CITY_CENTER
The pair were silent as they were whisked aloft within the luxurious elevator, the only occupants. Wood paneling, glass buttons, and a view out upon downtown that just seemed to fall further and further below them, like a grasping and spindly hand. The lift even had classical music playing through surround-sound speakers at such a quiet volume that the gentle lilt was immensely soothing.
The CEAL Tower was sixty floors tall, part hotel and part timeshare. The rumor was that the same holding group that owned the No-Tell Motel down in Kabuki, an infamous Night City halt that was prized by its innate ability to be completely discrete about their clients, owned part or all of the CEAL Tower. While the No-Tell Motel was a frequently utilized locale for the Night City underground, CEAL was the high-end alternative. The sort of holdover for mercenaries who had cash to burn and wanted to spend their downtime away from the graffiti and broken glass bottles. Room service and a massage, for the discerning client.
The doors opened and Ramses strode out into a dimly lit hallway.[1] Thick carpet, tasteful wallpaper that imaged a series of skewed polygons in some aimless pattern as if the contours of the corridor were wedged with spikes. Fiona followed, heart in her throat, fingertips cold. She tried to lift her head high, but her neck felt brittle as if it were made of glass.
She had wanted to say something on the car ride over. But even as they drove down the highway, through the jammed downtown streets, to end up parked in a dark underground garage several blocks away, she could not muster the courage. For she did not know if she owed Ramses an apology, an explanation, or just some acknowledgement of how things could possibly have gotten so out of hand. She had been right there with Villereal. Right there. And everything had gone completely wrong for reasons she could not explain.
Red electric bolts jittering in the night. Jumping from her body to immediately char and burn the man across from her, his scream echoing higher and higher in pitch until his vocal cords burned away…
Had it been a malfunction in her cyberdeck that had caused Villereal to flatline so violently? She had run ten security scans since leaving the neighborhood—no errors registered at all. Her quickhacks were all up to date with the latest drivers and there was nothing on the Net that indicated that complete incineration from the inside out was a potential side effect from any of them.
The shame of not being able to look Ramses in the eye was not a side effect, sadly. That was all her.
After rounding a corner, Ramses stopped in front of a door, grabbed the handle, and the automated sensors detected that he was a registered guest and rapidly unlocked to allow him inside.
Fiona blinked. The hotel room was nowhere near as spacious as Ramses' loft, but it was leagues more luxurious, presumably because the hotel had actual furnishings that could be put to use. Two queen size beds had been positioned near the poster window, which offered a stunning view onto the circular Corpo Plaza below—she could see the glimmering dome, construction and all, brighten in the center of downtown like an inset jewel. There was also a second room that had a curved couch that faced a high-definition projection screen. The carpet here was replete with an ashen-streaked line pattern while the walls were a smooth cream white color.
Ramses quickly performed a check of the room. He went into the bathroom, which was magnificently appointed with gleaming white marble counters, gold-encrusted mirrors, and a polished stone shower encased in a glass cube. Everything was angular, like it had come from an alien ship. There was nothing inherently familiar about this place, nothing organic. Almost as this room could have been constructed in the brutalist minimalism of the Net.
"Coffee machine's on the desk," Ramses angled his head after checking the closet, finding it empty. "Fix yourself something if you want. The number for room service is next to it, too."
"Not in the mood," Fiona hollowly said. Her voice sounded weird to her, as it were being emitted from far away. She walked over to the bed closest to the window and peeled off her jacket. She dumped it on the ground so that she would not smear blood and carbon on the sheets.
Watching as Fiona unbuckled her holsters and practically threw them, weapons and all, onto the bed, Ramses stood in the center of the room, totem-like, and crossed his arms.
"You're wondering why we're not back at the apartment," he said, eyes boring into the back of the netrunner's head.
Fiona leaned over, hands sinking into the mattress. She was down to just a tank top and pants, her pale skin covered in goosebumps wherever it was exposed to the airconditioned room. Sightless eyes peered out upon where she had callously discarded her clothes and weapons. Disgust at being in their presence, a woeful host, perhaps.
"Why?" she asked, voice only getting hoarser.
"A precaution. The job drew a lot of heat. Best to wait it out for half a day or so, see where the temperature is afterward. The CEAL Tower will at least make that wait somewhat bearable—there are worse places to hide out in."
To make that point, he strode over to the window and parted the curtains with a finger. With the city reflected upon his helmet, it looked like his head was nothing but stars in the vast blackness of space. He then leaned away, the curtains wisping behind him, and walked past Fiona before he stopped. He did not turn around before he addressed her again.
"You've been waiting this whole night for me to ask the question."
Fiona closed her eyes. Lips trembling. Lungs feeling like they refused to stop fluttering. A dull ache had infected her joints and her forehead felt oily after she had been overheating from the stress and panic.
"I fucked up," she finally said. "I know."
She waited for his agreement to sting. For him to tell her that she was not cut out for this line of work. The shame and embarrassment gripped her and she could only hunch over that bed, fingers digging into the comforter in their agonized claws.
But Ramses found the spare office chair behind the mahogany desk and sat upon it, not offering up any judgment. He looked like he belonged there, with the light of the desk lamp bathing the left side of his head in a warm glow.
"If the objective hadn't been completed," he said, vocabulator creating a ghostly rasp in his words more so than usual, "then this would be a very different conversation. But that isn't the question you want me to ask, is it?"
She turned around, finally noticing him sitting at the desk, leaning in the chair. A pale glimmer around him, as if he were an apparition.
"You want to know how," she stated, toneless. The memories would be forever burned in her brain. The glowing hot coals that had been Villereal's eyes as something cooked his body from the inside out. The fire that had torn out his throat, melting the thin flesh away. The smell of roasted hair and meat, ghostly screams echoing around her—the sounds of her victims or of her own imagination.
"That was an unexpected outcome," Ramses nodded once, slowly.
That's putting it lightly. "Yeah," she breathily agreed. "It was."
A pause as Ramses tapped his fingers upon the desk. His head tilted slightly. "You don't know how it happened?" The unvoiced question was, was it a malfunction?
She tried thinking of a logical answer. She really tried. But no matter how many soft scans she ran on herself, no matter how many times she dug into the programmatic history of every line of code that had been run in the past hour in her cyberdeck, she could not come up with anything other that she had no explanation. How had this been able to happen? For that matter, had it even been her that had killed Villereal and his entourage so violently? She had no proof, no leads, nothing.
Helpless, feeling hot tears of anger and impotence well in her eyes, she shook her head.
"I… I can't…" she whispered, almost in a state of panic.
Ramses seemed to sense the extreme level of anguish emanating from the woman and rose from where he was sitting. He walked over and stood in front of Fiona. He gestured to the bed, indicating for her to take a seat. Once she did so, he claimed a place on the bed opposite her. They were now sitting on the edge of their respective mattresses, the mercenaries staring upon one another. She sat hunched forward, hands gripped so tightly her tendons were twanging taut, her knuckles frost-white. Ramses was sitting upright, his own posture loose and controlled. He may have had a couple of inches on her in this position, but it felt to Fiona like she was staring up at a skyscraper.
"Were you expecting me to berate you tonight?" he asked.
She lifted her head a few inches. Silver eyes cloudy and morose. "I almost wish you would."
"What would that serve?" he said after making a soft scoffing sound. "Did you think this night was going to go by the book? You got thrown into a meat grinder and you got out. Not many people do on their first job. What happened inside that house, we'll keep a close eye out for if it happens again." The merc dipped his head down and turned one of his hands palm-up. "But if there's anything that you want to tell me, anything at all…"
He left the statement open-ended, as if he was hesitant at laying down such a firm ultimatum. She side-eyed Ramses, the adrenaline withdrawal making the roots of her teeth begin to ache.
"You don't even know how it felt to be there," she croaked. "You don't know what I was thinking when… when it happened."
"I can only imagine that you were afraid."
She laughed, dark and full of self-loathing. She wanted to explain to him in great detail how it truly felt in that moment. The nervousness from being in a room, inches away from a man she had been paid to kill. Running through her plan in her head, only for it to be derailed without conscious thought on her end. Something raw and powerful had centered in her gut, like a small flame, only for it to flow out from her fingertips, eyes, and mouth, like a rampaging virus. There had been something that she had been able to decipher in that moment, images thick and red, coursing with energy and crackling through her vision, before her understanding had been ripped away from her. For a split-second, she had felt invincible. Then when the power had begun to kill everyone around her, and the corpses had begun to surround her, all she had felt was that creeping dread, the horror of such lack of control surrounding her like a mist.
Her hands gripped each other tighter and she bowed her head. "I don't know if this is what I was meant for," she whispered aloud.
"No one is really meant for this kind of work," Ramses said, almost admonishingly. "It is only by our choice that we go down this path. You were ready when you started today. You're still ready now. You think perfection is something that someone is born with? You think everyone's first job is completed without fault?"
Fiona raised her head, silver eyes peering past her tangled forest of red hair. "Your first one probably was."
Now it was Ramses' turn to laugh, albeit as a quiet chuckle. "If only," he mused.
An uncomfortable void opened up between them, a quietus that lasted over a minute. Fiona resumed trembling again and Ramses was staring blankly over her head, past the window and out towards the city where the advertisement blimps were making their slow orbit around the plaza, trailing spotlamp spears and filling the empty space with squares of strobing and violent commercials.
"It was six years ago," he said, his soft voice causing Fiona to jerk in a fright, for it had been that quiet in the room. "You might have still been in that same ice bath. I was in Texas then. Working for a zaibatsu in Dallas. Uptown, a rather swanky place, next to the arena. I had a title then. Manager. Things were on the upswing for me. A corpo, on the promotion track, well-liked in the inner circle. I wore suits then. Could you imagine?"
It was hard for Fiona to imagine Ramses wearing anything other than his typical designer trench coat and fashioned armor, but of course he did not expect her to answer.
He stood from the bed, the act of reminiscence shooting electricity into his body with the desire to walk around. He momentarily appraised one of the mass-market paintings that hung over the bed—a kingfisher leaping from the water while a corona of sun powered through a screen of cotton clouds. A cheap reproduction.
Ramses folded his hands behind his back and began to pace. "One day, we got this message on our consoles. Militech was going to perform a hostile takeover of the zaibatsu. Thirty billion eddies just to acquire this company which would no longer exist within a month—corpo lawyers at that level work fast. In the same message, there was a notice. A layoff would be performed before the conclusion of the acquisition, around ten percent of the existing workforce. Scaling for economy, so they said, though everyone knew the real reason was to give the share price a bit of a bump for the shareholders to offset the drop caused by the acquisition. Of course, I was included in that ten percent. A rival manager had jockeyed ahead of me and ensured I was on the list. And as much as I protested and tried to plead my case… there wasn't anything I could do, and I was pushed out onto the street with the rest of the disposed like a piece of trash. The week before, I had my whole life planned out ahead of me. And on that day… I had idea where to even go. I had to start all over again. From the very beginning."
He was back at the window again, staring out towards the cityscape of lit windows and tangled concrete roads where red and white lights sluiced in their rows like arterial blood.
"For three months, I was adrift, trying to find work in a post-crash world. At one point, I even considered the military, but the Unification War had just ended and there was an overabundance of troops for any side. They were turning people away at the recruiting centers, a far cry from the immense pace that they could sign on fresh meat just years ago. Also contributing to my decision not to enlist were the illegal bodycam recordings taken during the battles, particularly the skirmish of Ridgecrest in South California. It's one thing to read the curated propaganda feeds on the Net. It's another to see the ground-level footage of panzer columns moving down the streets, crushing any soldier or civilian in their way, bombed-out buildings crumbling to dust in the background. Or of the wild firefights in the SoCal neighborhoods where RPGs ripped NUSA footsoldiers in half, flinging their guts in every direction. The high-def audio was adept at recording their screams, their cries for their mothers. One recording was of a soldier that had been crushed by an APC—his lower half was a pancake, but he was still alive, begging the docs to overdose him so that he could no longer feel any more pain. Once I had absorbed all that, the military was not the place I was willing to go to for direction, I had decided. One could say I had come to my senses on that part."
Fiona had turned around, sitting crosslegged on the bed, watching Ramses, her lustrous eyes wide with interest. She could imagine scant details of that face underneath his helmet, finally. As much as she wanted to interject with the occasional question, a shortness of breath foiled her at every turn.
"Soon, I became desperate. I was destitute and homeless—I needed an influx of cash and I stopped giving a shit how I would attain it. I broadened my search to the darknet and found a host of portals where people would post themselves as a courier for any service imaginable. There were the usual postings of unfortunates selling their bodies for eddies, for sex, or for medical purposes. But then there were also people selling their services as hitmen. Mercenaries. And the average payouts were substantial enough that it gave me pause. Untaxed income like that, a single job would have paid for my rent and amenities for a month. It almost sounded too good to be true. And then it was."
He sludged in a quiet inhalation. "I recognized a colleague's Net handle on the darknet. He had posted a personal ad, asking for someone to kill his boss. The target was the same manager who had gotten me fired from my old job. I don't recall exactly how I felt in that moment once I realized the scope of the job, but I do know that it didn't take long at all to compose a message back, indicating that I would take it up. But that was only the start of my education. I had no idea how I was going to kill this man. There was no one around that I could accost for tips. No one that would train me. I had nothing except gut feelings and my own overconfidence driving me forward. I was so poor that I never stopped to consider the morality of my actions, not that I regret them."
"I spent the next day dreaming up plans for my eventual action. I had decided early on that I wanted the man to suffer. He had completely derailed my life, so I thought it was only just that the consequences would scale with his actions. A gun would not do, even though I already owned a pistol for protection. I knew a dealer I used to purchase drugs from. He set me up with a compound, potassium cyanide, that I would find a way to poison the manager with. I also went to a store with the miniscule funds that I had after pawning the last of my valuables, and bought a knife and a cloth facemask to protect my identity. Too many cameras these days. I figured that taking steps to protect myself would be better than brazenly marching around in the open."
His speaking had dropped so quiet right now, that if even a nearby fan were humming, Fiona would not be able to hear him. But Ramses then cleared his throat again and straightened, resuming his stalwart gaze out the window. It felt to Fiona that he was avoiding looking at her, lest the spell of him pulling out his own thoughts for her to see would be broken.
"The details of the job mapped the manager's movements out rather elaborately," Ramses continued. "He went to the same bar near the college every Friday. Always the same time after work. That was going to be when and where my move would be made. I made sure to arrive early and seat myself at the bar an hour before he entered. Half the patrons were wearing masks—they had all developed breathing problems after being exposed to nuclear fallout during the wars, so I did not stand out with my own covering. In my pocket, I had the potassium cyanide. Holstered under my jacket was my pistol, a last resort. I was scared, Fiona. Real scared. Kept on shaking due to nerves. I tried to stay sober for as long as possible, but I eventually had to ask for some whiskey just to make the shaking go away."
"Eventually, he came inside and sat down next to me. A fortuitous stroke of luck. Seeing him again, I had forgotten how angry I could be in his presence. Looking upon his smug face steeled my resolve, made me think of myself as some righteous crusader. I let him get three beers in before I found my courage and an opening to dump the packet of cyanide into his drink when he nor the bartender were looking. I then waited to watch what would happen. The waiting turned into five minutes. Then ten. Fifteen. You can see where the problems had begun to start. Potassium cyanide typically worked instantaneously. Something had gone wrong with the compound. I had most likely been sold nothing but table salt, but that was a problem for another day. The problem I was facing now was still sitting in his seat, face-deep into his fifth drink of the night."
The mercenary finally turned around and even though the features of his helmet were intransigent, there was almost a pitiable look in his wirethin optics.
"I retreated to the bathroom for a moment to gather myself. I spent a long while pacing around, staring at the mirror, trying to build up the courage. The drug wasn't working. My carefully concocted plan was already in ruins. I had to go with a contingency. Or rather, I needed to make one up on the spot."
"With your gun?" Fiona finally asked, the words spilling from her mouth without her realizing it.
Ramses just shook his head. The motion slow, agonizing.
"There was a crowbar that I had noticed when heading to the bathroom, propped up near the exit. I grabbed it. Walked back over to the bar with the crowbar held against my leg, disguising it. He didn't see me coming. No one else noticed, too deep into their drinks. I lifted the crowbar high above my head. If anyone had noticed, they lost their chance in the next instant. I hit him in the back of the head. I remember the force of the blow—my wrists felt like they had shattered and there was this hollow, meaty sound of metal pulverizing bone and brain. I had hit him so hard that he was killed instantly. His skull had cracked into a hundred pieces. Flaps of his brainpan was dangling by threads. I just remember blood exploding all over the bar, the man slumping over, and my own, crazed heartbeat as I hit him over and over again until my arms had tired. I wanted him dead. I had to kill him. I just had to make sure."
He paused for a moment, studying Fiona's face to see if she found him a wretched monster. But her expression was vacant, without judgment. She didn't want to make her conclusion until she had the whole picture.
Ramses continued, "By then, the half-populated bar had recovered from the shock of the killing. I saw them go for their weapons, thinking me a madman. Still in my adrenaline-fueled haze, I dropped the crowbar and went for my own pistol. I don't know how many of them I shot, trying to escape from that place. I can still remember the sounds of the glass windows shattering behind me from the wild gunshots, the jagged pieces still embedded into the sashwork. Bullets were skipping all over the pavement as I ran into the night, lungs heaving. I could hear them off in the distance, looking for me. But I kept running until I could no longer hear their voices. Until I no longer had the strength to run anymore. It felt like I had been running until the dawn finally rose up and found me."
He looked down at the ground for a spell before he continued. "I didn't sleep for hours afterward. I was convinced that I had made a complete mess of things. But then the payment came. A hefty bonus had been attached, plus a glowing review from my colleague. Apparently, as messy as I had been, the job had been completed in such a way that he was thrilled by the outcome. And that review created a stir among that particular subnet. It attracted attention from others who desired similar services, from the killing of an abusive spouse, to the assassination of local political figures. All of them were willing to pay whatever it took to get the job done. More offers, more eddies. I was still in poverty and I was feeling like shit from my first job. At first, I thought I would never take more work like that again. But…" He lifted a hand, flexed his fingers, encased in that impermeable covering. "It all was a bit more insidious that I had first thought."
Fiona chewed the inside of her cheek. Still sitting on the bed, leaning forward like an eager child, she finally fell still.
"You could have said that you were perfect at everything you do," she said after a beat. "Could've fooled me."
Ramses made a dry sound of amusement. "Perfect, heh. Should anyone really know what to do for their first time? It should not be easy for you or I. Not in the beginning. Is it becoming clearer now?"
She considered the question for a long moment. She folded her knuckles together and rested them underneath her chin as she thought.
She looked at him and nodded. Unblinking. He reached over and patted her knee, the affectionate gesture unintentionally causing her to blush. But already she was feeling better. The sick feeling in her stomach had faded and her mind was feeling more like clear glass than storm clouds. Even her trembling had stopped.
Ramses then angled his head down and to the side, as if he was looking at a blank spot at the carpet. Then, like a switch had flipped on him, the mercenary's posture took on a new rigidity, the moment of vulnerability burned away.
"Are you going somewhere?" Fiona hopped off the bed, confused, as she followed Ramses towards the door.
"Wakako's a block away," he said. He took one of his pistols out of his holster, thumbed the slide back halfway until he spotted the glint of brass, pulled out the magazine to verify that it was fully loaded, and finally slotted the magazine back into the weapon. He performed the same action to a second pistol and he secured both guns under his coat. "There's some biz that I'll need to handle with her. In person, unfortunately."
"But I thought you said we needed to lay low?!"
"I did," Ramses was even in his intonation. "But sometimes there's a political aspect to the choices one takes. It's all about picking battles in this line of work. City Center is one of the safest places to be in, comparatively. I'll only be minutes away. If anyone even thinks of making a move, they won't do it here."
"Let me guess," Fiona rasped, nearly sarcastic, "too many risks for them to take?"
Ramses slowly placed his hands on his hips, his coat widening like the wings of a bat. "Now you're catching on."
A surge of pride rose in Fiona's chest. Something rippling through muscle and bone, warm and rushing, seemed to furrow up from her guts, rising to her head.
But Ramses was turning to leave, his hand already outstretched to open the door.
"Wait!" she called.
He looked back at her.
She shuffled her feet on the ground, suddenly shy. "Thank you," she whispered, the light from the lamps wisping a corona around Ramses' head. "Thank you for getting me out of there."
The door now half-open, Ramses just stared at her. Then, as if he were afraid to admit some secret truth, he pulled the threshold all the way open and left Fiona standing in the middle of the room, all alone.
STREETLEVEL
Just outside the hotel, a wide stone staircase the color of basalt stretched before him that led down to the street. He descended, hands casually in his pockets, and crossed the road, the tall spindles of the buildings razing the clouded sky.[2] The night was cold and filled with the sounds of machinery and raunchy advertisements. An almost soothing concerto.
He found her at the marketplace, a block away from the hotel. Wakako was sitting at food stall, eating dumplings with a set of steel chopsticks. Around her, a cadre of four snappily-dressed men stood at attention, their eyes always darting. Tattoos slithered up their sleeves and wrapped around their necks. Their faces were oily as they stood next to the steaming stand. Wakako's sons—the only entourage she could trust, or at least approximate as much trust as she could muster. And this was not even all of them, for she had nine in total from four separate husbands, all of whom were deceased.
One of the men held out a hand as Ramses approached, shaking his head in a way that indicated that now was not the right time to approach the fixer. Ramses was, of course, annoyed by this, seeing as Wakako gave him the all-clear to approach back in the hotel room, so he was considering smashing her son's nose in until her wizened voice cut clear through the clustered sounds of the marketplace.
"Leave us." She had not even looked up from her food.
The son that had stopped Ramses gave him a glare, but backed off in response to his mother's directive. The rest of his siblings followed suit, retreating amidst the steam and drizzle that had begun to drench a shiny patina over the city.
"Sit, why don't you?" Wakako said as she hunched over her meal, munching heartily. "I'm not going to turn around until this is finished."
Ramses chewed his lip, but pulled out one of the stools so that he could, like the woman's sons, follow orders.
The proprietor poured him a glass of tequila upon Wakako's request—a glass of the yellowed liquid sat next to her plate, already half-drunk.
"The job was completed, I take it?" Wakako asked right before she stuffed a dumpling into her mouth. Steam hissed from between her lips, but she chewed slowly, the discomfort not at all stoppering her enjoyment of the meal.
The mercenary just reached towards his microsoft port and withdrew a shard. He had recorded the entire job and had done a quick edit of only the parts that Wakako would find pertinent. He set it on the counter and slid it over to Wakako.
Still chewing, Wakako slowly turned her head towards Ramses, her eyes narrowing. She reached over and the shard disappeared down the sleeve of her thousand-eddie coat. Returning to her food, she adopted the same hard gaze when Ramses had first arrived.
"So. How did the girl do?"
Ramses held the cup of tequila in a hand, swirling it back and forth with the motion of his wrist. He looked down at the liquid, fantasizing what it would be like to drown himself in the waves of the alcohol, to go back to such a life that had threatened to consume him wholesale.
"She performed as expected," he said, the lie coming easily. He was not about to reveal to Wakako the massive asterisk that came with the outcome. He still did not understand what had happened with Fiona over in that house. He doubted Wakako could bring him any enlightenment. Best to keep that close to his chest until he could figure out what was really going on.
Wakako's glasses were fogging up from how close she had her face to her still-warm food. She smiled after taking a sip of her tequila. "But not up to your standards, though. Or am I incorrect?"
The mercenary set his own glass down, any desire for liquor rotted away like the notion had been bleached in acid. "Do you think anyone else could match me in what I do, Wakako?"
"Why not?" the fixer shrugged. "You wouldn't have taken her under your wing if you didn't think that."
Ramses bit back an impolite comment. He didn't come down here to get a lecture. He just wanted to get paid so that he could head back up to the hotel room and get some sleep. After such a hectic day, he was in an irritable mood and he wanted to fully divest himself from his thoughts, if only for a few hours.
Wakako spoke again after Ramses failed to respond in time. "For two decades, I've been in this business. I've seen mercs come and go, each of their dreams more aspirational than the last. The ones that make a habit of this—the ones who survive—are the ones who truly understand the city. Its rhythms. The vibe, if you will."
"Are you making an implication of my professionalism?" Ramses asked, his modulated voice coming out in a sawing rasp.
The fixer shook her head. "Merely one regarding the company you keep."
Annoyed, Ramses swiveled in his stool, facing the street. Sweepers were starting to move along the edges of the road, the steel bristles making a hissing noise as they scraped along the pavement. Off near the intersection, a drunk wobbled against a signpost before they bent to vomit. Someone cursed and threw a bottle, which smashed into the darkness.
He absorbed the environment with his trademark stoicism, but it was hard to not get offended from the fixer's insinuations. Any comment towards Fiona's performance was a direct reflection upon him. If she did well, it made him look better. If she did poorly, then that was a hit to his rep. He would not suffer any deviations to his reputation and he was fuming at the fact that Wakako was already inching in that direction.
"It was her first job," he defended, trying to keep his voice even so that it did not sound like he was being overly protective. "She carried out the objective. You have the footage—you can see the results for yourself. There is work to be done with her, yes, but there is something to work with."
There was a clinking noise as Wakako set her chopsticks down on the plate. She dabbed at her mouth with a napkin, crumpled it in a fist, and set it upon the plate as well. She then turned in her chair, mouth in a hard line. "One of these days, merc, you will have to look at the situation and observe it honestly. What you say may indeed come to pass. But, you may be waiting for that day forever. I have seen it before in those with less talent. Their hubris could almost eclipse yours."
A typical Wakako comment. Mixing praise with criticism in the same breath. The last time he had received such a lecture was around the time that he had torched one of her cars. If anything, she had seemed far more controlled back then.
"The difference is that they made mistakes," he finally rasped.
"They only needed to make one," Wakako said. "It is not for me to say what you needed to do or not do in the moment. The choice has already been made, and so have the mistakes. Sometimes, one is enough to tip that balance. To have your life all come undone by the tiniest thread. Perhaps you have reached that point where you no longer have the privilege of choice. Now, there is only the path forward, while the trail behind you has crumbled away."
The philosophy was lost on Ramses' ears. He had no head for such wordplay. The notion that there was nothing that he could do to dig himself out of the supposed hole he was in was nonsense, in his opinion. The implication that the fixer was making was obvious: his mistake was when he had abandoned his principles that one night. When he had made a choice that was nothing but personal when he had sworn never to do such a thing.
When he had saved a person whom he set out to kill.
Fiona.
Wakako made a soft noise and lit a cigarette from an angular lighter that emitted a tongue of dragon's breath. The distance—a stool's width—between them seemed like a gulf. The yellow halogen tubes embedded into the bar counter wafted goldenrod flames in the steam that seeped out between the ill-fitting cart panels. Wakako flicked the lighter off and took a drag of the cigarette, the smoke mingling with the smell of the roasting food while the overhead umbrellas drummed with the thickening rain.
"You don't want to believe me."
Ramses leaned his back against the counter. "Everyone wants to imagine they're in control of their own destiny."
"And you think you're in such a position? Do you think I am?" Wakako rotated in her seat, providing the mercenary with her undivided attention. Her gold rims flickered in sparkling halos whenever the light from a passing car caught them. "There is only the perception of control in this city, merc. Reputation. Cash. Clout. These are all a smokescreen that merely obscures where the true balance of power lies. And it isn't down on the street. It's up in the lofts, the penthouses, even past the very atmosphere. We are only part of the grand simulation that is Night City. We're simply programs in a code written a long time ago, playing out our parts. If you think you have the ability to see the various paths, the space in between the code, then you're only deluding yourself. We have no control over anything, and the sooner we start believing that, only then can we realize just how free we really are."
LEVEL_41
She had been sitting on the edge of the bed, watching the skyline before her, unable to see the lowlands past the screen of skyscrapers. To the north, just past the jagged maze of antenna over the rooftops, the glow of gas flares from the inland refineries. To the west, the occasional ignition of radiance in the clouds from passing rockets. She had been sitting in this position for ten minutes, in a torpor, unable to move or even to think of resting.
In that moment, Fiona felt nothing.
She had tried lying down on the bed in desperate search of sleep. Nothing came of it. She was just too wired. She considered taking a sleeping pill—but unless there was a miniature pharmacy stashed somewhere in this hotel room, then that was nothing but wishful thinking on her part.
"Stupid, stupid, stupid," she said as she paced around the room in an agony. Talking with Ramses had alleviated her anguish somewhat, but it would take an effort greater than one conversation could provide to throw off the yoke of tension and angst that gripped her in a fervor. She felt wrong, as if there was something else inhabiting this body under her skin. Like she was a meat puppet that was only seeing it for what it truly was. Everything itched and there was always a kink or an ache that threatened to crop up, always in a different spot, whenever she fell still for a moment.
But nothing ached so much as the blank spot in the middle of her mind, where her questions began but no answers could fill. Her fragmented memory, damaged enough as it was, was riddled with so many holes that it leaked like a sieve. Damn it, she just wanted to know who she was. Why events had transpired to bring her to this place and moment, and what she was truly capable of. Tonight had proceeded to just throw more fuel onto the fire in terms of the amount of questions she had.
Curious, she lifted her palm, and flexed her brow, her eyes burrowing onto a particular line etched into her hand. From her thoughts, she had manifested arcane fire, and she was almost expecting her hand to burst into an array of digital flames. She wanted to see that crimson glow again, those haunting symbols. Just to know that she could do it.
Yet it all eluded her. The feeling—that sense of reality washing away. It did not return.
The ache manifested itself into a phantom pain. She wanted to howl, to dispel this agony into a primal scream. But what good would that do? She didn't even know who to blame for all of this. There was a layered disgust that ran through her—hatred towards her captors, and by extension, herself. For being such a disappointment and a burden to the one person who trusted her.
"Why?" she whispered. "Why do you think I'm so special? I don't even know what I'm doing."
After spending a few more minutes tossing and turning upon the bed, Fiona finally had had enough. She got up from the bed and headed for the bathroom. She closed and locked the door behind her and turned towards the shower. Three glass walls with a gap of half a foot between them and the stone ceiling. A showerhead was built directly overhead, mimicking a circular rainfall.
A quick moment of introspection had revealed the need to use the shower. She had not taken one all day and a soak in the heat and steam would do wonders at taking her mind off of the day's events.
Quickly, she disrobed, and her clothes soon formed a pile near the door. She was glad to be rid of them. The blood that had adhered to the fabric had dried into a musty brown, the last remnants of Villereal. She felt that she should burn them once she was back at Ramses' place. Anything to forget the sight of his face melting while a fire in his skull charbroiled his brain.
Stark-naked, she tapped the display to the shower door and the glass silently parted to allow her inside. The raised tile floor was rough and grippy on her bare feet. There was a hollowness to which sound dryly echoed only once before dissipating.
The water soon drizzled down, the temperature blistering. The glass box soon filled with white clouds.
Fiona stood in the middle of the spray, her hair adhering to her scalp, eyes serenely shut. Her body felt like it was finally unknotting, the scalding water loosening her muscles. She opened her mouth, letting the water flow in. It had no taste, no trace of chemicals. So, this was what the rich drank.
She was so entranced by the feel of the shower that she did not notice the security system blinking red near the doorway, a fault having registered for a microsecond. The light then flicked over to green, as plaintively as before.
The netrunner also did not notice the door to the outside room begin to slide open, allowing an elongated submachinegun barrel to slide through the crack, pointed directly at her head.
STREETLEVEL
Wakako lit another cigarette, sparks flaring into the night. She inhaled, twin streams of smoke expelling from her nostrils. [3]
"You've been uncharacteristically quiet, merc."
Ramses stood just before the edge of the food stall's nearby awning, fat trails of gray tainted rainwater flowing past the muted glow of the slits in his helmet. Steam hissed from a nearby manhole cover and there was the searing sound of tires over wet pavement. Distorted echoes from distant advertisements bounced upon the tall buildings, the dancing animations appearing as if they were being slashed from the rain.
"My words aren't going to be the tool that convinces everyone," Ramses said, his back to the fixer. "Proving everyone wrong will only occur once I bring Fiona up a few levels. Then, I'll have garnered the ability to gloat."
Behind him, Wakako grinned as she took another drag of her cigarette. "Sunk-cost fallacy?"
He wondered if she was baiting him into saying something that he would regret. Emotions are a distraction. He kept his stare stalwart, towards the churning night. "She hasn't proved me wrong yet."
"Yet," Wakako repeated, as if she made a habit of reminding others of their fallibility.
Ramses turned around and looked at Wakako. His shoulder soon became spattered by a tiny trail of trickling rainwater that had intruded down the plastic awning, but he ignored it. "She made it past the first job. She'll make it past the second. And the one after that."
"Absconded with a touch of the clairvoyant, have you? No one can possibly be that confident. This is the wrong place, the wrong occupation, for such a thing."
"She has someone who's lasted for a while to help her," he growled. "How many of us can say we had such an advantage?"
But Wakako waved a hand dismissively. "Don't try and flatter yourself, merc. I'm immune to that sort of doublespeak. It's obvious as to what's going on here, but you're going to make me say it aloud, aren't you?"
"Obvious."
The fixer positioned her cigarette between two fingers in a raised hand, the lit end smoldering, a trunk of ash forming.
"She will never be you. She might not even get close. But you're so convinced that you're able to rise her above all that, to give her a head start. It doesn't work like that, Ramses. How do you think I know such things? I would only have to live them to have the knowledge. Have I ever told you about my brief stint at Kiroshi?"
He didn't know where she was going with this, but he suspected it would be another metaphor-laced yarn. Even though he was dreading the outcome, he shook his head as a signal for her to proceed.
"It was just after the Fourth Corporate War. I was hired by Kiroshi here in Night City to work as a Medtech—I frequently ran with their espionage crews, pulling corporate heists on their rivals. Stealing plans for valuable bionics, tampering with chemical reactions to destroy a particular fabrication line, and even the occasional poison research. At one time, I could identify any substance just by looking at it. But that was a lifetime ago. I had this partner, Renji, who was assigned to me. Young kid, looked like he just started shaving the week prior. He was nervous, but eager to learn. Very much wanted to make an impression. I liked him quite a bit, even though he could get on my nerves sometime."
Ramses had been in the process of slowly positioning his body so that his shoulders were square with the fixer. Wakako, on the other hand, seemed to be in a world of her own, looking down and to the side, as if she was merely rehearsing her words rather than intently relaying them.
"We worked well together, Renji and I. He soon learned the ropes of the job, and grew quite confident, too. Eventually, after a couple of years, he was offered the chance to plan a raid of his own. The idea would be his from the ground up. He would be responsible for the prework, the raid choreography, and the final exit. Corporate didn't mind letting new blood plan the missions. They liked the variety it brought, plus it did do morale good to bounce different ideas off of one another."
"Seems that you had free reign," Ramses noted.
"Yes, in a sense I was very lucky," Wakako admitted. "I thought it would be a job I would do for the rest of my life. And Renji did too, certainly. And so certain he was of his success that, for his first mission, the target of interest that he ended up selecting was one not even the most experience crewman in our squad would touch: Zeiss."
The name gave Ramses pause. In the world of optics, one would have to be an idiot to have not known of Zeiss' reputation. They were a household brand among the populace. European electronics with premium prices—they certainly gave the Japanese a run for their money. And they were quite jealous of their trade secrets. Ramses had passed by their regional headquarters a time or two; security was just as heavy as any Arasaka building in the area.
Wakako smoked, studying the merc. She then continued, "Corporate was keen to see someone so eager to take on a rival firm that they approved Renji's plan almost immediately. The objective was rather mundane: install a surveillance packet at a local substation that Kiroshi would then use to access recording services in the Zeiss buildings in Night City. A routine mission for a non-routine target. But, you must be wondering, since I am telling this story, you're waiting for when I get to the part when things fall apart?"
"The thought had occurred to me," Ramses admitted.
"Then you'll be surprised to learn that the surveillance mission was pulled off without a hitch."
"Surprising, indeed."
"Yes, isn't it? Everyone played their part to the letter. There were no moments of improvisation, all hostiles were taken care of in a non-lethal manner, and the surveillance packet was installed without any errors. Two hours later, Kiroshi was already in the process of parsing valuable data from Zeiss, now that they had complete access to the building's network."
Ramses waited for the pin to drop. There was obviously more to the story—Wakako would not be so cruel to waste his time while regaling him with a story that had no obvious point. He crossed his arms and waited for the fixer to finish her cigarette.
"Of course, everyone was slightly on edge several days after the job had been completed. But after two weeks with no retaliation, we allowed ourselves to relax." Wakako then stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray with a viciousness as if she was trying to crush an insect. "Soon after, Renji disappeared. No one knows how or when it happened." She glanced over at Ramses, his reflection filling her glinting bifocals. "They found his body in pieces in the waterway a few days later. Most of his body, anyway."
"Zeiss bided their time." Ramses walked over to the bar counter and leaned upon it with his forearms. "Your partner thought he had made a clean getaway. Complacency. A mistake."
A wan smile folded upon Wakako's face. She folded her hands in her lap, managing to look poised even in this environment.
"A mistake. Yes. But not the only one he made. One that everyone else seemed to realize at the same time. Do you know what that mistake was?"
Ramses looked out where the rain hissed and sizzled and where the pavement steamed. Faded shapes of buildings blending into the dusk, the neon hue of umbrellas lining the sidewalks.
"Tell me," he said.
Wakako stood from the stool she was sitting on, took out a foldable umbrella of her own from a pocket in her coat, and unfurled it. There was the loud spatter of raindrops hitting the clear plastic. Immediately, as if that had been a silent cue, her four sons arrived from wherever they had been skulking in the dark and surrounded her, ready to escort their mother—a bona fide VIP—to wherever she desired to head next.
"The city has a nature of its own," she said. "It has a memory that far outlasts even the megalopolises of Tokyo, Paris, or Berlin. For every action that occurs a Night City, a debt equal to that action is incurred. Sooner or later, Night City, much like a casino, will claim that debt back. It's a matter of statistics. A person is allocated only so many 'clean' getaways in their entire life. It's just that one bad one locked in the chamber that will end the game. We're all pulling the triggers on our own guns, merc. Night City is simply the entity that is loading the bullets."
LEVEL_41
Fully congested within the steam cloud that filled the shower, Fiona kept herself situated under the spray, feeling like she could soak in here forever. [4] Her eyes were still closed, mouth slightly parted, her hair matted tightly against her scalp as the raining water flowed down her body.
Then… something changed.
A chill. A slight breeze. A dip in pressure that she registered with her eardrums.
She opened her eyes. Near where the glass of the shower made a gap against the ceiling, she could see waves of steam abruptly rush out, as if there was a draft sucking out the air.
Then she looked down at the shower knob. It was hard to see in its curved face, but a slight reflection of the door, silently parting. Someone dark intruding, their arm holding a sinister object—
She moved to the side without thinking and the top half of one of the glass panels abruptly shattered, the sound of the firing gun nearly deafening her. The bullets sailed through the thick glass and embedded into the stone wall, carving off razor shards of polished granite chips. Some of the shrapnel struck Fiona in the arm, drawing a faint spray of blood, and she yelled.
The door to the bathroom now slammed open, but Fiona could not see who it was past the rest of the fogged glass. More muted fire chattered from the submachinegun. Fiona ducked, curling into a ball on the ground, and the shower glass shattered all around her, coating her in whited shards. The shower was still running, spraying water in every direction. Bullet holes pockmarked the wall just behind her and grime now slithered into the drain in dark trails.
Fiona lifted her head. Most of the glass around the shower was gone, allowing the steam to billow out in a shallow shockwave. With her view now unobstructed, she saw a man with an emotionless face. A neutral glare in his eyes. Hair cropped closely to his skull. He was reloading his submachinegun, the expended magazine already clattering on the tile floor.
She lifted a hand on instinct, a quickhack primed. The Extremaduran looked at his weapon as the internal electronics malfunctioned, the processor already in the throes of overheating—a faint wisp of smoke from a fried drive was already curling from the gaps in the submachinegun's paneling. The assassin scowled and tossed the gun aside. He drew a knife from a holster at his belt and stomped past the boundary where the shower glass had once stood, his boots crunching it underfoot.
Fiona was trying to scramble to her feet, but the glass on the ground cut into her bare feet and she yelped, hesitating for a crucial second. Blood now streamed into the drain.
The assassin strode forward and bodily kicked Fiona in the ribs. She rose up off the ground nearly a foot with a cry, the reinforced boot nearly breaking her ribs and driving them into her lungs. The Extremaduran tried another kick, but Fiona shot to her feet only for a brutal punch to smash into her cheek. A stream of red was forcibly ejected from her mouth and she was knocked against one of the last of the glass walls of the shower, which cracked as she set all of her weight against it. Naked, cold, and shivering, Fiona tried to get back up under her own power again, but she was too disoriented to mount another attack.
That gave the Extremaduran all the time he needed to close the gap and grab Fiona by the throat so that he could bodily lift her up and pin her against the wall. A cold metal shower knob jammed into Fiona's lower back and she gagged. The Extremaduran was partially standing in the still-running spray, condensation splattering his iron features.
She tried to scream, but the gloved hand holding her throat was too tight. The stone wall was freezing against her naked skin. She tried kicking out her legs, but the Extremaduran had positioned himself between them, able to avoid her blows.
With one hand, she clawed at the grip that the assassin had on her throat, making spluttering noises as she did so. With her other, she grabbed the man's other wrist, able to halt the progression of the knife that was now slowly travelling toward her eye. But it was a battle she knew she would never win—the man was just too strong, his muscles made of steel. The tip of the blade inched forward, a narrow line in her view.
She noticed, in some detached portion of her brain, that the Extremaduran did not have any visible cyberware installed. His face looked completely organic. It was only his eyes, the irises of which were faintly distorted, like a melted watercolor, that drew her. They were gray like the toxic morning mist.
Fiona wanted to cry out. To ask why he was doing this to her. But she lacked the breath to do so.
The Extremaduran's fingers dug into her windpipe. Her vision began to gray out. The blood still dripped from her bare feet, splattering the ground, and her entire body began to grow even whiter until she was pale as a sheet.
In desperation, she called up her cyberdeck and tried to open another quickhack. But her targeting software was malfunctioning—it was refusing to lock onto the Extremaduran. He had installed close-range nullifiers, she realized too late. Hacks were useless when inside his firewall shield. He was able to push her out so effortlessly. He was the one in Villereal's home system, she then realized. He was trying to thwart me at every turn. How long had this man been hunting her?
There were little in the way of options. Only those where logic could fail to take hold. She searched deeply within that unknown nonspace of her mind, desperately willing to make that horrible connection once again. She had used it on Villereal. She could use it now.
But nothing came. There was no indication that such energy would flow from her once again. Nothing would muster, as if she had drained her one and only chance for the night, if not for her entire liife.
The Extremaduran's head tilted and his eyes flickered with an unholy light. In the next second, a small progress bar popped up on Fiona's HUD. Incoming hostile packet, it read. A schematic of her body functions whipped up alongside it—several areas, including her heart and brain, where her cybernetics were the most congested, were flashing with a franticness that rivaled the pulse that rushed through her.
Killshot.
K_S initiated, a command prompt popped up in her vision. Executable will run upon download completion. A skull and bones icon then accompanied the text, the jaw animated in a sinister laugh.
Her eyes grew wider. 45%... it indicated. 50%... 60%... 80%...
She closed her eyes. This was it.
The progress bar stopped moving when it reached 90%. A sentence in red block lettering then flashed on the screen, so quick that if Fiona had not been paying attention, she might have missed it.
SOURCE CODE IDENTIFIED. RESETTING FIREWALL. DELETING EXECUTABLE AND RUNNING COUNTERMEASURES. UNACCEPTABLE INTRUSION. UNACCEPTABLE. UNACCEPTABLE.
The bar then rushed back down to 0%, as if it were a glass that had suddenly been drained. Curiosity and frustration now flecked the Extremaduran's face and, for a brief moment, he turned his head away, his current plan having fizzled out uselessly.
That was when Fiona made her next move. Bringing her foot around, she suddenly jammed it between the Extremaduran's legs and kicked as hard as she could. She hit something soft—he was not armored there.
Immediately, the assassin's knees buckled and he went down. The hand holding the knife jerked forward, plunging past Fiona's head and scraping onto the stone wall of the shower, leaving behind a whited gouge, the blade squealing as it trailed down.
Fiona dropped to the ground, her palms now getting cut up as she scrambled over the wet and glass-covered floor. She swiped a leg and the Extremaduran went down with a grunt. Her mind raced to where she had left her weapons, her clothes. Gun. Gun in the other room. She needed to get there.
Something slashed her thigh and Fiona grunted as more blood exploded across the ground. Freezing from being soaked and from not having a stich of clothing on herself, she stumbled to her feet, shivering from fear and adrenaline. But her mauled feet slipped on the blood that oozed from her wounds and she went down hard, banging her head against the tile floor so badly that the world flickered into a sea of grayscale static for a moment. Like a console screen that needed rebooting.
On her back, she lifted her head. The Extremaduran was slowly getting to his feet. He had flicked open a port in the grip of the knife that he held and his other hand held a small cartridge that had a bevy of warnings printed across it. Acid blade. A single scrape from a weapon like that would mean certain death from her arteries turning to liquid and her heart beating until it exploded.
The Extremaduran strode towards the fallen netrunner, about to slot the cartridge into the knife.
Fiona sprang her lower body up. Her heel connected with the hand that held the cartridge, the sudden blow folding his hand inward, forcing the assassin to crush the cartridge in his grip.
Milky white liquid sprayed between the Extremaduran's gloved fingers.
Fiona's eyes tracked the trajectory of the stream. She felt as if she should roll from the impact, to try and dodge it, but a sereneness had overtaken her, as if she had temporarily succumbed to some notion of destiny.
The acid hit Fiona's lower jaw and right cheek. Flesh began to hiss and bubble. Smoke from the immediate reaction curled from her face and rose into the air to mingle with the steam from the shower.
She had never before felt such pain. She forgot the faces of everyone she ever knew. Everything turned white from her. White from the pain. She howled, a scream so primal that she could have never conjured such a noise willingly. The netrunner tried to clamp a hand over where she was being burned, only to rip her arm away, the flesh of her palm also smoking from the acid from where she had touched it. It felt as if an industrial grinder was boring directly onto her jawbone—she could envision the pieces of her face flinging away from the imaginary drill, the bones of her skull becoming more and more revealed as her skin and cartilage rotted away.
Her tears mixed with the blood that streamed down her neck, the sweat of her body, and the condensation inside the humid room. She thrashed and spasmed, feeling her flesh boil and char.
She wanted to be back in the ice bath. She wanted nothing more to return to that cold place, where she could be forever alone.
The Extremaduran was ripping his own glove off before the acid could eat through the leather. The discarded garment hissed and smoked on the soaked floor. He still had the knife, however, and Fiona was still alive. Determined to see the job through, he kicked the netrunner until she was flat on her back, which was an ordeal given that she was still writhing around in agony. To stop her movements, he quickly straddled her until he was sitting upon her bare stomach, knife in a backhand grip. To the assassin, he had no other thoughts than murder. It was what he was paid for. It would be all that he would accomplish.
Fiona was trying to buck the Extremaduran off, but with him sitting on her, that was not possible. Her feet uselessly scraped on the floor and she was crying out a hideous note, a long wail. Her worst fears were being materialized before her. Near delirious from the pain, the image of her on the ground, naked, about to die before the assassin's knife, was beyond what her imagination had been able to conjure in the past.
Reaching down, the Extremaduran grabbed Fiona's chin, forcing her head up and at an angle, giving him a perfect view of her throat. There was no way he could miss.
Her eyes tilted towards the gleaming point, the spear of iron transfixed in her mind, her breathing now slow and serene.
She reached across the ground for something. Anything.
Something sharp cut her palm. A broken pane of glass from the shower. She closed her hand around it. Blood wept from where the glass cut into her skin.
Without thinking, she slammed the shard of glass into the Extremaduran's side, the razor edge nicking the bones of his ribs, and twisted it violently. For the first time, he made a grunting noise and bent forward, the knife springing loose from his hand and barely missing Fiona's neck as it bounced on the ground next to her.
Before he could wrench the glass out himself, Fiona yanked her arm back, her fist coated in the Extremaduran's blood as if she was holding his ripped-out heart. With the weight of the assassin positioned more over her lower body, she lifted herself up. Then she swiped her arm across with a fierce cry.
There was a gurgling sound and a savage red spray erupted from the Extremaduran's neck. Blood fountained into the air in a wide arc, soaking the far wall along with the netrunner trapped underneath the dying man. The Extremaduran's hands flew up to his throat, as if he thought he could stem the flow. Useless, as the glass had slashed clean through his carotid arteries and had nicked his windpipe. Blood flowed down into the opening in his throat, flooding his lungs and choking him. His wound continued to spatter until the pressure had diminished to a fine drizzle, then a mist, in just a matter of seconds. The assassin, the front of his body black with his thick blood, jerked once, twice, and finally keeled over, his eyes wide with surprise and just the slightest tinge of fear.
He fell to the side, leaving the bloodsplattered Fiona to become wracked with sobs and choking coughs. She had been completely coated from the torso up, the blood dripping down her skin in long trails and congealing in her hair. She kicked herself away from the dead man, whose fingers were twitching as he lay there on the ground, a dark pool spreading from his body.
There was a soaked towel lying on the ground nearby, flecked with red. She grabbed for it, her vision now in a haze, and pressed it against her jaw. She was crying again, though she didn't know if it was from just how scared she had been, the indignity of the fight, or from the massive pain that rocked her whole body. With one arm, she pushed herself into a semi-upright position, the Extremaduran's blood dribbling off of her.
In the next second—or so it seemed, for an hour could very well have passed—she heard the door open. Heavy boots stomped in her direction. The sound of synthesized breathing. She could recognize the sound of that man anywhere.
Ramses burst into the room, saw her naked on the floor, and then he saw the Extremaduran. Quickly, he drew his pistol, walked over, and shot the assassin in the head. Brains and bits of skull exploded across the ground in a dark and gory shockwave. He then shoved his pistol back into his holster and swiftly knelt down to take her in his arms. [5]
He was calling her name over and over again, but it was all blurring into one formless sound. His arms were then around her, his coat off of his shoulders and covering her body. His hands were checking her body for wounds besides the obvious one. Poking, prodding. She was so covered in blood he must have thought that she had been stabbed. He touched her cheek and she looked into where his helmet reflected the light, beads of condensation dripping from the armored surface.
I'm sorry, she wanted to say, but tears filled her eyes and her mouth could not form the words.
She heard her name being called again and everything cleared in time for her to hear him say, "Hold still." Then his covered fingers, glistening with a salve of some kind, cold and thick, brushed her jaw and the searing pain began to subside. Ice numbed at her face and more tears released from the sheer relief of the agony departing. Ramses was now holding her even tightly, trying to fix as much damage as possible, the sounds of his breathing escalated beyond mere concern. Her arms had been thrown around him and she clutched him with all of her strength, the lights of the bathroom searing afterimages into her eyes and the noise of the shower like killer's knife scraping across a stone.
A/N: The next chapter may suffer a slight delay, as I'll be out traveling for a few days in the beginning of next month. Even I need a break once in a while.
Playlist:
[1] The Room
"Should You Choose to Accept…"
Lorne Balfe
Mission: Impossible - Fallout (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
[2] Walk to Wakako
"The Killer"
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
The Killer (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
[3] Wakako's Tale
"Vertigo Train Memorex"
woob
9009
[4] Acid and Rain
"Fear"
Naoki Sato
Godzilla Minus One (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
[5] First Half Outro
"April 1945"
Steven Price
Fury (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
THE CAST (so far):
MAIN_CAST:
Ramses: Night City merc. Solo. Unknown age. Unknown origin. Adept in: precision weapons, infiltration, assassination.
Fiona (JP422-7C): Netrunner, formerly in the employ of NetWatch. Early twenties. Unconfirmed origin.
SUPPORTING_CAST:
Michiko Arasaka: Corpo. Head of Hato faction of Arasaka and member of the corporation's board of directors. 68 years old.
Rzhevsky: Unknown age. Estonian origin. Housed in DaiOni cybernetic conversion. Personal bodyguard of Michiko Arasaka.
Wakako Okada: Fixer in Japantown. A former mercenary. Known for her brusque manner and high (sometimes unreasonable) expectations with the contracts she holds.
The Extremaduran: Assassin. Hails from Europe. Under NetWatch employ. No Night City identification. DECEASED.
Rogue Amendiares: The so-called Queen of the Afterlife and former partner of Johnny Silverhand. Night City's best fixer, highly sought after by mercs due to her lucrative payouts and all-biz attitude.
Ryo: Merc. Former Tyger Claw. An avid collector of BDs from the Edgerunner crew and a friend to Fiona.
Tobin: BARGHEST commando. Based in Dogtown under the command of Kurt Hansen. Moonlights as a merc during rare opportunities of shore leave.
Kross: Ex-Malestrom turned merc. Retired from the gang but quickly got bored of life without the action. Went independent for the juice, not the cash.