None of her implants could explain how the moment before the crash stretched out. Not that she had much metal to speak of. Just the bare minimum that she could throw on a long term payment plan, debts due to hit her when she was old and grey and no use to anyone.

Gloria's foot was on the floor already, but David's voice had her trying to stomp the brake pedal into the road.

Her work mandated cyberdeck fitfully fed a scroll in the corner of her eye reminding her of the shift she was missing, the overtime piling up, though five to one flex-time at least kept her from being fired for rushing to her son's side. One of the treasured perks of semi-public service. It overlaid her vision of oncoming death.

She'd been trying to drop back since the moment the Animals opened fire. Why wasn't it working?

Dermal implant was almost too fancy a term for the chemplant that sat in her cheek. Feeding a steady drip of stims into her blood to keep her awake, cut down on her sleep cycle, let her melt the candle a little faster. It might be worth something if it survived the crash. If it wasn't crushed on the underside of the wrecked limo.

A stray bullet had locked up the steering column. She couldn't swerve away.

Her muscle implants, just barely strong enough to heave gurneys full of zeroed out chrome junkies, strained uselessly. Error messages piled up to accompany the ever-present twinge of fibres that had worn down and come loose. One more thing to crowd out her optics. At least the pain wouldn't last much longer.

It was too late to do anything. She'd just have to throw herself across David. And hope.

It was humble neural matter that realised her brakes had simply given out at a bad time, one too many months without getting the shoddy things fixed. Gloria's regular human brain told her that she'd once again picked the wrong bill to wait on paying. Her body meanwhile had already found the release for her belt so she could shield her son one last ti-

It hurt.

Everything hurt. Hurt worse than birth, worse than she'd ever imagined death could hurt.

A sob bubbled in her lungs, but Gloria Martinez didn't have the strength to gasp it out. Her agony lodged in her chest instead. Drowning the trickle of air still keeping her alive.

She was shattered. Too broken to move. Her world reduced to white hot splinters of agony and the steady throb of misery. That and the steady scroll of injuries that had expanded across her vision. Emergency dispatch orders as one of the nearest EMTs to a major incident.

The pieces of her not begging for the pain to end took a moment to realise she was looking at her own injuries. Beamed from her implants out to the city's systems, then back to her own cyberware to tell her what kind of state she was in. Broken meat, being the summary. Flatline waiting to happen. Or a Trauma Team special.

The idea of them saving her was funny enough for a laugh to shatter her ribs a little more. Even if she could afford them, she'd have given David the poli-

David!

Guilt thudded through her at forgetting him because of a little thing like impending death. Her thoughts swept through the injury feed until she found him. Martinez D. Six metres to the south. Sprains. Concussion. No major injuries.

It was better than any painkiller. Her boy was alive. She hadn't fucked that up too. She had fucked up everything else, but...David was gonna live...

Her strength spent, Gloria drifted. Barely aware of the familiar sounds of Trauma Team arriving. The superstars come to save some lucky corp. What she'd wanted to be. Once.

David was yelling something, far off in the distance. Yelling at them to save her. Silly kid. How would she ever pay...for...

A young punk, doomed from his first breath and determined to fight til' he reached it, watched his momma bleed out on the road.

He watched the first responders leave her to die.

He screamed himself hoarse and pulled his seatbelt like he had any hope of pulling it from the twisted metal that held it. But he couldn't get free. Couldn't reach her.

David Martinez could only watch, as the world tinted blue, and a dozen people in jumpsuits dropped out of thin air. A man in a furry hat suddenly standing by his mom and yelling orders.

"Bepo, secure those booster shits! Shachi, with me! The rest of you get to it!"

They were moving even as they yelled affirmatives; Two of them shoving aside the stunned Trauma Security Specialist like they had a death wish. Only when the guy tried to bring his gun up and blast them, he fell apart at the joints. A screaming pile of body parts to match the Trauma EMT who Fur Hat must have cut up with that sword he was waving. David could have sworn he was too far away to get them, no matter how long-ass his sword was, but then he had to be seeing things because he still couldn't remember how they all arrived and his mom looked like she was fucking floating. No jets or anti-grav. Just floating in the air while Fur Hat stared at her.

Then a mask got in the way and David couldn't see her anymore. Just some creepy smiley mask as the guy wearing it patted him down like, like his mom did when she thought he'd gotten hurt. Firmly and gently checking his pulse, probing for any injuries, then reaching for his belt while David wondered why the guy hadn't pinged his implants. Wondered if they were really being saved.

The answer came with a grunt of effort and his seatbelt ripping apart, leaving him to fall into a stretcher and be dragged out of the car. One more body on a road rapidly filling up with them, all laid out on stretchers while the jumpsuits split between collecting more patients and flitting between the ones already collected. One guy with exotics like David had never seen, white fur all over, was even tearing the corpo limo open like a cheap can of water, adding the suit and some bodyguards to the collection. Smacking one of them out like a light when he tried to get up.

All the while, Fur Hat didn't look up from where he was bent over David's mom. Pulling instruments out of the air and, and operating on her. Saving her. Some big shot super punk, all tatted up and looking ready to kill, and he was saving her. Focused on her like she actually fucking mattered. David couldn't believe it.

Until one of the jumpsuits shouted, "That's all of them Captain!" and Fur Hat looked up, then nodded to the guy who had been assisting him.

"Shachi, keep the patient stable." He said, "We're pulling out!"

As the jumpsuits yelled "Aye Captain!" David looked around for their AVs, seeing a pair of Trauma Team AV-4s in the distance screaming towards them, and nothing else.

Then the blue tint to everything flickered away, just for an instant, Fur Hat said, "Shambles."

-and they were somewhere else.

Impossible didn't cover it.

Them appearing was one thing. His bell had been rung so bad his vision was glitching. Fire and smoke so thick he could still smell it. Missing some weirdo paramedics airdropping in would have been easy.

Them leaving, and taking everyone they'd grabbed along for the ride? David didn't know how to even begin making sense out of it. One second his stretcher had been on asphalt, the next he was on top of a cot. The sky above had become metal studded with weird oversized yellow-tinted lights.

It wasn't possible...but it happened, and that meant he had to deal with it. Which started with trying to find his mom.

The hall he was in had the look of a hospital, like half a dozen he'd sat in waiting for his mom to finish a shift, 'cept it didn't look nearly run down enough for all the equipment he couldn't see. Whatever. The jumpsuits were busy getting everyone they'd grabbed off of their stretchers and plugged in to what ancient looking medical gear they did have. Perfect distraction. He rolled onto his side, legs coming up to slip off the cot as sneaky as he could. Then there was a paw the size of his head pressing down on his chest like a plush hydraulic press.

Gentle as it was, David still gasped and stretched out his legs on instinct. Missing the moment the stretcher was whisked out from under him and barely noticing the monitoring pads being stuck to his skin.

By the time he got his breath back the big throwback with the white fur was looking down at him with beady eyed amusement. With his very accurately sculpted eyes, in his equally perfectly sculpted head. Up close the mods were so well done that David almost thought he wasn't some guy with an exotic bodysculpt but an actual polar bear stuffed into a jumpsuit. Of course there weren't any polar bears left, and surely they hadn't been so big any way and...

'...fuck, is this what a concussion feels like?'

The Bear said, "Easy there. You're not ready to move yet." Then he perked up, as if remembering something, "Ah, you're not meant to move anyway. All patients are confined to their bed." With that he bopped his fist into the opposite paw, looking pleased with himself for remembering.

"Shouldn't you lead with that choom?" David said, trying to play nice, only for the big guy to flinch back and let his head hang down in defeat. "Uh?"

"I'm sorry."

"It's, it's no problem?" He shook himself, his battered head making him regret it immediately. The pain at least helped him break through the fog and ignore whatever weird shit was going on with the giant white gonk. "Look, I gotta find my mom. I don't see her in here."

That snapped the Bear back to normal scary fast. His head snapped up and he whistled at another of the jumpsuits, the masked one who dragged David out of the wreckage of his mom's car, and made some kind of gesture. The two of them shot signs back and forth, not like any he was chipped to understand, then the Bear turned back to him and said, "There was nobody else in the car with you," and before David could yell the obvious he continued, "so you must mean the lady we found on the road."

"Yeah! Where is she!" This time he didn't try to get up, but he glared at the Bear hard enough to make him answer anyway. Or that was the idea at least.

The sympathy shining back down at him from those bestial eyes sent a lead weight thudding into his guts.

"Don't worry. The Captain's operating right now. She'll be fine."

He hardly heard a word of it. Except for the worst one.

Operating.

Images swam behind his eyes against his will, and David found himself rolling back to face the door, mostly hidden behind the beds that had curtains drawn around them. The last fucking words he'd spoken to his mom ringing in his ears as he stared at the door. Hoping that she'd come through it. Hoping she was still alive.

'Please.'

Gloria floated back to herself on a warm ocean of painkillers and fatigue.

Whatever she'd been given, it was better than anything she'd taken in her life, including the experiments with dorph that had ended when she found out she was pregnant even younger than her own mom had been.

Normally those memories sent her into a spiral of self-recriminations that lasted all day, or until she got to see D again. On whatever this stuff was, she was too blissed out to even begin to care.

Black lace couldn't possibly be this good.

Combined with how exhausted she was -even more than normal- Gloria almost drifted back down into the darkness. Only, before she let unconsciousness claim her, her eyelids flickered just slightly.

The sight of her own organs splayed out in front of her would have blasted her back to full awareness even with every designer drug in Night City flooding her system. Only what had to be some cocktail of designer muscle relaxants and fancy paralytic nanites kept her from wrenching herself away from the nightmare in front of her.

Locked into her body, all she could do was blink quietly up at her insides, floating in the air above her like the medical holos she hadn't had the time to study in so long. She couldn't move a single muscle beyond the ones controlling her eyes. As if that wasn't bad enough, the feeds in her optics told her that she was being jammed completely. She couldn't even get a wireless feed from her own implants, let alone call for Maxtac to come shoot this psycho full of holes. Even if that meant finishing her off into the bargain. There was no way she was coming back from being splayed out like this anyway.

Fuck, the heart's not even...connected...

She looked again to make sure. Then again because it couldn't possibly be true. Sure enough she'd been right at first glance, and her heart was floating off by itself without anything connected to it...and still pumping quite happily. The drugs weren't even letting panic speed her heart rate up by much.

Fatigue dragged at her eyes despite the adrenaline, but she couldn't give in. She looked down to check that they weren't just the most realistic holograms imaginable, glad they'd at least propped her head up on a pillow, and saw herself stripped naked and slit open from collarbone to groin. Her flesh had been peeled aside like a cadaver and her insides taken out.

So how the fuck was she still breathing?!

She could even see her lungs when she thought to look for them. Entirely disconnected from her mouth and yet they inflated and deflated in perfect rhythm with what she was feeling through the pleasant haze of numbness. No symptoms of oxygen deprivation. No signs of shock. Glancing down at herself again, Gloria realised that she wasn't even bleeding. The sheets, clean and crisp and a cheery light blue, weren't stained by a drop of blood. Let alone the ocean that should have poured out of her by now.

Almost like this wasn't the work of a short-circed Scav getting his rocks off by ripping her up for spare parts, but some kind of miraculous medical tech she'd never heard a whisper of a rumour about. Floating a body into pieces like an engineering diagram. She hadn't even known it was possible to float something without incorporating the anti-grav into it directly and here that achievement was turned into a sideshow. A distraction from the main attraction, and once she stopped expecting to bleed out, Gloria finally realised what kind of a show she'd been missing.

The surgeon was wearing a full gown and mask, proper attire topped off with a furry hat that made him look like a back alley ripperdoc from the eyebrows up. It would already have been enough to condemn his skills in her eyes, if she hadn't been able to see his hands.

They danced across her scattered body parts and left them whole in the wake. They wove and stitched and probed and bound her back together. They plucked shards of bone from a blood vessel, then set the pieces into their proper place within a floating rib. They found the loose ends of her muscles and spliced them back together. They took a ruin of flesh and rebuilt it so fast that she could see it happening from one moment to the next.

All of it with tools that looked more basic and primitive the longer she looked.

No surgical robots or nanite dispensers or even a suggestive assistant, and he was still leaving every surgeon she'd ever seen in the dust. Even the doctors from her secret stash of braindances couldn't touch this guy and the editors of 'Nova Doc: Surgical Series' were definitely hyping their skills. It was humbling to see him work. Like the universe was pointing out how absurd her own dreams were.

And it raised one very important question in Gloria's head. Replacing her worries about dying with a far more sobering thought.

How in the fucking fuck was she going to pay for this?

They might have kidnapped her from the wreckage of her car and decided to save her all by themselves, but she wasn't nearly enough of a gonkbrain to think that a lack of consent would spare her from the bill. What would happen if she couldn't pay was no great mystery to her either. Her whole life Gloria had seen the aftermath of people owing money to gangers who ran out of patience. Corpses with every possible ED carved out of them. Dumped in the street with the rest of the trash.

She had already burned through most of her paycheck for the coming month, not that even a full year of it would have been enough for this tier of care. She had only one hope to pull that kind of cash together on short notice, and it was in sight. Her clothes were gone, but whatever bizarre tech this surgeon had at his fingertips, it meant he hadn't had to cut them off her. She could see her jacket piled up with the rest of them, in a plastic tub in the corner of the surgical suite, and no sign that the lining had been torn away to get at what she had stashed inside it.

A milspec Sandevistan implant that she had stolen from a corpse. The scratch she was set to get from selling it to a certain Edgerunner would beat everything else she'd ever made off her side job. Combined.

That would be enough.

It had to be.

It had to-

"Oi." the surgeon sounded almost as young as he looked. "You shouldn't be this awake." Suddenly leaning down to look her dead in the eyes, he reached a hand outside her field of vision and did something. Messing with her IV...by...the sound...of...

Gloria drifted back to sleep without another thought.