#river ward

River stopped measuring time in hours sometime around the fifth night.

There was no use when the meager slits of sunlight couldn't reach his desk in the recesses of the West Glen NCPD precinct. One hour bled into the next beneath the precinct's fluorescents. For the last eleven days, the detective clocked in before dawn and clocked out after dusk in an attempt to right the wrongs of Mayor Rhyne's death.

It was River's unwavering moral compass that committed him to revealing the truth of the mayor's reported death, even at the cost of his already unsavory reputation and diminishing sanity. He'd severely underestimated the work ahead of him when he submitted the initial request for review. If the average Night City homicide required a packet of paperwork to book, reopening the investigation of the death of the sitting Mayor required a medical textbook draft with an unimpressed Internal Affairs ready on standby for further revision. Correcting the story surrounding Rhyne's murder would have been easier if Han hadn't done a professional job of covering his tracks. He falsified every single report required to claim a medical malfunction and somehow got all possible signatures necessary to corroborate his story. Now, he had to refile each witness contradiction and submit new ones for the plethora of evidence found snooping around the Red Queen's Race. River was backstabbing the backstabber.

So despite spending all his waking hours at the precinct, no one saw him among the halls or the water cooler. Instead, he worked tirelessly, day after day, buried beneath his desk and a mountain of papers with no end in sight.

But on the twelfth morning, something was different. Something was wrong.