Chapter 48: The Unseen (Patreon)

(Previous chapter ending changed. This is the new ending for the previous chapter.)

"I really need to get myself a proper ride while I rebuild the Mustang," I muttered to myself as I got into the cab I had ordered.

Twenty minutes later, the cab dropped me at the corner of the alley that led to Vik's place. As I stepped out of it, I felt as if the ground had rolled beneath me, and for a fraction of a second I was surrounded by red rock and tall grass while animal-shaped machines moved past me. Then I was standing on the edge of a cliff, watching a red-haired woman run through the grass with a bow in her hand as the machines hunted her. However, she fought back and, at times, hunted them back. As she did, I noticed that the sky above her was a beautiful blue color that reminded me of the safari BDs I used to watch as a kid.

Then I blinked, and it was all gone. I was standing on the sidewalk where the cab had left me. I felt my hands shaking as it began to rain.

"What the fuck," I whispered, and I heard something whisper back. I turned my head to look around, but I was alone on the street, save for the hobo who was sitting against one of the stores.

I felt the world begin to spin and leaned onto a light post to steady myself. Then I looked up and saw a Galena G240 parked at the curb; its faded gasoline green paint and rust along the wheel arches hinted it was the car I had bought, fixed up, and given Mom. 

I frowned as my brain tried to come up with a reason for Mom's car to be parked here, blinking in confusion. As soon as I blinked, the G240 magically disappeared and in its place there was a GA32T in preem condition. Not only that, but it was also a whole different color.

"Okay, weird shit is happening," I whispered to myself, and this time, I heard multiple whispers coming from behind me. I turned to see who it was, only for the ground to tilt once again. I was, once again, in a whole new world, my surroundings having completely shifted as the same red-haired woman I had seen earlier stood in front of me, on a cliff overlooking a valley full of the animal-shaped machines.

I noticed that she seemed to be speaking with someone, but there was no one around her. Then she turned and looked right at me, and started walking my way. Just as she was about to reach me, the scenery once again disappeared, and I found myself back on the same sidewalk with a twitch in my left eye as louder whispers surrounded me.

My Kiroshis flickered, and for a split second, there was an overlay projected of a targeting reticle I had never seen. Glyphs seemed to form the edges of a triangle before disappearing from existence. My guess was that whatever the fuck that HADES fucker had sent my way was going to kepe on doing this shit, and it was only going to get worse.

So I pushed myself off the lamp post, forcing myself to walk as straight as I could as the world around me seemed to tilt. I reached the esoterica and noticed it was closed, so I had to go around to the side entrance and over the padlocked metal door.

Once I reached the door, I pulled myself up and over, landing in the alleyway, and walked down the steps that led to Vik's clinic. The door slid open as I approached, and my world changed once again as soon as I crossed the threshold. I was now staring at a massive machine, taller than any building I had ever seen, its body assembled from metal and cables and thousands of other smaller machines. The machine was letting out a screech that would have liquefied my brain, were this not a hallucination. I then noticed that the red-haired woman had climbed on its back and was pokign her with her magic voodoo staff as the machine flailed in an attempt to shake her off.

And as it flailed, something on it came flying at me, and then I found myself tripping and crashing onto Vik's medical shit by the chair.

"Jesus, kid," Vik said. "You alright? You look like shit."

He helped me up and helped me steady myself.

"Easy there," Vik said. "What's going on? What's gotten into you?"

"I don't..." I was about to start lying, but I realized that I needed serious medical attention at the moment, so I couldn't be hiding any secrets any longer from Vik. "An op tonight almost flatlined me. I need everything in my head checked. My self-diagnostic keeps coming back null or error, and I'm..."

I trailed off as the door to my left opened. It was the door I had always assumed led to a storage room, a garage, or some kind of back-office space Vik used for inventory. But for some reason, Mom was standing in the doorway, wearing a bathrobe. She was looking at me with an expression that was equal parts surprise and guilt, and I felt my brain malfunction because, like five minutes ago, I had just hallucinated her car on the street, and the hallucination had dissolved when I blinked, and now she was standing in Vik's doorway.

"Ma?" I said.

"Who are you talking to, kid?" Vik asked, drawing my attention.

"The fuck you talking about, Vik?" I said, looking at a confused and concerned Vik. "She's standing right th..."

I turned my head back toward the doorway, only to see that it was closed with my mother nowhere to be seen. I was then assaulted by another wave of whispers that was longer than the last one. They were saying something in a language I did not speak. Something that sounded like a name.

When they stopped, I found myself with one hand on the surgical chair, feeling out of breath. I could feel Vik's eyes.

"Sit down," Vik said quietly, and I obeyed. "You have to shoot straight with me, kid. What the fuck is going on with you?"

"I... I don't know," I said. I mean, it wasn't really a lie. I had a hunch about what was causing this, but I really had no idea what the fuck was happening to me.

(End of Previous Chapter)

"Nothing is true, everything is permitted."

- The Assassin's Creed

---

I really wanted to keep my secrets, maybe even take them to the grave. But in my current situation, I had to be truthful with Vik. So I told him everything while he worked on me. From the moment I had gotten my Kiroshi's chipped in and had pretty much seen a speedrun of the end of the world, to the events HADES had shown me, down to the vault architecture pretty much calling it quits and telling me to go fuck myself.

I told him about the hallucinations I had been experiencing after the cab dropped me off, and even seeing my mom standing by the door. I also mentioned the whispers I was hearing that basically played back on repeat. If he wasn't judging me about any of these things before, he sure as shit was now. I could see it in his eyes.

"That's a nice fairytale, kid," Vik said as he finished working on my head. I turned over and saw him leaning into his chair. "But to me it just sounds like that fucking Link your ol' pops had me chip you with is finally starting to give way. Though I couldn't really find anything that pointed its way..."

"I know how it sounds," I sighed.

"I mean, come on, Santi," he said, shaking his head. "You're telling me an AI from something like a parallel universe that ended the world multiple times poured a piece of itself into your Neural Link and is now feeding you visions of a red-haired woman fighting robot dinosaurs."

"He said that he was from a past of this world," I mumbled. "And when you say it like that, it sounds like I'm slipping into cyberpsychosis."

"Yeah, no fucking shit. It sounds like what it sounds like," Vik said, throwing his arms in the air before planting his elbows on his knees and leaning forward. "How do you know any of what this thing told you is real? How do you know it's what it says it is? You're a netrunner, for crying out loud. You know better than most people how easy it is to construct a narrative inside a digital space and sell it to whoever you're talking to."

"I know," I said. "I've been asking myself the same questions since I woke up in a ripper's clinic in Wellsprings. That shit about some Faro Plague, a whole terraforming system with nine subroutines, the supposed savior that came from nowhere as Sobeck and then cloned as Aloy, I know that shit can all be fabricated since there is nothing, historical or whatever the fuck that can prove what I was told."

"So you're taking it on faith," Vik said, running a hand through his hair.

"I mean, I can't just write everything he said as bullshit," I said. "I mean, with his ability to completely manipulate the environment around us, Vik, I don't think anyone would go to that extent to just spew some bullshit."

Vik looked at me for a moment, then stood, walked to the terminal at his workstation, and pulled up a display of the neural diagnostic suite he used for deep-chrome assessments.

"Let me offer you another possibility," Vik said, typing something into the terminal. "What if this HADES is just another netrunner?"

"A netrunner that can manipulate the Blackwall and rewrite NetWatch architecture in real time?" I asked. "Why the fuck would that be possible?"

"Why not?" Vik turned from the terminal and looked at me over the top of his glasses. "I mean, you're living proof of someone who just might be able to do that. Plus, back in the day, there were runners who could interact with the Blackwall directly. There was this one serious runner called Spider Murphy who worked with Johnny Silverhand during the Arasaka Tower hit in 2023, and the things she could do inside a network would make most runners look like script kiddies. From what I know, she could touch parts of the Net that nobody else could reach and manipulate architectures that were supposed to be untouchable. She was able to do things that the people watching her couldn't explain."

"Yeah, but Spider Murphy was a legend," I said as I rolled my eyes.

"Yeah, but she was still human. A very talented person with skills that she developed over decades of work. And she's been off the grid for years. Nobody knows where she is or what she's doing or if she's still even alive," Vik said before sitting back down and folding his arms again. "Look. The point I'm trying to make is that you're describing an entity that can manipulate the Blackwall, rewrite architecture, and communicate directly through a runner's Neural Link. That's extraordinary, but it's still within the range of what an extremely gifted human runner has been documented doing. Maybe this HADES is a runner with capabilities nobody else has seen, who has decided to operate from behind the Blackwall using a persona and a story designed to make themselves appear to be something more than human."

"And what about the other figures?" I asked.

"Shit, I don't know. Maybe they're an underground group," Vik said with a shrug. "I mean, the Voodoo Boys are a thing, so why can't runners working together from behind the Blackwall be one as well? The only difference is that this group is much stronger and is using fabricated identities and a mythology they've constructed to protect their anonymity. It wouldn't be the first time a group of netrunners built a shared legend to keep people from looking too closely at who they actually were."

I thought about that for a minute. I mean, Vik's explanation did make sense. Plus, it accounted for almost everything I had experienced without requiring me to believe that an AI from a forgotten past had survived twelve thousand years of drift and arrived behind the Blackwall of our current day and age carrying memories of ending a world just to rebuild it.

But they still didn't quite explain everything.

"What about the hallucinations I'm having?" I asked.

"That's where I'm concerned," Vik said. "It could be cyberpsychosis caused by the code they plugged you with, but it very well could be some virus that is just fucking with your visual and auditory receptors. If it's a virus, it would explain why your self-diagnostic is returning null because whatever was introduced to your firmware is operating outside the parameters your diagnostic was designed to detect."

He stood and walked back to the terminal.

"I've run every hardware test I can think of," Vik said. "You had some circuits cooked, which was causing you to run hotter. I already patched those up, but aside from that, I couldn't find anything."

"So my chrome is fine?" I asked.

"As far as I can tell, hardware is all good," Vik nodded. "Which means whatever is causing the hallucinations and the diagnostic failures is a software problem, which is why I think you got plugged with a virus or something."

"Can you remove it?" I asked.

Vik looked at me and took his glasses off.

"Santi, I'm a ripperdoc. I fix, install, calibrate, and tune chrome." He put his glasses back on. "But I'm not a coder by any means. What you need is someone who can get inside your firmware and identify whatever foreign code this entity introduced. Then they can either remove it or isolate it so it stops producing artifacts."

"So I need to do it myself," I said.

"Well, if you don't have someone you can trust digging into your chrome's coding, then yeah, you need to do it yourself," Vik nodded. "And that is a very short list for anybody, let alone a runner with custom firmware that nobody else wrote... You wrote your own firmware, Santi. You're the best person alive to debug it. That's my two cents."

"Thanks, Vik," I said.

"Anytime, kid. The rest is on you." He paused, then added, "And come back after you've dealt with it. I want to run the full diagnostic again once your firmware is clean, just to make sure nothing migrated into the hardware layer."

"I will," I promised. "How much do I owe you?"

"Only two thousand eddies," Vik said. "And get some sleep."

I sent Vik 2500 eddies for seeing me at such a time, and stepped out to the early morning air. The sun was already up, and it looked as if it was going to be a nice sunny day sicne there were no clouds to see, not that I could see many due to all the buildings around me. As I stepped out of the alley and into the street, the sunlight felt like the light from the world with the blue sky and the red-haired woman.

I blinked, and the feeling passed. I checked my internal clock and saw it was seven in the morning, meaning I had been awake for just over twenty-four hours.

I ordered a cab, and a minute later I was watching the city slide past the window. Twice during the ride I felt dizzy and suffered the hallucinations. I saw a flash of green forest that quickly turned into a billboard and a silhouette of one of those animal-shaped machines that turned out to be a construction crane. The hallucinations had significantly slowed down, and I noticed that while I had been talking with Vik, they hadn't even affected me.

By the time I got home, I felt another headache come over me. I walked into the building after feeding a new 94-digit passcode into the door's system. I had updated the G240's ECU with it as well so whenever it pulled up into the parking lot, it would feed it to the system and open Bay 2's door.

I climbed the stairs to the third floor and went straight to my room. I pulled off my boots, pants, jacket, mask, and gloves, threw myself on the bed without showering. I closed my eyes, and a second later, I opened them only to see that I was standing in a flat desert that stretched to the horizon in every direction.

The sun was hot as hell, and the air smelled like sand and something else. I noticed people around me. They were thousands, at the least, and they hauled stone blocks with coordination on wooden sleds across a ramp system that climbed the side of a pyramid.

I was staring at an actual pyramid being built by human hands. As I watched them work, I noticed the landscape in front of me shift, and instead of pyramids being built by hands, they were being built by massive machines with humans at the helm, coordinating everything. It was as if I was looking at an alternate history where humans had built a civilization that was considerably more advanced than anyone in my world would have ever imagined.

Before I had even gotten a chance to fully process what I had just seen, I found myself no longer standing in the middle of a desert, but rather on a coastline. The air was warm and humid, my surroundings vibrant with greenery, and there was a structure rising out of the jungle that looked like a cross between a pyramid and a tower. The entire structure was covered with some sort of runes, and there were also carvings of faces and figures I couldn't even begin to define.

And just as abruptly as it had taken place before, I found my surroundings shifting, and I found myself standing in the midst of mountains. It was cold, extremely cold. I looked around and noticed that I was really high up since I could see the peaks of other mountains as if I were standing at their level. As I did, I noticed a terrace system carved into the mountainside with a great deal of precision.

Fascinated with what I was witnessing, I tried to step closer to get a better look, and I noticed that the terrace system carved into the mountainside had a great deal of metal and glass, and it was full of those same ruins I had just seen a bit ago. But before I could get any closer, my surroundings shifted once again, and I found myself on an island, surrounded by a ring of massive stone heads staring outward at the ocean with varying facial expressions.

I watched as time seemed to reverse and the heads appeared to shift, but the scene in front of me changed before I got to see what happened. I knew that I was dreaming, but it all felt so real. The dream held me in the ancient world for what felt like hours, cycling through construction sites, engineering projects, and the accumulated evidence of a species that had built and destroyed.

When I woke up, it was already late in the afternoon, and I felt like I had been beaten with a sock full of rocks.

I lay in bed for a few minutes, staring at the ceiling, feeling the last fragments of the dream dissolve into a fuzzy residue. HADES had said the world suffered a reset approximately forty-five hundred years ago, and if I wasn't wrong, the pyramids were roughly forty-five hundred years old, give or take a few centuries.

I pushed myself out of bed, stripped, and went to shower with hot water. I stood under the water, letting the heat and the pressure pepper my back and work on releasing the tension in my shoulders and the back of my neck. I still had a headache, though it was much more bearable.

It was around four in the afternoon when I stepped out of the shower. It had been rather quiet since I woke up, so I called out for my mother as I toweled off, but she didn't respond. I wrapped the towel around my waist and checked the kitchen, but it was empty; the only thing around was her mug on the drying rack, still wet, which meant she'd been here not that long ago. But her tablet wasn't on the table where she usually left it, and her jacket was also gone.

She was probably out running whatever errands kept her busy, or out eating with friends. I didn't really know what Mom got up to while I wasn't around. Which was good and bad, because it meant that she could do whatever she wanted. But I know she felt like she was failing as a mother, having to rely on her son to do all the work and bring home all the money while she just lounged about.

Meh, it's whatever. I got dressed and headed down to my server room on the second floor. I shouldn't waste any more time without looking into this shit that this HADES character had injected in me, so I locked the door behind me, sat in the terminal chair, and plugged myself in.

I then dove into my server and was immediately greeted by multiple giant three-headed dogs I had created. They were defensive daemons that I had made in the form of a Cerberus because, let's be honest, shit was nova. They didn't really do anything except lounge about waiting for someone to decide that klepping data from my servers would be a good idea.

I mean, they were more like a deterrent than anything else, since the architecture of my servers, which was built by yours truly, was pretty beefed up. I mean, I had to tall-ass walls of defensive code that also had some Black-ICE in the form of HMGs and turrets that would only make themselves known if a gonk pushed past all of my guard dogs.

That reminded me I should definitely upgrade my self-ICE. Probably pack it to the brim with daemons that would save my ass and chew right through any attack. Getting throttled down by that Voodoo Bitchboy's daemon wasn't the most fun experience. It would also let me do a little better exploring the current net. I had seen how nova most of the shit here was. I mean, there were literal fucking castles and a fuckton of other preem shit for me to explore. But I mostly kept to interacting with things from afar because I didn't know how these gonked fuckers in the Net were. Upgrading my self-ICE would help me feel at peace enough to actually take a stroll through it all.

But that's not what I was here for at the moment. So I walked through the main gates of my server's architecture, which also put all the turrets around my building in the meatspace on high alert to ensure I was 100% safe from anything and anyone while I dove into my chrome's code. 

It sifted through my Neural Link's firmware, and it didn't take long for me to find the nasty little gift HADES had left for me. It was unlike anything I had ever written or encountered. It was basically a ball of compressed and self-referencing code that my MCU's decompiler struggled to unpack. Every time the decompiler resolved a layer, the layer beneath it referenced the layer above, creating a recursive loop that my processing had to trace manually rather than parsing automatically.

It was also small. Much smaller than I had expected. HADES had called it a microscopic fraction, and shift if he wasn't kidding. It was only a few hundred kilobytes of code, and it was just chilling there, sitting quietly in the amplification pathway.

"Bueno, Santi, time to go to work," I said to myself.

I spent hours mapping the code's structure without touching it. I traced every reference it had established inside my firmware, building a complete schematic in my mind of how it interacted with my Neural Link's existing architecture. The more I worked, the more I began to realize that the code had not simply been dropped into my firmware and left alone, but that it had actually integrated. There were threads of the foreign architecture that had woven themselves into my amplification pathway's signal processing routines, creating connections that were kinda fucking preem. Whoever or whatever had written this code understood neural firmware at a level that made me feel like my own firmware had been written by a fucking corpo cum script kiddie.

I attempted to isolate it, writing quarantine routines that would wall off the foreign code from the rest of my firmware. They cut the threads it had established and replaced them with null pointers that prevented the integration from deepening. The quarantine worked for a bit before the shit started adapting faster than my routine could sever it.

I tried different approaches, and they all meant jack shit. I was getting really fucking irritated with this shit until I found an approach the code couldn't immediately adapt to. I managed to isolate approximately seventy percent of the foreign architecture behind a quarantine wall that held, while the remaining thirty percent was too deeply integrated with my amplification pathway's core processing to isolate without risking damage to the pathway itself, which meant I could also fry my brain if I did so.

As I worked, I noticed the whispers I had been hearing in the meatspace were also in the cyberspace of my firmware. And the more progress I made, the louder they became. It was as if the code itself knew I was working on it and was responding to the interaction.

Eventually, the whispers grew loud enough to become distinct audio signals rather than background noise. They seemed to be saying something, but they were layered and speaking over each other in a way that didn't let me understand anything. But the speech rhythm became consistent, letting me notice it was repeating.

I stopped working on quarantining and tried to focus on the audio signal, running it through every linguistic analysis tool I had available. The signal was degraded, but the harder I attempted to pay attention to it, the clearer it seemed to become to me.

Cy...

..re.

...nos...

Cyno...

...su...

...ure...

As it repeated over and over, I eventually figured out what it was saying. It was a single word: Cynosure

As soon as I understood what was being said, the whispers came to an utter halt, and the background hum that had been running in my Neural Link went silent as well.

I stood in cyberspace mulling over the word. "What the flying fuck is a cynosure?"

Then I remembered that HADES had been trying to tell me something before the architecture of NetWatch's base collapsed. He he was telling me that I needed to go to the cyno something before he got cut off. So maybe this word, this Cynosure, it wasn't a thing but actually a place.

At first this HADES had my curiosity, but now he had my attention, and that meant that I had to find out everything I could about this "Cynosure." And I was just about to do so when I felt a tug on my consciousness from the meatspace. I manipulated the cyberspace around me to see what it was, which was easy as shit since cyberspace under your control was your domain and you could basically do whatever the fuck you wanted with it.

My mood soured when I saw that the caller ID read NCPD. I decided to disconnect from cyberspace and actually give this my attention since the NCPD did not call people like me. Shit, they barely called people at all, and when they did, it was usually because somebody was dead and the body needed to be identified. My mind immediately went to the worst possible scenario, which was my mother dead. 

"Hello?" I said hesitatingly.

"Santi? Oh thank God. Okay, so don't freak out." I felt an invisible weight lift off my chest when I heard Judy's voice on the other end of the call.

"Judy?" I asked, sitting up in my dive chair. "Why are you calling me from the NCPD?"

"Okay, so, funny story," Judy said, her voice sounding urgent. "So I may have, technically, gotten arrested."

"You got arrested," I deadpanned.

"Technically," she said.

"Let me guess," I said. "It was because of the firetruck?"

"Oh, how did you know?" She asked.

I sighed. "Judy-"

"Look, I know," she said, interrupting me. "I know how it sounds. But I had it under control. I had it completely under control right up until I accidentally ran a red light in front of a cruiser in Japantown. And then I had it mostly under control until the cruiser pulled me over and the officer asked for my registration and I didn't have one because, as we have previously established, the firetruck does not technically have registration because I found it in a scrapyard."

"And they arrested you," I sighed.

"They're trying to throw the fucking book at me," she said, and I could just imagine her throwing her hands up in the air in frustration. "They're trying to charge me with grand theft of an emergency response vehicle, which is a Class-2 felony, and also operating an unregistered vehicle, which is a Class-4 misdemeanor, and also for running a red light, which is a traffic violation, and also resisting arrest, which I did not do but this fat fucking pig seemed to have a very creative interpretation of."

"What's their creative interpretation?" I asked.

"I told him to go fuck himself when he said the firetruck wasn't mine," Judy said. "Apparently that counts."

I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose.

"Look," Judy said, her voice turning quieter. "I know we've only really known each other for like two months. And I know this is a shitty thing to ask. But I don't really have many chooms, Santi. And the ones I do have aren't the kind of chooms who can help with this. I was hoping you could maybe help me out with some eddies or something. Bail, a lawyer, whatever it takes. I'll pay you back. I swear on everything I have."

Well, wasn't she in luck. Thanks to last night's gig, which almost flatlined my ass and almost got me black listed by my highest-paying fixer, I had just about 4.7 million eddies currently sitting in my account. Although we had only known each other for a like two months, she was one of the few people I'd consider chooms of mine in this city. And though Sasha and I had warned her about getting arrested, it was honestly a fucked situation that she had gotten busted for driving her fixer-upper scrapyard find.

"Alright," I sighed. "Just give me some time, and I'll figure something out."

"Thank you," Judy said. "Seriously, choom. Thank you. Oh, and I don't mean to rush you, but the pigs said I'm able to keep my agent just for another hour."

"Alright, I'll make it quick," I said, ended the call, and sat there for about a minute, thinking. I could pay Judy's bail directly, but bail in Night City for a Class-2 felony was going to be steep, and paying it didn't make the charges go away. Which meant that the wiser choice was to get her a lawyer, a real one. But I didn't know any fucking lawyers, and they were all just corpo shills anyway... wait, Regina Jones might know someone.

I immediately hit her line, and it wasn't long before he answered.

"Ah, if it isn't the Ghost of Kabuki," Regina said, seemingly oddly chatty. "I heard you're moving up in the world. Dino won't shut his piehole bragging about this new runner he's got. But I highly doubt this is a social call. So tell me, what can I do for you?"

"I've got a choom who's in some trouble with the NCPD," I said. "She got picked up driving a vehicle the pigs are calling stolen, but she rebuilt it herself from a scrapyard find. They're trying to hit her with a Class-2 felony for theft of an emergency vehicle, plus a handful of smaller charges."

"Emergency vehicle," Regina said. "What kind?"

"A firetruck," I replied.

"Your friend stole a firetruck," Regina said after a short pause.

"My friend rebuilt a firetruck from scrap and then drove it around the city," I corrected her. Didn't want a fixer to think I was out here associating with street rats. "The NCPD is calling it a grand theft."

"Of course they are. The NCPD would charge a rat with breaking and entering if they could get it to hold still long enough for the paperwork." Regina's voice shifted from amused to business. "I have a lawyer who owes me some favors. He could probably get her charges dropped or reduced, but it will cost you."

"How much?" I asked.

"Fifteen thousand eddies," Regina said.

I pretended to think about it for a moment, making a sound that made it appear as if I was deliberating. The truth was that fifteen thousand eddies was pretty much pocket change for me right now.

"Alright," I said, letting out a deep sigh.

"Transfer the eddies, and I'll make the call," Regina said. "Though I'll be honest with you, Ghost. This particular lawyer might just take the case just for the fun of it. A teenager who rebuilt a decommissioned fire engine from a scrapyard and got arrested for driving it through Japantown? He lives for that shit."

"I hope you're right," I said as I transferred the eddies.

"I got the eddies," Regina said. "I'll send you his contact information. His name is Matt Murdock. He's expensive under normal circumstances, but for this one, the favor covers it. Tell your friend to sit tight and not say anything else to the NCPD until he gets there."

She ended the call, and a second later I got a message from Regina containing the lawyer's contact information. It was just a name, a number, and a single line of text beneath the number that read ATTORNEY AT LAW.

I forwarded the contact to Judy's Agent with a message attached: "Lawyer's on the way. Don't say another word to the pigs until he gets there. I mean it. Not a single word."

She replied to my message a few seconds later.

Judy: "You're the best choom I've ever had."

Me: "You need better chooms."

Judy: "Fuck you. But also, thank you."

I smiled at her bickering and murmured to myself. "Good job, Santi, you did a good deed today."