“So, whatcha got that’s so important ya had to drag me all the way out here to talk?”

  Mela lounged in one of my chairs, her feet up on my desk. Taking a piece of perfectly crunchy cannoli filled with ice cream and chocolate bits, she dipped it into a small plastic container of sweet cream.

  The combo had cost me thirty credits. Thirty. Credits. And I had to venture almost to the middle districts checkpoint to find a shop that carried it. I at least got a nice crepe for myself that cost a much more reasonable two credits. Sure, the ‘strawberries’ and ‘chocolate’ inside of it tasted a bit like cardboard, but with the volume I got them in, I could mostly ignore the icky undertones and enjoy the sweetness.

  Mela’s own meal wasn’t exactly authentic, but the reviews all claimed the ingredients tasted almost like the real thing. Mela clearly agreed. After one bite, she’d declared that she would ‘do whatever the fuck I wanted her to’ in exchange. That was a relief, at least until she added ‘well, if you wait a couple more years and fill out more.’ Then I was busy blushing and glaring.

  Still, she was apparently satisfied enough with her bribe to talk terms. But I couldn’t. I just wasn’t sure how best to approach the topic.

  Mela seemed to understand that, too. She actually put the cannoli pack down for a second, instead of hugging it to her chest like she would obliterate anyone who made a move for it.

  “Listen, kid. I know I bust yer ass, but ya can trust me when it counts, kay? No matter what ya did. Sure, getting some random girl pregnant’s gonna be rough for a little while on ya both, but Garren’s not gonna care too much, and I’ll help.”

  “Wha — why would — I didn’t — I haven’t gotten anyone pregnant!” I shouted, face already crimson.

  The languid smirk she gave me as she popped another cannoli into her mouth made me want to punch her so bad. Might even have tried it, if I didn’t know she’d just kick my ass right back.

  “Ready to talk now? Just gotta get your blood pressure up to get yer mouth moving.”

  I groaned and collapsed back into my chair. A chair that she’d gotten for me. Yet there I was, still hiding the truth from her, because a part of me was terrified I’d get locked inside some stuffy room and forced to keep Mort company.

  Or, you know, that I’d get myself killed.

  “So… I did a thing.”

  “A stupid thing.”

  “I saved your life. We’re friends. Yes, obviously it was stupid.”

  She gave a snort of both offense and amusement, but she waved her cannoli at me to get on with it.

  “I talked to my boss a while back,” I said. “Great guy. Gets all sorts of stuff into the shop. So, I figured, if anyone knows about black markets and other places to get rare stuff, it’d be him. And I was right.”

  Her eyes narrowed, but she wasn’t angry. Not yet. “And whatcha have him buy for you?”

  “Oh, didn’t do that. I went and bought the stuff myself.” I knew from her stormy expression I was about to get my ass handed to me, so I preempted that by pulling the shard sets from their hiding place. “Here. Check ‘em out.”

  She took the cases with a furrowed brow. “Ya do know I’m not one of those tech whisperers people like to lie about being real, right? Whatcha got on this?”

  “Netrunning lessons. One set’s from a corpo, the other’s from an experienced runner who took on an apprentice.”

  Mela fumbled and almost dropped the cases. “The fuck?! How the hell did ya — How much did this even cost!?”

  “The guy asked for seven thousand first,” I teased, feeling a tiny bit smug that I could actually elicit a reaction from her. “Got a pretty good deal though, because a girl owed Catill and the vendor owed her. It was a whole thing.”

  I waved my hand, like it was nothing. I was a big boy doing big boy deals.

  Totally not worried my first real friend was either going to shoot me for the shards or bring me in to be the gang’s new pet runner. No sir.

  “That’s still —!” Mela took a deep breath and gently put both cases down on the desk. Then she bopped me on the head, hard. “Of all the reckless shit. I swear, I should break yer legs to get ya to stop being an idiot.”

  “I think my boss would agree with you, actually.”

  I made a big show of rubbing my head, but I was slowly calming down. This was still Mela. She wasn’t freaking out. There were no sudden glitches in my eyesight to warn me of her lunging forward to incapacitate me.

  She just sighed forlornly and picked up her cannoli again, scooping an extra-large bite of the sweet cream as if to take revenge on me for the shock.

  “Okay. So, ya were probably a fucking idiot and yer lucky ya didn’t get shot, robbed, stabbed to death, or all of the above. Whatcha want with little old me? I ain’t got fancy runner training, that’s for sure. Guess I could chat with Mort about it, but… Listen, he might try to have ya shanked, okay kid? Stay away from Mort.”

  I just blinked at her. All my previous fears seemed so utterly pathetic and shameful that I couldn’t even luxuriate in the warmth blossoming inside of my chest.

  “What’s his story, anyway?” I managed, after clearing my throat to get rid of whatever had suddenly gotten stuck there. “I barely see him around. When he does venture out of his room, he’s always an ass.”

  “Ugh. Don’t ask. Let’s say Mort’s not exactly, eh, an upstanding citizen. And that’s coming from me. I keep telling Garren to just shoot him and be done with it, but I guess Mort’s too useful to do that.”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “Huh. He must really be good if Garren’s keeping him on in spite of all your complaints.” I knew Garren, and I knew Mela. She was a force of nature. What Mela wanted, Mela usually got.

  Her eyes suddenly lit up, and she leaned towards me with a sly grin. “Please tell me yer good. Please tell me ya can actually do the running stuff? How long ya been learning? Cause I’ll fucking sponsor the shit outta ya if ya can take over and I get ta slit dat bastard’s throat.”

  She was purring by the end of that little speech, her accent going wild. Clearly, she was deep in the land of imagination where she got to watch Mort suffer a painful and gruesome end.

  “Um… well... you see, that’s kind of the reason I called you here. Not the Mort-murder thing. It’s just, I’ve gone over a ton of the theory stuff, but if I want to keep learning and get better at this point, I’ll need to actually do, you know? And, well…” I waved around at my apartment, where everything I owned was on clear display. “I don’t have a deck. I’m about as useful at hacking as those shards are on their own.”

  Mela slumped. “I guess no knifing the asshole yet, then,” she muttered. Then she perked up. “Oh! But if ya just need a deck…”

  I nodded. “Yep. I can learn, and get better, and then you get to stabby-stab Mort if you really want to. I’m not asking for charity, either. I don’t have a ton of credits, sure, but you guys have been feeding me, and I don’t have a lot of other expenses. Even after my shard shopping trip, I’ve saved up about two thousand creds by now. But again… well, I don’t know where to spend them.”

  “Yeah. Not a lot of runner gear sellers out here.” Mela rubbed her chin. That’s how she found out her messy eating had left a bit of chocolate behind there, which devolved into a brief distraction as she tried to get the mess into her mouth.

  I resisted the urge to bury my face in my hands. This was my knight in shining exo-armor, who had dedicated her life to making sure I could keep mine. If someone tossed sweets her way in the middle of a battle, my ass was toast.

  Once she’d mostly taken care of the chocolate problem, I pulled out a bunch of credits and thrust them into her hands. “Any ideas? Here’s the creds. I trust you, so if you can somehow link up with a seller… Well, just go ahead. The only lead I’ve got is a seller in the middle districts operating out of a black market. Name’s Jelly, can share the deets if you need ‘em.”

  “Same one ya got the shards from?”

  “Yep. Just need to be careful about the quality of the gear. Apparently, he sometimes sells stuff that doesn’t work. That’s how he got into a mess with the woman who owed Catill, and how I got my discount.”

  “Hmmm… Well, I’ll see what I can do.” She grinned as she patted my head. “Don’t worry your ugly little head, kiddo.”

  “Oi!” I scowled. Sure, I was still petite. Sure, I looked kind of cute rather than intimidating or mature or attractive or whatever. But I had filled out a little over the past two months, dammit.

  My friend just laughed and took the rest of her sweets with her to go, along with my 2100 creds.

  “I’ll get on that now. Oh, and in the future? Do bribe me again. Woulda done ya a favor without this stuff, but I ain’t gonna say so.”

  With that cheeky comment, Mela was gone.

  And, four days later, I had my cyberdeck.

  Sure, it cost me almost my full budget. I only got 200 credits back. But it was one of the early briefcase models, and therefore, mobile!

  Garren did subtly pull me away from the regular HQ crowd the day after my chat with Mela. Very politely, he asked me to tell him the second I thought I could replace Mort, no matter how much of a longshot it was.

  Apparently, Garren was willing to take a hit to the efficiency of Kitten operations and the security Mort could offer if it meant he could be through with the runner. Or maybe Garren would keep Mort stuck in some underground cell and offload some relatively risk-free tasks to him. I didn’t know, and I didn’t ask.

  When I asked what exactly Mort had done to piss everyone off so much, the only answer I got was a grim silence and a haunted look in Garren’s eyes.

  I was already kind of terrified of all the things the runner could do to me if he got into my eyes. I decided right then, though, that I wasn’t going to drop my guard around Mort. Ever.

  Still, the Kittens seemed to have him on a decent leash, whatever that meant. That had to be good enough for me.

  —

  At the first opportunity, I hooked up the deck to my apartment’s power supply. I double-checked that the interface plugs worked properly, which was a trippy thing to do with my eyes’ scanning function. Then, at long last, I connected myself to the thing.

  It was kind of awkward. Typically, a runner would have a specialized chair to stop all the wires from getting in the way. I made do with my bed. It wasn’t the most comfortable solution, but it would work.

  Finally, I inserted one of the advanced shards into my port, ran another equipment check, and… panicked.

  The deck was warning me that I needed specialized runner goggles, so the ‘full immersion experience’ wouldn’t melt my brain. Where was I gonna get those?

  Then my eyes pinged me with a notification, asking if I wanted to link them up to the deck. As soon as I hit yes, the warning about the goggles went away.

  I let out a long breath of relief at that. Then I stared at the final notification hovering in my vision, courtesy of the shard.

  Obviously, I hit yes.

  My mind was catapulted into a whole new reality.

  I stared in awe as an entire world was built around me. Towers of data rose up into the skies, solidifying into buildings, streets, and even pedestrians.

  In no time at all, the environment around me looked as real as anything I might encounter in the waking world, and I was free to move in it.

  Notification and text windows popped up in my view immediately, trying to explain how I should handle myself, how to ‘move’ around and interact with the world, and everything else a beginner runner ought to know on his or her first venture beyond the physical.

  I ignored them.

  A feeling that I couldn’t shake was rising inside of me. A sense of belonging, and craving, and a conviction that I was finally where I was meant to be.

  My vision briefly glitched. Code scrolled all around me, roughly in the shape of the newly-created world, and I just… understood.

  I ‘took’ a step, then another, and then I was weaving around the simulated people and walking past buildings with the same ease I’d have using my own feet. The world still flashed into glitches occasionally, but it didn’t get in my way. If anything, those glitches were guiding me.

  I squinted at the building next to me as it glitched into code and back. There was a weakness in the wall, there. So I… stepped through. Right past the wall, and into the uninspired office beyond it.

  I felt myself smiling. The world around me glitched again, for a bit longer this time, but I ignored it. I ignored all the grinning faces watching me from within the code.

  It was time to focus in on the lessons.

  I dismissed the navigation modules immediately. I didn’t want to learn how to explore the digital world around me. I wanted to manipulate it.

  But even those lessons felt slow. They were trying to teach me how to ‘see’ beyond the simulated wall and interact with the code itself. How to interfere with it. About access points and data streams and all that stuff. In that moment, driven by my heady mood, it just sounded so… boring.

  I eyed the glitching wall of code next to me. A second later, I stuck my hand inside of it. The coding clung to my hand, eager for me to exert my will and tell it how to change. With a massive smile on my face, I prepared to do just that.

  Then a black, twig-like hand shot out from the wall of code and latched onto my forearm. The world glitched worse than I’d ever seen before.

  A shadowy form loomed over me, digging its way out of the wall. My eyes rose to meet the glowing red orbs of a grinning silhouette. It unhinged its jaws and spoke, its words digging into my ears like knives.

  I screamed.