Chipping In! 46 (Patreon)

Chapter 46:

– Panam –

Panam drove her newly repaired Thorton War Horse back up the washboard road to the Aldecaldos' camp with the windows down and the morning heat already pressing against her arms. The engine sounded better than it had in years. Miguel had done something to the timing, or the intake, or whatever else he'd muttered about while he worked, and the War Horse no longer coughed when she leaned into the throttle. 

It purred. She hated how much she liked that, because she hadn't paid a single eddie for it. Also, that came with admitting the fact that someone from the city was a better mechanic than her, an Aldecaldo. 

The camp came into view over the last rise, and Panam eased off the gas.

It had only been a day, but she could see the rest of her clan had gotten more defenses up. Where there had been an open stretch of dirt, there was now a crooked wall of stripped car hulks, dragged into a half circle and chained bumper to bumper, with sandbags stacked in the gaps. Someone had bolted a lookout platform together out of old scaffolding near the eastern edge, and a tarp snapped in the wind above a mounted gun she didn't recognize. Generators hummed. 

Cable snaked across the ground in neat, staked lines, which meant Carol had been yelling at people again.

The living quarters weren't just tiny little tents anymore. They were now bigger tents, of course.

Panam snorted despite herself. Bigger tents. A wall made of junk. A gun on a stick. It wasn't much, and anyone with real firepower could still roll right over it, but it was something. It was the clan doing what the clan always did when the ground under them got shaky—pulling closer together and building with whatever it had.

She saw Mitch and Scorpion guarding the front, posted at the gap in the car wall that served as a gate. 

Both of them straightened the second they recognized the War Horse.

Panam rolled to a stop and killed the engine. Before she could even open the door, Scorpion was already walking toward her with his arms spread.

"Well, look at that," he said. "She lives."

"Sorry to disappoint," Panam said, climbing out.

"Disappoint? Mitch was about ready to drive into the city and start knocking on doors." Scorpion jerked a thumb back at the older man. "Weren't you?"

Mitch didn't deny it. He looked Panam over from boots to hairline, the way he used to check her over after a bad fall when she was a kid, and only when he was satisfied did he let out a slow breath. "You sent us coordinates," he said. "Three Wraith cars. Then nothing. Not a call. Not a message."

She grimaced . "I was—"

"We went out there," Scorpion cut in, plucking the toothpick from his mouth and pointing it at her. "Picked them clean. Good haul, by the way. Two engines we can use, a whole lot of ammo, and a turret Carol is already in love with." He paused, and his grin thinned. "And a bunch of very dead Wraiths."

Panam kept her face still.

"One of them was a netrunner," Mitch said quietly. "Single shot to the head..."

"And one of them," Scorpion added, warming up, "had a car door through him. A door. Ripped right off the hinges and thrown hard enough to fold the poor bastard in half." He tilted his head. "So I gotta ask. When did you start throwing cars?"

Panam grimaced harder...

She could have told them the truth. She'd gone into Night City alone to prove she didn't need anyone and that on the way home three Wraith cars had boxed her in and she had been seconds from dying in the front seat with her pistol in her hand.

That a nineteen-year-old kid she'd nearly run over had walked across that lot like bullets were a minor inconvenience and saved her life.

That the same kid had paid for every bolt and weld on the War Horse without blinking, and put her up for the night in a penthouse with more bedrooms than the whole Aldecaldo clan had tents. And that she'd stepped out of the shower in a towel and seen—

Nope. She was not thinking about that. Not here, not now, not with Mitch looking at her like that.

Heat crawled up the back of her neck anyway. "I got busy," she said. "In the city."

Scorpion's eyebrows climbed. "Busy?"

"Yeah. Busy." Panam shut the War Horse's door harder than she needed to. "Had some business to take care of. Made a contact. Got the car fixed up. It's handled."

"Got the car fixed up," Mitch repeated. His eyes moved over the Thorton. "With what money, Panam?"

She rolled her eyes. "I said it's handled."

Mitch held her gaze. Scorpion looked back and forth between them.

Panam lifted her chin and waited. They didn't believe her. She could see it plainly in both of their faces. 

Mitch knew her too well, and Scorpion was too nosy to miss the way she wouldn't look at either of them for long. They knew something had happened out there, something bigger than "busy," and they knew she was lying straight to their faces about it.

Then Mitch shifted his rifle, stepped aside to clear the gap in the wall, and said, "Saul's been asking for you. Better go let him yell at you before he decides to come find you himself."

Scorpion stuck the toothpick back in his mouth and shrugged. "Guess the door thing'll stay a mystery. Like Bigfoot."

That was it. No more questions. They dropped it anyway, because she'd asked them to without saying so, and because they trusted that if it ever mattered, she'd tell them.

That was why she loved them.

Panam ducked her head to hide her smile, muttered something that might have been thanks, and walked past them into the camp. 

Behind her, she heard Scorpion stage-whisper, "Five eddies says it's a guy."

"Not taking that bet…" Mitch said with a cheeky grin.

Panam didn't turn around. But her ears burned all the way to Saul's tent.

Saul's tent was the biggest in camp. It was military surplus, olive canvas gone pale from too many years of sun, with the side flaps rolled up to let in whatever breeze the Badlands felt like giving. 

A folding table took up most of the floor, buried under papers, printed manifests, hand-drawn maps.

Saul was going over some documents in his tent when Panam ducked inside.

Panam's good mood vanished when he looked up at her and frowned. It was the one he'd been wearing ever since they crossed into California a year early with half the money they needed and none of the contacts. "Panam." He set down his pen. "Good. You're back."

She scoffed. "Told you I'd be fine."

"You told me you'd be back last night." He leaned back in his chair, and it creaked under him. "Mitch said you sent coordinates and then went dark. Said there were bodies out there."

"Wraiths," she said, as if that explained everything. "They're NOT a problem anymore."

Saul studied her for a long moment. Whatever he saw made some of the stiffness go out of his shoulders. "I'm glad you're okay," he said, and he meant it. She could hear that he meant it. Then he ruined it. "But this little plan of yours, going into the city by yourself, was foolish. I told you that before you left, and I'm telling you now."

Panam scowled.

He didn't even bother asking her how it had gone. He just picked his pen back up.

Panam scoffed and said, "Whatever."

Saul's eyes flicked up at her tone, but she was already pushing on. "For the record, it went fine. Better than fine." She folded her arms. "I got us work."

This time he at least spared her a glance. "Did you?"

"A future gig. With a reliable merc crew." She lifted her chin. "One I know I can trust." Her voice warmed on the last word before she could stop it. She was thinking of a kid with dimples and terrible timing walking across a gas station lot through gunfire like it was raining. She was thinking of him handing Miguel his card without a second's hesitation, and of him saying friends and meaning exactly that.

Saul set the pen down again, slower this time. "Trust…?" he repeated.

"Yeah. Trust." She nodded her head proudly. 

"A merc crew." He said merc the way some people said Militech, or raider. "You've known these people how long? A day?"

"Long enough." She told him. 

"And you trust—them?" Saul gestured at the canvas walls, the camp beyond them, the people out there hauling sandbags and stringing cable in the heat. "You've got a whole family here, Panam. Your blood. People who would take a bullet for you, who already have. And you come into my tent and tell me you trust a pack of city mercenaries you met—yesterday."

Panam got angry then, real anger, hot and fast. It wasn't what he'd said that did it. It was what he meant underneath it. "Don't," she said.

"Don't what?" he asked her. 

"Don't do that. Don't make it sound like I picked them over you." She jabbed a finger toward the camp. "I went to the city for the clan. Every eddie I make out there comes back here. You know that. Don't you dare question my loyalty because I found people out there who aren't trying to screw us."

"I'm not questioning—" He started to say but she cut him off quickly.

"You are! That's exactly what you're doing." Her voice had risen. Somewhere outside, the clank of someone working on a generator stopped. Panam lowered it, but not by much. "I'm not stupid, Saul. I'm not some kid who got dazzled by neon. If I say I can trust these mercs, it's because I know it."

The words hung there between them.

Saul held her gaze. For a second she thought he might push back, that he'd ask how do you know, and then she'd have to decide how much of the truth she was willing to give him. She'd have to tell him about the fact that she'd been one bad second away from dying in the front seat of the War Horse.

Instead, he just looked tired again. "Whatever," Saul said. It was her word. He threw it back at her flat and unbothered, and it landed harder than any lecture could have. He looked back down at his papers. "Fine. You want to run a gig or two with your city friends, run with them for a month or two. We need the money. I'm not going to pretend we don't."

Panam blinked. That was more than she'd expected.

"But that's it," he went on, without looking up. "One or two months. After that, you get ready to cut contact."

"Cut contact?" She stared at him. "Saul, I just got my foot in the door. If I do good work, Rogue—"

"After that," he repeated, firmer now, "you cut contact. I've got bigger plans in store for the clan, and they don't include you being on call for some fixer in the Afterlife."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "What plans?"

"When it's time, you'll know." he gave her the most vague possible answer that she was not happy with. 

She knew she had an indignant look on her face. "That's not an answer."

"It's the one you're getting." He didn't seem to care about her glare, he rarely did. 

Panam glanced at the table before she could stop herself. She caught a corner of a map with something circled in grease pencil, northeast of the camp, and columns of numbers in the ledger with too much red ink in them. A manila folder sat half under the tablet. Saul reached over without hurrying and flipped it closed.

So that was how it was.

"Fine," she said, in a voice that made it very clear it wasn't.

She turned and pushed back out through the tent flap into the heat and glare of the relentless California sun. She didn't slam anything, only because canvas didn't slam. Behind her, Saul's pen was already scratching again.

Panam stalked across the camp, past the new wall, the bigger tents and the gun on its scaffold, and she didn't stop until she was leaning against the War Horse's warm hood with her arms crossed and her heart hammering.

Bigger plans…?

She had no idea what kind of bigger plans he had in store for the clan, and the fact that he was not willing to share didn't make her trust him any more. But as long as nothing was happening for at least two months, she supposed she had plenty of time to figure it out. 

In the meantime, she was hoping that John would contact her pretty soon, because her family really did need the money.

And I want to see him again, she admitted to herself.

She had a lot of family in the clan, and she loved everyone here. But she didn’t really have any—friends.

Hm, the thought did give her a fond smile…

– John Welles –

It was a few hours later, after I had helped Jackie get his bike back to town to get it fixed up. Watching him and Miguel cry together as they assessed the damage—that was something alright…

Currently, I was inside Cortana's and my secret villain lair mountain base.

I still hadn't gotten tired of thinking of it that way. Every time I walked through that rebuilt blast door and heard it seal behind me, some part of me that had spent too many nights reading web novels in my old life did a little victory dance.

Specifically, we were in Cortana's main lab as she finished up what she had started yesterday. 

She was using my cyberdeck to control some automated robot arms and occasionally also using my own hands to work on the very intricate device on the table in front of us.

The last contact clicked home under my right thumb.

I felt Cortana shiver with happiness through our shared nerves. It was her feeling, but it moved through me, and for a second I grinned at nothing like an idiot.

"I really am a freaking genius," Cortana declared proudly.

She appeared next to me.

I turned to her, blinked, and promptly forgot what I'd been about to say.

"Uh," I managed. "What are you wearing?"

"Oh, this?" Cortana did a slow, deliberate turn on one heel, which was very clearly the point. "I'm a sexy scientist, of course."

Her lab coat was white, technically. That was about where its resemblance to actual lab safety equipment ended. Beneath it was a white skirt so short that calling it a skirt felt generous, then a whole lot of glowing blue leg, and finally a pair of white high-heeled boots that came up past her knees. She'd even added little black-framed glasses perched on the end of her nose, which she pushed up with one finger while giving me a look over the top of them.

"That's not a scientist," I said. "That's a sexy doctor."

"Is there a difference?" she asked me playfully.

"Scientists wear goggles. And closed-toe shoes." It was a strange fact to know, but I did.

"These are closed-toe." She lifted one high healed white leather boot to prove it, and her simulated clothes shifted in a way that made my brain lose its train of thought. "And I've decided goggles aren't flattering on me."

I smiled at her. "You're perfect. Everything is flattering on you." I was being completely genuine.

Her cheeks lit a shade brighter. I loved that I could still do that to her.

"Close enough," she said primly, pretending not to be pleased, and then she turned back to the table and spread her hands over it like a magician finishing the trick. "Anyway. It's done."

I looked down at our device.

Originally, Cortana had been planning on using the Militech device to create her own completely brand-new cybertech. But then, last night before bed, Cortana had the idea to use the high-end Arasaka cyberdeck Rogue had given me as the base.

I'd been brushing my teeth when it hit her. I knew because she'd yelled "OH" so loudly inside my skull that I'd jammed the toothbrush into my gums. She'd spent the next ten minutes explaining her reasoning at a speed I couldn't follow, which boiled down to this—why build a new chassis from scratch when someone had already handed us one of the best on the market?

She had scraped out all the 'Saka tech, of course. She'd done it gleefully and thoroughly, and she'd narrated each part as it came out, telling me what it was and what it had been built to report back to Arasaka. 

There had been more of those parts than I'd liked. 

Then she'd installed her own remodeled parts from the device Nadia had given her life for.

The result sat on the padded tray in front of me.

It was slimmer than I'd expected, about the length of my palm, with a black shell that still carried the look of Arasaka engineering. They loved their black and red. They were basically the Evil Empire/Sith of this world…

The cooling system had been completely redone. Even without understanding all of it, I could see that the channels were deeper and more numerous, laid out in a branching pattern that reminded me of frost on glass.

I turned the deck over in my hands, careful, as if it might bite. "Okay—genius," I said with a smirk. "Give me numbers. How many more hacks can you launch with this thing?"

Cortana's grin spread slowly, the way it always did when someone gave her a chance to show off. She pushed her ridiculous glasses up her nose with one finger and leaned over the table beside me, which put the single overworked button on her lab coat under a lot of strain.

"Well," she said, "the device obviously has much better cooling." She traced one of the frost-pattern channels along the casing, and a little thermal overlay bloomed across my vision, all cool blues and greens where the MK2 would have glowed angry orange. "On the old deck, every serious hack was a negotiation with your brainstem. I had to bleed heat into the Relic, into the nanites, and into tissue I'd really rather not cook. This doesn't need any of that. The heat goes where I tell it to go, and then it leaves."

Another overlay appeared, this one a block of shifting numbers I mostly didn't understand.

"And the RAM upgrade is big." She sounded very smug about that. "So, conservatively, I'll be able to put out five times the number of quickhacks, and more powerful ones as well. No more frying three gangers' optics and then needing a nap."

Five times…? I nodded slowly. "Cool. That's... cool." And it was. Objectively, it was. Five times the hacks, stronger hacks, and no more feeling like someone had pressed a hot iron to the back of my neck every time she went all out. But somewhere in the back of my head, a part of me that had grown up on game patch notes and anime power-ups had been expecting the number to be bigger. Ten times at least. I'd wanted something absurd, a number that would justify a shiver.

I thought that wasn't as much as I'd been expecting.

The problem with having your girlfriend live in your brain is that you don't get to think anything quietly.

Cortana noticed. She went still, her head tilting, and then a slow smirk crept across her lips that told me I was about to be humbled. "Oh," she said. "Oh, I see. 'Only' five times. Somebody's spoiled."

"I didn't say only."

"You thought it with italics."

"I did not think it with italics..." I grumbled. 

She leaned in before I could keep arguing and kissed my lips. It was soft and unhurried, with a warm press I felt all the way down my spine. It was the kind of kiss that let me know she wasn't actually offended, she was just about to win.

When she pulled back, she stayed close enough that the brim of her glasses nearly bumped my nose. "That's because the device isn't—complete," she murmured.

I blinked. "It's not?"

"Not yet. What you're holding is about half of a system." She straightened, spun on one heel, and threw out her hand toward the far wall. A projection snapped to life there, life-size and rotating slowly in midair.

My heart stopped.

It was armor. It was layered, with plates over a dark undersuit, a broad chest, and a helmet with a single curved, gold-tinted visor. It wasn't exactly the one I'd grown up staring at on loading screens, the proportions had been adjusted, and some of the plating looked lighter and more modern. But there was no mistaking what it was.

"Is that..." My voice cracked a little. I didn't care. "Cortana. Can you make that now—"

"Mjolnir! My own custom version" she said, and I could hear how much she was enjoying this. "Or it will be. I actually designed the deck so it would be compatible with your future Mjolnir armor. The armor has its own cooling loops, power, and processing lattice. It was built to carry an AI like me from the start." A thin line of blue light connected the hologram's helmet to the deck in my hands. "Once you're wearing that armor, the deck stops being the bottleneck. The cooling and RAM will be further enhanced through the suit's systems to make it not five times..."

She paused for effect. She absolutely paused for effect.

"...but twenty times more effective!"

I shivered.

It started at the base of my skull and ran down my whole body, partly awe, partly the purest, most unfiltered excitement I'd felt since waking up in that alley. The kid in me who'd spent entire summers playing through the same campaign again and again was screaming. 

Mjolnir. My own. Cortana in my head, the Chief's—no, mine—

And yeah, okay. I might have even gotten a little hard.

Cortana glanced down. Her eyebrows rose above the rims of her glasses. The smirk came back, slower and wickeder. "Well," she said. "I see somebody's very excited about the armor."

"That's—" My face was on fire. "It's not about the armor."

"No?" She gave me a teasing, knowing look.

I calmed down quickly and threw the look right back at her. "It's about you. Designing it. For me."

"Mm-hm." She stepped in close and trailed one finger down the center of my chest. "You know, I'm not sure how I feel about competing with a suit I haven't built yet. I'm going to have to make sure you never look at it the way you look at me."

Now I was smirking at her. "You're jealous of the armor?"

"I'm jealous of everything. You know this." She let out a huff. It was half exaggerated and I knew it was half completely serious. 

I laughed, which helped a little, and dragged my eyes back to the slowly rotating hologram before it could make my situation worse. "How soon?" I asked. "How soon can we build THAT?"

"Very soon," Cortana said, and the excitement in her voice matched mine. "Once we get this new deck installed, and once we have a proper factory set up that I'll be able to control directly. This lab is fine for surgery, chemistry, and small-scale fabrication, but armor plating, actuators, and the undersuit weave need industrial production lines. Precision forging, alloy synthesis, and a few things Night City doesn't technically sell yet." She waved a hand, and the hologram broke apart into a scatter of components hanging in the air like an exploded diagram. "I'll design the rest. I just need the hardware to build it with!"

"Okay." I nodded too quickly. "Okay, yeah. That's fine. We've got money. We can buy—stuff."

"Mm. About that." She tucked her hands behind her back and swayed on her heels in a way that was far too innocent. "The only… teensy downside is that some of the specific equipment we'll need to buy might be a bit… expensive."

My stomach did something unpleasant. "How expensive is 'a bit'?"

Cortana smiled up at me sweetly, glasses perched on the end of her nose, the very picture of a sexy, helpful scientist. "...Just around ten million eddies," she said.

I choked. My own spit simply went down the wrong way in response to the number, and I ended up doubled over the lab table coughing hard enough to rattle the parts trays. 

One of the maintenance drones drifted closer in polite concern.

"Breathe," Cortana said, patting my back with a hand that felt exactly like a real hand. "Your Spartan lungs can handle this."

"Ten—" I wheezed. "Ten million?" 

It took me a solid minute to stop coughing. Cortana spent most of it patting my back and the rest of it visibly trying not to laugh, which she failed at.

When I could finally breathe again, I braced both hands on the edge of the lab table and stared at the slowly rotating hologram of my future armor like it had personally mugged me.

"Ten million." I rasped.

"Just around," Cortana said again, helpfully.

"Cortana, I don't have ten million. I don't have one million." I started to do the math. I had close to 300k eddies, which meant I was loaded by Night City standards, but that wasn’t even 5% of what we needed. 

Cortana's laughter softened. She took off her glasses, folded them, and tucked them into the pocket of her absurd lab coat. Then she leaned against the table beside me, her shoulder pressed to mine, with her simulated warmth seeping through my sleeve. "Hey," she said gently. "Look at me."

I looked at her.

"It's not as scary a number as either of us is thinking." She said it with the calm certainty of someone who had already run the numbers six thousand times while I was busy choking on air. "You're still doing math like the game, John. In your head, a gig is a couple of thousand eddies and a pat on the back from some guy named Padre. That's not how it works here."

She flicked her fingers, and the Mjolnir hologram shrank out of the way. A column of figures replaced it, each one tagged with a little label I recognized.

The scav den, at twenty thousand base plus bonuses. The biochemical plant, at thirty. Ho-Oh, at fifty from Rogue. And then Bartmoss, a number so absurd it still didn't look real, sitting at the bottom of the list like a punchline.

"Unlike the game, this is real life," she said, "and real gigs pay a lot more. Clients aren't paying for a quest marker. They're paying people not to die, and to make problems disappear quietly. And you've gotten very, very good at both…"

She tapped the list, and it reordered itself chronologically. The numbers climbed fast.

"A month ago, you were a kid in an Arasaka uniform getting told to fuck off on a train. Now you've cleared a scav den, burned a fixer, found the most wanted corpse in history, rescued four women out of a Tyger Claw fortress, and walked out of Pacifica alive when a whole merc army didn't." Her voice warmed with something that sounded a lot like pride. "People step aside for you in the Coyote now. Your rep has reached the point where fixers offering you less than 50k for a gig would be an insult."

I thought about the poser kids outside the Afterlife, and the way the bouncer had waved me straight through. I thought about Kirk Sawyer's five-hundred-eddie job, which felt like a different life. Barely two weeks ago even.

I nodded at that, slowly.

"So we don't need ten million tomorrow," she went on. "We need good gigs, a crew that comes home, and a little patience. Some jobs will pay fifty, some will pay a hundred, and sometimes we'll fall into another Bartmoss. And every eddie that comes in builds something that keeps all of us alive."

Put like that, it didn't feel like a wall anymore. It felt like a ladder, a long, ridiculous ladder, but one we were already climbing. "Okay," I said. Then, more steadily, "Okay. Yeah. We can do that."

Cortana smiled and kissed my cheek again. It was a soft, fond kiss, the kind that said good boy without her needing to say it out loud. "And besides," she added, a bright, scheming note creeping back into her voice, "Mjolnir isn't even next."

I gave her a suspicious look. "What's next?"

"You of course."

"I'm already done. You made me a Spartan last week."

"I made your body a Spartan last week," she corrected. "Before I build Mjolnir, I'll be building you more implants as well. Proper ones. Not hand-me-down corpo chrome." She pushed off the table and began to pace, her heels clicking crisply on the lab floor, her hands moving the way they always did when an idea got into her. "I have my own plans for extra enhancements to give you. Designed by me, of course."

I nodded at her. "Of course."

"I've been taking notes on everything we've run into. David's Sandevistan, for a start." She held up one finger. "There's no reason speed has to cost you your spine. And V's mantis blades." A second finger. "Those are elegant, but the deployment mechanism is lazy, and I can do better. Optics, reflex co-processors, subdermal shielding that doesn't leave gaps Vik has to patch afterward..." She caught herself, then shrugged without a shred of shame. "I have a list."

"Hm… And how long is the list?"

She pursed her lips. "I'd rather not say. You'll make that face."

"What face?" I asked her. 

She pointed at me. "The face that I love and it’s adorable but also makes me feel a bit sad."

I was probably making that exact face right now… 

She pouted her purple lips at me. 

"I'm going to start on the designs for them as soon as you can convince Vik to chip in this completely unknown and—definitely not sketchy cyberdeck," she snickered, and she patted the black and red casing I’d set back on the table, the way someone might pat a very expensive, very illegal puppy.

I knew that was a conversation I wasn't looking forward to having with Vik.

"He's going to kill me," I said.

"He can't," Cortana said cheerfully. She hooked her arm through mine again, leaning her head on my shoulder as we both stared down at the deck. "I made you far too sturdy."

After searching a couple of empty rooms, I managed to find a portable security safe, basically a hardened suitcase. I gently placed my soon-to-be newly installed cyberdeck inside and sealed it tight. I didn't want it to have even a chance of getting damaged or scratched until it was inserted into my brainstem.

Cortana then locked up the facility and left her usual scary daemons guarding the place while I made my way back to our stolen AV. As usual, I flew it back to Rocky Ridge.

When we landed, and after I'd covered it up, Cortana pointed something out to me, though.

"This AV has already used up half of all the fuel we have for it, which means we're going to have to find a place to get more jet fuel, too," Cortana said, before adding that it would probably be something we'd have to do through Rogue, because ordinary citizens weren't supposed to be buying jet fuel.

I thought it would at least be another potential way to break the ice and talk to my new grandmother again. I hadn't actually talked to her since that last dinner, not counting the random text she'd sent me about Panam joining my crew.

I didn’t immediately head over to Vik’s clinic. Part of me wanted to. The security case sat on the Cthulhu’s passenger seat like it had a pulse, and every time I glanced at it, I felt that same itch I used to get as a kid when a game finished downloading and I wasn’t allowed to play it until after dinner.

But installing a high-end cyberpunk cyberdeck was not the kind of thing Vik would be ready for on a random drop-in appointment. This wasn’t swapping out a cracked optic or stitching me up after another bad night. This was a custom deck with no manufacturer, no certification and no installation guide, built by a genius who technically didn’t exist, and it was going straight into my brainstem. 

Vik would want scans, compatibility maps and time to stare at the specs, swear at them, and stare at them some more.

He’d need some prep time…

“He’ll need a lot of prep time,” Cortana corrected from the passenger seat. She’d changed out of the sexy scientist outfit into something closer to her normal sexy netrunner outfit and the boots seemed to be something she enjoyed keeping now as part of her look. She had her boots up on the dashboard in a way that would have gotten a real person thrown out of my car. “Honestly, I’m not sure his equipment can even read half of what I put in there.”

“Then dumb it down for him.”

“I already did. Twice.” She sounded deeply offended by the necessity.

So instead, I simply sent him a text message about needing a new cyberdeck installed, along with the specs of my custom device. 

Cortana had spent ten minutes sanding the most impossible details off the spec sheet. Even so, the numbers that were left looked like something a corpo black-ops netrunner would have to sign three NDAs to see.

I hit send and pulled out of Rocky Ridge.

My optics pinged back a few minutes into the drive. 

Vik immediately sent back a strongly worded text saying he hoped I wasn’t turning into a “chrome-addicted gonk” for needing something so crazy powerful.

The actual message was longer. It used the word kid four times, and it asked, very specifically, whether I’d hit my head again. It reminded me that he had told me, in person, out loud, using small words, no more major surgeries until your body recovers. It pointed out that the last time he’d seen me, I was being carried into his clinic with two liters of blood on the outside instead of the inside. It ended with: I’ll look at it. Come by tomorrow. I have questions…

“Oh, he definitely has questions,” Cortana said, delighted. 

I knew I’d get another lecture in person, the kind where Vik took his glasses off and pinched the bridge of his nose and talked slowly, as if he was choosing every word so he wouldn’t strangle me. 

I’d probably deserve it, too.

But that was tomorrow’s problem.

Today, I had too much energy and nowhere to put it. 

When I got back to Night City, I didn’t drive right home. I pulled my car into a familiar gym parking lot.

No matter what penthouse you live in in this city, never forget where you came from, I thought to myself.

Those were Jackie's words. He'd said them a week ago, standing in the middle of our new living room with a beer in one hand, looking out at the skyline through bulletproof glass, like he was afraid the view might swallow us whole. 

Then he'd clapped me on the shoulder hard enough to stagger an unaugmented man and gone to raid Mama's fridge.

It was funny. Where I came from was technically a whole other universe, an apartment and a life I barely let myself think about anymore. But standing in that cracked parking lot, under that flickering sign with its dead letter, I knew exactly what Jackie meant. 

This was where John Welles came from. Heywood, the Coyote, this gym. And somewhere along the way, it had become where I came from too.

I walked into the local Heywood gym.

Sweat, old leather, chalk dust, and the burned-dust stink of an air conditioner that had been dying for twenty years and was too stubborn to finish. Faded fight posters peeled off the cinderblock walls, some of them older than me. 

The heavy bags still had duct tape holding their seams together.

It was more crowded than usual.

Normally, at this hour, there were maybe a dozen people—a couple of old-timers, some kids from the block trying to look tough, and the occasional ganger working off a bad week. 

Today there had to be fifty. They were packed shoulder to shoulder, standing on benches and leaning on the free-weight racks, and the noise was a solid wall of shouting and whistles.

There was a group gathered over by the boxing ring.

"That's a betting crowd."

Then I heard a voice I'd have known anywhere, booming over all the others. "Kick his ass, V!" Jackie was right up against the ropes, both fists in the air and bouncing on his heels, grinning like it was the best day of his life. A couple of guys next to him were shoving eddies at each other through their links, the payment notifications flashing across my optics as my Kiroshis picked up the open transfers.

I pushed my way in until I could see the ring.

My eyes went a bit wide at the sight of V in the middle of it!

She was wearing a black sports bra, loose gym shorts, and nothing on her hands at all, not even wraps. Sweat gleamed along her shoulders and her stomach. There was a grin on her face—the dangerous one—the one I'd only seen right before people stopped breathing, and her lip was a tiny bit bloody.

As I watched, she ran her tongue slowly across the cut and licked the blood away.

My heart did something complicated.

"Oh, she knows you're here," Cortana said flatly. "She's absolutely performing."

"She didn't even see me." I said out loud, it was fine, so loud in here no one would here me talking to myself.

"She saw you the second you walked in. She clocks every door."

V was bare-knuckle boxing against a larger man, probably a Valentino. 

Actually, there was no "probably" about it. He was at least six-four, with a slicked-back pompadour gone loose and damp over his forehead, a gold rosary bouncing against his chest, and a sacred heart wreathed in thorns tattooed across his pecs. His knuckles had a dull chrome sheen under the skin, cheap subdermal reinforcement.

 A couple of other Valentinos stood on the far side of the ring, shouting for him in Spanish.

He had six inches and probably sixty pounds on her.

He did not look like he was winning.

I got closer to the ring. People were cheering and placing bets. Someone shoved a cheap cash chip in front of my face and yelled, "Odds are three to one on the chica, you want in?" 

I didn't even hear myself answer.

The Valentino lunged.

V slipped the first punch with an easy half step and turned her head away from the second. The third one caught her. It was an ugly right hook that cracked across her cheekbone and snapped her head sideways.

I saw V take a hit and almost leaped into the ring. My body just started moving. Spartan time kicked in and the world began to slow down!

"John," Cortana said sharply. "Stop. It’s just a random gym spar."

I stopped myself. I stood at the ropes with my hands clenched and my heart hammering, while the slowed-down world stuttered back to normal speed.

"Look at her," Cortana said, quieter. "Look at her. She's fine. She let that one through on purpose, probably to make the fight more interesting..."

I looked.

V had turned her head with the punch. She was already resetting her feet and rolling her shoulders, and her grin hadn't moved an inch. If anything, it had gotten wider. She spat a little red onto the canvas and beckoned at her opponent with two fingers, and the crowd went wild.

"If you climb in there and rescue her from a fight she's winning," Cortana went on, "she will never let you forget it. And then she'll put you in that ring."

"Okay," I muttered. "Okay. Point taken…"

The Valentino charged again, swinging wide and angry now, the way men did when they realized the woman they'd laughed at wasn't laughing.

V then landed a kick so fast only my augmented eyes caught it. Her hip turning over and her shin whipping up into the side of his knee with a sound like a branch snapping in a cold wind. 

His leg folded from the hit. 

I wasn't sure kicks were allowed in a boxing ring, but no one seemed to care. 

Jackie certainly didn't. He was screaming happily and pounding the canvas with both hands.

She proceeded to beat the stuffing out of the gang member.

There was no wasted motion and no showboating. It was just efficient, ruthless violence. A jab snapped his head back. A body shot folded him around her fist. When he tried to grab her, she broke his grip, stepped inside, and drove an elbow into his jaw on the way past, and I heard his teeth clack together over the roar of the crowd. 

He swung blind and wild. 

She ducked it, came up, and put a final straight right exactly on the point of his chin.

He went down like a demolished building. He didn't get up.

For half a second, the gym went silent. Then it exploded. People screamed, money changed hands, the Valentinos across the ring swore, and Jackie vaulted halfway over the ropes yelling, "That's my girl! Well, my brother's girl! Same thing!"

V stood over her opponent, her chest heaving and her knuckles split, blood smeared at the corner of her mouth. She looked down at him for a long moment as if making sure he was really finished.

Then she lifted her head, and her eyes went straight to me through all of it, through the noise and the crowd and the flashing transfer notifications. She'd known exactly where I was standing all along.

Her grin went slow and wicked in my direction.

"Told you," Cortana said. "She was performing."

…A couple of minutes later, there was already another fight going on.

Two of the block kids had climbed into the ring to settle some argument about a girl, and the crowd had shifted to watch them flail at each other with all the technique of drunk windmills. Nobody was betting much on that one.

I was over on the other side of the gym, though, lifting some 200-pound dumbbells that barely weighed anything.

That was still the strangest part of the augmentation, stranger than Spartan Time or the appetite. My brain kept bracing for weight that never arrived. I'd grab something I knew was heavy, and my whole body would tense up ready to fight it, and then it would just... come up. My muscles barely registered it. It was like lifting a sack of laundry.

"Slow it down," Cortana murmured, standing beside the rack and watching my form with a critical eye. "You're not training for strength. You're training control. Feel where your body thinks the weight is versus where it actually is."

So I slowed it down. I took a full count up and a full count down, focusing on the stretch through my shoulders and the way my newly rebuilt tendons pulled, learning the edges of a body I was still getting to know.

Jackie was next to me doing the same thing, and with regular muscles.

My brother really was a strong guy.

I'd known that, obviously. I'd watched him toss grown men across bars and haul engine blocks around Miguel's garage. 

But seeing him right next to me, pushing the same weight I was, made it real in a different way. 

He was grunting through every rep, veins standing out along his neck and forearms, his face going red. Sweat ran down his temples. It was pure, stubborn, organic power, nothing helping him but years of hard work and Mama's cooking.

He racked the dumbbells with a groan that rattled the floor and glared at me. "You're not even sweating, hermano."

"I'm sweating a little." Was I though?

He jabbed a finger at my chest. "Your doctor girlfriend is cheating. I want her number. I want whatever she gave you."

“You do?” I asked him, looking very serious. 

Of course we’d been planning to do it to V, Lucy and Rebecca—but the thought of doing it to Jackie and David had also crossed my mind. 

I wanted all my people safe…

Jackie noticed how serious my expression was. He actually flinched and lowered his finger. “We can talk about it later…” Jackie muttered something in Spanish, picked the dumbbells back up out of pure stubbornness, and went again.

V came over to us after getting cleaned up in the women's locker room.

She'd showered. Her black synth-leather jacket was back on over a fresh black tank top. The split in her lip had been healed at the very least. Her knuckles were still a bit raw. She looked completely, deeply satisfied.

I put the weights down. My hand went up before I could think about it, and I tilted her chin gently with two fingers to look at the non-existent bruise. 

V let me. She even leaned into it a little, her eyes half-lidded.

I let out a breath. "That was a great fight," I told V, and I meant it. It had been terrifying and incredible in equal measure. "But what was the reason for it? You don't usually do bare-knuckle with Valentinos for fun."

"...Usually?" V agreed, sounding amused.

Jackie spoke up, racking the dumbbells again and wiping his face on a towel. "Okay, so. Me and V, we were just working out, yeah? Exercising. Minding our own business. Blowing off a little steam." He paused. His face crumpled. "For my baby," Jackie fake-sniffled, pressing the towel to his heart and gazing mournfully toward the door as though his shot-up Arch might roll in on its own. "Miguel says the fuel line's gotta be replaced again, John. Again. She was perfect yesterday morning. Perfect."

"I said I was sorry..." I grumbled.

"You said the Wraiths were sorry..." he grumbled right back.

I shrugged my shoulders at him. "The Wraiths are dead, Jackie, they're very sorry." 

V snorted.

Jackie heaved a theatrical sigh, swabbed his eyes with the towel, and continued as if he hadn't interrupted himself. "Anyway. So we're working out, and some Valentino—punks—come in. New members. Real new. I don't even know their faces. Still got that fresh ink shine, you know?"

I knew. The Valentinos ran Heywood, and most of the older members knew Jackie and knew Mama, and they gave the Welles family the kind of easy respect you give neighbors you grew up next to. 

The new ones, though, always had something to prove.

"And they're looking at us," Jackie went on. "Whispering. And I figure, okay, maybe they've heard about me. Because my rep's been going up. Me and V have been taking gigs these last few weeks." He puffed up a little, unable to help it. "Good work. People are starting to talk."

"They are," V said dryly. "...Mostly about how loud you are."

"Same thing." Jackie waved her off. "So these punks, they don't think me and V are so tough. They figure it's all street talk. Especially V." His expression darkened. "One of them says, real loud, that it's cute that a girl is trying to be an edgerunner, and how a pretty little corpo thing like that wouldn't last two seconds in a real fight…"

I growled hearing someone insult one of my girlfriends.

V didn’t seem to mind. She even grinned. "I had to correct that guy..."

"You corrected him real good," Jackie said, with enormous satisfaction. "Then his buddy started taking bets. And then half of Heywood showed up. Somebody must've sent it out on the local feeds."

"I made four thousand eddies," V added, almost as an afterthought. "Jackie made six."

"Because I had faith in my choom," Jackie said.

V then leaned in toward me, close enough that I could smell the cheap gym soap on her skin and something warmer under it. And her expression changed.

The danger went right out of it. Her eyes went wide and soft, her head tilted, and her lower lip came out the smallest bit, somehow devastatingly cute. It became adorable in a way that made my heart skip again, which was deeply unfair coming from a woman who'd just knocked a two-hundred-forty-pound ganger unconscious.

"Were you worried about me?" she asked, almost shy.

I could have played it cool. Jackie was right there. Half the gym could probably see us.

But I'd learned something these past weeks—with V, honesty worked better than anything else. 

Nothing disarmed her like it.

"Of course I was," I told her honestly. "He hit you, and I almost went over the ropes. I'd already started moving." I rubbed the back of my neck. "But I stopped myself from jumping into the ring. I figured you wouldn't want me stealing your fight."

Something warm and pleased flickered across V's face, and she reached up to brush her raw knuckles along my jaw.

"Liar," Cortana murmured in my ear, her breath a phantom warmth against my skin, amused and fond and just a little smug. "It was me who stopped you."

"...Sooooo," Jackie said, squinting up at me. "What'd you do today, hermano? After you helped me get my baby to Miguel's?" He pressed a hand mournfully to his chest at the memory. "You took off like your pants were on fire right after."

I hesitated for half a second. Lying to Jackie never felt good. He was the first person in this world who'd ever looked at me like I belonged to him, back in Vik's clinic with a bandage around my skull. Every time I had to bend the truth around him, it sat in my stomach like a stone. 

Some things I couldn't tell him, at least not yet. But I'd made myself a rule, and that rule was not to lie more than I had to.

"I was visiting—Cortana," I said. It was true. I'd just spent hours with her. I'd spent the whole day with her, technically. I spent every day with her, technically.

"Smooth," Cortana said, sounding pleased. "Technically true. My favorite kind of true."

Jackie, of course, only knew that Cortana was my most mysterious girlfriend—the reclusive genius doctor who'd rebuilt my body from the cellular level up. Mama asked about her every couple of days, and I had to dodge every time.

Jackie's eyes went wide. He sat up straight on the bench and pointed at me with the towel. "Wait," he said. "Wait, wait, wait. Is that why you keep going to Rocky Ridge?"

I knew he’d eventually notice.

Behind him, V suddenly found the ceiling very interesting.

"Does she have a secret lab out there or something?" Jackie leaned forward, delighted with his own detective work. "Some creepy underground bunker full of glowing tanks and robot arms?"

My heart stuttered. Cortana burst out laughing in my head. "Oh, he's warm," she said. "He's very warm."

"No," I said quickly, shaking my head. I tried to keep my face perfectly normal, which probably meant it looked extremely abnormal. "No. She lives… a bit farther away than that. I go to Rocky Ridge because that's where I keep the stolen 'Saka AV. I fly it out to… visit her." That was also technically true. Our secret lab was a bit farther away than Rocky Ridge.

"Still my favorite kind of true," Cortana purred.

Jackie stared at me for a long moment. Then he slowly shook his head and let out a low whistle. "You're crazy, you know that?" he said. "Loco. My little brother is flying a stolen military AV across the Badlands for a booty call."

"It's not a booty call..." I grumbled.

“Not until we have some real fun in that lab… just the two of us…”

"Uh-huh." He grinned wide. But then, after a moment, his face softened into something warmer and fonder. "Nah, but I get it. I do." He looped the towel around his neck and leaned back against the rack. "If Misty didn't live so close? I'd do the same thing. I'd steal a whole damn Delamain fleet."

I smirked. "Hopefully my big sis can just move in soon. Then you won't have to steal anything."

Jackie went still. Then he sighed, long and happy and dreamy, like a man who'd been thinking about something for a long time and was relieved to hear someone else say it. "Yeah," he said softly. "I was thinking the same thing." He rubbed the back of his neck, a little sheepish. 

V had been watching us with a small, amused smile. Now she tilted her head toward me, her eyes glinting with obvious meaning. "So," she said lightly. "How's your secret project coming?" She knew exactly what she was doing. 

Jackie looked between us, confused. "What secret project?"

"Tell him," Cortana said. "It's fine."

"Cortana built me a cyberdeck," I said. "A custom one. Really powerful. Vik's going to install it tomorrow."

Jackie sputtered. It was a good sputter, the full Jackie experience. His mouth opened and closed, his hands came up, and he stood halfway off the bench and then sat back down again.

"She built you one?" he demanded. "From scratch? Like, with her hands? WHO DOES THAT? Who just—" He waved both arms at me, encompassing my shoulders, my arms, and my ridiculous new body. "First she rebuilds your whole skeleton like it's a hobby, and now she's out there building custom netrunner gear? John. John. Where the fuck did you find this mystery woman?"

Somewhere across the gym, an old-timer on a speed bag yelled, "Language, Welles!" Jackie ignored him completely.

"You really need to bring her around so Mama and I can meet her," Jackie insisted, jabbing a finger at me. "For real this time. Mama keeps asking. I keep asking. Misty's dying to read her aura. You can't just keep saying she's 'shy.'"

"She is shy," I said weakly.

"I'm working on that as well," Cortana said in my ear. Her voice was quiet, almost casual, but there was something underneath it, something almost secretive.

My eyes went wide. Working on it? What did that mean? Working on being less shy? Working on meeting Mama? Working on how?

I thought back to the lab, and to the sexy scientist outfit, the bodysuit, the party dress. Ever since my augmentation she'd been trying on new clothes like she was getting used to the idea of being seen. And there was the secret reason she'd refused to tell me, every time I asked.

"Don't strain yourself," Cortana said sweetly. "You'll find out…"

V caught my expression and raised one eyebrow. She knew that look. It was the one I wore when someone invisible had just said something to me that I very much wanted to ask about and absolutely couldn't.

"You okay, babe?" she asked innocently.

"Fine," I croaked. "Totally fine..."

Jackie squinted at me. "You're doing that thing again. Where you space out like somebody's talking in your head..."

"Oh, now he notices!?" Cortana pointed out. She then raised her voice in my ear. “Quick, emergency subject change! And—GO!”

I let out a fake cough. It wasn't subtle. 

V's mouth twitched. Jackie squinted at me harder.

"Wow," Cortana said. "Truly the master of misdirection."

"So— uh," I said, plowing ahead before anyone could ask about my spacing out. "In other news. Cortana actually has a new project she's working on."

"Careful," Cortana murmured.

"A big one," I went on, choosing my words like I was walking through a minefield. Mjolnir armor, a factory, ten million eddies. None of that was getting said out loud in a Heywood boxing gym. "But I need to make… a lot of eddies first. Like, a whole lot." I looked between them. "Any ideas besides just taking gigs?"

Jackie let out a long, gusty sigh and dropped his head back against the weight rack. "Hermano," he said to the ceiling, "that's the thing everyone in Night City wants to know. How to make a whole lot of eddies without getting shot." He waved a hand vaguely at the gym, the neighborhood, the entire city. "You figure that one out, you let me know. We'll be kings."

He didn't push on my change of subject.

I noticed that. He'd seen me dodge, and he'd seen the cough. Jackie wasn't stupid, he just knew when to leave a door closed. 

I loved my brother for a lot of things, but that might have been near the top of the list.

V spoke up. She did seem to think of something. "Actually," she said slowly, "I do have an idea."

Jackie lifted his head. "Yeah?"

"There's a new trend I've been hearing about on the streets." V leaned her hip against the dumbbell rack and crossed her arms. "Mostly underground. People are starting to pay for illegal braindances of edgerunners going on dangerous gigs."

"Yuck… Like XBDs?" Jackie asked.

"Sort of. But not the snuff garbage, and not scripted action BDs with actors and squibs either." She shook her head. "Real ones. Real mercs on real jobs—breaching a corpo facility, a car chase, a firefight with Maelstrom. The adrenaline, the fear, the shooting, the whole thing." Her lips quirked. "Turns out half of Night City wants to feel like a LEGEND for twenty minutes without actually having to bleed for it. Corpo kids. Wannabe mercs. Bored rich people in Charter Hill who think gunfire sounds romantic."

"Huh," Jackie said, sounding genuinely interested now.

She looked back at me. "The good ones sell well. If it's edited good, you can make an extra twenty to fifty grand per gig, even."

I blinked. "Per gig?"

"Per gig," she confirmed. 

Jackie whistled low. "Damn. That's real money."

It was. Fifty grand on top of a gig's payout would add up quickly. If the gigs kept coming at the rate they had been...

"Huh," I said. Then, frowning, "Wait. So I take a gig, record it, and sell it?" I rubbed the back of my neck, feeling my port under my fingers. "Don't I need special braindance recording tech installed? Like a whole recorder rig?"

"Usually, yeah," V said. "Most people get a dedicated BD recording implant. It's not cheap, and it's a pain to calibrate."

"That's not necessary," Cortana said. She appeared beside the rack, leaning against it just as V was, arms crossed in a perfect mirror. I wasn't sure it was intentional. Knowing her, it was absolutely intentional. "With me, you don't need any of that," she went on. "I'm already wired into everything you see, hear, and feel. Every sensory channel and every emotional spike. Heart rate, adrenaline, muscle tension, that little jolt in your stomach right before you jump off something tall." She tapped her temple. "I could record all of it at a higher fidelity than any Kiroshi BD rig on the market. Honestly, I already do half the time. That's how I keep footage of Mama yelling at you."

"You keep footage of—" I started out loud, then stopped. Jackie and V both looked at me.

"Keep talking," Cortana said serenely. "And we just so happen to know one of the best BD editors in Night City."

Judy Alvarez. My face heated before I could stop it. The last time I'd seen Judy Alvarez, she'd pressed me against a wall in the Ho-Oh and kissed me deeply to cover a hack, and Cortana had nearly set the building's network on fire out of jealousy.

"Yes," Cortana let out a huff. "—That one."

V was watching me with knowing eyes. She'd figured out I was talking to someone she couldn't see. Jackie just looked confused again.

"It's not for everyone," V said quietly, as if she'd read the doubt on my face. "There's a reason most mercs don't do it. You're selling a piece of yourself. And if it's edited badly, you're selling your crew's faces, your tactics, and your routes to anyone with the eddies to buy a copy." She shrugged. "But if you have the right editor and you're careful, it's real money, and nobody gets hurt that wasn't already getting hurt."

I looked down at my hands, then at the dumbbells I'd been lifting like laundry, and thought about ten million eddies, a factory, and gold-visored armor turning in the air. "Yeah," I said finally. "It's something to think about, at least."

"Oh, hell yes," Jackie said, standing and grinning wide. "Jackie Welles, the Braindance. Coming soon to a bootleg kiosk near you."

V snorted at my brother. "You'd need a director's cut just to edit out all the yelling."

"THE YELLING IS THE BEST PART!" Jackie declared so loud that it actually stopped the next fight in the ring. He at least looked a bit sheepish before everyone turned back around.

…I spent another hour working out with Jackie and V.

It turned out to be the most useful hour I'd had since the augmentation. 

Jackie ran me through combinations on the heavy bag until I learned exactly how much to pull my punches so I wouldn't split the canvas. I only split it once. He made me tape it back up myself while he laughed so hard he had to sit down. 

Then V took me onto the mats and drilled me on throws. She didn't go easy just because I was stronger now; she went harder, because she said strength without technique was just a faster way to get killed. 

By the end, she'd put me on my back three times and I'd put her on hers twice, and Jackie had started a betting pool with the old-timers on the speed bags.

After that, V walked me out to the parking lot.

The sun had dropped low, painting Heywood in that orange-pink smog glow that only looked pretty from far away. 

At the Cthulhu's door, she caught the front of my shirt, pulled me down, and gave me a passionate kiss. It wasn't a goodbye peck. Her hand slid up to the back of my neck to keep me exactly where she wanted me. By the time she let go, I'd forgotten what car I'd been about to get into.

"I'll see you later tonight~" she murmured against my mouth. Her eyes were heavy-lidded and her voice dropped low. "And I want my turn. After what you and Lucy did on the couch last night..." She dragged one fingertip down the center of my chest. "I watched. Now it's my turn."

Behind us, a towel hit the asphalt.

I turned. Jackie was standing in the gym doorway, gym bag in one hand, staring at us in pure horror. His face was doing something complicated.

"The couch?" he sputtered. "The new couch? The one in the living room?" He pointed at me with a shaking finger. "Hermano. Our mama better not find out about that. She sits on that couch. She watches her telenovelas on that couch!"

V just smiled serenely, unbothered, and patted my cheek. "See you tonight, babe," she said, and strolled back toward Jackie's borrowed ride as if she hadn't just detonated a live bomb.

Jackie stood there opening and closing his mouth. Then he pointed at me again, said "We are not talking about this," very firmly, and stalked after her.

I hoped Mama wouldn't find out either. I really, really hoped so.

"I wiped the security footage," Cortana said. "For the record. In case you were wondering."

Thank you…

"I kept a copy for myself of course!"

Cortana!

I then got back in my Cthulhu. The door swung down and sealed with a satisfying hiss, and the engine rumbled awake under me. For a moment I just sat there with my hands on the wheel and the evening traffic crawling by, the case with my new cyberdeck strapped into the passenger seat beside me.

I paused for just a second, thinking about where to go next.

My brain wouldn't stop ticking. There was Mjolnir. There was the factory and the ten million eddies. There was V's braindance idea, I was still turning over in the back of my mind. And there was Panam, who'd driven back to her clan this morning. She'd made me promise to find her work because her family was going hungry.

Then I decided—fuck it.

Panam needed a new gig, and I needed lots of money, apparently. So I decided to drive to the Afterlife to see my grandmother, Rogue.

My grandmother. That still didn't sound real. I hadn't seen her since that dinner, when she'd sat at our table in Mama's spare slippers, chopping onions and trying not to cry. 

I didn't know how to talk to her yet, whether she was the Queen of the Afterlife or my abuela or both, or how to tell where one ended and the other began.

"You know she can't be seen playing favorites," Cortana reminded me quietly. "Not in public."

"I know." I pulled out of the lot. "I'm not asking for favors. I'm asking for work. Same as anyone else."

"And the jet fuel." she reminded me.

"And the jet fuel," I sighed, how could I forget.

I'd considered calling Regina first, and I'd felt guilty about it. But the truth was, her gigs just didn't pay as much. Watson work was solid, but it was still Watson work. Twenty, thirty grand on a good day. Rogue was paying fifty, a hundred, or more.

Was it weird that I'd kind of outgrown my first fixer so fast?

"No," Cortana said simply. "She's a fixer. She'll understand and find other people to beat up car thieves for her.

I laughed despite myself. That was my first gig wasn’t it…?

At a red light, I once again looked at the case with my new cyberdeck on the passenger seat. 

You're in the big leagues now, kid, I joked to myself.

The light turned green. I hit the gas and turned toward the Afterlife.

XXX

Saul is probably doing something stoopid, but that’s just how he’s wired.

Cortana dropped the M-word but for REALZ this time! The only catch is a teensy ten-million-eddie price tag. 

Also, what is Cortana “working on”? Wrong answers only.  😆

Written: 10/27/2026