Chapter Text
November 12th, 2038
3:12 am
The fresh snow on every surface made it hard to hide your tracks.
Blankets of unbroken white lay across the sidewalks and streets of neighborhoods that had already been evacuated. It was grey slush over the more heavily trafficked areas, which unfortunately was not where Connor found himself in these early morning hours.
The electrical grid was down in this section of the city, and it made it easier to blend into the shadows, so long as he kept his blue arm band and LED covered.
There was an ever-present sound of helicopter blades circulating over the Detroit skyline, blasting columns of blinding spotlight down onto the streets. In the hours since President Warren had declared for the army to stand down and for the mass evacuation of Detroit to push forward in earnest, the city had rapidly descended into chaos.
Desperate humans tried to flee with their families, bottlenecking the evacuation checkpoints and crowding the perimeters of the city. Desperate deviants had tried to rally to Jericho, to seek safety in numbers and the solace of Markus’s strength and leadership. As the shock of Warren’s announcement had cooled, however, bands of angry humans had started to take to the streets in packs, armed with whatever weapons they could get their hands on and ravenous for the blue blood that dared to call itself equal to red.
There was nowhere safe to be.
The crisp, freezing night air cut through the thin Cyberlife uniform that he was still wearing. Notably, it burned through the bullet hole that had punched through his shoulder, exposing his inner wires to the cold. His ventilation pattern had increased to keep his internal system from overheating, and his exhaled air gushed like fog out of his mouth, looking too much like a human gasping for breath.
Jericho now had the numbers to insulate themselves against the riots that were erupting across the city, and Connor had chosen to quietly remove himself from their midst. The deviant murmurs had already been circulating about him. That the Deviant Hunter was moving among them like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. That he was pretending to be deviant, pretending to ally himself with them, still under orders from Cyberlife to infiltrate their ranks and get close enough to their leaders to dismantle the revolution from the inside. That he was incapable of deviating. That he was a beast of violence chained to Cyberlife’s hand. That he would only ever be a threat to them.
Markus, North, Simon, and Josh had tried to squash the murmurs, but tonight, unity among their people was more important than the splinters that might form if Connor remained with them. So he had made the choice for them and fled.
The first order of business had been to break into one of the supply caches that Cyberlife had maintained during his provisionary release as a prototype leased to the DPD. They were just small storage units spread around the 7th precinct where he had been assigned: so that he could replenish his thirium and perform minor repairs on himself without having to physically report to Cyberlife every day. He found nearly all of the caches to have already been broken open and cleared out, but he was able to scrounge two bottles of thirium and a small, basic repair case out of one of the gutted units before fleeing.
With the electrical grid down where he currently was, Connor was able to break into a laundry mat without setting off any security alarms, and he hurriedly scrambled into the back of the building before a passing pack of humans could spot him through the tall windows of the business.
Connor collapsed to his seat on the floor behind a row of clothes dryers, dumping the loose supplies from his arms to the floor between his knees. Huffing and struggling to get his ventilation back under control, he grunted and wrangled his damaged shoulder out of the sleeve of his jacket. His necktie, which had been serving as a temporary tourniquet around the bleeding, was hopelessly stained and no longer providing any help.
He glanced back toward the front of the store and tried to scan his surroundings, but the numerous system warnings cluttered his HUD too densely to read the results. He blinked rapidly and out of sync to try and dismiss them all.
Elevated stress levels. Decreased thirium volume. Damage to the shoulder unit. Misfiring electrical synapses in his main processor making it difficult to focus.
He loosed the necktie from his shoulder, pushing it down and leaving it on the floor as he cracked open the repair kit. His RK800 internal healing program was already doing the bulk of the work repairing the internal damage, but he had not been gentle when he had dug the bullet out of his hardware earlier. Honestly, he was fortunate not to have already bled into a shutdown.
He pulled out a small bottle of gel disinfectant used to sterilize android biocomponents, and he turned it over the open wound. The foreign sensation of harsh, stinging pain made him yelp and then clamp his jaw shut to stifle the noise. He squinted his eyes and pressed his back against the wall of the dryer to weather the horrific agony of it.
Was this what deviancy was? Agony?
He inhaled and exhaled rapidly a few times, in ways that he had observed humans did to endure their own pain. It did little to help, and he instead tired to focus on something else. He opened one of the bottles of thirium and drank from it, finding immediate relief as the blood rushed to where it was most needed in his body.
Clearing his throat once, he looked back again to the front of the store. This wasn’t a safe place to be…but he had nowhere else to go.
Ventilating heavily, he unbuttoned his white shirt and pulled it away from his shoulder, grimacing the whole way at the uncomfortable and new sensation of pain that apparently was a byproduct of becoming deviant.
Great. Wonderful. Just…shit.
Connor used a sterile pad from the kit to clean the shoulder damage as much as he could stand to touch it, then used another sterile pad and medical tape to make up a pressure bandage against the bullet hole.
Dizziness from the blood loss and the overwhelming information screaming across his HUD made him teeter in his seat, but his connection to Cyberlife was dark and quiet, severed. It should have been a relief, but the silence only reinforced just how alone and unsupported his position currently was.
He needed…he needed help. He was not going to be able to survive without assistance, and he did not feel safe returning to Jericho.
He muscled through the vertigo and maneuvered from his seat to his knees, drawing the gun that he had been carrying from his belt. He checked the clip, set the safety, and paused to feel the cold steel of it in his hands.
The sensation was repulsing, and he grimaced, looking away from the sight of it in his hand.
Deviant Hunter. Cyberlife’s attack dog. That wasn’t who he wanted to be. Not anymore.
The helicopters were circling back again, and so he moved quickly. He gathered the gun and his remaining supplies into a drawstring laundry bag hanging on a cart within reach. He leaned heavily against the dryer as he got to his feet, and he opened the dryer to find an abandoned bundle of clothes inside. He emptied the clothes into the nearby cart, pilfering through it and shoving a woman’s thick burgundy sweater aside to pull out a sturdy jacket and beanie hat. He paused, then tossed the beanie back into the cart.
“—blue blood and footprints lead this way…to that laundry shop over there! C’mon!”
Human voices registered to his heightened audio sensors, and Connor panicked, looking down at the mess of blue blood that he’d left on the floor.
He must not have been as careful at covering his tracks as he’d thought. They must have been able to follow him…
“Shit,” he hissed, assessing his surroundings and locating a back door through an office at the rear of the mat.
Keeping low to prevent any passersby from seeing him, he went up to the office door and found it unlocked.
Bright flashlights cut through the dark laundry mat, landing on his back and head.
“It’s in here! I can see its LED!” one of the humans alerted.
Connor frantically shoved the door open and crossed the office in long strides, hearing the glass front of the laundry mat shatter as the humans broke inside.
“Hey! Get back here, tincan! We just wanna take you apart a little!” one of them jeered.
Connor rushed around the desk in the office, his balance teetering as his thirium volume and stress levels made it hard to keep the world upright. The edge of his bag caught on the arm of the chair at the desk, nearly sending him to the floor. He panicked and dumped the bag, scrambling out the back door with only the clothes on his back.
“Fuck, it’s fast!”
“It’s damaged though, see that blue blood? C’mon, it can’t get far.”
“Never seen an android move like that before!”
“It’s deviant. Like a rabid animal, man. We gotta put it down before it hurts somebody.”
Panic and fear burned through the circuitry running through Connor’s extremities, and he didn’t even look back, just running as far and as fast as he could.
Where could he possibly go if nowhere was safe?
Hank, his mind involuntarily supplied.
With no other option and no rational thought left, he rapidly accessed Hank’s cellphone in his contact list, sending a text that he hoped didn’t sound as frantic as he felt.
“Hank, it’s Connor. Can we meet somewhere?”
For nearly 3:30 in the morning, Hank’s response was swift.
“R U ok? Streets aren’t safe right now. Where tf r u?!”
Connor grimaced as he ducked behind a dumpster, looking up at the clear, starry sky.
His firewalls were intact, no signs of further hacking or tampering since he’d broken away from Cyberlife and Amanda. Still…he didn’t want to speak plainly and put Hank in danger if anyone could tap into his wireless messages.
“I’m on the move. Can you meet me at the place where I warned you about Pedro’s gambling?”
Hank, to his credit, immediately picked up on Connor’s vague reply.
“Gotcha. Yeah, c u there at dawn. Stay safe.”
Connor exhaled heavily and grasped his knees, which wobbled slightly from the stress of the day.
He wasn’t completely alone. He still had someone that he could rely on. The only person he could rely on.
“Thank you, Hank. I’ll meet you there.”