Burn
The city like a live wire sparked from both ends. Grids of neon and starlight splayed open with the precision of a ripperdoc's knife, the pulsating arteries of people, cars, drugs, information, sex – anything that could be bought and sold in Night City was bought and sold in Night City. The blood flowed simultaneously to its source and its reservoir, to its engine and the pump that fed it.
To her.
From the balcony of her penthouse, V tapped her cigarette against the rail. The ash snowed into the darkness below. The splash of nicotine kindled the same receptors, the same high. Five months ago, she would've been one of the cells down there. Merc, solo, edgerunner, streetkid. So many names for the same pettiness, distilled among millions. Always chasing the next gig, the next payout, the next shot-glass of glory.
All it took to change was a bullet to the brain.
Did she deserve credit for someone else joyriding her body? When the only choice she made was to give up choice?
Warm arms embraced her from behind. In the neon glow, the tattoos strobed like their own advertisements. Fingers plucked V's cigarette from her lips. There was an intake of breath, an exhale of smoke. A satisfied ah.
"Ready for the big day?" Judy said.
V spun around, shifting her hands over Judy's hips, lifting her – an aikido move she learned from Jackie, lifetimes ago – so that now Judy's the one sandwiched against the balcony. Judy yelped, laughing. Somewhere in the distance an army of car horns saluted.
"I thought you were, and I quote, 'so sore I'm not walking for a week." V smirked. "Or are you up for a second round?"
Judy rolled her eyes. She was naked, a museum on open display, a lifetime of galleries spilling out a lifetime of stories. For all the enhancements available, the most popular was still the oldest, the application of dye to needle to skin. Judy was close enough to kiss so she did. V's thumb ghosted over the roses, the 13, the spiderweb, the whale. She breathed deep her menthol scent.
"You don't need to do this," Judy murmured.
V flexed her fingers. The mantis blades buried in her arm whirred. Maybe she should swap in the monofilaments. But if she did that she would need to pack her katana, and that hunk of metal always banged into something at the worst possible moments.
"What's there left to prove?"
"There's always something to prove," V said.
"We could leave. Take all the money and go somewhere."
Judy's voice rang without conviction, the old suggestion, the tedious argument. It had nearly split them and even now still ached, a bruise neither of them could resist rubbing. The familiarity of the pain comforted.
V was going to die.
Death haunted every word she spoke and every bullet she fired and every orgasm that rattled her body. That deserter-turned-rockerboy, anarcho-terrorist, narcissistic asshole – she missed him like a brain abscess. You don't share someone's mindspace without leaving behind an imprint, residual chemicals staining the very neurons that can't be scraped out with all of Arasaka's tech. She's developed an addiction to nicotine and a craving for beer with chili garnish. Some days she found herself humming songs she didn't know.
"Go back to bed," V murmured into Judy's hair. The green had begun to fade at the roots. "I'll join you soon."
Judy padded away. Looking at her, V realized that tonight was probably the last night they would ever share, the last time she could admire the curve of Judy's ass. This world of steel and chrome, this city more dream-stuff than flesh: Had a more beautiful thing ever existed? Where else could you eat knockoff yakitori a dozen for an eddy? Sample a thousand joytoys for every fetish? Where else could you shoot a man and upload his murder to a BD?
Somewhere beyond the Blackwall, Johnny still planned his rebellion against the world. The prophets would sing of his coming! V was born here, every breath polluted by the smog from Petrochem's factories, every sip of water contaminated by Biotechnica's runoff. Even before you left the womb, Night City's toxins fed you through the umbilical cord. The average lifespan numbered eight years shorter than the rest of America. Only the unlucky lived to an old age.
She squeezed the railing and laughed into the night.
There's no future for her; there never was, for any of them. Run, drive as far as you can, fly across the ocean or ride the rocket into space: There's no escaping the city you became.
Tomorrow the world will echo her name.
Everyone dies. But this? – this is how you shape a city. This is how you choke the life out of something you love and something you hate, scream with your dying breath a futile war cry that might be heard, generations later, as a whistle in the wind.
Even legends burn out early, but, ah, what a glorious blaze.