Once I came upon the Maelstrom encirclement around the city block where the recipient lived, I noticed that there were barely anyone in the streets. What the fuck was in the package to have those degenerate boosters out in force like that?

  Wasn’t any of my business, though. A group of five of those borged out psychos—wearing tech visors and horrifying body mods—spotted me and ran towards me, I just flashed on the Sandy and got far enough to leave all their sightlines. I arrived at the apartment block that the recipient lived in. No Strom guards stood in the way between me and them and I made the delivery peacefully.

  Then I raised Reyes.

  D: Done, job done.

  El Capitan: Fucking fast, kid. Real fast, fuck.

  D: Anything else? Still got time to kill.

  El Capitan: You good at zeroing?

  D: Depends on the gonks.

  El Capitan: Scav squatters on the outside of 6th street jurisdiction. Five to ten. Will pay you two thousand each for taking them out if you don’t claim the bounties.

  Fucking hell! That was preem as shit!

  D: Send me the deets.

  El Capitan: That was a test, kid. You don’t go into a gig like that alone. Thought you’d be smart enough to recognize when you’re outmatched, outnumbered. Bring some chooms for shit like this, and if you don’t got them, ask for another gig. Don’t throw your life away, fuck

  D: No, this is perfect. I’m good for it. Serious.

  El Capitan: What if I told you there was more to the mission? I need their data, too.

  D: No problem at all. I’m good with hacking.

  El Capitan: I promise you kid, if you’re trying to inflate your ability, I’m going to sink your rep, you hear me?

  D: Good with hacking, fast, and good with zeroing too. You need proof, just give me the gig. Not going to lie to you and bite off more than I can chew. Got shit riding on this too, you know. Like my life, for example.

  El Capitan: Fine. Here.

  He sent me the details.

  El Capitan: I’ll confirm the number of scavs there after you’re done cleaning up. If you don’t end up killing any scavs, but do end up ninjaing the data, I’ll pay you a base rate of five-thousand.

  D: Then what stops me from just killing all the scavs and fucking off if you’re not paying for the data unless I don’t kill the scavs?

  El Capitan: Your rep, kid. You took a job knowing what it required of you, but couldn’t deliver. That shit doesn’t look good, and cleaning off that stink is way harder than building rep in the first place. But I’ll give you a little out: just bring the harddrive uncracked if you can and I’ll pay you twenty-five hundred, that is if you don’t bork it somehow.

  D: It was just a hypothetical. I can crack the drive and send you the info easy, no sweat. Gonna take out the scavs, too.

  El Capitan: I’ll be waiting for you then. And here’s the rest of the cash.

  I received another thousand.

  I hadn’t broken even on all my recent costs, the BD wreath having taken the lion’s share of my recent scav windfall.

  I’d spent twenty-five hundred in just the last two days, and I was starting to regret having thrown that cash at the Animal who had helped me in a bid to cut ties indefinitely.

  Whatever. Mom would have agreed with my way of doing things. Never take help for free. Everything came at a cost. Had to identify those costs to know what you were up against.

  Then I received a sudden three-thousand five-hundred and ninety-one from an unknown address.

  Then a message from said unknown address.

  Unknown: Here’s your forty percent. So don’t go around telling people I’m in the business of not paying my debts, corpo cunt.

  The fuck?!

  Fucking Lucy. She changed her holo number?

  D: Always have to bring the mood down with your fucking bullshit. Get a butt implant so you can shit out that stick up your ass, you annoying bitch.

  I almost sent the eddies back, too, but common sense stopped me in time. The only reason we had made so much in the first place was because of me. To have her profit fully off it when I actually could help it was ridiculous.

  I saved her number as Stupid Bitch.

  Stupid Bitch: Say that shit to my face and you’ll be an arm shorter.

  D: Whatever. Go die.

  I wanted to block her, but that would be stupid. We were going to work together from now on. As much as she just annoyed the crap out of me, I still needed to be on call.

  Had to be professional like that, or I’d be no different from just another streetkid.

  000

  The problem about flatlining, I had come to realize, was that it just wasn’t the same when done with premeditation. That was probably the reason why premeditated murder was such a big deal to the justice system. It represented a qualitative increase in shittiness.

  I had bought an external cyberdeck on the way to the scav den—an arm-mounted screen that could extend itself, and had high enough specs to break through most ICE depending on the user’s skill. Needed it to break through whatever locks came my way.

  The ICE on their front door was sturdy, but it was clear that they didn’t have a netrunner because I managed to break through their lock, spending almost a minute doing so, without any interruptions.

  From there on, I activated the Sandy, and came to terms with what I had to do: kill.

  It was easier with the scavs who had kidnapped me. They had pushed my buttons in the worst way possible, and were indeed trying to kill me, too. All of that lent a weight to my actions that allowed me to skip over any feeling of guilt or hesitation entirely.

  This? This was just money. Not the same. Way grittier.

  I summoned a thought of mom and how she wanted me to go to Arasaka Academy. Big mistake. Now I wanted to kill these scavs even less. I returned to the normal timestream instead, to think.

  Huh.

  The solution was obvious, actually.

  I entered the scav den. Around an operating table where a corpse sat back down, its torso splayed open to reveal flesh and cyberware, were three different scavs, one of them holding a tong as he tried to pull out a piece of chrome.

  They all had pixelated face masks with simple drawn-on red faces, and all of them were directed towards me.

  “Who the fuck are you!” one of them yelled.

  The question was clearly a statement, and to punctuate it, the scav who had shouted was reaching towards his side where a gun would no-doubt be.

  Now I was in danger. Now I was motivated.

  I activated the Sandy and looked around for a weapon. I found a bladed implement very quickly; a curved sort of knife that was clearly ment to be held in a reverse-grip. The fuck were they called again? Carambas?

  Whatever. I just grabbed it and started slashing. Throats once again, easiest way to make sure that each hit, if not immediately fatal, would eventually be such.

  I left the living room in search for more scavs.

  Two of them were slowly getting up from their couches, likely in response to the first guy’s yell.

  I made sure that once time resumed, they would bleed out on the couches.

  I looked for another room. It was a bedroom. One scav was sitting on the corner of his bed, back against the wall, occupied by a BD judging from the wreath on his face. On another bed sat a dude with a dick-scker machine strapped to him.

  I did them a favor and opened their jugulars.

  How many was that, now? Seven.

  I searched every other room, but found nothing, except for the one room with the computer terminal. Bingo.

  I resumed time in order to interface with the computer, and then I heard a series of thuds as all the scavs I had cut fell at the same time. I closed the door to the room with the PC behind me and booted up my external cyberdeck. It was an older model, but not so old that it couldn’t keep up with recent tech. It was a decent machine, and what it traded for interactivity and netrunner synergy, it more than made up for in raw specs.

  I loaded my Breach Protocol—an intrusion algorithm meant to clear the way into a system— and shot it at the terminal. Without an opposing netrunner, this process was only a matter of time. The ‘deck told me it would take five minutes.

  I began interfacing with the PC, taking out the ICE manually as well. That would shorten things considerably.

  Wish I could have done it faster. Unfortunately Sandy speed was overkill, and I couldn’t trust each of my inputs to register at such speeds.

  I wish I could go slower.

  [If the Sandevistan was correctly integrated to begin with, you would have immediately sensed the option to modulate your speed. I can attempt to manually slow down the Sandevistan for you as well.]

  “Let’s give that a go,” I muttered as my fingers flew. I activated the Sandevistan and pressed on a key. It stayed down. Then it slowly, but surely bounced up again. I pressed the same key again. It bounced up a little slower than it took for my fingers to leave the key.

  David: a little slower.

  I deleted the nonsense inputs on the terminal and began experimentally typing.

  The feedback was better now. I could do this.

  This new method didn’t shorten the subjective time it took for me to crack the ICE, but it did make sure that I shortened the amount of time to retrieve the data considerably, reducing the chances of any surprises to reach me from behind.

  I ejected a shard from my socket and loaded it into the terminal moments before the ICE fully broke, loaded the contents of the drive into it, and waited patiently for it to transfer while I stared at the door to the rest of the apartment.

  Once the transfer completed, I ejected the shard and resocketed it.

  I raised Reyes.

  D: Sorry it took so long. Had to buy a cyberdeck for the gig.

  El Capitan: So long? Kid, it ain’t been thirty minutes since last we talked.

  D: I get around.

  El Capitan: I’ll say. How many hostiles? Flatlined them all?

  D: Seven scavs, dead scavs.

  El Capitan: I’ll send-send boys out to confirm.

  D: I’ll wait.

  El Capitan: What, ain’t gonna bug me for more giggys?

  D: Gotta make sure your boys count right. You had issues trusting me. Naturally, I got my misgivings, too. Nothing personal.

  El Capitan: Personal as fuck, kid. I built my business, I have rep, I got trust. Doubt means disrespect.

  D: New at this, you know. Still gotta wrap my head around the game.

  El Capitan: Fine. Fuck. Suppose it ain’t a big deal anyhow, but trust me kid, there are fixers who don’t stand for that shit.

  That sounded like some right bullshit. We edgerunners were shouldering the risk, and yet we had to give blind trust to these people? When they didn’t even trust us back?

  What the fuck were fixers even for? Could I maybe become a fixer, get myself my own gigs? Maybe that’s how gangs started; from edgerunners who were tired of the one-sided dynamic between fixers and solos.

  I eyed my Critical Progress bar and found that it was at a 65%.

  D: I’ll drop off the data shard-shard with one of your boys if that’s good with you. Calling it a day.

  El Capitan: Sandy starting to squeak or what?

  D: Something like that. Don’t worry about me. It was a pleasure doing biz.

  El Capitan: It’s just work, not biz. Good, honest work.

  Didn’t really see the difference, nor did I see the need to quibble over it.

  It took fifteen more minutes for Reyes’ boys to arrive, counting the dead and receiving my data shard.

  I headed home fourteen-thousand eddies richer. Cyberdeck cost almost two thousand, but then I also received that scratch from Lucy.

  Fifteen-thousand three-hundred and eighty in one day.

  Minus what I’d spent the last two days, and add the scav bounty, and I had made over twenty thousand eddies this week.

  I had to return the bulk of the family account to Maine as that was his money, but mom had saved up eighteen thousand eddies already. That made a total of thirty-nine thousand five-hundred and change.

  The semester fee was seventy-five, and it was due only in a couple of weeks. Needed more scratch. How much had I made in total with Lucy? Eight thousand nine-hundred and seventy-seven if my arithmetic was right, and it often was.

  I should get started on an eject shard quickhack. If I spent the entirety of tomorrow just klepping shards while using my Sandy all the way to maybe 50% Critical Progress, I could make maybe ten thousand. Maine’s trial gig was coming along soon, too, but I couldn’t count on that to be anything more than a couple of thousand maybe, same tier as the delivery mission I did today.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  I wish I could just keep going with Reyes, but then I’d risk going in half-cocked once Maine finally called on me. Couldn’t afford to show my ass for such an important mission. Maybe I should consider taking out a loan with Maine.

  And maybe I should consider swimming in a pool with electric eel as well.

  Ah well.

  Without the Sandy operable, I might as well go home, so I did.

  I spent the rest of the day, and a lot of the night coding and recoding an eject shard quickhack while also polishing up on my intrusion skills.

  000

  Lucy made it look easy.

  Maybe it was her chrome that made things so much simpler, but breaking through every Biotechnica suit’s personal bit of ICE in the NCART before they reached their stop and setting the stage for my klepping was not as easy as it looked.

  Several times, some marks of mine left too early. It took me twenty minutes to get all my pieces in place.

  I ejected every shard.

  Things immediately went wrong.

  The shards just… fell. They didn’t fly out like when Lucy had done it.

  Fuck!

  I activated the Sandy anyway and took as many as I could before returning to where I had stood.

  Then there was the second thing that went wrong.

  “Hey, what the fuck!”

  “Somebody klepped my shard!”

  “Picksocket! We’ve got a picksocket!”

  A lot of the marks noticed.

  As much as I hated to admit it, Lucy was good. She had several angles considered when picking her marks, and knew how to thief better than I did. I picked guys that were too attentive, too wary.

  One of my marks grabbed me by the shoulder and turned me around. I frowned. “What’s the matter, choom?”

  The suit narrowed his eyes at me. “You didn’t hear anything about the picksocket?”

  “My socket didn’t get picked,” I said with a shrug. “Why should I give a shit?”

  He growled but thankfully decided to just move on. What a dumbass.

  And there was my stop. I got off, fifteen shards in my pocket, as I formulated some revisions to the code in my head.

  Once all the people from the picksocket cart had left the station, I took out my cyberdeck and began to write changes to the code.

  Had to make sure the ejection went at full throttle. Had to implement a little firmware virus to get it to fully work, but once I did, I’d pretty much have what Lucy had, minus the skill to deduce the right marks.

  For the next cart, I upped my ICE-breaking by using the Sandevistan, assisted by Nanny.

  Fourteen marks picked, all of them facing the windows, and all of them either in a phone-call, on a BD, dozing off on their feet, or in a conversation with someone.

  Showtime.

  The quickhack ran and so did I.

  I put the runner in netrunner as I grabbed all the shards and returned to my usual spot before anyone could react.

  Thankfully, no cries of—

  “Picksocket!”

  Fuck.

  The NCART had reached its destination.

  Never let it be said that I didn’t learn from my mistakes. This time, I had done the hack just as we were about to reach the next stop. I just strolled right out while more and more suits began to realize that their shards were klepped.

  And so it went for the next four hours. Critical Progress had reached 40% and I was starting to get hungry, so I left the NCART at a stop near to where I lived and walked all the way home.

  It was a learning curve, alright, but I had gotten the hang of it near the middle. The trick was to make sure that their necks were turned at the right angle, too, or there would be no mistaking the feeling of a chip ejecting.

  Now I just… had to… fence them.

  Which was Lucy’s wheelhouse.

  I stopped dead in the sidewalk and looked up at the sky. “Fuck,” I groaned.

  000

  I finished my weekend homework—why the fuck did that even exist—just in time for Maine’s call to arrive.

  Maine: You’re up, kid.

  I jumped on my feet. Time to go!

  I put on the sugar skull mask—I cut a hole on the top to let my hair out—and put on mom’s jacket before heading out.

  A ride on the NCART and a cab drive later and I had finally arrived at the address given, a warehouse owned by a guy called Aldo.

  I walked up to the warehouse with the same number as the info Maine gave me. The roller shutters were halfway down.

  “Hey!” I heard Maine’s voice from inside. I ducked down to get a look inside and saw him on a doorway at the end of the storage room. “Over here, kid.”

  I walked through.

  “The fuck are you wearing?” Maine asked with an ill-contained laugh.

  “Disguise,” I said. “Right now, I’m D.”

  Once I got into his reach, he smacked me. “Cut the crap, kid. You’re dead meat if you don’t get serious.”

  I followed him into a smokey room where I once again found the large lady and the long-fingered guy, as well as a new person this time around: a girl with some kind of gray-blue skin and blond hair. She was the one who had filled the room with so much smoke.

  “Data wasn’t lying,” she said. “He is just a kid. A cosplayer, too. Can he keep up?”

  “Guess we’ll see,” Maine said as he sat himself next to his chooms.

  “He’s a funny little guy,” the tall and lanky guy said. “But keep your grubby mitts to yourself.”

  “Ugh,” the smaller of the two women groaned. “Why do we even put up with you?”

  Maine pointed at the one person in the room I hadn’t met before. “This one here is Kiwi,” he said. “And Dorio and Pilar, you’ve met,” he pointed at the large woman and the lanky guy respectively. “Make yourself comfy.”

  I sat down across from them. “My name is D.”

  Maine smacked me again. “Who asked!”

  That was beginning to seriously hurt. I fired up the Sandy to get rid of the pain.

  “Let’s get down to biz,” Maine said as he slid a shard on the table towards me. “Slot this in.”

  I did, and a dossier popped up in my head, of some buff dude wearing a corp suit. There was text next to him that named him and his role in the Arasaka Corporation. “Say hello to Arasaka corp driver and bodyguard Maxim. We’re gonna swipe the nav data from the limo he rolls around in.”

  “Not the car?” I asked.

  “We klep that car and Arasaka ninjas swarm us like flies to shit, so no, not the car,” he said.

  “How do we do it?” I asked.

  “This guy’s a degenerate gambler,” Maine said. “Betting on fights is his only joy in life. His ass always fills a seat at the underground fights in Rancho Coronado every weekend. He always puts a fat stack on the Butcher. She’s a fucking animal, in more ways than one. Most of the people just come to see her paint the stage red with some gonk’s blood,” I nodded along to his explanation as I waved through Maxim’s dossier and pulled up the Butcher’s. “But things ain’t gonna go down like that.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Nah. We got ourselves a fighter who will butcher the Butcher in round one.”

  My eyes widened.

  “Wait,” I said. “Can I bet on the other guy?”

  “You need a rep with the bookie to do that,” Maine said. “Gonk like you wins big, the house is more likely to keep it than dish it out.”

  “The fuck? How do they even run a business like that?”

  “It’s Night City, kid. Even gambling’s a gamble.”

  “What about you guys?” I asked. “Any of you have a rep with the bookie?”

  “None of us are betting,” Maine said. “That’d be match fixing, even though it isn’t, but that’s how things work around here. 6th Street would be on our ass for winning big without their permission. Juice ain’t worth the squeeze. Only reason we’ll get away with this is because our win won’t be with the other gamblers.”

  Dammit.

  “He’s in the habit of drowning his sorrows in this hole in the wall. While he’s good and greased, you nab the key, we forge a copy.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  000

  Everything had gone exactly according to plan.

  That was, until the man stirred. “Dammit,” Kiwi said on the open comms. “His master’s calling him.”

  “Key isn’t done copying,” Dorio said.

  “Shit,” Maine said. “Change of plans. Grab the key, David. Rebecca, trip him up.”

  I took the key and Sandy’d to Maxim’s limousine. It was closed. Didn’t bring my cyberdeck, either.

  “I’ll handle that,” I heard Stupid Bitch’s voice from behind me. “You get in.”

  After a few seconds, the doors unlocked audibly, and we got in.

  Lucy was already on the ball, her fingers flying on her own cyberdeck pad while her eyes flashed blue. I tried to keep up with whatever I was looking at, but it was too fast for even me.

  I could try it with Sandy, but then a thought occurred to me.

  We still had the key. Why did we still have the key?

  I opened the door and Sandy’d to Maxim, dropping the key in his pocket while trying my best to not look at what that small woman was doing in his pants, before returning to the car. Lucy didn’t make a comment, either.

  Finally, I decided to use the Sandy to keep up with what she was doing.

  And it was A Lot.

  I thought I was good at programming. Thought it was one of my best qualities.

  Lucy was fucking insane. It was like her mind was in ten places at the same time, each one doing something entirely different, but working together for a mutual purpose. If this was what it took to break down Arasaka ICE within a few minutes, then I knew that ICE would probably take me hours of singleminded dedication to even get close to cracking without the Sandevistan.

  She was nuts.

  Shame she had to be so inexplicably awful.

  “Almost done,” Lucy said. “There.”

  Kiwi: No time to spare.

  I took that literally, activating the Sandevistan and dragging Lucy out as gently as I could. Right on time, too, as I just caught sight of Maxim by the door.

  I took us away from any sightlines to the limo and let the Sandevistan deactivate.

  “What the fuck!” I heard a shout. “Who was in my car?!”

  “Shit,” I muttered as I just booked it, with Lucy following behind me. We made another turn, avoiding Maxim’s wrath altogether.

  Kiwi: He’s taking off. It’s done.

  Maine: Good reaction, David! And that was some damn good speed there, Lucy.

  D: Name’s D.

  Maine: I’ll start calling you that shit once you’ve really earned it, but for now…?

  000

  “Here,” Maine handed me a beer as he sat next to me. We were in Turbo’s that only looked like a gas station, but only lacked the actual fuel pumps, and instead had a large parking lot in front of a convenience store. It was night, but the assorted cars made sure to keep the environment as lit up as possible with their neon-colored halogen lights. “And, here,” he said.

  And my account instantly became twenty-thousand eddies bigger.

  “Holy shit!” I exclaimed. “Choom, I don’t know what to say!”

  Maine chuckled. “Hah. Don’t have to say nothing, kid. Everybody gets a fair shake. Only way I operate.”

  “So… does that mean we’re good now?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “Welcome to the crew. But remember. Ain’t no one you can trust more in this world than yourself.” I regarded him with seriousness as I gave a quick nod. “Start using us as a crutch,” he said, landing his heavy hand on my head. Just resting it there forced me to bend my neck, but the touch was hardly a violent one. It felt… good, sorta. “And you’re as good as dead.”

  “I understand,” I said. “Thank you.” Fifty-eight thousand. Only needed seventeen grand more to pay off this term’s tuition. “Can I take out the tracker, now?”

  He looked at me for a moment before nodding. “You’re really about this life, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I need the eddies.”

  “Go ahead, kid,” he said, and I ejected the tracker chip before tossing it away contemptuously.

  “Hey, I also wanted to ask: I klepped a bunch of shards this morning. You mind giving me some pointers on how to get them sold for cash?”

  “Ask Lucy. Ain’t picksocketing more her deal? Thought you guys met like that.”

  I grunted. “Lucy’s got a problem with me being in a corpo school. No idea what’s wrong with her. Thinks she has a monopoly on corp-caused suffering no doubt,” I frowned. “Fuck her. She doesn’t know shit about me.”

  “Hah! Tell ya what, kid,” Maine said. “That sort of anger ain’t the kind to come from anywhere else but passion. You play your cards right, you might still land her as an output.”

  I snorted. “That’s laughable.” I didn’t want shit to do with her, actually. Didn’t have the patience to explain myself to her, either. Why should I be the one to do that, anyway? She was the one who came at me guns blazing talking all that gonk shit. The fuck was I supposed to do about her being crazy?

  “I’m serious,” he gently shoved me. “You think my Dorio don’t buck? You just gotta really make sure it’s that kind of anger, or you might get flatlined.” I’d rather not deal with any anger at all if I was being honest. Not for me. “Then again, Pilar’s still alive, so I doubt she’d go so far.”

  “Pilar?”

  I had watched Pilar do some weird comedy show with his fingers, showing off their stability by holding a tray full of bottles with his fingertips.

  Now he had his arm wrapped around Lucy, chatting her up.

  Didn’t know they were close like that.

  “Pilar the techie,” he said. “You said something about being tech savvy yourself. Might wanna pay him a visit to talk shop or some shit. We’ll always welcome more techies.”

  “I can do netrunning, too,” I said. “I even have a cyberdeck.”

  “Aren’t you a jack of all trades?” he chuckled. “Don’t spread yourself too thin, kid. It ain’t all about versatility in this game. Sometimes, you gotta let your team handle their biz. It’s called ‘solo’, sure, but the real solos rarely last long.” Not like my netrunning skills could offer anything to his crew to begin with. Lucy was fucking wild all by herself. What the hell was she doing not working for ‘Saka counterintel? I wondered how much better Kiwi was, or if she even was at all.

  It felt hard to believe that anyone could be better than her. All this time, I thought myself nearing the peak of what being good at programming could grant you, but it turned out that it was just a false ceiling, some arbitrary bullshit academia limit that was imposed because putting numbers and grades to true genius was simply impossible.

  It was hard to believe that Lucy wasn’t the best in the world, but just going by logic, that had to not be the case. Someone out there was better. Rache Bartmoss was better, sure, but someone alive was certainly even more demonic on the cyberdeck than even Lucy.

  And that scared me.

  “Oh, hey,” I said. “I also wanted to ask, what’s the policy on taking out gigs on your own?”

  He looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “You got a fixer, kid?”

  I nodded. “I asked around in some solo hangout for the lowdown, sent me to the way of a fixer in Rancho Coronado. Took two gigs from him yesterday. Handled them no sweat. Just wanna know if that was kosher or not.”

  “Easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, huh, kid?”

  “Yeah, pretty much,” I chuckled.

  He smacked me.

  Ow.

  “That’s for being a smartass. But no, you can take out solo gigs if you want. Just make sure you don’t bite off more than you can chew and flatline, and definitely don’t fuck things up, either. Your rep is mine now that I’ve taken you on.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  Some old Japanese lady wearing a gray kimono approached us with a paper bag. Maine accepted it with thanks. “My immunoblockers,” Maine said. “You need any?”

  I shook my head.

  “Had to get them somewhere else after some gonk sent my ripper to the hospital. I get my hands on that prick, I’ll rip him apart,” he grumbled. Then he eyed me. “You still mostly ‘ganic?”

  I nodded.

  “Save up some eddies and look at getting some chrome. I don’t know what the hell you’re made of, but the Sandy’s eventually gonna get the better of it. Might wanna be ready when that happens.”

  “I’m working on improving myself,” I said. A part of me wanted to tell him about the nanites, but a larger part of me didn’t want Biotechnica’s fuckup to feature so prominently in my life, at least not in my public image.

  I’d have to come clean eventually, just so I’d be better utilized by Maine, but right now I just… wanted another day of being normal. As normal as a gonk wearing a luchador sugar skull mask could be.

  “Don’t think I ain’t notice that frame of yours,” Maine said. “Not to step on your toes, but if that’s Juice, then you should really be more careful. Chrome’s way safer, even if it takes more out of you. But in the end, that’s what makes you truly strong, not just a blazing candle.”

  “Got it,” I said. I wanted to interrogate if chrome really was that safe, considering the whole existence of, well, cyberpsychosis. Or any of the assorted pathoses related to excessive biocyberization. Juice would just give you a heart-attack before thirty, but aside from the occasional bouts of roid rage, it wouldn’t exactly make you batshit.

  Not that I had to worry about either. Nanny said that my tolerance for cyberware was nova. And I wasn’t exactly planning on chipping so much in that I’d be more chrome than ‘ganic. Didn’t exactly have the best experiences with ripperdocs thus far.

  If I was ever going to visit a third one, then I’d have to make damn sure I could trust him.

  I looked up at the big guy. “Maine,” I said. “When I get my next piece of chrome, I’ll need you to put God’s fear in that ripperdoc so he doesn’t think of screwing me over. That’s all I’ll ask.”

  Maine chuckled. “C’mon, kid! Where was all that spunk when you decided to chip in mil-spec chrome? Can’t have chromephobia if you wanna be an edgerunner—”

  “This is serious!” I said. “I’m not giving my body away to some gonk piece of shit whose only worry is eddies. Been burned twice over that shit now and I’m not letting a third time happen, I’m not.”

  Maine’s smile died on his lips, and instead of saying something, he just nodded and patted me on the shoulder. “I’ve got your back, kid. Ain’t no motherfucker in Night City gonk enough to screw you over on my watch.”

  I let out a sigh of relief. “Thanks, man.”

  A purple Rayfield Aerondight pulled into the Turbo parking lot, and the music immediately dimmed as the partygoers stared at the supercar, utterly transfixed. It pulled up in front of Maine and I, and I immediately felt like activating the Sandevistan.

  Maine had tensed, too.

  The door opened, and out stepped a man in a neokitsch maroon suit. He was an older guy, probably in his forties, and had the unmistakable vibe of a corpo to him. He had white hair and four eyes, three of them clearly chrome, and all concentrated on the right, stacked on top of each other. He exuded a sense of control and predation, a big dog with deep pockets.

  “I believed I had made myself clear,” the man began as he looked at Maine. “That discretion was the most important part of this assignment.”

  “Either I short-circed,” Maine said as he stood up and walked towards the man, practically towering over him. “Or I actually heard you say that we didn’t complete the assignment exactly to your parameters.”

  “Tanaka’s driver ratted on himself,” the man said. He had to look up at Maine to talk, but he still gave the impression of control. “He clearly felt that letting what he had discovered, that someone had been inside his employer’s vehicle, go without reporting would bite him in the ass, so he did the sensible thing and let himself get fired rather than something worse. The nav data is useless. Tanaka has changed sites.”

  “How the fuck is that our fault?” Maine asked. “We did everything right, and still something went wrong. That’s just how it is on the field.”

  “When I give out assignments, I expect them to be followed correctly, and by the letter. Your methodology was imperfect, and now I have spent my eurodollars in vain. Do you think you should be congratulated, Maine?”

  “I think you should get real, Faraday,” Maine said. “Mistakes happen. Ain’t no big deal. We’ll do it again.”

  “Tanaka is now wary.”

  “From what? An opened door? That could have been anything!”

  “Tanaka clearly doesn’t think so,” Faraday replied. “I’m here to give you a final warning, Maine. I don’t enjoy spending my eddies on useless endeavors. Either you get it right or you don’t do it at all, are we clear?”

  Maine hesitated for a moment before replying. “Clear.”

  Without another word, Faraday got back inside his car and it drove off at a leisurely pace. Even that was calculated, no doubt.

  I walked up to Maine with both fists clenched. “This is my fault,” I said. “I forgot to close the door behind me. Blew everything.”

  I had embarrassed him in front of his fixer. His rep would take a dive.

  I was so screwed.

  “I-if you need the money back—”

  “Don’t go there, kid,” Maine said. He turned around so I could see him, and he was grinning. “You did as well as you could for a first big gig. I’ll handle this.”

  “And I’ll help.”

  “Yes you will,” he said. “For now, just enjoy the party. Seriously, don’t sweat it.” Dorio came along and Maine walked off with her, leaving me alone.

  Feeling profoundly shitty.

  I spotted Lucy from a distance, sitting on the hood of some car, now alone without Pilar. She saw me. Her eyes narrowed.

  There was accusal in them.

  That felt even worse than letting Maine down.

  I shook up the remnants of the broseph beer in my hand to get rid of the carbonation and gulped the rest of it in one go. Still a little tingly, but it was easier that way.

  “Hey!”

  I looked to my left, and down, to see the same small woman I saw at the bar. She had this very pale green skin and her hair, tied in twin-tails, were a tad greener. She held a red plastic cup towards me. “Remember me?” she asked.

  I didn’t. At all.

  Wait. That hair was a little familiar. I only really recognized people by their hair.

  “Back at the bar,” I said.

  “Name’s Rebecca,” she said as I accepted the cup. “Heard a weirdo was joining the team, and I just had to get a good look. What’s with the mask?”

  I couldn’t handle the embarrassment of having to explain myself once again. “I’m a superhero,” I decided to say, because it was slightly funny, and too absurd to be as cringy as the truth, that I was doing all this to pay for a corpo education.

  She might suddenly turn into another Lucy and just give me endless shit for it. Paid to be more discreet.

  She burst into laughter. “You’re fucking hilarious, man. What’s your name, superhero?”

  “D,” I said. “Just D.”

  She laughed even harder now and fell on the floor where she actually rolled. She didn’t stop for a solid thirty seconds, and from there I couldn’t help it; I laughed with her.