Chipping In! 43 (Patreon)

Chapter 43:

– John Welles –

The next day.

My Cthulhu sat in the alley behind the Coyote with its hood popped open.

I stood over it with my arms crossed, nodding slowly at the engine in the way I'd seen Jackie and V do it—the way men in every universe nodded at engines. 

It was supposed to communicate expertise. What it actually communicated, if anyone had been paying attention, was that I had no idea what I was looking at. 

There was a big block of metal in the middle. There were hoses. Some of the hoses went to other hoses. One part was shiny and new where everything around it was scorched, which I assumed was good, or at least better than the alternative.

Two days ago this car had spent a night parked three blocks from a gang war while Pacifica burned around it. It had come back to us with two bullet holes in the rear quarter panel, a cracked taillight, something ugly in the undercarriage that had made a sound like a dying animal every time I touched the brakes, and a layer of soot so thick that Rebecca had written WASH ME, GONK on the back window with her finger. 

"Miguel did good work, hermano." Jackie's voice came from inside the garage, where the roll-up door was open and he was crouched beside his Arch. He ran a hand along the tank and I watched his shoulders ease. "Got our rides patched up right. Didn't even gouge us on the parts."

"He gouged us a little," I said. Dude charged me freaking 10k eddies!

"A little is fair. A little is respect." He stood, wiping his palms on his jeans. "A lot would've meant he didn't like us."

I guess that was true. That's a very Night City way to look at an invoice though.

I turned back to my engine and resumed nodding. I loved this car. I loved it with the embarrassing, uncomplicated love of a nineteen-year-old who had been handed something fast and black with doors that opened upward. V had talked the price down for me with a combination of technical criticism and shameless cleavage, and it had never once let me down.

I also could not have told you where the oil went.

In my first life I'd had a hand-me-down sedan and a membership at a car wash. In this one I'd inherited the body of a kid who'd taken the NCART to school every day. Between the two of us there was not a single qualified mechanic.

Which was why Cortana was standing on the other side of the hood.

She'd dressed for the occasion. She wore a mechanic's coverall in Cthulhu black, unzipped to the waist and tied off there by the sleeves, with a grease-smudged white tank top underneath that she had absolutely designed to be one size too small. A smear of oil ran along one blue cheekbone. Her hair was pulled back under a backward cap with the Quadra logo on it. She had a rag tucked into her back pocket that she had no use for whatsoever.

She leaned over the engine with her elbows on the fender, and I lost track of the hoses entirely.

She smirked at me. "Eyes on the car, Spartan."

You're the one blocking my view of the car.

"I'm improving your view of the car." She didn't look up. Her eyes were moving in the small, flicking pattern they made when she was pulling data through my Kiroshis faster than I could have read it, and I felt the faint pressure behind my optics that meant she was running a deep scan. "Compression is even across all cylinders. Coolant pressure nominal. He replaced the whole rear brake assembly rather than patching it, which is more than I expected from a man who works out of a shipping container. The suspension mount that was making that noise has been welded and reinforced." A pause. "Everything seems to be in working order."

You sound disappointed.

"I was hoping to find something I could fix myself." She straightened and gave the engine a small, approving pat that I felt as warmth against my own palm, a ghost of contact through our shared nerves. "I have a lab full of fabrication equipment and a partner who keeps driving through barricades. I'd like to earn my keep."

You rebuilt my skeleton last week.

"Yes, and it was very satisfying. I'd like to do it again, but to something with wheels." She tugged the rag out of her back pocket, finally found a use for it, and wiped the oil off her cheek. It came away clean and she looked faintly pleased with the realism. "For now, your car is fine. Your brother's bike is fine. Nothing is leaking, nothing is cracked, and nothing is going to fall off at a hundred and twenty."

Good. I closed the hood. 

I walked over to the garage, wiping my hands on my jeans even though I hadn't touched anything greasy, and leaned against the doorframe. Jackie had moved on to polishing a spot on the Arch's tank that was already clean.

"Thanks for handling all that," I said. "The cars. I know you've had your hands full."

"De nada." He didn't look up. "Miguel owed me one anyway. And I couldn't let you drive around with wash me, gonk on the back window. Mama would've thought it was a cry for help."

"It was a little bit of a cry for help." I think that’s what Rebecca was going for.

He snorted. I let the quiet sit for a second, listening to the alley. Somewhere out on the street a delivery drone whined past. Inside the Coyote, through the back wall, I could hear Gloria laughing at something and the clink of glasses being racked. My hearing picked up all of it now whether I wanted it to or not.

"Jackie," I said. "You okay?"

He stopped polishing. "What?"

I repeated myself. "Are you okay."

"Why wouldn't I be okay?" He stood up a little too fast and the rag flapped in his hand. "I'm great. I'm fantastic. Bike's fixed. Your car's fixed. Nobody's shooting at us right now. Why would you even ask me that, hermano, that's a weird thing to ask a man in his own garage."

I smirked at him. "Because you fainted last night."

“...”

“...”

He didn’t meet my eyes. "I did not faint. Men do not faint…"

"You went down like a tree, Jackie. Mama said Rogue is John's grandmother and you made a noise like a kettle and then you were on the kitchen floor." I shook my head slowly, still grinning. "I'd honestly never seen anyone actually faint from shock before. I thought that was just a thing in anime. Somebody gets surprising news, their eyes go white, little spiral in the background, they tip over. I didn't think real people did it."

"Your own reaction wasn't that far off, you know." Cortana was leaning against the Cthulhu behind me, arms folded over the too-small tank top, enjoying herself. "You dented a steel table with your bare hand and then I had to walk you through breathing exercises on a balcony. And may I remind you that a few weeks ago, you saw a number on your bank account and did the same thing.”

That was different.

“How?”

That was money. Money is scary.

“Uh-huh.”

And I didn’t hit the floor. V caught me. I even got a lap pillow out of it!

Cortana let out some huffs in my mind at the memory.

Jackie had gone a little red under his brown. He put a hand on his chest. "It's still amazing, John. I keep waking up and remembering it. We're familia with Rogue."

"Technically I'm familia with Rogue. You're familia with me," I corrected him.

"Same thing. That's how familia works." He pointed at me. He rubbed his jaw. "You know what this means, though. Right? You know what this means for us?"

I stared at him. "I have a feeling you're about to tell me."

"She's gonna hook us up." He spread his hands. "The best J.O.B.s in the city, hermano. The real ones. We're family. She's gonna look at a contract and go, hmm, who do I trust with this, and she's gonna think of her grandson and his very handsome, very capable brother. We’re getting all the best gigs from here on out."

I snorted. "EH—probably not."

He deflated an inch. "What do you mean probably not?"

“Because she’s spent fifty-three years making sure nobody knew she had a family.” I shrugged. “She raised my dad in secret because she was afraid Arasaka would come for him. If she starts handing her grandson every premium gig in Night City, every fixer and corpo with half a brain will start asking why. Her enemies would figure it out in a week. The whole point is that nobody’s supposed to know.”

Jackie sighed. It was deep and theatrical and full of loss—the sigh of a man watching a golden future crumble before his eyes.

"Is that my boyfriend I hear making disappointed noises?" Misty stepped in from the alley with her hands in her jacket pockets, and smiled at Jackie like the lights had just come on.

I knew that look. Not hers. His. It was the one I felt on my own face whenever Lucy came around a corner, or V leaned into a doorway, or Cortana decided to show up dressed as a mechanic. Everything else in the room went soft. 

Jackie didn't say a word. He grinned, crossed the garage in three strides, and picked Misty up like she weighed nothing, which to him she probably did. Her boots left the concrete.

She squealed a happy undignified sound, and kicked her feet. 

"They're sweet," Cortana said, in the tone of a woman filing something away to use against me later. "...You could pick me up like that."

You don't weigh anything…

"That's not the point of being picked up..."

Jackie set her down. Misty smoothed her jacket, then came over and hugged me, quick and warm. Sister-hug, not girlfriend-hug. The difference was obvious if you'd been on the receiving end of both.

"Hi, Misty."

"Hi, John." She stepped back and looked me over, head tilted, and the smile went gentle. "I'm glad you're doing better.” She smacked me on the shoulder! 

The left one. I grunted.

"Stop showing up at the clinic half dead!" Misty said. "Vik's not young anymore. Every time you come down those stairs bleeding, he loses a year. I'm going to run out of ripperdoc."

"I'll try harder not to," I said, rubbing the spot. "...Big sis."

Jackie made a noise like a stepped-on cat. “Big what?” he sputtered. “Hermano, what did you just—big sis?”

Misty’s cheeks went pink, but her smile was soft and pleased and a little shy. I could see her remembering our talk in the shop before the Pacifica job, when she’d said she thought of me as a little brother and then admitted, blushing, that she might really be my big sister someday if things with Jackie kept going well.

She didn’t explain it to Jackie. She just squeezed my arm once, gently this time, and looked at me like I’d given her something.

“Wait, wait, wait.” Jackie pointed between the two of us. “When did this happen? Why does he get to call you that? Are you two talking about me behind my back?”

““Yes,”” Misty and I said at the same time.

Jackie threw his hands up in despair. Cortana laughed so hard her projection flickered.

Misty patted my cheek, then tilted her head and gave me that unfocused, looking-through-you stare she sometimes got. It always made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, even though Cortana insisted auras were statistically meaningless. 

“Your aura looks much healthier,” she said after a moment. “The haze is still there, around the edges. There’s some gray in it. Grief, maybe.” Her eyes softened. “But it’s not choking you anymore. Not perfect, of course. But nobody’s is.” 

My throat went tight for a second. Nadia’s face flickered through my head. She’d smirked at me across Dex’s ballroom, and then said well, fuck with three claws through her chest.

“She’s got good instincts for a statistical anomaly,” Cortana murmured, quieter now. Her hand settled on my back, warm and steady.

“Thanks, Misty,” I managed.

Misty then turned to Jackie, who had managed to close his mouth. “So. Ready for our date?” she asked him.

“I’m ready.” The grin came back, then faltered, and he turned to me with the nervous look he got when he was about to ask for something he thought he shouldn’t. He scratched the back of his neck. “Listen, hermano. I forgot to ask. I know it just got fixed. But—” He waved at the alley, at the black shape sitting out there with its hood closed. “Can I borrow your ride? Just for today. You can take the Arch if you need to go anywhere. I’ll bring the Cthulhu back without a scratch. Swear on Mama.”

Misty was trying not to look like she wanted the answer to be yes. She was bad at it. The bike was great, but there was a difference between a girl on the back of a motorcycle hanging on for her life and a girl in the passenger seat of a car with doors that opened upward. 

Jackie knew it. Misty knew it. Jackie knew Misty knew it.

I looked at my car. I looked at my brother. I smiled and tossed him the key shard. “Go ahead,” I said. “Just don’t let her do a tarot reading in the front seat. I don’t know what happens if she pulls the Death card at sixty miles an hour.”

“The Death card means transformation,” Misty said primly. “Not literal death…”

I spent the first ten minutes almost humiliating myself as I learned to ride a motorcycle properly.

I stalled the Arch twice in the alley behind the Coyote. The first time, it lurched forward like a startled animal and died with an offended cough. The second time, I gave it too much throttle and nearly put the front tire through Jackie's garage door. 

Misty watched from the passenger seat of my car with her hand over her mouth while Jackie leaned out the driver's window yelling advice like "Gentle, hermano! She's a lady!" until Misty finally made him drive away.

"Clutch," Cortana said patiently, for the third time. "Ease it out. Don't dump it."

I'm easing.

"You're dumping. I can feel your left hand, John. That's a dump."

It's an aggressive ease.

"It's a dump." She didn't take over. Instead, she settled into the edges of my motor cortex the way she had on the rooftop with David. She was a quiet presence just behind my own intentions, adjusting a few millimeters here and tensing a muscle there. 

When I let the clutch out the third time, I felt the exact moment it caught, and the bike rolled forward as smoothly as water.

"There," she said. "Feel that? That's the friction point. Remember it."

And I did. My body learned now in a way it never had before. Every correction she made and every wobble I recovered from sank in and stayed. 

By the time I turned out of the alley, I'd stopped thinking about the clutch. By the time I merged onto the main road out of Heywood, I'd stopped thinking about the gears. By the time I hit the highway, I was weaving between a Thorton delivery truck and a bus full of tired commuters at seventy miles an hour. 

Her corrections came less and less often, until I couldn't tell whether she was still helping or whether I'd just figured it out.

"You're a natural," she said.

Am I? Or are you cheating?

"Both. Mostly you." 

The city thinned around us. The megabuildings fell behind, the ads grew sparse, and the traffic dwindled to the occasional truck bound for the Badlands. The air changed too. It turned drier and warmer, and it lost the chemical bite of Night City. 

And I could feel her.

She had projected herself onto the seat behind me, back in her black netrunner bodysuit, her short hair whipping in a wind that existed only for her. Her arms were wrapped tight around my waist, her breasts pressed against my back, and her chin rested on my good shoulder. She had made every point of contact warm and solid. 

If I hadn't known better, I'd have sworn a real woman was riding pillion with me.

But beneath the touch was something deeper pouring through our shared mind. There was happiness and love. Under both of those there was contentment.

It filled me up until I was grinning into the wind like an idiot. You're really happy right now…

"I am," she admitted. Her arms tightened. "Is that strange?"

No. It's nice. I like you feeling it.

She was quiet for a long stretch of road. The desert scrolled past in cracked earth, scrub brush, and the skeletal frames of dead billboards. Then she said, almost shyly, "I'm the first."

The first what?

"The first of your girls to ride a motorcycle with you." I felt her smile against the back of my neck. 

I laughed, and the wind snatched it away. Is that what this is about?

"No—Yes—A little…" She nuzzled into my shoulder. 

Something caught in my chest. I eased off the throttle, letting the Arch settle from a roar into a comfortable rumble, and reached back to cover her hand where it rested against my stomach. It's yours, I told her. First ride. All yours.

Her contentment flared but then she laughed. "Two hands on the handlebars, please," she said, a little thickly. "I didn't rebuild your entire skeleton so you could die on a borrowed motorcycle being romantic."

I put my hand back.

Rocky Ridge rose out of the desert about an hour later. Nobody lived there and nobody watched it, which was the whole point.

I rolled Jackie’s bike into the shadow of the old garage close to where we hid our next ride. Our AV that would take us to our secret Villain Lair in the mountains. Cortana had some stolen technology we risked our lives to acquire. 

And she wanted to get started as soon as possible on cracking it open and turning it into our new Cyberdeck. 

– Rebecca –

Rebecca was having some serious déjà vu.

She crouched behind a rusted-out dumpster at the edge of a cracked parking lot. In front of her loomed a chemical plant. Steam leaked from a vent on the roof. Somewhere inside, a forklift beeped as it backed up.

It wasn't the same chemical plant. The one she'd raided with John a couple of weeks ago had been in Northside, and it had been bigger and uglier, and it had ended up on fire. 

But it was close enough. Damn, Rebecca thought, chewing her lip. Night City sure has a lot of chemical plants, doesn't it?

She tried to count how many she'd seen in her life and got to seven before she lost track. Were there more chemical plants than ripperdocs? More than noodle stands? Who was buying all these chemicals? Was it all going into the synth-meat? Because that would explain so much about the synth-meat—

"Rebecca!" someone called out to her.

Rebecca blinked. V was crouched beside her.

"Yeah?" Rebecca asked. "Totally listening. Hundred percent!"

V stared at her. "What did I just say?"

"Uh." Rebecca glanced at Lucy, who was crouched on V's other side and looking deeply unhelpful. "Something—something—Chemicals?"

Lucy snorted.

V sighed through her nose. The Counterintelligence voice came out, the flat, crisp one that made Rebecca feel like she was being interrogated even when V was only telling her where to stand. "Let me try again," V said. "Lucy and I are both netrunners. We're going in through the back. Cortana sent us a shopping list—" she tapped her temple, and a little holographic list flickered briefly in Rebecca's optics, full of words that were mostly consonants, "—of the compounds she needs to start the augmentation protocols. For the three of us. So she can turn us into super soldiers like John."

Rebecca's whole face lit up. "Right. Right. That part I definitely heard." 

She'd watched him jump fifteen feet straight up with her and Nadia tucked under his arms. She'd seen him kick a steel fire door clean off its hinges, and she'd watched him outrun a three-meter Maelstrom borg while carrying her like a sack of very cute potatoes. 

She would be able to do that shit soon!

It was awesome. It was also completely insane. Both things were true at the same time, and Rebecca liked it that way.

John wasn't on this one. He was up at the mountain lab with Cortana, getting everything ready, unpacking that creepy Militech box Nadia had died for and doing whatever science-y stuff Cortana needed him for. Which meant this was a ladies' gig. Rebecca, V, and Lucy, robbing a chemical plant together.

Rebecca kind of loved it.

Her eyes drifted while V kept talking. She wondered—not for the first time—if the augmentation would make her taller.

It had made John taller. She was sure of it. At least two inches. She'd noticed it the morning after he came back from the mountain. He'd walked into the safehouse in Watson, and she'd had to tilt her head back further than usual to look up at him. His jacket had been all tight across the shoulders, and she had definitely not spent the rest of the briefing staring at those shoulders. So if it gave John two inches, maybe it'd give her two inches too…?

She did the math in her head and pouted.

Two inches wasn't going to make a damn bit of difference, was it? She'd still be the shortest person in every room. People would still look over her head at the bar. 

Maybe if she asked Cortana really nicely, she could get, like, six inches.

Maybe eight.

"—Rebecca."

"Listening!"

V closed her eyes briefly, like she was praying for patience to a god she didn't believe in. Lucy's shoulders were shaking with silent laughter.

"Your job," V said slowly, enunciating every word, "is to cause a distraction. Something big enough to pull the workers and the security out of the main building and toward the front lot. Long enough for Lucy and me to get in, find everything on Cortana's list, and get out. Ten minutes. Fifteen at most."

Rebecca stared at her. Then a grin spread slowly across her face. It was a wide, wicked, delighted grin that started somewhere around her toes and worked its way all the way up. "Oh, this really is déjà vu." Rebecca hugged Guts to her chest. "You know what I did last time, right? At the other plant? With John?"

"I heard," V said dryly. "Regina called John personally to complain about the toxic plume. It was on the news. They evacuated two blocks of Northside… Try, if it's at all possible, not to poison half of Santo Domingo this time."

"Try," Lucy added helpfully, "is the operative word."

"Hey!" Rebecca pointed at her. "You're supposed to be on my side, Luce. We're friends now. You said so. In the alley. After the princess carries John gave me."

Lucy's cheeks went faintly pink. "I said friends get one princess carry a day. That's not the same thing."

"It's exactly the same thing." Rebecca beamed at her.

Lucy rolled her eyes, but she didn't argue, and the corner of her mouth twitched. 

Rebecca counted it as a win. She'd been counting a lot of those lately. She'd spent most of her life being the loudest, most annoying person in any room, the one people tolerated because she was useful with a gun or because her brother was attached. 

Now she had friends. Lucy, who had kicked her out of the first date and then let her ride in the back of the escape car. V, who smacked people on the back of the head and was secretly a giant softie. Kiwi, who had hugged John in front of everybody. David, who was basically an annoying little brother. And John.

John, who had looked at her in a booth at the Coyote and said I need someone with real combat experience like it was obvious. John, who'd asked her to join his crew. John, who'd carried her out of a burning building and let her keep her hand hooked through his belt loop the whole way down the corridor.

Something warm and squishy and dumb happened in her chest every time she thought about that. She shoved it down. Later. She could think about that later. V and Lucy and Cortana had said she could. Later.

"Okay," Rebecca said. "Okay, okay, okay. Distraction. Nonlethal. Minimally toxic." She held up three fingers. "I got it. You two go do your sneaky netrunner thing."

V studied her for a second longer. Then something softened around her eyes, just a little.

Then she and Lucy slipped out from behind the dumpster and moved low and quick along the fence line toward the back of the building. Within seconds they'd rounded the corner and disappeared.

Rebecca was alone. She stood up, cracked her neck, and looked at the chemical plant with the expression of a kid let loose in a candy store. "Okay," she whispered to herself, slinging Guts over her shoulder. "Let's see what we are working with this time."

She hopped onto the dumpster, swung herself over the fence where the razor wire had rusted through, and dropped into the yard. Then she started looking for something flammable.

– Lucy –

Lucy followed V to the back entrance of the chemical plant. The door was a reinforced steel slab with a keypad lock that probably cost more than the plant's annual safety budget, and it took them about four seconds to hack it open and slip inside.

The service corridor beyond was narrow and dim. Pipes ran along the ceiling, sweating condensation, and every few meters a caged work light buzzed and flickered like it was thinking about dying. The air tasted like bleach and hot metal. Somewhere deeper in the building, machinery thumped in a slow, heavy rhythm, like a heart.

Lucy pinged the local network as they moved. It was cheap and old, built by someone who had installed the most basic ICE available and then never thought about it again. Three cameras covered the corridor. She looped all of them with a flick of thought and fed them twelve seconds of empty hallway on repeat. Ahead of her, V took the next junction without hesitation, already following the floor plan Cortana had loaded into both their optics, her steps silent on the grated floor.

They were early. Rebecca hadn't kicked off her distraction yet, so the plan was to get as close to the storage wing as they could and wait for the noise. Neither of them said anything for almost a full minute.

Then V said, without turning around, "I can feel you staring at my ass."

Lucy's eyes dipped automatically.

To be fair, V did have a fantastic ass. The tight black synth-leather tactical pants she'd stolen from Arasaka on her way out hugged every curve as she walked, and Lucy was honest enough with herself to admit that she'd looked before, more than once, usually while pretending she wasn't. It was a good ass. It was a corpo ass, toned by expensive trainers and better nutrition than anyone in Watson would ever see.

But that wasn't what Lucy had been looking at. Her gaze drifted back up to the back of V's head. "That's not why," Lucy said quietly. "Or where I was staring."

V stopped. She turned around slowly, and the glowing red of her optics was strangely soft in the half-light. 

Lucy had seen those eyes go cold enough to freeze blood. She'd seen them look at her across a dinner table like V was deciding which piece of her to cut off first. She'd seen them look at John like he was the last warm thing in the world. Right now they held something Lucy had never expected to see aimed at her. It looked like concern.

V studied her for a long moment. Then she let out a sigh and leaned back against the sweating wall, folding her arms. "Do you think we fucked up last night?" V asked. Her voice was low, almost tired. "Or maybe just in general?"

Lucy hesitated for a moment, then admitted to herself that it was probably both.

The truth was, they both had the most wonderful, caring, handsome young man in Night City, and they had both fallen for him hard. So hard, in fact, that either of them would have done absolutely anything not to lose him.

Maybe that was the problem.

Lucy pulled her hood down and ran her fingers through her hair. The pale strands were damp with the humidity of the corridor. "I don't like it," she said finally. "That it was Gloria. Last night. That she was the one who went into John's room to comfort him."

V's mouth curved. "And by 'comfort,'" she said, "you mean fuck."

Lucy rolled her eyes.

But V wasn't wrong, and that was the irritating part. 

When John and Gloria had come out of his bedroom before dinner, flushed and rumpled and not quite meeting anyone's eyes, neither Lucy nor V had been that upset about it. They'd been the ones who sent Gloria in. It had been their idea in the first place. Well. It had started as V's idea, in the kitchen while Gloria was cooking tamales. 

But Lucy had stood right there and listened to it, and she'd never spoken up against it. When Gloria had looked at her for permission, Lucy had nodded.

She knew she had serious issues. Who in Night City didn't? She'd spent her childhood in an Arasaka lab as a test subject. She'd watched the people she grew up with die, and she'd learned to keep her bags packed and her apartment looking temporary. She knew she had trust issues, abandonment issues, and possessive streaks so deep they had their own zip code. And she knew V had serious issues too. V had spent years in Counterintelligence learning to read people like files and treat love like leverage, until her own boss tried to murder her over dinner.

And somehow, the two of them had looked at each other and at Cortana and decided the healthy thing to do was literally go out of their way to sit John down and tell him they wanted him to fuck other women.

They'd planned it. V had laid out ground rules in that clipped, reasonable voice of hers: no sneaking, no lying, communicate. Lucy had nodded along, feeling mature and secure and very, very adult about the whole thing.

And then it had actually happened.

"After all of that," Lucy said, and hated how small her voice sounded in the corridor, "is it even right for me to change my mind? To say that him with Gloria doesn't make me as comfortable as I thought it would?"

V was quiet for a moment. Then she tilted her head, and something wicked slid into her expression. "It was really fucking hot, though," V said. "Did you hack into the security feed like I did?"

Lucy's face went scarlet.

Because yes. Yes, she had. She'd watched for longer than she would ever, ever admit out loud. 

It had been hot. That was the problem. That was half of what made her chest feel tangled now. But that wasn't the point.

V looked at Lucy for a long moment, her red optics narrowing in the way that meant she was taking something apart in her head. "I think I know what's wrong," she said. "And why you might be feeling this way."

Lucy crossed her arms. "Oh, good. Tell me, Doctor."

V ignored that. "How would you be feeling," she asked slowly, "if we'd sent Rebecca into John's room last night instead of Gloria?"

Lucy opened her mouth with a ready answer, then closed it again.

She actually thought about it. She pictured Rebecca slipping through the bedroom door, small and loud and grinning. She pictured Rebecca climbing into John's lap and saying something completely inappropriate. She pictured John laughing, and Rebecca making him forget about Nadia for an hour in the most obnoxious way possible. Then she pictured the two of them coming out afterward, Rebecca strutting like she'd won a prize, John red to the tips of his ears.

And she honestly wouldn't have minded.

She might have rolled her eyes and thrown a cushion at Rebecca's head. She might have stolen John back the second Rebecca was done with him. But the tangled, sour feeling in her chest wasn't there when she imagined it. If anything, the thought almost made her smile.

V watched her face and nodded, like Lucy had confirmed a hypothesis. "Yeah," she said. "That's what I thought."

"So what does that mean?" Lucy asked.

"It means the problem isn't John being with someone else. If it were, Rebecca would bother you too." V spread her hands. "The problem is that neither of us really knows Gloria."

Lucy had to admit that was true.

They'd spent days around Rebecca, fighting beside her, getting drunk with her, being shot at alongside her. They knew exactly what she was—loud, violent, loyal to a fault, a walking grenade with a heart of gold. 

But Gloria was different. Gloria liked John, and John liked her. That much was obvious to anyone with working optics. But Lucy didn't know much else beyond what she'd seen at Vik's and at the party. Gloria was a paramedic who'd been shot, a single mother with a seventeen-year-old who idolized John, and a woman who had kissed him twice before she ever made it to his bed. 

Lucy had flirted with her once on a rooftop, mostly to see what would happen, and then left her blushing.

That wasn't knowing someone. 

And it would probably blow up anyway, with the whole David situation. The kid worshipped John. Sooner or later he was going to put two and two together, and Lucy didn't want to be in the room when he did.

She glanced at V, wondering where she was going with this.

"So," V said. "We fix it."

Lucy tilted her head. "Fix it how?"

"We spend more time with her. Get to know her." V shrugged one shoulder, like it was obvious. "Take her out. Drinks, shopping, whatever. Find out who she actually is before we decide how we feel about her being in John's bed."

Lucy stared at her. "That's your big counterintelligence solution? Make friends?"

"It's a tried-and-true technique. Humanize the asset." V's mouth twitched. "Besides, let's be honest. It's pretty obvious that the two of us barely have any female friends."

"That's not—" Lucy started.

"You have Rebecca," V said, ticking it off on one finger. "And that's pretty much it."

"I—" Lucy froze.

"And I have Misty." V's expression went a little rueful. "Kind of. She's Jackie's girl, and she's sweet, and she read my aura once and told me it looked like a knife. But I haven't actually spent a lot of time with her. Jackie was my only real friend for years. Everyone else I knew either worked for Arasaka or wanted me dead." She paused. "Or both. Usually both."

Lucy pouted. She actually pouted, which she would deny later under oath. "I have Kiwi too."

V's grin spread slow and wide and absolutely insufferable. "Lucy," she said. "Kiwi is your mom. Everyone knows it."

"She is not—" her sputter was cut off.

"She's your mom. She's been your mom since the day she found you." V leaned in. "And while we're on the subject, is that another woman we need to start thinking about? Because I noticed how Kiwi was looking at John during that party a week ago. Over and over."

Lucy's eyes went flat and cold. "My boyfriend," she growled, "is not fucking my mom!"

V's smirk went supernova. "Ha. So you do admit she's your mom."

Lucy opened her mouth to retort, realized exactly what she'd just said, and felt her whole face go hot for the second time in five minutes.

Just then, a massive explosion went off!

It shook the entire building. The floor jumped under their boots, dust rained down from the pipes overhead, and every caged work light in the corridor flickered at once. A deep, rolling boom came through the walls, then a second, smaller one, then a long metallic groan like something enormous had just been thrown into the air and was coming back down. The explosion had come from outside, somewhere toward the front lot.

And under the ringing echo, faint but unmistakable through the concrete and steel, they could almost hear a high-pitched, maniacal cackle.

Lucy closed her eyes and sighed. "Rebecca," she muttered, "was supposed to keep the distraction small."

"To be fair," V said, brushing dust from her shoulder, "nobody actually believed she would."

Alarms began wailing through the building. Red emergency strobes kicked on overhead, painting the corridor in slow, throbbing pulses. Somewhere far off, somebody was shouting about a tank.

"Okay," Lucy said. "Storage wing. Now, before—"

"Hey!" The voice came from behind them. 

Lucy and V both turned.

Two security guards had come around the corner at the end of the corridor, clearly headed for the exit and the source of the explosion before they'd stumbled onto the two of them. They wore matching gray uniforms with the plant's faded teal logo on the shoulder, cheap ballistic vests, and stun batons on their belts. One was tall and lanky, with a cheap optic implant glowing yellow in one eye. The other was short and broad, with a neck like a fire hydrant.

"Who are you two?" the tall one demanded, his hand dropping to his baton. "What are you doing in here?"

Lucy's fingers twitched toward her monowire. V put a hand on her arm without looking, and Lucy stilled.

Then V smiled. It was a beautiful smile. She stepped forward with a little extra sway in her hips and let her shoulders drop, and her whole body went soft and friendly and enticing. 

Lucy watched it happen and was almost impressed. This sneaky bitch is a great actress…

"Hello, boys," V purred. "We're this factory's new supervisors. Corporate sent us over this morning to do a surprise inspection."

The guards blinked at her.

"And I have to tell you," V went on, stepping closer and resting one hand lightly on the tall guard's vest, "you two are doing a fantastic job. Very attentive. I'm going to mention you both in my report." She leaned in, lowering her voice like she was sharing a secret. "But right now, I think you should probably go check out that explosion. Don't you? That sounded serious. We'll be fine here. We know the way."

She batted her eyelashes. She actually batted her eyelashes.

Lucy would have laughed if she hadn't been so busy waiting for it to work.

It did not work.

The short guard's eyes narrowed. "We don't have any new supervisors," he said flatly. "And you two aren’t in uniform! You are nothing but stupid thieves!”

The tall guard yanked his baton free.

The bullshit didn't work, and both guards rushed them.

– Rogue –

People were looking at Rogue, and she found she didn't give a shit.

Yes, the stoic queen of the Afterlife was sitting in her private booth. And yes, she was smiling. Her bodyguards shifted nervously.

Last night had been the first family dinner Rogue had experienced in… literal decades. It made her a bit sad to realize how alone she'd been ever since her son, Johnny Jr., had up and vanished on her. Sadly, she didn't even know whether he was alive or dead.

But now Rogue had a grandson. And his mother, "Mama" Welles, had told Rogue she was welcome to come over whenever she wanted. Hell, she might even let Rogue move in if she asked, Rogue mused. She wouldn't, though. She had enemies, and she didn't want them finding out she had living family.

John Welles had just become the most important thing in a bitter old woman's life. And yes, Rogue thought it was a bit funny that his name was John too. Three generations in a row.

She could admit she was a bit—okay, very—obsessed. She'd asked Mama Welles a lot of questions in the kitchen last night.

Rogue had files on all of John's lovers. There was Lucy Kushinada, whom Arasaka was still looking for all these years later. Rogue could pull some strings and maybe bury that. There was V, who had faked her own death and then killed her boss afterward. Another dangerous woman, but one who obviously cherished John. Then there was the troublemaker, Rebecca. And the older woman, Gloria, whom her grandson had slept with last night as well.

Rogue sighed. Why did all of that bastard Johnny Silverhand's descendants have to be such magnets for troubled women?

Suddenly, a ping in her optics reminded her that she had a meeting today. It was with the representative of a new group of Nomads that had recently moved into the Badlands surrounding Night City, and this group wanted work. Or at least one of its members wanted to do some work for her. The rep was a woman in her late twenties whose name was Pan, or Panda, or something?

No, wait. It was Panam. Yeah, that was it.

The message and résumé this woman had sent Rogue had honestly been a bit rude, and full of herself. It was annoying how often she got résumés like that from rookies.

Rogue was still frowning at it when the woman herself slid into the booth.

That frown soon changed. Rogue let out a low internal whistle.

Damn. Most nomads looked like shit. It wasn't an insult, just a fact of life. When you spent your whole existence on the road, breathing desert grit, eating whatever you could scavenge, and sleeping in the back of a truck with a rifle across your chest, it showed. Weathered skin, bad teeth, cracked hands, and a permanent squint from staring into the sun. Rogue had met a hundred nomads over the years, and most of them looked like they'd been left out in the rain for a decade.

This one didn't.

She was in her late twenties, with a striking face and full lips set in a defiant line. She wore a battered synth-leather jacket over a cropped top, and cargo pants that hugged a body clearly built by hard work rather than expensive trainers. When she'd turned to sit, Rogue had gotten a clear look at an ass that could have sold cars on a billboard over Corpo Plaza.

A ten. Easily. Rogue had stopped handing out tens around the time she stopped caring what anyone looked like, but there it was.

The woman, Panam, caught her looking and snorted. "Well," she said, leaning back in the booth with her arms crossed. "Didn't expect the legendary Queen of the Afterlife to check me out."

Rogue snorted right back. "Honey, don't flatter yourself." She set her glass of whiskey down with a small click. "I check out everyone who sits in that seat. Your looks matter in this business just as much as your capabilities. Especially if you're a female merc." She shrugged. "People underestimate a pretty face, or they remember it. Both are useful. Both are dangerous. I need to know which one I'm working with."

Panam's eyes flashed. "My capabilities," she growled, "are the best. And they're all that should matter."

Rogue raised an eyebrow. "Is that so?"

"I'm the best driver in my clan." Panam leaned forward and planted both hands on the table. "I've run convoys through Militech checkpoints. I've outdriven Raffen raiders with a blown tire and a busted axle. I can run circles around any street racer gonk in this city, and I'll do it blindfolded!"

Rogue doubted that very much.

She'd seen a lot of drivers in her time. Most of the ones who bragged about being the best were dead within a year, usually wrapped around a pylon on the Badlands highway or splattered across a Kabuki intersection. 

The genuinely good ones rarely talked about it. They just drove, and let the corpses of everyone who tried to catch them do the bragging.

But she didn't say any of that. She just picked up her glass again, took a slow sip, and asked, "And what exactly is it you want from me?"

Panam didn't hesitate. "Work. High-paying gigs. Something that actually uses my talents instead of hauling scrap for chump change!"

"Oh," Rogue said dryly, "is that all?"

Panam's jaw clenched and she kept staring at Rogue.

Rogue didn't like people with no rep pretending they were hot shit. She'd built her reputation over half a century of blood, smoke, and bodies, and she had little patience for anyone who thought they could skip to the end.

And yet this introduction was giving her flashbacks to her meeting with that Judy Alvarez woman a few weeks ago. Judy had thought she was hot shit too, even though she only edited porn for a living. And yet, she'd ended up friends with Rogue's grandson.

Rogue swirled her drink and considered the woman across from her.

Her first instinct was to dump Panam on someone who would teach her what it actually meant to be a merc driver working for the Afterlife. Someone who'd show her what it took, knock the edges off, and send her back in six months either humbled or dead. 

Nash came to mind. He was a decent wheelman, mean enough to scare a rookie straight, and he'd taken greener drivers than this one under his wing before.

But then again, Rogue was planning on having Nash killed soon. She'd been hearing reports for weeks that he was in contact with the Wraiths. Selling routes, maybe. Selling clients, more likely. Either way, he'd be a corpse by the end of the month, and Rogue wasn't about to hand him a fresh recruit to sell along with everything else.

So, no. Not Nash.

"I'm not going to give you any solo jobs," she said.

Panam's face darkened instantly. "Excuse me?"

Rogue rolled her eyes. "You heard me."

"You haven't even seen what I can—" Panam tried to argue like her opinion was wanted or even mattered. 

Rogue raised one hand, and Panam's mouth snapped shut out of sheer surprise. People generally did shut up when Rogue raised her hand. It was one of the few perks of being old and terrifying. "I don't trust you," Rogue said simply. "I don't know you. You come in here with a résumé full of attitude and a lot of claims I can't verify, and you want me to put my name on a contract with yours. That's not how this works." She tilted her head. "But—"

Panam waited, her eyes narrowed.

"I might know someone who could use your skills," Rogue said. "Someone with a growing crew. They've got netrunners and muscle, but nobody whose whole job is getting them out alive when things go sideways. And things always go sideways around them."

A grandson who can't seem to go a week without ending up in a violent fight, Rogue thought. A pack of girlfriends who would all, sooner or later, need a wheelman to drag them out of whatever burning building they'd walked into.

"Who?" Panam asked.

Rogue only smiled. "Or maybe they won't like you," she said, "in which case you'll just have to find yourself a new fixer…"

XXX

Cortana is doing some mad tinkering. V and Lucy had a small heart to heart while Rebecca caused another environmental hazard. We got a decent look into Rogue’s mind at the end there. And one of the best girls from 2077 makes her appearance—but she’s not gonna be with John. I don’t want him to have any more relationships—he’s already trying to manage his current roster. I’ve been thinking of Panam and David. They could work pretty well…

Written: 10/18/2026