I was deep inside a stinky alleyway in Watson. Not a soul had eyes on me at the moment. I was as private as it was possible to be in Night City. I had my personal link hooked up to my external cyberdeck, running a program to detect if I was being traced, as I finally made the video call to the closest thing I had to allies in this scene.

  Rogue, Reyes, and… a surprise entrant to this demented enterprise, Regina Jones.

  Rogue’s info on the fixers and their various causes had come in clutch, especially with winning over this Regina Jones, whom I had known nothing about. Apparently, she was a former media worker whose special interest was cyberpsychosis and how to prevent it, or even cure it.

  I couldn’t have asked for a better person to partner up with. She had the know-how of media to spread awareness of this thing of ours, and I had the knowledge to truly make a difference in this city by helping her cause as well.

  My HUD lit up with the likenesses of all three fixers as they accepted the call near-instantly. I began without any preamble. “My main concern at the moment is winning over the other fixers one after the other. Give them more of a reason to side with me than not.”

  “Wise,” Rogue said. “I’ll compile a list of tasks for you to help you turn those frowning faces upside down. They’re all just looking for more personalized favors, beyond just the money and power.”

  I’d thought as much, honestly.

  “More money won’t hurt,” Reyes suggested with a shrug. “They’re only talking tough because they have to, but the more lucrative you become to them, the more likely they are to stick around, regardless of the risks. Except Ibarra. He’s too principled.”

  Sebastian ‘Padre’ Ibarra. The fixer of Heywood. And apparently, when he wasn’t paying people to rob, steal and kill at his whim, or the whim of someone wealthy, he also heard people’s confessions at a cathedral in Vista Del Rey.

  The very same cathedral that I had gone to. Christ.

  Yeah, ‘Christ’ was right. There was a chance that he might put two and two together. And a chance that he might go ahead with breaking that ‘seal of confession’ as long as it served him.

  He was a bad joke, and I did want to get to the bottom of it all. Better than

  “And Wakako’s ties with the Tygers are too substantial for things to go away quickly. You’ll… have to make some sacrifices, D.”

  “I’m not making nice with the Tygers.”

  “You should,” Reyes said. “Shobo was one thing. The eighty plus gangoons you took out? That deserves some recompense, at least.”

  “Right. An apology letter and some blood money is supposed to work?” I scoffed. “Best I can offer is immunity, and that’s entirely out of the question. They’ll learn to fear me or die. I just have to keep heaping on the pressure.”

  “That’ll push our timeline back,” Rogue said.

  “I can multi-task.”

  Rogue rolled her eyes. “Ceasefire. How about that? Then, you can conveniently break it at some point in the future once we no longer need to keep ourselves focused on important shit, like what we’re gonna do about this corpo investigation going on.” Huh. So she already knew about the Task Force.

  She was good.

  I clenched my jaws. “Fine. Float the idea to Wakako. I’ll throw in a couple of gigs free of charge to sweeten the deal, too.”

  “I only need one thing from you, D,” Regina Jones said. “I want to study your solution to cyberpsychosis. If you ever find the time, call me, and we’ll set up a meeting.”

  “Sure. Thanks for showing up, Jones,” I nodded at her.

  “I need to delta. Good talk.” She hung up a moment later.

  “Rogue,” I said. “I think we’d get pretty far ahead if we figured out a way to give Militech a leg-up in the race for Night City’s pie.”

  “Militech?” Reyes asked. “Why do you want to help out Militech?”

  “Because they hate Arasaka,” Rogue said. “And vice versa. You wanna throw a rock in the pond. Make the water all muddy. The more the big corps focus on each other, the less they’ll focus on us. I’ll get on top of that, too. By the way, I just thought you should know something: both of you. Judy Alvarez, the BD techie.”

  “She’s gone,” I said.

  “I know,” Rogue said. “I sorted it. Set her up with a couple of fake I.Ds and told her to hop countries. She’s in the wind. Even I don’t know where she is.”

  Huh. “Thank you, Rogue. You’re the best.”

  Rogue shrugged slightly. “Don’t you forget it.”

  “I’ll wait for your call Rogue,” I said. “Thanks for setting up this meet, too.”

  “Don’t mention it. Peace.” She hung up as well, leaving me with Reyes on the line.

  “Good news, D,” El Capitan said. “I got word from a new BD techie. I’ll set up a meeting later. Next week good?”

  “I’ll let you know,” I said. “Good work, Capitan.”

  “We need to hurry up and get this BD business up and running, D. Every day that passes is eddies burning. And you’re the biggest hit in these streets since Weyland ‘Boa Boa’!”

  I chuckled. “Sure. We’ll talk later.”

  “Keep out of trouble, chico.”

  He hung up then.

  Nanny manifested before me, eyes narrowed. [Are you sure that XBD-scrolling is wise at this point?]

  I hummed. “I should learn how to censor the virtus on my own at this point, but… I don’t think there’s any getting around the need for a techie to tune the shards properly.”

  I had no intention of putting myself in the position of having my techie know everything about me. Not again.

  “The BDs are important,” I said. “It’s a psy-op. Let the people follow along with what I can do, they’ll know to fear me, or trust me. Whatever works.”

  [Or dig information out of them.]

  “Not anything overly important.

  [Every clue is overly important, David. Don’t you think you are being too reckless?]

  “I’m only as reckless as I need to be,” I said. “Showing people that I’m strong, that’s important.”

  [We’re not strong enough,] she said. [We need to get stronger. You need to give me time.]

  “I will,” I said to her. “I promise. We’re playing for keeps now.”

  [I’m going to say something, and you’re not going to like it.]

  I furrowed my brows. “What?”

  [No more meat action as D. For one month.]

  I blinked. “Wha—what the hell are you talking about, Nanny?”

  [You stay on the Net if you want to move as D, or you don’t move at all. We’re powerful on the Net. We have Excalibur. And we can still do a lot of damage. We can still coordinate with the fixers, still work on everything we need to as D. And you won’t be in as much risk.]

  I frowned. “I’ll think about it.”

  [Don’t think: do. You’re running out of juice on the Sandy, we’re nowhere closer to figuring out this Biotechnica raid, and now half the city, plus Soviet mercenaries, are after you. Arasaka is one step away from sending Adam Smasher at you.]

  Adam Smasher. I wonder how I’d rate—

  [No, stop—bad meat-puppet. Stop fantasizing about fighting the literal attack dog of Arasaka itself. David, you keep making promises that you’ll slow down. You’ve told Lucy as much. Now I need you to make this promise to me. Your co…intelligence. Your brain roomie.]

  Implying that she was more important than Lucy.

  [Not more important: just better able to detect bullshit. You’ve cut yourself off from my skepticism because you doubt my ability to parse the risk you’re undergoing, but… I’m sorry. I just won’t have it anymore.]

  What the fuck?

  I began to subvocalize instead of talk out loud, for fear that I would start screaming.

  D: So this is an ultimatum.

  [Yes.]

  D: Fuck you.

  [Cry about it.]

  D: Fine. Fuck. Fine!

  [No exceptions.]

  D: Bullshit, Nanny.

  [Fine. If I think the excuse is good enough, I’ll give you the go-ahead. But I can tell when you are bullshitting yourself, or trying quite poorly to bullshit me.]

  Alright.

  Alright.

  Time to think about turning my new house into a Netrunner heaven.

  On the bright side, I’d get to spend a lot more time with Lucy than before.

  000

  Lucy, or Luna as she was known in the Net, sat quietly on a digital ledge of a rooftop as she waited for her signal.

  Her ICON’s legs dangled daintily as she listened to a song all the while. Another old world banger, one that she had only recently discovered, even. Smooth Operator by Sade.

  Something about those damn lyrics couldn’t help but make her heart flutter. Even here, in the most heavily militarized corner of Night City’s Net, right across from the HQ of NetWatch, she still thought of him.

  The evil fortress pierced the digital sky before her. Black black, crenellated walls, and ludicrously tall spires that would have stretched kilometers into the air in meatspace.

  “He’s laughing with another girl. Playing with another heart. Placing high stakes, making hearts ache. He’s loved in seven languages,” Sade sang.

  She saw the signal appear like a light shooting out of the demonic castle.

  She stood up, dove off the ledge, and activated her program, turning herself into a singular beam of information, chasing after the trail of data.

  “Jukebox life, diamond nights and ruby lights high in the sky.”

  An instant later as her program did its work in following the data, she was ejected a healthy distance away from the landing point of the cache she had followed.

  “Heaven help him… when he falls.”

  She stood atop a tall tower in the city’s IntraNet, from which she could see the data cache land, producing two figures: Netwatch agents. They each took rather basic ICONS: that of generic government-men looking figures in black suits, wearing shades and coiffed hairstyles. They even had earpieces connected to some unseen machine hidden by their suits with curly black cords.

  They were going into the NCPD. Precinct One’s Localnet, in fact. Also a heavily militarized data fortress, but compared to the big five megacorps and Netwatch, it was an easy seventh place in terms of security. Maybe even worse. Some smaller corps tended to invest disproportionately in cybersec, and the trouble of breaching them was usually not worth it.

  The NCPD, on the other hand, saw quite a bit of traffic. They had an easily accessible front-end after all, for civilian use.

  “Diamond life, lover boy. We move in space with minimum waste, and maximum joy.”

  Lucy watched as the two figures disappeared into the NCPD, and made to follow them.

  To confirm a suspicion of hers.

  David’s activities had been… rather too extreme for that famous net-sec agency to ignore at this point. Him wreaking havoc across Green Farm’s localnet to kill as many suits as possible was small compared to the damage they had both done to that data center that did operations for Green Farm (as well as a few dozen other local corporations in the area).

  They had gotten in and opened up a gateway to the Blackwall.

  Retrieved a program created for that purpose. The Blackwall Gateway. It was an urban myth in most Netrunner circles, but in the back of her mind, Lucy had always suspected that a program like that was being worked on.

  And not for Deep Dive purposes either. It was being worked on as a weapon.

  Lucy hadn’t had many opportunities to research the program too closely. Doing so would have required more than just looking at the codebase and comprehending how the soft ticked. But she wasn’t David. She couldn’t just… do that. She would have had to experiment to learn anything of use.

  And she couldn’t do that either, thanks to David’s warnings that the Gateway only ‘behaved’ because of his onboard AI keeping him safe.

  And wasn’t that a fucking nightmare and a half that she’d rather not think too hard about?

  A lot of what it meant to be with David entailed not thinking too hard about the sheer level of peril that he toyed with on a daily basis.

  In any case, David had activated that accursed quickhack enough times that Netwatch would have to have noticed by now. There was also the fact that he was already on record as a Netrunner, thanks to his gonky BDs that he kept releasing, just so everyone would know how strong he was.

  He wanted to be a reckless asshole? Fair. That was his choice.

  She would choose to follow him into death’s maw, and drag him out from it kicking and screaming if she had to.

  So, she slid into a crack between the bricks of the NCPD building, using a lightweight seeker-program to transmogrify her body into a ghost that could follow the pair into the data-stream of the cop Localnet undetected.

  The transformation was seamless. David hadn’t worked on this program, but she had learned enough from his approach to learn how to upgrade her own kit of dive-programs, including this one.

  It took her a few minutes as she swam through the data lines, pretending that she was a piece of innocuous data, fooling the system into viewing her as nothing more than a benign glitch—one of thousands that occurred every day.

  Until finally, she saw them.

  “—Gonna be real mad when he finds out that we don’t have shit on fuck for all our troubles,” one of the Netwatch agents said as he and his partner traversed the expansive hallway of the… quite frankly ill-maintained data fortress. The NCPD’s data-sec really was for shit, like the rumors always said. This was her first time breaching them, and it was still surprising to see this face-to-face. Even the system that belonged to that Tyger Claw data-admin known as T3nsh1 was far better kept.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  Then again, this was only one of the middle layers of the data fortress. The real data hoard was kept in the deepest layers: Access to high-level correspondences between the NCPD commissioner and NightCorp and other high-tier corporations, not to mention some good old blackmail material for whatever backroom deals they were engaged in with the big gangs.

  “Why do you always have to talk about how fucked we are?” the other Netwatch agent, with black hair as opposed to his partner’s brown hair, asked hotly. “Like that will make it better at all?”

  “It’s called venting, asshole. You should try it sometimes, considering how fucking emo you’ve been as of late.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know: talk about your feelings. Try not to bottle them in as much. Helps in preventing ulcers and the like.”

  “Ulcers.”

  “Yeah! Ulcers! And the vomiting! And the nervous breakdowns when you’re at home—“

  “Shut up. Fuck, shut up. Jesus Christ. You’re making me feel bad now.”

  “Whatever, dude.”

  Lucy debated on whether or not to pause the music, but decided against it; she was feeling the groove.

  “Actually, no,” the agent continued. “It’s not whatever. It’s about protecting our peace of mind. Our mental health. God knows the corp ain’t shelling out for mental health days to us B-5 employees. We’re all we have, dude. You and me, right here, talking about our feelings. And the job: like this fucking D dickbag who’s clearly—”

  “Hey. No sensitive chatter on an unsecured data fort.”

  “C’mon man. It’s the NCPD.”

  The partner stopped, and stared at his airhead partner in utter bafflement. “The fuck?”

  “What?”

  “Did I just hear you wrong, or did you actually just say: ‘it’s the NCPD’?”

  “Yeah? I mean, it’s the cops.”

  “Yeah, exactly! It’s the fucking cops! I’d be surprised if half of these kindergarten dropouts knew how to read fucking traffic signs, much less be able to program ICE worth even half a damn.”

  “Yeah, that tracks. It would explain their driving at least.”

  “So shut the fuck up and wait until we’re deeper in before you go on about the gig, alright?”

  Dammit. But… that did beg the question: was she alone here, or were there other prying eyes and ears hiding alongside her in the data streams? If there were any, they likely couldn’t sense her, just as she couldn’t sense them.

  And here she thought she was being clever, exploiting this tiny vulnerability.

  She wondered if she should bust out at this moment and see if she couldn’t ‘pickpocket’ the data while staying hidden—crouched, as it were. She concentrated on a path into the hallway and detected one easy way in. It wouldn’t trip any alarm bells or even raise the alarm of the two agents, if she was clever with it.

  Thankfully, her stealth programs were upgraded by David. They were lighter, and because of that, she could overclock them and make them even more effective.

  And if all else failed, she had already bought an extremely expensive escape route through a satellite uplink that she could use in an emergency.

  She sighed.

  Fuck it.

  She beamed herself into the hallway, ‘crouched’, and kept behind the two agents as they continued walking up ahead. Her integration into the traversable side of the data fort—the ‘hallway—was seamless as well, and she followed them along easily without tripping any alarm bells. Several tools like meters sat on her HUD, giving her a constant report about the disturbances that her presence had on the data fort, and she was well below the tolerances of even the most overblown estimates of what an agent could sense.

  All at the cost of being able to do anything but follow them around and continue eavesdropping on their chatter. There was no guarantee that she’d be able to follow them into the deepest bowels of the data fort, but… that wasn’t a necessity either.

  David already had access to whatever data the Task Force were being fed, due to his status within Arasaka Counter Intel. She wouldn’t have to exert herself. This gig was mostly for her benefit, to see how much she had improved with his help.

  She was already quite liking the result of their shared labor. These idiots were still chattering.

  “I don’t know, dude. I really think you’re just trying to stay closed off in order to protect some baseless sense of masculinity here. Who gives a shit if we feel sad, but each other? You really shouldn’t take this opportunity to stonewall me while no one’s listening.”

  “Fucking HELL! What are you, some wannabe shrink? Fuck off!”

  “I’m just saying, partner: you have an opportunity here to open up about how fucked this job is. We’re in N-fuckin’-C. Worst assignment on the planet. We could have been in NYC busting up crypto scammers, or in Paris gathering blackmail material from rapey politicians. But we’re here, hunting down a terrorist, and we’re still only getting paid two hundred a year. Isn’t that kind of insane?”

  “So it’s the pay you’re worried about?”

  “No, it’s not the fucking pay—“

  “Cuz it sounds like you’d rather do all this if you were being paid more.”

  “I’m saying it’s fucked that we’re even doing this for any amount of pay, motherfucker.”

  “Right, so quit.”

  “You kidding me?! We’re getting paid two hundred—“

  “So it is just the pay. Hypocrite.”

  “Talk about your feelings. I dare you. In fact? I double-dog dare you.”

  “FINE! You want me to talk about my feelings?! My bitch of a wife wants to divorce me because I’ve had a rough couple of months at work. I told her I’d be more ‘emotionally available’ once I got finished with this gig, but she didn’t wanna fucking listen. And you know what, asshole? I think she’s fucking the pool guy. And I’d have fired him at this point, but what’s the fucking point? She’d have just fucked some other guy anyway. I don’t blame the kid. I blame my bitch of a wife for tempting him in the first place.”

  “…Jesus.”

  “What?!”

  “TMI, dude.”

  The partner seemed lost for words for a moment, before just chuckling. “Fuck you, man.”

  “Heh. But… I’m sorry, man. That’s gotta fucking sting.”

  “What, you ain’t married?”

  “Hell fucking no. I’m in a polycule.”

  “Fuck me, dude.”

  “We’re not accepting new members, so no. Sorry.”

  The partner, despite Lucy’s expectations, just fucking laughed. “You’re a fucking dick. You know that? You’re a fucking dick.”

  “I am, actually. See, that’s the beauty of a polycule. I’m just the dick. I go in there and provide it, and they get all happy, and I’m happy cuz I’m just in it to fuck, right? And yeah, sure, I like to talk about my feelings, too. But my partners, they all have other partners to talk about their feelings with, so I’m not exactly leaving anyone in the lurch here. They get their emotional outlets, and I get my dicking on without worry that I’m being too neglectful. It’s a good system.”

  “It’s a very good system,” his partner said in an uncharacteristically Italian-American accent.

  The partner chuckled and elbowed him gently. “That’s a good fella right there. Three small onions.”

  “That’s too many onions.”

  The polycule partner slung his arm over his friend’s shoulder. “How’s about I invite you to a movie with my girlfriends and their boyfriends? I’m thinking ‘The Big Lebowski’.”

  “How’s about you take a Lexington and shove it up my ass and pull the fucking trigger til’ it goes ‘click’?”

  “Jesus.”

  His partner chuckled. “You said it, man. Nobody fucks with the Jesus.”

  All the while as they kept spouting obscure references at one another, she reached a finger into one of their digital pockets and started rummaging around. She picked the more serious of the two partners to rob, and came away with it with quite a bit of data. Netwatch internal memoranda, some private messages from his superiors, some dossiers about a variety of other Netwatch targets, and most interesting: a lead on some black market tech dealers, that dealt in modified cybermodems and external cyberdecks. Score.

  One of the agents—the one whose wife cheated on him—was right that they shouldn’t have dropped their guard just because they were inside a data fortress. Lucy had, for a time, debated on where to lift their valuables before settling on this place. They were off the streets, and they were also not inside their heavily fortified Netwatch bunker. That did make this the ideal place, at least for someone of Lucy’s limited means.

  She checked that guy’s pockets, too.

  “There’s no way in hell I’m meeting your polycule though.”

  “Yeah, I figured.”

  Chat logs. Case files. A profile on D. Jackpot. Exactly what she had been hoping for.

  She kept rifling through their memory, and retrieved a few other goodies. Nothing that compared to the profile, however. Perhaps if she followed them deeper into the data fortress, sticking around in their shadow while they kept going on about their private lives to one another, she could find something else of value.

  She didn’t see a reason to test her luck given that she had already gotten what she had come for. Instead, she slid back into the data-streams and rid the lightning along until she reached the outside of the NCPD data fortress.

  She didn’t log out straight from there.

  Instead, she headed to the Kabuki side of the NC Net, in order to visit an exclusive runner den managed by the ever-elusive and famous Yoko Tsuru.

  The EdgeNet shop was the beating heart of Night City’s underground Netrunner culture, and though she had been on the outs with the manager for a while now, she sensed that she would be let in now, with all that she was carrying.

  She appeared outside on the front door and pressed on the intercom. “Who is it?” someone responded swiftly. It sounded like Yoko, what with the Japanese accent, and the authoritative tone.

  “It’s Luna. I’ve got something interesting for you. As well as news about your choom: Kiwi.”

  “Kiwi? Fine. Come in. But you start anything and I’ll de-rez you faster than you can even think to click the log-off button. Be warned.”

  The door opened, and in Luna strode.

  The inside of the EdgeNet shop was a stark contrast from how it looked like in the real. It was an expansive town square with a variety of Asian-style gazebos dotted about for people to sit inside and have private chats. Around the gazebos were gardens and ponds were runners hung about staring into space, having long-distance communications with the wider Net outside the EdgeNet shop.

  The entrance to the entire space was a large Japanese arch, the ones that usually belonged in shrines and temples: red with black stripes at the top. Yoko leaned against one of the poles, wearing a deep black trench coat, and her signature tinted circular sunglasses. “Let’s talk right here, Luna. And make sure it’s worth my while. You’ve still got to prove yourself after last time’s fiasco.”

  Last time she had been drunk, and honestly, she hadn’t remembered much of what had happened. But according to Kiwi, it had been, in her words, ‘a lot’.

  No one had gotten hurt, but that was still rather embarrassing. That was the last time she ever got shitfaced on the Net, too. It was an unacceptable amount of personal risk to take on, really. She had been lucky to get out of it at all with her forebrain still intact.

  “Where do I start?” Lucy asked.

  “How is Kiwi? I haven’t heard from her in a while.”

  “Kiwi’s not coming back.”

  Yoko stiffened somewhat. “Dead?”

  “No. She’s just gone. But she’s not coming back. But… she’s doing good.”

  “Ah. Finally got that big score she was always going on about. And she made good on her promise to ghost. Good for her,” Yoko nodded.

  “She left me with quite a few goodies. A care package. That, and some data I swiped from a Netwatch agent.”

  Yoko lowered her glasses a tad to look at her. “A Netwatch agent? Hm. We can talk business, then. Follow me.”

  She unsheathed a katana that she had hidden underneath her coat, and sliced the air, creating a rift in space that she stepped into.

  Lucy carefully followed her in, trying to tamp down on her paranoia. Yoko was, as far as Netrunners went, trustworthy people. She was in it for the biz. Lucy wasn’t a coward by any means, and Kiwi’s co-sign did count for a lot when it came to this particular data-fortress.

  The inside was a Japanese-style gazebo that seemed to float above the clouds. The digital sky was gray, and the sun was a harsh blue. Yoko sat across from her, and Lucy sat as well, prepping her data.

  “Kiwi was a good customer,” Yoko began. “A good seller, too, as well as a good friend of mine. I appreciate you giving me word of her departure. That does put my soul at ease.”

  Lucy nodded. “That’s good to hear.”

  “Before we do any business, I have something for you.” She slid a tablet over the table. “This is footage of your last time in my establishment. Watch it. Reflect. And apologize properly.”

  Goddammit.

  She watched it, and tried not to cringe too badly.

  Grabbing some guy’s code from the air while he was mid-transfer—a debugged piece of software that he was providing to a client—only to rebug it in full and laugh at how they were unable to untie the Gordian knot she had made out of it.

  Sizing up a couple of corp-looking netrunner types and goading them into a fight that they then immediately lost because she’d already had them breached from the start.

  Laying traps all around the data fort for unsuspecting Netrunners to walk into, just for a quick laugh as they cried over how much data that Lucy had corrupted.

  “Five thousand eddies worth of data stolen, corrupted, or lost. Kiwi paid that sum back in full.”

  …Shit.

  She’d never told her about that.

  Fuck.

  …Then again, knowing her, she might have gotten her payback and then some from garnishing her pay for whatever Netrunner gigs they ran together.

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Be better.”

  “I am—I have been. I’m trying to be better now.”

  Yoko nodded. “Good. But this is your last chance, Luna. Your very last chance.”

  “I understand. Thank you.”

  Nothing I hate more than being talked down to like I’m a child. Lucy swallowed the indignation, however. It was the only thing she could do at this point. Kiwi was no longer here to hold her hand anymore, and flying solo could only take a Netrunner so far.

  She needed a decent network of her own making. Now more than ever before.

  “Good. Then we can do business. What do you have for me?”

  000

  Lucy logged off after an hour of negotiations with Yoko, who had tried her best to not be hyped to hell about the data that Lucy was hawking. She’d gotten a good price out of her. Not money, but favors. And Yoko now owed her.

  Even in spite of Lucy’s history, too!

  Slowly, she got out of her bath-tub filled with coolant and ice cubes. She noted with some satisfaction that the coolant was still registering at a cool negative seventeen degrees Celsius. Most of the ice cubes were still solid, even. Her program-use was that light.

  She could have pushed herself far more easily, maybe even followed those two chucklefucks further into the data fortress.

  A gig for another time, maybe. She had their names now. The soon-to-be divorcee’s name was Moshe D. Sykes, and the guy with the polycule was called George L. Jordan. Codenames, probably. Netwatch agents tended to be very cagey about having their real names anywhere on their Net I.Ds or even their internal I.Ds. To find their real names, she’d have to break into the Netwatch data fortress, which was such a nonstarter that it wasn’t even funny.

  But she had a bead on them now. She knew their likely destinations. She could find them again given time, once she saw a need to.

  She lifted the stopper off the drain on the bathtub, letting the coolant flow down her pipes, leaving just the ice behind. That, too, would melt in time, but she turned on the hot water to make it faster. Then she got into the shower to clean off all the coolant, and get rid of the industrial scent that would cling to her after every dive.

  At some point during her shower, she heard David arrive. Then, she saw him open the door, naked as the day he was born, and got in to share the shower with her. She had to make space for him as he entered. “Tight fit as always,” she muttered as he faced the beam of water with an open mouth, taking a satisfied sigh.

  “Good news on that front, by the way,” he said. “Jin came through with the rec letter earlier today.”

  Finally.

  “We should be able to move out and in as early as tomorrow,” he went on. “If you’re cool with that. Honestly, I’d sooner we get used to a bigger set-up than later.”

  She raised an eyebrow at him. “Bigger set-up?”

  “A bigger terminal. We could easily turn the place into a Netrunner den worth a damn,” he went on.

  She finished rinsing off and stepped out of the shower. “That sounds good. Speaking of Netrunning, I found some preem data today. Talk to you after you’re done,” she said as she wrapped her towel around her torso and shook the excess water out of her hair.

  After she got dressed, she settled into the couch, cyberdeck in hand, as she sorted the data for David’s perusal. Minutes into the work, David fell heavily next to her, wearing nothing but a pair of sweatpants and his fake-gold cross necklace. “Right. What have you got for me?”

  Lucy handed him the tablet, and he scrolled through it, nodding. “The profile’s thinner than I expected. Guess I didn’t show off that much.”

  “They do have you as a suspect for all the Blackwall breaches they’ve detected as of late.”

  He frowned contemplatively. “I see.”

  Lucy narrowed her eyes at him. “You see?”

  “I shouldn’t have gone overboard, that time,” he confessed. “When I was up against those Tyger Claws in Kabuki. I just used it cuz I was pissed.”

  They had already established as much. “And… what are you going to do about it?”

  “No, uh, meat action for a month,” he replied with a roll of his eyes. “Nanny’s idea. Apparently, I’m taking on a risk that’s unacceptable to her.”

  “Do you not believe that?”

  “I know better than to question the need for caution at this point,” David said. “I’ve already roused the beehive enough as it is. Now I’ve got Soviet mercs on my ass, and a crack team of intelligence officers from every major corp working together to capture me or worse.”

  “’No meat action’ is the least you could do at this point, David,” Lucy scowled. “Hell, I’d even question the need to go out as D on the Net, too. Why not just disappear into your secret identity for as long as it takes?”

  “Then I’d lose out on the Afterlife people,” David said. He then explained his day.

  All the way from the morning spent with Jin, to a meeting with the Soviet mercs in which he managed to talk them into taking the gig in the first place, to finally meeting with the Afterlife fixers and—

  “Street versus corp?” Lucy stared intensely at David. “That’s a dangerous sentiment to be dangling in front of a bunch of amoral slum royalty. It ain’t exactly like you’d be safe in this set-up. You or your friend.” A part of her felt slightly… vindicated that he’d even go this far. Vindicated and worried for how he might end up having to reckon with the results of his own words and actions if any of his corpo contacts bit the dust because of it.

  “We need internal cohesion,” David said. “That starts with identifying a common enemy. All the history books love to point this bit out. This sort of talk, it’s… it’s unavoidable if we’re going to eventually build something that might stand a snowball’s chance in hell of measuring up to the corps. Us versus them. And believe me, it’ll work. As long as they, the people, have confidence that the ‘us’ is capable enough of doing it. And it won’t take much, either. Not after I get the holdout fixers on my side. And better yet,” David looked at the holo-TV and turned it on with a blue flash of his eyes. The channel that was on was the N-54, showing footage of Green Farm. They were still going on about the death toll. Typical news slop.

  He muted it. “Regina Jones and her people.”

  “Who?” Lucy raised an eyebrow.

  “She’s a fixer. Media type that’s all about investigative journalism and figuring out how to cure cyberpsychosis. She’ll come in handy for all that communication stuff. As well as us Netrunners, who know enough to ensure that they will see us. We can hack anything to show what we’re about: billboards, holograms, TVs, even. We got every skillset under the sun at our disposal.”

  In any case, David couldn’t have picked a better group of people to finger as the cause for all of Night City’s suffering. The people of the city all knew it already. They just didn’t have the courage to say it out loud, or do something about it. Just giving them that courage could potentially go a long way.

  And that was precisely why over half a dozen megacorps were working together to kill this movement in the crib. If it had no shot of working, then why go through all that extra effort?

  Lucy nodded at him. “Then let’s move tomorrow. To Charter Hill. Let’s take over this fucking Net.”

  David grinned toothily. “Hell yeah.”

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