There were a bunch of suits inside I didn’t know.

Two immediately drew attention. A man and a woman I didn’t know, arguing, from opposite sides of an obsidian table.

The woman had jet-black hair tied back in a severe knot, and eyes like chips of ice. The man, lean, broad-shouldered and of a similar age with the woman, wore a gunmetal-gray suit and had stoic, classically American features.

“I will not,” the woman hissed, “hand point over to you, Jenkins. Not after Zurich, not after the Cape Town fiasco. You are an incompetent. This is my operation.”

The man scoffed derisively. “Incompetent? That’s rich. You just lost half a dozen of our embeds in the Tyger Claws because of their entanglement with that pet project of yours, Jotaro Shobo. The Ho-oh club is a complete loss and you got practically the entire Kabuki district’s Tyger leadership killed because, what,” he laughed, “you thought Shobo was a profitable intel asset? Please. You’ve been playing soldier ever since Michiko gave you a long leash, and every time you strain at its limits, the company bleeds.”

…Michiko Arasaka? The board member? And fucking Jotaro? What the—who were these people?

Murmurs were arising among the other suits. I recognized V, none of the rest. As far as I could tell, it was all mid-level CounterIntel officers, field managers, legal counsel.

What was for sure was that no one else in the room was daring to take sides aloud between the two big swinging dicks. The tension was thick enough to chew.

That was when the woman’s gaze slid across the room—and landed on me. Her expression shifted, instantly, from venom for the man, Jenkins apparently, to disgust for me: like she’d suddenly seen a cockroach in her vicinity.

“Who are you,” she demanded, her voice like a whip, “and what are you doing here?”

Every eye in the room turned. The weight of Arasaka Counterintelligence fell squarely on me.

“Uh,” I grimaced. I’d been hoping for a better introduction than this. “The CFO gave me permission. Said I could contribute.” I texted her my credentials.

Her expression barely even flickered. She just turned back to Jenkins. “And under you, CounterIntel is apparently a home for every random misfit and stray in the company. We need excellence here, not random high school students—”

“Let’s take this outside,” Jenkins said to her, while giving me a quick, dismissive look.

The woman grimaced, but nodded. They both trotted out of the room. Most of the CoIntel people stared after them, but a few continued to have eyes on me.

I walked up to V and gave him a nod, doing my best to ignore it all.

He spoke quietly to me. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Serving the company,” I replied. “What did I just walk in on?”

He sighed. “A dickwaving contest between CoIntel’s two senior vice presidents. Arthur Jenkins and Susan Abernathy. They’re both jockeying for the position of overall Director of Special Ops, so things have been pretty tense.” Then he nodded at the other Arasaka suit he had been talking to. “This is Carter Smith, my assistant. Carter, this is David Martinez.”

“The racing legend,” Smith said, nodding at me. “Nice to meet you.”

“Likewise,” I nodded at him.

“No offense meant, but,” he looked to V. “Ain’t he too young to be doing this?”

“Boy wasn’t lying when he said his recommendation came from the top,” V said, fixing me with a look of… something I couldn’t quite make out. Was it approval or the opposite? Or perhaps both? V continued, “David here has intel apparently. He’s been working as an XBD broker for the better part of a year now, selling them from out of Arasaka Academy.”

Nanny manifested next to Carter, wide-eyed. [So much for trying to pull one over on Counter Intel. Holy hell.] She laughed.

The fuck?

“Don’t look surprised,” V said to me. “You thought you could operate an illegal enterprise in Arasaka Academy without us finding out, you’re dumber than I pegged you for. Only reason you didn’t get your ass thrown out was because none of those XBDs were bugged. You tested them all before you hawked them, right? That, and you ended up snatching up some high-profile clientele who’d have hated to have their supply cut short.”

“What does this have to do with the case? I’m missing something,” Carter said.

V looked at him like he was stupid. “Clearly. D sells XBDs of his romps through town. David’s been hooked up to D content for two months now. And according to the data, D just dropped some new content. And David here managed to snatch some stills of someone on the XBD chain.”

“And what does Counter Intel know about that chain?” I asked.

V shook his head. “We never had much cause to investigate until now, but we’ve got some people of interest currently. One of the primary pushers is a fixer known as Muamar Reyes. Know about him?”

I narrowed my eyes and nodded. “He goes by El Capitan, I think. He’s from Rancho.” I had never heard of him until after I started edgerunning, but apparently he had a pretty huge reputation in the streets. As far as fixers went, he was a more charitable type. A bit of a hard ass to people who couldn’t meet his expectations.

I’d never seen that side of him, personally. He was… kind of entitled, but ultimately a fair guy.

V narrowed his eyes at me. “He’s the only other guy who seems to have a contract with D’s BD techie for the high-res original cuts. How’d you get hooked up with them?”

“Through my first supplier,” I said, having had this story pre-prepared. “A Ripperdoc in Arroyo.”

“I know about him, too,” V said, “From when I looked into your enterprise. Dominic ‘Doc’ Brown. Sleazy backalley ripper that made a living by chipping in crazies and edgerunners until they cracked. He ran a shit practice, too.”

I nodded. “Paid good edds to have me push those BDs. Haven’t spoken to him in a while, though.”

“Not since your family back home in Mexico finally started sending you enough money to start blending in with the other corpo kids,” V said. Jesus Christ.

I hadn’t exactly been secretive about that cover story of mine. In fact, I had gone as far as to create GSS specifically to cover up my edgerunning income as money sent home from my family.

The cover worked, it seemed. But it was still somewhat rattling to see it in action. Who knew that maintaining a web of lies would be this stressful?

“Wait,” I said, as I noticed V’s wording on Doc. They knew he was dead, then. “What happened to Doc? Is he out of business?”

V snorted. “You can say that,” V said. “The gonk is dead.” He looked at me carefully.

I just shrugged. “That’s… rough.” I tried to affect an expression of silent remorse, but I found that to be rather difficult. Then again, even if I never had that falling out with Doc, I really doubted I’d ever be able to grieve his loss.

I had killed the man after he had betrayed me. Or perhaps it wasn’t an actual betrayal? Maybe he was just a bad ripper, and had done his best all along?

Incompetence was no defense. I really couldn’t regret that gonk’s death, no matter how hard I tried.

“You don’t look too broken up about it,” V said. “Thought you were partners.”

“We weren’t chooms or anything like that,” I said. “And truth be told, I never liked the guy. Do you know how he died?”

“Probably got his shit kicked by a disgruntled client. Then he got shot in the head. There was never any formal investigation. Only a coroner report. Open and shut case.”

“That’s Night City for you,” I muttered, having expected no different.

V nodded. “Who’d he hook you up with, though? Before he kicked it? D’s techie, or middle man, or whatever?”

“Wish I could tell you,” I said. “All I have are unknown numbers that call me, and I can’t call back. And the numbers keep changing every time. All I get are dead-dropped chips for my efforts. But at least it’s no-bullshit, compared to most other street people I got to deal with. Gonk made a mistake, though. They underestimated just how far I’d go to find ‘em.”

I took out a chip from my neck slot and gave it to V, who slotted it in and watched the video of Judy leaving the shards in the coin locker. “This ain’t D, that’s for sure,” V said. “Too small. Probably a woman. Five foot six, a hundred and ten pounds… gay.”

“How do you know that?” Smith asked.

V tilted his head to the side. “Way she holds herself. Way she walks.”

Nanny clapped her hands. [Give it up for Arasaka Counter Intelligence.]

What the hell.

V took out the chip and gave it to Smith, then refocused on me. “Good job.”

“What about Reyes?” I asked. “Should I go see him?”

“I’ll worry about Reyes. You stay away from those people,” V said. “He’s a frequent member of a place known as the Afterlife. A hangout for edgerunners and fixers. You must have heard of it by now.” I nodded. “And the Afterlife is aligned with D at the moment. Flipping them is a delicate process. Dangerous, too.”

“I’m fine with danger,” I said.

V widened his eyes at me, tensing his jaw as he did. “I’ll. Worry. About the Afterlife. You will do as you’re told. I don’t care if Saburo himself gave you a co-sign. You’re a rookie. Pipe down, and keep your eyes and ears open before you get your ass flatlined, kid.”

I nodded.

A red-haired woman with a long pompadour, and two sharp locks of tech-hair jutting out from behind her head to curve around her jaw, rapped a knuckle on the table. She sat a few meters away from Smith, V and I, but I noticed that she had been glaring at V for the better part of the last few minutes. “Share with the class, V.”

V gave me a call.

V: Those are Abernathy’s people

David: That makes you Jenkins’... people.

V: Precisely.

David: Which side am I supposed to take?

V: Don’t know. But you gotta pick. Fence-sitters don’t last long, either.

I looked around at the room.

David: And what about those guys?

V: Bystanders. Something you ain’t. You’re actually investigating with us.

I clenched my jaw.

David: Well, if what Jenkins said was right, and that Abernathy was behind Shobo, then the answer’s pretty clear to me.

V gave me a… look. I couldn’t tell if it was respectful or pitying. I tried not to look any deeper into it. Shouldn’t have opened my mouth, really, and revealed any true thoughts on the matter. Aligning myself with D through sentiment? What was I even thinking?

Dammit.

Carter Smith gave the woman my shard. The man next to her was a black man with yellow hair parted in three wide rows—not braided, just cut. He also wore a large tech visor with a red display over his eyes, and he had chrome for a jaw. I saw some metal peeking in the back of his neck, and immediately surmised that he was a Netrunner.

I scanned them both.

Kate Winslow. Douglas Decameron.

Kate slotted the shard in and concentrated. “What do you think?” she said to V.

“Thought for a thought? I’m already giving you the shard.”

She clicked her tongue. “You gain nothing from being difficult with me. You know as well as I do that Jenkins doesn’t stand a chance against Abernathy. You might want to start thinking about how to soften the blow of your inevitable fall.”

“You might want to start considering bringing your A-game for once,” V said. “How long have you guys been on the Goto case? No headway. Not even a clue about how anything went down—and it happened in the middle of a fucking freeway. What the hell is this, Kate? Amateur hour? Get a grip before you try to get lippy with me.”

All I could think of was how proud I was of that gig.

Good job on those cameras, Lucy.

Kate wrinkled her nose in disgust. “At any rate, it’s not up to you. It’s up to—”

Arthur Jenkins re-entered the room. “Something came up. Proceed to the task force meet without us.” Jenkins pointed at V and gave him a clear-eyed look. “Take point.”

I suppressed my own smug grin. V did not.

000

The big meeting room looked like any old classroom, ten rows of desks oriented towards a single direction, the edge of the room I had walked into. There stood a podium, around which milled about several corpos, most of whom I couldn’t recognize.

Except for one, really. Varian Freeman. That was a surprise, but I knew already that he was a few years older than me.

Around Varian were two suits, probably his Militech superiors.

And even though I was dead last in the procession of Saka suits making their way in, all eyes were immediately on me. Probably because I was, easily, the youngest person in the room.

I took a moment to take in every single person in the room to get a lay of the ecosystem. I couldn’t recognize most of them from their faces, but I could recognize their suits. Present were ourselves, Arasaka, then Militech, Zetatech, Biotechnica, Kang Tao, Night Corp, and a guy from the NCPD, standing apart from everyone.

“Alright,” V loudly addressed the room. Kate Winslow spared him a glare of wrath for a fraction of a second, but she didn’t push the issue. She couldn’t afford to visibly struggle for power with a colleague, in front of their competition. I knew she was probably biding her own time. “Everyone take a seat. This meeting has officially begun.”

It had begun almost three minutes ago. But V had insisted on us arriving fashionably late. Though in his words, he was waiting for people to get impatient for a start, while also accounting for other latecomers.

Evidently, his instinct had been on point. All the corps were present and accounted for.

I took a seat in the front row, next to Carter Smith. As far as corpos went, especially spooks working Counter Intel, Smith gave me a good feeling. At the height of V’s bickering with Kate, the man had taken me aside gently to explain the rules to me in a way that V had simply neglected to, for no reason.

“Don’t get too nervous, kid,” Smith said. “Intra-department rough play is exactly what it is: play. In your case, just keep your head low and ask V for orders. Don’t go running off on your own. And don’t talk to Kate or Douglas, alright? They’re just gonna confuse you.”

I honestly couldn’t tell if he was being condescending or just gentle. I wasn’t about to lower my guard around him, but he didn’t seem like he was gonna screw me over.

Before any of the other corpos could refute V’s self-imposed position of authority, the man gestured towards the NCPD officer. “Over there is Captain Tyrese of MaxTac. Captain, why don’t you come and introduce yourself?”

The captain, dressed in plainclothes, stood up and walked up to the front next to V before addressing the room, introducing himself, and giving a few words about what the NCPD currently had on D, which was predictably very little.

Some Biotechnica guy leaned forward, his expression harsh, mocking.

“I don’t want to hear more complaining from MaxTac,” the guy said. I scanned him nonintrusively. Johnny Alto, apparently Biotechnica’s head of security. Interesting. “You dumbasses got called out twice to put down D when he was on the field and you couldn’t even get close enough to ID him. All I want to hear from you is that you’re getting your fucking jobs done and finding him! What else are we even paying you for?”

Captain Tyrese’s jaw clenched. He looked like he wanted to immediately argue with Biotechnica’s guy but had to force himself to go slow and stay reasonable.

“Maybe you don’t understand the way jurisdiction works in this city, Mister Alto. MaxTac doesn’t just do as we like.” Captain Tyrese started pacing, his expression frustrated. “We need coordination with NCPD Dispatch, and as you know, Commissioner Fawlter’s bureaucracy is stretched thinner than a razor. Half his people were privatized away this calender year, and they were already shorthanded. Just getting a line through to share intel on D is a nightmare,” he spread his hands, trying to look reasonable, but the heat in his eyes was clear. “MaxTac puts down problems on the street, we don’t sift through needles in this haystack of a city to find them. If you want this done more efficiently, then shove this problem back down where it belongs—on Fawlter’s desk, and then call us when it’s time to put down the perp.”

Harsh glares met him from around the world. Even I could tell that was the wrong thing to say.

Kate Winslow, Susan Abernathy’s person in CoIntel, lashed out at the man.

“Stop fucking around, Captain. NCPD already transferred jurisdiction up to MaxTac. That’s you. Not Fawlter, not his skeleton crew, you. You’re on the hook. So quit playing hot potato with this investigation before Arasaka decides to take a second look at our part in MaxTac’s budget.”

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Tyrese’s nostrils flared, but before he could retort, the lead woman from Militech spoke up.

“MaxTac’s record doesn’t need defending, but I’ll do it anyway.” I scanned her as well. Meredith Stout, apparently. “Why? Because Militech opposed your city council’s dumbass privatization of the police force, for precisely this reason: now you people are lobbing the consequences of your bad choices onto MaxTac, a force that was never designed for this kind of sweeping investigation.”

“Says the company most to blame for MaxTac’s incompetence,” Zetatech’s representative sneered. “MaxTac is majority a Militech outfit.”

“And? What does our connection have to do with anything?” Stout sneered at the Zetatech guy in turn. “Any Night denizen can point out the obvious: that MaxTac responds when no one else dares.” She looked around the room, her expression challenging. “This D is a menace to the peace, far more dangerous than garden variety psychos tripped up on too much chrome. MaxTac has to deal with psychos like that every day, and the fact that they keep walking away alive is proof they did their jobs. But you all need to remember what their jobs actually are.” Stout eyed not just the Zetatech guy, but also Winslow and Kang Tao’s representative in turn.

Behind Stout, Varian Freeman nodded. He leaned forward, his expression cold, and did something I hadn’t expected him to. He opened his mouth and spoke. “Don’t forget who keeps this city from turning into a scav theme park, Zetatech, Arasaka. Do not test Militech’s patience.”

Numerous intel figures eyed Freeman with hostility. “Kid,” Kang Tao’s representative said, a Chinese man with a long beard, I didn’t have a clue who he was. “I don’t care who or what you really are. Lucas Harford’s special assistant to the board has no standing to speak here except if invited to do so.”

“Enough,” V said, voice even but carrying over the room. “Settle down, people. MaxTac isn’t here to play tug-of-war with Fawlter’s bureaucracy. Biotechnica isn’t here to posture about contracts. Militech isn’t here to defend its toys.” Winslow opened her mouth, then closed it. She looked at V with a bitter look, but he went on, no one interrupting him. People seemed relieved that someone, anyone was taking charge of this fractious circus. ”We’re here because D has humiliated every single one of us, had the confidence to strike at Night City’s true powers. Had the arrogance to flaunt it by selling recordings of his braindances during his gigs. This cannot stand. Remember what we’re here for, all of you.”

Johnny Alto leaned forward. “Big words, Arasaka,” he smiled thinly. “You lot better have brought something to contribute here, then.”

V smiled thinly at him, a predator’s smile. “As a matter of fact, we did. Did you?”

A holo projector jutted out from the ceiling and projected a scene between V and everyone else. It was the footage of Judy, but the projector had taken into account all the disparate video angles to create this three-dimensional projection.

It was an imperfect one, and I could tell that for the places with less comprehensive coverage, generative algorithms had done the heavy lifting in filling the blanks.

The subject, Judy, was clear as day. Her dimensions, at least, if not her exact features.

“This is our first lead. A member of D’s XBD production ladder. Perhaps she’s a gofer? Perhaps she’s actually the techie in charge of converting D’s virtus into watchable XBDs? Whatever she is, things will get clearer if we find her.”

The projection showed new faces. “These are the fixers of the Afterlife—the facilitators of this city’s edgerunner subculture.” I could spot quite a few familiar faces, and quite a few that weren’t so familiar.

My eyes caught on one old latino who looked strangely familiar. Before I could think too hard about it, V magnified Reyes’ likeness. “This is another lead. And the highest member of D’s XBD production ladder.”

“Done!” Johnny Alto said. “We bag him, and we’ll be home in time for dinner.”

“You bag him and you’ll be eyeballs up in mercs,” V said. “You do not want to wage war against the Afterlife. Not while they’re exhibiting these levels of organization.”

“Arasaka’s right,” Stout rolled her eyes. “We’ll need to get classic before we can do something so bold. Standard cointelpro measures. Infiltrate, disrupt, discredit. With emphasis on the latter. This movement won’t be worth anything if faith unravels.”

“Fuck faith,” Alto growled. “Let’s just go in there and kill them all. We can do it. With MaxTac, we can do anything! When they get up off their lazy asses, that is.”

“Absurd!” Kang Tao’s man shouted. “You would risk all-out war against yet another gang? Lose yet another district to these miscreants? I need not remind you where this Afterlife is located: Watson. We all rely on Watson for our heavy industries.”

Zetatech snorted. “Pacifica happened for entirely different reasons. They try to pull that anarchist shit in Watson, it won’t even be a fucking contest. Calm down, old man.”

The old man swore in Mandarin.

The room broke out into shouting, conflicting voices overlapping and adding to a meaningless cacophony.

Night City. Even at your wealthiest, at your most resourceful, you still find a way to just collapse into chaos and idiocy.

I fought to keep myself from grinning, instead just silently listening, trying to absorb as much as I could from the noise, just to ascertain everyone’s general positions. Biotechnica’s desire to go scorched earth, Kang Tao’s pleas for caution, Militech’s desire to go back to traditional counterintelligence tactics—

BOOM.

The entire room immediately fell deadly quiet.

In V’s right hand was an upturned Malorian Overture revolver, barrel smoking from the bullet that had just been shot into the reinforced ceiling. The bullet had only dug an inch into the nu-concrete, and the surroundings barely even looked cracked, but the noise had blasted through the entire room, and stilled every tongue mid-wag.

“A corporation was burned to the ground. Hundreds died. And yet, here we are. Fighting. Like children. We can keep bickering. Or—we can try something radical for the standards of megacorps. Cooperation. You all remember what the word means, right?” V’s eyes roamed the room, inspecting and dismissing each of the corpo intel representatives in turn. “It means we pool intel, resources, manpower. It means we put aside whose logo gets the credit until the job is actually done. Because if you can’t even manage that, then D isn’t the only joke in this city.”

It dawned on me then, as I sat and watched as V delivered some sermons and continued impressing upon the crowd the importance of cooperation and unity in this mission—this motherfucker was real as could be.

I was… unused to finding people of high competence. My entire ascent to where I was now could be attributed to taking advantage of and manipulating people less capable than me. My greatest challenge yet had been none other than Hiroto Nakamura, who was a genius racer and an undisputed champion of his field. In order to catch up to him, I had sacrificed a large portion of the Sandevistan’s remaining duration, and I had almost died for it, too.

V was everything I had imagined a full-blown Arasaka suit to be, months ago when I had nothing to my name: omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent.

That was just the fear talking. I knew I had one up on him. For now, at least.

But I was beginning to doubt the solidity of my plan to take charge and mislead the task force. It… wouldn’t fly. Not with a guy like this at the helm. The best thing I could do, for now, would be to simply act within my role, and use whatever intel I could get my hands on to ensure that they would never catch me.

I had to take this ten times more seriously than I initially expected to. Only way to survive this.

V, having put the meeting on its rails, continued unimpeded for the next ten minutes, presenting Arasaka’s intel and taking questions without any disruption. I could tell that the gunshot hadn’t scared these people as much as it had… inspired them? Between the gunshot and his words, the top of the agenda had stopped being individual egos, and it had transformed into the mission at hand instead. Finding D.

Finding me.

“All in all,” V finally said, “We’ve got a lot of leads to comb through for the time being, but we’ll be doing scutwork for the most part until D makes another move. But when he does, we’ll be ready. The more pieces of this jigsaw puzzle fall on our laps, the better. So. Anything else?” He waited for someone to speak up. “No? Meeting adjourned.”

Everyone stood up and packed up their things. The basic understanding, the division of labor, was thus: Militech and Biotechnica took point on investigating Tijuana. Biotechnica was already there in force to try and re-establish their Green Farm subsidiary.

Unfortunately for them, Militech was taking every opportunity to try and push them out of their niche by propping up their own food and fuel subsidiaries, in a bid to widen their influence on the Mexican border city. Fortunately for me, they weren’t about to accomplish much working together on account of that rivalry.

Still, I’d have to alert the family regarding their presence.

Zetatech, Kang Tao, and Arasaka would remain in Night City, the latter because they weren’t allowed outside the confines of the city. This was the coalition of corps that stood the highest chance of making headway into the investigation.

They were the threat. Them and V.

I walked up to V and asked, “what do you want me on?”

“Keep following the CCTV thread,” he said. “However far it takes you. This footage was from today. Here,” he said, before transferring to me a digital passkey. “These are the public cameras the NCPD uses. Get all the footage you can and comb through it until you find the person of interest.”

I frowned. “That’ll take all day.”

V grinned. “It’ll only take all day if you’re quick with it. You wanna be useful? Show the Ryuzakis that you’re not just some SCOP they can throw away? You do this, and you do this well.”

“And… you’re on Reyes,” I said.

V steeled his expression. “Don’t even ask to come with. This is real biz. Just do what you’re told.”

“Fine. Thank you,” I nodded at him. “I’ll get it done.”

He tilted his head towards the door. “Vamoose.”

I walked out of the room, and found Varian giving me a steely glare, arms folded. “You’re playing a stupid game, kid,” Varian said. “These ‘Saka motherfuckers are never gonna give you the time of day.”

I frowned. “Oh yeah? How do you figure?”

“Your eyes aren’t squinty enough. Your skin’s too tan,” he said.

I rolled my eyes. “You’re one to talk about inclusivity. You can’t go five seconds without spouting some slur or other.” I looked his black self up and down. “Skin-color notwithstanding.”

“One thing Militech doesn’t do is put glass ceilings on potential,” Varian said. “Look at our former CEOs. Rosalind Myers. Elizabeth Kress. Evander Hawthorne, a black man. We don’t care where you came from, what color you are, or whether you have a dick or not. All we care about is what you bring to the table. Those Japs, though? They’d probably nuke this city to protect their bottomline. Again. They don’t give a fuck about anyone from this continent. They don’t give a fuck about you.”

“Yeah,” I rolled my eyes. “Alright. Preem speech.”

“Look the data up, motherfucker. The Free States are worse off in every human life metric compared to the N.U.S. And Night City? It’s the shitcream of the shitcrop. You should know this better than anyone, and what, you don’t care?”

I frowned at him. “Why are you getting personal? You don’t give a shit about what I think. Look at you. You’re a fucking trustfund baby born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Your au pair wiped your ass with silk sheets while my mom had to dodge gangbangers living with me in Arroyo.”

He snorted. “Bringing up class is a bitch move. You’re dodging the question.”

I tamped down on my hot rage. “Read my lips, then: I don’t have shit to say to the likes of you.” Fucking corpo lecturing me about right or wrong. Don’t make me fucking laugh.

Arasaka was bad, but Militech wasn’t any better.

I shoved my shoulder against his as I walked past him. “Good luck on the investigation.”

000

V sat on the front pew of Heywood’s biggest Catholic church, listening to Padre deliver his sermon. He didn’t pay much attention to the details, however. They didn’t matter much to him. Religion had never been his strong suit.

It never would be, really. Not after all he had seen.

All he had done.

He interlocked his fingers, waiting for the sermon to pass. As he did, he did an approximation of prayer. Not a true one. He didn’t pray for his immortal soul. He didn’t believe in it, really.

Instead, he prayed for his success, and nothing else.

If God is real, he’ll listen to me as I pray for this one thing.

This one fucking thing.

“Amen,” Padre finally concluded.

“Amen,” the few adherents that had showed up echoed. “Amen,” V spoke a beat later. No one had noticed his lapse, however. No one cared. Not in this city.

He stood up, and approached the confessional booth. He sat down, and listened to Padre as he sat himself opposite to him and gave a brief word.

“May the Lord be in your heart and help you to confess your sins with true sorrow,” Padre Sebastian Ibarra said.

“I’m sorry, Padre,” V began.

“Don’t be. I know why you’re here,” he spoke through the pitch black mesh.

“Then. Let’s get right to the brass tacks,” V said.

“I cannot help you, V. I really cannot.”

“Of course,” V said. “But listen. You and I, we’re not so different. I want for the city to be peaceful. So do you.”

“You want to know who D is.”

That was the talk of the town. And Padre was too smart to miss out on that particular detail.

“I just want you to lighten my heart, Padre—if you can. What is he planning? Is he going to get innocent people hurt?”

“Innocent people… yes, to be sure. People will get hurt in the wake of his actions. That is unavoidable. Especially if he continues to act as an uncontrollable wrecking ball that simply crashes into everything that he does not like.”

So far, there was no conclusive proof that D had killed anyone that, frankly, didn’t deserve to be killed, in Night City at least. The corpses of a few bystanders had been recovered at a couple of the scenes, especially in the scav dens, but they had been dead for far too long to be pinned on D.

He kept a clean act. A precisely controlled one.

In Night City, at least.

“Is he Valentino? Or was he?” V asked.

“If he was, no one can say who it is, exactly. Though, there are some ghost stories circulating through the barrios.”

V furrowed his brows. “Ghost stories?”

“Some say that he is the vengeful spirit of a long-dead folk hero. A Valentino from the Time of the Red who fought alongside the legend El Sombreron. He wore a blue and red Luchador mask that covered his entire head, and went out every day to hunt criminals and gangsters that tried to muscle their way into our barrios.”

“What was his name?”

“Miguel Hernandez,” Padre said with a brief chuckle. “He never had any children, and he is also very, very dead. I saw that with my own eyes. But it is amusing to hear about old Miguelito once again. It makes me feel young.”

A dead end. Of course.

Padre wasn’t going to cooperate, then.

“What do you think, Padre?” V asked. “Do you think he can help turn things around in this city?”

Why did he ask that? Why was that any of his business?

He was meant to catch this terrorist, not sympathize with him.

He closed his eyes. All part of the process. This was good data, too: seeing where he truly stood with the people.

“Tijuana was… an atrocity,” Padre said. “Many of whom you would call innocents were killed on that day. People in your station. You… you have much to fear from this man. My advice? Find a way to get off this case. Even if it costs you your job. At least, you would have your life.”

The hell?

“You think he could kill me.”

“I think he would. Moreover, I think he would find a way to get away with it if he did.”

V frowned sharply. This wasn’t Padre’s style, psyching people out.

No, this was honesty, pure and simple. He honestly believed that D would do something as crazy as kill an Arasaka agent.

V made up his mind on the spot.

This merc was a shit-stirrer of the highest caliber. Fucking mustard gas, liable to destroy everything if he were to proceed unchecked.

If he was allowed to continue unimpeded, it would only spell disaster for the people of Night City.

“You think he’s that strong, huh?” V asked.

His mind went back to the surveillance footage recovered from the scene of the Green Farm incident. The uses of his Sandevistan that looked almost faked.

V felt a chill riding up his spine. Felt it in his neural link.

“I have said too much already,” Padre said.

He had.

Now he knew, D was rocking a Sandy that ran on something that might as well have been rocket fuel.

Fuck me.

“Thank you, Padre,” V said.

“You can thank me by heeding my warning.”

V stood up. “You know that’s not possible.”

“I know. You… sacrificed much to climb to the position where you are. You are the barrio’s pride and joy. From Vista Del Rey to Arasaka. You could not have travelled further if you had circumnavigated the globe.”

And that’s why it wasn’t possible.

Because he wasn’t about to stop climbing. Not now. Not ever.

000

“You know, I kinda missed this,” I said as I sat next to Lucy, on our shared computer desk, each of us scrolling through hours of footage at double speed.

“What?” Lucy muttered as she tracked the Orbital Air footage. We were working in a sort of pincer maneuver. She started at the end of Judy’s journey, and I started watching from the coin locker in Kabuki. Eventually, we would meet in the middle, and then we would have a complete story of where Judy had been today.

“Just us, working,” I said. “Sitting next to each other all quiet, all focused.”

She hummed. “It beats staying inside all day. You cranked this city’s thermostat up to a thousand degrees.”

“Working on it,” I said with a grin.

She chuckled dryly. “You know, this… isn’t how I expected I would spend my afternoon. Looking for the notorious D.”

“Where could he be?” I muttered. Dammit. Lost track of Judy again. Keeping an eye on her was really like finding a needle in a haystack at all times. Especially when there were gaps in the footage, and I found myself having to scour every damn camera that was likely to be on her way. The only reason I hadn’t lost track of her yet was because I knew where she was headed.

Since going to the coin locker, she hadn’t taken a straight shot to the airport. That would have been a lot easier on me. No, instead, she had gone home to pack up, then visited a phone booth, presumably to say her final goodbyes. I retrieved the phone logs, read through them, and then summarily corrupted every single one of them. No use putting Judy’s loved ones through screening. Especially if they turned out to have good intel after all.

This Lizzie’s Bar thread was… concerning. I’d have to figure out what to do about it for… the next two days, maybe. This surveillance footage scouring was a lot of work, after all. Even if it would only take an hour more tops for Lucy’s thread and mine to connect in the middle, by all accounts, this would have taken anyone else dozens of hours of singleminded dedication.

I had a lot of other things on my to-do list besides getting to the bottom of how much of a risk Judy’s circle was to me. Lucy had let me borrow one of Kiwi’s data bridges to remotely jack into Lizzie’s localnet. I found not a hint concerning my true identity. The surveillance footage got deleted on a weekly basis, and it had been months since I had visited. The Net chatter regarding Judy was varied, most of it leaning towards concern and worry. From all I had read of those chat logs—coupled with the phone calls she had made to a few of her friends—Judy had stubbornly avoided ever mentioning me.

All she revealed was that she was in deep shit, and that she’d reach out once she got settled somewhere else. And the responses were unanimously bewilderment and shock.

[This is clearly a trick, David. You must hunt her down and kill her.]

I sighed. Maybe I was being a bit too paranoid. I gave it a ninety percent likelihood that Judy had kept her mouth shut, but that was a ten percent likelihood that I might lose everything.

[Thankfully, your arbitrary percentage-based predictions of the future are exactly that: arbitrary.]

D: Get out of my fucking head.

[Show me the formula that you used. Show me your working.]

Ugh.

Maybe I was just desperately looking for reasons to fuck Judy over, because I wasn’t satisfied with the one I currently had: personal gain.

I really didn’t need this moral dilemma clogging up my mental bandwidth. Especially not in the wake of my growing to-do list, that involved icing Faraday, checking in with Rogue, investigating this Tijuana chatter I kept hearing about Maine joining GSS, and planning out this Biotechnica raid.

That wasn’t even counting the stuff I had going on in the corpo side of things: settling this QianT deal, figuring out my place in the Ryuzaki household, buying Nakajima out, getting on top of that fucking algorithm—

Where did killing scavs and gangsters even fit into this equation?

This fucking sucked.

“Hit the middle, finally,” Lucy said. “You there yet?”

Huh? I looked over at her deck. What the hell? It had only been two hours.

I cranked up the speed to ten times, and activated the Sandevistan. Not to its highest setting, but just enough that I managed to finish up on my part after about three objective minutes.

By the time I finally did meet her, having tagged the footage appropriately all the while, Lucy was already deep into some coding work. I looked over her shoulder and intuited after a few seconds that it was a breaching algorithm.

“Working on something bespoke that might tear through ‘Saka ICE in seconds if you ever manage to jack into a deep enough access point.”

I blinked at her. “Thanks.”

Her fingers paused, and she stared at me with steely eyes. “I’m not telling you to do it. I’m just giving you options here. You’re in deep, David. Those Arasaka suits…” I had showed her my optical recording of the meeting. It had put her in something of a mood. Not a bad mood. Just a work mood. It had wired her into the mind-numbing task I had given her, and she hadn’t complained even once during it all.

I nodded slowly. “Yeah. They’re the real deal. Especially that guy, V.”

“Not V,” Lucy said.

I blinked. “...Not V? What, did the redhead and his pet ‘runner trigger any alarm bells for you?”

“You already know everything you need to know about them,” Lucy said slowly. “Them and their employer. This V is someone you should get close to. Not too close. Just… close enough to keep him as a buffer for whatever might rain on your head from up above. Jenkins, Abernathy—these people are fucking monsters. They're the ones you should worry about.”

There was something she wasn’t telling me. I could see it, sure as the sun. But whatever secrets Lucy was still hiding from me, I’d be patient. If I ever needed to know them, in time, I’d know.

In any case: she didn’t have to say that again. I knew well just how fucking soulless those people were. To think that fucking Jotaro Shobo was just some corpo bitch’s side project.

“Share the doc,” I told Lucy. “Let’s work on it together.”

She didn’t tear her eyes from her deck, or even stop typing—with her right hand, at least. She reached her left hand over to mine and squeezed it gently. “Let’s make these fuckers regret ever being born.”