Judy's BD editor was a beast: ultra hi-def trimonitor, vibrotactile keyboard, a multiplex deck fitted with a twenty teraflop membank, TruNeuro interface, a Raven Microcyber editing suite with built-in RealFeel.

Judy put on her BD wreath, synced it to her editing rig while she calibrated the sensitivity on her vibrotactile gloves. "I'll have it displayed on the monitor for ya," she told V.

"Nova. Sounds preem."

Judy turned to her rig, tapped out a sequence on the vibrotactile keyboard. The keyboard was a featureless, ergonomic slab of black silicon, the raised bumps on it indicating keys, like techie braille. "Where's Panam, anyway?"

"Camp. Discussin' the trip into the Trash Pan with Carol, Mitch and Cassidy," said V. "Plottin' the route, all that shit—y'know how it goes. Said she'd be back tonight."

"Exactly what I want," said Judy, in a tone suggesting it was anything but. "More desert drivin'."

The drive into Arizona had been rough. Besides sandstorms, blistering heat, and roads that hadn't seen a lick of new blacktop since the 2020s, Raffens were everywhere out in the Sonoran. A local Raffen clan calling themselves the Rattlesnakes had attacked their convoy on the drive into Flagstaff, right before her and Judy had broken off for Phoenix. Not that the Rattlesnakes had been able to do much other than annoy them, thanks to the Basilisk, and to her clan's collective skill in dealing with their ilk. Still, it wasn't a drive V was looking forward to either.

"We takin' your bike?" asked Judy, making a few adjustments to her wreath, then punching another sequence into the vibrotactile keyboard.

"Nah," said V, "we'll be ridin' with Panam." Her bike could handle the roads, but out in the desert, the riding got too rough, too choppy. And that wasn't including the mounds of trash out there in the Sonoran, which, for her street-rider, made it a definite no-go.

"When're we ever gonna get a Nomad car?" asked Judy.

"Soon as I can afford t'put one together," said V, and paused. "Or someone dies, and I call dibs first."

Judy examined something on her trimonitor, then said, "Great." V wasn't sure if she meant that about the Nomad car, or about something on her editing soft. After a moment, she made it clear she'd meant the latter. "BD's ready. Gonna go under, but you'll see everythin' in real-time on the trimonitor."

"Why not lemme sync my wreath, too?" asked V.

"'Cause you'd just get in my way, throw off my rhythm." Judy was grinning as she said this, the smile touching her eyes. "Y'rewind too much, take too long to find irregularities—"

"Okay, okay. Ouch." V put up her hands in mock surrender. "Leave it to the experts, gotcha."

Judy pecked her on the cheek, then reclined in her chair, soon lost in the braindance's flashing optic terminals, her face a catatonic mask. On the trimonitor, V watched as Teotihuacán—that was what the data-compound was called in her mind—sketched into existence, in bright lattices of logic: ziggurats materializing like children's stack-toys assembled in reverse, logarithmically-generated phyllotaxis manifesting the vast data-jungle from which the Locos guerillas had emerged to exact the dictums of a terminally ill rogue intelligence.

It was a bit disorienting, V thought, seeing the 3D representation of cyberspace from a 4D perspective, and she wondered if this constituted an approximation of an out-of-body experience. In cyberspace, the Net was as real to a netrunner as realspace itself; it became their here and now, not their there and then, and among more veteran netrunners, it became their here and now, always. Even jacked out, it was oftentimes hard to distinguish the two realities, and became harder still the longer a netrunner patronized that neuroelectric hallucination. V suspected that was partially why, other than as some schizoid mechanism to avoid the world, why Ayako stayed half-jacked: she would, invariably, go some variant of cyberpsychotic if she disconnected for too long.

She watched the sporeware event play out, and as it approached the moment the Locos netrunners breached the data-compound, V glimpsed an irregularity. "Pause right here, Judy."

Judy did, her hand, the one sheathed in the vibrotactile glove, manipulating some control only she could see.

V studied the freeze-frame: ghosts frozen in a charge, hot-decked and ready to flatline the opposition. The irregularity glitched behind the Locos, out among the mathematical vertices of the palms. V said, "Flycam into the jungle, magnify that anomaly." She recited the precise grid coordinates to Judy, watched Judy's fingers twist some invisible knob, flip some invisible switch, the camera detaching from its fixed axis and swiveling free, zooming in on the anomaly.

The gridlines were warped there, spooled tightly around a point, the palms around it strobing wildly. V said, "Now play it at 0.25x speed." Judy dragged a finger through the air, and V watched as the anomaly unspooled and expanded like a singularity event in virtual microcosm, sucking code into its blackhole depths. "Timestamp this for Ayako," said V, unsure of what she was looking at.

Judy marked the event, then resumed normal playback speed by releasing whatever invisible slider she'd been manipulating. The Locos and Digitales clashed on the grounds of Teotihuacán, Huitzilopochtli descending from its temple, gradually upscaling its resolution, size, and polygon count as it strode purposefully into the battle. V observed the visual representation of herself on the display, a hi-definition phantom gawking as the demon's huge blue foot passed by her, a Locos netrunner riding a gridline in behind the demon, poised for the kill, his strychnine sporeware queued for deployment.

"Pause," she said, and as Judy did, V added, "Magnify the netrunner."

Judy plucked at the air, upscaled the 'runner's resolution as much as she could, but there wasn't much there to work with when it came to reconstituted cached data; and the 'runners had been operating on basic resolutions anyway, to cut back on lag.

"Looks like your standard ICEbreaker," said V, watching a beam of laser-light tremble out from the netrunner, boring into Huitzilopochtli's code-fabric. The demon's texture-map started to warp and glitch out, its underlying armature morphing into some new, alien shape. "But ain't no way. Locos 'runners wrapped the sporeware up in a modified Sabertooth protocol? With how quick it took the demon out, shit, maybe." She shook her head, adding, "Dogear this for Ayako too, babe."

V didn't see anything else that caught her attention. Judy blinked rapidly as she came off the braindance, the swirl of lights in the optic terminals petering out. "Still wanna do some more editin' on this," Judy told her, her eyes more pupil than iris. "But y'don't gotta stick around for that, babe. Cleanup's the most borin' part."

"Y'don't gotta get all artistic on this, Jude."

"Hey, I got standards," said Judy, grinning.

While Judy touched up the BD, V tried to contact Ayako, but she didn't pick up. She headed downstairs to find Gotoda.

Found him selling a cyberdeck to a thin, pale kid with a bright blue deathhawk that made V think of some blue, feathery thing's tail. The cyberdeck was a second-gen Paraline MK; Gotoda was explaining, in his precise, accented English, how the kid could expand its RAM capacity beyond the stock capabilities of the hardware. "But this very old deck, understand," said Gotoda, carefully. "Very good beginner hardware, but incapable of running much current-gen software. You can overclock, add more RAM, but the neurographic unit will struggle, and you will need to update power-supply."

"That's fine, man," said the kid. He rubbed the back of his neck. "You gotta power-supply won't cost me too much? Deck's stretchin' my wallet thin as is."

" Hai ," said Gotoda, and he disappeared behind the counter, came back up with a yellow cardboard box. Quick fingers removed the lid and peeled away the tissue paper, and Gotoda held up a small, black cube so the boy could see it through the Lexan partition. "Paraline PSU, 650 watts."

"How much would that run me?" asked the kid.

"Do not worry," Gotoda assured him, placing the PSU back into its box. "It is on me."

"Seriously?" the boy said, surprised.

"Hai ," said Gotoda, smiling boyishly. "A gift from one netrunner to another."

Once the transaction was completed, the boy looked over at V as though he'd just noticed her standing there, the deck, carefully boxed, tucked under a gangly, tattooed arm. The kid couldn't have been older than sixteen; there was a dusting of cystic acne across his chin. His eyebrows were very black. "Ain't stolen this," he said, automatically.

"I ain't security," said V. She added, "Not exactly, anyway. Chill, choom." V paused. "Hey, you look like a local kid. Y'know a Juan? With the Las Digitales?"

"Juan Torres?" said the boy. "Sure, I know him."

"Seen him 'round?"

"Nah," said the boy. "Last I heard, he wasn't feelin' too good."

"Y'know if he was with a Japanese woman?"

The kid snorted. "Kunoichi? Sure. Those two are tight. Heard she's at his pad." The kid left the shop, the bell soundbite tinkling in his wake.

V turned to Gotoda. "Y'hear from Ayako? Got her BD done." She paused. "Well, almost. Jude's bein' artistic with it right now."

"I have not seen Ayako-sama, no," said Gotoda, and turned on the small plastic radio to play his Us Cracks noise.

"Guess she's too busy gettin' laid," said V, and she leaned against the Lexan partition, glancing at the radio. Doki Doki Tokyo, the band's latest sugary single, was playing. "Y'actually like Us Cracks?"

"They are idoru, V-san."

"Surprisingly nice, those chicks. Met 'em once. You a bit of an otaku, Gotoda?"

Gotoda smiled sheepishly. "Maybe a little, V-san."

"Call me Valerie," she said. "We're chooms, you and me."

Gotoda regarded her from behind the partition. "Please," he said, and bowed, "call me Daisuke, Valerie-san."

"Daisuke," she said, and nodded. V looked at him. "Was nice of ya, what ya did for that kid."

"Trevor-san is, as they say, a good kid." He looked at her with interest then, and asked, "So is this true? You met Us Cracks, Valerie-san?" Gotoda sounded gently skeptical.

"Swear on your Kami-sama, I did. Even did a gig for Blue Moon, over in Kabuki. Stalker sitch."

Gotoda flinched at the mention of Kami-sama. "I see."

"Y'okay?"

Gotoda did his best to smile. "I am fine," he assured her, but something in his tone suggested that he wasn't, in fact, entirely fine. Still, V didn't pry.

A brief silence passed. Gotoda disappeared for a minute or two, came back with a spray-bottle and a microfiber rag. He stepped out from behind the counter and started to wipe down the partition. Several decals of accepted credchips had been smoothed onto the Lexan, and a laminated sheet of compressed paper-flake, its borders taped in oxidized strips of packing adhesive, listed the store's policies in English, Spanish, and Japanese.

Gotoda asked, "Did you meet Purple Force and Red Menace?"

"Briefly. This gig I did for Kerry Eurodyne. Long story, that." She studied him, then said, "Daisuke, that thing 'bout T-Bug—"

"I am sorry, Valerie-san," said Gotoda, dolefully.

"No, it's fine. I get it," she said, and squeezed his shoulder. "You had a job to do. But wanted to know somethin' else. 'Bout Konpeki. What y'meant when you'd said it was necessary to get Ayako outta there."

Gotoda stared at her for a moment, his expression unreadable. He stuffed the microfiber rag into the back-pocket of his recycled jeans and set the spray-bottle down. "T-Bug was on the company radar, as one would say," he explained, his tone cautious, as though he were afraid someone might overhear them. A self-preservation reflex he'd likely cultivated during his time with Arasaka, V decided. "While you waited for her ICEbreaker to cut the Konpeki subnet ICE, T-Bug had another contract to fulfill. She began to sniff around the Arasaka Net. Seeking files. Files from the black clinic trials. She was tasked this thing by a man named Mr. Blue Eyes. A Net-handle, I assume, to preserve his anonymity."

"Who is this guy?"

"I do not know this," admitted Gotoda, guiltily. "But this man wanted this data. Data on Ayako-sama and the black clinic trials." He resumed cleaning, spritzing the Lexan and wiping it down. "Had T-Bug managed to extract this information, Ayako-sama would not have been able to disappear from Arasaka." Gotoda looked sidelong at her, adding, "The company would have stopped her before she reached the border of Night City, on suspicion of data-theft and conspiracy to commit data-theft. Among several other charges."

"But 'Saka knows Ayako's here now, in Phoenix. Thanks to Oiwa."

"Oiwa-san's priority is you, Valerie-san. Not Ayako-sama. There is a strict hierarchy of protocol within Arasaka to be observed." Gotoda stared at her. "Besides," he continued, "it does not matter. They know she is here now."

"Think once they collect me—not that m'gonna let 'em—they'll go after her?"

"Yes," said Gotoda, "she is a company asset." He moved to a showcase displaying a variety of maneki-neko cats, wiping down the Lexan. "I helped delete her file during the chaos of Konpeki. All of her data. Every shred that I could. And Arasaka was in such disarray that they did not notice and did not look for her. But now, Valerie-san?" Gotoda shook his head.