Back at home, Laith exhaled as he sank into the comforting folds of the wrinkled soft-mink sofa. Traveling from one side of the city to the other had been surprisingly draining, and he felt altogether exhausted and weary. But he managed to pull himself up after a few minutes and head to the bathroom to wash up for his prayers. He had missed a couple while he was moving back and forth from one location to the next, and a quick glance at the clock told him it was almost time for the next one.

When he was finished, he shuffled into the kitchen and started making himself some dinner. His wife had left him an audio earlier on in the day that explained she had an unexpected late shift at the hospital tonight, so he’d been hoping to make her dinner, and despite his late return home and his buzzing mind, he was determined to go through with his plan. As he chopped the Greenland Farm onions and processed them, however, and as he sautéd them in the pan over his biomass stove, and as he went about getting the rest of his homemade spaghetti sauce prepared, his mind kept returning to his case. His first ever homicide case.

He didn’t quite know what to make of everything he had learned today. There were perfect prints on the murder weapon, but PATET somehow couldn’t match them to anyone in its database. There were no signs of breaking and entering, which meant it had to have been someone the victim had been comfortable around in the house – in her pajamas. The most fitting match would be Aster Lockwood, but Cassia Grove’s husband was missing, and his Slate had been traced to the Ruins, of all places. And – whether it said something or not – the perceived relationship between husband and wife didn’t sit right with him, either. Something felt off about their marriage, and he couldn’t quite put his finger on what exactly it was. He would have to dig a little deeper to find out.

A soft pressure against his calf snapped him back to reality, and he looked down to see ever-lovable and mischievous Saba rubbing against him. “Hello, there,” he greeted him, crouching down to give him a quick head-scratch, to which Saba purred happily. “Did you just get back, too? How was your day?”

Saba padded over to his bowl across the room and meowed expectantly. “That bowl was full when I left the house this morning, and there’s only one cat roundabouts that could have emptied it, my friend,” Laith said, pointing at him with a fork. “You’re not getting any more until tomorrow.”

With an insistent meow, Saba sat down next to the empty bowl and stared at Laith, his big round eyes boring holes into him. “Don’t look at me like that,” Laith muttered, avoiding the long-haired orange cat’s gaze. “The vet said you’re obese. If we want you around for longer, we’ve got to get you on a diet. So, I’m doing this out of love, really, and you can’t be mad at me for that.”

Saba didn’t seem convinced, though, and Laith sighed, eyeing the refillable bag of cat food hidden away on one of the shelves. Maybe just a little bit more wouldn’t hurt...

The arrival of his wife shook him out of his moment of weakness – and just in time, too. The spaghetti was boiled just right, the sauce was ready to go, and he started setting the table as he listened to the familiar sounds of Warda putting her giant purse away, taking off her comfortable shoes, and hanging up her shawl. She hummed loudly as she padded through the hall and towards the kitchen. “Something smells great!” she called, and before long she was popping her head into the room with a big grin. “Salaam!”

“Wassalaamu 3alayki, habibati!” Laith responded in greeting. “You’re just on time for dinner.”

They sat down at their small, two-person dining table looking out over the park beside their apartment building and engaged in pleasant chit-chat for a while, until it became very obvious that Laith was still all too preoccupied with his case, at which point Warda asked him if he wanted to share his burden. He couldn’t tell her sensitive information about the murder case or the investigation, but he decided it was alright to share one intriguing little tidbit.

“I learned today that there might be people in Heliopolis who aren’t recognized by PATET,” he told her, reaching over for seconds. “It just surprised me, I guess. PATET is supposed to be air-tight. They go on and on and on about the all-seeing eye and yet...”

“PATET isn’t all-seeing,” Warda replied after a moment’s consideration. “It’s very effective, and it’s very smart, but it’s human-made, too. So it can’t possibly be all-seeing. It can only see what we tell it to see.”

“Right,” Laith agreed, mixing the tomato sauce into his second helping of spaghetti and sprinkling some toasted garlic flakes – courtesy of Spice Wise, a subsidiary of Emerald Farm which processed its natural produce, namely its herbs. “You’re right. But then, what does it mean if someone isn’t in the system? Everyone who’s ever stepped foot in Heliopolis is automatically introduced into the system. Everything is recorded. People can’t hide from PATET. They need it for – for payment and banking and education and legal issues and medical matters… How can someone live in Heliopolis – exist in Heliopolis – without PATET recording them?”

Warda shrugged as she thought this over, her brown eyes lingering on the park below as she chewed her spaghetti and mulled over his question. “Is it possible for someone to smuggle themselves into Heliopolis? People in the Ruins might have found a way in; I imagine many of them aren’t in PATET’s system.”

“Some of them are, because they used to be citizens, but many of them aren’t,” Laith replied, considering this seriously. “People who were born in the Ruins or never made it to Heliopolis in the first place. That’s certainly a possibility, and one of the more probable ones. But I can’t imagine PATET allowing someone through its borders without the correct security and identification procedures. It even registers visitors that come for a day and never return. Unless this particular person is exploiting a weakness we don’t know about yet. A weakness that even PATET hasn’t encountered in its diagnostics and scans? Or maybe one it wouldn’t know to warn us about? How strange...”

Add to that the fact that this person would have had to have some kind of reason to kill Cassia Grove, and it made the theory all the more unlikely. Unless… Unless this was somehow linked to Aster Lockwood’s Slate being in the Ruins. Perhaps his wife was right, and there was a connection there – one that they simply weren’t aware of yet.

“Maybe it’s a glitch,” she offered. “A bug or something like that. Maybe it was a one-time fluke.”

A one-time fluke that led to a murder suspect being completely impossible to trace through PATET? If that were the case, it would have to be a pretty big coincidence…

One Laith wasn’t sure he was ready to believe just yet.