Cross didn’t fire. He sidestepped, swept Kane’s legs, and pinned him to the wet grass in one smooth motion—a takedown he’d practiced a thousand times in the simulator. Handcuffs clicked. Kane sobbed into the dirt.

“You don’t understand,” Kane said, voice trembling. “He was in the crosswalk, but I was late for my shift. I panicked. I just—I panicked.”

Cross rounded the corner onto Fairmont. The scene was already lit up by the flickering strobes of two other units. A woman in a nurse’s scrubs knelt over a crumpled form on the asphalt. Cross killed the engine and grabbed his med kit.

Cross tapped the dash screen. Police Simulator Patrol Duty-CODEX flashed its splash screen—a legal relic from the department’s transition to full-body cams and predictive AI. The CODEX overlay wasn’t a game. It was the department’s new case-logging and evidence-synthesis engine, nicknamed “Codex” because it turned patrol work into a checklist of charges, fines, and report templates.

Cross kept the gun level. “You saved a life tonight? Because I just watched you try to erase one.”

Officer Alex Cross had run this scenario a hundred times in the training sim. But as he flicked on his lights and the Ford Explorer’s V8 roared, he remembered what his training officer told him: “In this job, every call is a simulation until the moment you step out of the car. Then it’s real.”

Kane’s face twisted. He lunged.

“They said the computer wrote me off,” Marcus said. “But you didn’t.”