the impossible truth: the face belonged to Aria.

He didn't remember moving; he only registered the sensation of hitting the floor, of being suddenly less than himself. He crawled forward, hands shaking, teeth grinding soundlessly.

"Don't touch her," Elias warned from the doorway, breathing hard. "She is mine. She is what I promised Evelyn."

Aiden couldn't make a sound that registered as speech. Everything else—the officers, the medic who rushed in and shouted into a radio, the smell clinging to the instruments—faded into a thin white.

Mira was beside him in seconds, not holding back the way anyone reasonable would. Her face was a mask of professional calm, but her hand trembled as she checked the woman's pulse. "Weak, but present," she said. "We need to disconnect—now."

"Get your hands off her," Elias said, and the sentence bent like a threat. He advanced as if the chair itself rooted him to this place.

Aiden rose through something like anger and something like prayer. He pushed past officers and grabbed Elias by the collar. The man went limp, a practiced surrender that didn't match the cold fire in his eyes. Aiden wanted to strike him, to make him answer with pain, to tear confession out by any means. He wanted to break the man and be done with it.

Instead, he hauled Elias toward the cuffs. "You're not the judge here," he said, voice raw. "You're just a criminal."

Elias smiled once, and in that smile, something small and human broke. "Perhaps," he said. "But I will be remembered."

They led him out, shoulders hunched under the press of uniforms. The medics worked over the woman, unhooking, checking, murmuring. She coughed once, a small wet exhale, and then blinked, blue light swallowing the whites of her eyes in a way that made Aiden want to scream.

Outside, sirens rose to a different key. The city's lights, distant and indifferent, pulsed back to yellow. Aiden rested his forehead against the cool metal of the gallery door and let the weight of something enormous fold over him: grief, relief, a hollowness that felt like responsibility.

Mira stood in the doorway beside him, rainwater running off her jacket, looking at the row of faces like a priest watching an altar be stripped. "He wanted witnesses," she said. "He got them."

Aiden thought of the filament in his mantel, of the text on his phone, of the calls that had come without names. He thought of the woman who had come back to him not as Aria but as a lit, breathtaking echo.

He did not know whether he had saved her or merely preserved the shape of what he wanted to remember. He only knew the work was not finished. The choir would sing another night, and someone would have to answer.

Elias's last words in the booking van—murmured, almost intimate, as if to Aiden alone—followed him like a promise. "Light never lies," he said. "But it will show you what you want to see." 

 Every Week 10 new chapter will come