Viktor Vector rubbed his face tiredly as he continued looking over the monitors while Noh sat watching him silently, his eyes unfocused at the revelation that his mind had been hacked to pieces and then put back together like a child's jigsaw puzzle. There really wasn't much more to it. Viktor didn't have any kind of real answers as to what he was looking at, and he couldn't even begin to try. There were complications, and then there were Complications, and the abomination in front of Viktor was definitely the latter.

Shifting uncomfortably, he looked at Noh and said, "I don't really know what to tell you, kid. You hear about this kind of stuff out in the underground. Prototype tech, weird wild shit that the Megas put into people, trying to figure out how to make it work. Bleeding edge, using parts handcrafted in orbital labs and with specs way, way above anything you can find in the streets But it's all prototype for a reason. They're trying to work out the bugs, and usually they're using some poor bastard to do it. And in this case, that poor bastard is you."

Leaning back further, Viktor stared at the ceiling before continuing. "I don't know what to tell you. I really don't. But this is just the tip of the iceberg if what this diagnostic is telling me is true. From what I'm seeing, there's barely any of you left. Putting the whole braincase issue aside, everything from the neck down is completely mechanical. From your bones to your organs, the blood in your veins, the muscles and skin on your body, every last bit of it has been replaced with a cybernetic analog. Some of it's wildly advanced, some of it is just strange in its application. But all of it kind of meshes together into a horrifying amalgam of what a person would look like if they were purpose built in a lab."

He exhaled slowly, the weight of it settling in his expression.

"This is the rough part of the news. All I can tell you for certain is that there's a lot of eddies put into you. A lot of time, a lot of tech. That's not the kind of stuff that we can mess around with. I can't even begin to guess at where to start, and I'm no slouch. I been in this game for a long, long time, so believe me when I say it's bad, because in the end? This is so far over the edge that we're hurtling through the abyss."

Viktor stared at Noh for a moment, and there was something old and haunted in his eyes.

"Whoever did this to you did it with a purpose in mind. A very specific purpose. You were being built for something, kid. And whatever that something was, they pulled out all the stops."

Viktor took a moment to gather his thoughts as Noh seemed to process that. Never in his whole life did he think he'd ever see something like this, not in his chair, under his knife. It was the kind of urban legend you hear in ripper circles, about lost or escaped lab specimens, chock full of rare and expensive tech that nations and governments would kill for.

"If I could give you something to work with, answers, or a clue, or something... well, even then, I don't know if I wanna go and touch this. What you are is dangerous, kid. You're real dangerous. And I don't really know where to go from there." And that was the real tragedy of it all. Vik liked to think he was a good person, but even he had limits, and Noh... he was tempted to kick him out, wipe the files of him ever being there, and blacklisting him, Kiwi, and anyone associated with them. Because this was the real shit, and while rippers were often treated as one of those necessary evils by the powers that be, there were limits to that tolerance.

But that wasn't Vik. He built his practice on being the best provider in Watson and while this landmine was in his chair, he would do his job. He would need to be careful, though. There was doing his professional best, and then there was getting tangled up in this and hoping he wasn't on the list for a long walk off a short bridge. Weighing his thoughts, he came to a decision.

"I will say this. You took some real damage. I can see the signs all over your cyberware. Serious wear, combat damage, fried circuits and buildup in your moving bits, and all manner of dents and divots besides. You're a real mess, I'll give you that much." He said, looking over the information in front of him, "But that's where the bad news ends, because you're fixing yourself. You've got one of the most advanced trauma control systems I think I've ever seen." Viktor paused, then asked curiously, "You've been hungry lately? Like real hungry, starving almost."

Noh, having sat in silence, just nodded. Viktor hummed in response, not blaming him for still processing the revelation that he was pretty much a brain in a jar. "You... You're gonna be that way. As long as you've got nutrients in your system, your trauma control system will keep fixing you."

"What does that mean, Vik? All that shit doesn't mean anything to me." The words were tense, quiet. All the teasing and smirking and bravado was gone, and all that was left was a cool monotone that Viktor did not like.

"It means your body is building itself back up." Vik replied quickly, cutting him off before he could spiral. "From what I'm seeing here, so long as that brain pod in your head is in one piece, even if they flatline you, even if your cyberheart stops, even if your synth lungs stop breathing, even if you bleed all of your hydraulic blood out, so long as that system is running, eventually it'll pick you back up. It's using one hell of an advanced nanoprinter to assemble you one cell at a time, and seems smart enough to start at the most damaged bits and work its way down."

Noh watched Viktor for a long minute as they were chewing on what the horrifying revelations he just received were. "So," he said finally, "you don't know what I am or where I came from. You don't even know how I was put together. But hey, if I get my chest blown open and my arms and legs chopped off, eventually they'll grow back, right? Like some kind of fucking lizard?" Noh snorted, but the sound was distant, unamused, hard and unhappy. It was the sound of someone who didn't know what to think about what they'd just heard.

"Look, Noh," he said, grabbing the bearded man's attention, "This is a lot to take in, I know, but I'm not done and I need you to listen to me, and listen very carefully. You have so much cyber in you, you should be a raving, stark foaming at the mouth lunatic. Cyberpsycho doesn't even begin to cover half of what you should be processing, and what little is left in your head should be cooking from the raw load like scop on a griddle. Yet somehow, whatever's left of you, seems to be handling the load. That assessment you took, the Humanity Index exam, came back telling me you were operating in the green. For now."

"What the hell does 'for now' mean, Viktor? You saying I'm burning out?" Noh snapped, and Vik leaned back slightly at the wild glower in the lanky borg's eyes.

"No. You've got all the signs, the classic ones, that you should be completely over edge, but your neural load isn't showing it. Your nerves are intact. You're not ranting about delusions of grandeur or having obsessive ideations or suffering extreme paranoia. All the usual hallmarks of the insanity the kind of load you're under should be putting on you aren't appearing, and I don't know what to say to that. All I know is that whatever is inside of you, whatever is keeping you together, and however it works, it's beyond me. I could do a little bit of work and fix some of what's broken, but..."

"But at the end of the day there's nothing you can do to really help. Then what the fuck good are you, Vik?" Noh growled, practically squaring up, but this wasn't Vik's first rodeo with an irate borg. The older man gave him a pinning stare, as he replied just as sharp.

"Don't shoot the messenger, son. I wasn't done." He said, tone hard, and Noh leaned back, out of his face, "What I'm saying is that I have no idea how you're staying above board, but if you start spiralling, you could very well tip yourself over anyway. You do that, if half this shit does what I think it does, you're going to kill a lot of people before someone puts you down. Do you understand?"

Noh glared at him mulishly, and Viktor sighed as he rolled up some of the more recent footage of the last milspec borg to go off the deep end. He'd lost his shit in Japantown after his girl got taken by Strommers and turned into a flesh puppet. He chromed way the hell up, and hadn't even made it out of TC territory before the load fried his brain. What followed was a three hour chase through the city as the man went from block to block, chopping people up like a demented buzzsaw.

"Noh, listen to me. I'm not your enemy, but if you don't keep yourself in check, this is you. Now I'll ask again, do you understand?" Vik asked patiently, as Noh slowly nodded his head. "Good. Because... despite my better judgement, I want you to come in on the regular. Misty is a registered therapist, and I want to keep a diagnostic breakdown of what's going on internally for you. Monitor you for instability, see if we can't keep you from going down the bad path."

"Why? What do you care, Vik? From the way it sounds, just being around me is puttin' your head on the block." Noh asked, but the defensiveness, the anger, in his tone was gone. Or at least better hidden, which was good enough for now.

"Because I can't in good conscience leave you out there like a time bomb waiting to go off. Normally I'd be telling you to chrome down, take some of this out, get some low impact civware hooked in to reduce the stress, but your pieces and parts are all custom jobs. There isn't any replacing it. Just trying might throw the delicate balance of spinning plates going all over, so monitoring and maintaining is the best option." Vik said, as he pulled up more information, forwarding it to Noh's HUD. The files clicked open, and he was surprised to find it was largely a bevy of pamphlets and booklets, mostly talking about cyberpsychosis, the signs, and what to look out for.

"I'm guessing you want me to read these?" Noh asked, tiredly, and Vik nodded.

"Back to front. You start seeing any of these signs, I want you to call me. Doesn't matter when or where. Even if you just suspect you're experiencing any, give me a call. You have such a high load right now that I'm worried any bit of deviation, any inkling of a collapse, will cascade exponentially into a full blown episode." Vik said, as he forwarded an appointment schedule and a list of medications. "I'm also going to put you on a preventative. It's the same one they give military borgs, a potent mood stabilizer, designed to mitigate the worst effects of overloading your neurons. That one I need to charge you for, though, they aren't cheap or easy to get, but they will help keep you from going off the deep end. I'll give you a month up front, on an IOU, but after that-"

"No free meals, I know. I'll see what I can do, alright?" Noh sighed, and Vik had heard that tone before in so many other chrome junkies. He turned to look at Noh with that same hard look.

"Don't fuck around Noh. Not with this. You're Kiwi's friend, don't make her put you down. Or worse, you put her down, and have to live with it. Do you get me, son?" That seemed to break through to him, Vik could see, and Noh nodded. It would have to be good enough.

Later on, when Noh was gone and he gave Kiwi the truncated version of what he found (Noh, for whatever reason, hadn't objected to him cluing her in, but he could tell even she had no idea the extent of his internal mechanics), he had decided to do a little research on his own. He knew better than to ask leading questions or post any kind of specs on the net, but he had a few contacts he could talk to anonymously that he'd built up over the years. Most of them were recluses, and the places he posted in were as old as the net itself, predating even Bartmoss' madness in some cases, but the secrecy and anonymity made it that responses could be delayed for days, weeks, or even months.

It was the best he could do, for now. The truth was that he still had his trepaditions about digging into this particular rabbit hole, but there was a part of him, a big part, that burned with the kind of curiosity that had put him on the medical track to begin with. Despite all sense to the contrary, he kind of wanted to know, and if it meant he could help some poor gonk, all the better. It would help ally some of the guilt, too, that had been chewing on him.

Because he hadn't told Noh or Kiwi the whole truth of what he found. For all the damage that afflicted the tall borg, it paled in comparison to the things that were missing, and there was so much. Organs for certain, but that was obvious and unimportant. No, the big issue was what had been removed from the brain. The memory center was gone, the inhibition center was heavily mutilated, and the part of the brain that made you feel things like fear, hate, and most importantly, love? That had been infected with a nanocell tumor the size of a golf ball, and he had no idea what that could have been doing to the man in the interim.

He meant what he said. Noh should be a vegetable at best, or perhaps more mercifully, just dead, outright, but he was still alive. But for how long? Viktor couldn't say. Because the nanocell tumors were spreading, slowly, in fractions of fractions, but they were. And when they got big enough... Vik didn't know how much of Noh would be left.


000


Noh followed Kiwi silently, a ghost on the streets of Watson, face cold and somber with the revelations that Vik had dropped on him. On them, really, and to Kiwi had made a sick kind of sense now that all the pieces were being put together. She still hadn't processed the severity of just what Vik had been implying, and that wasn't what she was thinking about, but rather, she was thinking about the ill-fated and, if she were being totally honest, completely fucked gig.

Faraday's job sending her out into the wasteland, to go and intercept a random convoy, all to go and retrieve what was ostensibly a custom-built killbot with a human face. She hadn't forgotten how sparse he'd been with the details of the job, even more than his usual circumspection, not that it mattered in the end. She suspected his other team fell afoul of the Raffen just like hers did. It was unusual for them to have been out in those numbers and oddly convenient that they were just in the right place at the right time to hit them right as they were least expecting it. The probably tortured it out of those poor fucks, but she wasn't discounting the idea that they might have been Faraday's 'plan C' and just jumped the gun looking to triple their payday.

He was snakey like that, and she had to admit, after what she saw, Noh was a hell of a prize. He'd want to get his claws into the man no matter what, if he thought he could. Hedging his bets just seemed like the play, right up until one of those bets decided to edge out the other two. Of course that was all speculation, she didn't have the proof and if anything did exist it was probably sitting on a charred corpse strapped into one of those burned out wrecks they'd left behind.

As for why he went to the lengths he did? It was obvious enough. If it wasn't the bevy of experimental tech crammed into his body then it would be for the raw utility a custom-made killing machine capable of what Noh had managed to accomplish. Even as banged up as he apparently was, the guy was a walking blender. More than that, with his brain functionally wiped Faraday could put whatever he wanted into his head. Perfectly loyal bodyguard that didn't have the ability to say no? Enforcer that you never had to worry about being bribed or coerced? Assassin that could blend in perfectly right up until the killing blow? The possibilities were endless.

Faraday would have spared no expense, and the only thing that seemed to stop him from dumping a fortune into one of the premier wetwork teams out of the Afterlife was the time constraints. Hence her gonk ass getting rolled out into the middle of nowhere to pop a convoy that, for all intents and purposes never would have made it anywhere near Night City, getting into the shit, quite literally, and ending up with her tied up in some jackass's trunk.

It almost killed her. Almost, but not quite.

And now here she was, walking around with his prize. She was sure it would burn him up though, if he figured it out. She suspected that it was in her best interest, not to mention Noh's, that Faraday not find out the details of the situation until there was well and truly no other choice. She was there to crack a convoy. Convoy got summarily cracked. He owed her for that, and if anything else went tits up, that wasn't her problem. If he wanted her to care he should have paid her more, because that's not how things shook out. No, she was the one who had the cards. She was the one with the leverage, and fuck Faraday anyway.

She didn't know if he set her up, but you never could with his type. The man only cared about Number One, from start to finish. But he was a well-paying narcissist, and money was the lubrication that made the wheels of society turn, so long as he paid his part and didn't try to fuck her too bad she'd still pick up his calls in the future.

After all, as it turned out, Noh was a real diamond in the rough. She'd had some trepidations. They'd been coming back and going as she pondered whether or not to really commit, but... So long as she could keep him away from getting picked up by the Megas, he'd be a very valuable asset to her. If things got too hot, she could always pull a runner but a little biosculpting and a few altered biometric transmitters and nobody would know him from any other chrome-dome borg so the risk was acceptable.

Vik had gone in deep looking for bugs or transceiver tags and she would do a once over of his internal ICE and call it a day. Besides, she knew he liked her. Hell, he fucked her into the bed not too long ago, (and she was definitely going to be taking advantage of that tonight) and she was reasonably sure he wouldn't object. Plus she could drag Lucy along and see if the barely legal Eurostalker was of any use with something a little more subtle than carpet bombing a corporate host system. It would be a good way to find out if the neokitsch nightingale had any holes Kiwi needed to patch.

She had to admit, if just to herself, that she had been concerned that Noh wouldn't take the revelations about what his insides looked like particularly well. She knew she wouldn't have, but Noh, aside from being a little more taciturn, didn't seem to be falling to pieces over it either. That was something else Kiwi appreciated about him. He wasn't the type to get up his own ass about it, going all 'oh no, woe is me'. There were enough of those sob stories that seemed to be the backstory of every Tom, Dick, and idiot that wandered the streets of Night City.

Noh was practical. Maybe a little shaken, but nothing a good fuck and a good meal wouldn't get out of the way. She wanted him sharp for when she got into it with Faraday in a day or two, once she got her bearings back. She had no doubt there would be an issue, somewhere, but having her own hustle to match the gangoons the four-eyed fuck had would do wonders for her confidence. He liked to outsource to the Animals, and while they were intimidating, very few of them were a match for a real borg.

She had the makings of a crew here, and that had its own potential. Lucy was following behind her like a gosling, much like Noh had been, and she had decided she would keep her. For all that Lucy had uh... hunted her down, for lack of a better term, had been proof enough that the girl had skill, and overall wasn't a bad netrunner. Despite her annoyance at how things shook out, she also could admit she saw a little of herself in the scrappy girl. From what she'd learned from their talks on the net, she had been in the game for a while,  but was blind to the more nuanced aspects of the job.

Kiwi really wasn't one to take on apprentices, but... well, Lucy could be useful in her own ways. Having a backup netrunner could be useful, especially on some of the harder jobs. It was a rare enough profession as it was and teamwork made the dream work and all that drek. So for now, she would let the girl crash on her couch. It wasn't like she planned to put Noh there and she barely used the thing anyway, preferring to either lounge in bed or in her ice bath.

Kiwi sighed, reaching into her jacket and pulling out a cigarette, slipping it into the vents of her mask and lighting it up. It masked the raw sewage smell that always seemed to permeate Watson in the middle of the summer. NC did a shit job at garbage pickup on a good day, and it was even worse with the heat congealing everything. Half the people who smoked did it just to give their poor, abused lungs something else to process besides the stink of rotting food and shit.

Why did she miss Night City again?

Ugh, it'd been too long since she'd had a decent coffin nail, and the burning ash in her lungs felt refreshing. She'd missed it on the road, the two packs she'd brought with her lost when she was stripped and the shitty hand-rolled Navajos she'd found on the Shivs were nothing to write home about. They did in a pinch but nothing beat the brand name stuff.

Out of the corner of her eye she caught Lucy eyeballing her cigs, to which she let out an amused huff. The platinum-haired girl flinched a bit, but said nothing. 'Jesus,' Kiwi thought to herself, 'for a seasoned cyberpunk the slip of a netrunner was certainly jumpy.'

It was a bitter thought, but in retrospect she could see why. The girl had been desperate enough to roll the dice and show up at her apartment with her hat in hand and no backup plan. For all she knew Kiwi was just the handle for some kind of honeytrap pimp looking to groom a new joytoy, and still she came. Now she was at her mercy, and Kiwi had admittedly been somewhat distracted by other things, many of which were net-related now that that fucking Jammer was gone.

It was a little cruel, and while Kiwi was into that, it was a later thing. For now she just sighed and offered Lucy a cigarette of her own. She did chuckle when Lucy jumped a bit and almost dropped it as an arc of electricity sparked across Kiwi's thumb and forefinger, lighting it seamlessly.

"Enjoy it. You're gonna be working for the next one." She said, almost sighing, and Lucy perked up.

"That mean what I think it means?" The younger woman asked hopefully, and Kiwi nodded.

"Yeah. Couch is yours, provided you work for it." If nothing else, a little kindness paid dividends later and it cost her very little. It wasn't like she was paying for her utilities. She just hacked the damn things, like a good netrunner should.

"And where does that leave me, Ki?" Noh chimed in, glancing back at her. The blonde just gave him a flat look, and he nodded. "Right, right. How silly of me." He hummed, before going back to his brooding. Men.

All in all, things were really coming up Kiwi.


000


Staring down the barrel of a gun, Kiwi decided that perhaps, maybe, possibly, she had been a bit too optimistic. Behind her she could almost hear Noh’s teeth grinding as he was held in a situation similar to hers, if, you know, worse what with the crackling, glowing anti-borg ASPDS rifle pressed to his spine and the Soviet hand cannon shoved against the base of his skull. Or in the case of Lucy, an Umbra tucked right into the sweet spot where a shot would blow her internal organs into their external setting.

What was even worse than that though? She never saw it coming, not from Faraday. She knew he was a big wheel over in Pacifica, but she hadn’t internalized just what that meant until today, when she spotted some of the nastiest solos in the biz stepping out from the alcoves. Off the top of her head, she spotted Joe ‘The Shroom’ Shizaki wielding the railgun pressed against the small of Noh’s back, along with his partner in crime Victor Montego, a cartel sicario that had made a name carving up a number of big name gang lords over the last couple years. Flanking Faraday himself were the Kansai Couplets, two siblings that were Tyger Claw Oni, their special anti-borg hunter killers fresh off the latest gang war with the ‘strommers, and bringing up the rear was a titan of a man that Kiwi only knew by reputation, standing at seven foot six and a wall of muscle, the Maine Man, his crusher at a low ready. Not that he’d need it with those oversized gorilla arms of his.

They had gotten the drop on them and it wasn’t even particularly hard. Between Noh being lost in his own head for the entire walk home and Lucy half asleep, she was the only one with her head on and in the now, and she had been too busy getting high off her own supply to notice the less-than-stealthy tail that had been following them for the last two levels of the megabuilding. The fact that the elevator had been unable to take them higher due to a ‘maintenance issue’ should have set off warning signs on its own, but she hadn’t even noticed her home security had been bypassed in the process.

And now it was too late for it to matter. Noh had snapped to it as soon as he realized shit was getting real, but he barely managed to take three steps before flying face first into the wall, a digitized scream of anguish pouring out of his mouth as he sparked and seized. Faraday had some kind of device in his hand that he’d pointed at the borg and with the flick of a switch shut the big man down entirely.

“Much better, don’t you think? We don’t want anyone doing anything regrettable, now do we?” He’d laughed as Noh had a seizure on the ground, body twisting into a horrifying rictus as Kiwi forced herself to watch on impassively, not willing to show even a shred of vulnerability in the face of her relatively new partner going through what looked like a Short Circuit of some kind, but the total shutdown looked more like a Cyberware Malfunction, maybe both. “He certainly is a violent one, though, isn’t he Kiwi? If I didn’t know any better I’d say he was coming for me right then, wasn’t he?”

“You did drop in unannounced, Faraday.” She said calmly, glaring at him from the side, her voice modulation set to a flat, almost bored tone. They watched Noh writhe on the ground for a minute longer, and Kiwi just glared impassively, even as Lucy looked away. “Is there a point to this, or are we just going to watch you cook my huscle for fun?” She eventually bit out, and Faraday snorted.

“Now now, if I didn’t know any better I would say you were worried about the dear borg. But yes, it is necessary. After all, you know as well as I do that he’s lethal enough when properly motivated.” The four-eyed fixer said with an almost bored tone. “This is just a little bit of insurance to make sure he understands that I won’t tolerate any more little outbursts.” He rolled a cylindrical device across his fingers, one that made Kiwi’s eyes narrow as she puzzled over the device. It looked like a manual toggle of some kind, and it wasn’t hard to see that every seizure was associated with him pressing the trigger on it.

Which had its own implications. Noh was a byzantine mess when it came to trying to get through his Cybersecurity, and she’d tried a few times. It wasn’t that he was particularly difficult to get through to. It was that there wasn’t anything there to get through in general. Aside from his wireless connectivity centers everything was detached. She’d seen it before in corpo execs, a biological airgap system meant to stop just that, but the fact that he’d had it and was still flopping around like that said something else to her.

This thing, whatever it was, was mechanical, and he was going to kill Noh with it if she didn’t stop him. But she’d have to be careful, because Faraday was the exact same kind of manipulator that would hone in on it and go out of his way to do just that just to make a point.

“If you break him you buy him, Faraday. And the carpet too.” She said, almost drolly, turning to him. “I still have payments on this one, you know?” The words pulled Faraday’s attention from Noh and to her, finally making him ease off on the switch in his hand.

“My, the balls on you.” He said with a low chuckle, “I never took you as the protective type. You’ve only known him for what, a week? Less? And yet here you are, digging a hole for him all the same.” Leaning back on her couch, the fixer played with the switch in his hand for a moment longer, before finally flicking something on the device, making the writhing electricity that had been all but crawling out of Noh to finally cease.

It didn’t stop some of the Faraday’s own goons from picking the man up, who hung limply between them from cuffing him with Borg Locks and shoving a Crusher into his throat. They’d been piling in at a steady pace, locking down the little room with a press of bodies, and if she wasn’t nervous enough before, she was now.

Noh groaned in pain as he lolled his head, and Kiwi forced herself to look away, her head shifting back to Faraday. She tried not to look at the mercenaries and goons in the room, tried not to let Faraday know she was afraid of them, but Lucy gave the game away all the same, and she worried about how Noh would react once he started getting his bearings back.

The thing that got her though, was that aside from the Maine Man, none of these solos were on Faraday’s payroll normally. None of them were worth the expense of intimidating two no-names and a borg, no matter what Faraday might be playing at, and that was what bothered her the most. These people had their own crews, had their own connections, and Faraday? Faraday was on the outs. He was a fixer from the Time of the Red that hadn’t adjusted well to the sudden loss of power that the re-opening of trade routes and the final radiation scrubs had ushered in, and had been trying to pick up the scraps ever since.

He didn’t have the pull to drag these mercs in, not for something so small, so it made her wonder just what the play here was. Intimidation? Clearly, but was he really that petty, that spiteful to spend what was probably a million eddies in hired help sitting in this room. Granted, that didn’t change much when it came to the reality of the situation though. With his ability to functionally shut down Noh, the only real credible combat threat she had, like he was nothing, had been enough of a message.

Or so she thought, in that vaguely hysterical sort of way. She wondered if she should be pleased that Faraday thought she was worth this level of investment just to give her a scare, because she was absolutely fucking terrified, make no mistake. She knew what these people were, and more terrifyingly, Noh and Lucy didn’t. Which just meant that if either of them got cute, all of them were going to die, and die violently. Some more than others, maybe, but she was absolutely sure of that.

The best part? They all seemed to know who they were dealing with. Lucy was nothing without her hacking, and the same was true for Kiwi, much as she hated to say it. Noh, on the other hand, was something else. They came loaded for borg and it couldn’t have been more obvious why. If anyone was going to need to go down immediately, it would be the tall man with an increasingly pissed off look on his face as his brain rebooted but they had him dead to rights anyway.

They weren’t taking any chances either. Kiwi was now face to face with someone she thought she might have, possibly, potentially, underestimated. Faraday, the so-called washed-up Pacifica Fixer sat impassively on her couch like a king taking court, and in his hundred thousand eddie suit, he might as well had been. Looking every bit the imperious prick that he was, he looked at her from down his nose even though she was the one standing, and yet all the same he made her feel somehow lesser.

She hated that so goddamn much that she found herself seething inside, but she knew that if she lost her shit even a little bit Noh would probably lose what little self-control he had left and get them all flatlined, so instead she grit her teeth, and with a tight, sharp voice, she hissed out, “So what can I do for you Faraday? I’m… surprised to see you here. In my apartment. On my couch. I thought your usual M.O. is to make me come to you, not the other way around.”

“Oh? Yes, I can see how this is something of a shock, Kiwi. Almost as much as mine was, really, when you failed to contact me the moment you were back in town to report on the results of your mission.” He sneered casually, before his eyes went over her, then her two companions. “Not quite the team I sent you out with, are they. Am I to assume the others met an unfortunate and untimely demise?”

“You mean the three gonks you saddled me with? Those guys? The ones who died pretty much immediately? Yes, yes they did.” Kiwi said, crossing her arms with a scoff. “I hope you didn’t cancel the warranty on them. I’m afraid they didn’t make it back.”

Faraday hummed at that, as if he were contemplating it, before visibly dismissing it. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. The wasteland can be… unforgiving at best. And you didn’t encounter the other team I had operating out there either, did you?” He asked, but they both knew the answer to that one. Kiwi shook her head anyway. “I didn’t think so. What a pity. More to the point, though, I suppose this seething mass of cyberware was the passenger I sent you to break out?”

“Doesn’t matter if it is. I got hired to crack the convoy. It was cracked.” Kiwi snorted, “Or did you forget ‘you don’t need the details, just do the job I tell you to’? Because that’s what you told me when I asked, Faraday.” The grain of truth was there, because he really hadn’t told her to do more than hack the handful of transport vehicles. Everything else was really just a happy accident.

“That is… true. Annoyingly.” Faraday ground out as he leaned back, staring at the woman as he thought. “Still, I find this to be a less than ideal situation. You should have contacted me immediately once you were back in range, while things could be managed. Making me chase you down was bad form, Kiwi. I expected better of you.”

“Of fuck right off. If it wasn’t for your ‘prisoner’ here my ass would have been raped, eaten and the remains stripped for parts in a Raffen Shiv camp right now, and you’d have nothing.” Kiwi said dismissively. “Those idiots you sent me with were so sub-par they actively hindered anything I could do and I wound up Plugged and tossed in a fucking trunk. I was just getting back from having my ripper remove the jammer they rammed into me.”

“I see.” Faraday said, slowly, “Did you have this ripper… look at him?” Faraday asked carefully, “It would be… unfortunate, if someone got too good of a look at him. It could be problematic for both of us, you understand.”

“I’m not an idiot Faraday. Aside from getting him deloused, my guy knew better than to go digging.” The lie was easy eddies for her. She would never admit to getting the full diagnostic on Noh, not if she didn’t want the four-eyed fuck to crawl up her ass. “He’s a professional, not unlike how I had assumed you were. Color me dis-a-fucking-pointed.”

“Oh? Are you blaming me for the hurdles you ran into in the field?” He asked, almost drolly. “You are paid to do a job, the details are up to you to handle, so long as you accomplish the objective.”

“Yeah? Then explain to me how I didn’t, because it really sounds like you’re trying to say that, Faraday.” Kiwi said with a cold inflection in her voice. “I did what I was hired to do. Your hired help shit the bed, your other team failed to do their part of the job, and despite all that I made it back alive and in one piece to tell you what happened.” Her words were frigid as she stalked forward, heedless of the blades that buzzed tantalizingly close to her neck. “Then you show up in my home to lecture me about it?”

“You took the package for yourself. That was the whole point of the job, or did that escape you? You had a simple job to do, and the assistance I generously provided you should have been more than enough for you to clear any hurdles that got in the way. Instead, here it stands glaring at me in some puerile attempt to intimidate me. It’s clear that it’s no longer Viable, which means you stole my package for your own use.” He said, matching her tone. “Which means you owe me, Kiwi. It doesn’t matter that it was entirely incidental, it’s spoiled now, which is going to put a number of other operations it was needed for on hold while I try to salvage something from this debacle.”

“‘It’ has a name, chucklefuck.” Noh growled behind her, finally having recovered enough to stand on his own two feet, if just barely, and Kiwi had to hide a wince as Faraday’s eyes shifted to stare at him. “If you’re gonna sit there talking about me like I ain’t here, then we’re gonna have issues, Four-eyes.”

“Noh, shut up.” Kiwi snapped, but it was too late. With a movement of Faraday’s hand the men restraining Noh forced him upright, pressing a second shotgun to the back of his head to keep him from doing anything inadvisable.

“Noh? It has a name now?” Faraday asked, as if the concept was almost entirely foreign to him. “Good god, Kiwi. What a waste.” He sighed, and stood, leaving the couch to circle the tall man, and Noh met his gaze with an even glare. Pressing a hand to Noh’s cheek in an almost touch, he stared at the tall man in disappointment. “You know, in an ideal world, you would have been dropped off pristine and ready to fulfil a glorious purpose. Oh yes, there were such plans for you, my chromed out friend.” Faraday sighed, a small frown on his face. “Unfortunately it seems like your time with Kiwi has ruined you. You do understand that you’re a tool, yes? It’s a miracle that there’s anything left in that head capable of forming coherent thoughts, much less an opinion on something.”

“What’s your point, scav-fucker?” Noh spit the words, as the man in question looped him again. “I’m not some thing for you to boss around, and even if I was, I’m pretty sure I’d just stab your gonk ass just as soon as do anything you tried to tell me to.”

There was a moment, a single moment, when the bevy of goons tensed, as Noh barely restrained himself, his eyes jumping to her, trapped between the guillotine blades and Faraday, so close he could reach out and pop his head off like a cork. Kiwi desperately shook her head no at him, barely moving from her spot, all her bravado gone as the fixer watched him like a piece of bacteria under a microscope.

“Charming.” Faraday finally said as he made his way back towards her, stopping in front of her. “He’s well and truly beyond salvaging. I hope you’re pleased, Kiwi. He’s good for little more than spare parts at this point.” The words had Noh’s hackles rising, and Kiwi could see it happen in real time. She had to head this off before he did something she’d regret.

“Noh, amp down. I’ve got this.” She said to him, before turning to Faraday, “And antagonizing him is beneath you, Faraday. He is what he is.” She sighed, annoyed and agitated. “You obviously want something, if you’re willing to go through this whole dog-and-pony show. Why are you actually here?”

“Now that is the question, isn’t it, Kiwi? Why am I here, wasting my time with you when the easiest solution would have been to have you all shot and left to rot in a dumpster somewhere, another tragic and meaningless statistic?” Faraday laughed, as he slid into her personal space. “Because you owe me, Kiwi. You all owe me, for the trouble, for the cost, and for the lip.”

“Gentlemen?” he said leadingly, and then Kiwi blinked as the mantis blades retracted. A moment later she saw stars as his backhand cracked across her cheek with a resounding crunch, sending her to the floor. He followed it by a vicious kick to her stomach. Noh growled, struggling against the hustle holding his arms, but the press of the two guns had him freeze. Kiwi let out a pained gasp from the floor as he was forced to watch. “Because one, don’t think you can tell me what is or isn’t beneath me. You’re nothing Kiwi, just another piece of gutter trash that does what I tell them to when I tell them to. If I tell you to jump, you jump, if I tell you to bleed, you bleed, if I tell you to die? Well, you get the picture. You’re nothing more, and nothing less.” He circled around, before pressing the sole of his shoe to the back of her head, forcing her forehead against the ground. “And two, even more importantly, you owe me for taking him from me. He’s useless to me now, and you'll be paying me back for the loss I’m about to incur because of it.”

“As for you-” He said, snapping his gaze to the enraged borg as he did everything in his power not to outright assault the arrogant fucker, his teeth grinding so hard even Faraday could hear it, “I’ll get some value out of you yet. We’ll see if something can be salvaged from this fiasco. I’ll be in touch soon with a bill on how much you owe me, and what you’ll be doing to pay me back for the trouble.” He sighed dramatically, as Kiwi tried to remember how to breathe. “Pick her up.”

Kiwi found herself hauled to her feet in the iron grip of the two Oni once more, presented to him like a prized kill. His hand snaked out to grab her by the chin. “Look at me, Kiwi, come on, focus… focus… there! Now that I have your attention, I’m going to explain how it’s going to be. You owe me. You will continue working for me until that debt is paid, and you will do so happily and enthusiastically.” He said, and he forced her to look him in the eye, the left side of her face already swelling. “Do you understand Kiwi?”

Dazed, Kiwi tried to say something, but it came out garbled. Faraday sighed with frustration, before turning to the others, a put-upon look on his face. “Do you see what I have to deal with?” He asked, before his fist collided with Kiwi’s abused stomach again. She let out a piteous groan as she tried and failed to puke up what little was in her stomach through her mask. “Let's try this again. Do. You. Understand?”

“Y-yes…” Kiwi groaned out, barely, her voice feeble. Faraday nodded, and she was dropped unceremoniously onto the ground, where she curled up around her abused stomach. Faraday watched her impassively before turning to Noh and Lucy, who had done her level best to vanish from the room. Instead, Noh met his eyes with an icy hatred that Faraday could only sneer at.

“You’ll be paying as well. Plus extra for the attitude, ‘Noh’.” He said the name like it was something he scraped off his boot. “Do you understand?”

“Fuck you.” He hissed at the four-eyed fixer. “You’ll be paying for that. I promise you, Faraday.” The words were like acid, but Faraday just snorted a laugh. He shook his head, not quite willing to put himself into arm’s reach, but unimpressed all the same.

“You just… don’t learn, do you? So allow me to correct you, like the mutt you are.” In an instant Noh was screaming and seizing again as the goons holding him struggled to keep him up despite the violent shaking. Arcs of electricity crawled over his body and streams of lighting jumped from the top of his mouth to the bottom as he flopped around like a fish on dry land. Smoke drifted from his eyes, nose and mouth as Faraday pressed the button over and over again, cranking up the voltage as he listened to the man scream in uncontrollable agony, so much so that his joints started to glow from the heat. The light from the shocks cast shadows across the room from how much juice was pouring out of him, whatever leash the fixer was tugging at completely overloading his system. Finally, after what felt like hours, he released the button, and Noh slammed into the ground barely alive, much less conscious.

“The bill just went up again for his lip. For all of you.” The words were ice cold, as the two women, one from the ground, the other having stood very still ever since this whole nightmare began, stared at the smoking borg in contrasting horror. “I see you understand the position you’re in. The position all of you are in. You have no idea what her,” He spit on Kiwi’s prone form, “little fuckup cost me and my organization. The funds, the planning, the equipment, all of it gone to waste, all because she couldn’t just die like a good little pawn.”

“Useless fucking trash, all of you.” With that parting shot, Faraday strode out of the apartment. None of them moved, paralyzed by fear, by pain, or just outright paralyzed, even as the rest of the goons left with them. The last one out, the big borg with the blond flat-top, stopped at the door, looking back, clearly unhappy with something. He chewed on his thoughts for a moment as the three stared at him from their supine positions, and he looked at each in turn. Glancing out the door, as if looking for something, and then finding it, he focused in on Kiwi.

“This was nothin’ personal. Just biz. Remember that.” He rumbled in a deep baritone, and then he was gone.

Eventually Lucy gathered herself up enough to go fish out a pair of BounceBacks from the medical kit under the sink, but it was barely enough to get the badly beaten woman and the heavily tased man into some semblance of function again. Both were in rough shape as the small woman did her best to drag Kiwi onto the couch, followed by Noh, feeding them another BounceBack in the process, this one showing much better results. Slowly, the two recovered, and Lucy, despite not being either of their biggest fan right that moment, glad that she wasn’t stuck alone with a pair of crippled runners.

Laying there next to Kiwi, Noh couldn’t help but seethe, as Lucy got her stuff and made herself scarce. Kiwi herself had been silent through the entire episode, and if he hadn’t been barely a foot from her, he wouldn’t have noticed the pained look on her face, or the tears beaded in the corners of her eyes. She was far away now, her mind elsewhere, the toll of the fixer’s surprise visit had had on her, and how shaken she was by the whole thing. There was something there, he knew. You don’t get people like Kiwi without some trauma, though once more, the hows and whys of how he knew what he knew sitting in the back of his brain, even as he psychoanalyzed her.

Faraday had done them both an injury. Lucy escaped unscathed, but was clearly shaken. Kiwi would recover. Eventually. So would he, as the numbness faded from his limbs, but neither of them would ever forget this. No, they would remember all of it, and one day, some day, he would make that four-eyed fuck eat those words, right before he slit his throat from ear to ear. Because it was like the old saying went, never do an enemy a small injury. Noh didn’t know who said it, but there was a truth there, and he would remember.

He and Kiwi both.

“Fuck fuck fuck!” Lucyna Kushinada said under her breath as she hammered away at the terminal, her wired link to the unit heavy as she forced herself to concentrate in AR, playing meat runner and trying not to look suspicious as she did so. She hated this shit. Hated it so much, but there was no time. That Bitch had managed to catch up to her last hidey hole and forced her to abandon it with almost everything she owned in the process. She didn’t know who the merc was that had been tracking her across Europe, but they had been relentless, zeroing in on hideout after hideout as Lucy tried to put some kind of semblance of a plan together, her already dwindling funds barely enough to give her a coffin in a tombstone motel and some kibble to keep her going.

That had been the last six months. Find a hide, try to get some jobs, do some work, make some cash. Either on the net or running the edge, but whenever she thought she had escaped her past That Bitch would find her and it would all start over again. And Lucy didn’t even know how she managed to track her! She’d gone to rippers and had them dig around inside of her for bugs, she’d opened herself up to Skylight to see if there was some kind of digital flare on her, but nothing. She was either just that sloppy, or her hunter was just that good. Maybe both.

But that didn’t matter now. She had come up with a last ditch, desperate effort to break free. She had made a friend online, a netrunner named Kiwi who had seemed nice and was willing to give her advice on occasion. It was a longshot, but maybe she could give her someplace to hide too. Tracking her down was a big no no, a violation of the runner code, since they weren't enemies and weren’t in competition, but she did it anyway. Kiwi had good trace protection, too, but Lucy was Lucy. Running her down wasn’t the hardest thing she'd ever had to do, and maybe Kiwi would be okay with it when she explained the situation? From what she knew of the woman she’d gone through a hell all her own, so maybe she’d understand.

But the problem, as with all things, was getting to where she needed to go. Kiwi was in Night City, in SoCal. She was currently hiding in an airport terminal in Vladivostok avoiding the roving mercs that had been hired by Arasaka to find her and doubtlessly bring her home. She had lucked out in not being home when they hit the little hole in the wall she’d staked out, but that left her running scared in the Russian winter. And if the name didn’t give it way, it was Fucking Cold, capital letters included. 

Lucy didn't really have the time to come up with something better than this particular hail mary, though, which sucked all kinds of dick. It wasn’t like she could try selling herself or her skills with That Bitch on her ass from Florence to Paris to Kiev. She had hoped that putting half a planet between them would be enough. No, it had to be enough, because despite the total shitshow her life had become in the last decade, she had been at least passingly happy.

It had all gone wrong so fast, and it had just kept going wrong from that point on. She had built a life, one away from the eyes of Arasaka and their pervasive reach across the planet. She had finally started coming to terms with the horror that was her childhood, and had been accepted into the underground as a skilled netrunner. Then her team had been ripped apart by a Black Ops squad on a milkrun, her friends tortured for her location, giving her barely enough time to grab her bug out bag and wipe her accounts, and from there? She’d seen every miserable alley, burned out building and stolid cesspit Europe had to offer, and all the worst kinds of scum in between. If they weren’t after her organs, or her chrome, they were after her ass, literally, because she was cursed with those youthful good looks that made her seem just shy of legal that most of the trafficking strongholds in the new-old Soviet Bloc nations coveted. She’d killed… a lot of people, from shady coyotes to would-be pimps to a dozen shifty gang bangers, all of them eyeing her up like a piece of meat.

America had to be better than that. And she absolutely did not want to put herself at the mercy of her captors, so when staying wasn’t a choice and hiding was just a slow roll of the dice, leaving was the best possible option. Which is how she found herself wedged under a desk in a Russian airport at two in the morning. Because the fuck she could afford a goddamn international ticket. And even if she could, it wasn’t like the NUSA were particularly welcoming. Gone were the days of green cards and safe immigration. She needed a ton of paperwork to go anywhere, even in the areas that were only paying lip service to the greater whole. Shit, the Republic of Texas tended to hang border jumpers as spies on principle.

She had to sneak on, and the plan, such as it was, was pretty simple. There were a number of SovOil flights heading out to Night City, and getting onto one couldn’t be that hard. She would ship herself there. The big ultra-jumbo haulers were weighted to the ounce, but adding an extra package, like say, herself, and then slipping in a few lines of code to adjust the automatic fueling and countercheck systems to ignore the discrepancy was much more doable. Of course those systems were airgapped. She had accounted for that, slipping in like she did.

She wasn’t expecting the depths of security between her and the terminal she needed, though. She didn’t have the time for something fancy, so hacking cameras, causing distractions, and doing a lot of crawling around in some of the most disgusting drainage systems around the traffic control tower were par for the course. But she did make it. She even managed to get to the server terminals without setting anything off.

That was about when things went to shit, as one might expect. It wasn’t even her fault. She had been perfect, far as she could tell. No, a faction of Russian Vory had been caught on the runway  for the same fucking jumbo she had been angling to stow away on. When she adjusted the system for herself, it reset the tolerances, revealing sixty tons of pure opium that a bunch of gangsters were loading onto the back end of the plane. This, of course, summoned the local security forces, who, given that this was a major airport, consisted of ex-military security contractors armed with automatics, explosives, and a fucking battle-borg with a small tank cannon strapped to it’s arm to engage the dozen strong syndicate operatives.

Then someone fired a rocket into the plane, fucking her own plan in the ass and forcing her to exfiltrate. Finding the passenger liner she did was a small miracle, as it was prepping to take off, a little firefight on the adjoining runway not enough to justify delaying what were certain to be some very rich people who paid very good money to fly out of Russia. She quickhacked a panel in the bottom of the plane open, slipped in, buried her ass in the deepest part of the aircraft she could find and hoped that nobody cared to check out the extra sixty kilos of girl that had been added to the cargo hold.

She had planned to hide out there, and that had almost killed her outright. As it turned out they didn’t pressurize the cargo hold and a combination of the air thinning out and the frankly sub-zero temperatures that were even colder than the Russian Winter had been bad, but the pressure change left her bleeding out her ears as she desperately forced herself to crack four different firewalls to access the crew storage area. She had also barely quashed the alarm that the pressurized part of the plane was exposed to the unpressurized part, which it absolutely was not supposed to do. All in all, wedging herself in the cabinets and hoping that nobody needed the napkins she was tucked behind was the best shot she had.

That had somehow worked. She was free and clear to Night City ten agonizing hours later, slipping off and out of the airport with as much grace as her filthy, sweaty, half-frozen ass could manage, and off to find Kiwi’s apartment.

Then the psycho bitch’s door mounted proximity mine had almost blown her rather pretty face all over the wall across from her apartment and the rest was history.

000

Lucy picked at her bowl of lukewarm cereal as Kiwi sat across for her, a distinctly unimpressed look crossing the chemical blonde’s barely expressive face as she stared at her. The cyberpsycho with the sword was standing not far behind, watching the two of them as he are one of those flavorless nutrition bars that the older hacker seemed to have stashed away nearly everywhere in the apartment. Not that she had room to complain about that, having, you know, tracked her down, broke into her house, and set up camp like the world’s sexiest squatter. In her defense, it had only been a couple of days, and she could pay for the food and the water, at least. Assuming Kiwi didn't just have her killed by her pet lunatic.

Admittedly if Lucy had known about that little detail she might have risked setting up camp somewhere else. What was even with that? The gonk sniffed her out like some kind of bloodhound and then instead of investigating or asking questions of anything else, he chose violence and almost skewered her through the forehead. Nobody could blame her for pissing herself when that happened. Nobody expects to get a fucking katana through the door until it actually happens.

Kiwi was admittedly less than impressed.

“So let me get this straight. Based on bare bones location data, with no plan, and no money, you hacked your way onto a suborbital, hid in a storage cupboard on the jet, escaped through one of the wheel wells, and then tracked down my apartment. From there, you disabled the six daemons I had guarding my door access, disarmed the directional mine, added yourself to my security turret’s FOF, tapped into my FoodBinge account and bought yourself breakfast.” Kiwi said, in the flattest deadpan she’d ever heard. “We only spoke three or four times on the net. You had nothing but a masked handle to go on, and to be frank my cybersecurity is fucking spectacular. I would be more pissed if I wasn’t so goddamn impressed.”

“So are we keeping her?” The psycho asked, amused, as Kiwi’s head shot around to glare at him. “Come on, Ki, I don’t know what half that shit means and I’m impressed.”

“Shut up, Noh.” She snapped, and Lucy almost giggled. Almost, because one of those purple nails was between her eyes in an instant, with the older woman not even looking at her. “You too, squatter. I still have no idea how you got through my netcurity. You will be explaining that when we’re done here, and then I have a date with my ripper, and both of you are coming with me. You,” she looked at Noh with a cutting glare, “Because your dumb ass needs to be checked over, and you,” she eyed Lucy, “Because I don’t trust you to run up my fucking FoodBinge account. I’ll figure out what to do with you later.”

“She’s so mean. Isn’t she mean, squatter?” He asked Lucy in a put upon tone. Kiwi just stood up and punched him in the bicep, giving him a look before storming off towards her room. Lucy tried very hard not to stare at her ass while she stormed off. She hadn’t bothered to dress before interrogating the younger woman, and holy shit, that was a whole thing, because Kiwi was naked the whole time. She was;t gay, but still, hot.

Then the psycho, Noh, sat down across from her and put his sword on the table, shaking her out of her daze “So.” He started, “Whatcha running from?”

“W-what? What gave you that idea?” Lucy lied, badly. Noh just stared at her, finger tapping the sword. Tap tap tap, each one making her flinch a little as his eyes bored holes into hers. After a moment she cringed lightly and realized how stupid that sounded. “What gave it away?”

Noh paused, thinking about his answer, before seeming to find the words. “Look, I’ve been running from or to something ever since I met Kiwi.” Technically true. “And I like to think to myself that I know what it is that looks like. You dig?” He asked, and Lucy nodded along, as he leaned back, watching her like a particularly large owl would watch a mouse it wasn’t sure it was ready to eat yet. She had seen it in a documentary once.

“Good. So my question is this, squatter. Is whatever you’re running from going to knock down a wall and come charging in in a couple of days looking for your pale ass?” He asked, almost casually. She felt the edge in his voice, though. “Because that would really harsh my chill, you know? It’s been a rough couple of days.”

“N-no? No I don’t think so?” She hated how unsure she sounded, and Noh sighed. There was a flicker of movement, and in an instant Jucy’s chin was held in that iron grip, the tall man looming over her as he forced her to look up into his cold eyes. In that instant, her entire spine locked up as he leaned down, into her bubble, and her jaw creaked from how hard he held her.

“I don’t think we’re communicating clearly. So let's try again.” He said, and Lucy tried to pull herself out of his grip, to little effect. Her hands came up to grab his arm, wishing she had the eddies to have gotten those monowires she wanted, “When I ask you if your problems are going to become our problems, I need an answer here, okay? Not your best guess.”

“Nuh!” She finally forced out as his grip slowly tightened, “Nuh, ‘ey wunt!” Lucy grunted when she realized that he wasn’t going to let her go. He just cocked his head, like some kind of demented bird, studying her, and her jaw was slowly beginning to creak under the strain.

“Let her go, Noh.” Kiwi said, from behind him, and the pressure was gone immediately. “The fuck was that?” She had thrown on some kind of netsuit under a red coat that was really very striking and Lucy would have appreciated that if the bottom half of her face wasn’t throbbing in a very unfun way.

Noh, for his part, was entirely unapologetic. “What? You gave me the nod.” He said, almost whining. Kiwi stared at him like he was a particularly dim bulb, before sighing.

“That was the ‘keep an eye on her’ nod, you gonk. Not the ‘rip off her lower mandible’ nod.” She said with an almost growl, before turning to look at Lucy, “I’m sorry for him, he’s like a third of a human being on a good day.”

“Hey fuck you, Ki. I’m at least half.” He grunted, before something occurred to him. “And I could have sworn that was the mandible nod. We really need to work on our nod communication. Shit’s confusing…” He grumbled as he stalked off to go grab his coat.

Kiwi just sighed and shook her head, as Lucy stared from him to her and back again, because honestly? That went better than she thought it would. Last time she pulled this stunt she got shot, so hey, improvement. Granted that was bullshit, Noh was one bad nutribar from murdering everyone probably and Kiwi, who she had kinda hoped would be sympathetic, both wasn’t and also a crazy nudist. But she hadn’t officially been booted, and she hadn’t been stabbed, despite Noh’s apparent best efforts, so she could work with that. Probably.

000

Her time in Night City, or rather, the week she’d been there, had been both horrifying and highly educational. It wasn’t the lawless hellpit that had been the Time of the Red, but the signs of it only just being a bit past those dark days were all around. The sheer amount of homelessness was shocking, but statistically Night City was considered to have around forty percent unemployment, and people had to live somewhere. Usually in a combination of encampments, shantytowns, dump-adjacent land or Pacifica, which had an unusually high crime rate for Night City, which Lucy felt said everything she needed to know. She had also seen no less than fifteen dead bodies, two abductions, nine murders, and all manner of depravity and deprivation besides. Drugs, prostitution, flesh trafficking, chrome trafficking, theft of every flavor, and all of it underpinned by a society that took its vaunted Second Amendment with an almost monomaniacal focus. Everyone had a gun. Everyone. That had been a shock, seeing a woman not much larger than she was hauling a full on assault rifle down the street without anyone batting an eye.

Given her European origins, that was a hell of a shock. She had gotten a personafix chip to hide her accent while she acclimated, but the sheer shock of every man, woman and child carrying some kind of iron had shaken her worldview. Shit, she passed by a Kang Tao advertisement talking about how their latest .22 subcompact was perfect for a toddler-sized shooter, and to buy now, buy early, and buy often. It was almost as pervasive as the sex ads, which, her first Chromanticore ad had been wild. That thing was just… right fucking there, in her face.

But that was besides the point. Back in the EU it had been rare to see anything more than a pistol outside certain very specific instances. She had avoided the loud jobs like the plague, even though they tended to pay better. She was never terribly comfortable with violence like some of the others she’d known, not that it was any kind of hindrance to her pulling the trigger. It was mostly just a preference thing. Here, that was the preferred way of life, and she knew she’d have to evolve to survive it.

Which brought her to her two erstwhile companions. Kiwi was someone she had misread, badly. The two had shared a lot online, enjoying the kind of anonymity that you could only get from a stranger. Despite Kiwi downplaying things, they had been messaging a lot, when Lucy had the chance. She was the closest thing the netrunner had to a friend, which was why she had thought this was perhaps doable, showing up out of the blue like she had. She had thought that would be enough to get her some kind of in, but that wasn’t the case. Granted, Lucy had gone about it pretty badly, but hell, what choice did she have?

She… probably shouldn’t have hacked her FoodBinge account. But she was starving, nobody was home, and she couldn’t have accounted for Kiwi apparently being out on a job for the last several days. Or that she would apparently have an input? Or a… pet? She wasn’t really sure what Noh was. Kiwi never mentioned him before, but he followed her around like a giant, murderous lost puppy. Not that that wasn’t a whole thing on its own, but while she had been forced to reevaluate Kiwi, he was a wildcard that threw everything else out the window.

The fact that he reminded her of some of the scarier borgs she’d ever met wasn’t a point in his favor, and while the whole byplay between the two of them seemed almost playful, something about it was… concerning. Like there was an undertone of seriousness to Noh’s whining, where he really did think Kiwi had sicced him on her like the bad cop in a period crime drama. She had no doubt that he would have ripped her jaw clean off if he thought he would have had to, and given that her handful of attempts to scan him or ping him had come back blank was even more worrying. If he came after here there was literally nothing she could do to slow him down except beg Kiwi for mercy was almost worse than the feeling of being hunted across Europe. And given that she knew Kiwi’s home address, she was fairly certain that just taking her leave would be off the table.

It wasn’t like she had anywhere else to go.

“So what’s the dealio, Ki? Where we goin’?” Noh asked, as he munched on another nutribar, his fifth one in an hour. He was feeling peckish, so sue him. “Figured you’d be making sweet love to a pillow right now.”

“I would be, if I didn’t have this fucking polyp on my neck.” Kiwi sighed as the three walked down the street. “I can’t even call my bike with this thing plugged in.” The masked woman groaned as rubbed her face. “Sooner it’s gone the better. Fortunately I know a guy who’ll see walk-ins and isn’t a total fucking skeeze. ‘Bout as back alley as it gets though.”

“Oh?” Noh asked, curiously as Lucy watched his gaze land on three cyberpunks wearing Maelstrom colors. They didn’t seem interested in anything but the fire barrel they had burning though, and she could almost see him dismiss them as they walked. He had been training behind Kiwi and in front of her, almost orbiting the two of them with a hand on that katana of his. Not that she blamed him. Twilight in Night City was not someplace she wanted to be out alone, and even their little group felt a little too exposed to her.

He didn’t seem to be too bothered, and Kiwi seemed oddly comfortable despite the several gangers that seemed to infest the Kabuki district, if her internal map wasn’t wrong. Most of them seemed to mind their own business, though they had been followed for a block by what Lucy was fairly certain were Scavs. They had been a problem in Europe too, especially the closer she got to Russia, but here they were like roaches. Nobody who knew really bought the whole ‘independent’ line that they tried to sell. Everyone knew they were fingers of the Consortium and anyone with sense knew not to point it out.

Either way, Noh spotted them out pretty quick and they seemed to find something other than them to care about. One of the small advantages of having someone who was obviously a Borg in the group. Nobody wants to fuck with one if they don’t need to. At least, that was what Lucy had thought, before reading about Maelstrom during her research. Just the idea of a borg gang sent shivers down her spine, given their relative rarity in the EU. It was just one more thing for her to get used to.

“Yeah. Vik’s good people, even if he’s kinda preachy sometimes. Doesn’t cut corners like that fat fuck Ryder.” She shuddered, lightly. “Prick tried to slip some watchware into my optics a few years ago, claimed it was a mistake when I called him out on it. He was too well connected for me to do anything about it though.”

“That sucks.” Noh hummed, in a way that Lucy didn’t like, and Kiwi stopped and looked at him with a gimlet eye.

“No, Noh. I know that tone, and I don’t need you making waves.” Kwi said, staring, and for a moment he seemed to freeze, before shrugging.

“I didn’t even say anything, Ki. I would never.” He lied unconvincingly, but Kiwi just sighed and let it go. “Following your lead here.” He said, giving her a wide grin, and Lucy could almost see his priorities shifting. It was so damn weird to see from the outside, and she didn’t know if that was just his normal, but Kiwi didn’t seem to notice, so she let it go unsaid.

They were weird with each other, even though it was a comfortable weird. Lucy had spent years mastering the art of reading people, she’d had to, and these two were throwing up all kinds of signals that left her more confused than anything. Maybe it was a sex thing? She knew a few guys like that. Big, scary motherfuckers that could rip a man in half, but liked to be led around on a leash and given headpats and shit when they weren’t actively murdering something to death.

She didn’t see the attraction, but this was America. People were weird here. Her friend was weird, her murder puppy was weird, and this whole city left her feeling weird too, because this wasn’t the worst neighborhood she’d ever been in, but the whole place felt unfamiliar and unwelcome. Night City was a new jungle and the closest thing she had to an ally hadn’t had time to process that she kinda sorta broke into her house. Being fitted with a jammer made some sense, and also told her that Kiwi had not had a good time on her last job, and that shit would hit the fan once she managed to get that off her and get a real night’s sleep.

Lucy just hoped that she would get to stay the night in the meantime. Honestly she wasn’t sure what Kiwi would want to do with her now that things had come to a head. They hadn’t really talked much outside of the older woman taking the time to listen to her sob story, and then leaving her to Noh. She was fairly certain if Kiwi wasn’t thinking of something else that she would have been kicked out then and there. And hey, if she wanted Lucy to work to earn her room and board then she would. Lucy was good at what she did, she could be useful.

“Welcome to Misty’s Esoteri- Kiwi!” Lucy was torn from her thoughts by the bubbly cheer of a rather energetic blonde woman in a spiked necklace, who had all but pranced forward and taken the tall woman’s hands in her own. “I haven’t seen you in weeks! Where’ve you been?”

“Misty.” Kiwi nodded, letting herself be dragged deeper into the shop, leaving Noh and Lucy to share a look before he strode after her. Looking around curiously, the small woman picked up one of the small crystal statuettes, carved in the shape of a yin/yang symbol. The walls were lined with them, of all different types and denominations, along with hanging scrolls, and even what looked like real, actual bonsai trees. Along the furthest wall stood one of those new-age cyber-Buddas that had started cropping up in recent years, not just in Night City but worldwide, though Lucy still didn’t know what that was about. It was still eyecatching, and for a shop talking about esoterica, a bunch of crystals and statues weren’t the worst thing the young woman could be selling.

“-need to see Vik, if he’s in, sorry. I need to get something looked at.” She heard Kiwi as she followed along, finding the three out in the alley behind the shop. “Job was kinda rough, you know?”

“Of course, yeah! I’m sorry things went rough. Lemme just…” Misty’s eyes had lit up for a moment, before she smiled at Kiwi. “He can see you now, yeah. You got lucky, he was about to pack up.”

“Had to happen eventually.” Kiwi said with a bit of a wan tone to her voice. “Noh, I’ll see if Vik’ll check you out once he gets this thing off me. Don’t get lost. You too, Kushinada.” She called over her shoulder as she headed down the stairs with a wave, leaving the three to stand there awkwardly. Lucy rubbed her arm as she glanced between the two, not really sure what to say. Fortunately, Misty came to her rescue.

“So!” Misty clapped, “Can I get either of you something? Tea maybe?” The question was delivered with the same endless enthusiasm as Noh followed along behind her, Lucy following in his wake.

“I could have some tea, sure.” Noh said, and Misty nodded, prancing over to a small tea pot she had bubbling away on a hotplate and leaving the two to stand there, Noh just seeming to fall into some kind of rest mode while Lucy kind of shifted away from him. He glanced at her immediately, with a raised eyebrow, leaving the pale woman to blush lightly and scowl, more at herself than him. She knew better than to let that kind of thing show.

The seconds dragged on as the two watched Misty, before Noh glanced over to stare at the cyber-Budda, before looking back at her. “It wasn't personal.” He said, finally, startling Lucy. She glanced at him and tried to figure out what brought this on.. “Really, it wasn’t. Been a rough few days. Lots of people chasing us.” He grunted. “Been on edge.”

“I get it.” Lucy sighed. “I don’t care. It’s fine.” And that should have been the end of that, but Noh kept looking at her. “What?”

“Nothing.” He said, but he kept staring.

“No seriously, what is it?” She asked after another moment, her hackles rising.

“It’s nothing.” He said, before turning back to Misty, who had been making her way back with a few small cups on a tray. “Thank you, Misty.” The tea was warm, and smelled excellent, rich and earthy to Lucy’s nose, but she kept peeking at Noh from the corner of her eye. Christ, he was weird…

“So how do you know Kiwi?” Misty asked, and boy wasn’t that a question that caught Lucy’s attention. She’d been curious too, but had been hesitant to bring more attention to herself by prying. She knew he had to be a new addition, or Kiwi would have probably mentioned him. She’d never been shy about talking about other edgerunners she’d wound up working with.

“Recent addition.” He sipped the tea, “This is good!” He blinked as he looked at the cup in his hand.

“Glad you like it, it’s a bitch to get in and twice as expensive, but I refuse to compromise on my tea.” Misty laughed, before glancing around at the shop. “So what do you think? I’m always interested in what new people think. Like it?”

“It’s different, I guess. Seems to mix and match a lot, though. Religious iconography, vaguely Asian tapestries, bonsai everywhere. Nice vibe, weird execution, I guess.” Noh shrugged, and sipped his tea. Misty chuckled at that, instead of taking offense, and in doing so raised Lucy’s estimation of the woman just a bit. She didn’t seem like the type, but you never knew.

“Fair, fair. When I got started it was a little more… directed, I guess, but I’ve had to adjust to the theme to fit the clientele. Lots of different ideologies and beliefs in NC, yanno?” Misty said, stepping over and picking up something from a table with her cash register on it. Holding it up, the two saw the tarot deck in her hand. “Like these. You’d be surprised how many people want to get a reading, and I like to think I’ve gotten pretty good at it.” She gave him a sly look. “Think you might wanna give it a try? First one’s free.”

“Says the dealer to the junkie.” Noh snorted, getting an eyeroll from Misty. “But sure, why not?” He said as he stepped over to her table, seeing her shuffling the cards. For all the setup, Noh had to admit she was pretty slick in her execution, as he slid into the seat across from her. “So how does this work, exactly? Need me to say some magic words or something?”

“No, nothing like that,” Misty said, giggling, “Just relax and let me do my thing, k?” She asked, and Noh tilted his head curiously as she shuffled the cards again and again. There was something almost mesmerizing watching her fold the cards together, the deck stretching long in her spiderlike fingers, each card dancing across the others. She was good, real good, Noh realized, as he watched her shuffle, and on and on it went. Five, six, sevenfold, the cards were folded together, and then…

“The Tower, upright.” The card slid out cleanly, sliding onto the table like a serpent. “Ominous. It symbolizes the upheaval or the new order and the remnants of the old. Something that was there before has crumbled, changed forever into something radically different.” Misty frowned. “But more than that, it feels like… what was old isn’t gone, just swallowed up under the surface. Deep depths hide old secrets, roiling and ready to rise again, at the right time.”

She drew the next card slowly, and glanced at it as she set it down. The black, skull-faced figure stared up at her, upside down, facing Noh with its forked tongue and raised blade. “Death, reversed…” She went quiet for a moment, pondering it, before she spoke again, in a hushed tone. “Death isn’t an end, but a sign of change. Reversed it implies stagnation, a refusal to change, a… sense of being trapped, in between states. You’re pulled between the currents, trapped by something you can’t escape, not easily. It’s like you’ve been entangled, choked by the cocoon of who you were and who you’ve become. A half-life, in other words.” She looked at him, really looked, and seemed to see something that made her look away.

She drew the third card quickly, setting it down. The picture of a man, hanging by his foot met Noh’s gaze, and for a moment, he thought he could see himself, the cable wrapped around his own leg, hanging him high over the abyss. He blinked, and the image was gone, just a picture on a card, but Misty’s lips cut a sharp frown as she began to speak.

“The Hanged Man, upright. The card signifying sacrifice, surrender, the pause before a fall, and the brief moment of hesitation before being sent on the path of death and rebirth. I… I don’t understand this one.” Misty said, as she leaned back. “I’m sorry, but the path here is muddled, like it’s not supposed to be the right card, but it’s the one that was drawn. Like it’s not supposed to be yours. The Hanged Man is indicative of the road ahead, but it feels like this was your past, like it had already happened, and the echoes of it are all that remain.”

“Weird.” Noh said, hiding his thoughts behind a vaguely amused hum. Misty shook her head, like she was trying to clear it. “So that’s it?”

“Well… no. There’s supposed to be one more draw but that last one was… I dunno. I might have messed it up. That can happen sometimes.” Misty shrugged. “It’s up to you though.”

“Eh, why not. What’s the harm?” Noh asked, giving her a grin. Misty shuffled the deck again, and gave him a grin, though it was less confident than before. She still drew the last card, but there was a caution there.

“The Devil, upright.” She said, with a breathless sigh, as the grinning face stared up at them all, its red eyes glowing almost ominous under the dim mood lights of the shop. Misty didn’t say anything, and a moment passed, then another, then a minute, and Noh glanced up at her, only to see that her face had gone pale. “Symbolizing corruption, bondage, addiction, obsession, power and entrapment. For you it… it tells me that you’re consumed by something. Tangled up by something you can’t control, that you don’t understand, not yet. But whatever it is, it’s got its claws in you deep. Something exists within you, an anchor, holding you under the water, keeping you from being able to even see the surface. Finding it and severing the chain is the only path you have forward.”

“Well, shit.” Noh said, leaning back. “That was pretty heavy, huh?”

“I’m sorry, genuinely.” Mistay said, and she sounded like it. “I’ve never gotten a reading that dark before. I hope it didn’t worry you.”

“Nah, it’s fine.” He waved her off, standing. “Shit happens, but I don;t really believe in that kinda stuff. I have to admit, that was a neat trick with the shuffling though, really got me invested.” He turned to look at Lucy, who had drifted away to the massage chairs that sat along the far wall. She seemed rather content relaxing there, under the humming ministrations. He rolled his eyes at that.

“Trick…?” Misty seemed to chew on the word, before shaking her head, “Sorry, yeah I’m still pretty new to the whole reading thing, so I probably got a bunch wrong. Tell you what,” She said, gathering up the cards, “Come back some time later and I’ll give you another one on the house, k?”

“Yeah, alright. I can do that.” He said, stretching, as he spotted Kiwi making her way back in, the woman seeming to be in a better mood than she had been in days. “Hey Ki. How’d it go?” Kiwi looked at him, before glancing to the insensate Lucy, before looking back at him.

“It was fine. Vik had the defroster for the jammer’s ICE on hand. The thing was a piece of shit that apparently barely managed to keep functioning. According to him it would have basically broken on its own in a couple of days.” Kiwi sighed, before kicking Lucy in the leg, jolting her back to reality. “I see you’ve gotten comfortable. Get up, I need to get you checked for trackers and I need to get him deloused.”

“I’m not a dog, Ki.” Noh protested to nobody as Misty tried to stifle a giggle behind her hand. “Besides, if I had fleas you’d be crawling with them by now.” The tall man said with a wry grin.

“Don’t remind me. Now up you get. I need to have a word with Lucy.” Kiwi waved as she sent him off. Noh just shook his head, already getting used to Kiwi’s tendency to roll over whatever he might otherwise say, knowing it was pointless to argue. She was the expert after all. He gave the three women a parting wave as he trundled out back and down the stairs, finding a sliding gate already open and waiting for him.

Stepping inside he found himself looking at a rather nondescript and surprisingly organic man in his late fifties, dark black hair slicked back and a rough five-o-clock shadow on his face. He turned to Noh from what looked like a boxing match on a small TV in front of him, the highlights muted. “So you’re the stray Kiwi picked up. Noh, right? I’m Viktor Vector.” He held out a hand, and Noh shook it. For someone with barely any chrome, Noh was almost surprised by how firm his grip was.

“That’s right. Apparently Ki thinks I need some… delousing, was the word?” Noh hummed, and Viktor gave a laugh. “I’m not sure if I should feel offended at that.” The laughter came natural to him, and the grin easy. The ripper looked at him with a hiked eyebrow, as he led Noh to the chair.

“Don’t take it personal, son. You must be new to’ve never heard the term before.” Viktor said, as he slipped on his ripperglove, the needles and sensors built in flexing and pulsing as he shifted his hand. “Delousing is just what they call a bug check. Make sure you aren’t running any spyware or transmitting anything your friends wouldn’t want you to. It’s not uncommon for new… members, shall we call it, of the community to pick up a few unwanted hanger-ons in their early career.” He said as he hooked a cable into one of Noh’s ports.

“Far as it goes,” He continued, “Your ripper should have been doing this for you as a courtesy, since most of the stuff you’ll run into is off the shelf and just needs a quick wipe to clear out. I can tell you’ve had some work done, and at a professional grade, so I’m guessing it’s less you being new to the game and more you being new to town?” Vik asked as Noh felt something roll over him, and his HUD lit up with a notice that there was a diagnostic running from an outside source. He let it through with barely a thought. Kiwi trusted Vik, and he trusted Kiwi, so it was probably fine.

“You could say that. Ki picked me up on her last job and we seem to work well together.” Noh said, barely paying attention to the rolling data that had started rolling over his vision. Vik hummed thoughtfully as he watched the screen next to Noh’s head, his lips etched into a frown. “Is that unusual?”

“For Kiwi? Maybe. She’s not the most social of people.” Vik said as he leaned back and started typing on a tablet out of Noh’s line of sight. “Say, would you mind doing something for me while the diagnostic runs? It’s just a little exam to measure your cyberware compatibility.” The ripperdoc added another cable to the first, before typing another note. “Just something I like to do to get a baseline for your neural load. It’s all above board, just a pretty standard questionnaire, but it’s been useful in keeping all your thinking bits working.”

“Yeah?” Noh asked curiously, and blinked as a form popped up in his ARO. He glanced over it, reading the questions and noticed that most of them were very vague, possibly on purpose, and almost all of them were just some kind of word association. How do you feel about tulips, one through ten, or what comes to mind when you hear the word poop. Silly things that made him roll his eyes as he ran through it. A hundred short questions, and most of them were nonsense.

“Pretty silly, right?” Vik asked after a moment, “You’d be surprised to find out how much it might tell you about your Humanity index though.” The word sounded odd to Noh, and he glanced over at the older man curiously.

“Humanity?”

“It’s the generally accepted term for your cyberware compatibility.” Vik said, typing a few more notes, his face cut in a frown for a moment, before smoothing out. “Wen you get cyberware, a lot of the processing load is dumped into your hindbrain, letting the old organic processor take off some of the stress. Problem is that those processes can interfere with things like emotional regulation and memory. Turns out you can only handle so much information going in before it starts to leak into your thinking brain. You start acting less human, hence, your Humanity.” He said. “Cyberpsychosis is the result of losing too much of your humanity, but that’s more of a catchall term for the rampant buildup of mental disorders that can hit you when your brain is spending too much time and energy trying to make your eyeballs shoot lasers.”

“Ah. Makes sense, I guess.” Noh said, going back to the exam. “Gues this is supposed to give you an idea on how much I can take.”

“That’s the idea, Noh. I’m not like some of those scav rippers who’ll load you up with shit just to come back after you pop and try to recollect their investment, yanno? I like repeat customers.” Vik chuckled, and Noh nodded along. “Besides, Kiwi’s been coming to me for a while. She paid well to get you sorted out. Plus I kinda like her, so I’m grateful you pulled her ass out of the fire.”

“She told you about that?” Noh asked, surprised. Vik just chuckled at the question.

“Not in so many words, no, but she gave me the highlights. Seems you made an impression.” Vik said as he drifted off back to his diagnostic readings. “Huh. This is weird.”

“Hm?” Noh asked, turning his attention back to the boxer. “What’s weird?”

“I’m not… sure? I’ve never seen ‘ware like this before, kid. It’s throwing up some weird readings.” Vik said, frowning. “Did you finish that assessment yet?”

“Uh… yeah.” Noh said, feeling a bit off center, as he sent the form back to Vik. “The whole thing was pretty simple, like you said. Is everything okay? That isn’t a ‘everything is copacetic’ face, Viktor.”

“No, yeah… it’s… Noh, do you mind if I ask where you got this stuff put in? I understand needing privacy in this line of work but I uh… I feel compelled to ask.” For the first time, Vik’s easy demeanor was all business, and that set the other man on edge. “Some of what I’m reading here doesn’t make any kind of sense.”

“Wish I could tell you, boss. Kiwi didn't tell you just how we met, did she?” The question was loaded, Vik could tell, but he shook his head. “Let's just say I’m suffering from some memory problems.”

Vik was quiet for a long minute after that, staring at the screens in front of him, before he sighed, leaned back and rubbed his eyes, before steeling himself. “Noh, I don’t know what to tell you. I ran these diagnostics half a dozen times, and all the readings are coming back the same.” He said, before spinning the screen to face the bearded swordsman. “Take a look at this. This is a standard human brain. When we put in neuralware, generally we hook trodes and inlines directly into various parts of it, to increase functionality. It’s the most invasive type of cyberware you can get, because every direct line exponentially increases the load. Following with me?”

Noh nodded, as Vik continued. “Even the most invasive neuralware, Speedware, or Doll Suites, only replace fragments of the brain, using nanoprogramming to reroute brain function from meat to metal. Generally this is incredibly traumatic to the brain’s tissue if abused, causing actual burns from overheating and cooking your noggin in the process. It’s why Dolls generally have a shelf life of a few years, before they either need to get rid of the Suite or get turned into a particularly animated vegetable. Generally you lose between three and five percent of the brain this way.” Vik then flicked the screen, showing another brain, this one covered in strange splotches and partitioned up like someone had cut it up and dropped the chunks into their own little boxes.”

“This is your brain, Noh. Whatever cyberware you’re running, whatever was done to you or how it was put in, I can’t say. You’re missing more than forty percent of your grey matter, and what’s left is a mix of tumor-riddled slurry and threaded with nanofilament wire. If you hadn’t strolled in here on your own power, I wouldn’t believe this was anything but somebody’s idea of a sick joke.” Vik said, as he shifted the data stream to show how everything looked, and it wasn’t even recognizable as a brain any more, just a contoured mass of meat shaped to fit into a skull.

“So I should be a vegetable, is what you’re saying.” Noh said, finally.

“No,” Vik said, staring at him, “No, what I’m saying, kid, is you shouldn’t even be alive to begin with.”