Henry stood over the 3D printer, watching attentively as it deposited layer upon layer onto his special project. The instructions for said project filled the screen of a computer in the opposite corner of the evidence cage, and emitted the only light in the entire room. He had used the evidence cage at his police quarters as an office for several months now. It was in the basement of the building, which meant it was out of the way, and kept most of his fellow officers off of his back.

And he needed them off his back, because although 3D printing a firearm wasn’t necessarily illegal, it was heavily frowned upon by his colleagues. He knew at some point they would accuse him of mishandling police technology, but they didn’t understand that he needed this. He needed this incredibly useful machine to put his plan to rid the world of a Fool in motion. And his needs were more important than their stupid, trash opinions.

Late the previous night, he had researched firearms for a few hours on Bing, and had ultimately chosen to print a fully automatic 9-millimeter Glock. Such a weapon would work marvelously to exterminate any foolhardy individual who got in between himself and the girl who thought she could get away.

Suddenly, Henry’s phone in his butt pocket buzzed, taking him out of his obsession for just a moment. The buzz came with the familiar but jarring wail of an Amber alert. Why people had to go losing their brats while he was in the middle of something so important was beyond him, but he pulled out the phone and tapped on the notification anyway.

He recognized the name. Blake Van Dyke. That was his only cousin Breanna’s baby boy.

“Hmmm.”

The gears of his mind churned until something clicked. This was a perfect excuse to give if a suspicious fellow officer walked in on him up to no good in the evidence cage. He silently thanked Breanna for being such a negligent parent at the exact right time.

“Kepler? What are you doing?” came a voice from the cage door, as if on cue.

“Dude,” Henry promptly responded to his lieutenant in a surprisingly calm tone, already trying to deescalate things, “it’s okay, don’t worry about it.” He then put his phone back into his butt pocket.

“Are you printing a damn sidearm?” the lieutenant pushed, ignoring Henry’s request to drop it. He crossed his arms in disappointment. He knew that was what was happening; he didn’t even have to make Henry move out of the way to see 3D printer. In a somewhat parental way, non-threatening and genuinely concerned, he continued, “is there something you need to tell me? Is this about those dreams you’ve been having?” The man’s white-blonde mustache bunched to the left with his grimace.

Henry said nothing for a moment, he just kept his eyes fixed on the printing process. He had not yet turned to face his superior. The little noises of the machine’s movement occupied the pause while he considered how best to redirect the conversation. The lieutenant was very expectant, after all.

“It’s about my cousin, Bre,” Henry lied. He didn’t want to talk about the dreams—they weren’t just dreams, they were visions. They were reality. He saw Ruse with The Fool on the news yesterday. Nobody had taken him seriously, and he wasn’t going to let them think he was out of his mind, so this would be about Breanna on paper. “She’s been getting a lotta harassment these past few days. I been thinkin’ of heading down to Japantown where she lives, to check up on her. She’s a pole dancer ‘n all. She got haters.”

“Bro, that is a severe conflict of interest,” the lieutenant protested. But he did seem to believe the lie.

“I know,” Henry said as he heard him step closer. “I’m not gonna use the gun. That has nothing to do with her. Honestly, bro, I’m just havin’ it printed as a collection piece. You know how I am about my guns.” He turned around with a smile, his long brassy dreads slipping over his shoulder. Henry had been an avid collector of antique and unique guns since university, and his fellow officers and superiors knew about it. That helped with his excuse. “I just need something to focus on, y’know? To keep my mind anchored in the now.” He tapped a finger to his forehead to emphasize what he was saying. But the lieutenant looked unsure. “Besides,” Henry went on, trying to appeal to him in another way, “I haven’t visited my family since uni, it’d be good for me to catch up with Breanna.”

The lieutenant leaned back with a furrowed brow, which caused the suspenders he wore to tighten over his button-up. “I’ll speak to the chief about it, but don’t get your hopes up. He’s worried about you, too.”

The two men in blue shared a tense few seconds of eye contact, then the lieutenant turned away to leave. “I won’t tell him about what you’re doing in here, but he will find out,” he warned. “You gotta keep your personal and work life separate, for your own health. And don’t blame me if this gun you’re printing gets confiscated, you know how this looks.”

“Wait,” Henry stopped him at the last second before he exited the cage. “Ask him if I can get permission to use the MDF software again. It’s about Breanna—my cousin. Her little boy is missing or something. He’s probably fine, probably just with his friends because his mom’s too busy hoeing to bother taking care of him. I still wanna check up on her though, just to help her out.”

“Was that what that noise was?” He must’ve heard the Amber alert. “You shoulda started with that.” He sounded aggravated, but said, “sure, man.”

But Henry had no intention of helping Breanna or her little goblin of a son. He had never even met the child, and he hadn’t seen Breanna since they were both kids. All he even knew about Breanna recently came from the endless stream of cleavage selfies she posted on social media, and he had no interest in her whorish desire for attention. Mobile device forensic software would continue to be an invaluable tool instead to aid him in finding Ruse.

Once the lieutenant left, Henry felt a tickle building up in his core. He leaned against the cage door and let out a laugh. This was turning out to be so very easy.

* * * * *

Even in her dreams, Ruse could not manage to escape Henry’s watchful eyes. She wanted to wake up; she hated that she couldn’t feel safe even in her own mind.

In the dream, she looked around. Henry was excitedly pulling her by the wrist towards an enormous red brick building standing out against the murky gray sky. It was the Military Historical Museum of Artillery, Engineers and Signal Corps in Saint Petersburg, Russia. There were old tanks and cannons of various size and variety in the grass on either side of the path leading up to the entrance, and they all made Ruse very uncomfortable.

It appeared this dream, which was slowly revealing itself to in fact be a nightmare, had taken her back to the summer after their first university semester together. Henry had forced her to purchase a passport to go with him out of the country, even though she wasn’t exactly fond of the military, or space and astrophysics, or engineering and technology, or Henry himself…but he wanted so badly for her to see this fancy-shmancy ‘space pistol’ the Russkies made for the cosmonauts when they landed back on earth after their space voyages, so they could survive in the Siberian wilderness or something like that. Ruse was slowly learning to tune out all his space-talk at that point in their relationship. Keeping track with his blabber was such a chore. Besides, Henry didn’t expect her to be responsive to his rambling; he wanted her to remain silent as he spoke, and just accept that he was some kind of genius. This made it easier for her to feign interest, at least.

Inside the museum, with its tall white walls and cathedral ceiling, Henry, clad in one of his many NASA t-shirts, led Ruse from display to display until they reached a certain ‘TP-82 Soviet combination pistol’, a strange little firearm under a glass case. Ruse didn’t see anything special about it; to her, it just looked dumb and flimsy. Definitely not a sight worth the hundreds of dollars it took for her to get there. But at least now they had located the damn thing; now she could look forward to this trip coming to a close.

Henry leaned over the case, eyeing the pistol almost lovingly, resting his palm on top of the glass of in a way one would to a precious family heirloom. Ruse stood there behind him, hip jutting out, watching him give a piece of man-made junk more affection than he’d ever given her.

Henry looked back after his tender moment with the pistol, past Ruse and past the glass cases of military uniforms and machine guns. He seemed to be checking to see if there were any other visitors or guards nearby. He even looked up to the ceiling to search for cameras to see if he would be caught. The nearest camera was panning back and forth across that particular area, and once it panned enough away, and he thought the coast was clear, he rammed the force of his entire elbow onto the pistol’s glass case. It came out of nowhere—there were no signs he would ever do something so rash leading up to this point.

Immediately, an alarm sounded. The glass didn’t budge an inch, as was expected in a museum like this. It was probably an inch thick and bulletproof. Henry’s arm made a noise like it had popped painfully out of place somewhere.

Ruse began to panic. She backed away from him with her hands halfway up in case a curator showed up with the intent to arrest her for being a part of her idiotic boyfriend’s stupid decision to try to steal foreign military museum property.

Several men in dark uniforms grabbed Henry and began to drag him out. A tall gray-haired white woman gently grasped Ruse by the arm and started speaking to her in Russian. Ruse had no idea what was happening, so she just babbled out a frightened plea in English, the only language she could properly speak.

The couple was escorted back outside, Henry all the while kicking and spitting and screaming that he ‘needed’ that gun, that he was the descendant of Johannes Kepler for fuck’s sake, that without his ancestor, there wouldn’t be a gun in their stupid museum to begin with!

More words about space information and technology and a ‘birthright’ were spewed, but Ruse’s ears were ringing, and she kept her face down, embarrassed as hell. How could Henry put her in a situation like this?!

They both received a permanent ban from the museum, which Ruse was honestly grateful for. She was ready to hide under a blanket for the rest of her life in shame. Henry, on the other hand, vowed to return to Russia and take back the ‘product of his ancestor’s hard work’, the space gun of which he supposedly was the rightful owner.

During the flight back home, Henry, arm dressed in a small cast, continued his downward spiral into fanatic absurdity, loudly insisting that he was the most fearless man on the planet for his attempted crime against those lame Russian space nerds. He asked Ruse, who was unfortunately sat right next to him on the plane, multiple times if she was impressed with him being such a courageous guy, to which Ruse responded each time with silence and contemplation of the whole relationship, all of which Henry was too absorbed in himself to even realize.

Mid-way home over the Pacific Ocean, Henry received a call from some person high up on the corporate ladder at NASA, where he had recently started interning. Ruse could hear the person speaking in a strict tone to Henry, who continued to smile and nod and examine his fingernails like this was just some run-of-the-mill phone call and not a serious coaching from one of the most prestigious administrations known to man.

When the person calling him finally stopped talking, Henry did something that made Ruse feel almost sick to her stomach. He lied to his boss. It came out so naturally, so believably. He told his boss an entirely different story than what had actually happened, in a way that sounded as though even Henry himself believed it. He lied away his hurt arm as an accident that occurred while climbing the Swiss Alps to stargaze, even!

Ruse was horrified. She didn’t know he could be such a convincing liar, manipulative and conniving like that. And weren’t astrophysicists above that? Couldn’t they see past his lie? There was no way they were that stupid, right?! Right…?

Oh no… she thought as it slowly hit her, have I been just as stupid all along?

Henry told his boss that things were ‘lost in translation’ and that the Russians were making things sound much worse than they were. That they had no proof, which the person on the other end of the phone corroborated, though they still sounded unconvinced. But that meant…the Russians really had no video evidence.

Henry ended the call with the most insidious grin, while Ruse gawped at him. Then he continued his raving about the space pistol debacle that he had just denied over the phone as if the phone call never even happened.

And yet, even after such a drastic display of a red flag, Ruse remained with him for over a year afterward.

* * * * *