December, 2076 - Night City

  The air changed on the way down. Wet synthcrete first, then spilled liquor, sweat, cigarette smoke and underneath all of it something chemical and sweet that no amount of renovation would ever scrub out of a building that used to store bodies.

  Zara took the stairs two at a time, boots ringing on metal grating. The bass found her before the music did – not sound yet, just pressure, pushing up through her body. Then voices layered over it, dozens of them, the low commerce of people who killed for a living conducting their biz in the only bar that mattered.

  The Afterlife.

  She'd pictured it. Lying on her back in her Heywood shoebox-sized flat after her mother's funeral, staring at water stains on the ceiling, no eddies and no future, only debts and unpaid rent. Cheap hotel sheets that smelled like disinfectant and someone else's cologne, learning what her body was worth when everything else ran out. Stacking empties behind the bar at Coyote Cojo while mercs talked about the jobs they'd run. Sitting on a rooftop in Watson after the crew's third successful gig, Kai's chemical enthusiasm painting the night six different colours, and Zara thinking: we're going to make it there. We're actually going to make it.

  Three and half months later, here she was. Here they all were.

  The corridor opened and the Afterlife filled every sense at once.

  Neon green – soft, diffuse, the glow that gave the place its permanent underwater light. The bar ran the full length of the main room, bottles backlit against panelling that still showed the faint rectangular outlines of mortuary cooler doors. Booths lined the walls in the open diner style – no partitions, no privacy, because in the Afterlife you wanted to be seen. Smoke from a dozen substances hazing the air in layers, ventilation struggling to catch up.

  And mercs. Everywhere. Subdermal armour visible at necklines, smart-linked weapons mag-clamped to thighs, cyberoptics cycling through spectra Zara couldn't see. A woman in a far booth with enough chrome to set off a security scanner from across the street, laughing at something on her agent while two solos flanked her. These were the people who got the preemest contracts, the fattest paydays. The ones who'd made it. Major leagues.

  And Zara Morrison, nineteen years old, four months running a crew she'd built from nothing, was in the same room breathing the same air.

  Best night of her fucking life.

  "Holy shit." Kai's cybernetic eyes were cycling so fast the colours bled into each other. "Boss lady. Boss lady, that's – do you know whose booth—"

  "David Martinez." Of course she knew.

  "David fucking Martinez!" Kai was already moving toward the booth, drawn like a magnet. "Maine's whole crew. They all sat here. They named a drink after him, Zara."

  "They name drinks after dead mercs, Kai."

  The booth was empty. Kai dropped into it before Zara could object, running his hands across the surface like he could pick up residual data from the table. Zara shook her head but slid in across from him. Crew leaders faced the room – she'd figured that out watching people who knew what they were doing.

  Diego settled beside her. His gaze moved – entrance, service corridor, fire door behind a support column – and his shoulders dropped a fraction. Wire's version of making himself at home.

  Kai was already scanning the drinks menu projected on the table surface. "They have a David Martinez. Zara. They have a David Martinez and we're sitting in his booth."

  "Order it and shut up."

  He moved to the bar, ordered three — one for each of them. Diego caught the barmaid's eye separately, pointed at a tequila bottle behind the bar. No words required.

  When Kai came back with their booze, Zara let herself have thirty seconds. Just thirty. She looked at Kai – vibrating, chrome eyes cycling through overlays, grinning so hard his face might split. At Diego – solid and quiet and here. Her people. Her ridiculous, brilliant, dangerous people, and she'd brought them here.

  Then she pulled up her agent.

  "Right. Business." The holo display painted her fingers blue. "Remember Nyx? From the Velvet Room?"

  "The girl with the Maelstrom input?" Kai leaned in. The fanboy vanished. This was the other Kai – the one whose brain worked when it latched onto a problem.

  "Ex-input. The gonk dumped her last week. But not before she'd done something clever – or stupid, depending on how you look at it." Zara grinned. "One of the Velvet Room's regulars is Militech. Serious braindance habit. Comes in twice a week or whenever pressure in his pants gets him. Bring work with him. Last week, Nyx slipped a scrapper she got from her Maelstromer into the suite's hardware – pulled the handshake data from his agent when he jacked-in. Login credentials, authentication tokens. The full set."

  Kai's optics flickered like they’ve just rebooted, and not from the stims. "Militech access credentials. On a shard."

  "Except the Maelstrom gonk took it when he ghosted on Nyx. Walked out with it, dumped her, and brought it back to his pack at the old Zetatech air filtration plant off Pershing." Zara pulled up a map.

  "Then it’s gone and she what? Wants some gonk vendetta? "

  "Nyx encrypted it before she handed it over. So even Maelstrom would need to spend time chewing on it. But the encryption won't hold forever." Zara killed the map. "So the clock's running. And here's the thing – I already have a buyer."

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  Kai went still. Even Diego shifted.

  "Fixer named Arthur Cormac. Works for Militech competitors. I reached out yesterday, tested the water, and he bit hard. Harder than I expected." She paused. "He thinks we already have the shard."

  "But we don’t!"

  "Not yet."

  "Zara—"

  "He's offering fifty K, Kai. Fifty K for one shard. We get it from the Maelstrom hideout, deliver it to Arthur, and that's twice as much as our biggest score ."

  Silence. Then Kai grinned – the sharp, reckless grin that meant he was in. Dieago was listening silently. He poured himself tequila and was nursing the glass in his paws - one organic one black matt chrome.

  "So what's the play?" Kai asked.

  "Nyx has been to the plant a few times with that gonk." Zara pulled up what she had – rough layout, nothing precise. "Perimeter's wired. Maelstrom hardened the whole facility after they moved in – turrets, sensors, the works. Local network's locked down tight, no wireless access. But there are drainage tunnels running under the east side. Nyx says her ex used them as a shortcut when he didn't want to deal with the front checkpoint."

  "So we go in through the tunnels," Kai said. "Bypass the perimeter entirely."

  "That's the idea. In through the drainage, grab the shard, and—"

  "You'll die."

  The voice came from behind her. Female. Flat. It cut through the Afterlife's noise the way a monofilament wire cuts through everything – without effort, without caring what was in the way.

  Zara turned, mouth already shaping the fuck off—

  The woman sat alone at the bar, two metres away. Close enough to have heard everything. She wasn't looking at them – her attention was on an agent balanced on the bartop, both hands resting in front of her.

  Both hands. That's where Zara's eyes stuck.

  Chrome fingers. Actually chrome - articulated metal from the knuckles out, the joins to flesh so clean they were invisible. The green light caught in the surface with each micro-movement. A faint tap as one finger touched the bartop – a sound almost musical.

  Raven. The fucking Raven.

  Silver hair swept to the back, both temples shaved close to the skin. Geometric patterns climbed her neck and spread across the shaved temples - likely high-end subdermal hardware, the kind only corpo executives and top-tier mercs could afford. Pale skin. Silver interface ports glinted at her right temple. The rest of her was lean and angular, dark synthleather jacket over something fitted, heavy boots, the kind of outfit that sat between netrunner and street without committing to either.

  "You got something to say about our job?" Zara's voice came out harder than she intended. Good. Better than starstruck.

  Raven didn't look up from her agent. "The drainage tunnels. Maelstrom sealed them with shaped charges two weeks ago. Pressure plates in the floor." A pause. "You'd have made it forty metres before the ceiling came down on you."

  The booth went quiet. Zara felt it spread outward from her sternum – cold, specific.

  The drainage tunnels were the plan. The entire plan.

  "How do you know that?"

  "Because it's the only approach that works without a netrunner, and Maelstrom's security isn't stupid."

  "We'll find another way in," Zara said. Because she wasn't going to sit there looking rattled in front of a legend.

  "There is no other way in. Not without someone inside their security architecture."

  "I've got a new bypass module that—" Kai started, bouncing forward in his seat.

  "Will trip their countermeasures before you clear the first junction." Raven's tone stayed level – conversational, almost bored, like she was discussing the weather. "But please, don't let me keep you from your planning."

  Zara sat with it for two seconds. The smart move was to say thanks, take the intel, regroup. That's what a reasonable crew leader would do.

  "Fuck it."

  She was out of the booth and at the bar before the thought finished forming. She grabbed Raven's hand and shook it.

  Raven's head snapped up. Silver eyes – the irises a colour that didn't exist in nature – locked on Zara's face. The chrome fingers twitched against her palm, warmer than metal had any right to be.

  "Zara Morrison, leader of the Neon Phantoms." Zara pumped the hand hard enough to move Raven's whole arm. "You know the facility, you know the tech, and you're obviously between jobs or you wouldn't be sitting here. Want in?"

  Conversations nearby dropped to murmurs. Heads turned.

  Raven looked down at where Zara still gripped her hand. Chrome fingers resting in Zara's grip, neither closing nor pulling away. Then those silver eyes came back up and her expression locked into something Zara couldn't read – no anger, no amusement, just a stillness behind those optics that gave back nothing.

  "You're offering me a job." Not a question. "A Maelstrom raid. For fifty thousand."

  "Split four ways, but yeah." Zara let go. "Unless you've got something better lined up?"

  Raven glanced at her agent. A message pulsed red on the display – overdue, by the look of it – before she tilted the screen away.

  "My client is running late. Again."

  "So kill time with us. Worst case, you get some entertainment watching us plan our deaths. Best case, you make twelve and a half K for one night's work."

  Behind her, Kai made a strangled noise.

  Raven studied her. Those silver eyes moving across Zara's face, her gear, her posture, all of it. Taking inventory of a nineteen-year-old street kid from Heywood who'd just grabbed a legend by the hand and asked her to come play.

  "You have no idea who I am."

  "Sure I do. You're Raven. You cracked Biotechnica's core when no single netrunner was supposed to be able to do it. You walked through Arasaka's black archives and came back breathing. Corps hire whole security teams just to war-game how to keep you out." Zara shrugged. "You're also sitting alone in a bar waiting for some asshole who doesn't respect your time enough to show up."

  A muscle in Raven's jaw moved once, then stilled.

  "The facility runs on a hardwired network. Every turret, every sensor, every lock — all on the same closed system. I'd need physical access to a jack-in point. Anywhere on the network."

  "So we get you in."

  "Through Maelstrom patrols. Past their sensor grid. Without starting a war."

  "We're creative. Ask anyone." Zara grinned. "Well. Don't ask the Tyger Claws. Or Sixth Street. But everyone else."

  "Jesus." Raven shook her head, but Zara caught the corner of her mouth twitch into what might have been a smile. "Fine. I'm in. But we do this my way, or we don't do it at all."

  "Deal." Zara stuck out her hand again.

  This time the chrome fingers closed around hers. Firm. Deliberate. Warmer than metal had any right to be.

  "When?" Raven asked.

  "Tomorrow night. Midnight."

  "Of course it is." She looked past Zara to the booth. "That your crew? A techie running hot on stims and a solo who looks like he's killed more people than he's had conversations?"

  "Hey!" Kai called out. "I'm only recreationally addicted!"

  Diego nodded once. Looked like he took it as a compliment.

  Around them, the Afterlife's noise settled back to its normal pitch. Tomorrow, every merc in Watson would be talking about how some nobody crew had talked Raven into slumming it for pocket change.

  "Your client's definitely not coming," Zara said. "Drink with us? Kai makes cocktails if you don't mind mild neurotoxicity."

  "I only use premium neurotoxins!" Kai called from the booth.

  Raven looked between them – this crew that had no business being in the same room as her, let alone the same job. Her expression was still unreadable.

  "One drink," she said. "Then we plan how to keep you idiots alive long enough to get paid."

  They walked back to the booth. Zara caught her reflection in the metal trim behind the bar – huge grin plastered across her face, eyes bright. She'd just recruited a legend into her little crew with a handshake and pure nerve.

  Fuck, she loved this city.