A detective story you steer, one chapter a day
Night Crawl
Vote on Detective Elias Rook's next move. One case a week in the drowned wards of Harrow City, one chapter every morning, and the dice decide how each choice goes.
Who is Elias Rook?
Detective Sergeant Elias Rook, fifty-four, twenty-six years with the Harrow City Police. He works out of Precinct Twelve, the Drowned Precinct, down in the lower wards where the floodwater never quite leaves and the corporate towers above keep the sun for themselves.
He has a chrome knee from a raid that went wrong, lungs full of the city, and four years clean from Lull, the street sedative that nearly took his badge. He still carries the empty inhaler in his coat pocket. He does not know why.
His old partner, Dana Okafor, died on a job he still replays at three in the morning. His daughter Nia stopped calling two birthdays ago. He is tired all the way through, and he keeps turning up for the next shift anyway, because somebody down here has to.
When he needs to know what the street knows, he goes to Pook, who runs a noodle bar in the Undercity called the Den and hears everything.
Season 1 · Week 1 of 13 · Undercurrent
Undertow
- Week 1: this week
- Week 2
- Week 3
- Week 4
- Week 5
- Week 6
- Week 7
- Week 8
- Week 9
- Week 10
- Week 11
- Week 12
- Week 13
Something is pulling Harrow City’s lower wards under, and it is not only the floodwater. Pumps fail on the wrong nights, evictions come the morning after, and the same shell company keeps buying what is left.
The board 0 of 13 threads
Nothing pinned yet. Every case Rook solves this season adds a thread.
Case file · Week 1 · Precinct Twelve
The Glass Orchid
Mission Find the missing courier Mira Sato before the people she stole from do
Mira Sato, a courier for the Glass Orchid club, walked out of a delivery with a data shard that was not hers to keep. Her flat in the lower wards was turned over before dawn. Her mother filed the report because nobody else would.
Suspects
- Anton Reyes, owner of the Glass Orchid. Smiles too easily for a man who lost a courier and a shard in one night.
- Lale Kurt, Mira’s ex, a small-time netrunner. Was seen at Mira’s building the night before, and has not been home since.
- Captain Iris Vey, Rook’s own precinct captain. Told Rook to leave this one alone, which is the surest way to make him pick it up.
Evidence
Nothing solid yet.
4 clues still out there.
At zero health he ends up in hospital; at zero resolve he hands in his badge; at 5 heat Internal Affairs pulls him off the case. He needs 3 leads by the last chapter to close it.
Chapter 2 · Digging
Nothing Left to Find
The lock on the Glass Orchid's service door gave in under a minute. That should have been the first warning. Nothing in this city opens that easily unless somebody has already finished with it.
Inside it smelled of bleach and cold ash. The booths were stripped to their frames, the bar cleared down to bare steel, the drawers under the register pulled out and left open like a mouth. Someone had gone through the place ahead of me with method and patience and industrial cleaner. I went over it anyway, on my hands and knees, chrome knee grinding, until the grey came up in the windows and my coat was wet through from the floor. Three hours. Nothing. Not a receipt, not a hair, not a shard.
On the way out I stopped in the back corridor, because there was one thing on the wall they had not bothered to take. A civic leaflet, taped up crooked, curling at the corner. A photograph of the flood commissioner in a clean coat, shaking hands with somebody at a reopened pumping station, the water behind him flat and obedient. Corvin Hale. Smiling in a nightclub corridor in the drowned wards. I looked at it longer than it deserved and could not tell you why.
I walked out into the rain with nothing but a wet coat and the certainty that I had been slow. They cleaned that room before Mira's mother even finished crying at my desk. Which means they were not searching. They were tidying.
I am standing under the Orchid's dead sign with the morning coming up dirty over the towers, and my hands will not quite get warm. Reyes opens at noon. The alley behind me has a bin that nobody has emptied and a door that somebody used. And the Den is nine streets east, and I have not eaten since yesterday.
Right now Find out who emptied the Glass Orchid before I got there, and where Mira ran.
What does Rook do?
Voting closes at . The most votes wins; a tie goes to the dice.
3 votes so far. The split stays hidden until the dice roll.
The story so far
Chapter 1 The call You chose: Break into the Glass Orchid club and search it yourself Went wrong 3 vs 14
The rain had not stopped in three days, and neither had I. Then the call came in: Mira Sato, a courier for the Glass Orchid club, walked out of a delivery with a data shard that was not hers to keep. Her flat in the lower wards was turned over before dawn. Her mother filed the report because nobody else would.
Anton Reyes, owner of the Glass Orchid. Smiles too easily for a man who lost a courier and a shard in one night. I wrote the name down and looked at it for a long time.
Somewhere a siren started and gave up halfway. The floodwater slapped against the steps of the old metro entrance, patient as ever, waiting for the rest of us to go under.
I am standing at Mira’s flat in the lower wards with the rain coming sideways, and I have to decide what I do next.
9 votes: A 3, B 1, C 5.
No account needed. Voting sets one cookie holding a random code, so you get one vote a chapter; we store only a scrambled version of that code, never anything about you. The story is written each morning by AI from the choices you make; the dice and the rules are ordinary code.