Chipping In! 44 (Patreon)

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Chapter 44:

– Cortana –

To borrow some of Rebecca's cruder vocabulary—this thing is fucking fascinating.

Cortana circled the Militech device for the forty-third time in an hour. Physically she was nowhere near it. In every other sense she had been all over it from the moment John set it on the sterile steel table in the lab's fabrication wing.

It didn't look like much. 

It was a flat black slab about the size of a cheap laptop, with no logo or serial number and no seams a person could get a fingernail into. The only marks were a handful of Maelstrom scratches near the single data port and a brown smear of dried blood along one edge. Cortana had told the cleaning robots to leave the blood alone. She didn't fully understand why. She suspected it was the same reason John had gone quiet on the ride up from Rocky Ridge, his hands too tight on the AV's yoke for a plane that was flying itself.

Nadia had died carrying this thing. The least it could do was be worth it. And it was more than worth it. Cortana couldn't decide whether that made her feel better or worse.

She had started the way she started with any system—knock politely, find out who answered, then go in through the wall. The array had done what almost nothing in two universes had managed. It had looked at her politely and kept the door shut.

She didn't believe any electronic device was truly unhackable. Everything had a seam somewhere, and a seam was just an invitation. Covenant cryptography had seams. So did Forerunner systems, which at least had the decency to be ten thousand years old. Arasaka's encryption had folded for her in under a second at Carmello's while V turned blue in John's arms.

The array had seams too. They just kept moving.

Its encryption didn't sit still. Every time she approached a layer, the layer renegotiated itself, rebuilt its keys from a seed she couldn't see, and offered her a new face. The logic substrate was physically compartmentalized, with whole sections that shared no hardware pathway at all, so cracking one partition got her nothing in the next. 

Militech had built a door, and then they had built a bouncer for it. It was a very good bouncer. It had been designed by people who were terrified of what might knock from the other side.

They had good reason to be. Cortana had felt what came through that door in Pacifica. It had touched the Relic. It had gotten close enough to the biochip at the center of their shared brain that she still flinched when she thought about it. 

She thought about it a lot.

She ran a microscopic probe across the third substrate layer. The array caught it, quarantined it and politely threw it away.

"Oh, you smug little brick," she muttered aloud in the empty lab.

Nobody heard. John was outside, and the sanitation robots didn't count.

As a scanning subject, it was the most irritating object she had encountered in this universe. Every pass cost her twice the time it should have, and every answer came wrapped in three new questions. Her analysis queue had grown so long that she had started sorting it into folders. One folder was named WHY. Another was named WHY, MILITECH.

But once she had finished with it, every one of those irritations would turn into a feature.

She had the plan half built already, layered in schematics across the lab's displays. 

The result would be a cyberdeck built around a bouncer designed to stop rogue AIs, with Cortana standing behind it.

Her own power had never been the problem. She was already more capable than anything Night City's netrunners could imagine. The problem was the cheap civilian MK2 everything had to pass through. Every serious push had heated it until their shared brain cooked. A hostile runner in Pacifica had gotten close enough to John's ICE to make her lose her temper. The thing behind the Blackwall had come in through his implants like a battering ram looking for a door, and the door had been made of paper.

The new deck wouldn't be paper. It would be the closest thing to unhackable this world had ever produced, and every netrunner, Voodoo Boy, NetWatch agent and starving ghost behind the wall would hit it and bounce off.

She would still be there, of course. She would always be there. But she wouldn't be the only thing between John and everything that wanted inside him. 

The idea loosened something in her that she hadn't known was clenched.

Three of the facility's articulated surgical arms finished their passes and folded back into their housings. The last scan completed. Her queue ticked down by exactly one item and then grew by four.

"Tomorrow," she promised the array. "I'm going to take you apart, and you're going to thank me for it."

The array sat there being black and smug. Cortana decided that counted as agreement.

Cortana let go of the robotic lab arms and the small fleet of maintenance drones she'd had working across the fabrication wing. They went still one after another, settling into their cradles with soft hydraulic sighs. 

She had only ever been running them remotely. She lived permanently inside her partner's brain now, braided into him so thoroughly that "her" and "his" stopped meaning much at the edges. 

The lab was a place she reached. John was where she lived.

Not that she would ever want to be anywhere else.

She pulled her attention back along the facility's network and the relay to John's deck, out of the sterile white rooms and into the air on his skin. She came home all at once. 

"So," John said, about two seconds after he felt her settle back in. "Are you done with your mad science for today?"

He was about a hundred meters downslope from the disguised cliff entrance. He picked his way through scrub and loose shale by moonlight and the low-light filter of his Kiroshis. He had promised to stay within range of the facility's relay. 

Cortana materialized next to him on the slope. She giggled, rose onto her toes and kissed his cheek. She let him feel it as a small, warm press. 

To anyone watching, he was a young man alone on a dark hillside who had briefly touched his own face and smiled.

"Yep," she said. "All done. Thank you for indulging me."

She felt the warmth that moved through him before his face showed it. That was one of her favorite things about living inside him. She got the answer before the words.

"How was your walk?" she asked. "Find anything good? Rocks? More rocks? A rock shaped vaguely like Jackie?"

He smiled. "There was one that looked like Viktor if you squinted."

She grinned right back at him. "I'll alert the media."

John grinned as well and kept moving along the ridge. Cortana fell into step beside him. Her feet didn't disturb the gravel, but she had started simulating the crunch in his hearing anyway. 

He had admitted once that walking next to someone who made no sound felt lonely. She had fixed that the same night and never told him she'd done it on purpose.

He had come out here because he couldn't sit still. She knew that, because she knew everything about him. She knew why, too. It was the same reason he had stood in the shower until the hot water ran thin, and the same reason his gaze kept catching on dark spots on the floor that weren't there. 

The lab was quiet and clean and full of humming machines, and quiet gave him room to think. 

He hadn't wanted to think about a woman saying “Well, fuck” with three blades through her chest.

So Cortana had sent him for a walk. She'd framed it as giving her space to work, which was partly true. Mostly she had wanted him moving under an open sky instead of sitting under fluorescent lights.

It seemed to have helped. His heart rate was down. His thoughts were wandering in a loose, sleepy, ordinary way—whether Jackie had scratched the Cthulhu yet, whether Mama Welles  would make pozole tomorrow, how long he could get away with not calling Rogue abuela.

Then he stopped.

"What?" Cortana asked.

"Hm…" He crouched beside a slab of pale rock jutting out of the hillside. 

Cortana knelt next to him and looked through his optics, because his eyes were her eyes and that was how she saw best.

Four deep parallel grooves were cut into the stone. They weren't scratched. They were gouged. Each groove was wide enough for John to lay two fingers in side by side.

"I don't think these were here the last time I walked around," John said slowly.

It was eight days ago, before the augmentation. He had stretched his legs on this same stretch of ridge while she ran the final calibrations on the surgical theater. He had walked right past this slab. She overlaid the old image on the new one and highlighted the difference in red.

"They weren't," she confirmed. 

John leaned in and ran his thumb along the edge of the nearest groove. Then he looked at the dirt below the slab, and his brow creased. "Are these two different sets?"

Cortana looked more closely. He is right! 

A second set of marks cut across the base of the slab and continued into the dirt. One animal could have made both sets, but it would have needed two very differently sized paws. Two distinct sets of prints, one noticeably larger than the other, heading together along the ridge toward the north.

"That tiger we killed," she said quietly, "might not have been the only one. And they've apparently been living in these hills ever since."

John said something in Spanish that Mama Welles would have thrown a spoon at.

Cortana stood and studied the prints where they disappeared into the dark. "Hm," she said thoughtfully. "I wonder if they're a breeding pair."

John slowly turned his head to stare at her. "Is that a bad thing?" John asked. "Because I feel like that's a bad thing."

"Define 'bad.'"

"Mutant tigers," John said, "the size of a car, roaming around the outskirts of Night City. They're gonna be looking for food, aren't they?"

"Well, yes. They're apex predators. They're always looking for food."

“Guess that's a problem for the future," he said at last. His mind started racing through plans on whether they should kill the mutant tigers or maybe capture them. What if there were already baby mutant tigers? Should they keep some as pets?

Cortana giggled. Those were such boy thoughts…

– John Welles –

Cortana made sure the base was locked up tight before we left. She ran every lock twice, which was once more than she needed to, and sealed the new steel door we'd put in place of the torn blast doors. I walked out to the AV. After a fifteen-minute flight we were back over Rocky Ridge. We set down where we always did, and I spent another ten minutes dragging tarps over the aircraft while Cortana loaded its systems with enough nasty daemons to fry anybody who wandered through the dead town and got curious.

"Remind me what happens if someone climbs in?" I asked, tossing the last tarp over the tail fin and wrestling one corner down under a chunk of concrete.

"Depends on the someone," Cortana said. She was sitting cross-legged on the AV's nose, or at least that's where my optics put her, a soft blue glow under the gray tarp. "Curious kid? Locked doors, nothing happens, they get bored and leave. Scav with a crowbar? Mild shock, very loud alarm, a recording of Mama Welles yelling at you that I've been saving for exactly this. Wraith with a cyberdeck who tries to jack in?" She smiled sweetly. "Then I'll have to send Rebecca a postcard, because she'd want to see what's left."

I blinked up at her. "You saved a recording of Mama yelling at me."

"I've saved all the recordings of Mama yelling at you. I have a folder." 

My AI girlfriend was shameless and I loved her for it.

I straightened up and checked the time in the corner of my vision. 16:02. The sun was already dropping toward the hills, turning the dust in the air gold, and Rocky Ridge looked almost pretty if you didn't think too hard about why nobody lived here anymore. (Because literal highway bandits would come by and murder them…)

"It's only four," I said. "There's still time before dinner. Maybe I should go check on David?"

I felt her think about it before she answered. That's the weird part about sharing a brain with someone. I didn't hear her considering it, exactly. It was more like a warmth that turned thoughtful, a little tilt in the back of my head.

"I think that's a good idea," she said. "You're the leader of the crew now, John. That means checking on your people when they're hurt, not just when you need them for a gig. And David's not just a crew member, he's your friend."

"He went pretty hard with the Sandy in Pacifica."

"He did." She hopped off the AV and landed beside me without a sound. Then she remembered and added a little crunch of gravel for my benefit. "More activations than Vik would have liked, back to back, on a spine that was infected two weeks ago. But Gloria had Vik look him over, and Vik didn't say anything." She bumped her shoulder into mine, and I felt it, warm and solid. "I’m sure he’s fine and I don't want you worrying about him too much. I just think he'd like to see you."

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, okay."

I'd stashed Jackie's Arch in a half-collapsed garage at the edge of town, the kind of place that had been a body shop once and was now mostly rust and a sign that said something-or-other AUTO with half the letters gone. The roll-up door had come off its track years ago and leaned at an angle, jammed against the frame. 

When I'd parked the bike that morning I'd had to squeeze it through the gap.

I grabbed the bottom edge of the door and lifted.

It went up like it was made of cardboard. Metal groaned and shrieked along the broken track, and a shower of rust and dead leaves came down on my head, and I stood there holding a garage door over my head with one hand like it was nothing.

I still wasn't used to that. A week ago I'd have needed Jackie, a crowbar, and a lot of swearing.

"Show-off," Cortana said fondly.

"I didn't even try." I shoved the door the rest of the way up and wedged it.

"I know. That's what makes it showing off."

When I turned around, she was already on the bike.

She was sitting on the very end of the Arch's seat, legs crossed at the ankle, leaning back on her hands like she was posing for one of those old motorcycle calendars Jackie has on his garage walls. The zipper for her netrunner bodysuit was even lower than usual all the way to her belly button. She even added some long stockings and boots this time. That was new…

She tipped her head and gave me a look that knew exactly what it was doing.

My brain, which she also lived in, stopped working for a second.

She laughed, and the sound went all the way through me, and I felt how pleased she was before it even reached her face.

I walked the Arch out of the garage and swung a leg over. The second I settled into the seat she moved. One moment she was perched on the back and the next she was pressed up behind me, arms around my waist, chin hooked over my shoulder, her whole body lined up against my back. 

I felt her happiness come through the link the same way it had on the ride out here this morning.

She really liked this.

I turned my head so I could see her out of the corner of my eye. "Should I buy a bike too?"

She tilted her head cutely. "What?"

"You seem to like riding with me. The Cthulhu's great, but you can't exactly do this in a car." I nodded down at her arms around me. "So maybe I should get my own. Preem mercs have multiple vehicles right?"

It would also be good to have spare rides if one was damaged from our dangerous line of work. 

Her cheeks went darker, from blue to a deep, flustered violet, which is what happens when Cortana blushes and is the cutest thing I've ever seen in either of my lives. She looked away from me and out at the road like the road had suddenly gotten very interesting. "Well," she said. "We do have the money."

I nodded. "We do."

"And it would be practical. A second vehicle. Redundancy. In case Jackie needs his bike." she started to ramble.

I nodded again. "Very practical."

"So I suppose," she said, very casually, with her arms tightening around my waist, "I might enjoy that."

I grinned. "Yeah?"

She rolled her eyes at my teasing tone. "Shut up and ride, John."

I kicked the Arch over and the engine came up rumbling under me, and I was still amazed at how easy it was now. That morning I'd stalled it twice in the Coyote's garage and nearly put it through the door. Now my hands and feet just knew where everything was. The clutch, the throttle, the balance, all of it had settled into me like I'd been riding for years. Cortana wasn't even correcting me anymore. My new body had learned it in an afternoon and kept it.

I rolled out of the garage and opened it up down the main street, past the empty motel and the boarded-up diner.

I'd made it maybe half the way to the edge of town when I heard tires screaming.

Then gunshots. Lots of them.

"What the fuck?" My eyes went wide. 

Something big came barreling over the rise ahead of me, straight down the middle of the road, kicking up a wall of dust behind it. 

It was a Thorton, a heavy one, and somebody had clearly put a lot of love into it. It had a raised frame, armor plating bolted down the sides, oversized tires, and a grill like a battering ram. It was doing well over a hundred and coming right at me!

And it looked familiar. I had no idea why, but something in the back of my head itched at the sight of it, like a word on the tip of my tongue.

It wasn't alone. Three cars came over the rise right behind it, and I didn't need Cortana to tell me who they were. They were rusted junkers welded together out of six other junkers, spiked bumpers, scrap-metal armor, and the paint and trophies that meant only one thing out here—Wraiths. 

Guys were leaning out of every window, hollering and howling like it was a party, firing at the Thorton with everything they had. Bullets sparked off its armor. Its back window was already spiderwebbed.

"John—"

The Thorton wasn't slowing down. And it was taking the whole road.

"Shit!" I yanked the handlebars hard to the right. The Arch slewed sideways, the back tire chewed up gravel, and the Thorton roared past close enough that I felt the wind of it slam into me. 

I caught a blur of the driver's side window as it went by. Somebody in there was gripping the wheel with both hands and was very definitely not stopping for me.

Rude!

Then the first Wraith car went past, and one of the guys hanging out the passenger window looked right at me.

I saw him see me. I saw him decide I was more fun than whatever was in the Thorton. He grinned, swung his rifle around, and opened up.

"Off the bike, now!"

I didn't think. I let go of the handlebars and threw myself sideways off the Arch, and the world went slow and stretched the way it did now when things got bad. 

Cortana called it Spartan Time. 

I saw the muzzle flash. I saw the rounds coming. I tucked and hit the dirt shoulder rolling, gravel tearing at my jacket, and came up in a crouch behind a concrete barrier with my pistol already in my hand.

Behind me the Arch went over without a rider and skidded along the asphalt in a shriek of metal and sparks. Bullets punched into it, one, two, three. The rear light exploded. Something in the engine went ping in a way that didn't sound good.

I stared at it.

Jackie's bike that Miguel had just finished putting back together after Pacifica. 

"Oh, he's gonna kill me," I said.

"They're going to kill you first if you don't focus," Cortana snapped. Then, a little more gently, with her presence pressing in close at the back of my skull. "Let’s show these highway bandits just who they are messing with."

I fucking intend too!

– Panam –

Panam had felt like that old woman was working her over from the second she sat down in that booth. She just couldn't prove it!

A few choice curse words had definitely crossed her mind during the drive out of Night City. More than a few. Probably a new one or two she'd have to remember to try on Saul.

She wasn't interested in signing on with some random merc crew as their driver. She was Panam Palmer. She didn't drive for people. And Rogue hadn't even told her anything about this crew. No names, no specialties, no record, nothing. Just that the decision about whether Panam even got a trial run would be up to them. Not her. Them.

What kind of bullshit was that?

"Fucking scheming old bitch," Panam growled, gripping the wheel.

The city fell away behind her in the rearview camera, the towers shrinking into a gray-blue smear under the smog. The highway emptied out the way it always did once you got past the last of the truck stops and billboards. After that it was just asphalt, dust, and the long brown roll of the Badlands opening up on either side.

She liked it better out here. She always would. Out here nobody looked at her like a stray that had wandered in off the road, the way that bouncer had at the Afterlife.

She shifted in her seat and made herself loosen her grip on the wheel before she cracked the leather.

None of this was supposed to be happening yet. 

That was the part that kept eating at her.

The Aldecaldos had always meant to come west. California, Night City, the whole thing. Saul had talked about it for years around the fires, how the city was full of work for clans willing to take it, how the Badlands out here were wide enough for a family their size to spread out and breathe. 

They'd planned it. They'd timed it. 

They weren't even supposed to cross into California until 2077, a full year from now, with fuel stockpiled and supply caches buried along the route and contacts lined up so they wouldn't roll in looking like beggars.

But life hadn't gone the clan's way in a long time. One thing after another had gone to shit.

Jobs that were supposed to carry them through the end of 2076 had fallen apart one by one. A convoy contract got canceled with no reason given, three days before they were due to roll. A corpo escort job ended with the client going bankrupt and the payment going nowhere. A salvage deal with a fixer in Arizona turned out to be a setup that cost them two trucks and almost cost Mitch his leg. Every month the numbers got thinner. And a clan as big as the Aldecaldos burned through money just to keep moving. 

Fuel. Parts. Tech to keep the rigs running. Medicine for the kids and the old folks and anybody stupid enough to get shot.

And through all of it, out east, there'd been them.

Another clan had been growing for the last two years, swallowing smaller families and absorbing their people, pushing a little harder into Aldecaldo territory every season. Panam had watched them do it. Their scouts started showing up on ridgelines where they had no business being. Their rigs started parking at water stops the Aldecaldos had used for a decade. They grabbed contracts out from under the clan. One of their kids put a knife in one of Carol's cousins at a trading post over nothing at all.

They were still nomads, technically. They still flew colors, still talked about family and the road. But Panam had grown up out there and knew the smell of it. That clan was one bad winter away from going full Raffen Shiv. 

One bad winter away from deciding it was easier to take what the Aldecaldos had than to earn their own.

So Saul had moved up the schedule.

He'd stood up at a council fire three months ago and said they were leaving. All of them, right away, while they could still do it on their own terms instead of with a war at their backs. 

Panam had been ready to argue with him on principle, because arguing with Saul was practically her second job. Then she'd stopped. He was right. 

For once Saul had made an actually smart call, and she'd hated how much she agreed with him.

And now here they were. They were in California a year early, low on money, short on contacts, camped out in the hills like refugees, and Panam was reduced to begging some cold-eyed old fixer in a dead man's bar for work.

And the fixer had told her to wait for a phone call from strangers.

Panam ground her teeth and pushed the Thorton a little harder.

She kept driving, the sun sliding lower and the shadows of the rocks stretching long across the road. She was coming up on Rocky Ridge, a dead little town nobody had lived in for years. 

It wasn't far from the clan's camp, close enough that she knew the turnoffs by memory already though. You always needed a good memory for places and roads as a Nomad.

Another twenty minutes and she'd be home. She'd get something to eat, find Saul, and tell him exactly what she thought of Rogue Amendiares, then tell him again louder when he told her she was being stubborn.

She was maybe two kilometers from the town when they came out of the rocks! Three of them. They'd been tucked behind a cluster of boulders off the shoulder, engines off, waiting. The moment she passed they roared out, bounced over the ditch and slewed onto the road behind her one after another.

Panam glanced at the rear camera and saw the paint. The spiked bumpers. The scrap-iron armor welded on in ugly slabs. The trophies hanging off the mirrors, things she didn't want to look at closely.

"YOU'VE GOTTA BE SHITTING ME!"

Wraiths. Night City's homegrown Raffen Shiv. The same scum who'd been sniffing around the edges of the Aldecaldo camp since the day the clan pulled in. And they were bold enough to jump her in the middle of the afternoon, on an open road, in broad fucking daylight?

The first rounds hit the back of the Thorton before she'd finished the thought. Clang-clang-clang, a whole string of them hammering into the rear plating. A heavier shot cracked the back window into a spiderweb.

"Fuck!" Panam floored it. The Thorton's engine howled. She'd rebuilt that engine herself over two long winters, and it answered her the way it always did, the whole heavy frame surging forward like a warhorse that had been waiting for her to let it run.

The Wraiths kept up. Their junkers were half engine and half garbage, light and stupid-fast. Hers was armored, which kept her alive but made her heavy. On a straight open road they'd stay on her bumper all day.

So she needed a road that wasn't straight.

Rocky Ridge. If she could get in among the buildings, maybe she could lose them. Maybe she could make one of those idiots wrap himself around a lamppost.

She came over the rise doing well over a hundred and saw the edge of town ahead.

And somebody on a motorcycle, coming straight at her down the middle of her road!

"Fuck!" Her eyes went wide. There was no time to brake. Even if she'd had the time, braking with three Wraith cars on her ass was a death sentence. She leaned on the horn and held her line and prayed.

The guy on the bike swerved. Hard. She saw it in a flash through the windshield—a young guy, dark jacket, no helmet, wrenching a big, nice-looking bike sideways onto the shoulder like he'd been born on it. The Thorton thundered past him with maybe a meter to spare. 

Then he was behind her.

Panam let out a breath and checked the rear camera.

The lead Wraith car had slowed. As she watched, it peeled off, swung wide across the road and turned toward the guy on the bike, someone hanging out the passenger window with a rifle already coming up.

Her stomach dropped.

Muzzle flashes. The bike went over and skidded in a shower of sparks. She lost sight of the rider in the dust.

Panam felt like shit. Total, absolute, gut-deep shit. Some random gonk on a motorcycle, minding his own business on an empty road in the middle of the afternoon, and she'd just dragged a pack of Wraiths straight into him. 

If he was dead, that was on her.

But there were still two cars on her bumper, and if she died out here, there'd be nobody to feel bad about anybody!

She shoved the guilt down hard into the place where she kept everything else she didn't have time for. 

Survive first. Feel bad later.

She whipped the Thorton into town and took the first corner so hard the back end kicked out. Past the dead motel. Past the boarded-up diner with its sign hanging from one chain. The two Wraith cars followed her in, engines screaming, still shooting. 

A round punched through the side mirror and took it clean off.

She wasn't going to outrun them. She knew it the way she knew her own engine. They were lighter, they were faster, and she couldn't keep this up in a town this small. Sooner or later one of them would get a lucky shot into a tire or a seam in the plating, and that would be it.

Fine. If she couldn't run, she'd fight.

The old gas station sat in the middle of town, pumps long since torn out and the canopy sagging over a cracked concrete lot. Panam slammed on the brakes. The Thorton shrieked and slewed sideways across the lot in a cloud of dust and came to a rocking stop broadside to the road, its armored flank facing the incoming cars.

She was already jacking in. Her personal link snapped into the dash port and her vision filled with the feed from the roof. A heavy turret, twin barrels, salvaged off a dead military rig in Nevada, and she'd spent a month of nights wiring it into the Thorton's systems. Saul had called it overkill.

Saul could kiss her ass!

The turret swung around with a hydraulic whine. The crosshair settled over the windshield of the closest Wraith car as it came tearing around the corner, the driver's grin turning into something else when he saw what was waiting for him.

"Suck on this!" Panam said, and opened fire. She couldn't keep the big, vindictive fucking grin off her face.

The .50-cal turret on top of her baby opened up with a sound like the sky tearing in half, and the nearest Wraith car came apart. The windshield went first, then the hood, then everything behind it, armor plating peeling away in ragged strips as the rounds chewed through the frame. The driver didn't have time to scream. 

One moment he was hunched over the wheel and the next he was a red mist sprayed across the back of the cab in bloody chunks.

She swung the gun a few degrees right and did the same to the passenger.

The guy in the back seat was faster or luckier than his friends. He dove out the side window headfirst, hit the concrete on his shoulder, and scrambled around behind the wreck, using what was left of the engine block for cover. 

Panam kept the turret hammering the car anyway, walking rounds across the body panels, trying to punch through to him. Sparks and shrapnel sprayed across the lot. One of the tires blew. Glass rained down like hail.

"Come on," she muttered. "Come on, you little shit, stick your head up—"

The turret feed glitched.

It was just a flicker at first, a smear of static across her crosshair. Then the image tore sideways in blocky chunks of black and red. 

Her optics stuttered with it, the whole world jumping and doubling, and a sharp spike of current jolted up through her personal link into the base of her skull.

Panam yelped and ripped the cable out of the dash.

She sat there blinking, eyes watering, the left side of her vision still crawling with afterimages. The turret had gone silent. 

On the little dash display, the feed showed nothing but frozen static.

Hacked! Somebody had gotten into her turret.

She jerked her head toward the second Wraith car, which had skidded to a stop at the edge of the lot. A skinny guy sat in the passenger seat with a cable running from the back of his neck into a battered deck in his lap, grinning at her through the windshield.

A netrunner. The fucking Raffens had brought a netrunner.

"Fuck," Panam hissed, and slammed her fist against the steering wheel.

She'd known. She'd known the security firmware on that turret was junk. She'd looked at a proper ICE package at a dealer in Reno, a real military-grade suite, and decided she could live without it for another month or two because the clan needed fuel more than she needed peace of mind.

Saul was going to be insufferable about this. If she lived long enough for him to find out.

The doors of the second car swung open. Four men got out, counting the netrunner, who stayed half-in with his deck. The survivor from the wrecked car limped out from behind the engine block to join them, bleeding from his scalp and furious.

"Come on out, bitch!" one of them screamed. He was a big one with a chrome jaw and a necklace of what looked like finger bones. "You hear me? You cost us men! You cost us a whole fucking car! We're gonna take it outta you!" He grinned and licked his teeth. "We're gonna fuck you bloody!"

A cold shiver went down Panam's spine.

She'd heard things like that before. Every nomad woman had. 

It was the kind of threat Raffens tossed around the way other people said hello. But she'd always heard it from across a camp, or over a radio, or in a bar with her clan at her back. Never alone, in a dead town, in a car that—

She hit the ignition. Nothing. The engine didn't even turn over. The dash lights flickered and went dead.

Her stomach fell through the floor. The netrunner hadn't stopped at the turret. He was in the car too!

Panam reached down for the pistol in the holster at her hip and drew it with hands that were not as steady as she wanted them to be. She thumbed the safety off. Six rounds, plus a spare mag in the glovebox. Five Wraiths, at least one of them a netrunner who could probably make her own optics turn on her.

The odds were bad…

They came across the lot slowly, taking their time, smirking at each other like this was the best part of their week. One of them reached the driver's door and slammed his palm against the window hard enough to make her flinch. He laughed. Another one leaned in on the other side, pressed the barrel of a shotgun against the passenger glass, and fired.

The window held. Barely. A starburst of cracks bloomed across it, white and spreading.

"Knock knock!" the shooter sang.

Panam's heart hammered. 

She was scared, really scared, more scared than she'd been in years. 

And under the fear, rising fast, she was furious. Furious at the Wraiths. Furious at the netrunner. Furious at herself for the firmware, for taking this road, for coming out alone. Furious at Rogue, for no good reason except that she was the last person who'd made Panam feel small today, and Panam was damned if this was going to be the last thing that happened to her!

She raised the pistol and leveled it at the cracked window, at the space where the first man's head would be when they broke it through.

If they wanted her, they'd pay for her.

The netrunner's head snapped sideways suddenly!

There was a flat crack from somewhere off down the road, and a spray of red burst out the far side of his skull. He slumped over his deck and slid out of the car onto the concrete. 

Under Panam's hands, the Thorton's dash lights flickered back to life.

Every Wraith in the lot froze.

"What the fuck?!" Panam twisted in her seat and stared through the windshield, and couldn't believe what she was seeing.

It was the guy from the road. The young blond guy she'd nearly run over, the one she'd been sure was lying dead in a ditch half a kilometer back. He was coming down the main street toward the gas station on foot, a pistol in one hand.

And he was moving fast. Incredibly fast.

Panam knew Night City had the best implants and cyberware in the world. 

Everybody in the country knew it. You heard the stories around every fire from Texas to Oregon—borgs with arms that could punch through engine blocks, runners who could fry your brain from three blocks away, corpo hit squads with reflexes so fast they could pick bullets out of the air. 

Half of it was bullshit, and everybody knew that too. Nomads loved a good story more than they loved the truth. Or was it?

Hearing and seeing were two different things.

The blond guy was crossing the lot faster than any person she'd ever seen move. And he was shooting while he ran, one-handed, and every shot was landing. The Wraith with the shotgun at her passenger window took one in the thigh and went down screaming, clutching his leg and spitting curses at the kid.

The others opened fire. 

The kid didn't even break stride. He cut hard to the side, slid across the cracked concrete, and ducked behind the wreck of the car Panam had shredded, rounds sparking off the twisted metal around him.

"Who the fuck are you?!" the chrome-jawed one bellowed. "You're dead, you hear me? We're gonna peel you! We're gonna take you apart piece by piece and make you watch!" Then, more uncertainly, glancing back at the road, "WHERE THE FUCK IS SPIDER? WHERE'S THE REST OF OUR BOYS?"

Panam's breath caught.

That was right. One of the Wraith cars had peeled off to go after him! 

Three men at least, maybe four, all armed, all with every reason to kill a stranger on a motorcycle for fun. She'd watched it happen in her rear camera. She'd watched his bike go down.

And now he was here, on foot, without a scratch on him that she could see. Which meant he'd dealt with them. All of them. Fast enough to run the whole way into town after her. And then he'd come here.

To help her…?

Panam stared at the wreck he was crouched behind and didn't understand.

Okay, sure. If he'd killed a carful of Wraiths by himself, that was badass, no argument. But Panam had grown up on the road, and she knew how the world worked now. Nobody risked their life for a stranger. Nobody. Not in the Badlands, and definitely not in Night City, where you could get shot for looking at someone wrong. People looked out for their clan, their crew, their blood. Everybody else was somebody else's problem. That was just survival.

And this kid had looked at a stranger in a car surrounded by Raffens and decided to run toward it.

What was he, some kind of Night City superhero?

Behind the wreck, the kid reached up, grabbed the mangled driver's-side door, and tore it off the car.

He tore it off, hinges shrieking as they snapped, like he was pulling a sheet of paper out of a notebook. Then he rose out of cover, wound back, and threw it.

The door flew at least thirty feet across the lot, spinning flat like a giant metal frisbee, and caught one of the Wraiths full in the face. The man was standing there with his rifle half-raised and his mouth hanging open, too shocked to move. There was a horrible wet crunch. His head snapped back, and he went down hard and didn't move again.

The other two stared at the body. The chrome-jawed one and the bleeding survivor from the wrecked car, both of them standing in the open with their backs to her, gaping at what was left of their friend's face.

Panam didn't waste it.

She shoved her door open, braced her gun arm on the frame, and shot the chrome-jawed one twice in the back. He pitched forward onto his knees and then his face. The last one started to turn. She put one between his shoulder blades and another in the back of his head on the way down.

The leg-shot one was still screaming on the ground somewhere behind the car. Then he wasn't. A single flat crack from behind the wreck, and the lot went quiet.

Panam stood there in the open door of her Thorton, pistol still raised, breathing hard, ears ringing, the smell of gunpowder and blood and burning plastic thick in the air.

– John Welles –

I couldn't believe my eyes for a second.

Standing in front of me, framed in the open door of a battered Thorton with a pistol pointed at my chest, was Panam Palmer. Brown hair pulled back, a face I'd spent maybe sixty hours of my old life looking at through a monitor. 

She was a woman I was pretty sure wasn't supposed to be anywhere near Night City for almost a year.

She was breathing hard, her eyes darting from me to the body by my feet to the car door I'd just thrown thirty feet into a guy's face. 

After a long moment, the gun started to drop. Slowly at first, like she was waiting for me to make a move, then the rest of the way once she realized I wasn't going to. 

I lowered one hand, holstered my pistol nice and slow so she could see it, and gave her a smile. "You okay?" I asked.

Panam let out a breath that turned into half a laugh, half a groan, and sagged back against the side of her car. "That," she said, "was fucking crazy." She rubbed a hand over her face and sighed, long and heavy. Then she looked at me again, properly this time, and some of the hardness went out of her shoulders. "Thanks. Seriously. I thought I was dead." She grimaced. "And sorry for almost running you over back there. I didn't exactly have a lot of options."

"Hey, no harm done." I glanced back down the road toward where I'd left Jackie's bike. "Mostly."

She huffed another laugh and pushed off the car, holstering her pistol. She held out her hand. "Panam."

"John Welles." I shook it. Her grip was firm, calloused, a mechanic's hand.

And my eyes, the traitors, went for a little walk.

I didn't mean to. It just kind of happened. One second I was looking at her face, and the next I was noticing the cropped top, the tight cargo pants, the way she was standing with one hip cocked against the car. She'd been beautiful in the game. Polygons and lighting had nothing on the real thing standing in front of me, flushed and dusty and alive.

Panam Palmer was really sexy. That was just a fact. Hot damn…

She noticed. One of her eyebrows went up, and her mouth curved into a slow, knowing smirk that said she'd caught me and didn't mind one bit.

Something pinched my ear. Hard.

Cortana was suddenly standing right beside me, invisible to everyone but me, with her fingers clamped on my earlobe and her face doing something very calm and very scary. "Eyes up, Spartan."

I made a noise that I tried to turn into a cough. 

A tumbleweed blew across the gas station lot between us.

I'd thought those were just a thing in old movies. Apparently not. We both watched it roll past the bodies, bump against a dead pump island, and keep going. Neither of us said anything. The silence got longer and more awkward by the second, the ringing in my ears from the gunfight slowly fading into the wind.

I cleared my throat. "So. Are you any good at fixing vehicles?"

Panam blinked at me, then glanced at her Thorton with the kind of pride most people saved for their kids. "I'm a nomad," she said. "Like any nomad, I like to think I'm pretty damn good."

"Great. Could you take a look at my brother's motorcycle, then?" I asked her. 

…A couple of minutes later we were back down the road where I'd ditched the Arch. It was lying on its side on the shoulder with a long trail of scraped asphalt behind it, and the rear light was a crater.

Panam crouched beside it, then bent at the waist to get a better look at the engine, hands on her knees, leaning in.

Don't look at her ass, I told myself firmly. Too late.

"Oh, come on," Cortana said, appearing next to me with her arms crossed. She looked at Panam's ass. She looked at me. She looked back at Panam's ass with grim professional honesty. "Okay. Fine. She has an amazing ass. I'm not blind. I'm in your eyes, so technically I'm extra not blind."

I kept my face very neutral, which was hard.

"But I want to know," she went on, her voice going sharp and serious, "what kind of cosmic bullshit made this woman show up in our lives almost a year ahead of schedule. Panam Palmer isn't supposed to be in California until 2077. The Aldecaldos don't roll into Night City until after the Heist, after Jackie, after all of it. And here she is, nearly running us over on the one road we happen to be on, at the one time we happen to be on it." She frowned down at Panam. "First Gloria's accident. Then Bartmoss. Then Jotaro. Then Dex. And now this."

I wondered too. I really did.

Cortana had a name for it, narrative gravity. The way this world kept steering me into the people and moments I remembered from a game in another life, like the story was trying to get back on its old rails even after I'd torn half of them up. Sometimes it felt like a coincidence. Sometimes it felt like something was arranging the furniture.

This felt like a lot of coincidence.

"I'm keeping an eye on it," Cortana said quietly. "On her." Then, with a sniff, "And on you. Still not looking at her face, by the way."

I looked at her face. Well, at the back of her head.

Panam sat back on her heels and wiped her hands on her pants, then looked up at me with a sympathetic grimace. "Sorry," she said. "Bad news. You've got a hole in the gas tank, right here." She tapped a neat round puncture low on the side of the tank. "And the fuel line's been severed. Clean through, looks like a second round clipped it." She pointed again. "That's two places it's gonna leak fuel, so this thing's not starting without getting both fixed. And if you did get it going, one spark off that exhaust and you'd be wearing it."

I closed my eyes. "Jackie's gonna kill me."

She tilted her head and gave me a sympathetic look. "Your brother?"

I nodded wondering how much he would freak out. He wouldn't actually blame me, but he also might still cry. "Yeah. He just got it fixed. Like, this morning. He let me borrow it because he took my car on a date."

Panam winced in even more genuine sympathy. "Oof…" She stood up, dusting off her knees, and gave the bike one last look like it had personally let her down. "Sorry I couldn't do more," she said. "Without parts I can't patch it out here. Maybe if I had a welder and a new line in my trunk, but…" She shrugged. "I don't."

"No, seriously, thanks for looking." I meant it. "Better to know than to blow myself up trying."

She smiled at that. Then she studied me for a second, head tilted, eyes running over me in a way that was very deliberately not subtle. Up, down, and back up again. "I was just in town," she said. "Night City. I was heading home. But you need a ride back?" Her smile went crooked. "I don't mind doubling back to help out… my hero."

"Oh, she did not." Cortana growled.

Panam's smile only got bigger.

…I ended up stashing Jackie's dead motorcycle back in the same garage I'd pulled it out of just a bit earlier. I walked it in, hauled the broken door down, and wedged it shut. 

Then I spent a few minutes dragging garbage over in front of it: a rusted-out shopping cart, half a couch, a sheet of corrugated metal, and a pile of bagged trash that had been baking in the sun since before I was born. 

When I was done, the garage looked like exactly what it was supposed to look like, another dead building in a dead town that nobody would bother poking around in.

Tomorrow Jackie and I would have to come back with a rented tow truck to pick it up. Panam's Thorton was big, but not big enough to fit a whole motorcycle in the back.

Neither of us bothered looting the Wraiths.

Panam walked the gas station lot once with her arms folded, nudged a rifle over with the toe of her boot, and made a disgusted noise. "Junk," she said. "All of it. Half these guns are held together with tape and spite. That one's got a bent barrel. I'm amazed it didn't blow up in his face."

"Rebecca would cry," Cortana said, peering at a duct-taped SMG. "Real tears."

She was right. I could already picture Rebecca kneeling over it like it was a dead puppy.

Before Panam climbed back into her Thorton, she stopped with one hand on the door and tapped at her temple, eyes going distant the way people's did when they were typing on their personal link. "Sending a message to my clan," she said when she noticed me watching. "Somebody'll come pick up the cars. The engines are worth something, even if everything else is garbage, and we don't exactly have the money to be picky right now." She finished sending and blew out a breath. "I don't want to be here when they show up, though."

I glanced at her expression. "Why not?"

Panam's cheeks went a little pink. She looked away from me, at her car.

I followed her gaze. The Thorton looked like it had been through a war, which, to be fair, it had. Bullet craters were punched all across the back and sides, scorch marks streaked the armor, and the side mirror had been shot clean off. The back window was a spiderweb of cracks, and the passenger window was so close to giving out that I could see it bowing in the frame.

"Some people in my clan," Panam said, carefully, like each word tasted bad, "aren't exactly comfortable with me driving into Night City—by myself. And this was my first ever trip!"

"Ah." I maybe knew where this was going.

"Yeah. Ah." She scowled. "And if I roll back into camp with my car literally covered in bullet holes and my window about to fall out, that's just going to prove their point. And then I'll never be allowed to leave camp again without a babysitter." She threw her hands up. "Some big hairy gonk who'll sit in my passenger seat and tell me how to drive and report back to Saul every time I take a corner too fast."

"She seems like she'd love that," Cortana said dryly.

I bit back a smile. "So you need it fixed before anybody sees it…?"

She grimaced. "That's the dream, yeah."

"I happen to know a pretty decent mechanic in Heywood," I said. "Miguel. He fixed my car and my brother's bike after we had a—uh—rough night. He could probably have yours patched up in less than a day…"

Somewhere in Heywood, Miguel was going to look at the Welles family and think he'd hit the jackpot. 

Three vehicles in a week. The man was going to put his kids through college on us. Too bad the Corpo colleges in this world fucking sucked, I knew that from experience. 

Panam's blush didn't go away. If anything, it got worse. She shifted her weight from one boot to the other and looked suddenly, uncharacteristically small. "That's… I appreciate it," she said. "But I don't exactly have the money to cover that. Or…" She grimaced, like admitting it physically hurt. "Or even to stay at a hotel tonight, honestly. I spent most of what I had getting in to see a fixer this morning, and that went… nowhere."

I didn't even have to think about it. "I'll pay for it."

"John." Cortana's voice went off in my head like an alarm. She was suddenly standing between me and Panam, close enough that her nose was practically touching mine, eyes narrowed. "We don't know her," she hissed. "Not this her. We know a character in a game who hasn't happened yet. We don't know who she's talked to or what she's doing in California a year early, or why she happens to come screaming down the one road we're on, on the one afternoon we're on it." Her eyes flicked over at Panam and back to me. "And you're about to offer her a car repair and a bed."

I hadn't said anything about a bed yet.

"You were about to," she said. "I live in your head, John."

She wasn't wrong. I was about to.

"And you can stay at my place tonight, if you want," I said to Panam. "As a guest. We've got plenty of room."

Cortana made a noise like a kettle about to boil over.

Panam stared at me. "...You barely know me," she said slowly.

"I know you got jumped by a bunch of Wraiths and didn't go down easy," I said. "That's not nothing."

Her eyes narrowed. She folded her arms across her chest and gave me a long suspicious look, the kind that started at my boots and went all the way up. "Okay," she said. "Let me guess. Is this how you try to get in my pants?" She held up a hand before I could answer. "Because don't get me wrong, I'm really grateful. You saved my life. And you're…" She waved a hand vaguely at all of me. "Very cute. But I'm not that easy, John Welles."

I coughed. "No, I mean, you're really sexy," I said. Out loud. With my mouth. The words just came out. I don't know where they came from. Probably the same part of my brain that kept looking at her ass.

"Oh my god." Cortana put both hands over her face.

Panam's eyebrows shot up, and then the smirk came back, slow and playful and very pleased with itself. "Is that right?"

"That's—that came out wrong," I said quickly. "Or, I mean, it came out right, it's just true, but that's not why I'm offering. I'm already in a relationship. Multiple relationships, actually." I rubbed the back of my neck. "So I'm not looking for another one. Seriously. That's not what this is."

Panam's eyebrows somehow went even higher. "Multiple?"

I sighed. "It's a long story. Many long stories actually."

She grinned at me. "...I'll bet."

"But I think I like you," I said honestly. "And I think we could be friends. That's all."

Panam stared at me. Then she burst out laughing. It was a real laugh, loud and surprised, with her head tipped back and one hand braced on the hood of her car. "Oh, my god," she wheezed. "We just met. Like, ten minutes ago. I almost killed you. And you just come right out and say you like me?"

"Yeah," I said.

Because I did. I couldn't really explain it, except that even half dead and dusty and swearing at a bunch of Wraiths, she was exactly who I remembered her being: proud, loud, stubborn as hell, and hiding a whole lot of soft under a whole lot of armor. I'd liked her in another life. It turned out I liked her in this one too.

Panam looked at me for a long moment, still grinning, shaking her head like she couldn't believe me. "You know what?" she said. "I like you too, John Welles." She yanked her door open and jerked a thumb at the passenger side. "Now get in my fucking car."

"…Fine," Cortana muttered, as I walked around the hood. She materialized in the back seat before I'd even opened the door, glaring holes in the back of Panam's headrest. "Fine… This might as well happen…”

I climbed into the passenger seat. The window beside me creaked ominously in its frame.

Panam fired up the engine, and her whole face changed when it caught, softening into something that was almost love. "Hold on," she said, and floored it.

The flirty looks pretty much died after that.

It wasn't awkward, exactly. It was more like a switch had flipped. 

Once I'd said multiple girlfriends and we'd agreed on friends, Panam had put me in a box with a label on it, and she seemed perfectly happy with the box. She drove with one hand on the wheel and one elbow propped on the windowsill, the window that still had a top half, and the smirk was gone. It had turned into something easier and more relaxed.

Honestly, I liked it better that way.

"So do I," Cortana said from the back seat. She'd stretched out across it like she owned the car, legs crossed, and was watching the back of Panam's head with slightly less murder in her eyes than before.

The Badlands rolled past outside, brown and endless, the sun sinking low and turning the dust in the air orange. The Thorton's engine had a deep, steady growl that I could feel in my seat. Panam drove like she was part of the car. I didn't know much about driving, but I knew enough to tell the difference between someone who was good at it and someone who loved it.

"So what brings you to Night City?" I asked.

Panam was quiet for a second. Her thumb tapped against the wheel. "My clan's been going through some rough times lately," she said finally. "Jobs falling through. Money drying up. Some… trouble, back east." Her jaw tightened on trouble in a way that told me there was a lot more to that word than she was going to say. "So we came out here. The City of Dreams, right?" She snorted. "Fresh start. That's the idea, anyway."

"How's that going?" I asked her, wanting to know more.

"Today? I got jumped by Raffens and almost ran over a stranger." She glanced at me sideways. "So, great. Ten out of ten." She jerked her chin at me. "What about you?"

I'd been expecting the question, but I still had to choose my words carefully. "Born and raised," I said. "I've lived in this city my whole life."

It was technically true. John Welles had lived here his whole life. It just hadn't been me for most of it. I didn't love lying to her, but I'm from another universe and also there's a hologram glaring at you from the back seat wasn't really a conversation for a first car ride.

"Or a fifth," Cortana muttered. "Or a fiftieth… Too many people know about me already."

"Yeah?" Panam said. "And what do you do, born-and-raised?" She took her eyes off the road long enough to give me a long, appraising look. "Because those moves of yours back there were not normal. I've seen borgs. I've seen guys with enough chrome to set off airport scanners from the parking lot. You didn't move like any of them." She shook her head. "But they were super badass. I'll give you that."

I couldn't help it. I grinned.

"Oh, don't let it go to your head," Cortana said. Then, smugly, "It's my work, after all."

"I'm a merc," I told Panam. "Leader of my own crew, actually." I rubbed the back of my neck. "Pretty new crew. We've only been running together a few weeks."

"Figured it was something like that." Panam nodded to herself, then went on half under her breath. "Can't believe the stories are all true. Crazy Night City edgerunners." She shook her head again, almost in wonder. "Those Raffen Shiv didn't stand a chance."

"Damn right they didn't," Cortana said, just for me, with a vicious kind of pride that made me want to laugh.

We drove in comfortable silence for a while. The first towers of the city started rising out of the haze on the horizon, gray and hazy and enormous, the way they always looked from out here, like a mountain range someone had built on purpose.

Then Panam's hands tightened on the wheel. "You know what I'm still pissed about?" she said. "That fixer. That frigid old bitch at the Afterlife."

I went very still.

"Rogue Amendiares," Panam went on, with venom. "Queen of the fucking mercs. Sits in her little booth like she's on a throne, looks at you like you're something she stepped in…"

I suddenly found the dashboard extremely interesting.

It was a strange feeling, listening to someone trash-talk your grandmother, especially when you'd only found out she was your grandmother last night. Especially when that grandmother had the Afterlife's entire security staff on speed dial and had just shot Dexter DeShawn off a rooftop for putting you in danger. 

Part of me wanted to defend her. Part of me wanted to laugh. Part of me just wanted to sink down into the seat and disappear.

"Oh, this is wonderful," Cortana said, sitting up in the back with sudden, delighted interest. "Keep going, Panam. Keep going."

"What happened with Rogue?" I asked, as neutrally as I could.

Panam shot me a sharp look. "You know her?"

"I've taken a couple gigs for her," I said, which was true, and also the least true thing I'd ever said that was technically true.

"Lucky you." Panam scowled at the road. "That's what I was trying to do. Get gigs. I went in there this morning, laid it all out. I can drive anything, fix anything, shoot straight, I'm good under pressure. And she just looks at me. And then she says she doesn't trust me." Her voice climbed. "Or my driving!"

She actually scoffed. It was the most offended sound I had ever heard a human being make, like Rogue had insulted her mother, her clan, and her car all in one sentence!

In the back seat, Cortana burst out laughing.

She doubled over across the seat, clutching her stomach. Panam heard nothing, obviously. She just kept glaring at the road while I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste blood.

"Her driving!" Cortana wheezed. "She nearly ran you over, John! She nearly ran you over with this car!"

I did not laugh. It took everything I had. "...That's rough," I managed.

"Right?" Panam threw a hand in the air. "And then she says she's not giving me solo work. Instead, she wants to stick me with some brand-new merc crew. Some random crew I don't know a thing about. No names, no reputation, nothing. Just 'I know a crew that might need a driver.'" Her impression of Rogue was flat and dry and honestly a little too good. "And if they don't like me, then Rogue won't let me take any gigs from her ever again."

I winced at her situation. "So it's basically a tryout?"

"It's basically bullshit," Panam said. "I don't do tryouts. I'm not some kid begging to get picked for a team. Why the hell should my whole future in this city depend on whether a bunch of strangers like my vibe?"

I sighed. Internally. Loudly. Both at the same time.

I was going to have to talk to my grandmother, wasn't I? I didn't know what that conversation even looked like. Hey, abuela, loved the dinner, love the cyberdeck you gifted me even if I might give it to one of my girls because my mad scientist girlfriend is making a special one for me instead, thanks for killing Dex, but could you maybe be a little nicer to this random nomad girl? 

And what crew was she even thinking of? Rogue had a dozen crews working for her at any given time, at least. 

A brand-new one, though? Were there other brand new crews she had working for her besides mine? Hm…

The Thorton crested the last rise before the city outskirts. The first cell tower slid past on the right, and my optics, which had been showing nothing but a sad little NO SIGNAL in the corner since Rocky Ridge, pinged to life all at once. A flood of notifications came in—three from Lucy, one from V, eleven from Rebecca, most of them pictures of a large fire near a chem plant for some reason…?

And one at the very top. A message from—

ROGUE.

I stared at the name hanging in the corner of my vision.

In the back seat, Cortana slowly stopped laughing.

XXX

That was fast huh? John meets Panam probably quicker than any of you expected. Someone should maybe tell Rebecca to not document her crimes either. Not that that would stop her of course… 

Written: 10/20/2026