The turnstile at Pershing Street swallowed my credits with a hungry chirp.
[€$10,790 — €$25]
[€$10,765]
Twenty five eddies to get across the city. I stood for a moment on the platform side of the barrier, looking at the yellow safety line painted on the edge of the platform, worn thin in the middle where ten thousand pairs of feet had crossed it daily without thinking about it.
The station itself was the functional kind, not the showcase infrastructure of the Corpo Plaza lines, just the working transit of a district that needed to move its people efficiently and had been given the budget for adequate rather than impressive. Exposed ducting ran along the ceiling. The lighting was even and fluorescent and unkind to everyone equally.
Back home, travel had meant the rhythmic crunch of tires on gravel or the open wind of a highway with the windows down. Something with give to it. Something that moved at a pace that allowed for the possibility of changing your mind.
This was something else entirely.
When the NCART slid into the station it didn't just arrive, it displaced the air with a hot ozone-heavy sigh, the magnetic braking system venting heat in a wave that hit my sensors before it hit anything else. The carriages were long and utilitarian, the exterior scuffed and tagged in the lower sections where the platform height made it accessible, pristine corporate signage above that line where human hands couldn't reach. The doors opened with a pressurized hiss that felt less like an invitation and more like a vault accepting a deposit.
I stepped in. My boots clanged on the ribbed metal floor.
I didn't sit. I took a position near the center of the carriage and gripped a chrome handrail, the cold vibration of the system running through it at a frequency my sensors logged automatically and my brain translated as alive. The carriage was maybe two thirds full, the mid-morning mix of the city in transit, the people who worked shifts that didn't align with the standard commute, the people who didn't work at all and had somewhere to be anyway, the people who just existed in the spaces between.
To my left a salaryman in a slate grey suit that had been expensive once and was still trying stared at nothing, his eyes cycling through the staccato blue flicker of an active data feed, whatever he was reading or watching or being told reflected in miniature across his irises. He had the posture of someone who had learned to sleep standing up and was currently doing something adjacent to it.
Opposite me, a girl no older than twenty was fully asleep in her seat, head tipped back against the window, her jaw replaced from the chin up by a polished chrome prosthetic that caught the carriage lighting in a clean geometric line. A guitar pick was still gripped in her hand, jagged at one edge where it had broken, knuckles loose around it in the particular way of someone who had fallen asleep mid-thought and hadn't let go.
I was getting stares.
Not aggressive, not threatening, just the specific attention that heavy augmentation attracted in enclosed spaces, the involuntary recalibration that happened when someone's brain registered more chrome than it had been expecting. A man two seats down had clocked me when I boarded and hadn't quite managed to look away since, his eyes moving between my arms and the handrail my hand was wrapped around with the focused concern of someone trying to work out the load bearing math. A teenager standing near the doors had her agent angled in a direction that suggested she thought she was being subtle about taking a picture. She wasn't.
I didn't blame any of them. I was a lot to process in a confined space.
The train lurched, throwing my weight forward against the handrail as it climbed toward the elevated section of the line. The tunnel gave way without warning.
My breath hitched.
Through the reinforced glass Night City opened up like a wound that had learned to glow. Not from below, not looking up at it, but from inside it, level with the midpoint of the towers, the elevated rail carrying us between structures that had seemed abstract from the ground and were overwhelming from here. Holographic advertisements bloomed across the faces of the occupied towers, cycling through their rotations in pink and teal and gold, casting moving light across the faces of the silent passengers around me, washing them in color and then taking it away again.
Below, the city was a canyon. Steam rose from grates in the walkways far beneath us. The pedestrian levels were dense and continuous, the kind of crowd that moved like water through the channels the architecture had made for it. Pipes and conduit and the bones of infrastructure ran along every surface, the visible workings of a city that had never had the space or the inclination to hide what kept it running.
It was beautiful in the way that things were beautiful when they were also slightly terrifying.
As the train banked northward toward the coast the character of what was visible through the glass changed, the commercial density of Little China giving way to something heavier and more industrial, the buildings lower and wider, the spaces between them occupied by yards and loading areas and the kind of infrastructure that served the docks rather than the people who lived near them. The Ebunike Docks came into view to the west, the massive cranes rising against the smoggy late morning sky like prehistoric birds that had decided to stop moving and become architecture. The light out there was different, flatter, the marine layer cutting the neon and leaving something grayer and more honest in its place.
The air in the carriage felt different too. Heavier. The industrial throb of the docks transmitted itself through the elevated rail structure and up through the floor in a low continuous vibration that the salaryman beside me didn't seem to notice and that my sensors flagged and catalogued and then set aside as environmental background.
The intercom crackled.
"Next station: Eisenhower Street."
I moved toward the doors as the maglev brakes engaged, a high-pitched mechanical whine that climbed through registers my sensors found uncomfortable and that the other passengers appeared not to hear at all, or had learned not to. The train slowed, taking a turn on the elevated track carrying us over a cluttered alleyway below, and in the distance, highlighted on my HUD, there it was.
A neon tiger mural on a corrugated wall, vivid even in the daytime, the orange and black of it cutting through the industrial grey of the surrounding surfaces with the confident brightness of something that wanted to be seen. Below it, the faded signage of a business that had been several things before it became whatever it currently was.
Wicked Tires and Salvage.
Eventually we made it to the stop. The doors slid open and vented a cloud of stale chilled air into the humid Northside heat, the temperature differential immediate and physical. I stepped onto the platform, the smell hitting me at the same moment my boots hit the decking, salt spray from the docks and burnt rubber and something chemical underneath both of them that my olfactory sensors logged and cross referenced and came back with a list of industrial solvents I didn't particularly want to think about.
I adjusted my jacket, checked the coordinates MK had overlaid on my HUD one last time, and headed for the rusted stairs down to street level.
[DESTINATION: 1142 LONGSHORE NORTH]
[ESTIMATED WALKING TIME: 10 MINUTES]
[THREAT ASSESSMENT: ELEVATED]
[TYGER CLAW ACTIVITY CONFIRMED IN SECTOR]
[RECOMMENDATION: APPROACH FROM AN ELEVATED POSITION.]
Ten minutes. I started walking.
The stairs down from the platform were the industrial kind, open metal grating, the kind that let you see the ground coming up to meet you the whole way down. The street at the bottom was wide and poorly lit despite the hour, the buildings on either side tall enough to cut the available light into a narrow strip that ran down the center of the road and left everything else in shadow.
'What are you basing the threat assessment on?' I directed the thought toward MK as I turned east at the bottom of the stairs, following the route marker it had drawn across my vision in amber.
[ASSESSMENT BASED ON INFORMATION PACKET PROVIDED BY REGINA JONES. TYGER CLAW PRESENCE IN SECTOR FLAGGED AS HIGH RISK. MULTIPLE ARMED INDIVIDUALS REPORTED AT TARGET LOCATION. STANDARD THREAT PARAMETERS APPLIED.]
I considered that for a moment, stepping around a stack of drainage pipe someone had left on the pavement with no particular concern for the people who needed to use it.
'Standard threat parameters,' I repeated. 'You're calibrating against an average merc. Someone who bleeds when they get shot and goes down when they bleed.'
[CORRECT. CURRENT PARAMETERS REFLECT STANDARD CIVILIAN AND OPERATIVE VULNERABILITY PROFILES.]
'Right,' I thought. 'So a room full of armed Tyger Claws reads as elevated because for most people it would be. For me it's an inconvenience if they get lucky with their aim and a waste of time if they don't.' I stepped over a rusted drainage grate without breaking stride. 'Going forward I want you to recalibrate. Base threat assessments on two things only. Possible structural damage to my chassis, and possible exposure, someone getting a clear look at me, getting footage, making a connection I don't want made. Everything else is just noise.'
A brief pause, longer than MK's usual processing latency, the kind that meant it was actually reworking something rather than just retrieving a stored response.
[UNDERSTOOD. RECALIBRATING THREAT ASSESSMENT PARAMETERS.]
[REVISED ASSESSMENT: 1142 LONGSHORE NORTH]
[STRUCTURAL DAMAGE RISK: LOW. NO WEAPONRY CONFIRMED AT LOCATION CAPABLE OF PENETRATING CHASSIS AT STANDARD ENGAGEMENT RANGES.]
[EXPOSURE RISK: MODERATE. CAMERA COVERAGE ON EASTERN APPROACH IS LIMITED BUT NOT ABSENT. TYGER CLAW PRESENCE MEANS WITNESSES WHO MAY REPORT UNUSUAL OPERATIVE DESCRIPTION TO GANG NETWORK.]
[REVISED THREAT LEVEL: LOW TO MODERATE.]
[NOTE: RECOMMEND MINIMIZING TIME ON SITE AND AVOIDING PROLONGED ENGAGEMENT.]
'Better,' I thought. 'That's actually useful.'
The docks were audible before they were visible, the deep mechanical rhythm of the cranes carrying across the rooftops in a low continuous percussion that the buildings redirected rather than absorbed. The smell of salt water was stronger down here at street level, layered under the rubber and solvent of the industrial district, the ocean asserting itself through everything the city had built on top of it.
I kept walking, the amber marker steady ahead of me, and let the Search Eye run its passive sweep of the street as I moved.
Four minutes out. 'While we're walking,' I thought, 'see if you can pull the floor plans for the target location. And access whatever cameras they've got running inside, I want to know exactly where the laptop is before I walk through the door.'
A pause.
[FLOOR PLANS: QUERYING LOCAL REGISTRY.]
[RESULT: WICKED TIRES AND SALVAGE. REGISTERED AS AUTOMOTIVE REPAIR AND SALVAGE FACILITY. ORIGINAL BUILDING PERMITS ON FILE. HOWEVER, STRUCTURAL MODIFICATIONS MADE POST-REGISTRATION ARE NOT REFLECTED IN AVAILABLE DOCUMENTS. CURRENT INTERIOR LAYOUT MAY DIFFER SIGNIFICANTLY FROM PLANS ON RECORD.]
[CAMERA ACCESS: UNABLE TO ATTEMPT REMOTE CONNECTION FROM CURRENT DISTANCE.]
'What do you mean unable?'
[THE TARGET FACILITY OPERATES ON A LOCAL CLOSED NETWORK. ACCESSING IT REQUIRES EITHER PHYSICAL PROXIMITY TO BREACH THE LOCAL SIGNAL RANGE, APPROXIMATELY FIFTEEN TO TWENTY METERS FROM THE BUILDING PERIMETER, OR ACCESS TO A BROADER WATSON DISTRICT NODE THAT COVERS THE SECTOR.]
[CURRENT CONNECTION IS LIMITED TO THE CITINET ACCESS ESTABLISHED IN ARROYO. WATSON DISTRICT INFRASTRUCTURE IS A SEPARATE NODE. WITHOUT AN AUTHORIZED ACCESS POINT FOR THIS DISTRICT, REMOTE BREACH IS NOT POSSIBLE FROM THIS DISTANCE.]
I slowed slightly, turning this over.
'So if I had access to a Watson data terminal I could reach their cameras from further out.'
[CORRECT. A WATSON DISTRICT NODE WOULD SIGNIFICANTLY EXTEND OPERATIONAL RANGE FOR PASSIVE SURVEILLANCE AND NETWORK RECONNAISSANCE. IT WOULD ALSO IMPROVE REAL-TIME MAPPING, LOCAL COMMUNICATIONS INTERCEPT, AND THREAT TRACKING WITHIN THE DISTRICT GENERALLY.]
[NOTE: THIS WOULD BE ADVISABLE REGARDLESS OF THE CURRENT 'GIG'.]
'You could have led with that,' I thought.
[THE OPPORTUNITY TO MENTION IT HAD NOT PREVIOUSLY ARISEN.]
I stopped walking and looked at the route marker ahead of me, then at the amber overlay MK was already generating showing the nearest Watson data terminal, two blocks south and one block west, sitting on a corner of a street that ran parallel to the elevated rail line.
A detour. Maybe six minutes there and back, plus however long the connection took.
I checked the time. 11:22. Viktor at 14:30. The gig location another four minutes from the terminal if I came at it from the south rather than the east.
Workable.
'Alright,' I thought. 'Take the detour. Find me the closest one.'
[REDIRECTING. WATSON DISTRICT DATA TERMINAL: 0.4KM SOUTH. ESTIMATED TIME TO TERMINAL: 6 MINUTES.]
The amber marker shifted, drawing a new line through the Northside streets, and I turned with it.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jackson 'Neon-Eye' Sato
Wicked Tires and Salvage, Northside Industrial District, Watson.
11:44
Life, I had decided, was finally going my way.
I leaned back into the good couch, the one we'd pulled from an apartment three months ago on a job that had gone better than planned, real leather or close enough that nobody in Northside was going to raise the point, and looked at the ceiling with the contentment of a man whose immediate future contained nothing he objected to.
The girl currently making my morning significantly more enjoyable was Mia, one of the joytoys who worked the stretch of Longshore that ran parallel to the docks, the kind of block that the NCPD had decided wasn't worth the paperwork and the Tyger Claws had decided was worth a modest ongoing tax.
I'd called her at eight, half expecting her to be occupied, and she'd shown up thirty minutes later with a bottle of something that hadn't come with a receipt and the particular professional ease of someone who had long since stopped distinguishing between work and being good at it.
She had chrome-tipped nails, the decorative kind rather than the weapon kind, and an unhurried quality to everything she did that I was currently very grateful for. In my experience the ones who rushed were the ones who wanted to leave. Mia never seemed to want to leave, which was either genuine or the best performance money could buy, and at this point I didn't particularly care which.
I closed my eyes and let the ceiling blur above me.
The couch creaked softly beneath me as Mia moved between my knees with the kind of confidence that made men stupid. Warmth. Pressure. Slow enough to make me feel every second of it. Her chrome-tipped nails traced lightly along the inside of my thigh, teasing rather than hurried, and I felt my muscles tighten instinctively in response.
"Fuck," I muttered under my breath as she swallowed me. The word came out rougher than I intended.
Mia glanced up at me once, amused at the effect she was having, dark lipstick smudged faintly at the corner of her mouth like she'd done it on purpose. Probably had. She liked watching me lose composure piece by piece.
My fist tightened in her hair without thinking, not enough to hurt, just enough to ground myself. Synthetic black strands slid between my fingers, soft despite the neon streak threaded through one side. My pulse thudded heavy in my throat, my cock pulsing in tune.
"Don't blow just yet output, we're just getting started," She said sliding off, her tongue trailing the underside of me all the way to tip, the contrast of the cold air, and the worm tongue made me curl my toes, almost doing just that as she quickly took me in her mouth again.
Outside, somewhere beyond the cracked windows of Wicked Tires and Salvage, Watson groaned and rattled through another polluted morning. Distant engines. Raised voices. The metallic scream of machinery from the docks carrying over everything else like it always did.
Inside, none of it mattered.
Not the laptop sitting ten feet away worth a small fortune. Not Maelstrom. Not corpos. Not the possibility that by tonight I might actually claw my way out of Northside for good.
Right now there was only the warmth of her mouth, the slow burn coiling low in my stomach, and the dangerous feeling that for once in my life the universe had stopped trying to take things from me.
The laptop sat on the table across the room, closed, its Kiroshi logo catching the light from the single working overhead strip. Small thing. Unremarkable thing. The kind of object you'd walk past a hundred times without a second glance.
Worth more than everything in this building combined, apparently.
I'd known it the moment I popped the trunk of the corpo's car in that Little China parking garage, the kind of case that came with biometric locks and impact padding and the quiet suggestion that whoever owned it had paid serious money for both the hardware and the discretion. I'd taken the car out of opportunity and found the laptop as a bonus, the kind of find that happened maybe twice in a career if you were lucky and knew what you were looking at when it turned up.
I knew what I was looking at.
Kiroshi property. Proprietary optical data, a runner had confirmed it without getting close enough to trip the encryption, reading the shape of the thing rather than the thing itself. Which meant it was worth exactly as much as the right buyer was willing to pay, before the wrong buyer found out it existed.
I had a couple of interested parties already, but the only that mattered was the corpo contact, almost certainly a Zetatech middleman operating at careful arm's length from anything traceable, had come in considerably higher, with the additional detail of a meeting scheduled for this afternoon.
This afternoon.
I thought about what this afternoon represented. A number with more digits than anything I had personally handled before. Enough to leave Northside properly, not just relocate within it but actually leave, somewhere the chapter politics and the Maelstrom territorial pressure and the general ambient grind of the industrial district stopped being my daily weather.
Mia must have noticed my attention drifting, because she immediately picked up the pace. One second I was thinking about the laptop sitting across the room and the kind of money attached to it, the next coherent thought got ripped clean out of my head.
Her rhythm turned faster, rougher, deliberate enough that my hand clenched in her hair without deciding to. Black strands twisted between my fingers as she moved like she had something to prove.
My agent buzzed against the armrest.
Ignored.
Her hand slid up my chest slowly, nails scraping lightly over skin, and I felt my stomach tighten hard. She looked up at me once through dark lashes, mouth curved around a smug little smile like she knew exactly how close I was.
"Mia, fuck—"
The words barely came out right.
Both hands buried in her hair now, the couch creaking under us as I leaned forward. The entire room narrowed down to heat and pressure and the sound of my own breathing turning uneven. When it finally hit me it hit hard enough to blank my vision completely.
White exploded behind my eye.
I dragged her closer on instinct, rubbing her face against my pelvis, feeling her swallow even as I went as deep as I could, and by the time I finally let go of her hair my arms felt like they were made of something heavier than usual. I dropped back into the cushions like somebody had cut my strings.
For a moment neither of us said anything. Just breathing heavy.
The hum of neon outside. The distant grind of machinery somewhere deeper in Northside.
Eventually Mia climbed up beside me, breathing almost as hard as I was. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and leaned her head back against the cushions, hair completely wrecked from my hands. Sunlight pushed through the dirty warehouse windows behind her, catching the smoke drifting through the room and turning the edges of her silhouette gold.
Up close she looked softer than she did on the street. Still sharp around the edges, still Night City through and through, but softer. Smudged lipstick. Chrome at her throat glinting faintly beneath warm brown skin. Tired eyes half hidden under messy bangs. The oversized shirt she'd stolen from my floor hung half open over one tattooed thigh as she stretched.
"Shit," she muttered breathlessly.
She reached into her purse, pushed aside loose rounds and makeup cartridges, and pulled out an inhaler. Two quick puffs. A long breath out.She reached into her purse, pushed aside loose rounds and makeup cartridges, and pulled out an inhaler. Two quick puffs. A long breath out.
"Come on," she said, voice still rough. "Like I said. We're just getting started."
She handed the inhaler over.
I took it with a laugh, still trying to get my lungs working properly. "Yeah? Give me a minute and I'll wreck you."
That got a real laugh out of her. An actual one, not the performative kind.
My agent buzzed again. I ignored it again.
"You got somewhere to be?" she asked.
"Iie," I said, rubbing a hand down my face. "Just the boys bitching because I've got them standing outside in the heat while I'm in here with you."
"Charmer."
I looked over at her after that. Actually looked.
The sunlight behind her turned the smoke hanging in the garage into pale gold haze. Mia sat curled into the corner of the couch with one knee tucked under herself, cigarette burn scars and chrome glinting faintly along her arms. Pretty in the dangerous way Night City specialized in producing. Pretty like a switchblade left on a bar counter. The kind of woman you met at three in the morning and ruined your life over willingly.
My father would have called her a distraction.
My father was dead and hadn't been right about much anyway.
"You ever think about leaving?" I asked before I could stop myself. "Stopping all this. Settling somewhere else."
She snorted immediately. "Leave Night City? Settle down in some small town? Pop out a couple of brats?"
"Maybe."
"With what money, Jackson?" she asked. The amusement was still there but something underneath it had shifted, something that had been performing lightness and stopped for a second. "With who?" She shook her head slowly, and when she looked at me there was something in her face that was older than the rest of her. "A happy ending? For people like us."
She said it the way people said things they had already made their peace with, there was no bitterness or sadness in her tone, just flatness the way you stated a fact about the weather.
"Wrong city," she continued, quieter now. "Wrong people. Wrong everything." She looked down at her hands, the chrome tipped nails, and something crossed her expression that was gone before I could name it. "And who the hell wants to settle down with a doll, Jackson?"
The last part wasn't a question. It was something she had asked herself before, probably more than once, probably at three in the morning in some room that wasn't hers, and had arrived at an answer she didn't particularly like and had learned to live with anyway.
The room was quiet for a moment.
"Me," I said. The word left my mouth before I'd finished thinking it.
Mia blinked at me.
"With you," I said again, quieter. "Tomorrow if you want. If Night City's the problem then we leave. Somewhere nicer, better. We start over there."
For once she didn't answer immediately. She just stared at me.
"You serious?"
"Yeah."
"You barely survive here."
"Not after today."
Her eyes narrowed slightly. "This about the laptop?"
I didn't answer. Didn't need to.
Mia leaned back into the couch slowly, studying me for a long moment before exhaling through her nose.
"You pull this off," she said carefully, "and maybe I'll believe you."
"Maybe?"
"Don't push it." She pointed at me lazily. "You pull through, get the money, prove this isn't another Northside bullshit dream..." Her expression softened just slightly, the professional edges dropping back far enough to show something underneath. "Then yeah. Maybe I go with you."
For the first time in longer than I could accurately remember, I felt genuinely happy. The uncomplicated kind. The kind that didn't have a catch attached to it.
Then my agent buzzed again. The feeling evaporated instantly.
"Fuck," I muttered, snatching it off the armrest. "Somebody better be dying."
I checked the screen.
Kenji. One of the boys I had watching the perimeter outside. The message was four words.
Fuck borg! Get out here!
I stared at it. Then at the laptop across the room. Shit. I was moving before my brain fully caught up.
The couch shoved backwards as I stood, already dragging my pants up while my agent buzzed again in my hand.
"What's wrong?" Mia asked immediately, sitting upright.
"Just give me a minute." The sharpness in my own voice surprised even me.
I was halfway across the room before she could answer, snatching my pistol off the table while I moved toward the security monitor setup beside the garage office. The old CRT screens flickered under bad fluorescent light, cycling through grainy camera feeds around the perimeter.
Everything looked normal. Too normal. No alarms. No gunfire. No movement.
But Kenji had sounded terrified. Then I noticed the timestamp. The footage was delayed. Five whole minutes. A cold knot formed in my stomach.
"No no no—"
I grabbed the slider and rewound the feed manually. The image skipped backward in static bursts before stabilizing.
And then I saw it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The first camera overlooked the outer lot. Kenji's boys were standing around the chainlink entrance smoking and half paying attention like usual when something came down out of the sky just outside the frame hard enough to shake the camera on its mount.
Not jumped a fence.Not climbed. Came down from above.One of the guards turned toward the impact.
The thing that had landed hit him before he finished turning.Fast wasn't even the word for it. It crossed the distance between them in something that wasn't quite a run, more like a controlled fall forward, all weight and momentum, one hand catching the guard by the throat mid-stride and carrying both of them through the hood of a parked van hard enough to fold the engine block inward. The car alarm screamed and died in the same second.
The others barely had time to register what they were looking at. One reached for his gun.
The thing pivoted on one heel, slipped inside the draw like it had seen it coming three seconds ago, and drove a straight punch into the man's sternum. Not a big punch. Compact. The kind that looked underwhelming right up until the man it hit folded backward and didn't get back up.
Third guard came in with a machete, a real swing, committed, the kind that would have opened a normal person from shoulder to hip.
The thing stepped inside it.
That was the only way I could describe what happened. It didn't dodge backward or to the side, it moved forward, into the swing, close enough that the blade passed behind it harmlessly, and in the same motion it trapped the wrist, applied pressure in a direction the joint absolutely was not designed to travel, and swept the legs out from under the guy simultaneously. He hit the pavement at an angle that made me wince even through a grainy monitor. Before he'd finished bouncing the thing had already dropped a heel into his chest and was standing again.
The whole sequence had taken maybe four seconds. The footage shook as something else triggered the next camera.
I switched feeds.Inside the garage proper. Six more of my guys spread across the floor space, two near the vehicle lifts, one by the tool wall, two flanking the main entrance, one up on the mezzanine with a rifle.
The rifle guy fired first. He had the angle, he had the drop, he had a clean shot from fifteen meters at a stationary target framed in the doorway.
He missed.Not because his aim was bad. Because the thing wasn't there when the round arrived.
It had moved the instant before the trigger broke, a lateral step so small it shouldn't have mattered, except it had calculated exactly how much it needed to move and done precisely that and nothing more. The round sparked off the concrete floor behind it.
The rifle guy cycled the bolt.The thing looked up at him.
Then it ran up the support pillar.
Not climbed. Ran. Three steps up the vertical surface, using the momentum to rotate, and came off the top of the arc feet first directly into the mezzanine platform. The rifle guy went through the safety railing and dropped the full height to the garage floor below. He didn't get up.
The remaining five moved in together, which was the smart play, the only play really, overwhelming a single target with simultaneous angles.
It didn't help.
The thing dropped into the middle of them like it had specifically chosen the worst possible position for all five of them at once, and then it started moving and didn't stop. A spinning backfist that caught the first man across the temple while the thing was already rotating into an elbow for the second. Both dropped inside a second. The third caught a palm strike to the sternum that launched him backward into a workbench hard enough to bring the whole thing down on top of him. The fourth tried a tackle, a genuine committed rugby tackle that would have moved most things.
The thing caught him by the collar mid-lunge, redirected his momentum sideways without absorbing any of it, and introduced his face to the windshield of a car that had been waiting patiently on the lift. The windshield lost the argument.
The fifth man, the smart one, the one who had backed up against the far wall the moment it came through the door, finally had a clear shot with nobody between him and the target. Clean line. Stationary target. Point blank was generous but it was close.
He fired three times.
I watched the rounds hit.
Watched them hit and flatten and fall away from silver plating like they had struck concrete.
The man stared at his gun.The thing looked at him with those gold eyes.
Then crossed the distance between them in two steps, took the gun away with one hand, and tapped him on the temple with the butt of it precisely hard enough to put him down.
The restraint of something that knew exactly what it was capable of. The camera switched automatically.
Three left, the ones I'd kept near the loading area as a last resort. My best guys. Daisuke with the combat shotgun and the Militech chrome on both arms. Riku with the mantis blades, the real ones, the Arasaka grade hardware that had cost him two years of earnings. And Tanaka hanging back with a designated marksman rifle, patient, waiting for a line.
For the first time the thing actually stopped moving.It stood in the loading bay entrance and looked at the three of them the way a person looked at a math problem they had already solved.
Tanaka fired.
The thing dropped flat to the floor and the round passed through the space its head had occupied a fraction of a second earlier. From the floor it launched itself forward in a dead sprint, staying low, below Tanaka's follow-up angle, closing the distance to Daisuke before the shotgun was fully raised.
Daisuke fired from the hip.
The blast hit. I could see it hit, the muzzle flash lighting up silver plating at near point blank range.
The thing didn't slow down.
It hit Daisuke like a freight vehicle, one hand driving up under the shotgun to redirect the second shot into the ceiling, the other catching him by the front of his jacket and continuing forward without breaking stride, using his mass as a battering ram to take out the shelving unit behind him. Two hundred kilos of shelving came down on both of them.
The thing stood up out of the debris.
Daisuke did not.
Riku came in from the left, blades deployed, moving with the trained precision of someone who had spent serious time learning how to use them. Fast. Technically correct. The kind of fighter who would have ended most people in the first exchange.
The thing watched him come.Riku committed to the first thrust. The thing caught his wrist.
Not the blade. The wrist, behind the blade, fingers closing around the chrome housing of the mantis arm with a grip that I could see was final even through a grainy monitor.
Then it pulled.
The mantis blade assembly tore free at the housing with a shower of sparks and the specific sound of expensive hardware being separated from the body it had been installed in. Riku screamed. The thing held the detached assembly for a half second, looked at it with what I could only read as mild curiosity, then threw it away like it didn't cost 30 000 eddies.
Tanaka fired again from across the room.
The thing raised Daisuke's dropped shotgun without looking, angled it backward over its shoulder by feel alone, and fired once.
The round caught Tanaka's rifle and his hands.
He started screaming at his gored hands, bone and circutry exposed to the open air, and he would have kept screaming if the borg didn't throw the used shotgun at his head with enough force to knock him out.
'How didn't I hear any of this?'
It stood alone in the wrecked loading bay, surrounded by the evidence of twenty seconds of absolute systematic violence, and it wasn't breathing hard. It wasn't breathing at all. It just stood there in the settling dust, gold eyes moving slowly across the room, cataloguing.
Then its head turned.Toward camera seven Toward where Kenji was hiding.
On screen, Kenji pressed himself tighter against the thin warehouse wall, the panic visible even through the grain of the footage, almost around the time my agent had been buzzing.
The thing walked toward him.
Kenji tried to move.The thing punched through the wall.
Through the wall itself, concrete and rebar exploding inward, and a silver hand closed around Kenji's throat and pulled him through the opening like the wall had always been a suggestion. Kenji hit the ground on the other side hard, scrabbling, trying to get his legs under him.
The thing placed one foot on his chest. Leaning forward in a that suggested the weight it was putting on his chest, was enough to cause him a lot of pain without any exertive effort
Kenji went still. The thing looked down at him for a moment. Asking him something, Kenji answered and he looked in the direction of where my safe room was.
Then it looked up.
Directly into the camera, its face was scrambled, but like two burning suns, its eyes shone through.
Gold .Steady. Patient. Looking directly at me through the monitor like it had always known I was watching.
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I realized I was gripping the edge of the desk hard enough my knuckles had gone white.
Behind me, Mia spoke quietly. "Jackson." I didn't answer.
"Jackson," she said again. "We need to go. "I started pacing.
Three steps toward the monitor. Three steps back. The footage still rolling on the screen behind me, the thing standing in the wreckage of my garage looking up at a camera like it had all the time in the world.
How did it know where I was.
That was the question pulling at the back of everything else. Not how it had gotten through my guys, that was obvious enough now, painful and obvious. But how it had known to come here at all. How it had known I had the laptop. How it had known I was trying to move it.
I hadn't told anyone. Not Kenji. Not the boys outside.
The only person I had told was—
I turned around slowly.
Mia was on the far side of the room, moving fast, gathering her things. Her purse. Her shoes. Her jacket from the back of the chair where she'd thrown it an hour ago.
Not looking at me. The cold thing that had been forming in my stomach since I'd seen the timestamp on the footage completed itself.
I crossed the room in four steps, grabbed her by the arm, and threw her into the couch hard enough to knock it back against the wall.
"Who did you tell?"
She looked up at me with an expression I had never seen on her face before, something that was trying to be indignant and landing somewhere closer to frightened.
"Jackson, what are you—"
"Who did you sell me out to." My voice came out flat and quiet in a way that was worse than shouting. "Who did you tell about the laptop."
"I don't know what you're talking about, I didn't—"
I went to the table. Picked up the laptop case. Picked up the smartgun beside it, a Tsunami Nue, the one I'd kept back from the last job because I'd liked the weight of it, and turned back to her with the gun hanging loose at my side.
"Who." I raised it and pointed it at her. "Who did you tell."
Mia's face changed.
Just slightly. Just enough.
"Some guy," she said, the denial already collapsing out of her voice. "I don't know who he was, he was asking around about someone who'd taken a car from a corpo in Little China, I didn't think it was—"
I pistol whipped her.
The crack of it echoed in the room and she went sideways off the couch, hand coming up to her face, and I stood over her with the gun still raised and something burning behind my eye that wasn't quite rage and wasn't quite grief and was worse than either of them separately.
"Fuck!"
The word tore out of me.
I was a gonk.
That was the thing sitting in the center of all of it, the thing I couldn't get around or dress up as something else. A complete and total gonk. A woman I'd known for six months, a joytoy from the docks, and I had sat on that couch and talked about Atlanta and starting over and meant every word of it, had felt genuinely happy about it, had let myself believe for approximately four minutes that the universe had stopped trying to take things from me.
I had done it to myself and Northside was going to be where I died because of it and—
The door came off its hinges.
Not kicked through the way doors got kicked through in films, with a boot and a dramatic pause. It simply ceased to be a functioning door, the frame separating from the wall around it and the whole thing landing flat on the garage floor with a sound like a gunshot.
Through the opening walked the borg.
Gold eyes moving across the room with the calm inventory of something that had already assessed and catalogued and decided. Silver plating catching the light from the single overhead strip. The wreckage of my entire operation visible through the opening behind it.
I moved without thinking, the gun arm coming up and around, Mia pulled back against my chest, forearm across her throat, the Nue pressed hard against her temple.
"Don't take another fucking step." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "You do that and I'm blowing this snitch bitch's brains out right here."
The borg stopped.
Its hand went to its jacket.
"Hey! Stop! You fucker, I said stop—"
It pulled out a revolver. Old frame, heavy, the kind of gun that people bought when they were done being clever about it. It held it loosely at its side, barrel toward the floor, with the complete absence of urgency of something that didn't find the current situation particularly threatening.
"She isn't why I'm here," it said in a cool tone I'd never knew a natural voice to have. "The case you're holding is."
"Yeah?" I pressed the Nue harder against Mia's temple. She made a small sound. "But she works for whoever sent you, right? Which means your boss probably already knows where I—"
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Genos Harker
I put the smoking revolver back in its holster and walked to where what had been Jackson Sato was currently lying on his back.
I guess its true what they say, first times always the hardest.
The gun first, a Tsunami Nue, nice piece, well maintained, worth selling. Then his eddies, a modest roll of physical cash that suggested the big payday hadn't arrived yet. A few datachips. A credchip with a balance I'd check later.
The laptop case I picked up last, checking the latches, confirming the biometric seals were intact. Still locked. Good.
"You going to be alright?"
The girl didn't answer.
She was standing where she'd caught herself on the arm of the couch, not sitting, not moving toward the door, just standing and looking at the floor with a look I'd only seen in war documentaries. Her hand was pressed against the side of her face where the pistol whip had landed.
I looked at her for another moment, then at the room around us, the evidence of a morning that had started one way and ended significantly differently, and decided there was nothing useful I could add to the situation.
I picked up the case, pocketed the Nue, and headed for the door that was no longer a door.
The drop point was twenty minutes on foot, which given the alternative of flagging down transit with a stolen corporate laptop under my arm felt like the right call. The Northside streets did what Northside streets did, moved around me, generated noise went about the business of being themselves without particular interest in what I was carrying.
I put the laptop in the designated drop point and sold the Nue to a 2nd Amendment outlet two blocks over for a number that suggested the previous owner had paid considerably more for it than he'd had any business paying on a Northside income. Good taste. Poor judgment. The combination was not uncommon.
My agent chimed as I was walking away from the counter. Regina's avatar populated the corner of my vision, cigarette already burning, eyepatch catching the light.
"You do quick work, Genos." A pause. "Not as quiet as I would have liked, but good."
"I could have gone in quiet," I said. "I wanted to give you a show. Let you see what you're working with."
Something moved in her expression that wasn't quite amusement but was in that direction. "Yeah, well, next time do try and handle retrieval jobs more subtly. My clients prefer their retrieval jobs not to trend on the Northside screamsheets."
Next time. "Noted."
"Keep an eye on your agent," she said, already moving on, the professional efficiency of someone with three other things happening simultaneously. "I'll be in touch." A beat. "And Genos."
"Yeah?"
"Good call on the doll. Most mercs wouldn't have bothered."
She hung up. A few seconds of silence, just the ambient noise of the Northside street around me, the distant machinery of the docks, a car horn somewhere two blocks over, the general indifferent percussion of the district going about its day.
Then my HUD lit up.
[INCOMING TRANSFER: REGINA JONES — FIXER FEE, JOB: BAD DATA DAY]
[AMOUNT: €$2,500]
[€$10,765 + €$2,500]
[CURRENT BALANCE: €$13,265]
I looked at the number for a moment.
Two thousand eddies for twenty minutes of work and a train ride. Less the Nue sale on top of that, which had added another comfortable margin to the morning's total.
Not bad for a first job. Not bad at all.
I stood on the Northside pavement for a moment and thought about the standing in that room with her hand pressed against her face, looking at the floor. About Sato on the floor, bullet hole in his forehead, staring up with emptied eyes to the sky.
About the specific texture of a city that manufactured hope in small quantities and took it back with interest.
Then I checked the time.
[12:31.]
Viktor at 14:30. I started walking.
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Authors Note: That's it for Chapter 10, The Seven of Swords, hope you enjoyed it.
The Seven of Swords is the card of strategy and cunning, taking what you need through intelligence rather than just brute force. It's usually showed as a figure walking away from a camp carrying swords they've quietly lifted, getting away with something not because they overpowered anyone but because they were smarter about how they moved. That's the energy of this chapter, information gathering, calculated entry, knowing exactly what you came for...the fact that it turned into a small war inside a chop shop is neither here nor there.
I also used this chapter to experiment with writing a sex scene, partly because I know I'll be writing more of them later and wanted to find my footing before it becomes load bearing to the plot. Let me know in the comments how it landed.
The bigger thing I wanted to do with the Sato section was show that everyone in Night City is the main character of their own story. He's not a villain, just a guy who found something valuable, made a plan, and let himself feel hopeful about it for forty five minutes before the universe reminded him where he lived. Night City is full of people like that, people mid-story, people whose chapter ends when someone else's needs them to. I hope that came through.
As always leave a like and a comment, any criticisms welcome. Ko-fi for tips and commissions, Patreon for early chapters. See you in the next one.