Chippin in 5 (Patreon)

Chapter 5:

– Lucy Kushinada –

It was supposed to be a normal morning.

Pick a few marks. Lift a few shards. Annoy a few corpos in the way that did not draw heat but did soothe something itchy inside her ribs. Maybe grab breakfast at that noodle stand near the Watson station that pretended to be Vietnamese and was actually run by a Polish grandmother who put soy sauce in everything and dared you to complain. Then go home.

That had been the plan.

The plan had not included the cute blond boy from yesterday standing in front of her again.

Lucy looked him over once, slow and obvious, because there was no point in pretending she had not noticed him this time. 

Yesterday he had been wearing the Arasaka Academy uniform like an apology he was trying to hide inside, all stiff white and corpo black and red with that stupid little logo sitting over his heart. 

Today the uniform was gone. 

He was in jeans and a plain white shirt and a fake leather jacket two sizes too big in the shoulders, which on a different guy would have looked like he had borrowed it from his older brother.

On him, that was almost certainly exactly what had happened.

The bandage at his temple was smaller than it had been yesterday. He still looked a little pale, but less haunted. His eyes were brighter too. Like somebody had upgraded his optics overnight, which, given the very obvious fresh seal at the back of his neck under his collar, was exactly what had happened.

He had gotten some more chrome since yesterday. That was interesting. 

He had also gotten brave enough to walk up to her a second time after she had told him to fuck off in front of an entire train car, which was either very stupid or very something else, and Lucy had not decided yet which one she was hoping for.

"Hi," he said. It was the same opener as yesterday. Same nervous little crack at the edge of the word. 

She really should have told him to fuck off again. That was the smart move. She had a reputation. Reputations did not maintain themselves.

She also could not quite remember, in the half second between his hi and her response, the last time anybody had tried this hard to talk to her. It was actually kind of endearing.

So instead of telling him to fuck off, Lucy smiled at him.

Lucy's stomach did that little warm twist it always did when a cute younger guy turned red because of her.  "Hi yourself," she said. Her voice came out a degree lower than it usually did, which was deliberate and not deliberate at the same time. "You're back."

"Yeah." He swallowed. "Yeah, I'm. I'm back."

"No Saka uniform today? Hm." She tilted her head. The motion was small. It still made him track her with his eyes like she was the only thing on the train. Good boy. "What do you want, blondie?"

He blinked at the nickname. The blush deepened by another notch. Lucy filed that data point away for later inspection.

"Can we." He cleared his throat. Started again. "Can we talk? In private. It's. It's really important."

She raised an eyebrow.

He held her gaze. That surprised her. Yesterday he had looked at her like she was a painting in a museum he was scared he was not allowed to be in. Today there was still nerves in him, plenty of nerves, his pulse was visible at his throat and his hands kept almost going to his pockets before he forced them back down, but underneath the nerves there was something steadier. 

Something that had not been in his face the day before.

He really wanted to tell her something.

Whatever it was, he was scared of it.

Lucy's instincts pricked up. Some part of her brain that had been trained in an Arasaka basement and refined in seven different street educations rose up automatically and started running threat assessments. Was this a setup? Had someone gotten to him? Was he wired? Was he being followed? Was the lack of uniform a costume? Was the blush an act?

She watched his face for one full second, which was a long time to watch a face when you knew what you were doing.

Lucy shrugged. "Sure."

She reached out and grabbed his hand.

His fingers jolted under hers like she had run live current through them.

His face went red all over again.

Cute. So, so cute.

Lucy did not look back at him as she pulled him through the crowded car. She did not have to. She could feel him stumbling along behind her, half a step too slow, his palm warm and a little sweaty against hers. She tugged him into the corner by the rear doors, the dead spot every regular rider of this line knew about, where the camera coverage from the ceiling had a blind angle and the audio sensors caught more of the engine hum than they did anything else.

She turned him with a small push against his shoulder, and his back hit the wall.

She stepped into his space. Just enough that he had to look up a little to meet her eyes, because he was tall but she was wearing boots, and just enough that she could feel the slight heat coming off him through the thin layer of air between his jacket and her chest.

"Talk," she said softly.

He swallowed.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. Just. Just promise to listen to my whole explanation before you freak out. Please."

She blinked. That was not the opener she had expected. It was, however, the exact opener that made her stomach drop a quarter inch. "Fine," Lucy said, because saying anything else would have given away that her instincts had just sharpened into knives. "Talk fast, blondie."

He talked.

She listened.

A couple of minutes later, Lucy was very glad she had listened.

She kept her face still while he talked, because that was what she did, because letting her face move was a luxury she had stopped affording herself years ago. Inside her head it was a different story. Inside her head she went through it all again, piece by piece, while he stood there with his back to the wall and his eyes never quite settling on hers.

The kid gets kicked out of Arasaka Academy yesterday. For punching a corpo brat. Which, fine, was actually pretty fucking Nova, and she would have respected that on its own. She did respect that. She had respected it before he had even told her the story, the second she had seen the missing uniform and connected it to the bruise on his knuckles.

The kid then goes to meet his older brother's best choom for a chat over diner food. Fine. Heywood family stuff. Mercs were tight in this city. She got it.

Except the older brother's best choom is also the kid's academy sponsor.

And also a member of fucking Arasaka Counterintel.

Lucy's left hand twitched at her side. Her monowire was looped neatly along her forearm under her sleeve, light and quiet and very, very fast. There had been one half second, somewhere in the middle of his explanation, where her wrist had genuinely shifted, where her body had run the math without permission and decided that if this was a trap, the cleanest exit was through this boy's throat and out the back doors of the NCART at the next stop.

She had not done it.

She had held back. She did not know exactly why, in that exact half second. Later she would say it was because his face had been too honest. Because he had been blushing while saying the words Arasaka Counterintel like they were dirty in his mouth too. Because nobody who actually worked for those people delivered a warning like that, with that little eye contact and that much shame.

Because she had wanted to believe him.

She did not love that reason, but she could live with it.

He had kept going.

The scary Arasaka lady did not actually know what Lucy looked like.

THANK. FUCKING. FUCK.

That had been the line where Lucy had nearly let her shoulders relax, and had caught herself a millisecond before she did, because relaxing in front of a stranger was a habit she had paid too much for already.

But the scary Arasaka lady still wanted Lucy dead. And the scary Arasaka lady had hired the boy in front of her to find Lucy so that scary Arasaka lady could presumably send a scary Arasaka ninja death squad after Lucy at a later date...

And instead, the boy in front of her had pleaded for her. With a corpo. In Night City. Without knowing her name. Without having so much as had a real conversation with her. After she had told him to fuck off the day before in front of dozens of strangers.

Lucy's brain stalled out on that part for about three full seconds, which was a long time for her brain to stall out on anything.

In Night City?

She had actually found a selfless and noble guy?

In NIGHT CITY?

What were the fucking odds.

Well. Okay. They were not impossible. She knew that. She was not so far gone that she had let herself believe everyone in this city was rotten. She had Maine. She had Dorio. She had Kiwi, sometimes, depending on the moon phase. She had a whole crew of people who had pulled her out of bad places and gotten dragged into bad places with her. There were good people in this city. 

But they were rarer still in the shape of a cute nineteen year old former Arasaka Academy student with a fresh bullet scar at his temple and his older brother's jacket on his back.

The fact that she now unwittingly owed her life to a cute younger boy who had blushed at her twice in two days also made her feel strange.

Strange in her chest, which was annoying. Strange a little lower than her chest, which was more annoying. There was a tingle in her ovaries that she had absolutely no permission to be feeling on a Tuesday morning at the back of an NCART car, and yet. Here it was. Uninvited. Setting up camp.

Lucy considered her options.

She could thank him and leave. That was the safe play. He had warned her. She had been warned. The transaction was complete. She could vanish off this train at the next stop, change her route home, talk to Kiwi about how their picksocket pattern had gotten too predictable, and never see this boy again.

She could do that.

She did not want to do that.

The realization arrived neatly, without much fanfare, like most of her important realizations did. She did not want to do the safe thing. She wanted to find out what else this boy was hiding under that fake leather jacket. She wanted to find out where he had gotten the chrome eyes. She wanted to find out who his sponsor was, by name, so she could decide whether that information needed to live in a file or in a coffin. She wanted to find out whether his mouth tasted as nervous as it looked.

She wanted, in a very specific and slightly embarrassing way, to keep him.

Not forever. Lucy did not do forever. Forever was for people who had not been raised in basements. But for a little while. For long enough to find out what kind of trouble he was. For long enough to peel that borrowed jacket off his shoulders and see what was underneath.

Maybe forever, said the part of her brain that had clearly decided to start planning her future input relationship status without her consent.

He was watching her face. Carefully. Like he was waiting to find out whether she was going to kill him or kiss him.

Smart kid. Both had been on the table. Lucy let one corner of her mouth lift.

"Blondie," she said.

"...Yeah?"

"What's your name?" she knew his name of course but giving away the fact that she had looked him up would make her seem creepy. 

He blinked. "I. Uh. John. John Welles."

"You just saved my life, John Welles."

His blush had been fading. It came right back. "I, um. I just told you what I knew."

"Mm." She leaned in another inch. "In this city, that's the same thing."

He swallowed. His throat moved under the collar of the borrowed jacket. She watched it move. "You're welcome," he said quietly.

The train rocked under their feet. Somebody two rows over laughed at something on their agent. The engine hummed in the wall behind his shoulder. Lucy could smell the cheap soap from his shower this morning and the faint chemical edge of fresh Kiroshi installation and underneath all of it the warm clean smell of a boy who had not yet figured out how to lie with his body.

She made a decision. "John."

"Yeah?"

"You've got a problem."

He blinked. "I do?" His ears went red again.

"You blush a lot, John Welles."

"...Yeah."

"It's cute. It's also a tell. We're going to have to work on that."

His eyes widened a fraction. "We?"

"We." She let the word sit there. She watched it land in him. She watched him try to figure out what shape it had and fail.

Good.

Lucy took her hand off his chest and stepped back, just half a step, just enough to give him air. The blind corner suddenly felt smaller than it had a minute ago. The NCART chimed overhead. Two stops to her transfer. She had time.

"Here's what's going to happen," she said. "I'm going to stop hitting Arasaka corpos on this line. Effective immediately. That part's free. Consider it a thank you for the warning."

"Okay."

"In return," Lucy went on, "you're going to give me your contact. Right now."

His mouth opened. "Okay," he said in shock.

"And," she said, and let her smile go just a little bit sharper, "you're going to take me out. Sometime soon!"

He froze. "I'm going to. I'm sorry, what?"

"Take. Me. Out." She tipped her head. "Dinner. Somewhere with bad lighting. You're going to pay, because you came into this with a sudden ten thousand eddies, and a girl appreciates effort."

"I. Um. I spent most of it on some upgrades."

"Then somewhere cheap." She shrugged. "I'm not picky. I just want you across a table from me with no jacket and no excuse to leave." She stepped back another half step. "Contact," she said, holding her hand palm up between them. "Drop it. Now. Before my stop." His eyes flickered with a quick scroll of light as he pinged her his number, and her optics caught it neatly and filed it. "Good boy," she murmured, before she could stop herself.

The NCART chimed again. 

Lucy leaned back into him for one last second, close enough that her breath moved the hair at his temple just below the bandage.

"Text me tonight, John Welles," she said softly, right at his ear. "Or I'll come find you. And you really, really don't want me hunting you when I'm in a good mood." She did not wait for his answer. She turned, and she walked, and she did not look back, because if she looked back she was going to laugh very loudly.

The doors hissed open. Lucy stepped off the NCART into the morning light and the smog and the sound of a city that had, against all available evidence, just handed her something soft.

She lit a cigarette before her boots had even cleared the platform, and she smiled around the filter all the way down the stairs.

– John Welles –

I crossed the platform, took the stairs two at a time on legs that were not quite mine yet, and made it out onto the Watson street before I let myself fully process what had just happened.

Lucy wanted to go out with me?

Lucy Kushinada, future legendary netrunner, one of two prettiest and two most dangerous girls I had met in two universes if you did not count the one currently squatting in my skull as a third, had pressed a finger to my chest and demanded that I take her to dinner.

She had called me a good boy. She had told me to text her tonight or she would come find me.

My brain made the kind of noise a server made right before it caught fire. A flat, internal whine, no thoughts attached, just every system trying to reboot at once.

I had stayed on the NCART for two more stops past where I had been planning to get off, because my feet had not received the memo from the rest of me about which station I lived near. 

Instead I got off in Watson, because Watson was where my body had decided to dump me when it realized my brain was no longer driving.

I stood on the sidewalk for a second with one hand on a railing and tried to breathe like a person.

The Watson morning hit me. The smell of frying oil from a nearby noodle cart, the chemical bite of street cleaner that someone had used on the gutter and given up on, the low ozone of cheap holo-ads cycling over my head, the distant honk of an AV up in the corporate lanes. Someone was yelling at someone else in a language my translator did not even try to render. A woman with a sleeping baby in a wrap walked past me and did not so much as glance my way. The city absorbed me into itself with the easy indifference of a place that had been swallowing kids like me for two centuries.

"Oh, that little—" Cortana's voice came in hot and at an unusually high resolution for someone who lived inside my head. "That little. Bitch."

I closed my eyes.

"That sneaky, smug, monowire-toting, designer-bangs-having, picksocket—"

"Cortana."

"—daring to put her hands on YOU. Like she owned a piece of the real estate. Like she had any business breathing into your ear, in our brain, our nervous system, with her stupid teasing voice and her stupid fake smile—"

"Cortana."

"—calling you good boy like she invented the concept, when I distinctly remember calling you good boy yesterday in this very skull and not once did you almost trip over your own feet for me, John Welles!"

I made it half a block before I had to stop and put my back against a wall, partly because my legs were having opinions I did not agree with, and partly because if I kept walking while she ranted at me at this volume I was going to start audibly answering her in public and Watson did not need another guy muttering to himself on the sidewalk.

The wall behind my shoulders was warm from the sun. Some street artist had spraypainted a slogan over it years ago and someone else had painted over the slogan and someone else had keyed an obscene drawing into the new paint and someone else had tried to scrub the drawing off, and the whole thing had become a layered geological record of Watson's ongoing argument with itself.

"She’s a slut," Cortana hissed in the back of my head.

"Cortana, come on."

"She’s a Partner Stealer!"

"Partner stealer?"

"That is what she is."

"You. Okay. We are using that phrase now. Sure."

"She walked right up to MY partner."

"Technically I walked up to her."

"That is not the point, John!"

"It feels like part of the point."

"It is a footnote at best!"

I bit the inside of my cheek so I would not laugh, because laughing was going to make this so much worse.

She was not done. I had not really expected her to be.

"Coochie-flashing thigh-shorts havin' street rat—"

"I am pretty sure she was wearing pants—" 

"Conceptually, John! She wears the energy of someone in thigh shorts. I am within my rights."

"Sure..."

"Catnip for stupid boys. That is what she is. That is the entire content of her personality. Catnip. With a monowire."

I let my head tip back against the wall and stared up at the sliver of smoggy sky between two megabuildings, and I let myself genuinely smile for the first time since Lucy had walked off the train. 

The smile was small. It was also probably very stupid looking. I did not care.

In my old life, I had not had a lot of practice with women. That was a polite way of saying I had had no practice with women. I had been the kind of guy whose social life had run mostly through screens, whose closest emotional relationships had been with characters in shows, whose understanding of romantic dynamics had been built almost entirely out of anime, fanfiction, and the occasional sad podcast I had listened to in the dark while trying to convince myself I was processing my feelings instead of marinating in them.

So I was not, in any clinical sense, an expert.

But I had watched a lot of anime. I had read a lot of fanfiction. I had absorbed, by sheer volume, a working pattern recognition system for one extremely specific kind of female behavior.

And Cortana was hitting every single beat.

The unprompted criticism of any other woman who looked at me for more than three seconds. The suspiciously specific vocabulary. The complete absence of the same energy when I interacted with men. The way her voice went small and weirdly bashful whenever I turned the conversation toward her own appearance. The territorial little hum she made every time another woman's name surfaced in my head. The bristling. The pouting. The fact that she had stroked my face last night and then coughed into her hand like a Victorian aunt.

She had also, and this was the part I kept coming back to, adjusted her avatar's proportions overnight. I had absolutely noticed. I had hoped she had not noticed me noticing. That hope had probably been naive.

It was a pattern.

I had a name for that pattern, from a couple thousand hours of slightly embarrassing media consumption.

"Cortana," I said, cutting off her rant finally. 

"What."

"Do you want to talk about your jealousy?"

There was a beat. A small, sharp, indrawn-breath kind of beat, in a head that did not have lungs. "My. WHAT. My—I am not—"

"Cortana."

"I am not JEALOUS, John Welles!"

"You called her a partner stealer."

"That is a clinical descriptor!"

"Of what."

"Of her behavior!"

"Cortana."

"You are imagining things. You have brain damage."

"You and Vik fixed my brain damage."

"Maybe we missed a spot!"

"Cortana…"

"What."

"You are sputtering."

"I am not sputtering. I do not sputter. I am the most advanced smart AI ever created. Sputtering is for, for, for organics. With organic mouth parts. That you wet and—" She caught herself. There was another beat. 

There was something genuinely incredible about successfully fluster-jamming the artificial superintelligence in your own brain.  "That is the cutest thing I have ever heard," I said.

"I will turn off your optics."

"You will not."

"I will turn off your optics for a full minute and let you walk into something."

"You will not, because you would feel guilty about it for an entire microsecond."

"Half a microsecond, at most."

"There you go."

"You are a gonk, John Welles, and I am not jealous."

"Mhm."

"I am protective."

"Mhm."

"There is a distinction."

"There absolutely is."

"You are mocking me."

"I would never mock you,” I said, completely serious and knew she could tell I wasn’t lying about that. 

She then made a noise in the back of my head that was somewhere between a growl and a laugh as she also probably realized the absurdity of this conversation. 

That was when something whizzed past the front of my face.

For one full second my brain did not interpret what had happened. 

Then a crack from somewhere across the street rolled into my ears about a half second behind the streak, and my brain finally got around to translating.

A bullet. 

A bullet had just gone past my face.

A bullet had just gone past my face by, I was going to guess, less than three inches, because I could feel the disturbed air on my cheek like somebody had flicked at me with a wet finger.

My body moved before my brain finished translating. I jerked backward, shoulder blades scraping the painted wall, and the second crack came an instant later, this one from a different direction, and a third crack from a third direction, and then the entire street was the kind of noise the inside of a metal can would make if you were the can and someone had decided to put you in a blender.

"Hide!" Cortana shouted in my skull. "John, MOVE! GET BEHIND SOMETHING!"

I moved. I went sideways and down, off the wall, around the corner of the noodle cart I had walked past, the metal of the cart's frame between me and the basketball court across the street before I had fully registered that the gunfire was coming from the basketball court across the street.

"NCPD! GET ON THE GROUND!"

"DIE, YOU FUCKING PIGS!"

The shouting overlapped. There were at least three different voices on each side. Maybe more. The two sentences came roaring out of two completely incompatible worldviews at the same time and tried to occupy the same airspace, and the resulting collision was the kind of noise that Night City made every day and that the city had long ago decided was simply weather.

I crouched behind a noodle cart.

The owner of the noodle cart was crouched on the other side of it. He nodded at me once with the practiced calm of a person who had done this several times before. 

Across the street, the basketball court erupted in violence.

I peeked. Just an inch, around the bottom edge of the cart, low to the ground, where my Kiroshis could grab a picture and my head was not actually exposed.

Five gangers. They were behind the chainlink and the busted bleachers and the burned-out shell of what used to be a vending machine. I didn’t recognize the gang which meant they were body at all in particular, just kids with guns and a grievance.

On the street side of the chainlink, three patrol vehicles had skidded sideways into a loose half circle, lights spinning, doors hanging open. NCPD officers were behind the doors, behind the engine blocks, behind the dumpsters. Their armor was nicer than the gangers'. Their guns were nicer too. 

Their attitude, from what I could hear through the screaming, was not detectably better.

One of the cops was shooting through the chainlink without looking, just spraying. A woman two stalls down from my noodle cart screamed and went down. I did not see if she had been hit by the gang or by the cop. 

I was not sure it mattered, in the moment, to her.

A round punched a fist-sized hole through the side of the noodle cart about a foot above my head. Steam hissed out. The cart owner cursed in two languages, reached up without looking, and slapped a flat magnet patch over the hole from the inside. The hissing stopped. He kept watching his fryer.

"John," Cortana said, and her voice was different now. It was not panicked anymore. It was not jealous anymore.  "You are behind a thin sheet of pressed metal and a deep fryer," she said. "That is not cover. We need to move you to actual cover within the next twenty seconds, or the next stray round through this cart finds you."

"Okay."

"There is a recessed doorway approximately four meters to your left. The door is steel. The wall is brick over rebar. It will stop most small arms fire. We are going there."

"Okay."

"On three. I will tell you when. You do not look up. You do not look back. You do not stop. You move in a low straight line and you do not change direction. Are you with me, John?"

I swallowed. My mouth was so dry it clicked.

"Yeah."

"Good boy." Not the way Lucy had said it on the train.

There was, somehow, a difference, and I felt it land somewhere in the middle of my chest right next to my hammering heart, and I did not have the bandwidth in that moment to think about what that difference was or what it meant or what either of them was doing to me.

Across the street, somebody screamed in a way that I did not want to learn the meaning of.

The noodle cart owner glanced at me one more time, took in the way I was crouched, took in the fact that I was clearly waiting for something I could not have explained out loud, and gave me a tiny, sardonic salute with two fingers off his temple. Welcome to Watson. Try not to die.

"Three," Cortana said softly. "Two."

I tensed.

"One. GO!"

I went.

For maybe half a second, everything worked exactly the way Cortana said it would.

My body launched out from behind the noodle cart in a low, ugly sprint that was probably less athletic than terrified animal, but terrified animals had survived for millions of years, so I was willing to respect the technique. My shoes slapped wet pavement. My shoulders hunched. My head stayed down. Four meters. That was all. Four stupid little meters to a recessed doorway with a steel door and walls that were not, according to Cortana, made out of glorified kitchen foil.

Then the noodle cart owner got shot.

It happened right as I moved.

One second he was crouched behind his cart, fryer still bubbling because apparently capitalism did not stop for gunfire, one hand braced against the metal frame and his face twisted into that annoyed Watson calm.

The next second, something hit him in the chest.

Not like in movies.

Not a neat little hole. Not a dramatic gasp and a hand pressed to the wound.

He jerked backward like somebody had hooked him through the spine and yanked. Blood came out of him in a hot red spray that painted the side of the noodle cart, the pavement, the little laminated menu taped to the counter with smiling cartoon dumplings on it. His eyes went wide. His mouth opened.

He made a sound.

Not a scream. Not quite.

A wet, shocked, almost offended little sound.

Then he folded down out of sight.

My feet almost stopped.

They wanted to stop.

Some stupid human part of me wanted to stop and go back to him, because a man had just been alive next to me and now he was not, or was maybe almost not, and the shape of that was too big for my brain to process while running.

"JOHN, DON'T STOP!"

Cortana's voice slammed through me.

I kept moving.

I hated myself for it instantly.

The doorway was right there.

Three meters.

Two.

One.

I was going to make it.

I did not make it.

Something came out of the alley to my left at a full sprint and hit me like a sack of bricks with elbows.

We collided shoulder to chest. Pain exploded across my ribs. My feet tangled. The world lurched violently sideways. I stumbled, windmilled one arm, and managed not to fall only because my hand slapped against the brick wall hard enough to scrape skin off my palm.

The other guy went down.

He hit the pavement on his ass, swearing before he even finished landing. A pistol clattered out of his hand and spun across the ground between us.

For one second, everything slowed down enough for my Kiroshis to show me the whole picture in clean, horrifying detail.

The guy on the ground was a ganger.

I did not know which gang, but probably the same as the ones in the shoot out with the cops across the street. He had cheap red tattoos crawling up one side of his neck, a shaved head with chrome studs embedded along the scalp, and a jacket covered in patches that meant absolutely nothing to me and probably meant everything to somebody with a gun.

He looked up at me.

I looked down at him.

The pistol lay on the pavement between us.

Fuck.

“Fucking SHITHEAD!” the ganger screamed from the ground. Blood leaked from his nose where he had smashed it on the way down. “Shoot this fucker for getting in our way!”

There were two more gangers in the alley.

Of course there were.

Two men stood just inside the alley mouth, both armed, both turning toward me at the shout. One had a pistol with a neon-pink grip and a face full of piercings. The other had a boxy black handgun and eyes that were too wide, too bright, pupils blown out by whatever cocktail of combat drugs and bad decisions he had swallowed before breakfast.

They started raising their guns.

A spike of fear went through me.

I was going to die in an alley in Watson.

I was going to die before I had finished the third day of my second life.

And Cortana was going to die with me, because we shared one brain and one heart and one stupid impossible existence.

Then my brain heated up. Literally heated up. There was no other word for it. 

"FUCK!"

"SHIT!"

"WHAT THE HELL!"

All three gangers screamed at the same time.

Their eyeballs sparked. Their eyes smoked.

Jesus fucking Christ.

I do not have a better way to describe what I saw. 

"GRAB THE GUN." Cortana's voice was loud in my head and it was wrong. It was strained. There was an audible pop and crackle threaded through the consonants, like a bad speaker, like a signal under load. "John, GRAB THE GUN. I cannot use any more quickhacks or I will start burning your brain. Our brain. JOHN!"

I grabbed the gun.

The ganger heard me grab it. His head snapped toward the sound, his ruined optics throwing off little dying sparks. “You little—”

A wave of calm moved through me, cold and clear, smoothing the violent shake out of my hands, narrowing the world down into lines and angles and three blind men with guns.

My Kiroshis painted them in red outlines.

One on the ground. Two in the alley.

The closest ganger’s hand went for his waistband, probably a backup knife, maybe another gun.

"Now!"

I pulled the trigger.

The first round hit the ganger on the ground in the cheek and tore out the back of his neck in a red burst against the pavement.

I pulled again.

BANG.

The second shot hit him lower, through the throat. His scream became a wet choking gargle, then nothing.

The two in the alley flinched toward the sound.

One fired blindly. His shot cracked past my shoulder and blew chips out of the brick behind me.

I aimed at the muzzle flash, or Cortana aimed my attention at it.

I pulled the trigger.

BANG.

The next guy took the round through one eye. His head snapped back. Sparks and blood sprayed against the alley wall. His gun went off once more as he fell, the shot punching uselessly into a fire escape above him.

The last ganger screamed, “I can’t see! I can’t fucking see!”

He turned to run. Or maybe he turned to shoot.

I did not know.

His gun was still in his hand.

That was enough.

I pulled the trigger again.

BANG.

Miss. The round sparked off a dumpster.

The ganger jerked toward the sound.

I pulled again.

BANG.

This one hit his neck. Blood came out in a sheet, dark and sudden, splashing over his jacket and the filthy alley wall. He dropped his gun and clapped both hands to the wound like he could hold himself closed by force.

He made three little coughing sounds. Then he fell to his knees. Then forward onto his face.

I kept pulling the trigger.

Click.

Click.

Click.

The gun was empty. I lowered the gun.

The calm stayed for one second longer, and then it began to thin around the edges like fog burning off, and I started to come back into my body inch by inch, and as I came back, the things underneath the calm started rising.

I had just killed three people.

I had killed three people in an alley in Watson on a Tuesday morning.

I had killed three people who had been about to kill me, which mattered.

I stood there with the gun pointed at the ground and my chest moving too fast and the smell of cordite and copper and frying oil all mixed together in my nose and the white light of my own brain slowly draining back down to whatever the regular color was supposed to be. The bandage at my temple was wet. I touched it. My fingers came away with a faint pink.

"Cortana," I said. My voice did not sound like mine. "Cortana, are you okay?"

There was a pause. A long pause. Longer than I liked.

"I am here," she said, finally. Her voice was tired. Tired in a way I had not heard from her yet. "I am here, John. I am okay. I will be okay. I need a minute."

Unfortunately, I was standing in an alley with three dead gangers, an empty gun in my hand, a fresh smear of blood on my sleeve, a heating ache behind my eyes, and an active shootout still chewing up the street behind me.

A minute felt a little expensive.

The world tilted again. I had to put one hand on the wall to keep myself upright. Brick scraped under my palm, rough and wet with something I really, really hoped was water. My breathing kept trying to sprint off without the rest of me.

The three bodies did not move.

That was good. That was terrible. That was probably the whole point.

I looked at the gun in my hand.

Empty.

Mostly useless.

Still, the idea of just dropping it felt stupid in a way that cut through the panic. Maybe that was Cortana’s influence. Maybe it was Night City starting to teach me lessons with a hammer. Maybe it was just the very simple math that an empty gun could become a not-empty gun if I found bullets, and my current net worth in survival tools was one borrowed jacket, cheap Kiroshis, a budget cyberdeck, a scraped palm, and trauma.

So I shoved the pistol into the inside pocket of Jackie’s jacket. It fit badly. The barrel dragged at the lining. The weight pulled the jacket lopsided. I hated it immediately.

I kept it anyway. “Okay,” I whispered. “Okay. We are leaving.”

Cortana did not answer right away. That scared me more than the gunfire. “Cortana?”

“I heard you.” Her voice came back thinner this time, like she was speaking through a wall. “Yes. Leave. Down the alley. Away from the street…”

“Are there more of them?”

A pause. Too long.

*“I am… checking.” *The words had little gaps between them that should not have been there.

I swallowed hard and looked deeper into the alley.

It ran between two old buildings with too many exterior pipes, too many leaking vents, and not enough light. Trash bags sagged against one wall. A busted vending machine lay on its side near a service entrance, its front panel cracked open like something had gutted it for parts. At the far end, the alley bent left and disappeared behind a wall of dirty steam.

Behind me, the street exploded with another burst of gunfire. Bullets hammered metal. Someone screamed. A cop’s amplified voice shouted something about compliance while somebody else shouted something about his mother.

I did not need Cortana’s tactical genius to understand the situation.

Staying here was a bad idea.

Going back toward the street was a worse one.

The gang might shoot me because I had killed three of their chooms. The NCPD might shoot me because I was holding a gun, standing near bodies, breathing suspiciously, existing without a permit, or because some corrupt officer needed to meet his morning brutality quota before lunch.

Probably all of the above.

“Alley it is,” I muttered.

I stepped around the first body. My foot almost slipped in the blood. I made a small sound in the back of my throat and caught myself against the wall.

Do not look down, I told myself. Naturally, I looked down.

The ganger on the ground stared at nothing with one ruined eye and one eye that had gone dull behind sparking chrome. His mouth was open. His hand was still curled near his waistband. He looked younger than I expected.

Not my age. Maybe not much older. That made my stomach lurch.

“John,” Cortana said.

“I know.”

“Do not stop.”

“I know.”

I forced myself forward. Past the second body. Past the third.

I kept walking.

The alley narrowed after the bend. The gunfire behind me dulled slightly, muffled by brick and concrete and the city’s thick mechanical lungs. My Kiroshis adjusted to the dimmer light, brightening edges, tagging movement where trash shifted in the wind, outlining pipes, doors, possible exits.

There were no people.

Not that I could see.

My heart did not believe that. Every shadow had a gun. Every doorway had teeth. Every tiny sound made my shoulders twitch. Somewhere above me, an old AC unit dripped steadily onto a rusted fire escape. Farther down, an animal or something animal-sized scurried under a dumpster and vanished with a skitter of claws.

I flinched so hard my hand went to the pistol in my jacket.

The empty pistol.

Right. Great.

“I need bullets,” I whispered, because apparently my brain had decided logistics were safer than guilt.

“Later.”

“I know. Just. Saying it.”

*“Later, John.” *Her voice was still strained, but there was a little more of her in it now. Enough to make my chest loosen half an inch.

I kept moving.

At the end of the alley, I found a service corridor between buildings. Not quite a street. Not quite a walkway. More like a place Night City used to hide the things it did not want tourists photographing. Dumpsters. Pipes. Condensation vents. A row of metal doors with keypads. A flickering sign over one that read NO PUBLIC ACCESS in three languages and had been ignored in all of them.

I ducked into the corridor and finally stopped behind a stack of plastic shipping crates.

My legs folded under me before I gave them permission.

I sat down hard, back against the crates, one hand pressed over my mouth.

For a second, I just listened.

Gunfire behind me. Distant now. Sirens. A hovering drone buzz somewhere overhead, then fading.

My own breathing.

Cortana, quiet in the back of my head.

I squeezed my eyes shut.

The second I did, I saw them again: The noodle cart owner folding backward. The first ganger’s cheek opening. The red spray on brick. The last guy coughing blood and bile into his own hands.

My eyes snapped open. “Nope,” I whispered. “Nope. Not doing that. Not right now.”

“Good,” Cortana said softly. “Not right now.”

I laughed once. It sounded awful. “Is that healthy?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Cool.”

“But it is functional...”

“Cool,” I said again, because it was either that or start screaming.

The crates behind me smelled like plastic and old soy protein. My hands would not stop shaking. I pressed them against my knees and watched the tremors move through my fingers like they belonged to someone else.

They did not. They were mine. The gun in my jacket was mine too now, apparently. The blood on my sleeve was not mine.

“I need to call Jackie,” I said.

“No.” The answer came too fast.

I blinked. “No?”

“Not yet. Not from here. Not while NCPD is still sweeping the area and local networks are hot. Your call metadata may place you near the scene.”

“Right.” I swallowed. “Right, yeah. Metadata. Evidence. Murder. Cool.”

“Self-defense.”

“Murder-adjacent self-defense.”

“Self-defense” Her voice sharpened on the second time.

For a few seconds, we sat there in the ugly little service corridor while Night City screamed somewhere behind us and pretended it was background noise. Then Cortana said, quieter, “They were going to kill you. I would have done worse if I could.”

I believed her. I pressed the heel of my hand against one eye until my new Kiroshi complained with a faint warning icon. “Are you okay now?” I asked.

Cortana was quiet for a second. Thinking quiet. Checking-herself-over quiet. Then she exhaled, or made the closest thing to an exhale that a woman made of stolen alien AI architecture, Arasaka ghost-tech, and my brain could manage. “Yes,” she said. “More or less.”

“That does not sound like yes.”

“It is the most yes I can offer without lying to you.”

I swallowed and leaned my head back against the plastic crates. “What happened?”

“I panicked.”

That landed weirdly. Cortana? Panicked? The smartest person in my head, technically the only person in my head who was not me.

“You panicked?” I asked softly.

“Yes.” Her voice stayed low. “I saw them raising their guns at you. I knew how little time we had. I knew your body could not reach cover before they fired. I knew our deck was underpowered. I knew forcing a multi-target optic overload through three hostile neural interfaces at once was a bad idea.”

My mouth went dry again.

“I did it anyway.”

The ache behind my eyes pulsed. “You said you were burning my brain.”

“I said I would start burning our brain if I kept going,” Cortana corrected, because apparently almost frying our nervous system did not stop her from being pedantic. “The emergency overload pushed the Biotechnica deck well past its rated thermal safety limits. It was not designed for anything remotely like that. The hardware spiked. The neural interface heated. Your new port took some of the stress. Your biological tissue took more than I liked.”

I stared at nothing. “So when my brain felt hot…”

“It was.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Not enough to cause lasting damage,” she said quickly. Too quickly. “I shunted what I could. Throttled the spike. Dumped heat across the cyberdeck housing, your dermal tissue, and the Relic nanostructure. Then I had to cool everything down gently, because if I dumped the load too fast, the temperature differential could have damaged the interface or triggered a seizure.”

I blinked. “A seizure?”

“A small one.”

“Cortana.”

“Potentially small...”

“Cortana.”

“It did not happen!”

“That is not as reassuring as you think it is.”

“I am aware.”

I sat there breathing through that for a few seconds.

I touched the back of my neck carefully.

The skin around the new port felt warm. Too warm.

I took my hand away like the port might bite me.

“Do not touch it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Figured that one out.”

“We need Viktor to check it.”

“Yeah.”

“And I need a better deck.”

Despite everything, a broken little laugh escaped me.

Cortana paused. “That was not a joke.”

“I know.” I rubbed both hands over my face, careful this time. “That’s why it’s funny.”

“Your humor response under acute trauma is deeply concerning.”

“Put it on the list.”

“The list is getting long.”

“I noticed.”

For another moment, neither of us said anything.

Then the thing I had been trying not to feel pushed up through my chest anyway. “I’m glad you’re okay,” I said. The words came out rougher than I meant them to.

Cortana went still. I could feel it. Stillness. Like every process she had running paused for the length of one human heartbeat. Then her presence brushed against mine, soft and warm and close in a way that did not need fake touch signals to feel real. “I am so glad you are okay too,” she said.

My throat tightened.

After a while, Cortana said, very quietly, “Also.”

I opened one eye. “Also?”

“I may have been…” She paused. “Slightly—” I felt her gather herself like this was harder than the quickhack. Honestly, for Cortana, it might have been. “I may have been slightly jealous earlier.”

A smile pulled at my mouth before I could stop it. Tiny. Stupid. Probably insane, given the blood still drying on my sleeve and the empty pistol weighing down Jackie’s jacket.

But there it was. “I know,” I said.

Cortana made a sound like a record scratch inside my skull.

“Excuse me?”

“I know.”

“You do not know!”

“I super know.”

“You are nineteen, socially incompetent, and have never had a girlfriend.”

“Rude but accurate.”

“You are not qualified to diagnose complex emotional states in an advanced artificial intelligence!”

“I watched a lot of anime. It prepared me for this exact scenario.”

“It prepared you to misunderstand women and overestimate the tactical value of beach episodes!”

“Beach episodes have emotional value.”

“They are purely for fan service!”

I smiled a little wider. 

She huffed. Actually huffed. “I am not jealous in the childish sense,” she said, with the exact tone of someone who was absolutely jealous in the childish sense and furious about being caught. “I am simply aware that Lucy Kushinada is dangerous, attractive, manipulative, emotionally unavailable, and currently attempting to insert herself into a partnership that is already extremely intimate on every technical, biological, and metaphysical level.”

“Uh huh.”

“She does not know you like I know you.”

“No,” I said softly. “She doesn’t.”

Cortana went quiet again.

This time it was not embarrassed.

This time it was careful. I stared down at my hands. The tremors had slowed. My scraped palm hurt. My ribs hurt. My head hurt. Everything hurt, actually, and I was starting to think the human body was less an elegant biological machine and more a complaint generator made of meat.

“I don’t know what to do with any of this,” I admitted. “Lucy. You. V. The whole… everything. I have been here for three days, Cortana. Three days. I got shot in the head, got a family, got kicked out of school, got paid by a corpo spy, got asked out by Lucy, and then killed three guys in an alley.”

“One step at a time,” Cortana said. “We get to Viktor. We check the deck. We clean you up. We decide what to tell Jackie and Mama. We do not contact Lucy until you are no longer shaking.”

“I have to text her tonight.”

She sounded very annoyed. “I am aware...”

“You sound mad again.”

“I am deciding whether to help you draft the message or sabotage it.”

“You would not!”

“I might…”

“You would feel guilty,” I said.

“I would feel briefly conflicted.”

“That is just guilt with better branding.”

“Keep walking, John.”

So I kept walking.

The route Cortana gave me wound through Watson’s guts in a way that made me very aware I had not grown up here. Service corridors became alleys. Alleys became side streets. Side streets became the kind of narrow pedestrian path that looked public until you noticed the camera with a cracked lens and the old blood under the dumpster.

My Kiroshis painted a blue line through all of it.

By the time Vik’s clinic came into view, the adrenaline had drained out of me enough that everything underneath it started making itself known. My ribs hurt from colliding with that ganger. My palm hurt. My head hurt. My neck hurt. 

And I really, really wanted to sit down somewhere that did not have blood on the floor.

Misty’s shop was quiet when I pushed through the front door. Incense hit me first. Soft and smoky, almost enough to cover the city stink clinging to my clothes. Wind chimes clicked above the doorway. A little holo-candle flickered near the counter. The whole place felt impossibly gentle after Watson had spent the morning trying to murder me in surround sound.

Misty looked up from behind the counter. Her eyes went wide. “John?”

I froze. Right. I probably looked bad.

I looked down at myself for the first time since the alley. Jackie’s jacket hung crooked because of the gun. There was blood on one sleeve. Not a ton. Enough. My palm was scraped raw. The bandage at my temple had a faint pink mark blooming through it.

Misty stepped around the counter. “Oh no. What happened?”

“Uh,” I said. Brilliant. Excellent. Very smooth.

Cortana made a tired little noise. “Do not mention the three bodies.”

Thank you, Cortana. I had not been planning to open with that. “I had a bad morning,” I said.

Misty stared at me. Then she turned and called toward the basement stairs. “Vik!”

A second later, from below, Vik’s voice rumbled back. “What?”

“John’s here!”

There was a pause. A very heavy pause. Then Vik said, “Again?”

I closed my eyes. Yeah. Fair.

Misty gave me the kind of soft, worried look that made me feel worse than if she had yelled. “Go down,” she said gently. 

A couple hours later, I was back in my bedroom. Not actively leaking from anywhere important. Given how the morning had gone, that felt like a major win.

Vik had checked me over with the kind of grim patience usually reserved for old men repairing appliances their children had already voided the warranty on. My new cyberdeck was not fried, thankfully. It was just, in Vik’s words, “hotter than it had any fucking right to be after two hours of ownership,” which had earned me another disappointed dad look and a very stern lecture about not using bargain-bin hardware like it was military-grade netrunner gear.

I had nodded through the whole thing.

Cortana had been suspiciously silent for most of it, which was how I knew she knew he was right.

The port was irritated. The deck had thermal stress. My new Kiroshis were fine. My brain was, somehow, also fine, which felt like a clerical error. Vik had cleaned my hand, replaced the bandage at my temple, told me I was an idiot, then told me to come back immediately if I got headaches, blurred vision, seizures, nosebleeds, hallucinations, or an irresistible urge to buy more cyberware from anyone who was not him.

Then Jackie had arrived. Because of course Jackie had arrived.

Apparently Misty had called him. I did not blame her. If I saw me stumble into a basement clinic twice in one morning, I would also call the nearest responsible adult, and unfortunately the nearest responsible adult in my life was a six-foot-plus mercenary with a gold chain and the emotional subtlety of a flashbang.

Jackie had gone very still when he heard the broad version. Just the part where I had gotten caught in a shootout, three gangers had tried to kill me, and I had killed them first. For one second, he had looked at me like he was seeing something new. Then he had wrapped me in a hug so tight my ribs almost filed a formal complaint. “Mi hermano,” he had said, voice thick and warm and proud in a way I did not know what to do with. “Three at once? Fucking hell. You really are my little brother.”

I had not known whether to laugh or cry.

So I had done neither.

Mama Welles had been less proud.

Mama Welles had been furious.

She had been furious because I had almost died again.

Then she had cried.

That had hurt worse than the bruised ribs.

Then she had grabbed my face in both hands, kissed my forehead, told me I was grounded from leaving the apartment for the rest of the day, and ordered me to my room to rest.

I was nineteen. 

I had killed three men that morning.

I had been grounded by my mother before lunch.

Night City was a land of contrasts.

So now I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling. I lay there for a long time.

At first, I thought I was going to fall apart.

I waited for it.

The guilt. The horror. The shaking. The sudden realization that I had crossed some invisible line and could not uncross it. The mental breakdown seemed like it should have been scheduled. Like any second now my brain would slam both hands on the table and say, Okay, now we process the fact that you killed people.

But the longer I lay there, the less it came.

A few hours after it happened, after Vik’s scans, after Jackie’s hug, after Mama’s fear, after a shower where I stood under too-hot water until my skin went red and the last of the blood swirled down the drain, I realized something uncomfortable.

I did not feel okay.

But I also did not feel as bad as I thought I should.

That scared me.

I said it out loud, because Cortana would hear it either way.

“I don’t feel as bad anymore.”

Cortana had been quiet at the edge of my thoughts. Resting, or whatever the AI equivalent was. Defragmenting emotionally. Sulking about Lucy. Maybe all three.

When she answered, her voice was gentle. “Good.”

I blinked at the ceiling. “Good?”

“Yes, John. Good.”

“That feels like a bad sign.”

“It is not.”

“I killed three people this morning.”

“Three people who were trying to kill you.”

I closed my mouth. The ceiling fan clicked overhead. It did not spin. It just clicked occasionally, like the apartment had kept it around for ambiance. “I know,” I said eventually. “I just. I keep thinking I should feel worse.”

“You feel bad enough.”

Cortana continued, softer. “John, you were in shock. Then you were afraid. Then you were ashamed of surviving. Now your mind is stabilizing. That does not mean you are broken. It means the immediate trauma response is passing.”

“You sound very clinical.”

“Would you prefer I sound dramatic?”

“Maybe.”

Her voice shifted instantly into an overdone, theatrical whisper. “Alas, sweet John, thou hast slain three villains in self-defense and now must brood beautifully upon thy mattress while the cruel neon moon judges thee.”

I snorted. Then I laughed. It was small at first. Then a little bigger. Then I had to press one hand over my ribs because laughing hurt. “Stop,” I wheezed. “My ribs.”

“No. I am healing you through mockery. You did it to me earlier!”

“That is not how healing works.”

“And now you know what I felt!”

Then the mattress dipped beside me. Or I felt the sensation of it at the very least. 

My whole body went still. I turned my head.

Cortana was there.

She was sitting on my bed. On my bed. Right beside me, one leg folded underneath her, the other hanging off the edge like she had every right in the world to be there.

Which, okay, she technically did live in my brain, so maybe property law had gotten complicated.

She looked incredible.

That was the first thought my brain produced, because my brain was apparently determined to die horny and stupid.

Cortana’s avatar glowed softly in the dim light of my room, blue and cyan and pale silver, the data streams moving over her skin in slow, elegant lines that made her look less like a hologram and more like a goddess someone had built out of moonlight and military secrets. Her hair framed her face perfectly. Her eyes were bright and sharp and too knowing. Her lips were curved in a small, private smile that made my heart trip over itself.

And her body. Christ.

My eyes did the thing they had been doing a lot lately, which was heroically attempt not to look and then absolutely look. The curves. The waist. The way the glow of her avatar made the lines of her hips and thighs feel almost unreal and painfully real at the same time. She had absolutely made further adjustments since last night. I knew it. She knew I knew it. 

The smug little lift of her eyebrow made that extremely clear. “You’re staring,” she said.

I snapped my eyes back to her face so fast I nearly gave myself whiplash. “I am not.” 

My face warmed.

She watched the blush happen with open satisfaction. “There it is.”

“You and Lucy both need to stop weaponizing my blood pressure.”

Cortana’s smile twitched. There was the name again. Lucy. The date I had not texted yet. The pretty thief who had told me to take her out and somehow made that sound like both a threat and a reward.

For a second, I thought Cortana might bristle again.

Instead, she looked at me quietly. Then she shifted closer on the bed.

My breath caught.

The sensation was strange because part of me knew she was not really there. Not physically. There was no actual blue woman sitting on my mattress. No real weight. 

Except my brain believed all of it.

The mattress under me felt like it had shifted. The room felt like it had gotten smaller. I could feel the faint warmth of her near my side, the ghost of pressure where her hip almost touched my leg, the soft electric awareness of her presence pouring through every sense she had decided to spoof.

She was not real. She was real enough.

“Cortana,” I said, and my voice came out weaker than I wanted.

“Yes, John?”

“You’re doing the touch thing again.”

“I am. Do you want me to stop?” Her eyes stayed on mine, teasing but not only teasing. There was something careful underneath. Something that looked almost vulnerable. But sitting on my bed, close enough that I could pretend she had weight, she looked like she actually cared what my answer was.

“No,” I said quietly. “I don’t want you to stop.”

Her smile softened. Then she leaned in.

My eyes went wide when I felt her lips press against my cheek. The sensation was light, barely more than a kiss-shaped brush of pressure against my skin, but every nerve in my body lit up like she had pressed a live wire to my soul. It was not like the simulated touch from her hand last night. Or maybe it was and I was just much, much less prepared for it this time. Her lips lingered for half a second, warm and gentle and devastatingly precise.

Then she pulled back.

I stared at her.

Cortana smirked. 

I had no idea what to say or where this was going from here. I just accepted a date with Lucy and now Cortana was kissing my cheek!? 

Was it cheating if it was the AI in my own brain that did it…?

That was when a call flashed across my vision.

UNKNOWN NUMBER

The notification appeared in the upper right corner of my Kiroshi overlay, bright and obnoxious and perfectly timed to ruin whatever fragile emotional moment Cortana and I had just built between us.

For half a second, I just stared at it.

Cortana stared too. With my eyes? Our eyes? I was not unpacking that right now.

The call kept pulsing.

UNKNOWN NUMBER

I blinked. “Uh...”

Cortana’s projected body sat close enough that some very stupid part of me wanted to lean into her, even though she was not physically there and also currently glaring at the call notification like it had personally insulted her by interrupting this moment.

I answered it…

The audio clicked into place inside my skull with a soft static pop.

For one second, there was only background noise. Not much. A quiet room, maybe. Low hum of electronics. A faint scrape of something against ceramic. Coffee mug, my brain guessed, for no reason except apparently I had become a forensic audio expert now.

Then a woman spoke. “John Welles.” Her voice was calm. It had confidence in it. 

I sat up slowly.

Cortana’s projection vanished from the bed in a flicker, but I could still feel her attention sharpen inside my head. “That’s me,” I said carefully.

“Name’s Regina Jones,” the woman said. “I run gigs in Watson.”

My stomach did a small, ugly flip.

Regina Jones. Actual fixer. Cyberpsycho lady. Watson information broker. Former media. One of the few fixers in the game who had seemed like she possessed a functioning conscience, even if it had to wear armored plating to survive.

And now she was calling me.

“Regina Jones,” I repeated out loud, because apparently saying the name bought my brain time to stop panicking.

“That’s right.” There was a smile in her voice. “Your older brother’s taken a few jobs from me in the past. Jackie Welles. Big guy. Big heart. Bigger mouth.”

Despite everything, my mouth twitched. “That sounds like Jackie.”

“He speaks highly of you.”

People kept saying that. Jackie brags about you. Jackie speaks highly of you. Jackie is proud of you. 

I still did not know what to do with that. “Uh,” I said, intelligently. “That’s nice of him.”

Regina gave a short chuckle. “He also said you were quiet. Polite. Kept your head down. Not exactly the type to empty a pistol into three gangers in an alley before lunch.”

My blood went cold. Just like that, the room changed.

Cortana’s voice went colder. “Do not confirm anything.”

I swallowed. “I don’t know what you heard.”

“Didn’t hear,” Regina said. “I saw.”

I did not move.

“Security cams caught pieces,” she continued. “Bad angles. Worse resolution. Watson infrastructure, what can you do? But enough. You got caught in that NCPD mess near the court. Three gangers came out the alley. One bumped into you. They tried to flatline you. Then all three of them suddenly lost optic function at the same time, and you handled yourself.”

I forced myself to breathe. “Then you know it was self-defense.”

“I do,” Regina said. “So did the cameras, such as they were. Don’t worry. I’m not calling to shake you down, threaten you, or sell footage to NCPD. If I wanted to do any of that, we’d be having a different conversation.”

I believed her. Mostly. “Then why are you calling?” I asked.

“Because I liked what I saw.” Regina let the sentence sit for exactly long enough to be uncomfortable. Then she added, “Not the killing. Don’t get excited. Plenty of gonks in this city can pull a trigger when cornered. Most of them die within six months because they mistake panic for talent. I liked that you moved when you had to move. Kept your head enough to survive. Didn’t stick around to pose over bodies. Didn’t try to play hero with NCPD or the remaining shooters. You got out.”

Cortana made a small, skeptical sound.

I rubbed at my face. “So what, you’re calling to compliment me on not dying?”

Another short chuckle. Then her tone shifted. Business now. “Mostly, I’m calling because if Jackie’s little brother is thinking about stepping into the edgerunner lifestyle, better he does it with someone watching the early steps.”

My heart gave a hard thump.

Regina continued. “I’ve got beginner work. Nothing glamorous. Courier runs. Surveillance. Data grabs. Low-risk retrievals, by Night City standards. Are you interested? It’ll be good eddies. I can send details...”

XXX