Chapter 40: A Gig From Dino Dinovic II (Patreon)

"Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak."

- Rachel Zoe

---

I'd say that getting inside the building was almost insulting. Moth led the way, with Torque following closely behind, flowing through the perimeter fence via a maintenance access gate on the facility's north face, which was secured with a lock I bypassed with a simple quickhack before they reached it. The lock disengaged without a sound, allowing Moth and Torque to slip right through the gap in the fence.

I followed with Patch a few seconds later, crossing the open ground between the fence and the loading dock, ducking to be just below the sightline of the single camera covering the area. Not that it mattered, anyway, since I had already looped the feed, giving it sixty seconds of recorded footage from its own archive on a seamless cycle that should hold for about twelve minutes before it became detectable.

The loading dock's service entrance was a reinforced steel door with a biometric panel that I probably could have gotten past, but Patch produced a spoofing module from her harness and pressed it against the sensor housing before I was even allowed to try. So I let her shine.

The device cycled through captured biometric profiles until it found one that matched an employee currently logged as off-shift. The door opened, and we had already made our way inside in under three minutes.

The ground floor was a one-to-one of what the building permits said it was supposed to be. There were rows of server cabinets running procurement databases, filing rooms with physical document storage, administrative offices with their screens turned off and chairs empty, and hallways lit by the soft blue lights of a building operating after hours in energy-saving mode.

I sent out a ping quickhack and found there to be two guards on this level. I quickly controlled the nearest camera and found them on the far side of the building near the main entrance, chilling without a care in the world as they watched "MAXTAC: LIVE" and ate some burritos.

I manipulated the building's HVAC via the surface network, triggering a maintenance notification for the environmental controls in the east wing. The alert was legitimate, and I had pulled it from the facility's own maintenance calendar and rescheduled to fire now instead of next Tuesday. Both guards would need to acknowledge it and log a response, which would keep them occupied for about four minutes and pull their attention away from the west corridor where we were moving.

"Service alert deployed," I said through our comms. "I bought us a four-minute window to make our way through the West corridor."

"Stairwell access is thirty meters ahead on the left," Patch said as she took a quick look at the floor plan. "Sub-level entry is a restricted elevator and a parallel service stairwell. But the stairwell needs a separate credential set."

As soon as she said that, I was on it. I began pulling the credential architecture and tracing the access control protocols. The stairwell appeared to run on a standalone authentication system that validated against an employee database, which I couldn't reach from the civilian network. However, the standalone system was connected to the building's power management grid for its backup battery monitoring, and the power management grid was connected to the surface network, which I was connected to.

I simply followed the connection to the standalone system's maintenance interface, which had probably been designed for technicians to test the battery backup without needing full authentication, and injected a temporary credential. If I did everything right, then the system should accept the temporary credential as a valid maintenance override for hopefully ninety seconds before the next validation cycle purges it.

"I have the stairwell credential up and running," I said. "We should have a ninety-second window."

"You heard the kid, move," Torque ordered.

We made it through the door just in time, with Moth taking the lead while I followed last, pulling the door shut behind me as the credential expired and the lock re-engaged.

The stairwell descended three levels, each landing marked with a painted designation that the facilities team hadn't considered worth removing.

SB-1

SB-2

SB-3

The temperature dropped more and more the lower we went. The climate control shifted from the energy-saving warmth of the above-ground floors to around fifty degrees meant for a data storage environment.

The first sub-level opened into a corridor with reinforced concrete walls and full-spectrum overhead panels. The corridor stretched for around forty meters to a junction that branched left and right. I sent out a ping and noticed two humanoid security drones docked at their charging stations, flanking the entrance. Their sensor arrays were powered down, most likely tied to the intrusion detection system.

Patch found the hardline terminal recessed into an access panel beside the stairwell door, and I plugged my link cable into it only to immediately be hit by a bucket of cold water. This was unlike anything I had seen before.

The ICE was extremely dense and layered. And if that wasn't enough, the shit was also adaptive. It had three distinct security architectures running in parallel, monitoring traffic patterns, analyzing access requests, and comparing everything against a behavioral baseline it had been building for months. That meant any deviation would trigger an escalating response protocol, which most likely began with passive monitoring, progressed to active containment, and then to a full facility lockdown with the deployment of the drones.

I couldn't just brute-force my way through this as I would usually do. It was time for me to use Dino's advice and add my own flair to this and convince it that there was no one here.

I spoofed my network presence as a scheduled diagnostic process, mimicking the system's own internal maintenance routines in timing, packet structure, and authentication headers. After a bit of toying around, the ICE acknowledged me as a legitimate system function and continued its baseline monitoring without flagging the activity, and I was inside the network like a fucking virus.

I accessed the drones' management subnet and inserted a delayed authentication request into their activation queue that would loop indefinitely without resolving, effectively preventing them from receiving a valid activation command even if the intrusion detection system triggered one.

"Aaaannndd drones are down," I said. "Let's move to the primary server."

"Already? That's how you fucking do it," Patch said as she slapped me on the back.

"That was fast," Torque complemented. "Well done, kid."

Moth stayed quiet, but they gave me a short nod of acknowledgment as well. I think now I understand what Dino was talking about. There's something exhilarating about doing shit right and being recognized for it.

We quickly made our way through the corridor with Moth leading the way, Patch with her ECM suite active in the middle, and me in the rear. Torque had split off and gone back upstairs to keep our exit clear. 

The server room was behind a biometric door at the end of the left-branch corridor. I accessed the authentication system and injected a spoofed biometric profile matching that of the facility's chief data officer, a Korean woman named Bae Ji-Sung, whose credentials were stored in the employee database.

The door opened, and I was immediately met with an even harsher cold. The racks stretched floor to ceiling in four rows, their LED status indicators blinking in patterns I determined to be active processing or storage allocation. The extraction target was exactly where Dino's intel said it would be, a specific partition on the third rack from the left, designated with a project code that I confirmed to be the contracted file set.

I plugged into the nearest terminal and initiated the extraction, chewing through the ICE guarding the partition with a speed I had never achieved before. The three encryption layers cracked in sequence, and I used the MCU to feed pre-compiled decryption routines faster than the ICE could regenerate its keys.

Once I was through the ICE, I was able to get the data copied onto one of the shards in my pocket in under a minute.

"Alright, I've got the primary target," I announce, and that should have been it. Contract complete. Pack up, move out, and go home. But I was still connected, and my MCU was still indexing the surrounding directory structure when something caught my eye.

There was an additional storage partition that shouldn't exist. It wasn't exactly hidden, per se, but more like it had been forgotten. It was filed in a subdirectory the facility's data management system had stopped indexing a long time ago, and access logs showing no activity since 2052. The encryption was also generations behind the ICE protecting the contracted target, almost as if it had been purposefully forgotten.

What made it suspicious was how unsuspicious it really was. I mean, in a facility running mil-spec adaptive ICE on every active partition, this one sat pretty much unguarded and unmonitored. Either it was genuinely unimportant information, or it was so important that someone had decided the best security was making it look like it wasn't worth securing.

Curiosity got the best of me, and I opened it.

The partition unfolded across my overlay in a cascade of file directories that my MCU struggled to index in real time. And- HOLY MOTHERFUCKING SON OF A FUCK. MY eyes widened as I realized that I JUST HIT A FUCKING GOLDMINE!

These were black-budget project files carrying classification headers I had never encountered. There were some covert financial transaction records linking Militech procurement accounts to offshore entities that didn't appear in any registry, political correspondence between Militech executives and NUSA officials documenting in detail illegal manipulation that would end careers and trigger investigations at the very least, possibly even reshape the balance of power between the corporation and the government it was currently serving as a private army.

There was also procurement corruption, experimental neural interface research with test subject data carrying dates and casualty numbers, prototype cyberware architecture with manufacturing specifications worth millions to any competing corp, information about previous Blackwall-breaching sites and...

I felt my heart drop as I read.

Project BLACKGLASS

Project Lead: Alejandro Alfonso Lopez Reyes

Project Status: Terminated

Team Status: Terminated by Project Lead

Reason for Project Termination: Unidentified Blackwall AI breach.

I felt my blood run cold for a second as I read my Father's name and the apparent project he had led. But I couldn't just go through everything here, so I pulled one of my personal shards from my pocket and initiated a copy. The partition's contents were extensive, and the data flow required bandwidth that would, if sustained, eventually deviate from the baseline traffic pattern I'd been spoofing.

While the copy ran, my Paraline kept indexing the partition's structure, and somewhere in the deeper layers of the directory tree, I noticed something that made even less sense than what I had just seen.

There was a process running, yet it was consuming zero resources.

"That's impossible," I whispered. Every active process consumed computational resources. From CPU cycles to memory allocation to network bandwidth. That was just how computing worked. A process that executed without resource consumption was a contradiction in of itself, the digital equivalent of a fire that produced no heat.

I attempted to identify the process type, its function, and its origin. But the query returned as null. As if the process existed in a space I couldn't reach, occupying the partition without occupying the system, basically running without running.

I stared at it for maybe two seconds and logged the parameters before moving on, because the copy was nearing completion and the transfer had been running long enough that the bandwidth deviation was climbing toward the monitoring AI's detection threshold.

The second it finished copying, I disconnected.

"We need to move," I said. "I've been on the network longer than planned, and it's more than likely that the monitoring AI is going to flag the traffic deviation."

"How long?" Patch asked.

"The thing's been learning my spoofed pattern for the past six minutes, and the deviation between my actual bandwidth and the baseline I'm faking has been growing at a rate that'll cross the detection threshold in about..." I focused on the timer in my Kiroshis. "Eighty-three seconds."

"Then you three better get a move on, now," Torque said through comms. "Stairwell's clear. Get up here."

We moved and had barely even made it to the sub-level-one corridor before the alarms hit. The overhead lights shifted from white to amber, and my overlay exploded as the facility's security transitioned from passive monitoring to active containment.

The drones tried to activate, but thankfully my delayed authentication loop held...

"Fuck," I said. "The facility's security AI forced a hard reset on the drone management subnet and cleared my injected command. The drones are live."

As if confirming what I had just said, both drones powered up simultaneously, their sensor arrays coming online with a high-pitched whine, and they quickly began target acquisition.

I didn't even notice Moth move as I was focused on the drones, sending an optic reboot to both of them. The drones stood still for a second, allowing Moth to plant one hand on one of their chassis and drive a compact EMP charge into the sensor housing.

The EMP charge went off, and the drone dropped like a marionette with its strings cut. But the second drone managed to get its optics back up faster than anticipated, and began rotating toward Moth. I hit it with a Cyberware Malfunction and an Overheat quickhack that scrambled its motor control and forced it to spit out its upper body and snap a few lines, and Moth finished it off with another EMP charge.

We didn't waste our breaths and immediately took the stairs, ascending from sub-level one to the ground floor in under fifteen seconds, and emerged into a hallway flooding with amber lights.

I sent a ping out, and the guards who'd been eating and streaming on the far side were moving now. Though I didn't need a ping to know that, since their voices carried through the corridors as they coordinated with the security center. There were also an additional two moving toward the east wing.

"Main entrance has two more guards moving toward the east wing," I said through the comms. "We have three minutes, maybe less to delta the fuck out of here."

"Let's go out the way we came in," Torque said as he took point, leveling a suppressed Tsunami Kyubi while moving down the west corridor with controlled strides and a very military-esque stalking stance while jogging. We followed him while I used my Kerenzikov and quickly buried myself in the surface network, manipulating the facility's environmental controls and triggering the fire suppression in the east wing, flooding the corridor between us and the guards with halon gas, buying us forty-five seconds.

I also sealed the interior blast doors between the east and west wings, cutting the facility in half and blocking any reinforcements from reaching the loading dock corridor, and killed the lights in the west wing. I deactivated the Kerenzikov, and a split second later, our exit route was plunged into darkness. Since we all had cybereyes, making our way out would be rather easy.

A guard appeared at the end of the loading dock corridor, stepping out of a side office with his sidearm half-drawn, looking like he had just woken up from a nap.

Torque didn't break stride as a suppressed round left his weapon with the sound of dropping a water bottle on a carpet. The guard dropped, clutching his right shoulder, alive but no longer a factor in anyone's operational planning.

"Shoulder," I said, mostly to myself as I noted that wasn't the shot most solos took, as if he was trying to limit casualties.

"Bodies attract investigations," Torque said without turning around. "Wounded guards are akin to a report, but a dead one starts a manhunt."

He made a fair point, but it was still odd.

We reached the loading dock door, which was sealed. I hit the release through the surface network and the heavy panel began its slow, hydraulic climb. It was way too slow. "Patch, anything you can do about-"

"On it," she said as she walked past me and was at the manual override before the words had finished leaving my mouth, hauling the emergency release handle down with both hands and adding mechanical force to the hydraulic cycle, forcing the door to climb faster and allowing us to roll under it.

The van was about fifty meters from us, but I didn't want to risk much more. So I remote-started the engine and put it into autodrive to meet us at the gate. We crossed the open ground at a sprint and were just about to exit through where we'd come in just when the van pulled up.

I guess Torque activated his Sandy because one second he was by me and the next he was already in the driver's seat with the cargo doors open before the rest of us closed the distance. Patch and Moth dove in, and I dove in after them, shutting the cargo doors behind us.

Torque punched the accelerator without waiting for directions, almost taking us towards a dead-end.

"Take a left at the loading dock access road, through the service gate," I said.

Torque didn't answer, but we took a sharp left, throwing Patch on top of Moth, and blew through the service gate hard enough to tear the chain-link clean off its hinges and send the gate post spinning across the pavement behind us.

We were on the public road in under ten seconds. Torque turned on the lights, merged into traffic, and brought the van down to the posted speed limit. He relaxed a bit and checked the mirrors to ensure no one was following.

Some gonk in a Mizutani Shion Targa MZT roared past us, and we noticed a Militech Hellhound speeding behind us. I thought it was over for us, but thankfully they chased after the MZT. We took the first exit as the sound of gunfire echoed in the highway.

Patch let out a sigh of relief mixed with a chuckle. "Poor gonk just bought us our freedom."

"Dumbassess always attract the most attention," Torque said from the cab.

Moth closed their eyes and said nothing.

I rubbed my fingers over the two data shards in my pocket with a weight on my chest as I thought of the information I had seen, the questions in my head multiplying by the second.

After an hour of driving, we all split. I took a cab home for a quick shower and to decide how much I would give Dino by the time we met tomorrow.

I immediately made my way to my server room, sat on the terminal, and plugged into it. I pulled the second shard two from my pocket and slotted it into the terminal's port, and spent the next forty-five minutes processing it. Thanks to my new upgrades, I was able to ingest the file directories at a much higher rate than before, indexing each file by type, classification level, and potential value while I evaluated the content.

Most of it was Black-budget project files, covert financial transactions, and yadi-yada. A whole bunch of pullshit I didn't really care too much for.

What I wanted to go over were the things that had caught my eye. I pulled a blank data chip from the drawer beside the terminal and began copying the black-budget project files and what I could sell onto it.

Copying it took me eleven minutes, mostly because I was picking and choosing which data was going to be put onto it. Once I was done, I pulled the blank chip, encrypted it with my personal keys, and set it beside the shard containing the data I was contracted to retrieve, while I locked the second shard in a drawer beneath the terminal.

I went upstairs, took a shower, and knocked out for the night.

---

Color me surprised when Dino hit my agent with a text saying we were going to meet in the Afterlife tonight.

I'd heard about the place, a legendary fixer bar built inside a converted mortuary in Watson, where the biggest deals in Night City got brokered over drinks named after dead mercs and where the only currency that bought you entry was a reputation worth having.

It was almost nine in the night when I arrived with a slightly different get-up tonight. I had decided that if I was going to be stepping into the Afterlife, I had to do so looking dapper. I threw on a black bomber jacket, on top of a cream colored mock turtleneck, with black tactical pants, and black boots. I switched my mask out for a cream-and-gold-colored half-mask, gold-rimmed glasses, and threw on some gloves because the fit just looked fucking nova with them.

The bouncer was a woman with a shaved head and Gorilla Arms who briefly evaluated me.

"Name," she asked.

"Ghost," I replied.

Her eyes glowed for a second, and then she stepped aside, sweeping her arm out. "Welcome to the Afterlife."

I stepped through, and inside the converted mortuary stretched out into a dim space that still carried traces of its former purpose. The bar ran along the back wall beneath a row of screens showing N54 News on mute, the ticker cycling through the latest news, which said that Hansen had made yet another advance and was now even closer to Night City. 

I spotted Dino in a corner booth in the same clothing he had when I met him in The Silo. He had a bottle in front of him, and one boot up on the seat beside him like the booth belonged to him.

I looked around and saw that Torque was at the bar, two seats from the end, with a bottle of vodka. He noticed me too and gave me a short nod before returning to his bottle. I looked around a bit more, trying to spot Patch or Moth, but it looked like they weren't here.

I slid into the booth across from Dino.

"Looking rather suave, Ghost," he said. "And in one piece. My favorite outcome."

"Yeah, everybody came back," I said while nodding.

"Yeah, Torque already filled me in," he said before taking a swig of the bottle. "Exit could have used a little more refinement, but all's well that ends well. So talk to me, did you get what you went in for?"

"Before I do, I'd like to say your crew's solid," I said. "Torque held the ground floor and was quite efficient in his use of ammo. Patch's bypass on the loading dock was most likely what saved our asses if I'm being honest. Moth is quite skilled as well."

Dino grinned widely.

"They'll like hearing that," he said as he set the bottle down. "Now. The extraction."

I reached into my left cargo pocket and placed shard one on the table.

"This contains the complete file set from the sub-level-three research partition," I said. "I encrypted it and ensured that I got everything your client asked for."

Dino looked at the shard and nodded once. Then his eyes moved to my hands, which hadn't left the table.

I reached into my right pocket and placed another shard beside the first. Dino's eyes went from the shard to my face, and they grew sharper as he seemed to sober up.

"And what's this?" he asked.

"A little something I found and thought it might interest you," I said, smiling beneath my mask.

"Something you found," Dino said, but didn't reach out to touch the shard.

"Yeah," I confirmed. "There was a storage partition in the facility's data management system with no active monitoring and some old-ass encryption."

"And?" Dino asked.

"I copied some of the data," I said. "It has black-budget project files, covert financial transactions linking Militech procurement to offshore entities that don't exist on any registry, political correspondence between Militech executives and NUSA officials documenting... influential operations. It also has information about procurement fraud, and a selection of prototype chrome with manufacturing specs."

Dino looked at me and quietly picked up the shard. He turned it between his fingers slowly, and I watched as the gears turned behind his eyes.

"I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that this is a curated sample," he said. "Not a raw dump."

"Yeah," I nodded. "I went through the trouble of pulling the material that has immediate leverage value and has the ability to reshape negotiations."

Dino set the shard down and looked at me with a sly smirk.

"You curated it," he said. "You didn't just grab everything and dump it on the table. You sat down, read the data, evaluated what was worth showing me and what wasn't, and built a package."

He leaned forward, planting his forearms on the table. "That's not what runners do, Ghost. Runners steal data, but they don't edit it. They don't evaluate its political impact before they deliver it. They grab the files, bring the shard, and they let the fixer sort shit out."

"I guess most runners don't read what they steal," I said.

"No," Dino said. "They don't. Most runners are only interested in the payout from stealing something, not what that something is. They also don't have the judgment to know the difference between raw data and leverage."

He looked up for a second and started chuckling.

"Oh... oh. You motherfucker. You brought me leverage. Gave me something I can use strategically, saving me time and money. Kid, you just made yourself much more valuable than I initially anticipated." He reached into his vest and produced a credit shard, sliding it across the table. "Seventy-five. As agreed."

I picked it up and scanned it before slotting it in.

Transfer authenticated: 75,000 eddies.

Then Dino produced a second credit shard and set it beside the first.

I looked at it. Then at him. "What's this?"

"Most mercs complete contracts," Dino said. "Yet you improved mine. That instinct is worth paying for, and I'd rather overpay a runner who brings me opportunities than underpay one who brings me problems. That right there brings your total to two hundred."

I picked up the second shard, scanned it as well, removed the previous credit chip from my data port, and slotted this one in.

Transfer authenticated: 125,000 eddies.

I watched in real time as the eddies ran through my Aiden Protocol and dripped into my account, bringing my balance up to 218,789 eddies and turning this into the most lucrative gig I had ever carried out. It was also more than enough for me to settle the fifty grand I owed Vik and pay Orsen the price of the materials for the Widowmaker. And even then, I'd still have over eighty grand leftover.

"That's very much appreciated," I said, trying to make my voice sound calm.

"Don't fucking appreciate it," Dino said as he leaned back into the booth. "Style, kid. You keep bringing me shit at this level, and I'll keep feeding you gigs and eddies. Simple as is."

"Simple works," I chuckled.

"Simple always works." He raised the bottle a fraction in my direction and drank. Then he tilted his head at me, and something in his expression shifted. "How 'bout you take the mask off."

"What?" I asked, my brain short-circuiting for a second.

"You heard me. You're in the Afterlife, kid. Nobody in here gives a shit who you are, and if they do, they're smart enough not to say it out loud," he said as he gestured at the room with the bottle. "Half the people in this building are wanted by at least two corporations. The other half are wanted by three. You're the safest you've ever been."

I looked around and noticed that he was telling the truth. Nobody was watching us. Nobody had been watching us the entire time. I hesitated for a second, then pulled the mask down.

"You just cleared two hundred K on a single gig," he said. "You walked into a Militech black site, walked out with something they didn't even know they were hiding, and you didn't so much as leave a footprint. You know what that makes you?"

"A legendary runner?" I asked.

"Fuck no," Dino laughed. He then pointed the neck of the bottle at me. "You're a man. You've been a kid doing a man's work for a while now, but you just crossed over. And every man's got to have a drink. Not the drink someone handed you or the drink the room's already ordering. You need your drink. The one that shows up in front of you when you sit down somewhere because the bartender already knows."

"I'm sixteen," I said.

"Like anybody gives a fuck," Dina smirked. "Plus, you downed a whole glass of premium vodka at my bar five days ago and walked it off."

"I drank vodka once at your bar because your bartender is a menace and told me it was RealWater," I countered.

Dino let out a real laugh, loud enough that I noticed a couple of heads turned to see who was laughing and immediately turned back.

"Mojo's a professional. She saw a kid who needed his first drink, and she gave him one. That's some real motherfucking service right there," he said as he slid out of the booth and stood. "Come on."

The woman who'd been working the bar was pulling off her apron and hanging it on a hook beneath the register as we approached. She said something to the man stepping in behind her, most likely a quick handoff that covered the open tabs and the booth reservations, and then she was gone through the main entrance without looking back.

The man who replaced her was tall. Not my kind of tall, but tall enough to fill the space behind the bar with his physical presence. He was a black man, bald by choice since I could see some of his hair growing back, and with a neatly trimmed beard that framed a jaw that looked like it had been carved from stone.

His forearms were thick, and he worked without any hurry as he dried a glass with a bar towel, and his dark eyes seemed to sweep the room, as if he was scanning who was here and who wasn't. If I was being honest, the guy looked like he should be the bouncer rather than the chick out front, and he probably would've been if not for his minimal visible chrome. He had no obvious implants, and the name tag pinned to his vest read IDRIS ELBA in block letters.

"He's buying," Dino said, jerking a thumb at me. "And he's figuring out what he drinks."

Idris looked at me and then at Dino with the same expression.

"Start him with vodka," Dino said. "Premium. He's already got a relationship with it."

Idris didn't say anything as he served up a 3 ounces of vodka with nothing else. I drank it, and it burned the same way it had at The Silo, like drinking something designed to sterilize surgical instruments.

"Not bad," I said. "But not it."

"Vodka's a foundation," Dino said. "You're supposed to build on it."

Over the next twenty minutes, we ran through the options. Vodka with citrus was too bright and too thin, tasted like something a corpo would order to impress a table full of people who didn't respect him. Vodka with synthetic bitters was all edges and no body and tasted like medicine. Vodka with a coffee reduction that Dino swore by and that tasted, to me, like shit.

"You're zero for three," Dino said. "I'm starting to think you just don't like drinking."

"I think I like drinking fine," I said, feeling alright since the alcohol wasn't really having much of an effect on me.

Idris had been listening without appearing to, a skill I practiced myself. Without a word, he reached under the bar and set down a bottle of blackberry concentrate.

It was dark and thick enough to move slowly when he tilted it, and when it hit a fresh pour of vodka it bloomed through the glass in a slow spiral of deep purple that caught the Afterlife's neon and turned it into something else entirely.

"There you go," Dino said quietly.

I slowly adjusted it. Four ounces of Vodka, an ounce of the blackberry, then a quarter ounce of black cherry synth syrup, and three ice cubes to top it all off.

The result sat in the glass as a mostly dark violet with subtle burgundy highlights from the cherry syrup. It would shift between deep purple and crimson depending on whether it was being hit by blue, violet, or red lights. As the ice began to melt, the edges lightened gradually, bleeding outward from the dense center into a translucent purple that crept along the glass in shifting gradients.

Dino leaned forward on his elbows and looked at the glass for a long moment.

"Well," he said. "If that isn't the most fitting drink I've ever seen a man make."

"Fitting?" I asked.

"Kid, you've got white hair, violet eyes, and you just made a drink that looks like it came out of your own optics." He turned to Idris. "Let me try what the runt made."

Idris made it with the same proportions and sequence. He then set it in front of Dino, who picked it up, held it under the neon, watched it glow, and drank.

I drank mine at the same time.

The first sip bit like ice wrapped around fire. Pure vodka, clean and sharp and impossible to ignore, cutting a line straight down the center of my tongue with a cold authority that demanded attention. Then the blackberry crept in behind it, softening the edges without dulling them, and wrapping the burn in something that made it bearable. By the time I swallowed, a whisper of black cherry lingered at the back of my tongue, just sweet enough to tempt another sip before the burn had completely faded.

I set the glass down.

"I think that hit the spot," I said.

"Fuck yeah, it did," Dino agreed as he set his glass down beside mine and looked at me with a hint of respect. "You know what I like about you, Ghost? You didn't shy away from it. Most kids your age would've buried the vodka under six ounces of syrup and called it a cocktail. You built something that still tastes like what it is and let the alcohol do its job, giving it just enough company to make the job interesting."

"Is that another style lesson?" I asked while smiling.

"Everything's a style lesson," He said as he picked his glass back up. "How you drink. How you dress. How you do your gigs. It's all the same shit. The world watches you whether you want it to or not, so you might as well give them something worth watching."

As he finished speaking, someone walked past the end of the bar and conversations died down a bit. A merc two seats down straightened his posture without noticing, and Idris's hands paused mid-pour for a fraction of a second before resuming.

The person who walked in was a tall blonde, and she moved through the Afterlife as she owned it, which she did.

"Rogue," Dino said as he set his glass down and slid off the stool. "Kid, great work. You can keep the drink. I'll be in touch when I get another gig for you."

He crossed the floor toward her, saying something I couldn't catch, and she turned and gave him a tolerant look, as if she had known Dino for a long time, and then they both disappeared into a booth on the far side of the room.

I finished the last of my drink, took my time drinking the one Dino had left me, and left a tip. I pulled the mask back up and turned to leave when something caught my attention.

At the far end of the bar, Torque was still sitting where he'd been all night, his bottle of Vodka in front of him. As I watched, he raised one hand from the bar's surface and extended a single finger toward Idris in the gesture of a salute.

Idris saw it and set down the glass he was drying. He walked to Torque's end of the bar and extended his hand, and Torque shook it.

The handshake was brief, as if they knew each other. Idris leaned down on the bar, bringing his face close to Torque's, and they started chatting. After a few seconds, both of them looked at me and nodded.

I returned the nod and turned to walk out of the Afterlife.