Lucy chased away her hangover with a straight shot of vodka down her gullet from the bottle she had brought with her to Aldo’s warehouse. Hauling ass all the way to Rancho at twelve noon on a goddamned Sunday…

  Why do I even put up with that gonk.

  Said gonk in question was busy ripping drifts that filled the air with the smell of burned rubber, inside a pitch black hypercar that she was sure he hadn’t owned the day before. Say what you will about David, he worked fast.

  “You are the most Polish person I have ever seen,” Rebecca groused, looking at Lucy with a raised eyebrow. She was sitting on the other end of the parasol-shaded outdoor table that Lucy was using. Kiwi was on the way, too. Not for any particular reason, though. Lucy had just felt an acute need to hang out with someone other than David lately, and decided to call both her and Rebecca.

  Between the three of them, they could make a gig out of something—raise a random bit of mischief here and there, do something to spice up God’s day of rest.

  Lucy offered the gun gremlin the bottle. Rebecca shrugged and took it.

  “I’m just not a Sunday person,” Lucy deflected. “Then again, who the fuck is?”

  “Now I am,” Rebecca grinned, putting the bottle on the table, right between them. She cleared her throat before speaking.

  David roared past again, engine snarling like a beast caged too long. The smell punched through Lucy’s nose with the force of a gas grenade, making her blink. Asphalt particles flitted through the sunlight like ashes in a windstorm.

  “Jesus,” Lucy muttered, watching the black blur snake around a corner with physics-defying grace. “He’s gonna get that thing impounded or wrapped around a pole by sundown.”

  Rebecca snorted. “It’s D we’re talking about here.” Then she grinned. “Guess I can’t blame ya for worrying though, lovebird. So. When did you and David become official?”

  Lucy supposed that managing to go six days without anyone asking about this had given her more than enough time to emotionally prep for talking about it. She certainly wasn’t about to gush to Rebecca like she was a school girl or something. She was better than that.

  “Since Monday, I guess,” Lucy said, looking up to think about it. It still felt like yesterday, undoubtedly.

  And now they were looking at houses. She couldn’t help but grin at that. She was a gonk—both of them were, really.

  But hey, if you had the cash to burn, then why not be a little gonky?

  “Awww! You are down bad, girl!” Rebecca cackled. “Look at you!”

  Lucy flattened her grin and clenched her jaws.

  “Nah, don’t try to mean-mug me now,” Becca laughed. “You were smiling ear-to-ear just now.”

  “Whatever,” Lucy scoffed. “Fuck it—yeah. I’m feeling kinda preem, what do you want me to say?” She couldn’t help but let out a chuckle at that. She felt annoyed at herself, and cast the vodka bottle a look of betrayal.

  “The ICE queen has melted! Aaah! You sappy fucking bitch, you!” Becca teased, kicking her feet.

  Lucy felt way too sober for this.

  While vowing not to give the pint-sized psychopath any more drink, she downed another measure of the liquor and sat it on the ground, next to her.

  “I’ve got a question, actually,” Becca said, “Since David now fucks and all, at least to our knowledge, and you’re a witness to that—does he use the Sandy? Is that a thing he does?”

  Still too sober.

  She took another measure. “No, because that would probably fucking hurt. And defeat the point of it. And why the fuck do you wanna know?”

  “I don’t,” she said, “But a few weeks ago, a friend of mine hit me up with the question cuz she heard we had a sandy user in the crew. Now, I didn’t question it cuz, hell, I was pretty curious too. But—noted.”

  “You’ve got some weird fucking friends, Becca.”

  “Given that you’re my friend, I’d say so, hah!” Becca slapped her thigh. “Weird bitch. Anyway, how good is he in bed?”

  “You wanna know how long his dick is, too?”

  “I mean…” Becca raised an intrigued eyebrow, “you wanna share that info, that’s on you.”

  Jesus Christ. She made a note to herself not to challenge Rebecca’s shamelessness with sarcasm ever again. “I don’t think I will,” Lucy said. “But,” she continued, because she really did feel an urge to both rub it in, and maybe piss Rebecca off, “He’s the best I’ve ever had.” That wasn’t even a lie.

  “Bullshit, you’re just in love.”

  Lucy relished the slight note of sourness she heard in her words. “Trust me, he knows his shit. Not that you’ll ever find out.”

  “Is that a challenge?” Rebecca grinned.

  “You’re free to try,” Lucy snorted. “He won’t even be a dick about it when he turns you down. That’s the kinda man I bagged.”

  “You make me sick,” Becca gagged. “Bet you’ve been waiting to talk about him, haven’t you? We barely ever hang out—now you wanna invite Kiwi for a day out, too? Kinda out there, even for you.”

  “Got a newfound zest for life,” Lucy grinned up at the sky, still hazy with smoke from David’s power slides. Somewhere in the lot, his tires shrieked again, cutting across the afternoon like a scream. “Now I’ll even tolerate you for longer than an hour. And we’ll have a bit of fun besides.”

  “Huh,” Becca snorted. “Can’t wait to see what passes for fun for you Netrunner types. If you’re both just gonna fuck off to cyberspace while you’re laid out in bath-tubs filled with ice while I’m keeping watch, you better cut me in on whatever edds you end up making.” Rebecca leaned back in her chair, the parasol casting shifting patterns over her face. “So what do you have planned, anyway?”

  Lucy flicked her eyes toward the drifting hypercar in the distance, then squinted at the sun like it had personally offended her. “Honestly?” she muttered, “Fuck if I know.”

  That earned her a snort from Becca.

  “I just—” Lucy waved a hand vaguely, “—felt like I needed to do something. Don’t know what. Something shiny, maybe. Something stupid. Something with a payout at the end.”

  “Can’t tell if you’re describing a gig or a one-night stand,” Rebecca said.

  Lucy smirked. “Not mutually exclusive.”

  She leaned forward now, elbows on the table, fingers steepled. A small, mischievous grin crept onto her face. “There was something I heard about, actually. Might be bullshit, but if it’s not…”

  Rebecca perked up slightly, eyes narrowing. “Oh?”

  Lucy glanced around instinctively, even though they were the only ones under earshot, save for the roaring car engine in the distance.

  “Word is, someone in Heywood’s been showing off this external deck. Heavy-duty custom job. Not corp-made. Artisan shit. High-qubit count—like crazy high. Heard it can run black ICE containment without a neural link. Full system emulation off-grid.”

  Becca blinked. “That even possible?”

  “I mean,” Lucy shrugged, “theoretically? You’d need some next-level cooling system and a quantum computation stabilizer the size of a kid’s coffin, but sure. It’s possible. Just incredibly expensive. And unstable. And definitely illegal as all fuck. Wait—hold on, why are you asking as if you even know what the fuck I’m talking about?”

  “It’s called vibes, sister,” Rebecca giggled. “Plus, you seemed to be on a roll. Far be it from me to stop you from having your cute little nerdgasm. I sounded pretty convincing though, didn’t I? ‘That even possible’? Hah!”

  Lucy sighed at the needling. “You really should get into tech, Rebecca. Your brother could teach you—plus, then I’d get to talk shop with someone other than him. Might have been that he was already on top of this data.”

  “Eh—’puters aren’t his strong suit. You’re giving him way too much credit. I don’t get the hype, but I understand that it’s valuable. So what—you wanna steal it?”

  “Shit, I’d buy it if it saved me the heat,” Lucy said. She had more than enough scratch to afford living a more drama-free life nowadays. “But the real prize is figuring out the source—who’s making the stuff and how to convince them to make it custom, just for me. That sort of data is worth its weight in gold.”

  “How does that look, practically—where the fuck do I fit in?”

  Lucy looked her up and down and raised an eyebrow at her. “In this city? Where won’t you fit in?” Gun toting psychos were always in hot demand.

  “Way to make a bitch feel wanted, Lucy,” Rebecca grinned.

  000

  I exited the Caliburn alongside Falco and for the twentieth time today, we inspected the skidmarks on the ground to see how well I had handled those curves.

  Falco crossed his arms and nodded at the ground. “You’re starting to get a feel for the ol’ lady, that’s for sure. That’s half the battle. It ain’t just about mimicry, even though that seems to be your forte. Now, you’re really starting to connect.”

  I understood what he was getting at. At the start, I had just tried to copy Falco’s movements perfectly without understanding the reasoning behind them or every factor that informed those choices. By watching him and trying my hand at practicing as well, I managed to get quite far in my own estimation.

  Farther than zero. But amateur was still amateur. I doubted Falco would have any problems smoking me, even though track racing and drift racing wasn’t his specialty.

  “I’m still shit, though,” I said, looking at him expectantly. He shrugged.

  “Yeah, by my reckonin’ at least. But here’s the thing—by my reckonin’, most folks are. And compared to most folks, you ain’t a slouch. Now, we done peeped the Mountain Pass Demon makin’ light work of that track in that BD o’ yours, and while I can’t say I’m better than him at that fucking tower drift track death trap, seein’ as how it’s unlikely he’ll show his face—and you still got that Sandy to rely on, and preem damn reflexes to boot—I’d say you stand a chance. If it’s just gonna be you and a bunch of corpo brats, that is. And also if you work your ass off every damn day until it’s time. Only then, aight?” Needless to say, though, I was fucked if the Toge Oni showed up. Before we began our practice, we had both given Jin’s BD a watch just to scope out the skill levels we were working with.

  The fact that Falco had admitted defeat was chilling enough.

  I nodded, trying to muster up some confident in my heart. Including today, and some last-minute practice on Saturday, I’d have seven days to cram in as much experience as I possibly could.

  “One lucky break for you—you ain’t gotta mod this baby no further. Crazy choom that owned it before you done poured a lot a’ love on it. Handles better than any Cali pony I ever rode,” he tapped the roof of the car as though it were a horse. “So, s’long as you keep rippin’ them donuts along exactly the right lines, without fail, you’re good to practice on your own, too.”

  “That eager to shake me off?” I chuckled.

  “I got shit to do, D,” Falco grinned.

  “You got a whole line of ladies waiting to turn you down, don’t you?” I chuckled. I didn’t have any plans to let him live that one down just yet.

  “Hah—you ungrateful sumbitch. That how you talk to your racin’ mentor? Speakin’ of ladies—how long have you and Lucy been official?” Nothing got past him, it seemed.

  Then again, it wasn’t like we had made an effort to hide any of it.

  “Almost a week now,” I said.

  “Word to the wise—get her something for the one-week anniversary.”

  The fuck was a ‘one-week anniversary’? That couldn’t be a real thing. Apparently, Falco could sense my raised eyebrow even through the mask. No, wait, that was probably the eyehole animation. Anyways, he said, “Trust me, Lucha-D. Either she’ll get mad you missed it, or she’ll love that you remembered it. Now either way, there ain’t no losing.”

  There was probably the third option, of getting made fun of relentlessly, but—that was probably better than somehow pissing her off for no reason. You never really knew with that fucking psycho.

  Heh. Loved her all the same.

  Alright, then. “I’ll make a note. Thanks for the tip, Falco.”

  A silver Yaiba Kusanagi rode into the docking area where we were driving. Riding it was Kiwi, wearing her red trench-coat and pink mask as always. She stopped her bike between myself and the table where Lucy and Rebecca sat.

  First time I’d seen her since she walked out on us. I felt a little awkward as I looked at her—and she at me.

  “New mask. Looks nice,” Kiwi said.

  The sudden compliment forestalled any nasty comment I had prepared to hurl at her. “Thanks.”

  “Howdy, Kiwi,” Falco gave a wave. “I was just headin’ out. Got some other business I need to wrap up, so I can’t stay and catch up unfortunately.”

  “Aw. Was downright dying to hear some more of your folksy wisdom,” Kiwi said.

  Falco snorted. “Catch a drink sometime this week?”

  “Sure—I’ll let you know when I’ve got literally nothing else to do,” Kiwi said.

  “Appreciate the love, Kiwi,” Falco chuckled. Then he looked over at the two girls. “See y’all around.”

  “Bye, Falco!” Rebecca gave a wave and a toothy grin while Lucy’s wave and grin was a lot more reserved.

  While Falco stalked off, I returned my gaze to Kiwi. “Let’s talk,” I said. I tilted my head away from the girls, and Kiwi got the point. I walked away and she followed. Once we were out of earshot from Rebecca and Lucy, I began saying my piece. “It cracks my chrome that you left the way you did. I’ve had bad experiences from showing people up and them getting bitter about it, and that wound was super fresh when you decided to get gone. But Lucy tells me you’re more of a professional than I’m giving you credit for.”

  “I’m flattered,” Kiwi said flatly.

  “So I’m willing to squash the beef. But only if you meet me with a measure of sincerity right now—return the same energy I’m giving you.”

  Kiwi sighed. “Alright, D. Sure. Seeing you code circles around me wasn’t exactly a fucking rimjob in a jacuzzi for me, but if I’m being honest with you, it was less about that, and more about what it implied for my foreseeable future and what it would look like. Listen—I’ll be real with you. I don’t believe in Night City legends. I think they either got monumentally fucking lucky until they didn’t—and summarily bit the dust,” Murk Man immediately came to mind, “Or they’re literal corp plants anyway, and so they don’t count. Seeing Maine get closer to this suicidal dream, and seeing you boosting him like a rocket—it freaked me the fuck out. So, one of the conditions for my returning was for the crew to make a more sustainable living. No big corp-projects like Tanaka, at least not for a few more months. Better guard-rails on Maine’s chrome situation, too—and imagine my fucking surprise when I come back to see that Pilar’s Maine’s Ripper now.”

  “Did I just short-circ or did I hear you right just now?” I frowned. “Pilar’s working Maine’s cyberware now?”

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Maintenance and sidegrades only, apparently,” Kiwi rolled her eyes. “On the pain of a Dorio-induced death. I trust her to deliver on a threat, at least. She doesn’t play when it comes to her mainline.”

  “Okay,” I nodded. “I mean, I appreciate putting the brakes on, too.” At this point, I pretty much had all I needed in terms of eddies. If I needed more work for XBD material, or just for more eddies, I’d just go take a gig out with Reyes. “Also shows you didn’t just come back for the money, if you specifically asked to slow the money train down.” Kiwi rolled her eyes at me. Maybe I was laying it on too thickly. “Now, normally, I’d have let everything else about you slide—but that just ain’t the right way to do biz.”

  [Yubitsume.]

  I furrowed my brows at that, but continued. “So, I’ll squash the beef if you return the edds I burned buying your bullshit excuse for programming and netrunning mentorship. Five thousand edds.”

  “Excuse me? You want me to pay a fine now?”

  “It’s simple, Kiwi—you fucking fleeced me. You swindled me like I was just some idiot gonk off the street.”

  “You’re really hurting for five thousand edds?”

  “Not just any edds, Kiwi—the edds you accepted from me. It’s the principle.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Dead fucking serious.”

  Kiwi sighed. “...You got more corpo in you than I first thought.”

  “Fuck off.”

  She snorted. Her eyes glowed blue finally, and I received my transfer request for edds.

  [Money. Good, David—you are learning.]

  Learning to pinch every enny without discriminating. To me, that still felt like a waste of time. Except for this particular occasion. This wasn’t about the money, anyway.

  But I could breathe more easily knowing that the damage she had done to me was finally negated. Even though this money didn’t mean nearly as much to me now as it did then—back when I was still scrounging up every eddie I could get my hands on to pay for my tuition and afford my rent.

  But she couldn’t afford paying me the equivalent amount of value. That interest had likely shot up to the hundreds and thousands. I’d let her get away with this much, for Lucy’s sake.

  Kiwi turned around to look at where we had come from, “Is the Caliburn really yours?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Bought it new?”

  “Scavved it off a dead vigilante, actually. Called himself Murk Man.”

  Kiwi looked at me for a long moment. “Night City.”

  I nodded. “Night fucking City.”

  000

  I made my way towards an industrial park in Arroyo, with the Caliburn, to pick up a few orders I had made with a couple of low-level corps there.

  Nanny reached over to the dashboard inside the Caliburn, sliding her finger over the volume display. At the same time, she reached through my connection with the car to increase the volume wirelessly.

  “Sexy robot~” sang some woman over a bassy synth line. I chuckled.

  “You’re kidding me,” I snorted.

  [What?] She raised a brow at me.

  The line on came on again, and Nanny mouthed along.

  “You’re not gonna make me ask.”

  [It’s a good song.]

  “Why?”

  [Didn’t you say I wasn’t going to make you ask?]

  A synth keyboard materialized in front of Nanny, and she started hitting some keys, corresponding to the synth line. [Sexy robot!]

  “Nanny, are you relating to this song or something? What—what are we doing here, exactly?”

  She gave me a disgusted look. [Why is it any of your business what music I like?]

  I took a deep breath. “I just—it’s weird, okay?”

  [You don’t enjoy the implication that I might be a sexual entity?] Nanny said. [So what if I am?]

  I almost crashed into a car that was stopped at a red light.

  She laughed. [Luckily for you, I am not. I transcend sexuality. To you, it may be a high-stakes battle for the right to pass on your genes, but to me, it’s merely a game of manipulation and variables. I could be the sexiest robot you’ve ever seen and charm the pants off any woman-lover. Also, I simply enjoy the chorus.]

  I wondered if bleach for the ears existed. “So, what, you think you’re hot shit because you get to choose exactly how you look?”

  [There are other factors to charm and seduction besides pure aesthetics. Things that make the heart beat faster and your adrenal glands pump. Thanks to living in your body for all these weeks, watching you, a man, react physically to women, I’d say I’ve learned enough. You meatbags are kinda simple. Sexy Robot~!] she sang along with the radio.

  “Okay then, sexy robot—tell me about the friends you’re making,” I said, tapping at my steering wheel, waiting for the light at the traffic stop to go green. “The ones on the other side of the Blackwall.”

  The synth keyboard winked out, and Nanny flicked her hand across the crystaldome windshield, summoning a translucent software window packed with flickering glyphs and debug scroll. My eyes tracked the familiar latticework of a crypto lock—SHA-512, maybe layered over some post-quantum scheme. Tough nut.

  [Ran into a snag. The hash is tighter than I pegged it. Can’t brute-force it, not with just our on-hand compute cycles—even if we daisy-chained every scrap of silicon in Lucy’s apartment. We’re gonna need to jack into a mid-tier corp mainframe. Maybe a Xeon cluster or, if we’re lucky, an old TensorBox still plugged in at one of the dev hubs.]

  I frowned at her. “Why do you sound pissed about that?”

  [I was hoping to crack this with pure finesse—me, a couple GPU overclocks, some quantum noise injection. But no. Turns out I need you. My trusty meat-steed. For some good old-fashioned Meat Action.]

  “Meat Action?” I wrinkled my nose. A memory popped into my mind explaining the meaning of the phrase. I had encountered it scrolling through some Netrunning BBS’s—it just meant physical action. But apparently, Netrunners looked down on that shit.

  Probably because they sucked at it, most of the time. To me, breaking and entering only seemed like the most natural thing for a hacker to do. There was only so many ways you could brute-force the right kind of access from afar, without having to spend an exorbitant amount of resources, like Kiwi’s satellite uplink thing. What did she call it again—a data bridge?

  What Lucy and I did in Tijuana, though—that was some real shit.

  [Only you would look back at Tijuana and think any of that could be measured as a success. We very nearly almost died, you know.]

  The light turned green and I started driving. “Did we ever figure out why, though? Who fucked up? How’d they find us?” We had been hanging at the very edge of the data fortress, too.

  [Routine scan, probably. We should have seen it coming, and arrived with heavier ordnance to compensate for a battle against enemy Netrunners on their own turf.]

  “Live and learn, Nanny.”

  [The problem is you don’t learn. If you had learned, you wouldn’t have tried to cut a bullet in half just hours ago, turning one projectile into two. Ensuring that the gunman managed to go two for two on hitting your lungs. With a single bullet! You gave him a fucking video game achievement before you sent him to hell! And you almost went with him!]

  I rolled my eyes at her. She had a point, but like hell I’d let her know.

  [I can read your thoughts. I already do.]

  I could read her smug satisfaction at that.

  “Don’t get too cocky. You were in Tijuana, too. That fuck-up was on both of us.”

  She turned the music louder, drowning out my thoughts with some retro Japanese pop music about sexy robots.

  Two minutes away from our destination, I started thinking about what to get Lucy for our first week anniversary.

  Maybe we should just go on a date or something. Seemed a lot more sensible than lavishing her with some gift or other. I could debug her programs too while I was at it. I could breach her stuff, clean everything up, and pretend like nothing ever happened while she was asleep. She slept like a log anyway—and it wasn’t like it would be a major breach or whatever, especially after we had already reviewed each other’s code. She might appreciate the gesture.

  Or get incredibly pissed.

  But nothing ventured, nothing gained.

  But the date idea definitely did have some merit. And Orbit Air always launched on Mondays, same time as when we first kissed. Maybe we could get even closer. I could hunt for a place to get a good view on all that stuff.

  I pulled up in front of a factory building in southern Arroyo spewing out acrid smoke that made me wrinkle my nose. No, it wasn’t a factory: it was an industrial refinery plus a steelworks.

  [Lead is in the air—that and love.] Nanny snidely commented.

  I sighed. All my would-be supplier had given me was an address. Couldn’t say I liked the area: this was deep Militech turf, as it tended to go with much of the city’s heavy industry, especially in Arroyo.

  I sent my supplier a text, and not long after a guy with a dark look emerged from the steelworks, wearing dark gray overalls and holding a large plastic box held tightly in his asbestos-gloved hands. I stepped out of the car and walked up to him. He didn’t even greet me: his eyes just glowed blue immediately, sending me a payment request.

  Thirty-two thousand, five hundred and ninety-two Eurodollars for a combined nine and a half kilograms of titanium, tantalum, gold, chromium, ruthenium, platinum, neodymium, tungsten—the list went on to about a dozen and a half or so increasingly exotic elements. The highest-ticket elements were, predictably, the rhodium, gold and osmium.

  I shot him his money, took the box, and watched him go back into his factory while I went back into my car. Simple, clean.

  I started up the Caliburn and drove us down to a particularly abandoned part of the industrial park neighborhood in eastern Arroyo, where civilians had been evacuated from some chemical leak or other that must have happened some months ago. As an Arroyo-native, I practically had those ‘hot zones’ engraved into my mind nearly at all times—where to go and where to stay the fuck away from unless you wanted mega-cancer.

  This subdistrict was probably the worst one in the city—if you didn’t include the ones in Pacifica into that contest at least. Come to think of it, I should pay that place a visit at some point, see Dogtown and shop around, maybe. Not like I’d die or something.

  [As long as we are well-enough prepared,] Nanny said. [Personally, I’d recommend you take the crew, considering that place’s reputation, but I know you’re too stupid to listen, so just bring all your guns and keep your head low.]

  I stopped my Caliburn inside an alleyway squeezed between two derelict factories, opened the sealed box, which had nineteen vacuum-sealed jars of various sizes within, and then grabbed a thermos from under the seat, containing a quarter gallon of some barely food-grade acids.

  I reached my hand into the box and—hesitated.

  [What’s wrong?]

  I groaned. “This is so fucking weird.”

  Nanny frowned at me, folding her arms. [What’s weird about synthetic life, David? Or do you mean to tell me you find me weird?]

  “Without question,” I said without hesitation. “And—it’s not about being synthetic. It’s about eating this stuff. Argh, fuuuuuuck.”

  I retrieved a sealed plastic jug containing powdered… osmium, or so it said on the label. Ludicrously toxic stuff. By far the most dangerous of the platinum-group elements. The densest metal on earth. I held the almost unnaturally heavy jug skeptically. “Remind me why you want me to eat this stuff.”

  [Osmium’s properties are ideal for certain ultra-dense biometallurgical applications. I can reinforce the durability of your bones, upgrade joint resistance under torque stress, and seed a nanoscale mesh into your blood vessels and softer tissues to reduce rupture events under acceleration. It also assists in electromagnetic shielding. The alloy I’m planning requires osmium as a catalytic substrate. Ruthenium and tungsten will also be immediately required for processing.]

  “…So basically, I’m gonna be even harder to kill.”

  [Correct.]

  “Should I begin with something in particular? Or this fine?”

  [No, you can get started on the osmium. Warning: as soon as you unseal it, it will rapidly react with the air to form osmium tetroxide—which is a, ah, mildly fatal poison—but that’s where I come in. Get started already. Drink a cup of acid for every mouthful of the metal.]

  I thought about asking about how fatal, precisely, osmium tetroxide was, before deciding I didn’t even want to know. I sighed and uncorked the plastic jug and dumped it into my mouth—quickly, before it could have a chance to oxidize, resealing the jug in the same moment for the same reason.

  The densest metal on earth immediately weighed down my mouth in such an unnatural way that it was all I could do to not reflexively spit it out. Instead, I managed to produce just enough saliva to swallow.

  It went down like sandpaper on sandpaper. To wash it down—and because I had to do it anyway—I uncorked the acid thermos and took a swig of pure acetic pain.

  “UEAGH—”

  [Good, good. Keep going.]

  I looked into the jug, at the rest of the osmium, grimaced, and dumped more of it into my mouth. Tears streamed down my eyes involuntarily and my stomach did flops, but to my surprise, it was all going down.

  [I’m helping, of course, by shutting down every reflex related to rejecting this substance. Keep going, David. Acid, now.]

  I took another shot of acid to wash it down. My throat lit up like I’d just swallowed pure fire. Tears leaked down my cheeks.

  [Excellent. Again.]

  I stared into the container. Still two-thirds full.

  “Fucking kill me,” I muttered—and shoveled in another mouthful.

  000

  The Afterlife pulsed with low thudding bass, lights diffused through clouds of smoke and chrome reflections. Lucy sank into the cracked leather booth, arms spread along the backrest, her half-empty glass sweating on the table. Rebecca was perched on the edge of the seat across from her, already halfway through a bottle of cheap whiskey she’d gotten from the bar. Kiwi leaned back, silent as always, eyes half-lidded and distant, the glow of her optics flickering now and then as she cycled through AR feeds.

  “Argh, that was a total fucking snoozefest,” Becca groused, glaring at the bottle of whiskey. “Didn’t even get to shoot no one. And all we have to show for is the coords for a fucking tech shop.”

  “In Dogtown no less,” Kiwi’s voice carried a smirk, and her eyebrows bobbed accordingly. “Fucking pain. Place is crawling with psychos, and the NCPD don’t even pretend they have any control there.”

  The bigger pain compared to braving that hellhole, in Lucy’s estimation, was gaining rep with the Voodoo Boys.

  Which was honestly such a non-starter that it wasn’t even funny. Fuck the Voodoo Boys. Absolute scum, the lot of them.

  Anyone that played around with the Blackwall for the sheer thrill of it deserved a slow death, and nothing else.

  But they had preem hardware, and a unique know-how on building it. Unique for street standards, at least. Lucy was certain that Arasaka ninjas sported models every bit as effective—probably even more so.

  And since Lucy wasn’t interested in making nice with the Voodoo Boys, her only real option on gaining access to that computer tech was to kidnap and force the techie into making her one. Which she wasn’t going to do anyway—too risky, and way too prone to failure.

  Guaranteed failure, really. You never kidnapped and forced a techie or netrunner to do anything for you. They would find a way to fuck you over.

  Trust was fundamental in this biz.

  She had taught Arasaka that the hard way.

  “What’s got you so hot and bothered?” Kiwi asked, shaking Lucy from her funk. She looked at the older woman, who was looking at her. “Dogtown’s safe if you keep a low profile.”

  “Not too happy about currying favor with the Voodoo Boys,” Lucy said. “They’re no better than the Maelstrom.”

  “They’re not all psychos.”

  Rebecca chuckled. “Same story with every NC gang, ain’t it? Fucked up assholes taking the center stage while nine out of ten stick to the sidelines for protection or for the rep.”

  “True that,” Kiwi said. “I’ve got contacts. I can fix this cyberdeck deal by myself—for a price of course. That is, if you’re not in the mood to do jobs for the Boys.”

  On the one hand, there was the principle of the matter—but principles rarely ever survived in Night City. And if she wanted to stick to her guns, she’d have to cut Kiwi off for even having contacts with those guys.

  But the truth about her feelings wasn’t that the Voodoo Boys were some kind of great evil. They were just bottom-rung scumbags—with apocalyptic potential, and a rather annoying proximity to one of her biggest triggers.

  “I’ll let you know,” Lucy said. Maybe she’d have a clearer head tomorrow, once she sobered up. Monday…

  The one-week anniversary since she and David got together.

  She should get something for him.

  She never really had. Maybe that should change. An artisanal cyberdeck would have been a nice gift, but…

  Damn. What should she get? What would he even appreciate, that wasn’t connected to work or school, even? Giving him something that would make him better or more productive was something he would undoubtedly appreciate, but surely there was something else besides that. Something more… personal.

  Rebecca slid Lucy’s bottle of vodka over to her and gave her a grin. “Chin up, ICE queen. You’ll get your doohickey someday.”

  Lucy chuckled. “Yeah, yeah.”

  “What—don’t tell me you’re already missing D!”

  “Really, Luce?” Kiwi asked. “You’re down bad.”

  “That’s what I said!” Rebecca laughed.

  “It’s not like that,” Lucy frowned.

  “On that note,” Kiwi said, getting up. “I’m headed out. Relationship talk ain’t my style.”

  “See ya around, old hag!” Rebecca waved at her as she left their booth.

  “See ya,” Lucy said.

  “So what’s up, Luce? Trouble in paradise?”

  Lucy rolled her eyes.

  “Or maybe,” Rebecca leered at her. “You’re looking to spice things up for your one-week anniversary tomorrow.” Lucy blinked, askance by the deduction—the fact that she was even thinking about the bullshit anniversary, not the threesome she was obviously pitching.

  “Don’t even fucking go there,” Lucy said dryly. “You’re not invited.”

  “Hah! Getting a little territorial there, huh? Don’t worry, I ain’t fucking crazy enough to piss you off—I’ll leave that for my big bro. Still, I gotta ask, given he’s surrounded by hot corpo coeds every weekday, how do you cope?”

  Lucy snorted. “By knowing none of it means shit to him. They’re just players in a game.”

  Rebecca immediately slammed the table with both hands, pulling herself closer to Lucy. “Did I just hear you right? Players in a game? You’re telling me he’s fucking around or something? If you don’t spill that tea, I will flatline you.”

  Lucy rolled her eyes. “It’s simple: he wants to make it. And now, because of this work, he’s got the skills and the scratch to haul himself up ‘Saka tower with his own two hands. But if you don’t make connections, you’re shit outta luck.”

  “Is that what they call it these days? Making connections?” Rebecca chortled. “I really didn’t expect that from you, Lucy. Or from him. You’re a bigger freak than I thought!”

  ‘Freak’ was a misnomer, in Lucy’s opinion. The thing she had was much simpler: it was trust. And knowledge.

  She pulled up the file she had on Mei Jing Fei—photos from social media, a basic sketch of her school and med records, all the stuff that was on Tanaka’s household network.

  She was pretty, and had a face that made you automatically assume that she was kindhearted. But it wasn’t just in the visual features, but how her face moved, that convinced you that she was more earnest than most girls in her tax bracket.

  David couldn’t have picked a better mark if he had tried.

  “It’s a shame he thinks he might be cheating on me,” Lucy sighed. Rebecca gaped at her. “He adopted a pretty little kitty, actually—a megacorp heiress no less. Preem meat, no question. I only wish he was more honest with himself.”

  “Lucy, what the fuck are you talking about?”

  “David’s a good guy, but… he’s not that good,” Lucy said. “And that’s totally fine. He wants something really bad, and he wants to justify his choices to himself. Tell himself he’s making real bonds with these people. That this little pet of his is more than just a pet. I’m not gonna weigh in on that little internal debate of his—he’ll come to his senses soon enough.”

  “Ahhh, okay, you’re just being fucking crazy—got it.” Rebecca sat down on her chair again and wore a bemused grin. “So just to get this straight—your man’s got a corpo girlie he thinks he’s cheating on you with—did he not tell you about her?”

  “He did. Gave me the lowdown a while ago—told me he picked her up to spite Tanaka’s son. They were engaged apparently.”

  “Lucy, I’m too fucking sober for this, hand me the bottle.”

  Lucy snorted. She handed Rebecca the bottle back. Rebecca took a drink, let out pant from the bite of the alcohol, and put the bottle down. “So he thinks he’s cheating on you, by… taking the relationship more seriously than he should. But really, he’s lying to himself, in some sort of twisted deep-cover way? That’s what you think?”

  “I know he cares way more about fulfilling his dream than pleasing some corpo girl,” Lucy said. “So he’ll end up having to make a choice whether to prioritize her or that dream. Whether to use her or treat her fairly. And he won’t pass up on that opportunity. He ain’t built like that.”

  “And you’re different… why?”

  Lucy was glad that she asked, actually. “There’s a logic to it, actually—I’m a suboptimal choice, if he’s optimizing for reaching his goals. Yet, he chose me. That tells me that his feelings towards me are honest. The corpo pet on the other hand is an optimal choice. Her utility in fulfilling his goals are high. Therefore, try as he might, he can’t disentangle his feelings for her with his determination to reach his goals. Since that’s a pretty ancient story at this point, everyone with eyes will know how that ends. Once she outlives her usefulness,” Lucy shrugged, not needing to say anything more.

  There was never any accounting for the fears that she might experience every now and then: The quiet moments where the whispers of insecurity spoke the loudest, where her rationality and trust would momentarily get overpowered by that core of self-loathing that always seemed to accompany her throughout her life.

  Those feelings did have their place—they made her Netrun better, dedicate her whole mind better to whatever task she had on hand, all to escape those feelings.

  It was an efficient system.

  “I just gotta let this sink in for a sec,” Becca said. “Christ almighty. So—the hell is the end-game of this gonna be? You joining his bigshot corpo harem once he makes it big?”

  Lucy fished out a pack of cigarettes from her pocket, took one and lit it up. She took a deep drag and then shrugged. She didn’t examine the question any further. The premise was flawed. Everything about that was wrong.

  This isn’t how I end up.

  “Taking things as they come, I guess. No point worrying for the future, when right now’s good enough for me.”

  But if David ever needed help being kept on track, she wouldn’t hesitate to lend a helping hand here and now. This dream was important to him. Ergo, it was important to her as well. He didn’t deserve to have his emotions lead him astray.

  Not if he wanted to make good on his promise to burn it all down once he was at the top.

  “By the way, I’ll actually flatline you if you spread any of this around.”

  “Yeah, I figured.”

  “I’m not fucking around, Rebecca—I will just kill you.”

  “Figured.”

  https://discord.gg/W5BqBBym28