Excerpt One:

After the shaking of limbs ceases and the heartbeat slows to a stop, the body becomes still. Shepherd begins his work with wavering concentration. He holds the man’s limp arm and analyzes the wrist, just above the distal radius and ulna. Orange tinted glasses slide down to the top of a small respirator. Covered by a black surgical glove, his hand squeezes a small laser scalpel. His eyes shut tight. Shepherd mutters to himself under the mask. Something is wrong with the cutting laser. He releases the arm, and there is a dull crack as the knuckles hit asphalt. A closer look after another squeeze of the device and the yellow blinking dot reveals that the device will no longer hold a charge. With a grunt, he hurls the defective device into the nowhere distance. He walks to his truck and folds the driver’s seat forward. Then he reaches into a crevice of clothing and tools and pulls out a sleek hacksaw.

Playing the blade between his gloved fingers, he walks back towards the body lying on the pavement. He stops, takes a moment to concentrate on controlling his breathing, to lower his own heartbeat, and observes the scene at his feet. A dark pool of blood has formed near the head, considerable damage to the occipital bone, unintentional. It is a man, younger, perhaps Shepherd’s own age. He should send a DNA sample to J for her to run through the database, but he can’t bring himself to bother with it.

A dusty southern wind brushes across Shepherd’s face. He crouches next to the body then coughs and spits accidently on the dead man’s torso. After, he snorts, wipes something on his own pants. He picks up the forearm once more and aligns his saw at the distal ends, above the wrist. When he cuts, the saw initially chews smoothly back and forth until it meets bone, where it takes more effort and an adjusted grip. From the first cut into skin, the arm bleeds red, and after bone, a muddy purple. The blade grinds against an artificial material attached to bone. Shepherd swears to himself. His arm grows weak before the cutting stops altogether. Stuck more than halfway through, the blade won’t budge. He exhales loudly, drops the arm. The lodged hacksaw clangs on the ground. From a crouched position, he lowers to one knee and places his left boot on the man’s forearm. He then tries to force the hacksaw through the final parts of connected hardware and wrist bones. In the end, a stomp of his boot is enough to finish the removal of limb from body.

***

The land is drenched in a beige colored tedium. Except for a herd of dark rain clouds with no plans of sharing precipitation, the sky is a large stain of grey. Shepherd drives at a comfortable speed of about sixty-five to seventy miles per hour. Before him, the road seems straight, but as far as Shepherd is concerned, he could drive in one seriously covert circle and never know it. This particular stretch or land adorns itself with mostly dead and otherwise determined foliage scattered about and nothing else worth noting. It’s the kind of monotony that drives itself into a person’s skin and crawls through old motors, not much different from how it looked hundreds of years ago. Places with such a character have the tendency to fool a person into dream states or something similar. A tail of dust swirls behind his truck.

A persistent rattling noise emits from a black crate situated in the back of the truck’s cab. Shepherd guides the steering wheel with one hand as the truck purrs and rumbles over a road caked in dirt, dried over from the last rain, months ago. Noise wavers inside with angry pockets of wind through the open window. He reaches back into the crate and pulls out the rashly dismembered hand, bringing it to the steering wheel before him. The wheel jerks beneath his wrists as he stares at the uneven cut on the appendage. He figures it will do and turns it around. Purple fluid stains the knuckles and fingers.

Because his usual extraction routine failed him, Shepherd forgot to account for the variation of the Derringer line’s link zones. Instead of only cutting through organic flesh and bone, he forced the saw’s teeth over the connecting hardware. The damage won’t affect the use of the implant, but the value will drop lower than it already is on average. An amateur grinder or student of intermediate biohacking will still pick it up. Mech-hands aren’t hard to come by, and the Derringer models were some of the first to find their way into the workshops of transhumanist tinkerers around the world. Some magpies pass over items like the Derringer since its older models flood the market, but Shepherd considers them a reliable payout, always a confirmed sale within seconds of posting.

His focused eyes nearly crossed, Shepherd wrestles with the loose synthetic skin, hanging from the wrist. Synthetic skin is trickier than artificial. Artificial skin is as simple as taking off a glove. Shepherd takes off his own gloves so his fingers can more easily pinch and twist to peel away the sundrenched flesh. The truck favors the opposite lane until Shepherd steadies it then decides as long as he stays on the road it doesn’t matter which lane he uses. When he removes the skin, intricate vein-like wires reveal themselves, tucked amongst green hued circuitry and artificial bone structure of polished metal. A blue fluid runs out of the amputated hand and trickles down Shepherd’s forearm. He tosses the useless fleshy material out the passenger window, aiming for an old road sign. He misses.

Shepherd inspects a small circuit board in the palm of the hand and finds an engraving that reads Derringer 1778. The Derringer line is extensive, one of the first prosthetics drafted by Fragaria Innovations out of Mi-Byeok for an American company in Philadelphia. It was named after Henry Deringer, a gunsmith famous for his original compact pistol and the Derringer style it inspired. Professor Marcus McWilliams, a writer, historian, geologist, and an entertaining drinking partner, told this to Shepherd one night over a flat beer in a Dongdaebyeok bar. He explained, also, that Derringer is the more common title for the gun style and prosthetic line, even though it began as a misspelling of the gunsmith’s surname, and that John Wilkes Booth used the original Philadelphia Deringer to shoot President Lincoln in the back of the head. After breaking into the skull, behind the left ear, the bullet tore through the brain until it fractured the orbital plates. It lost all momentum at the front of the skull. Shepherd didn’t know much about the assassination of any American Presidents before the professor’s excerpt, but Lincoln’s death fascinated him. He still thinks about the way Booth operated. That night, he told McWilliams that the assassin’s method, at least the initial shot to the head, was simple and effective. But the rest, it was too chaotic, unplanned. If they were alone, if he could have done it from afar… He thinks Booth would’ve made lousy Magpie, same as assassins today.

“What?” McWilliams said in response. “Do you not like to cry out ‘Sic semper tyrannis!’ after a successful extraction?” Shepherd didn’t know what he meant by that. McWilliams then said that some American patriots, even today, might agree that Booth’s methods were not so admirable. “Lincoln is still one of their most revered presidents, you see. Many years ago, he was on them old banknotes, the paper ones with faces and buildings.” Another thing Shepherd didn’t understand. Regardless, ever since this exchange, the Derringer worked its way upwards in Shepherd’s pyramid of obsessions.

 A deep fracture in the road jolts the crate behind Shepherd. He remembers to punch the mech-hand’s make and model number into the glowing dashboard touchscreen. The screen flashes a message window after only a few seconds. Item identification code received… Processing…

Back in the crate with a metallic clunk goes the prosthetic. He wonders how low the estimate will be this time.

After no more than a minute, a call comes in.

            “Derringer, huh?” A woman’s voice, Kim Jiyoon’s.

            Shepherd says nothing.

            “Hmm,” she says, “I don’t think this one will fetch any more than the last few you brought in. But who knows? This time might be different.”

Excerpt Two:

Nanami glimpses her own reflection floating along the large glass windows of the dimly lit lobby and feels very much like an apparition, believing that if someone were to see her now, they’d scream out as if she were indeed a ghost. Beyond the automated doors, the cold night air overwhelms her, reminding her that she is made not of wispy or otherwise formless visions but of flesh, of the blood rushing in her pinpricked hands and cheeks. Wearing wrinkled black jeans, old sneakers, a t-shirt, and a black turtleneck sweater, Nanami retreats her clenched fists into her sleeves to keep them warm. Fat snowflakes like torn up office paper float down in the light of the streetlamps then fade back into the dark of night to land somewhere silently and add to the layers of fresh snowfall. She sees no one else in the streets, no cars, but somewhat recent tire tracks are still visible in the covered roads. All is incredibly quiet. The trains have stopped running until early morning. Nanami doesn’t have a destination in mind, nowhere that she’d need the trains to get to. She just wants to walk, to move away from one thing and towards something else.

Her footsteps scar the otherwise pure and white blanketed earth with a trail left behind from her pilgrimage. When she passes under the pious red glare of a church’s illuminated cross, she glances back at her path and its unsteady nature to find her dragged footprints hold no color but darkness. She moves on while looking again to the church. The main structure itself is inconspicuous and buried behind others of a similarly underwhelming design, but its pointed tower and glowing red cross stands alone to oversee the block of apartments and offices. The cityscape of Seoul is dotted by countless others, red glowing crucifixes as blemishes or marks of comfort depending on the spiritual temperament of their observers. Nanami wonders, not for the first time, why they aren’t white rather than red. She discovered while first reading about the subject that their red color had been chosen to represent the blood of Christ, but at night they can look ghastly and ominous, as many citizens and visitors to Seoul alike have noted. She remembers opening one of her notebooks and, using the same pen now lost to the young detective, writing, “Who in their right mind wants to look up and see a night sky of glowing red blood?” She feels the same way now. Blood of a savior or otherwise, where is the comfort in that? If the church’s intention was, as one interviewed pastor stated, to draw in lost sheep for comfort at any hour of the night, then why not use a clean white light? The snowflake sky diffuses the red glow of the cross above her, and while Nanami observes the structure, considering if she’d actually be received kindly at the church’s doors, a lone snowflake falls into her eye, causing her to blink hard and her vision to go blurry.

All these thoughts of red and of blood cause Nanami to imagine Sojung’s murder scene. Blood throughout the apartment, a floor covered in sticky red, her body sprawled out and lifeless… Would it really have looked like this? She has no idea what Sojung’s apartment looked like after her murder, how gruesome or how mundane. Is murder ever mundane? Of course, it is. Murder happens every day. She’s reminded of another scene, one that she has tried many times to box up and bury deep below her accessible memory to no avail, and perhaps it was this image that she had been remembering from the start. The white walls and floors of Dr. Seo Hyunmin’s lab. A pool of brilliant red blood. The gleaming blade, partly red itself, dripping. Shepherd, a grim look upon his face. The dog Kalgwi, as breathless as his master. And Nanami herself, holding her arm and frozen by what she sees before her, feeling confused, afraid, and yet strangely relieved.

The wind picks up and scornfully drives more snow into her face. As a result, she can’t see anything in front of herself. She turns her back to the gusts, but they show no sign of relenting, and so she walks with her head angled down and arms crossed at her chest in an attempt to gather the remnants of warmth still present in her core. Her feet stomp, push, and pull through inches of fresh snowfall. When she looks down, she sees her legs moving, but she feels like she’s gaining no ground at all until, suddenly, she finds herself near Sojung’s university. She thought coming back here, whenever that might be, would summon unwelcome emotions, but nothing of importance overcomes her in the moment. She walks on.

A lone car passes by on the road. The driver doesn’t seem to notice the girl walking steadily through the snow in only a sweater and jeans, but there’s no way to know. They may have seen her. What did she expect them to do, stop, call out to her, and then what? They drive off, and Nanami watches until she loses sight of the taillights in the snowfall. She’s left alone once again to pursue her ambiguous pilgrimage. Perhaps, she thinks, this is no new pilgrimage at all but an extension of one that started long before tonight.

When Nanami first arrived in Seoul after she decided against following Shepherd to Northern California State, she quickly found herself underprepared for all the responsibilities of living and maintaining a life alone in a major city. She sorely needed work but found none. To make things worse, she realized only after the first two months that she was overpaying for her first apartment and her shallow savings would quickly disappear if she didn’t make changes. As the summer neared its end, Nanami went out one night to drink alone, like usual, with the intention to make her final decision. She’d tried before and failed, putting off the choice for later. Not this time. Would she push on with her goal of rediscovering and living in Seoul on her own terms even if it means homelessness or temporarily moving to a smaller town to find work, or would she go find Shepherd, who consistently insisted that she would be welcome with him wherever he went, and rely on him to get her out of yet another bad situation?

Nanami found herself tiptoeing around a final decision by wandering down a trail of self-criticism for treating herself to somewhat overpriced grilled pork belly when a loud, bubbly girl with dyed hair from the table behind hers crashed into her back. A large section of the restaurant turned to look in their direction, making Nanami go red. Her second bottle of soju, still nearly full, knocked into the grill pit. Through plumes of smoke, she swore in two of the three languages with which she held the capacity for expressing such vulgarity. Sojung laughed loudly and introduced herself with a rosy smiling face. She was sorry to bump into Nanami and offered to buy her two more bottles of soju to prove it. Before Nanami could answer, Sojung sat down beside her on the bench and grabbed a fresh pair of chopsticks. She then lifted a piece of meat from the drenched grill while an exhausted looking server cleared the air by yanking down the corrugated tube vent and unenthusiastically flapping a white towel in small circles. Sojung ate the charred piece of pork belly with a weird smirk. After swallowing, she squealed with delight and told Nanami to try one. Nanami’s decline went unheard.