Augustus Gonzalez sat up straight in his hospital bed as his favorite sicario, El Chupacabra, walked into the room with a rolled up screamsheet.

The deceptively smooth-faced, suit-wearing psychopath did not greet him. He just threw the sheet at Augustus’ bedridden form without a word. It landed unfurled on his stomach.

“I hope the doctors gave you some good news like it being possible to salvage your nuts or something—” It wasn’t, actually, thank you so much for pointing that out, pendejo. “—because I’m telling you, that right there is not good news,” Chup said impassively.

Augustus looked down at the screamsheet, and before he could read anything, closed his eyes.

This news was going to be some ugly shade of ugly, a blind man could have seen that from the non-look in Chup’s face.

Trauma Team had rescued him, but not in time for them to save what little ganic he still had in his extremities. His arms were now fully robotic. More powerful, but less controlled. Not a trace of real bionerve was left in them. Adapting to them would take months.

Thankfully, he had savings aplenty, and discipline over himself bar none. He would power through this period with or without anyone else’s help.

He would be alright.

He would be. No matter what this news was, he would come out of the other side all right. He was still strong. He was Augustus Gonzales, head of Green Farm security, enforcer king of northern Mexico, and nothing could change that.

He opened his eyes, took the screamsheet with shaky shitchrome fingers and looked at the front page of Night City News.

‘Green Farm becomes a Scorched Farm.

At approximately 11:39 PDT Sunday, the Tijuana branch of the famed Biotechnica subsidiary Green Farm fell victim to an impromptu terror-attack orchestrated by the masked Night City vigilante known as D! CEO Cristobal Zambrano confirmed dead on site, alongside an estimated 312 employees. Casualty figures continue to rise as first responders comb through bullet-riddled hallways—

He stopped reading after that point.

Then he shouted like an animal. “FUCK! FUCKING FUCK!”

“Boss…”

“FUCK!” He weakly slammed his fists on the bed like it would do anything, and it wouldn’t. Not until he got cleared from all this treatment and was given access to a real ripperdoc with real chrome. Some heavy-duty precision Militech mitts would do him some good, so he could find the nearest hobo and choke them to death slowly. “FUUUCK!”

“Your whole damn family’s dead, by the way,” Chupie added, just for good measure. “Sorry,” he said with an awkward hiss. “Yeah, that D guy? He ripped them all to shreds. Fucked them up good. All your cousins and brothers who were there—gone. And it was everyone. You were the only one outside the splash zone.”

Augustus felt like he had become stranded on a tiny square-meter island in the middle of a vast ocean. He felt trapped. Where would he go, what would he do?

“Shame about the boss,” Chupie mused. “He always did throw the sickest parties. The cocaine never stopped flowing when he was in the house.”

“What about my sisters?” Augustus growled.

“Ambrosia was in the executive floor when D struck. Elenora was shadowing her, too. So it goes.”

My brothers. My sisters. Augustus came back to himself, met his sicario’s emotionless eyes with a venomous glare. “So you think I’m not your fucking boss anymore. That’s why you’re rubbing this shit in my face”

Juan laughed. “Teamwork makes the dream work, hermano. I ain’t going anywhere. After all,” he gestured towards the door, and a suit walked in.

He had shoulder-length gray hair and a closely cropped gray beard, was thin like every other pencil-pushing corpo, and wore a sharp gray suit with—

Augustus’ eyes boggled as he caught a singular detail in all the threads: a faint lattice of shifting light stitched into the fabric, like constellations blooming and fading with each movement. This was Paramenti Stellari. Those suits easily went for millions, were all limited edition, and all hand-tailored. The latest_epɪ_sodes are on_the novel(ꜰ)ire.net

Augustus scanned the man, then. The man allowed the scan, easily revealing his identity. “Giovanni de Prima,” the man said as Augustus read the words in his HUD. “Regional director of Biotechnica’s Night City operations. Your boss’ boss.”

“Ah,” Augustus said. Then he turned on his charm and simply grinned. “A pleasure, signore. Normally, I would have gotten up on my feet to meet one such as you, but…”

“I wouldn’t ask that of you,” Giovanni said.

“But to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit, then? What would you ask of me?”

“You have it all wrong,” Giovanni said. “I’m here to help you. The… ne’er-do-wells that attacked your family’s company made off with quite the enormous sum of money. Scores of millions of dollars tied to off-shore accounts, gone. Millions more in physical assets, gone. And your good name as head of security?” He nodded his head slightly, as if to say ‘does anything else need to be said?’

It had only dawned on him how fucked he was.

Cristobal was dead. His employer ruined, his men slain. All under his watch.

He was unemployable.

Now, his accounts would tick downwards henceforth—never upwards. Not anymore. He had failed emphatically as security manager. Failed in a way that might as well have been branded into every record in existence with white-hot nuclear fire: there would be zero room for argument over the enormity of this failure.

Giovanni…

…wasn’t just here to give him a second chance. Augustus saw right through that bullshit.

A second chance? Perhaps. But it would come with heavy conditions.

“What are the strings, sir?” Augustus said quietly.

“You’ll take a slight demotion and come work for Biotechnica security,” Giovanni said. “Not as the head, of course. I am quite fond of the one we already have. You will work in the same capacity as your man over there,” he turned his head slightly towards Chupie, but his eyes never left Augustus. Chupacabra was a sentinel. A top-tier enforcer, answering only to him.

That meant that if he took this job, he’d be top-tier too, answering only to the current head of Biotechnica security.

That was… too good to be true. “I asked you for the strings, sir.”

“Hm,” Giovanni said. “An… experimental treatment option. One that has the potential to make you into a new man. Biotechnica’s answer to Adam Smasher. Your man has already said yes. How about you?”

Two paths laid stretched out before him. If he broke free now, and quietly recuperated, he could potentially get back on his feet as a mercenary—though not in this hellhole of a city, of course.

Somewhere else. Somewhere less… all-encompassingly fucked up. Maybe New York. Or Mexico again.

But if he went with Giovanni, if he took this chance, and it paid out… “On one condition.”

Giovanni fixed him with a look. “Name it.”

“You put me on the team that goes after D. Front and center. I will have his fucking head before anyone else.”

Giovanni smirked. “That can be arranged.”

000

“Here’s what we know about D.”

Jerry Fawlter, Commissioner of the Night City Police Department, let the words hang in the stale air. His voice was nasal, slick with the salesman’s drawl that still clung to him from his Dataterm years. Which was only proper, because in so many ways, he was still a salesman: the only thing that had changed was his business.

He’d once peddled premium holo-consultancy packages to corpo execs.

Now, he was peddling the police.

The privatized NCPD under his watch had been gutted—half the beat cops cut loose, assets sold, patrols eliminated, the rest of manpower rerouted into revenue streams. Ticketing, asset seizures, debt enforcement. Solving crimes didn’t make money; squeezing the rich and shaking the poor did.

And tonight, he was in a room with the richest squeezes there were, each and all of them representatives for the hard security organs of the city’s greatest powers.

The long obsidian table reflected nine faces, each gleaming with the subtle perfection of corpo augmentation. Some were chromed, some were ‘ganic, but man or woman, they were all beautiful, all perfected with the best aesthetic chrome and cosmetic ‘ganic that corporate health insurance packages could buy.

More importantly, all of them were money. Each one of these nine people could throw one percent of their checking account balance on the table, and the sum total would amount to more money than Jerry would ever see in ten lifetimes.

Unless, of course, he played this meeting right… and all the other meetings like this to come, whenever some psychopath managed to upset the city’s resident pantheon of corporate gods.

Arthur Jenkins, senior vice president of Arasaka’s Night City Counterintelligence leaned back in his seat, arms crossed, expression somewhere between boredom and disgust. Gao Zemin, Kang Tao’s Director of Special Operations for North America, was glaring in ire at her counterpart in Militech, Meredith Stout, who for her part was drumming her fingers against her datapad, jaw set hard enough to crack a molar. Concerningly, she was accompanied by Varian Freeman, son of one of the NUSA megacorp’s Washington-based bigwigs.

Night Corp, Zetatech, Petrochem, Biotechnica—all had representatives present as well, all trying not to look like they were sweating.

Jerry tapped the console and the holos lit up: grainy footage, security cam after security cam, of blurred motion and sudden blood. Sometimes it was a man. Sometimes only the results.

“He has single-handedly neutralized nine scavenger cells in Arroyo. Eighty-plus Tyger Claws, including Jotaro Shobo, eliminated in one night. Green Farm’s Tijuana headquarters reduced to a tomb not even a day after. Casualty count, conservative estimate, four hundred trained combatants. Twenty-four hours.”

He changed the slide again. “We had an Edgerunner from the Afterlife willing to talk to us after we reached out. Some scumsucker by the name of Eugene Calloway. Said he had the data on D and his pals. Fifteen minutes later, my boys found him dead in a ditch. And now the Afterlife’s enforcing an Omertà order: code of silence.”

It was a fucking mess. This level of organization was unprecedented, and the sort of thing that should make every established power have their hairs standing on their ends.

Night City’s underbelly was an unsightly, horrifying monster whose only saving grace was that it was too busy nibbling at itself for nutrition (and thus weakening itself in the process) to do anything truly destructive. No one had united the beast to such a level just yet. This level of organization… it could easily result in the birth of a new major-league gang, like the Tygers or Sixth Street.

And that was only a best case scenario.

The worst case? Someone teaching the beast to look upwards for food.

Jerry didn’t mention the real kicker: that the NCPD wouldn’t do jack about it. Not because of lack of manpower—though that was true—but because he didn’t want them to. The longer D roamed, the more valuable D’s identity became. And when the time came, when he managed to find out, Jerry Fawlter would sell it to the highest bidder.

Plus, as a side bonus, having all the megacorps looking for one arch-criminal would, in turn, lead to more and more rigorous investigations of all kinds of other, related matters that could potentially cover the gaps in policing the City in the wake of Jerry’s cuts.

The more riled up the corps became, the quieter the city would become as a consequence. And the less he had to spend. And they’d spend more on him in order to solve their own pet problems; a beautiful arrangement, taking money from both sides.

Murmurs broke out across the table. Jenkins raised a brow. “You’re telling us a single merc did all this? This reeks of propaganda, Commissioner. Someone’s giving you inflated numbers.”

Jerry leaned forward, flashing his fake salesman’s smile. “Arasaka’s got bodies in the morgue, same as the rest. All my boys did was add up the reported flatlines. You, Kang Tao, Trauma Team, REO Meatwagon, all the rest. Unless you’d like to accuse your own security division of padding the count? Or someone else’s?”

“Immaterial,” Stout cut in sharply. “What we need to know is: how was it done? No Sandy trace in half the footage, and when there is a trace, it’s inconsistent. Glitched, almost. I mean, how else are you going to explain it? No Sandevistan runs like that. Not even black-market.”

“Agreed,” Arthur Jenkins scoffed. “The video’s been glitched at best, tampered at worst. He’s fucking with the feeds.”

Or, Jerry thought privately, he’s just that good.

But aloud, he gave a shrug, keeping his tone neutral. Let the corpos argue. Let them fear. Fear opened wallets.

It was a very, very good thing for Jerry that Stout was this openly worried about this psychopath. That means Militech is worried, Jerry thought dryly.

Militech’s black-ops science project, the Apogee, was in fact the fastest next-gen Sandevistan on the planet. And even that one couldn’t match some of the speeds they were seeing, from what little they could salvage from Green Farm’s surveillance footage.

Jerry didn’t waste much time contemplating the legitimacy of the footage: he’d rather focus on how riled Militech were. How riled that made all the rest of them.

Because, that fear… that was money in the bank.

Stout continued hotly. “MaxTac flagged him twice but never got close enough for an ID, while he was out shooting scavs. There's no way this is homegrown merc. Don’t think I was born yesterday. This is a black project gone rogue.” She looked around the table accusingly. “And someone better fucking fess up and take responsibility before I lose my patience.”

Jerry had largely come to the same conclusion. And though he didn’t have the standing to eyeball Biotechnica’s head of security who was currently in attendance—a real greaseball by the name of Johnny Alto—the others did it for him.

“Johnny-boy,” Jenkins said. “Something you wanna say to the group?”

Thank you, Arasaka, Jerry thought drily.

Though the media forgave and forgot, and the public followed that trend much the same, the other corps were loathe to forget that clusterfuck of Biotechnica’s internal power-struggle that had occurred seven years ago.

Illegal experimental treatment options that had resulted in the deaths of over a hundred upstanding, rent-paying, and tax-paying civilians, all the while as Giovanni de Prima cleaned house and quietly took control, fighting to shed that ugly reputation of theirs.

Johnny Alto, a shifty-eyed cyborg with slicked back black hair and a sharp, hawkish face, barely budged. “You think we’d be stupid enough to juice up a guy, only to have him hit one of our subsidiaries? The fuck do you think this is, amateur hour?”

Stout laughed harshly. “There is such a thing called a ‘loss of control’ You’d know that better than most, Biotechnica.”

“This had nothing to do with us,” Alto maintained. He poked his index finger onto the table with an audible clink. “And I invite you to show me the evidence suggesting otherwise. And if you do? Tell ya what: this one will be on Biotechnica alone.”

The back-and-forth was heating up, and Jerry let it play out. He wanted them riled, wanted them paranoid enough to throw money at their Police Commissioner—namely, at him.

Finally, Arasaka’s guy, Jenkins, turned his sharp gaze on him. “Tell us how exactly Night City’s finest have yet to capture one mask-wearing lunatic terrorist. I mean, don’t we pay you idiots enough?

Jerry killed the holo feed. Silence fell over the room, corpos eyeing one another with all the trust of a pack of jackals. Then he spoke, channeling all his polish as a salesman.

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

“Here’s the truth, folks: NCPD don’t have the bandwidth to do this solo. My officers are… streamlined. Focused on revenue operations. To catch this guy, I’ll need a coalition. Counterintel, muscle, surveillance grids. All expensive shit. You want him gone? We do this together. And we share costs.”

Alto scoffed. “We already bankroll your boys to keep the streets clean: that includes chasing down psychos and street gangs. You can’t keep up with one mask?”

Jerry raised both hands. “Gentlemen, ladies. Let’s try to maintain some perspective, here. You saw those vids, same as me. Modified, or impossible, the facts remain as such: he’s setting up an organization, he’s cutting into your assets, he’s burning down your investments. Do nothing, and he becomes a symbol. Symbols create gangs. Gangs turn into movements. Movements eat profits, and as we’ve just seen, they also kill CEOs. You want that?”

He saw the looks in their eyes, the quiet glances they gave one another. No, they did not want that.

“Look at this guy,” Alto slammed both of his palms on the table. “You got a lot of nerve telling us to get up off our asses, Porky. We all pay you bastards to take care of this public-service shit for us. And lest you forget, and unless some of youse had those scavs or those Tyger Claws on payroll,” he very pointedly looked at Arthur Jenkins when he mentioned the Tygers, “I’m the only aggrieved party in this room.”

Stout snorted. “I agree with the Commissioner.” Jerry gave her a respectful nod. “This D organized a raid that managed to burn an entire corporation’s headquarters to the ground, and it was done without leaving a single malcontent or disobedient ally of his behind. There were no bodies on his side, no solidly traceable evidence. They were in and out in less than an hour. And it was done across country lines at that. I’ve seen special forces raids that were less clean. This is organization. Has to be.”

Perfect. Jerry’s eyes glinted. He leaned forward, observing the reactions of the men and women in the room. Grimaces, scowls, looks of intrigue. Yes, they’re hooked. Now for the sinker.

“So here’s the deal, folks,” he said smoothly. “Chip in resources. Put your best people on it. All of you will share intel with NCPD, and we’ll put our best men on the data streams. When we get an ID on this ‘D’, you’ll be the first to know. His name. The names of his accomplices. And if you’re more inclined to…” Jerry shrugged, and pretended like he was just throwing the idea out, “Monopolize this data, then it would pay for you to give it your all, of course, and get your hands on that data yourselves.”

This way, all the corps would compete against one another on trying to kill, or catch and study this freak specimen. And the harder they tried, the less Jerry had to try.

That meant more money left in his pocket at the end of the fiscal year.

“End of the day, D needs to die,” Biotechnica’s guy said. But he didn’t raise another stink.

“Capture would be preferred,” Stout said. “Better that we know how he’s doing this.”

“Then we get first dibs,” Alto said.

“You think you could out-investigate Militech? Are you delusional?”

Jerry, keeping his face carefully blank, watched in satisfaction as his scheme came together flawlessly. He could almost taste the Eurodollars already.

Kang Tao’s representative leaned forward. “We agree with the Commissioner’s proposal, as a general course of action,” the woman said. “We’ll figure out the particulars by call later.”

More nods, murmurs of assent, open agreements came in: from Zetatech, from Petrochem, from Biotechnica. Militech went without saying, though Jerry noted that the corpo brat shadowing Stout, the black Freeman kid, had been frowning for this entire meeting. Annoying - he would no doubt be reporting back to Washington after this. Jerry could only imagine how Militech’s real higher-ups over on the East Coast were interpreting this latest embarrassment coming out of Night City.

In the end, all agreed.

Arasaka’s CoIntel senior vice president drummed his fingers on the table as he spoke. “We’re all on the same page on this, then. I’ll get Arasaka’s best guys on it. We’ll set up a task force, share resources, hit hard and fast. I expect you’ll all do the same?” Suits all around the table nodded. “Arasaka will make sure of it,” Jenkins announced. “This motherfucker won’t last the week. And then we can get to the bottom of this mess and discuss who to crucify for letting their lab rats run around unattended. Meeting adjourned, or do I have to keep wasting my time here?”

Arthur Jenkins always had been something of a stiff, Jerry knew. The man was a controlled psychopath, a true force for Arasaka. Like most of their CoIntel higherups, he was entirely ambitious, effective, confident, and completely, utterly without morality, even by Jerry’s standards. A division of corporate killers, now on the hunt for Night City’s newest terrorist.

In any case, Arthur Jenkins didn’t wait to be dismissed, simply standing up and leaving the moment he finished speaking.

Perfect. Jerry leaned back in his chair as the suits filed out, his grin returning. All to plan. Maybe I actually will be able to buy that nice North Oak place, after all.

000

I let myself get drunk to celebrate.

I didn’t see the point of having an afterparty for every gig. Even big ones, like the Tanaka kidnapping.

But this gig deserved a truly, truly immense party. My relatives were still going strong, like sleep was a foreign concept to them. Instead, they were congregated in the expansive yard of the family manor that granny had bought, grilling food, playing loud music, dancing, swimming in the pool, or having a boxing contest.

I had been worried, and a little embarrassed, to have the crew meet my family. These people… idolized me. I didn’t know how to feel about that, being honest. It wasn’t something that I took any particular pride in, because that felt like a gateway to becoming an even bigger asshole than I already was.

Instead, I simply accepted that it was what it was. My biggest worry was having the crew clown me, only for my family to get offended. Or for the crew to get cringed out at the hero worship, the same way I was.

In retrospect, those worries were immensely self-centered. They hardly talked about me. Instead, they got to know each other. Maine laughed and drank with my uncles and aunts, along with Pilar and Dorio. Occasionally, they’d show off their cyberware, start boxing, and get their shits kicked by the crew, just for them to laugh it off a second later and drink more.

Lucy and Kiwi were entertaining a barrage of questions from my female cousins. The pair gave out Netrunning tips, and talked about Night City’s Net, comparing the differing landscapes to each other.

I, myself, was encircled by a bunch of my male cousins, and Lola, all of whom stared at me wide-eyed as I relayed the events of the past few days. Rebecca and Falco were with me, and threw in their few cents every time I omitted a non-essential details.

I was doing it for their sake more than my own. It turned out that no matter how I tried to downplay my, uh, ‘adventures’, there really was no minimizing the scale of my frantic and murderous campaign.

No matter how hard I insisted that my opponents were weak and barely worth noting.

[Correct me if I’m wrong: but don’t you have school in the morning?]

I blinked.

D: Why does that matter? The night is still young—

[The night is thirty minutes away from being day.]

Ah, shit.

I called Lucy.

D: Let’s delta. I need to get to school.

From across the yard, Lucy stopped typing in her Cyberdeck and turned to me with a nod.

Lunacy: As long as you’re the one driving.

000

Rayfield rarely disappointed. The Aerondight was a vehicle just as fast as the Caliburn, meaning I managed to make my way back to the city with ample time to spare.

And according to a screamsheet I had found inside the car, they were coming out with a newer model soon—their fastest, yet. Crazy stuff.

This car in my possession, though? It was no longer Green Farm’s property, let alone Cristobal Zambrano’s. I’d made damn sure of that.

First, I had Nanny jack into the onboard computing and scrape every last ID broadcast from the car’s interface: the VIN, the registration data, the telemetry logs synced with Rayfield’s corporate servers. Burned all of the local data, then the data in their servers plus backups. Then I slotted in a series of spoofed credentials: license plates cloned from a half-dozen other inactive Aerondights registered in Night City, mixed and randomized in a way no badge or checkpoint scanner would ever find flagworthy. Even the GPS ping history was replaced with a fake trail of commutes: downtown gridlock, corpo golf courses, luxury malls. In other words, exactly where some corpo jackass I’d hypothetically bought the thing from would have been wasting his afternoons.

For physicals, I didn’t need to do much. The car had a CrystalCoat, like any Rayfield did. The first thing I did when I acquired the car was change the color.

By the time I was finished, the Aerondight was, on paper and in practice, nothing more than another piece of Night City’s anonymous excess. No badge, no camera, no registry would ever be able to trace it back to Green Farm.

It was mine now, in every way that it could be.

I had needed to bridal-carry Lucy into the apartment, and into her bed, while I myself got showered and dressed. Nanny had thrown up a list of ‘debuffs’ due to my inebriation and lack of sleep. For much of that laundry list of symptoms, I just needed some food and water. But my reflexes would be shot for the time being. Not by too much, and it wasn’t like I intended on working anyway.

I’d just have to bear that cross until it was time to go to bed again. After I had gotten myself prepared, I drove on to Arasaka.

Five minutes before homeroom began, I finally pulled up in Arasaka Academy’s parking garage, and parked my Aerondight somewhere convenient, attracting a good few stares from other students, and their guardians and parents.

Even at Arasaka Academy, a car at this level was a rare sight.

After disembarking from it, I stepped back from it, looked for a good angle, and snapped a still with my Kiroshis. Then I sent it to Jin.

Jin immediately called me.

Jin: Hah! You fucking asshole! You said you wouldn’t!

David: Said I wouldn’t what?

Jin: You said you wouldn’t get the Aerondight! But look at you. Caved so quickly!

David: I never said that. I said I wouldn’t give Rayfield my money.

Jin: …you fucking.

Jin: Don’t even talk to me anymore.

David: Hah!

Jin: Glad you called, by the way. Was gonna tell it to you face to face, but I might as well do it right now: time’s up. You’re meeting my old man right after school. He’s run out of patience.

David: I get the sense that you’re jerking me around. If he wants me so bad, why hasn’t he called me, yet?

Jin: I told him not to. Couldn’t trust that you wouldn’t mouth off like a fucking gonk. Asked him for a day to just coach you through this.

I walked into the building as Jin continued talking.

Jin: Which is why you and I are gonna have a no-bullshit conversation come lunch-time.

David: Can’t think of a less fun thing to do. Fine. See you, Jin.

Jin: See you, winner.

He hung up immediately after.

I caught sight of Fei-Fei near the door of the classroom, looking somewhat anxious. Then, she turned to look at me, and her eyes lit up. “David!”

“Hey,” I smiled.

“You look good!” she said.

“I am good,” I said. “Can’t beat Night City medicine.”

“Good, that’s good,” she said. “I wanted to ask you—” The school bell rang. She jumped and looked slightly sheepish at the reaction.

“Let’s go in,” I chuckled. “We’ll talk later.”

000

In light of our recent conversation, I had been slightly worried about just what a pure friendship between Fei and I would entail.

Of particular concern to me were our… differences. She was stupid rich, and had been stupid rich all her life to boot. Meanwhile, I… boosted bikes and debugged hacking programs as a kid, just to make enough scratch so that mom wouldn’t have to eat kibble to survive.

I couldn’t deny that if I didn’t know who she was as a person, or hadn’t warmed up to her already, I might have felt… bitter about her. But I did know her very well, and I was experienced enough in this corpo world to know how little she deserved any of my resentment.

She was just too damned open-minded. She cared, which is what sucked about it all.

Between the first and second period break, we talked about Hiroto of all things, both of us walking through the hallway together. “What did you two talk about, on the finish line?” Fei asked.

“Ah—he told me it was a good game. I told him the same,” I said. “Seemed like a nice guy.”

“Really?” Fei gasped. “He seemed a little… crazy to me.”

“Yeah,” I said like it was obvious. “Of course he was. But he’s nice-crazy.” I thought about the crew when I said that.

“Like you,” she said, bumping into me playfully. I chuckled.

“Yeah… kinda feel bad about how it almost ended,” I said. “We both got pretty, uh… fired up.” I wouldn’t go into detail about our several mutual murder attempts.

Water under the bridge, of course.

“Makes sense that he’s crazy,” she said. “You kinda have to be, to be that dominant at a sport where so many people die.”

“I’m surprised this is news to you,” I said. “Isn’t he a bigshot celebrity? He’s massive in the racing circuits.”

“You know, I wondered the same thing,” Fei mused. “I never really followed racing, but my brother does. Apparently the Tōge Oni doesn’t even do any interviews. My brother tried to read up on him, but he’s, like, totally private. He grew up in Heywood to a single mom, and he’s not even a corpo at all.”

I frowned. “Yeah… and the only reason he took on that sponsorship was…” I sighed. Though it wasn’t difficult for me to think about it all that much, it felt hard to talk about it to Fei-Fei.

“What? What’s the matter?”

I chuckled dryly. “Well, he told me his mother was sick, and that Biotechnica could potentially help. But only if he won. He didn’t say it to psyche me out. Just to gauge my… resolve or something. I don’t know—guy’s a fucking nerd,” I chuckled and shook my head. “All about willpower and determination with his type. No wonder he dresses like a schoolboy.” I still didn’t know if that was his actual style or just a cosplay. “But… there weren’t any hard feelings at the end of the race.” I shrugged. “He knew the score, as someone else who came from the bottom.”

“Wow,” Fei said. “I’m surprised anyone would be that benevolent.”

“It ain’t really benevolence. More like understanding. Or… he empathizes, cuz he and I aren’t so different,” I said. “You said he came from Heywood and that he wasn’t corpo-raised. When you’re from a place like that, and you’re really fucking good at one thing, you tend to hold fewer grudges. You tend to have a longer sight. Because you know there’s a way up for you if you just keep focusing on that thing you’re good at. For me, that was coding. And going to ‘Saka Academy,” even if it fucking sucked. In retrospect, I had always been rather insulated from the worst that this city could offer, for that reason. “For him, it’s racing.”

“Sounds like some kind of warrior’s mindset,” Fei observed, then she shrugged. “Like something from a story. Whatever helps you keep pushing on, I guess.”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“You know, I’d envy you, but… ambition’s kind of a drag,” she said. “I don’t really know what I’m doing. Or where I’m going to end up. Maybe travel?”

I chuckled. “That’s real original.”

“Screw off,” she said. “I don’t really care that much about being unique. Someone as wild as that might as well be an edgerunner, and they never live for long. And who needs that nonsense? Life’s too precious to waste.”

Nothing I could say to that. She was right, really.

The bell rung again. We had to split, head to different classes. She headed off to Corporate Economic Strategy, while I had to go through my Advanced Statistics class, the highest-level class in that track offered by the school - still could have literally done it in my sleep.

Between second and third period, we talked again as we moved through the hall. “You know,” I said. “You talk like you won’t have a future working. You… don’t wanna become a corpo?”

She sighed. “I mean… it’s all I ever trained for. My family practically onboarded me from birth. I don’t really… I can’t really imagine another way to live,” she said. “Crazy, huh? All the cash in the world, and I still feel like working.”

Fei, working. Strange thought. I tried to imagine her in the role of any of the corpos I’d met, spoken to, worked with, killed. It was like holding a piece of the wrong puzzle. She just didn’t fit with the pieces. “You sure you have to?”

“True, I could just be the wastrel daughter,” she mused, but with a slight grin. “My brother’s picking up the slack easy, you know. He actually likes this crap. But I can’t—I wanna support him, cuz he’s my brother. I guess… maybe that’s why it’s hard to imagine doing something else? Cuz then I’d be leaving him behind.”

“Makes perfect sense,” I said with a nod. “Family’s important. Bonds are important. If you’re doing this gig just so you won’t leave your family behind, and not necessarily because you want it, I think… that’s perfectly valid.”

“Besides,” Fei said, more cheerfully. “Qiang tells me I’d be good at it! Not that I’m sure yet what it is,” she laughed, “but I don’t mind helping my brother with his dreams. I can find my own later, you know! I’m still only seventeen!”

Dreams, huh.

I told her about how my mother had assigned to me her dream—of me being in Arasaka’s C-suite.

How I had latched onto it as something to remember her by.

And how over time, it had transformed into a drive to do it just to prove that I could. My core conceit.

There was nothing wrong with conceit, not if it gave you the drive to keep taking the next step forwards.

“Your mother’s dream!” Fei groaned, looking up at me. “Not that that’s a bad thing, but—you’re supposed to say ‘follow your heart and be free’!”

I snorted. “My mom was never much for platitudes. Neither am I. I'd tell you to follow your heart, but then I'd just be insincere.”

“I know, but it’s just nice to hear.”

“Freedom…” I said, tasting the word. “It’s… a dumb dream. It’s overrated. As long as you got people in your life, you can never be free. Nor should you want to be. Being free means being alone, most of the time.”

“You’re such a guy,” she said with a helpless giggle. “Ever heard of this term called commiseration? Girl talk, maybe? I don’t want solutions here. Just… work with me.”

I nodded. “I get it. The future’s… fucking scary. Even I don’t know what exactly will come. It’s weird, though. Sometimes… I look at a release date for a movie, and wonder if I’ll be doing good, or down in a ditch trying to scrape two ennies together by the time that movie rolls up. You ever feel that way?”

She giggled. “I, uh, no, I don’t think I have. Well… the becoming poor part, that is. To me, it’s more like… will I get locked down and made to go through something else equally as awful as getting engaged again? What will my parents ask of me? How will I be forced to disappoint them again?”

The future was scary. It did help to not think about it too closely. Just focus on the next sure thing.

Like this meeting with Jin.

Fei and I continued chatting, Fei pointing out how the other students were looking at me, and myself wanting nothing to do with those adoring and often-times confused eyes of theirs.

I was just grateful that they were giving me a wide berth, one and all.

000

Once lunch period began, Jin gave me a call.

Jin: Come to the bathroom nearest to your classroom, alright?

Ugh.

David: Sure thing, overlord.

Jin: Tch…

I gave Fei a look besides me. “Jin is calling. I’ll meet you in lunch.”

“Ah, okay.”

I walked away at a brisk pace, towards the bathroom.

Once I reached it, I found Jin, hands shoved in his pants pockets, looking down at a kneeling row of three beaten-up underclassmen. “Yo,” Jin said.

“What’s up, Jin?” I looked over the knocked-up freshmen skeptically. What was this, some obligatory inner Arasaka hazing ritual? “Why am I here?”

Jin looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “Oh—I just needed you away from her for a sec. You know, Fei. You’ve been hanging out with her all day like a fucking gonk, and you were probably gonna eat lunch with her, too. I told you we needed to talk.”

“So… what. You’re gonna beat me up, too?” I asked. “Make me kneel like these guys?”

“No, you fucking idiot,” he said. Then he stomped at one of them. “Get up. Fuck off. Stand outside the bathroom. Keep watch. Or I’ll kill you.” The three boys scurried to their feet and ran around me, out of the bathroom. Jin took a deep breath and didn’t waste any time. “Alright. My old man wants to see you. And I suggest you come clean to me about this QianT connect if you value your life, David. I’m for-real for-real right now.”

I groaned. “It’s not that deep,” I said.

“You thinking of defecting?”

I snorted. “Hell no. I’m not signing any loyalty contract. I’m about to become a shareholder, not an employee.”

Jin’s eyes widened and he laughed. “You’re fucking crazy, David! The fuck! You know that shit’s real bad for your health, right? Muscling into a board with no connections, no permissions.”

“The higher-up I spoke to seemed fine with it,” I said.

“And you picked the dumbest fucking corp to do it with,” Jin said. “Fuck me. You might as well have withdrawn everything in your account and made a bonfire of all your money for all the good that’s gonna do you. QianT is a sinking ship, you fucking dickhead. And you’re doing this cuz you’re best chooms with Fei Fei?”

I sighed in exasperation. “What sort of issue would your old man take with my investment? It’s my money. I can do whatever the hell I want with it. And if I’m still down to be one of your lackeys, then what the fuck does it even matter?”

“I was worried about defection, not burning seventy plus million eddies of your own money on a bad investment,” Jin waved his hand in dismissal. “She must be the best lay on the planet, damn!!”

“Don’t go there,” I warned. “She’s just a friend. I’m doing this for my own reasons. I know my shit, I know the score.”

Jin tsked. “You can do whatever the hell you want with your eddies, man, even if I think it’s dumb as shit. What you can’t do is give the old man any lip.”

Jin wasn’t going to fucking scare me with all these warnings. But I’d heed them, regardless. “Textbook etiquette?” I said.

“Pretty much—best to be safe and go textbook with this shit. That won’t fail you.”

“And just to remind you: I could potentially get killed because your dad isn’t the type to take no for an answer.”

“Yeahp! Pretty much, yeah!”

“Fuck my life,” I muttered under my breath.

Jin narrowed his eyes. “You know,” he said, “I wish you didn’t have this demonstrated pattern going on of responding better to threats than you do incentives. Like, damn, man! You haven’t even asked about all the perks of this entire vassal arrangement.”

“Such as?” I said, rolling my eyes.

“Such as, don’t fuck this up and you might even have a straight shot to the C-suite in a few decades! Right along with me! ” Jin openly boggled at me. “Like, what the fuck, man? No need to look so glum! We should be celebrating!” he clapped me on the shoulder, hard, his tone turning more casual. “I know guys who’ve gotten themselves entire busloads of joytoys for jack shit compared to this! This is a good thing, man! This is a big win! For you, for me!”

Hm…

This fucking gonk. No.

But still, Jin wasn’t wrong about the surface-level aspects of this goddamned problem knocking down my door.

Meaning, Masaru Ryuzaki wanted me. Therefore, I was considered a potential asset. And for as long as that remained true, I had value in the eyes of someone all the way at the top of Arasaka’s incredibly tall hierarchy of motherfuckers.

Meaning, while his old man interviewed me, I’d have a chance to interview him, as well.

And when it was all said and done, I’d have his measure.

And then I’d know whether it was more worthwhile to play along… or do him like I did Gotō Tanaka.