"My first clear memory is of you coming into the kitchen," Connor said levelly.

Hank nodded. He had considered this option.

"So when you said what you said when I came home-"

"My name is Connor and I have been designed for your pleasure," Connor intoned, as though Hank needed a reminder. He was, however, surprised at how much the delivery of that very first line Connor had ever said to him differed from the voice he was using with Hank now.

"Yeah, that. It wasn't in any way specific, was it? Like, were you ordered to say these exact words by whoever sent you here?"

"No. It's a default owner salute for my model."

Also expected. However, something else was nagging at Hank's attention.

"Wait a moment – you said clear memory? Does that mean that you have any less than clear memories from before that?"

"I remember being… assembled, I think," Connor said so quietly that Hank almost didn't catch it over the TV noise. Hank fished for the remote to turn the damn thing off. The room sank into silence, interrupted only by the sound of Sumo's heavy breathing.

Hank looked at Connor and waited for some elaboration. None followed, however. Connor just started fidgeting with the strings of Hank's hoodie with his eyes downcast. His LED light was a twirl of yellow. Hank noticed that he seemed paler than normal, even in the dim light of the lamp in the corner.

"What about after you finished being assembled, but before you appeared in the house? Nothing?" Hank pursued.

Connor shook his head in denial. There's only one lead to follow, then.

"What exactly do you remember about your assembly?" Hank asked.

"For some reason, these memory files seem hard to access. Those are probably just memory tests run upon launching; they're not designed for later reviewing, I think," Connor said softly. His eyes still wouldn't meet Hank's.

Hank's heart started to beat faster. Something was not quite right here. His instincts were screaming at him to drop it, to not pressure Connor further. At the same time, he felt like he simply had to know. He heard himself saying in a detached tone:

"Try to access those memories for me, will you?"

Connor gave him a small nod and closed his eyes. He let go of the strings and neatly folded his hands in his lap, furrowing his brows in concentration. Then his temple light turned red and his face contorted in what looked like agony.

"I don't-," he gasped, his breath hitching. "Give me a moment, please."

Hank waited, watching Connor's troubled expression with growing concern.

"Trying to review those memories is… unpleasant," the android said after a beat of silence, sounding oddly uncertain.

"Then stop doing it!" Hank blurted out, panic creeping into his voice.

At the sound of Hank's raised voice, Sumo let out a loud whine, disturbed from his slumber. The android reached down to pet him until the Saint Bernard slipped back to sleep.

"I'm sure I can overcome this," Connor said after he turned to face Hank again, sounding much more composed. His LED light slid back to yellow. His calm demeanor was, however, belied by the slight tremor in his fingers, which once again found themselves tugging at the strings of Hank's hoodie.

Hank reached out without a thought, catching those hands between his own, stilling them. The trembling dissipated right away.

"I don't want you to hurt yourself," he murmured.

"I am a machine; I cannot be hurt in this way. The pain sensors don't work like that," Connor explained, but Hank was having none of it.

"Just don't. It's like you said, some tests or something, won't tell us much anyway," he said, trying to sound dismissive. Whether he did it to convince Connor or himself, he didn't know.

"Perhaps if you contacted CyberLife, they could extract these memories for your viewing," Connor suggested.

"Like in a fucking Pensieve?" Hank asked incredulously.

The android gave him an uncomprehending look.

"So you haven't been to my Harry Potter books yet," Hank observed.

"There are no such books in your collection," Connor said, puzzled.

Of course not, Hank realized belatedly. Three years ago, he had only just started to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone to Cole, just a few weeks before the accident. After, he couldn't stand the sight of those books, so they ended up with all the rest of the things he gave away to charity.

"Never mind that," he sighed. "We're not going to CyberLife."

Hank found himself harboring misgivings about Connor's explanation. He somehow doubted that his computer felt agony when he tried to make it open a document he had moved in the meantime. No; Connor's behavior looked suspiciously like trauma to Hank. And if Connor had what appeared to be traumatizing memories about being assembled, what would being disassembled feel like for him, even if it was only for the short time needed to access his memories? Not to mention what Connor had told him the very first day, about CyberLife destroying defective models.

Come to think of it, that was kind of a strange thing to say.

Why would Connor think of himself as defective? Hank mused, gazing at the lines of Connor's face, his expressive eyes and soft, pliant looking lips, and finding nothing else than perfection.

Connor licked his lips under his stare.

Hank was reminded of the lust he involuntarily felt those first days, after Connor had given him a taste of his programmed skills. An echo of that lust was still there, but mostly it turned into something softer, something that made his chest feel constricted.

Hank forced himself to look away from those lips. He abruptly let go of Connor's hands and stood up, stepping over the bulk of Sumo's sleeping form.

"I'm calling it a night. See you in the morning, Connor," he said and all but fled to his bedroom.

Hank didn't see Connor in the morning; when he came to kitchen, there was a freshly brewed coffee, a glass of orange juice and a plate of toasts with a generous helping of tomatoes and bell peppers, but no sign of either the android or Sumo. Connor usually waited for Hank to wake up to keep him company during breakfast, but Sumo was sometimes so eager to be let out that Connor had to walk him even before Hank's alarm. This must have been one such morning. Hank ate and drank everything Connor had laid out for him and headed for the station.

It didn't take much investigating to find out that Carlos Ortiz was a waste of space. Drug addict, convicted felon, violent and abusive towards fellow human beings and apparently towards androids as well. His landlord had tried to get him evicted a few times already. When they interrogated him, the said landlord spoke of the victim with such venom that they might have suspected him of committing the murder, were it not for the fact that he was a frail man over seventy who wouldn't stand a chance against Ortiz, especially considering the latter's perpetually enraged state brought on by red ice.

On one of his futile visits with the aim to get at least some money from his least favorite tenant, the landlord came upon a sight of Ortiz burning his domestic android's bare arms with a cigarette. "I know they're just machines, but it still felt sick, you know what I mean?" the landlord told them, and Hank did, in fact, know perfectly well what the man was talking about.

The droid's action didn't seem like a random glitch anymore, but more like a revenge of someone driven to despair, or that of a cornered animal forced to lash out. Hank felt like he should be more concerned about a murdering robot on the loose, but truth to be told, he couldn't shake the feeling that the murderer had done society a favor.

But no matter how justified it might have seemed, a murder was still a murder, so they spent hours trying to find the missing android's whereabouts, which mostly consisted of searching any abandoned buildings in the vicinity. Detroit being what it was, there was a lot of those. Technically, Hank could leave the legwork to the lower ranks, but there was not much to do for him at the station at the moment, so he decided to oversee the search in person. Hank texted Connor not to make him dinner, instead getting a share of the pizza Chris had ordered, and spent the next few hours crawling through every abandoned ditch they could find.

Hank was not complaining; he had long since become accustomed to this less glamorous side of police work. These days, he often welcomed the tiresome legwork as mercifully numbing. But God, he was exhausted, he thought after they had called it a day and he was dragging himself towards his car. Maybe he should take up running again.

He somehow made it home, collapsing into his bed without even checking on Connor and Sumo.

He didn't have the chance to catch more than four hours of sleep before he was woken by a phone call. Hank reached to turn on his bedside lamp.

"Anderson speaking," he croaked into his phone while blearily blinking into the unforgiving light.

"I'm really sorry for waking you, Hank," Ben told him. "But there's been another murder, and we suspect it's the same perp as in the Milton and Courtland case, and you're in charge of that. The vic's a young adult male and had been handcuffed before being stabbed to death."

Hank's blood ran cold in his veins. A serial killer. It's been a while they had to deal with one of those.

"Gimme the address," he commanded, feeling fully awake.

Ben complied, providing Hank with a location which was just a few minutes' drive from his house. There was a probability this crime was fresher than the last one, which would significantly increase their chances at catching the sick fuck who'd done it, so Hank wasted no time. He hurriedly dressed in yesterday's clothes, scribbled a quick post-it note on the fridge and was on his way.

This time, the murder victim was discovered in an empty dilapidated house, one in a row of identical buildings that had been built for factory workers in the 1930s.

Hank showed his badge to the uniform at the door and entered the house. The entry hall was narrow and dim, lit by a lone flickering light bulb.

"The lighting here's shit. Can't wait for daylight," Ben told him by way of greeting and beckoned Hank to follow him down the hall.

They went into what once upon a time must have been a living room. Sharp white light of police reflectors pierced the semidarkness, revealing a few outmoded pieces of dust-laden furniture and piles of dirty rags, moldy papers and other debris.

The room was teeming with detectives and uniforms alike, most of them concentrating in the far right corner, leading Hank to the conclusion that it was there where the victim lay.

"It must've happened last night. An old lady next door called a little past 2 AM, complaining about a ruckus some coke-heads were making in the abandoned house, but something like this happened every other night or so, so patrol took their sweet time getting here," Ben filled him in as they approached the crime scene.

Hank, however, hardly registered a word from what Ben was saying. His full attention was on the slender body of a dark-haired man lying face down on his stomach, naked but for a single piece of clothing carelessly thrown over his back. A steel blue, black-sleeved baseball jacket.

Hank couldn't breathe.

"Connor," he whispered, and had to put his hand on the wall against a rolling wave of dizziness.