Chapter 32: New Faces I (Patreon)

The N54 News broadcast resounded throughout the third-floor common area when Santi walked out of the shower, a towel around his waist and his hair dripping with water.

"...Colonel Kurt Hansen, commanding officer of Militech's 3rd Expeditionary Brigade, has emerged as the most operationally effective field commander in the western theater since the conclusion of the Battle of Ridgecrest. Hansen's forces, designated Task Force Ironclad by NUSA High Command, have advanced one hundred and forty-seven miles northwest from the Ridgecrest forward operating base in the eight weeks since the battle's conclusion, establishing a chain of fortified supply depots along the Highway 14 corridor and systematically reducing Free State defensive positions in the southern Sierra Nevada foothills.

"Defense analysts on the WNS network have described Hansen's operational tempo as 'relentless,' citing his brigade's twenty-two-hour daily operational cycle and his documented willingness to bypass hardened defensive emplacements in favor of rapid encirclement and siege tactics that deny the defenders resupply rather than engaging them directly..."

Santi toweled his hair and looked at the screen from which the anchor's voice came, carrying a smoothness that could make anyone feel like they were at a boardroom presentation. The man spoke Hansen's name with a reverent familiarity that corpo media only reserved for generals who were good for ratings, which meant Hansen was either genuinely dangerous or extremely photogenic. But based on the satellite footage cycling beneath the news ticker, showing column after column of Militech armor rolling through the desert in a haze of dust, it was probably both.

Santi killed the broadcast with a blink command and pulled a clean black t-shirt over his head, then put on dark cargo pants and a pair of new tan combat boots. He left the tactical gear in his room, not taking a holster or anything to help him disguise himself, since just waltzing around with an Overture would be a headache if a NCPD Cuntfficer tried to stop him.

The past two months had been rather productive for Santi. Since the gig with Padre in July, Santi had thrown himself back into netrunning to help sustain the three-story building's operational costs, any other living expenses, and his eventual goal of having the Mustang resurrected from the dead.

He had pulled fourteen solo gigs across Watson, Westbrook, and Japantown, mostly filled with data extractions and corpo subnet breaches, which he ensured to leave no trace whatsoever. 5 of the jobs had come through Regina Jones, who, thanks to their interaction to sell the goods he'd taken and his honesty in paying her a fair share, had decided to throw Sasha's choom a couple of bones to chew.

He'd also gotten another 3 through Padre, and another 2 through Wakako Okada, who had apparently changed her mind about working with him since the last time he had shown up at her parlor. The rest of the jobs were taken through three independent clients who had found his handle on the runner boards and had liked what they read.

The cumulative payout from the fourteen gigs sat at just over one hundred and thirty thousand eddies, all of which he took the precaution of routing through his Aiden Protocol and further diluted them by opening 3 new bank accounts in Sweeden, the Switzerland, and France, as well as a crypto reserve that existed on a banking satellite whose orbital inclination placed it outside the jurisdiction of every nation-state on the planet. Santi had been tempted to put all his money in a single account, but decided against it because you should never put all your eggs in a single basket.

Combined with the fifty from Padre's commission and the remaining balance from the house sale, his total liquid assets amounted to two hundred and ninety thousand eddies. It was the most money he had ever held at one time since the building purchase had zeroed him out, but he still needed more. Sure, that amount of scratch could get him some nova chrome. But what good was it if he couldn't install any of it yet?

And as the underlying rule of Night City, that amount would never be enough.

His Agent had pinged twice while he was showering. The first was a system update notification from the building's security subnet, which he dismissed, and the second was a message from Regina Jones requesting a callback at his earliest convenience regarding a data extraction opportunity targeting NCPD internal affairs records with no hard deadline and an estimated payout of thirty-two thousand eddies, potentially higher depending on the depth of the pull.

Santi read the message and tagged it for follow-up under next week's operational queue. The NCPD gig was good money and clean work that he could most likely pull from the safety of his own server room without ever having to leave the building. But today was a chill day, and he'd already made plans to hang out with Sasha... well, more like she had made plans to hang out with him.

He walked out of the bedroom into the hallway and came across Julia at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and reading something on a tablet she had bought two weeks ago. She looked up as Santi passed, noticing what he wore, his posture, and the absence of his iron from his right thigh.

"No gun?" she asked.

"I always carry a loaded one," Santi said while bringing his index finger to his head. "Plus, I'm taking the day off."

"From the gun or from everything?" Julia asked.

"Both," Santi replied. "I'll be hanging out with Sasha."

Julia's expression shifted toward a smile she was visibly suppressing. She returned her attention to the tablet with an exaggerated casualness.

"Have fun, mijo," she said.

"It's not like that, Ma," Santi sighed.

Julia raised her brows as she brought a hand to her chest in mock shock. "I didn't say anything."

"You were thinking it," Santi said, as his right eye decided it was the perfect time to twitch.

"A mother is allowed to think," Julia said, turning her attention back to her tablet. "Tell Sasha I said hello."

Santi rolled his eyes and made his way out of the building into the September morning that was more than tolerable. The smog layer that haunted the city for the previous week had almost completely disappeared, and the sun was cutting through the industrial haze of Northside with warm clarity.

He walked towards the data term and took a cab to Kabuki.

Santi and Sasha met at a ramen stand on the corner of Sagan Avenue and Holly Street at ten in the morning. It was a narrow, open-fronted stall that served boiling synthetic tonkotsu in disposable bowls to whoever needed the calories more than the authenticity.

Sasha was already there when he arrived, sitting on one of the three wobbly metal stools with her legs crossed and a half-finished bowl in front of her. Her dark hair fell in a loose curtain around her face, her pink-and-blue eyes scanning the morning foot traffic of Kabuki with a constant alertness. She was wearing a dark, fitted jacket over a grey shirt and plain boots.

She looked up as Santi approached, and an instinctive flash of warmth flashed on her face before being replaced by a carefully constructed expression of casual, platonic friendliness.

"Hey, you," she said.

"Hey, yourself," Santi said, dropping onto the stool beside her and ordering some ramen for himself.

"You look taller," Sasha said.

"I'm the same height I was three weeks ago," Santi said.

"Okay," Sasha said, tilting her head, "but you look taller."

"It might be the boots," Santi said, stretching one leg. "They're new."

"Hmm, maybe," Sasha said. "But I don't think it's the boots."

Once they finished their meals, they left the ramen stand and began to walk. After hanging out with Sasha over the past months, Santi had come to learn that spending a day with Sasha was never planned.

They would set a rough meeting point and a rough time, and then they would just walk, letting the city carry them from one block to the next, through the crowded markets and the narrow side streets and the elevated walkways that connected the residential towers of Kabuki, talking about whatever was sitting at the top of both of their heads, which, today, was the war.

"Hansen's going to hit the Central Valley inside of two months," Santi said as they crossed the Watson Bridge on foot. It vibrated beneath them with the constant rumble of traffic. "I doubt that he will follow the standard Militech advance-and-consolidate pattern since he's been doing something different altogether. He's bypassing the defensive positions and cutting supply lines instead of punching through them, which means the Free State militia forces in the Sierra passes are going to starve before they get a chance to fight."

"I mean, it's the smart play," Sasha said, her eyes drifting toward the skyline.

"It's more than smart," Santi said. "It means the passes don't matter when everyone's been talking about the passes like they're some kind of natural fortress. The fucker just doesn't care about the passes since he's aiming for Highway 99 and the rail corridor through Bakersfield. If he takes those, then he can control the agricultural supply chain for the entire western seaboard, and Night City's food imports would drop by forty percent overnight, forcing us to join the war."

Sasha glanced at him, her eyes catching the mid-morning light in a way that made them look almost iridescent. "You think about this a lot."

"Well, somebody has to," Santi said while scratching the back of his head.

They walked through the Kabuki roundabout, weaving between food vendors, secondhand chrome dealers, and a man selling counterfeit Arasaka jackets from a folding table. If it had been before the war, wearing an Arasaka jacket would've gotten you shot in the open market. But with the way the NUSA was moving, and the slow understanding of who was funding the free states' defense, it had become a fashion statement for teens who thought rebellion came with a brand.

They cut through Jig-Jig Street without lingering, passed through the commercial corridor behind the Kabuki Market's main drag, and stopped at a coffee vendor that Sasha swore served the best iced synthi-caf in Watson, which turned out to be a reasonable claim, since it was the first iced coffee Santi had ever consumed.

They sat on a bench overlooking the harbor, watching a cargo hauler crawl across the bay toward the Northside docks, and Sasha told him about a subnet breach she had pulled the previous week against a mid-tier Biotechnica subsidiary that had been running unlicensed human trials of a neural-stabilization compound at its Rancho facility.

The data had been sent to an independent journalist who had published the findings on a darknet clearinghouse, and the facility had been shut down within forty-eight hours by an NCPD task force that had received the information through channels that could not be traced to any individual netrunner.

They walked some more, and talked about the Net, about a new ICE architecture that Militech had deployed across their western subnet infrastructure that was reportedly burning through netrunner rigs at an unprecedented rate, and about whether synthetic tonkotsu would ever taste like the real thing, which Sasha insisted it would not, based on a childhood memory of actual pork broth that Santi wasn't sure she had invented or not.

Between their sentences, Sasha's shoulder would brush against his arm, and Santi's hand would find the back of his own neck every time she looked up at him with those impossible eyes. It was very clear that the two felt something for each other, and it had only grown the more they hung out and chatted. But neither ever took the step to confess their feelings for the other. Santi never did so because he lived with the thought that the war was getting closer by the day, and Sasha never made a move because she had long since come to terms with the fact that there were no happy endings in Night City, and her superstitions drove her to think of the worst.

So they walked together. Sometimes talking, sometimes in silence. But it was peaceful, bringing a sense of calm and security to the two of them that neither could put into words.

---

The Edge Net occupied a ground-floor storefront on the eastern edge of the Kabuki Market, sandwiched between a braindance editing suite and a ripperdoc clinic that advertised discount Kiroshi installations on a flickering neon sign. The storefront was narrow and packed from floor to ceiling with netrunning hardware, custom ICE packages, daemon compilers, and cyberdeck peripherals that you could not find on the open market without either knowing the right people or being the right people.

The interior was dimly lit by strips of cool blue LEDs running along the ceiling and the ambient glow of dozens of display screens showing real-time Net traffic visualizations, ICE integrity monitors, and what appeared to be a rotating catalog of custom quickhack suites organized by function and threat level.

A woman stood behind the main counter at the shop's entrance, adjusting the leads on a disassembled cyberdeck with a pair of precision tweezers and a magnifying loupe clipped to a headband above her right eye. She was in her mid-thirties, short, and of Japanese descent. Her hair was dark and pulled back in a functional knot, and her hands moved with the steady precision of a watchmaker.

"Yoko," Sasha called out as they entered, her voice carrying a warm familiarity.

The woman looked up from the deck, her eyes flicking from Sasha to Santi and back with a quick assessment. Her gaze lingered on Santi's eyes, and she scanned him, but she ran into a garbled mix of words that made it impossible to determine his identity from a simple scan. She raised an eyebrow before moving on without comment.

"Sasha," she said, setting the tweezers down and pushing the loupe up to her forehead. "Thought you were taking a day off."

"I am," Sasha said. "But I wanted to introduce you to someone. This is Santi, a choom of mine. We met in the Net a few years back."

She gestured toward Santi, who was standing two steps behind her and taking up what felt like an unreasonable amount of the shop's narrow floor space.

"Nice to meet you," Santi said, nodding to Yoko.

"Santi," Yoko repeated, raising a brow. "Welcome to the Edge Net. You an edgerunner or a netrunner?"

"A bit of both," Santi said. "But I lean more to the netrunning side of things."

"Good. Then let me give you the rundown." She leaned against the counter with her arms folded. "This shop exists for people who prefer face-to-face biz, and for those who want a vendor they can trust. Everything I sell is tested, verified, and clean. I don't do corp-flagged firmware, recycled ICE with expired authentication certificates, or secondhand daemon packages that have been cracked and repackaged by some Westbrook script-kiddie who's going to sell your entry signature to the highest bidder the moment you jack out."

She gestured at the rows of hardware lining the walls. "I've got some custom decks, peripheral modules, ICE suites, quickhack compilers, Net architecture consulting, and diagnostic services for rigs that have taken damage. If I don't have it in stock, I can source it within a week. If I can't source it within a week, it doesn't exist, and whoever told you it did is either lying or trying to sell you something that will burn your frontal cortex."

"Nova," Santi said, and he meant it. The shop was clean, organized, and stocked with hardware that his Kiroshis were tagging as mid- to high-tier on every visible shelf. A place like this was run by someone who clearly knew what they were doing, and it was worth more than its inventory.

Sasha leaned against the counter beside Yoko, her shoulder almost touching the vendor's, and her expression carried the satisfaction of someone presenting a trusted resource to a trusted person and waiting for the two to connect.

"The reason I wanted to bring him along," Sasha said, "is because he's a wiz in the Net. Genuinely. And I figured that since you prefer face-to-face for biz, it might be helpful for you to know someone who could take a second look at things if you ever need an extra pair of eyes on a piece of hardware or a fresh perspective on an ICE architecture. He's the best I've ever worked with."

"Really?" Yoko raised an eyebrow and looked at Santi again, this time with a slightly different quality to the evaluation. "I've never heard Sasha hand out endorsements."

"She's just being generous," Santi said.

"No, I'm not," Sasha said with a firmness that surprised him. "You've long surpassed me, so quit being modest when I'm vouching for you."

"I'll keep it in mind," Yoko smiled, her expression carrying an understated seal of approval. "It's nice of Sasha to bring her input around."

Something about the way Yoko said "her input" made the air shift among all three of them, and Santi watched as a visible flush climbed Sasha's neck and settled across her cheekbones.

"We're not... It's not like that," Sasha said quickly. "We're just chooms."

"Sure," Yoko said, her smile remaining unchanged.

"You..." Sasha said. "You're implying things."

"I said 'her input,'" Yoko said. "I don't know what you heard, but that's not an implication."

Santi looked up at the ceiling. The ceiling suddenly became a very interesting ceiling. It had LED strips and ventilation ducts, and absolutely nothing to do with the conversation that was currently making his ears warm.

They stayed at the Edge Net for another twenty minutes, browsing the inventory, discussing a new daemon compiler package that Yoko had sourced from a Japantown developer, and establishing the baseline of a vendor-client relationship that Santi suspected would prove useful in the future.

Yoko gave him her contact, told him the shop hours, and said that if he ever needed diagnostic work on his Paraline, she could accommodate the hardware despite it being Militech and despite the fact that Militech hardware was generally a pain in the ass to service without corpo diagnostic tools.

They left the Edge Net at just past three in the afternoon, stepping back into the noise of the Kabuki Market.

"Thank you," Santi said. "For the intro."

Sasha shrugged, the flush having receded, but the residual self-consciousness lingered as she was deliberately avoiding eye contact. "She's good people. And you need a vendor who isn't going to sell your rig specs to a fixer the moment you walk out the door."

They stood at the intersection of Sagan and Cartwright for a moment, the pedestrian traffic splitting around them like water around a rock, and the unspoken thing that lived in the pauses between their sentences pressed gently against the air between them and was, once again, not acknowledged.

"I should head back," Santi said.

"Yeah," Sasha agreed. "I've got a subnet crawl queued up for tonight. Client wants a clean pull on a Kang Tao logistics manifest before Friday."

"Be careful, and stay safe," Santi said.

"Always am," Sasha said.

"Yeah, right," he scoffed.

"That's fair," she admitted, and smiled at him with unguarded warmth.

She turned and walked into the crowd, and Santi watched her go, his eyes subcounsously drifting down to her hips.

"Hate to see you go," he muttered to himself. "But I love to see you leave."

His eyes trailed back up to her hair and followed her until she disappeared into the flow of bodies moving through the Kabuki Market's arterial corridor.

Then he turned and started walking. The Kabuki Market was only a few blocks from the building, and as he cut through the residential stretch of Northside separating the market district from the industrial zone where his warehouse sat, his Agent pinged.

Incoming call: El Capitan.

Santi stopped walking. He had not spoken to El Capitan in over half a year, and the Petrochem corpo's name appearing on his incoming call list was surprising to say the least.

He accepted the call.

"Ghost?" El Capitan's voice came through energetically. "That you?"

"No, this is a Buck-A-Slice," Santi said flatly.

There was a moment of silence on the other end, followed by a muttered "Shit" and then an embarrassed inhale. "Aw, sorry about that. Damn, wrong number, let me just..."

"I'm messing with you," Santi said.

The silence held for another half-second before El Capitan let out a barking laugh. "You son of a... Okay, okay. Haha, funny, real funny."

"What can I do for you, Cap?" Santi asked, resuming his walk. "It's not every day you get a call out of the blue from a vendor you had a single transaction with."

"Yeah, about that. I got a question for you, Ghost, and I need you to answer me honestly." El Capitan paused, and Santi could hear the man adjusting something on his end. "Are you in the market for a way to manufacture your own engine block?"

Santi stopped walking again, as, for the first time in months, his attention narrowed to a single point.

"I'm listening," he said.

"I knew you would be," El Capitan said, his voice shifting from casual to business mode with ease. "Okay, so here's the deal. I've got my hands on a package of used equipment, all of it operational and ready to install. I got an engine CNC machine, a gear cutter, a glass press, a scrap-fab equipment maker, and a furnace with welders. The CNC alone is worth the call, but together? Together, you're looking at a full-scale fabrication setup. You could build an engine block from raw stock, machine your own transmission gears, press your own windshield glass, fab your own body panels, and weld your own chassis reinforcements from scratch."

Santi's mind was already running the calculations, mapping the equipment list against the Mustang's rebuild requirements.

The CNC machine alone would let him manufacture a new engine block from raw metal, to his own specifications, with tolerances that no aftermarket supplier in Night City could match. The gear cutter would handle the transmission and differential components. The glass press could produce a reinforced windshield and window panels to whatever specs he wanted. The scrap-fab unit would let him fabricate body panels, brackets, mounting hardware, and structural reinforcements. And the furnace and welders would give him the thermal processing capability to heat-treat, temper, and join every component he produced.

It was, in literal terms, a door to doing the entire build himself. Every bolt, every gasket, every bearing surface, every piece of the car that was currently nothing more than a rusted shell sitting on his ground floor. The full automotive resurrection would be executed by his own hands, on his own equipment, in his own building.

"How much?" Santi asked.

"The CNC runs one-fifty," El Capitan said. "Gear cutter, eighty. Glass press, eighty. Scrap-fab, fifty. Furnace and welders, forty-five. That's four-oh-five if you're buying à la carte."

Santi did the math in the time it took El Capitan to finish the sentence. It would cost him a little over one hundred grand more than his current balance.

"But," El Capitan continued, pausing theatrically, "if you're buying the full package, bulk rate, one transaction, I'll do the whole thing for three-fiddy flat."

The equipment would've cost him millions if it were brand spanking new, which was why he had never considered doing the job himself. But with a price tag of just three-fifty for what was supposed to be four hundred and five, the deal sounded more like a bargain, which raised questions about its quality.

"You said it was used," Santi said. "But how used. Like, am I just throwing eddies into a fire, or is it worth it?"

"C'mon choom," El Capitan said with an audible smile. "You know I only sell preem stuff. I would never scam anyone out of their hard-earned eddies. They're in great condition, the only thing is that these machines were discontinued almost twenty years ago. So they're just old and don't really serve any purpose."

"Uh-huh," Santi said. "I'll take your word for it, but I still want some images confirming their quality."

"I'll send those over in a bit," El Capitan said.

"I've got two-ninety liquid," Santi said, because there was no point in pretending otherwise.

"Two-ninety won't cover it," El Capitan said. "And before you ask, no, I don't do installments. This is used industrial equipment from a decommissioned Petrochem fabrication facility that was dismantled under an asset liquidation order. It's clean, and it's sitting in a warehouse that I'm paying rent on every day it stays there."

"How long can you hold it?" Santi asked.

"A month," El Capitan said. "After that, I've got two other buyers I've thought of lined up, both of whom are less charming than you and both of whom have deeper pockets. I'm only extending this olive branch to you because you have something that I would love to see tear down the streets one day. And also get a ride in it too."

Santi was sixty thousand eddies short and had thirty days to close the gap. Regina's NCPD gig was sitting in his queue at thirty-two thousand, which would bring his total to three-twenty-two and leave him needing roughly twenty-eight thousand more, a manageable amount at his current operational tempo and the expanding pool of fixers who had started sending work his way.

But the real question was whether the machines were worth more than the money they cost.

If he bought them, he would have the equipment to rebuild the Mustang entirely from raw materials, on his own terms, in his own shop, to specifications that would fit his imagination. He would also have a permanent fabrication capability that extended far beyond a single car, allowing him to modify weapons and cyberware and, maybe even, expand his line of business to custom vehicle components for clients.

The machines would pay for themselves pretty quickly if he used them for commercial work, and they would give him a capability that almost no solo in Night City possessed. And more than all of that, more than the ROI projections and the operational utility and the long-term asset value, they would let him build the car with his own hands.

That was the itch. The unscratchable, bone-level itch that had been sitting in his chest since the day he had found the Mustang. This car was his, and it would be built by nobody else.

"Hold it for me," Santi said.

"Holding requires a deposit," El Capitan said. "No such thing as a free meal."

"How much?" Santi asked.

"Slide me ten K," El Capitan said.

Santi did not hesitate and routed the transfer of ten thousand eddies to the anonymous bearer address that El Capitan had transmitted alongside the request.

Transfer authenticated: 10,000 eddies. Destination: Anonymous bearer instrument. Remaining balance: 280,000 eddies.

On the other end of the line, El Capitan received the confirmation, and Santi heard the man let out a self-directed curse. "Fucking gonk. I should've asked for fifteen."

"I told you to work on your prices last time we talked," Santi said. "And keep your word."

"Yeah, yeah. You've got a month," El Capitan said as the playful regret vanished from his voice. "If I don't receive the remaining three-forty thirty days from today, I'll be moving to another buyer."

"You'll hear from me," Santi said and ended the call.