David snapped awake and knew -with instincts honed by a life in Night City- that something was wrong. But what?

His attention snapped from place to place. It wasn't the light slicing through the busted blind that refused to fully close. Not the pile of blankets that he'd brought to the couch. Not the wrapper of his dinner, eaten with the guilt of knowing his mom was probably starving and dehydrated by now. Everything else in the apartment was exactly as he'd found it yesterday, so wha-

The floors by the apartment door shifted and he had his answer. Someone was at the door. Someone was at the door and not announcing themself. Meaning they were about to scan the room, and after how many times he and mom'd done the same dance when they lived in Megabuilding H6, David knew exactly what was going on.

He grabbed the Sandy, the credchips, and his jacket, while rushing as quietly as he could towards the shower. Thankfully he'd been too distracted to replace the vent cover, letting him jump and scramble inside it just as he heard the tell tale whine of a shitty old Evictor © warming up.

Kicking someone out of their home could be dangerous work, and the low level corpos assigned to wreck a dozen lives a day knew it. Lucky them, they had devices tailormade to scan for bodies, weapons, and anything valuable enough to serve as collateral. Unlucky them, the Megabuildings were more interested in profit than keeping a few movers from getting zeroed, and people paid more for rooms they could hide contraband in.

In H6 that had been a maintenance crawl space that his mom had squeezed them into. This time he waited in the vent and muttered his thanks to whichever gonk had approved the lowest bid for H4's fittings.

After what felt like an hour, the drone of the scanner died down and he made his move. Slipping down into the room as quietly as he could, David moved fast. They'd be sure to log the scan before they came inside but that gave him minutes at best.

Just enough time to grab the things they couldn't replace, pictures and documents first, then with those chips thrown in a bag he went for what few valuables they had. Mostly that meant throwing the more expensive clothing into the same bag then grabbing their BD rig on his way to the bathroom.

Anything else, he left. All too aware of what would happen to the money he needed to save his mom if he was caught. Better to lose things than risk losing her.
David scrambled back into the vent, pushing the bag ahead of him. Then he twisted to hang down and grab the vent cover, pulling it up and into place until the fittings slotted back into place. Just in time, as the door cycled to open and he got the hell out of there. Scurrying through the vents like all the other rats.

He risked staying in them all the way down two floors, then got clear after his fifth close call with a vent fan. Popping his head out of a smashed vent cover on the edge of the central shaft, David looking around for any sign of extortion happy corpos, then tumbled out and nearly went straight over the edge.

Head and shoulders over the side of the shaft, David had a perfect view all the way down to the floor. He also had a firm grip on the strap of his bag, and with it still stuck in the vent he managed to pull himself back before he could slip any further.

'Gotta be more careful gonkbrain. You're the only hope she's got.' He got his breath back, not sure when he'd started gasping his breaths, and told himself for the hundredth time. 'You're chill. You're hard. You can fucking do this.'

Question was, David thought as he picked his way around the shaft and found a ladder up to nearest floor, what could he even do?

Sell the implant was an easy one, but even if he could get through to the asshole he was selling it to, he still needed to, huh.

'I should make a call.'

By the time he made it to the ground floor, hanging up as he got off the elevator, David was feeling just slightly more confident about his plans. He was also rapidly realising that he could not carry around a bag full of irreplaceable items as well as all his money and the highly valuable illegal implant. Not if he didn't want to get murdered for the whole lot of it.

So his first stop was already decided. NCART-Central, specifically the locker bank there. Anonymous and guarded by a couple dozen sentry turrets, it was the perfect place for stashing anything that the cops wouldn't grab on one of their 'random' scans of the lockers.

Since he doubted even the dirtiest pig would want any of their stuff, David was fine with paying a couple hundred eddies and stuffing the keyshard into his left sock. Since his right sock already had a credchip in it.

After another failed call to the contact, David left the main station, and lost himself in the anonymity of Night City's endless tide of commuters too poor -or too afraid- for the roads and not quite desperate enough to plug into a workpod twenty hours a day.

NCART might have been run by a corp, but it was one of the few public institutions worth a damn in Night City. Cheap enough that even the meanest ennie-counter would hardly notice the cost. Reliable enough for corpos with punitive late-for-work clauses in their twenty year contracts. Plus, every route ran fast and regular, with barely point two percent of riders being caught in crashes, station violence, or uncontained outbreaks.

Rumours that it was subsidised by other corps were common. Even at Arasaka Academy there were whispers that it was a conspiracy by those looking to keep their workers on time and living out of sight of their glittering penthouses.

Of course, at school those whispers were a lot louder when David was around, and only got louder each time he blew past everyone else to claim the top grade ranks yet again. He'd never minded. They were the kind of comments that he'd almost come to see as friendly, compared to the kind of shit Katsuo and his friends said anyway.

One more reason to stay the hell away from the place. He might be looking healed up, but he didn't need to hear whatever SCOPshit they'd come up with to 'explain' the injuries he was still carrying. Not to mention…

David fought not to look too angry at the idea of what might be said about his mother, his imagination feeding on all the many things that he'd already heard his classmates say about her. Looking too unstable was a good way to get the bad kind of attention on the NCART, and the last thing he needed was to be stopped for a 'random security check' at the next station.

Anyway, just like he was dodging paying rent, David couldn't afford to go to school and be forced to pay for the damages he'd incurred yesterday. Which left him with buying an all day NCART pass and trying to drag out the time until he hit the ride limit.

Three times around the city on their longest route and he still hadn't gotten through to his mom's contact. Though he had figured out exactly how long he could spend in a station before the system started pelting him with reminders to get on a train or fuck off. He was setting up a countdown timer on his cyberdeck when a flash of white in the corner of his eye blew every other thought out of his head, for the second time in as many days.

Only this time, when he jerked his head to get a better look, he saw her. The girl he'd caught glimpses of for the last few months. Standing in the station like she was just another gonk waiting on a train.

She was close enough for him to see that she had dyed a pale rainbow gradient into her hair, and for him to clock her as rocking a netrunner jumpsuit straight out of a Neomilitarist stylesheet, played off with cut away sections to expose her arms and thighs, and contrasted by her kitschy shorts and crop-jacket. The outfit was nothing special, but she made him look twice anyway.

Any other day and he would have walked over to her and shot his shot. Even if all it got him was a closer look at her it would have been worth the embarrassment, and David was no stranger to getting rejected. Not after years at the Academy, where the only time girls interacted with him was when they wanted something cheap and dirty.

Whatever they thought of him, he wasn't worthless enough to stuffit with the first corpo girl to make eyes at him. Or to try and flirt with a random girl when his mom needed his help. So David made a note of the station, just in case, and turned away.

Which is why he saw her move. Sheer dumb luck meant he was moving his head in the right direction to catch her abruptly slipping past a suit who looked just a bit too high level for the NCART, and snatching at the air with her trailing hand.

A picksocket. The girl he'd been dreaming of for months and she was a fucking picksocket.

Not that he was judging. It was just, not what he'd built her up to be in his head.

'And whose fault is that, gonkbrain?' Good thing he hadn't tried talking to her with that SCOPshit in his head. 'Gotta stop acting like a kid already.'

She'd vanished while he was beating himself up, and it was getting to be time for another journey if he wanted to keep blending in, so David pushed off the pillar he'd been leaning on with a heavy yawn, and immediately got lucky a second time.

As he reached back to stretch out his arms, he just so happened to feel the shard ejecting from his socket. A shard with several thousand eddies still on it.

He didn't hesitate, or even waste time turning around. He just threw himself backwards and to the side, aimed at his best guess at where she was, and was rewarded by a grunt of pain and the brush of a warm body against his. Then he was spinning to the side, his arms dragged up behind him and something painfully thin coiling around both wrists and his neck for good measure.

Not that she needed the monowire -'Holy fuck there's monowire around my fucking neck!'- when she clearly had enough muscle implanted to shove him around despite her slight frame. Before he could get his bearings she had hustled him all the way to one of the station toilets.

He caught the ping of her paying the fee, then the door was sliding open and he was stumbling through into the fancier class of public shitter. Meaning it burned with the smell of industrial cleaners and there were barely any vomit stains. David braced a foot on the opposite wall and tried to turn and face the thief.

The gun she put to his back stopped him in his tracks.

"The hell are you playing at, prep boy?" She sounded pissed, and when the mirror in front of them shimmered to reflective, he found she looked it too. "You wanna catch a bullet?" The threat of the monowire went unsaid, but he wasn't thinking of any of that.

"Give it back!"

Her smirk had the edge of a sneer, "Ooh, desperate boyo. You got something nasty on this shard?" She held up his klepped shard between two delicate fingers and her eyes flickered with the light of a scan while he fought the urge to try to grab it. "Wait." Shock slackened her jaw, "You have like five K on here." Then her whole face lifted into a grin, and some gonk part of him stared into the mirror and thought it was like watching the sun rise.

The rest of him jerked back against the gun and yelled, "I need that!"

She dug the barrel into his back, painfully, "Oh I'm sorry, was this your allowance for the week? You 'saka kids are something else."

"It's not like that."

"Not like what? A kid with an Arasaka Academy ID and a couple months of my rent on an unsecured credchip?"

"I'm not a kid! Or a fucking corpo."

"Hate to break it to you, but you ain't that convincing when you flash this kind of cash. Maybe try dressing down a little harder next time."

Then she pulled back the gun to pistol whip him, like he'd seen in a thousand BDs, and David could practically see how it was all going to play out. How he'd be left on floor, stripped of everything he had, by some picksocket who only saw a rare chance to fuck with an exec's kid. He imagined what would happen to his mom because of his fuck up.

And he moved.

The monowire didn't matter. He took the chance she had given him and lashed out with a leg that didn't go up nearly as far as in the martial arts BDs. Lucky him, kicking her in the shin worked too.

She flinched and he lowered his shoulder to charge and ram her against the door. Then he got punched in the face, and as he staggered back, she pressed her gun into the meat of his neck with murder in her eyes.

The monowire dug in enough to sting, and she cocked back the pistol's hammer with her thumb. "Any last words rich boy?"

David could barely feel the gun, or the wire, or the blood dripping from his nose. All he could think about was his mom on that bed with the jumpsuits gathered around to cut her apart. So, with no options left, he broke one of the cardinal rules of surviving in Night City.

He begged for mercy.

"Please. They're gonna kill her."

Where his protests and struggles had gotten amusement and anger out of the girl. Pleading made her rock back away from him, uncertainty in her eyes for the first time.

She scrambled for her composure a moment later. "What, your joytoy in trouble?"

"My mom." Again he saw his words hit home, though he resisted the urge to dive for the opening when she pulled the gun back a little.

"Your mom?" He could see her puzzling over it, trying to figure out what was going on. "An exec's joytoy then?"

"I'm not an exec's kid, or any corpo's, we ain't got shit." She glanced at the credchip that she had, like any true street kid, kept a firm grip on. "That's everything I could put together. After skipping rent."

"How do you explain the ID, if you're nobody."

"Scholarships, and my mom works like hell to pay the rest. It's her dream to see me- that's not important. Look, she got grabbed by scavs, and if I don't pay them off…"

Neither of them needed him to finish. Everyone on the streets knew what the scavs did.

But she wasn't done thinking. "If that's true, then this isn't everything, is it?" Despite himself, David knew he had flinched a little. "Nobody that dumb would have made it this far. You've split it up haven't you. Some in your account, some in credchips."

The credchip stuffed in his sock felt like it was ten times bigger all of a sudden, but her gaze was on his torso, irises spinning with the telltale sign of a deep scan.

"No way, is that a Sandevistan? Preem quality too. Stuffed in your…CityMed…jacket."

The gun came back up, and her eyes went cold.

"Your mommy's a scav. That's how she pays for you to be a prep boy, huh. Sounds like she's getting what she deserves."

"Don't you call her a scav!" Fury made him forget the pain, stepping into her space despite the gun pressing deep into his throat. "She's a Medtech to the core. Just recycled chrome from some corpses is all, she'd never slice anyone. No way in hell."

Her eyes were hard, but he made his hard too. He stared her down, until she blinked. Then she stepped back with a sigh and a shake of her head. Uncoiling the monowire from his neck and arms as she pulled her gun back to cover him from the hip instead.

"Damn. You're telling the truth aren't you." She lifted rueful eyes to look at him again. "Guess there are no easy paydays." Then she reached out, and with only a little painful hesitation, slapped his eddies back into his hand.

Determined to be chill after he'd made a fool of himself, and still a little pissed off at her accusation about his mom, David managed not to sigh in relief. He just nodded and played it off with a, "Thanks." If it was a particularly heartfelt thanks then, well he had run into someone kind enough to give the money back. Hard not to be emotional about that.

She shrugged it off, clearly as interested in forgetting about it as he was, and David found his eyes skating off to the side. They landed on one of the toilet's ad feeds, which had definitely picked up on there being two of them in the room, and started playing some very targeted kinds of content.

'Don't you fucking blush gonkbrain. Don't you dare.'

He looked for a place to look that didn't have ads, or a part of her he shouldn't be staring at. Then a thought occurred to him.

"My, uh, meetup to sell the Sandy isn't for a while. Room for an assist with your picksocketing?" He grinned at her. "I ain't got no love for 'saka, if that's who you're targeting."

She blinked at him, and he caught the corners of her mouth twitching upwards.

"Not sure I'm pulling in the kind of money you seem to need."

"Every enny helps." He regretted the words immediately, worried she'd think he was talking down to her, but she just pressed a knuckle to her lips and laughed.

"You got much experience as a thief?"

"Not really, but I learn fast. Name's David by the way."

Her laughter died down, and she schooled her features back into the cool distance he'd first seen her with. Then she turned to the door and pinged it open.

The noise of the station washed over them again, ending a spell David hadn't noticed until it was gone.

But before she left, she paused in the doorway, and turned her head to say to him in a low voice, "I'm Lucy."

Then she paused for a long moment. Like she wasn't sure if she should just go, or keep talking.

"You know, your heart's in the right place. But…Trying too hard to save someone, it'll just get you killed."

She sounded quiet, and sure, and David found himself replying before she could get more than a few steps into her exit.

"I don't give a shit. If I die, I die." As he said the words, he realised he meant them. Believed them. "If I get killed, at least I won't regret that much."

Then he stepped past her to make his own exit.

Of course, she spoiled it before he could get very far.

"Hey David." She called out to him, prompting him to turn and find her not quite looking at him. "If your meetup isn't today, then I might know someone who can take that thing off your hands a little sooner."

Gloria was bored.

Less than a day and a half since the crash, and she had gone from feeling sick with terror and despair, to just sick of being stuck in bed. Even the agony of her injuries had been transformed by her latest nap into a kind of vague full body ache. Leaving little to distract her from her boredom, since her attempts to question Law had mostly been ignored, and his own questions were…

…she was pretty sure Law had escaped from a lab or maybe a cult because, European or not, there was no way someone who had grown up in the world could have the kind of questions he had bombarded her with. The man was a highly skilled surgeon who didn't know the most basic info about how someone chromed up, or what most people had chipped.

Of course the other possibility was that he had been testing her with his bizarre string of questions about everything from what she normally ate to how common cyberdecks were. Unfortunately, that thought just fed the lingering knot of stress that made her want to get up and do something, anything at all.

Anything that wasn't lying immobile and counting the antique bulbs that dotted the ceiling. Again.

Law had paused long enough for her to get in a question about David, and his answer had reassured her that he put her son ashore -she had also learned they were on a submarine, of all things- in a safe enough area that she wasn't any more scared for his safety than she normally was. Though whether he had been able to get everything in order after he got back to the apartment was another question.

Gloria was painfully aware that she had neglected to re-up the rent before she rushed to work, and then she hadn't had the time to pay it before she had to divert to Arasaka Academy. Then she had gone and gotten herself into what was sure to be a crushing amount of medical debt. Not to mention the costs of David's mistake with the wreath update, and the penalties she would be earning for unsanctioned sick leave, and the loss of days of her wages.

Again came the urge to get out of bed and back to work. Again she had to sit and count the lights.

Then a certain furry white mountain eclipsed her view of the ceiling with an oddly adorable smile on his face. "Ohw era uoy efielng?" He asked.

She couldn't help but smile back, especially as he froze and grabbed for the translator hidden under his fur. "Rroys Rroys!" suddenly became "Sorry sorry!" and he repeated his question, "How are you feeling?"

Her meagre help with their patient, or maybe her interrogation by their Captain, had earned her a lot more care about them using their translators around her. Now that she could understand them, Gloria was finding it hard not to like the Jumpsuit clad Medtechs, especially the one she was fairly sure was Law's second in command.

"I'm doing fine, thank you Bepo." She bit her lip and tried to phrase what she needed to say, without admitting she was trying to keep their fee down. "It'd be nice to stretch my legs though. How about it?"

Instead of reaching for any kind of scanner or even her chart, the bear-sculpted man bent over to press one of his little round ears to the plaster. Lifting a paw, he tapped gently on the hard surface of her casts and she realised he had some kind of echolocation cyberware installed. Or bioware, probably, since the whole crew must have come from Europe with Law.

After a little while of him shifting his head to various spots and her trying to resist the urge to stare at his ears swivelling adorably to catch the sound, Bepo stood up and cocked his head to the side. He said, "You're not healed yet, sorry."

He sounded so genuinely apologetic that she couldn't find it in herself to doubt him. As much as she told herself to assume they'd get up to the same crap as CityMed always did, and try to hike up her bill, Gloria was running into the problem that Law's crew were a lot more pleasant to be around than any of her coworkers. It made it damn hard to maintain a healthy cynicism.

Especially when Bepo was looming over her like a giant teddy bear, clearly fretting over his diagnosis, until he finally said, "We might be able to give you some more movement though." Then, with his face bright with guileless optimism, Bepo ran off with a parting, "I'll get the Captain."

She felt the relief in the room as he left, and she didn't understand it. She saw them glancing fearfully at him whenever the seven -or maybe eight, it was hard to judge when she was lying down- foot tall polar bear man came into the recovery room. They were even more afraid of him than they were the rest of Law's crew, but while she agreed that a lot of the others looked dangerous, Bepo was ridiculously cute.

Too cute really. He made her forget to keep her guard up.

Not like the man who sauntered into the room a few minutes later. She'd yet to see Trafalgar Law, as he had introduced himself to her, without his enormous sword close at hand. A habit that might have seemed nervous in another man.

Since he was the least nervous person she'd ever met, Gloria figured he didn't want to waste time fetching it when he decided to cut someone apart. Even with the crazy tech he had access to, half a second to teleport his sword into his hand struck her as too great a barrier between Law and violence.

Not too different from other cyberpunks she knew in that sense, though she supposed she should call him a biopunk instead. Him being European and all.

A biopunk who, while her mind was wandering, had made an odd sweeping gesture then laid a hand on the hilt of his weapon.

His arm twitched, and she sunk deeper into her cot as her casts separated at most of her joints. Dozens of cuts and he'd done it faster than her eyes could follow. It was hard to say how impressive that was when everyone who chipped any sort of speed enhancement looked like a blur to her, but the 'Saka bodyguards were both looking at him like they'd come out of a bar to find MaxTac waiting for them.

Gloria said, "Thank you." Then wondered if there was any way she could confirm whether David had needed to hand over the Sandevistan without giving away that she had it if Law didn't already know. Having to return her finders fee to Maine was the last thing she needed, and if he wasn't lying then he'd hardly know it was valuable anyway.

Just like the last time, he didn't give her enough time, and Gloria found herself staring at his departing back while her thoughts whirled in her head. Then another of his crew -Vesa she thought his name was, a man with braided hair and a yellow cap wedged onto his head- came up to quietly transform her precisely sliced casts into their final form.

He sanded down the sharp edges, and gave her a sling for her weaker arm. Then it turned out that her chest was ready to lose the cast entirely, so he drew the curtain around her bed and cut carefully along lines Law had scored but not fully cut. One hospital gown later and she was able to lean back against the cushions and practically sit upright.

After spending more time lying down than she ever had before, it was a welcome change.

The confirmation that the floors really were made of wood barely made her jaw drop at all.

As for her fellow patients, they were mostly as she'd been able to see while lying down with her head propped up. Seven of Night City's lowest of the low, a couple of fancy types, and the rest of the thirty-eight occupied beds were taken up by her own kind. The movers of Night City -a term that would get David to look at her like she had been around to run from the dinosaurs- were the majority on its roads so it wasn't surprising to see so many of her fellow struggling professionals.

The abject terror was a little strange to see on all their faces now that she wasn't feeling it herself, but at least the Arasaka Exec and his bodyguards didn't look entirely comfortable either.

Another few beds of rich folks were people who she vaguely recognised from a vid or a BD or maybe a newsfeed. Mostly they struck her as too self-absorbed to realise that they should be afraid. Except for the occasional moment when the door opened and she wondered if that was all a mask as their eyes darted around in panic.

It was all a rare opportunity to people watch, and interesting enough to distract her for a time. And if nobody would look directly at her or include her in the occasional whispered conversation when none of Law's crew were around, well she had some ideas about that.

Ideas that might still mean more trouble on top of the pile of crap she already had to deal with.

'And I'm back to worrying. Hijo de puta.'

Lucky her, no sooner had the thought crossed her mind then a big old distraction came through the door.

In the form of two men in jumpsuits and a gigantic trolley piled high with pots and plates and cutlery. Steam was gently wafting from several of the containers, and as if that wasn't enough of a clue they both promptly started walking around and flipping concealed tables into place over the occupants of each bed. Occasionally they took a moment to pull someone up into a sitting position, though in Gloria's case she just got a nod and a quiet offer to reposition her pillows.

Having slept almost the entire time, and been on IV nutrition until she woke from her most recent nap to find it gone, Gloria wasn't surprised to see the food trolley. They obviously wouldn't have the pre-cooked tray meals that most Night City hospitals used, and she was considering whether she could get a discount on her bill by introducing them to a supplier when she noticed something weird.

Everyone else in the room did look surprised to see the trolley.

An explanation was forthcoming pretty quickly, as one of the two men fiddled with his translator and said in a booming voice, "Good news. Since you've all told us what you can eat," He glanced her way at that, and Gloria realised why Law had asked about food, "we can give you some real food, 'stead of that wrapped machine crap."

While she was busy reeling at the idea they'd been feeding trauma patients food from a S.C.S.M. the two men laid out the trolley and opened the largest pot in a billowing cloud of steam.

A second later, the smell hit her in a wave so strong she could practically taste it. Her mouth started watering instantly and she was so busy puzzling through the spices she could smell that she barely noticed what they were doing until a pair of bowls and a plastic cup were placed on her table alongside a disposable fork and spoon.

She very nearly skipped the cutlery and ate with her hands, so good did it smell. Instead she grabbed the flatbread sticking out of the larger bowl with one hand, and her spoon with the other. Then she dug in.

Food had, for as long as Gloria could remember, been a functional part of her life. From the hungry poverty of her childhood, to the slightly less hungry poverty of her teenage years, to having David and discovering the struggle of keeping him fed on top of herself, food had always been a thing to get enough of in whatever form that she could.

She preferred certain things over others, and she was glad when CityMed rewarded its workers with the occasional ration of fresh food in the cafeteria, but it simply wasn't a large part of her life.

So the explosion of flavour when she took a spoonful of the stew felt like a revelation.

Had she been missing out on this much all along? Was this what food was supposed to taste like?

Gloria dunked her bread and took a huge bite of it, then managed to drag her attention over to the Exec on the other side of the room as she chewed. Even the richest guy in the room was clearly struggling to eat slowly, and with that reassurance she returned to attacking the food.

Distantly she realised that it was all fresh. Everything in the bowl was a fresh ingredient. Nothing tasted remotely like the artificial fillers that made up most of what any normal person in the city would eat. Except that, while the idea of how much this would cost her was almost enough for her to put the spoon down, it also didn't explain why it was so circ-blowingly good. She might only have a bare handful of fresh meals in most years, but she had eaten fresh food before.

'The spices maybe? They taste so much stronger than anything I've had before, but they don't overpower the food either.' All she could conclude, as she took a drink of the pure clean water she'd ever had and wished she could afford to drink it instead of sodas, was that whoever had cooked the meal was unbelievably skilled.

Judging by the covetous look on the 'Saka Exec's face, she wasn't the only one with such thoughts.

One of the patients who looked like he'd come directly from sleeping on the streets felt the opposite way, "E-excuse me. Sir." When that didn't get them any attention from the pair watching them all eat, he spoke up a little louder, "Sir! I can't eat this."

She had a vague idea that the man who wandered over was called something that started with a 'T', but her major impression of him was how he loomed more than Bepo despite being two feet shorter. The poor gonk in the bed certainly felt the same, trembling and looking up at him like he expected to die at any moment.

"You allergic?"

"Ye-!" Something on the jumpsuit-clad Medtech's face must have made him rethink the lie. "No. Not allergic."

"Then stop being picky."

"I'm not-" Again, he cut himself off, sagging miserably into his bed as Gloria tried not to let herself feel for him. He'd probably be fine anyway. Guy might not realise it, but she was confidant Law and his crew would stick to taking whatever they could to pay off the debt, and the fall to zero wasn't that far for someone like him.

It was as close to a helping hand as Night City would give him. No matter how her stomach twisted as she got back to her own meal.

Though as she polished off the stew, she realised that the way everyone else was drinking from their second bowl suggested some kind of soup, whereas she had something that looked a lot like apple sauce, if apple sauce was golden and smelled like a fruity perfume instead of the chemical tang that she was used to.

More fresh ingredients.

When she lifted the bowl for a better look she found that it was weirdly heavy too. More than the small portion size looked like it should be.

She strained to lift it with her fingers still clumsy with the lingering casts on parts of her hands, and caught the eye of their minders as she did so.

There was something to the way they looked at her and then the bowl. Something she couldn't name.

When she realised she had cocked her head to the side with curiosity, Gloria wondered if she was overstepping, but the looming guy just quirked his lips in the ghost of a smile and said, "Captain's orders. It was going to go bad soon anyway."

Then with that baffling statement they set about gathering up the empty bowls and disposing of the implements as everyone but her seemed to have finished eating.

Gloria rushed to swallow the apple sauce, which really was incredibly dense on her tongue, before they made it around to her. The flavour was so powerful that she wondered if everything she ate for the rest of her life was going to taste of it a little, though she wasn't sure if she'd call it delicious like the rest had been.

'I guess there's only so much you can do with apple sauce.'