“What’s that smell? Aww yeah… smells like grade A chow,” Maine muttered. I could hear him all the way from down the hall of this apartment building deep in the trenches of Arroyo. It was empty and scheduled for demolition by a large corp, but thanks to Kiwi having hacked that corp, all records of it just disappeared, and since the business world moved like lightning in this town, they had been forced to focus on other things to keep competitive.

  That had earned the crew yet another safehouse, one that Pilar used to store most of his tech crap.

  Apparently, that included med-tech crap, too. I walked into the basement room with heavy bags of food in each hand, Lucy following behind with twelve-packs of beer. Inside the room, Maine’s insides were splayed open as he laid on a surgery chair. He was barechested, but at least he wore pants.

  Pilar, standing next to him with a pair of tongs, clicked his tongue. “Choom, you ain’t eating shit in this state. I still gotta close you up.”

  Dorio approached us at the doorway with a big, goofy grin. “Hey, kids! Glad you brought that food!”

  Rebecca ran up to me and jumped on me, hugging me. “Deeeee!” she squealed. “I missed your psycho ass.”

  I chuckled as she disentangled from me and grabbed a bag. “Missed you guys too, actually.”

  Rebecca pouted and raised an eyebrow at me. “That’s real distant, you know. Lumping me in with all these other freaks.”

  Dorio took the other bag, and both women brought the grub to a table. Falco, who was on a chair in the corner, got up with a dopy grin, rubbing his stomach. “I’m so hungry, it feels like my belly’s touching my back.”

  Maine glared at Pilar. “Why do you keep cutting me open, anyway? The syn-lung works, dammit!”

  “Yeah, yeah, but that’s just because the biofeedback was skewed to—you know what, I’m not even gonna fucking explain. It’d go over your chrome-dome anyway, so why even bother?”

  “So you didn’t do it right,” Maine said. “That’s what I’m hearing.”

  “So I’m out of practice. Fucking sue me.”

  I walked over to Maine. “How’re you doing?”

  “MaxTac rifle popped him through the lung and nicked his heart,” Pilar said. Holy shit. “Thankfully, the big borg’s so hopped up on redundancies that even if you sliced his throat open, he’d probably survive.”

  “Hah, that’s right!” Maine shouted. “It’s gonna take a fucking bomb to take me out!” He pounded the spot above his chest that wasn’t splayed open, revealing meat and machine intertwined so tightly together.

  I knew his loadout, had worked on every single piece personally, but seeing it in action was fucking fascinating.

  Nanny manifested next to Maine, opposite to where Pilar stood, and peered into the hole. [I can’t say I’m happy with this installation work. And people wonder why people turn cyberpsycho when this is how humans have learned to fuse flesh with machine.]

  She could do a lot better, that was for sure. If I had what Maine had…

  …I’d probably lose out on my ability to rapidly regenerate. Wasn’t worth it. Especially not after I burned a core processor on my Tetratronic Rippler ‘deck trying to open the Blackwall on that fucking MaxTac Surveyor.

  The good news was that Nanny could take care of it. The bad news was that it would take a while. Days. Days with no quickhacks or Netrunning, or any sort of breaching.

  And going to a Ripper to get it fixed was a nonstarter. There was no one I trusted with my body. No one but Nanny.

  “Shit luck,” I muttered at Maine.

  “Hah, fuck that. I’m lucky as hell. Popped two Psycho Squad grunts in just as many seconds. You know how fuckin’ rare that is? I’m the man!” he roared, banging his fist on a nearby table, shattering it.

  I laughed. “You’re the man, Maine.”

  “You keep stroking yourself like that and you’re liable to cum all over my chair,” Pilar said as he pulled Maine’s chest panels closed, fusing them back together with a special tool. “Alright, beefcake. Off ya go and eat!”

  Ripperdoc work from Pilar. Now I’d seen everything.

  Then again, he had revealed once that he used to be in the Maelstrom. There was a lot that I didn’t know about him.

  Maine hopped off the chair and went to grab himself some of the food. Lucy was already around the table. That left only me and Pilar, whom I was looking at the hands of. “Do you do much Ripper work?”

  “Heh,” Pilar tossed his tools on another table, next to the one Maine had crushed. “You wanna hear my story, don’t you?”

  “Can’t say I ain’t curious,” I replied honestly. “Maelstrom, huh?”

  “You’re gonna shoot me, hero?” Pilar joked, grinning widely.

  “It’s not like that,” I growled at the mockery. “I’m just curious is all.”

  “You and I, we’re not so different,” Pilar said. “I mean, we are, probably. Just wanted to use that line.” Heh. What a gonk. “Well, it started in the streets. Dad was a big-time edgerunner. Becca and I said we wanted to be just like him, back when we were little. But see, here’s the thing: I figured out pretty quick that edgerunning meant dying pretty horribly. No shit, right?”

  Pilar had never struck me as someone that shied away from death. Not even once. “So what’d you do?”

  “After my dad kicked it, I tried doing something I never thought I’d be capable of. I studied. Studied my fucking ass off. Racked up insane debt getting into NCU to get a nice and shiny degree. I wanted to be a med-techie for Trauma Team. Fuckers said no.” Something dark seemed to infect him as he recounted that. “Cuz I’m fucking stupid, apparently. GPA was too low to overcome the fact that I had zero connections, and I was on record for being related to a freelance merc. They told me I was fucking delusional to think I could ever clean that stink off. Every other med-tech corp except R.E.O Meatwagon gave me the same shit, and those motherfuckers will accept anyone.” I felt a prickle of irritation at that. My mother had worked in that company. “So that’s the only job I ended up landing. The fucking Meatwagon. I wasn’t gonna be able to pay off my debt until I was fifty at that rate.”

  “So you joined a gang?”

  “Nah. Became a freelance ripper,” Pilar said. “Earned good scratch from that. Maelstrom took notice. Said they wanted me to supe people up. Didn’t really have an ethical code at the time—all those first, second and third-round interviews kinda burned every last ounce of care I had for the human race—so I thought ‘fuck it’. Started making friends with the psychos too, even as I juiced them up like there was no tomorrow. I didn’t just up and join the gang at some point. The transition point’s fuzzy. One day, I woke up and realized: shit, I guess I’m Strom now.”

  I felt a pit in my stomach as I asked him. “So… you were making cyberpsychos?”

  “On purpose,” he said. “Some of those miserable sad-sacks wanted me to drive ‘em over the edge. They even paid me for the privilege. That’s how fucking crazy they were. And I said yes and took every edd that came my way until I hear that they kidnapped a Mox girl, and wanted me to work on her so they could throw her in the pits or some shit. They wanted me to start doing that for them, too.”

  “The pits?”

  “Fighting pits,” Pilar explained. “They’d chip in some randos and watch ‘em fight. It’s… yeah. Exactly what it sounds like.”

  Wait a minute. “You said a Mox girl.”

  “Yeah, you might’ve guessed by now that my sister used to be a Mox, based on the bitchy attitude and slutty image. Anyway, that’s who they caught. They just beat the shit out of her. Didn’t rape her or nothing—most of those psychos don’t even have that in them anymore. Too much chrome, no room for anything sexual. But yeah, she was my gig, and I had to make a choice.”

  I nodded. “So you chose your sister.”

  “Wasn’t hard,” he said. “Guess that’s my one redeeming factor, heh. Anyway, we got out, laid low for a couple of months until all the capos I had connections with got flatlined, one after another. Three months. An eternity in gang-time. They forgot all about us. Anyway, I finally got my shit together after a point: turned out that I’d been skating close to the edge, myself. Never noticed it even, after being surrounded by psychos for so long. You start to get a new normal.”

  New normal. How could something like that ever be normal?

  Would my life have taken a similar turn, if I hadn’t chosen to stay in school? Or if Maine hadn’t found me? Would I have gone for the nearest gang of boosters and chrome junkies, making good on my childhood fantasy of becoming a cyborg?

  “You got lucky,” I said.

  “Haven’t we all?” Pilar laughed. “Anyway, after I got clean-ish, went light-spec, did a stint in cyberpsychotherapy, my sister and I decided, maybe it was time to finally revisit that childhood dream of ours, to follow in daddy’s footsteps. Then we made each other a promise: if one of us went psycho, the other would have to flatline ‘em.”

  Wow. Also… “Did you just call your sister slutty?”

  Pilar grimaced. “Get off my dick. I can call her whatever I want.”

  “I’d seriously prefer you didn’t.”

  “I call it like I see it.”

  Dammit. “You’re literally her brother—you know, whatever. Just, hand me the data on those new pieces you stitched into Maine.”

  “Nah,” Pilar shook his head. “Why bother? He’s just gonna toss ‘em away and get the same shit he had before. I just gave him med-grade. He’s not nearly back to one-hundred.”

  I frowned. That was… “Shouldn’t he be focusing on downgrading anyway?”

  “Yeah, but it’s Maine we’re talking about. It’s probably all he can do to stop himself from upgrading. But if you wanna know if he’s currently in the red or something, cuz of that chrome-mixing bullshit you told us about… surprisingly, he’s pretty stable.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “How do you know?”

  “I read his brainwaves,” he said, tilting his head over to a computer. “Gave him the ol’ Freud-Laing test, too. You know, I got real good at that shit, back when I was running with the Strom?”

  [The Freud-Laing test is a cyberpsycho diagnostic tool that, ideally, measures a subject’s proximity to cyberpsychosis. The test administrator reads brain patterns and asks questions in a random pattern in order to gauge the subject’s emotional volatility, impulse inhibition, and dissociative drift—three early indicators of cyberpsychotic onset.]

  “How did he do?” I asked.

  “No blips. No nothing. Doesn’t mean ‘perfect’—the test really ain’t that airtight. Not unless you take it every day, like I know some corp huscle do. The result’s a sight better than what I expected, though. As far as physical symptoms go: none, whatsoever. No micro-lag, no tremors, the guy feels like he’s on top of the world.”

  I nodded. “Thanks for looking out, Pilar.”

  Pilar patted me on the shoulder. “Let’s eat, kid.”

  000

  We made merry through the night, sharing flatbread and feasting on the several pots of stew that I had brought, chatting and laughing as we did.

  The aftergig party tradition had grown on me. The first one I’d ever been in, after our botched attempt to steal Tanaka’s nav data (my fuck-up), had felt rather dry. Not on account on the many drinks that flowed that night, but because I felt, deeply, that I hadn’t deserved it. The many other afterparties that followed felt hollow for one other reason: I felt that I simply didn’t deserve to celebrate. Even the successes, I hadn’t celebrated.

  Many times, I forewent rewards as well, for the sole reason that I just didn’t feel that spark of deserving.

  This one felt perfect.

  To me, at least. There might have a bitter aftertaste in the food for the others, from Kiwi’s departure no doubt. She was, to me, just a simple colleague. I couldn’t have cared less she was gone.

  But to Lucy, who seemed closer to Rebecca than ever as they joked and laughed about everything and nothing at all, she had been more than that. A mentor. A surrogate aunt, perhaps.

  Family, in a loose sense.

  Or maybe in a truer sense than I could readily accept? I had heard her story, now. And I knew that when one was alone as she had been, anyone giving you their hand and lending you their attention and tutelage was worth far more than iridium, let alone silly things like diamond and gold.

  Dorio and Maine recounted tale after tale about Kiwi, back in the early days of the crew, when it had been just the two of them and Kiwi.

  “It really shouldn’t have at the time,” Dorio laughed as she scooped up a helping of the beef suqaar with some of the anjera flatbread—it dripped on the floor sloppily. Pilar cried plaintively, but Dorio didn’t listen. “But somehow, in some way, I missed how fucking gay she was, that when I introduced him to that choom of mine—he turned to me instantly! Fuckin’ instantly! And said: ‘Yeah, nah, I don’t think this is gonna work. She’s not battin’ on my team.’ Kiwi didn’t even say a fuckin’ word. Not a one!”

  Everyone laughed at that. Dorio continued. “Shit made my face redder than a blood-spill after a Friday night out in Kabuki.”

  “Real fuckin’ professional!” Pilar laughed. “She fuckin’ hated talking about personal shit. Always wanted to act like she was some fuckin’ corpo, clockin’ in and out. And here I was angling to be her fuckin’ work-husband, too! For the longest time! Didn’t even realize it until that Dorio-fiasco!”

  “Work-wife would have been more like it!” Rebecca cackled. “Oh man, she was so tough about your bullshit, too! Called you out for the fucking incel piece of shit that you are! Roasted your ass—“

  “Hold on, no!” Pilar protested.

  “Roasted your fuckin’ ass harder than any human’s ever been roasted before!” Rebecca screamed. “And it was some fucking eloquent, poetic shit, too! Told you she wouldn’t so much as—“

  “Shut up, you stupid—“

  “Calm it!” Maine roared, laughing as he did, as he grabbed Pilar in a headlock and clamped his enormous paw over Pilar’s mouth so he couldn’t complain.

  As Pilar struggled out of the hold, Rebecca continued. “She wouldn’t so much as fart in your vicinity if she knew you could smell it, cuz she didn’t want you to orgasm on the spot!”

  I laughed at how gross that sounded, along with everyone else. Maine finally let go of Pilar, who gasped for breath. Then, angrily, he reached for two cans of beer and started chugging them simultaneously.

  “Uh-oh,” Dorio said in reaction. “Somebody’s gonna try and save face.”

  “It’ll never work,” Rebecca cackled.

  “Nah,” Falco chuckled. “Me, I sense danger on the horizon.”

  Pilar put both cans on the table, burped, and eyed the people in the room.

  Then his eyes fell on me.

  And his face lit up into abject glee. “Word on the grapevine is Dee-Dee got scammed so many times by Kiwi that he had to beg her for his money back!” Pilar laughed.

  Everyone’s faces turned to me.

  “She gave the money back!” I shouted back at all those accusing eyes. “And I didn’t beg, I demanded it ba—“

  Dorio burst into laughter.

  Immediately, the room turned against me.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  I looked at Pilar in abject betrayal. “What the fuck did I do?!”

  “Oh no, shut up, kid, I ain’t done!” He roared. It quieted down the laughter. “You! Becca! For all your talk of being good with guns, I ain’t seen you make it out of a real firefight even once without having someone bigger and badder than you to bail your ass out when you bit off more than you could chew!”

  “Fuck you, name one—“

  “The Animals last week. The Tygers two days before. The fuckin’ mall security guards three days before that, and the fuckin—need I say more, people?!”

  “Shit, Becs!” Maine laughed.

  “And you! You washed up military has-been!” Pilar shouted. “You got your dick replaced!”

  “HEY!” Maine roared.

  “Cause Dorio wanted somethin’ she could actually feel inside her cavernous box!”

  “HEY!” Dorio roared. Things seemed like they were genuinely about to go out of control now.

  He looked at Lucy now. I glared at him, hoping to convey a seriousness great enough that he wouldn’t so much as try.

  He opened his mouth.

  I put a Unity pistol inside of it.

  While I knew that Lucy could take a joke, I sensed that the room needed Pilar to be put down a peg, else things might really escalate.

  Pilar’s eyebrows rose.

  Then he wrapped his lips around the barrel of the gun, and started bobbing his head.

  He pulled his head back just as I pulled my gun back, feeling strangely violated. “You’re—fuck!” I shouted.

  “Alright, point taken,” he said. Point taken? The point I was taking was that he was deplorable in every way. Every way!

  Falco laughed, and the others followed suit soon after, the tension disappearing by the second.

  I was hard-pressed to identify a more fucked up group of people in the city than these guys.

  “Point taken?” Lucy asked. “I don’t know.”

  Then Pilar started convulsing as arcs of electricity darted around his chrome.

  “Now, we’re even,” Lucy grinned.

  “Didn’t say shit to you!” Pilar whined.

  “David’s mine to bully,” Lucy asserted.

  “Wow, thank you,” I said to her flatly.

  What the hell was I getting out of associating with these guys anyway? All of them, Lucy included.

  [Hey, don’t forget me!]

  I had no allies.

  “Shit, I forgot the cowboy,” Pilar frowned pointedly at Falco, who just chuckled and shrugged.

  “Go on, get your jokes out,” Falco said. “I’ll miss ‘em.”

  The statement put a slight pall on the festivities, the reminder that he, too, was about to leave.

  “Alright, here goes,” Pilar said, terminally incapable of reading the room as he was. “Your mom—“ Maine grabbed Pilar by his throat and squeezed, but didn’t pay the gagging nutjob any attention as he instead gave Falco a look of concern.

  “When are you leaving?” Maine asked.

  “Sooner rather than later,” Falco said. “In the morning, probably. Got what I came to this city for. Kiwi got while the going was good. Might as well follow in her example. Don’t much see a point in tempting fate any further than I done did.”

  I heard what Falco wasn’t saying: the Tsviets were too close a call.

  Maine eased up on his grip around Pilar’s throat, and his heavy, rasping breaths.

  Falco took his beer from the table and raised it. “Imma miss Kiwi. All jokes aside, wasn’t a realer dame this side of the Mississipi than her. She had a tongue on her, but there was an honesty to her. An honesty most Night City folks don’t got. She’ll always have my respect for that.”

  I didn’t say anything, because unlike Pilar, I could read a room.

  “Hear, hear,” Maine raised his own glass. We all did the same a moment later. Even Pilar, who had shaken off the indignity of being choked out for being too much of a brat at his big age. “And to you, Falco,” Maine continued as we lowered our drinks. “You drove us through every fucked up, crazy gig I ever dragged you into, and you did it without complaining.”

  “Got paid enough to, didn’t I?” Falco said. “Got my fair shake, like you promised. Wasn’t much else to it.”

  “Fuck that,” I said. “You’re the man, Falco. I’m serious.”

  Falco chuckled at me.

  “I’m gonna miss your cowboy mustache!” Rebecca muttered.

  “Thankee,” Falco grinned. “But why don’t y’all set a poor devil’s mind at ease, and tell me what’s next for y’all?”

  “Going to Mexico,” Maine grinned. “See if I can’t help the kid build himself an army, or two.”

  Dorio threw her arm over her boyfriend’s shoulder. “And I’m gonna babysit this asshole, and play drill sergeant on the side.”

  “You really gotta ask?” Rebecca cackled. “I’ll go where D goes. And my bro goes wherever Maine goes.”

  “I love to see that direction y’all got,” Falco said. “Best way to not drive yourself headfirst into a gorge. But whatever the hell y’all wanna do, just make sure you give it your all. Even if you ain’t sure.”

  I saw the truth in his words. There was no more room for hesitation, now.

  None, whatsoever.

  “Hey, Falco,” I grinned. “How about, after a couple of years, I track down Kiwi, and you as well, and invite you both for one more party. After I’m done with what I’m working on?”

  Falco grinned toothily. “You gon’ be able to track me down?”

  “Doesn’t matter how many mustachio’d Texans there are out there,” I said. “I’ll always be able to find a friend of mine.”

  Falco nodded. “Aight then, Lucha-D. You go and find me then.”

  000

  Despite everything, I still felt the most free when I was around the crew. The most me.

  The week that had followed my victory in the Nightmare Rally, followed by my subsequent masked rampage across the city, in which I pursued an old, old grudge—namely, the one I had against the very awfulness of this city that took my mother from me in the first place—I had been winging it constantly, inches away from defeat or destruction (or even self-destruction).

  I hadn’t had a moment to relax. Not with the Memorial Week forcing me to attend to Jin and his whims after he had press-ganged me into his stupid fucking corpo club, or my joining the Task Force responsible for arresting me.

  I felt alive while doing it. Stimulated, active. I didn’t regret the necessity.

  But I had missed the simplicity of just this. Rest, recuperation. Being with friends, knowing that no one had died. That Maine hadn’t spent his life on a personal request of mine.

  It was all too easy to take my life into my own hands. It was my life to spend as I pleased. But for others, especially those close to me… it made me realize just what it cost to be the general in a war.

  And it made me question whether I even had it in me… to make the trades necessary, to lose battles just to win a war.

  Even if it meant my chooms dying.

  We finished eating the metric fuckton of food I’d brought, and then the crew made short work of all the drinks. Our topics of conversation became less and less intelligible as we dove headfirst into this realm in which I really couldn’t tell if someone was going to open fire on someone else or not, for all the shit being thrown around.

  But that was the game, apparently. Running on the edge, always. That was how edgerunners partied.

  With the sky still mostly dark, and the desert horizon just barely giving off the light of dawn, still an hour away, the crew had found itself on the Badlands, all of us watching as Falco took his newly refurbished Quadra—the same model that he had all but scuttered in that one derby I had ridden shotgun on—and did donuts on the dirt ahead of us.

  Then, without any preamble, he swung hard and drove ahead.

  Away from us.

  I received a call from him then.

  Falco: Don’t go blowing up my number unless you done made it, kid. I ain’t your goddamn personal hero.

  Then he hung up.

  I laughed. The rest of the crew looked at me in surprise.

  I just kept laughing. What a dumbass.

  They all were. But that’s why I loved them.

  And why I felt so bitter that this night eventually had to end.

  Falco’s Quadra became just a blip in the horizon as the sun rose in front of him, the light swallowing his silhouette up entirely.

  A new day.

  And a new set of disguises.

  000

  Corpo life was theater.

  That’s why, when I called Nakajima, who was just about to clock into Arasaka Academy for another shift as the sysadmin, I intercepted him on the parking lot, mid-way to his job while I was just off from riding a Delamain AV—thirty thousand a ride.

  He got out from his car, saw the AV, then saw me come out of it, and it stopped him dead in his tracks.

  I walked up to him, hands in the pockets of my obscenely expensive maraoon blazer, and grinned at him. “Didn’t think I’d forget about you, did I?”

  The lanky Japanese man’s gobsmacked expression slowly morphed into one of pure glee. “I did, actually.”

  I chuckled. “Alright. Let’s go.”

  “What?” He asked, eyebrows furrowed. “I still got—“

  “I bought you out, choom,” I said. “Cost a cool one and a half mill. Just like you said. Don’t make me think about it too hard. Let’s just go.”

  He warred between wariness, alarm, and every other emotion, before he simply settled into a razor-sharp grin. “Alright then. Boss. Let’s go.”

  He walked up to me, and then we got into the Delamain AV together.

  While inside, I briefed him. He sat opposite to me in the back-most passenger seat, while I sat on the one nearest to the driver’s seat, oriented towards him. “How’ve you been?”

  “Nova,” he replied, but he seemed distracted by his thoughts. “Listen. David. I gotta ask. What exactly am I doing here?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

  “I like you, kid. I do. I liked you since the second moment we met, when you cleared your name and proved you were hot shit,” he said. “But I gotta be honest to myself here: I wouldn’t have gotten a step ahead if it wasn’t for your ideas. You were the one doing me a favor. Massive favors. I owe… fuck,” he shook his head. “I owe the project to you. So tell me. What am I here for? I’m not your ticket into relevancy anymore. You’re already relevant.”

  “You went to school,” I said to him. “You speak the language. You have practical experience.”

  He frowned now. “Don’t bullshit me—“

  “Bullshit?” I asked. “Don’t be stupid, Nakajima. Yes, I got you beat in net worth and sheer genius,” I chuckled. “That’s not a secret. Let’s not pretend like I’m being coy here, cuz I’m not. I know what I am. And I know what you are.”

  “And what am I?” he asked me.

  “You speak the language,” I repeated, remembering what the Arasaka Academy principal had told me all that time ago. “You went to school to speak the language.”

  “You lazy fuck,” he laughed. “You’re just gonna pimp me out for my corpo speak, then?”

  “Yes,” I replied, utterly unruffled by his accusation. “Corpo speak, and know-how. On project management. You know how to wrangle a workforce. Because you’ve been in one.”

  “Bold of you to assume,” he said.

  “You know more than me,” I said. “You’ve worked in a team longer than I have.”

  He couldn’t help his grin, then. All too soon, he flattened his expression. “Alright, then. So that’s me. Working a team of drones, to your tune.”

  “Thirty-five thousand eddies a month,” I said. “As a start. And it’s not including bonuses. Boom. You’re a part of the ninety-nine percent, now. That hundred kay I gave you? It ain’t even going to be a nickel compared to how much you’re going to make out with once we get this show up and running. And if I am just bullshitting you,” I NFC’d him the contract. “Then at least you’re gonna make off with a fat fucking sum before the shit burns down. But it won’t. Because I’m calling the shots, here. And I’m not a fucking corpo-nepo baby. I’m here because I got ideas—“

  “Nah, you won a race and made yourself a bit of change.”

  “A bit of change?” I laughed. “Nah. Funny. We’re gonna make it to the top, whether you want to believe it or not. So tell me, Nakajima. Are you gonna run away like a pussy-bitch? Or are you gonna give it your fucking all? And I do mean your fucking all. Sixteen hours a day, every day of the week, for months on end, all for a shot to make billions down the line. You! Billions!”

  I had him. I already knew that I did.

  And he knew it, too. He knew what my work was capable of achieving.

  “I got back-ups,” he said. “Of your work, on my work-drive. How are—“

  “Taken care of,” I said. “We’re out of the case competition. Half a million a-piece? Don’t make me laugh. We’re gonna make more than that, us two.”

  He laughed now. “Holy shit! Holy fucking shit, David! Alright! I’m sold!”

  The AV was already just about to land on the high-rise containing the bulk of QianT’s IT force[1] [2] [3] . It was in City Center, but not directly facing the central plaza that was reserved for Night City’s Big Five: it was a highrise a few blocks down the road from Kang Tao’s titanic, skyscraping monolith of an HQ.

  The Delamain AV angled itself between two glass spires, which displayed a blown-up sky hologram of the QianT logo, a pearl-white dragon circling a stylized moon. The hologram floated well above the rooftop landing pad for all the city to see, just like all the other corpo and megacorp HQs in City Center.

  Nakajima whistled at the sight.

  “Welcome to the big leagues,” I muttered, straightening my blazer.

  The AV settled down easily. I stepped out first. Night City’s skyline stretched all around us: many of the skyscrapers were taller, true, but we still had a damn good view of the city from up here. Air even tasted cleaner. A bit windy, but that was all.

  Qiang was already waiting for us, just off to the side of the landing pad. I saw a couple of other AVs already parked, including one I was pretty sure was his personal one—I’d seen it before in the parking lot at Fei Fei’s place in North Oak.

  He was fully suited, standing tall, which was easy for him because he was a pretty damn tall guy. His face was as stern as a rock, the effect completed by all the metal in his face. His cheeks were threaded with EMP shielding, and with the mineral-finished mandibular implants he looked like a smile had never crossed his face once in his life.

  Between that, the dark sunglasses, and the black suit he had going for him, he was all-black everything except for the red shirt and white tie.

  In my suit, no matter how pricy it was, I felt like a poser compared to him. This was a real-deal corpo here.

  And beside him stood a short old guy I hadn’t met before: A Chinese, or more likely Taiwanese guy old enough to be my grandfather, with white hair and highly elaborate white mustache.

  Qiang spread his arms. “David. Good timing.”

  “Qiang.” My eyes flicked to Mustache Guy. “Who’s the wizard?”

  The little old guy chortled. “David Martinez. I’ve heard a lot about you.” He offered his hand, and I shook it as the guy smiled. “QianT’s acting CTO. Wei-Chen Tsai. Pleasure to meet you.”

  I blinked. “Acting?”

  Qiang gave me a thin smile. “I accepted the previous CTO’s resignation this morning.”

  “Resig… nation?” Nakajima repeated, his voice turning high, then awkward when he realized he’d spoken out of turn. But I could tell what he’d been implying: hopefully ‘resignation’ wasn’t a corpo euphemism for ‘death’. “Sorry.”

  “He resigned. That’s all.” Qiang said flatly, then his eyes flickered to me. “Who’s your plus one?”

  I nodded. “Mei Jing Qiang, meet Takeo Nakajima. He’s my guy. My proxy, my doer of things. I trust him.”

  Qiang nodded. “Last CTO wasn’t a fan of bringing you on. Or of fixing his fuckups. The incompetence had been stacking for years. You’ll see soon. Both of you.”

  Well. That was comforting.

  “Shall we?” Qiang gestured toward the rooftop access doors. “I’ll give you the ten-minute version before I hand you off. Wei-Chen will handle you from there. I’m still supposed to be dead, so I can’t actually leave the exec floor.”

  “Yeah, I was wondering about that,” I muttered.

  Qiang smirked. “It won’t be for much longer. Trust me, I have a plan.”

  000

  We actually didn’t take the elevator down, just the stairs. It was only two flights (the building’s actual top floor was presumably reserved for the building’s maintenance and air conditioning) and then we descended into what had to be the executive level.

  It was quiet. There weren’t many people, and most of the offices were dark. We walked through hallway after hallway of corpo opulence, with thick carpets and mahogany walls, but we saw only two other execs, neither of whom gave Qiang a second glance. Meaning they were in the know, then.

  Mostly, I noticed that these exec floors were considerably more pleasant than Arasaka’s had been: the architecture and overall vibes were something almost approaching human.

  And then we were facing a set of double doors, which slid open at Qiang’s approach, revealing what had to be his office.

  A corner office, apparently. This whole corner of the exec floor was his. It was a vista of two-story glass… not windows, but walls, offering a panoramic view of Night City’s sprawl.

  Aside from that, his desk was huge in its own right, it was a huge U-shaped thing with a couple of embedded terminals made of some lacquered redwood that had probably been imported from Taiwan, if I was understanding the various artworks engraved into it properly.

  “Please,” Qiang said, gesturing with one gloved hand, “sit.”

  We didn’t sit before his desk, but at a couple of couches off to the side of the huge office. “Here’s the short version,” he said, after we were all comfortable. “QianT North America is supposed to manage everything this side of the Pacific. Marketing and distribution, firmware updates, cross-country asset coordination. Our subsidiaries in Canada and Mexico going on south through the Organization of American States route through here. Official HQ is in Taiwan, but thanks to recent reorganization and our push into North American growth, the majority of our executive decision-makers? They’re here.”

  “…so you’re saying production isn’t here,” I gathered. “What am I supposed to do then?”

  “You’re going to have full remote access. If it proves necessary, I can fly you out and get you set up in the Taiwan megafactories within the next twelve hours. But I don’t think that will be necessary: the remote access is complete. And everything’s coded in English company-wide. Obviously.”

  I nodded. “Fine.”

  “Your algorithm is supposed to help us catch up on the production pipeline,” he said. “Bring error rates down, at least. Those have been one of our biggest issues. That and getting all of our different algos to play nice with eachother. We have too many of them, and none of our engineers know how to fix them on a systematic level. Some of them date to before the Fourth Corporate War and are operating on generations of bandaids and spit at this point. Any headway on that issue could make a world of difference for the logistics flow between our distribution points and our resource suppliers, to say nothing of the megafactories themselves. But I’m not depending solely on you, David.” He held up a hand. “I don’t have expectations. Low ones, at best.”

  “Gee,” I muttered. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “I do hope you surprise me,” he added. “Believe me. I really, sincerely hope you do. Which is why I’m giving you something… drastic.”

  He turned toward Tsai.

  “Give David level 1 Executive Master Access.”

  Tsai froze. “Master access? To everything?”

  “Everything except the top secret servers,” Qiang said. “He doesn’t need those.”

  I chuckled. “I can’t exactly help if I don’t know what I’m working with, Qiang.”

  “This is CEO-level IT access, Mr. Martinez,” Tsai said kindly, but there was a hint of steel in his expression now. “There is nothing to be concerned about.”

  “The top secret stuff’s irrelevant,” Qiang said, waving off my concern. “You’re here to fix production lines, not dig through our legacy projects and black-ops work—and mostly, our failures. We’re an old company. We’ve got baggage. It’s mostly useless. Very little of it is even remotely current in 2076. And none of it is capable of affecting our overall financial situation in a way you could help with.” Then he focused on me, hard. From behind his sunglasses, his eyes were searching mine. “If you want access to the top secret archives, David…”

  He let the sentence hang.

  “…yeah?”

  “You’d better marry my sister.”

  I choked on my own spit, even as Nakajima’s jaw cracked open and stayed there. Tsai didn’t even blink.

  Qiang turned away without waiting for a reaction. “Think about it. Or don’t. Either way, Tsai will onboard you.”

  The doors slid open.

  Qiang gestured, waving us out of the office.

  “Good luck,” he added, as we stood and walked out the doors. “Try not to disappoint me.”