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[attr="class","prism-textbox"]“You ever wonder,” the gold coin flicks through the air at the snap of the masked man’s fingers, “what the world would look like — ten, twenty years from now?”

The coin lands on the nail of his thumb with an artificial clink.

Tails.

He hums, turns it over, and garrote strings cling to the material until it dangles mid-air like a pendulum. Astrid rolls her eyes at the sight, indifference in her gaze. He continues to sway the coin, seemingly enamored by how it hangs below his hands and above the cliff’s edge of a crumbling rooftop.

“I didn’t take you for the philosophical type,” the girl responds, half-earnest and half-guarded. “We both know I’m not beating your deadline.”

Where does one even begin to find the name of a man who hides under so many layers of anonymity, he may as well be an eternal mystery?


“Do you want a fight or what, Fractal?”

He snaps his wrist forward, and the coin lurches ahead, almost violent. The string keeps it tethered to the tip of his fingers. For once, in this virtual existence, everything is silent.

“Do you really think all I want is a fight, Ayame?”

“Stop calling me that. I go by Astrid here.”

God help her, even with the blank surface of his mask, she can swear he’s smirking.

“I could push you off the roof, you know.”

“I’d just respawn a few miles away.”

“Technically, it’d mean I win the deal. I take you down to 0HP, so now you go off to Grimoire Dawn for your crimes.”

“Is it criminal of me to just be a damn good player?”

“You TPK everyone who tries to even cross this part of the map, Fractal. My guild’s collecting your bounty. All’s fair in love and war.”

“Does that make what we have love and war?”

She doesn’t understand him, Astrid finds. In every image she could build of Fractal — notorious party killer, infamous solo player, the masked mad man who’d learned to main wires and smoke bombs until they became one of the most banned items in the server marketplace — nothing about him makes sense. A picture of casual confidence in blacks, purples, greys, and golds; stupid hoods and stupider masks; someone who could spend the rest of his time in this game at the top of every leaderboard, wanted by all, and yet is sitting here now, at the edge of a rooftop, knowing her real name all because he wants… what?

Her company?

“You’re the one who’s lording my real name over me until I figure out who you are.” And despite the accusation, she can’t help the way she bumps her shoulder against his — playful, comfortable, like she can do this all her life.

As if her friends aren’t fracturing at the seams as a fear toxin threatens to swallow both the virtual and the real; as if she doesn’t miss Momo, despite everything she’s told her; as if Ayame Ishihara, sunshine in a bottle and girl next-door in every slice-of-life dream, wouldn’t sooner spite her own face than see her again; as if every interaction she’s ever had with Fractal prior to this point hadn’t been a fight, a battle that leaves her dead until she respawns again, with the memory of his victory as vivid as the image of his switchblade in her throat; as if they don’t always do this because she wants to win something for once in her life, and he seems to believe that she will.

“Like I said, Astrid,” his shoulders shrug, a laugh buried in his throat, boyish and lovely, “I consider you a worthy opponent.”

“Sounds to me like you’re just way too into the thought of me finally killing you.”

“I can’t say I don’t think it’d be pretty hot to have my ass kicked by someone like you.”

“And yet, you won’t give a single inch to tilt the odds in my favor.”

For a moment, she thinks he won’t respond, and she wonders if she’d at least beaten him here.

"Heads or tails?"

The girl tilts her head when she looks at him. He remains staring at the expanse of code, data, and pixels beyond them.

"Heads. Why?"

He turns the coin over his fingers, slender and skilled as ever. In the gesture, Astrid is fully reminded of how he takes to a battle. Thin string wires and deft hands, of all things.

"I flip the coin. If it lands on heads, I give you a hint to who I am. If it lands on tails, we do another fight."

And somehow, she can't say she's surprised by the options.

She also can't say she curious by what'll happen, when they're both subject to the whims of fate.

"Do it."

Fractal tosses the coin in the air, and her heart leaps into her throat.

The gold coin falls over the edge, caught halfway by the string. He pulls it back, and it lands onto the palm of his hand.

Heads.

He releases a breath. Astrid blinks.

"I'm seventeen."

She had a feeling. The hint does not narrow her list of suspects any more than she wished it did.

"I go to the same fencing class as you."

She pauses. Two hints?

"I am terribly, horribly, pathetically interested in girls."

She blinks.

"Why would I think you aren't when you flirt —"

"Just trust me on that, yeah?"

She doesn't even have the time to argue with him, because he flicks his wrist and pulls up the menu. In the same moment, Astrid realizes how his finger moves to hover over the log off button.

"Hey, wait —"

The gold coin is tossed her way and, on instinct, she takes it. Clasps it in both hands like a prayer, and he watches her like it could be the last time.

"And I sure as hell hope you and your friends can beat the Architects and stop that toxin from getting out."

Does that mean —

"If there's anyone I'd put my bets on to pull it off, it's you."

He's gone before she can speak. Astrid blinks again, replaying each word in her head until it's a song.

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“Aye, yeah, you never did tell me — what brought you to the Eternal Fire?”





“I mean, I’ve heard the rumors, but none of them can really be true, right, friend?”






“They say you came from Cintra, choked out as many mages and elves and hid under the floorboards until everything was ash. And others claim you’d murdered a duke. In. Cold. Blood. For the record. I daresay, I even heard one mention you to be the bastard of our good old Father Obaga, and that’s why he’s soft on you, friend.”





“It doesn’t explain why you have the blessing of Kreve, though. Or why you’re still here.”



“Annnnd you’re staring at me. Terrifying glare, by the by. Could make a man think you’ll bury him in pieces.”



“That only asks more questions, though. Why would someone like you turn to priesthood?”



“Come now, if we’re to train together, wouldn’t it do us well to be, oh, I don’t know, friends?”



“At the very least, I’d like to understand what drives a holy man to a bottle of spirits each night.”







“Do you really not know what happened in Cintra?” He asks, and it’s the first time she’s spoken this night, and his throat feels raw with a childhood’s worth of grief. Quickly, Severine finds it overwritten with something worse.



“Everyone knows what happened in Cintra, Sev,” Ribis responds, sighing.



“Everyone who knows what happened in Cintra had the luxury of hearing a story.”



Her grip on the bottle of spirits tightens, and Severine wonders what it must be like — to never be the witness. To only hear of tragedy and war, in all its macabre details, without an echo of memory in your body. Without the demons, or the nightmares, or being the one who survives the atrocity of another's victory.



“You didn’t see the mages at work. You didn’t see the Emhyr’s army destroy my home. You didn’t cling to the hope that Queen Calanthe would find a way to stop the invasion, only to hear that she jumped to her death.”



There must be a funeral in the fact she can’t even remember how old he’s been the night the world turned over. And, suddenly, Severine finds that she envies his companion. She finds that he wants him to choke on the sound of his own voice.



“If I’m still here after all of that, then there must be a reason.”



She’s aware there’s a simplicity to the logic: a desperate plea of hope, or sense, in a reality in which there is no reason to his trauma. Only the greed of a tyrant, and to be a footnote — a nameless statistic — in the history books of his war and his victories. In the lack of justice, faith must be enough of a substitute.



“A priest of Kreve found me, so there must be a reason why he did.”



What he doesn’t say is that she needs there to be.



There’s a newfound silence that sinks, enveloping the room. For a brief moment, Ribis does not speak, allowing only the hymns of the church ground to fill the quiet in his stead. Severine drinks.



“Kreve is a bit different from the Fire, isn’t it?” He asks.



“In a way,” she responds after.






“Kreve believes in the fight against all evil, but above all else — Kreve wants to protect, to take decisive action. When you pray to Kreve, you pray to the sky, and it will point a way for you to go.”



There’s a kindness when he talks of the religion, like one does a relative of the wake.



“But,” Severine continues, “the Eternal Fire promises more than that.”



She knows that he’s staring at him. She does not meet his gaze.



“The Eternal Fire promises a tomorrow.”



When pressed to choose: isn’t that worth faith?



“To be the light that illuminates the darkness.”



To understand that, despite everything, there was meaning to what he’d endured.



“I came to the Eternal Fire,” she says instead, turning his gaze above (a sky full of stars, and all Severine can feel is the smoke of absolute desolation, in memoria), “because it gives me a purpose.”



“What kind of purpose?”



“To be alive, I think.”



Severine never wanted a path. All she needed was a reason.



“And do you think that’s worth what they’ll make us do?”



Only then does he look at the boy on the other bed, with his bright eyes and golden hair. Ribis is pretty in the way Severine knows she isn’t: his edges soft, sweetness in his lips. There is good in him — one that, achingly, reminds him of the siblings she’d already lost.



Ribis would have liked Kreve, Severine thinks. Their god demands less blood.



“If it means no other Northern Kingdom ends up like Cintra — I’d do anything the Fire asks.”

---

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---

side a:



the blood of witches that demanded a better world lives and breathes in her veins, and her parents die in the afterthought of another man’s duty. takes what’s left behind of the family before she could learn vietnamese. gives them a new home, and everyone calls her the daughter of heretics and monsters, as they overwrite what remains of her name to a more acceptable alternative. she is not trinh, make her prince, and let everyone ignore the blood in her bones.



the girl had a brother, once. it didn’t last.

---

---

the girl makes a friend, and he’s everything she isn’t. sunshine and gold in a person, with a heart so big it hurts. he’s a believer — in good, in worth, in salvation that always seemed so far away from her two hands. she thinks she loves him. it will never be enough.



when people speak of stories, he is the protagonist, and everyone else proves themselves a character worth remembering in each retelling. he’ll bleed for someone, anyone, and the world will call him great. and she will watch him in the sidelines, allow each decree and demand of her knowing it always comes with strings she willingly takes because it’s something, and she’s never the person chosen for the story, or the time, or the reason, or the cause — too difficult, too sad, too angry, too distant, too imperfect for someone else’s perfect hero’s journey. and he will keep winning, and she will keep losing, and her life will become a symphony of ghosts, almosts, maybes, and forgetting, until it drives her mad, and death takes her with the bullet of a man who wanted to reclaim his crown by killing his usurper — not her, but another. she just happens to be collateral.



wrath’s prince likes her enough to save her, though. so at least there’s that.



she’ll live.

---

---

hunters will remember her as the witch who’d doomed their future. a cause she’d given a lifetime for, twiceover, will see only the failures and the problems she’d left. a match of good intentions, striking fire to burn it all down. she who killed her dearest friend, symbol of tomorrow, greatest witch hunter of this generation, future leader of the holiest creed, son of saints and kings. she who’d married witchcraft with the divine, ushering forward a new dawn of warfare and ammunition. the very pillars in which a cult hellbent on ringing forth kingdom come with their own hands has used to rise in prominence.



never the child soldier who just tried to listen, obey, and perpetuate. all because her survival rested on how well a weapon she could be.



laura prince thinks she really should not have been the one to live past the graveyard.



she thinks she will always be sorry, and as long as she lives, wrath’s song will whisper in her ear — a shackle and a collar that burns with all her regrets and mourning. she thinks all she wants anymore is to rest.



what a disservice that must be, after everything she has wrought.



perhaps there are fates far worse than death, in the end.

---

---

once upon a time, a desperate girl shoots a boy in a cave, and he should have died. instead, his life is granted an irreparable cost.



skip a year or two later, and she’s everything she shouldn’t be — gave herself in to a demon, its promise, and can burn a man alive with her own two hands. huntress becomes hunted, but the cause still remains, and when there’s nowhere else to go, she meets the symbol of her god head on, awaits execution.



he offers penance with a single extended hand, and a query:



don’t you want to change this world for the better?



where else can you go, but to the end of the line?



fast forward years down the line — both witches, one hunter and the other hunted, and in searching for a way to keep herself alive, she takes aim.








she takes it.




she misses the person she used to be, and mourns everything she couldn’t become.



she really should not have been the one who lived through this story.

---

---

side c (a different timeline):



“you know, you remind me of someone i once knew,” a boy with bright ginger hair says as he enters the car. immediately, thian considers slamming the door in his face. it’d make more sense, given their loyalties.



“if you say my brother, i will jump out this car.”



hathorne laughs, and it makes the blood in his veins boil.



“no, no. not him. she’s—she was definitely not him.”



thian’s not stupid enough to dismiss the word choice, but he can’t help the curiosity that comes with a comparison. even if to question it feels, dangerously, like accepting prophecy.



“was?”

---

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[attr="class","prism-textbox"]When she closes her eyes, the phantom pain returns until it hollows out her bones.



Not literally, Logan is sure. For as bad as the damage had been, the twins had gotten them to an ambulance before the wound became irreparable. There’s just the shadow of an action, a numbness across her shoulderblade where the knife had been. If she digs deeper at the sensation, she thinks she remembers the way the cultist twisted it — macabre rearrangement, sadistic enjoyment, predator toys with prey.





Logan hates it.





She still goes back to work.

---

There’s a child in front of her who claims he’s the devil, and Logan thinks this is the greatest fucking joke life’s played on her yet.



John doesn’t seem to think so, but John’s always been a sucker for this kind of shit. Believer in the supernatural and everything it entails. She thought it funny once, made a game of it. One side a believer, the other a cynic, makes for a credible enough investigation firm in a place like Saintsport, City of the Occult. Then they investigated an abandoned warehouse, walked into some fucked up cult initiation rite, Ren gets found out, and in trying to play the responsible adult who needs to make sure her high school intern is safe — Logan Hisau is beaten, dragged, and displayed before their leader like it’s a shitty snuff buff’s fantasy, and he stabs her until she screams, and Logan Hisau is acutely aware that none of this is a game anymore.



She still thinks the kid’s bullshitting her, though.



"You want us to help you find a way back home,” she repeats, dangling a lollipop across her fingers as she watches him. “Which is Hell.”


The kid sighs, the kind of way that reminds her too much of academic condescension, reminds her of that one twin (Henry, wasn’t it? Ugh, it doesn’t matter now).



“I told you mortal solutions wouldn’t work, Miss Duarte.”


His companion — the older woman (thirties, if she had to guess), with the sunglasses and the designer outfit, shakes her head. Slips the glasses down to stare at him, and truthfully, Logan is pretty damn sure she’s the kind of woman who could get anything she wanted with that look, which only begs the question of what her role is in all this.



“And I told you my family wouldn’t be an option. August alone would kill you.”



“I’d rather put my faith on witch hunters than… whatever that is.”



She hates him already.



“Big words from a demon, Addie.”



“If you must refer to me by name, do it properly.”



The woman turns to meet her gaze, apologetic, and all Logan can say is:



“You actually believe him?”


Moreover, what was that he said about witch hunters?



“There’s a great big world out there, yeah?” The woman smiles, drop-dead confidence, and Logan could almost trust that she knows what she’s about. “He’s the real article. The longer he stays here, the riskier it gets for his host.”



“A child’s body isn’t meant for long-term possession, and I despise how helpless it is,” the kid-demon-Addie interrupts. “Further, the longer away I am from my domain, the likelier my rivals would take advantage of the absence.”



“Right.”



“Wars in Hell have been waged for lesser conflicts. A Great Prince gone missing is more than that.”



She doesn’t believe what she’s hearing. Turns her head to John and Ren, needing the confirmation that this isn’t a dream. The fear in John’s eyes is enough of an argument as he starts, “Logan, if any of this shit is remotely true—you know it’s bad news. We’re not taking the case.”



“I can’t read him,” Ren adds. “It’s like… hearing nails on a chalkboard. I can’t sense his thoughts.”



The kid snorts. “Even your psychic agrees.”



Logan Hisau does not believe in ghosts, the supernatural, or what goes bump in the night. The only thing she’d ever believed in was herself, what she could make happen with her own two hands, and what facts and stories she could capture with a camera and a pen. The paranormal was never part of that equation. Witch hunters were not part of that equation. Demons were never part of that equation.



Her gut instinct claims to shut the door before the kid’s face, call out the prank and the joke, and focus on paying the next month’s rent. To stand at the precipice, humoring the delusion of a possible gang war for Hell was beyond her paygrade.







She tells John to drop Ren off at school, in the end.

---

“Assuming that I believe what you’re both telling me, and Hisau & Meyer Paranormal Investigations takes on your case.”



Logan taps the surface of her desk as she watches them—Arin Duarte, eldest of a supposed ancient family of witch hunters, and her self-imposed charge, Micah Lazarev, witch child currently… indisposed by a supposed possession by a Great Prince of Hell, Adremelech. All of it still sounds like a joke.



Her eyes narrow. “Let’s discuss payment.”



Adremelech smiles, smug as sin. Even in that body, he reminds her of power. Absolute.



“You’re in conversation with a demon, Miss Hisau. A Great Prince, even. What would you like in exchange?”



His eyes are bright gold hellfire. It sends a chill down her spine, and the room goes cold in each passing second. Logan keeps her gaze level.



“I could give you the means to start a revolution, challenge political leaders, run away to the next continent. Riches beyond your wildest dreams. Your darkest and most twisted dreams brought to life.”



He extends a hand. “All it takes is a deal.”



“Does it really count as a deal with a demon if I don’t think you’re one?” Logan muses, evaluating the limb. She notes the way Arin looks away, plausible deniability, maybe.



“If you didn’t, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, now would we?”



Logan has never been one for religion and spirituality — John cared more about that stuff than her — and yet everything about what she’s doing now screams at her to go, run, stop before it’s too late. Like she’s walking into something forbidden, and something that, if she does wrong, could end in so many variants of tragedy, loss, and suffering.



And yet, she remains unfazed. Impassive cool, even in the face of odds beyond a meager mortal journalist’s hands.







“It’s called payment. You’re the one who needs my help. My conditions are your repayment,” she clarifies. In all the stories she’s heard, read, and watched, bargains with demons were never meant to be taken lightly. Each word must be deliberate. Each decision, certain.



He makes a non-committal, annoyed sound. Logan almost takes it as a victory.



“I can’t help you get home if this is all I’m capable of —” for extra measure, she gestures at her own person, so absolutely human it hurts, just like the knife wound, “— so let's talk.”



Her mind whirrs with all the possibility, heady with the danger of diving headfirst into a world beyond her. Moreover, sharpened resolve at the thought of facing a dark corner.



“Teach me forbidden witchcraft, black magic, whatever. Make me powerful enough to expose a cult, and I’ll find you a way home.”



It sounds so effortlessly simple, when spoken aloud.



He doesn’t say anything at first, and Logan wonders if he’s ever experienced been anything other than the toll collector. Part of her wonders if he’s already found a way to have it all blow up in her face.



She’ll still take that chance.



“And your companions?” Adremelech inquires, turning his gaze toward the office door. “You dismissed them before this, so I assume they wouldn’t be happy with this development?”



John would hate her if he knew. Try to stop her before she can even get a fraction of work done, stifle the match before the fire even comes. Ren would join him, and Logan will hate herself for disappointing a student that relied on her.







But there’s a cult on the loose, and she needs this. Justice, retribution, karma — whatever you wanted to believe in. And so, when presented with an opportunity, no matter what it is…



“The psychic would be an issue, you realize. They can sense magic.” He talks with a casual drawl that unnerves, a cat waking up from a long slumber. Her nails dig into her palm.



She knows.



“We keep it a secret,” Logan decides, before glancing Arin’s way. The woman still doesn’t look at them, and she turns back to the wolf in this story. “And you teach me how to guard against myself against psychics. Misdirect their attention away from the magic, so they don’t notice anything’s changed.”



His smile widens, his eyes glow gold, hungry.



“That’s a new bargain, Miss Hisau.”



She had a feeling.











“Name your price.”



He gives her a lazy, careless smile. “A favor.”



It’s easy to understand the situation. She was balancing a tightrope, and he was trying to cut the strings. But she was smarter, and reckless, and desperate.



In the end, though, never make a bargain with a person who believes they have nothing to lose.



Adremelech offers his hand again.



"Do we have a deal, Logan Hisau?"



Here is a secret Logan had always known: sometimes, stories and opportunities don't come in neatly wrapped presents. They don't come knocking on your door, waiting patiently for you to take them. And sometimes, they don't come without conditions. You have to grab on, and grab tight, and never let go. And you have to be willing to do whatever it takes. If you can't beat the odds, you change the game entirely.


Logan Hisau takes his outstretched hand, determination in her gaze, something boiling deep within her. You could say it was the magic of their contract, their deal, festering within like a plague. But it could have been something far more mundane, far more human, filling itself like its own disease and choking mortal men whole, as she decides to shake hands with a demon.




She wouldn't be.



"It's a deal, Adremelech."

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The crackle of a police scanner brings the sleek apartment alive. In a damn near instant, its occupant settles on his chair — lavender hair peeking out of a perfectly maintained grooming routine. He doesn’t really give a damn about the lifestyle.



Instead, Jamie Saito would argue there are more important things to focus on, as the wired channel continues to sing.







Four?



Now, isn’t that interesting.



The executive types onto his keyboard, pulls out a folder, as the report continues. Another monitor shows news footage of the firefight: gang war, according to the headlines. Some new territory grab until the cops came in, breaking off the fight, isn’t that nice?



lmfao, what a joke.



He keeps looking through his files. An idle glance is given to the newscast again — the reporter keeps things sanitary, clinical. He delivers a straightforward summary without giving all the details, and Jamie rolls his eyes.



He keeps searching.





He settles on a clip of a company’s profile, then looks back at the feed.



Pause. Capture.



Jamie narrows his eyes as he stares at the screenshot.



Enhance.



In the background, a couple crates with a single logo plastered on the side.



“Well, well, well, my dear friend…”









“I do love a good conspiracy.”



Something is brewing here — Jamie is certain. Moreover, he loves being right. And if months worth of unresolved investigations begin to draw together in the stringboard of his mind, whirring with near hundreds of potential ammunition, thread, and stray end, well then.



Play the right move, and that’s another player down.



The only thing that’s left, then, is confirmation. A means to blow this whole operation wide open, when the games corporations play always fasten their secrets and leave poison at the door. Humanatech may not be global, not yet, but its name holds weight, and for as long as he maintains employ of Ziggurat’s finest PR team — he knows whatever misstep he takes could stoke a larger fire.



Jamie sighs.



Maybe he shouldn’t have accepted that promotion.



He needs to find another route.





Only then does the scanner actually break him out of his thoughts. It’s sudden, inelegant, when the executive’s head snaps to stare at the radio. Listen to the rest of the conversation.

---

Nightshade does not ask to use his one-call. It is given without request.



He does still take the call, though.



“Care to regale me with the grand epic of how you got caught by NCPD, babe?”



He sighs.



“Do I want to know how you found out, Jamie?”



“The good and respectable Night City way, of course! I watched the news.”



What Jamie doesn’t say, unsurprisingly, is that he’d wiretapped a cop car the last time they needed to take Ziggurat’s nepotism baby, in all his drunken glory, home. Nightshade rolls his eyes.



“The bail’s two thousand eddies.”



“Just for you?”



Immediately, he knows the trail of thought passing through the other boy’s head. He does not question it.



When you know Jamie Saito, you know that he always has some angle to play. A hundred different plans in his head — most stupid, some remarkable, and still some several shades of incomprehensible that it leaves saner men breaking. And so, he doesn’t ask.



He already has a feeling.



“Half that for each of the other runners. They’re fresh meat.”



“Are they any good?”



He considers this for a moment, allowing the phone to rest between his shoulder and his ear. In the same motion, one hand begins to trace the edges of chrome across his other arm.



Truthfully, he could break out if he wanted. A sword cybernetically attached to your bones does wonders, when unveiled. But Nightshade knows Jamie prefers to keep things clean. Easier plot point to backtrack on when you need it, as he puts it, in the unknown anomaly that is his head.



“They held their own better than the O-Zoners did.”



“And did you figure who the enemy gang was?”



“Don’t think they were a gang. Hired mercs, more like.”



“Epic.”



“It isn’t ‘epic’, Jamie.”



“It iiiiis for us. You know that as well as I do, Kai.”



He gives a non-committal sound that, only to Jamie’s ears, he suspects would read as agreement.



“Can’t tell if they’d be willing to work with a corpo.”



“Then they can consider me their super cool anonymous benefactor. For now, anyway.”



“You think they’re mad enough to want to dive headfirst into a job an anonymous benefactor will give them, after this shit?”



“Ohhhh, good point.”



“Babe.”



“But, I raise you: they’re newcomers with potential, and they’ve just been betrayed. Most of the O-Zoners dispersed by the time MAX-TAC came. And, remind me, what did the O-Zoners want again?”



“...All Gravestone told me was that Electrica heard there’d be a big dead drop. Black market-level shit.”



“And was this in a well-populated, well-known, or otherwise notable location, my dear knight in shining armor?”



“No.”



“So how would MAX-TAC immediately know where to go, just a few minutes after the firefight started? With all the manpower they brought?”



Of course he did his homework.



“You think the O-Zoners were sold out.”



“Night City’s a dog-eat-dog world, and the facts are all there. Not only do I think they were sold out. I'd bet there had to be a mole.”



He frowns.



“And if your friends are as new as you say they are — which, of course, I believe everything my amazing boyfriend has to say — I’m willing to bet they think they were compromised too.”



There’s a song in Jamie’s voice, one that reminds him of smug victory. He doesn’t bother to remind him what the tarot cards suggested last week. Jamie never believed in the esoterica. He always likes having shit answered, neatly. Immediately. Frustratingly. Nightshade is certain that, when faced with a locked door, Jamie would be perfectly content with blowing the whole damn thing open to sate his curiosity.



He tries not to think of a future in which that could well lead him to the darkest ditch, with little mercy of a good funeral. The kind of fate media journalists with a knack for hunting down truth and corruption only really get in this goddamn place.



He tries not to consider the possibility of worse.



“So you think that they’ll want answers.”



“Who wouldn’t? Nobody goes edgerunner just to take the dirt this city gives them. We go down fighting, and we give the big man hell while we’re at it too.”



Or you’re just shot down by the firing squad, Jamie, he almost says.



He hates the way concern and fear wraps around his person at the rhetoric. Turn back time a year, and Jamie should have been everything he hated in a person: rich boy coddled by a good family name, surrounded by the fancy lights and high-rise apartments. Doesn’t know any better, too sheltered by a world that loved to please him. The kind of wannabe revolutionist who only goes into the gig because it sounds cool, it sounds edgy, it sounds dangerous, and it’s not a matter of life-and-death, really, because privilege is one hell of a cushion you can run away to when the bad and the ugly show its colors. The slow death of poverty and corruption, as granted by the powers that be, isn’t a real thing; it’s a game. Demanding a revolution isn’t a necessity; it’s a pretty word. And the moment the curtain falls, Jamie can run away, to his fancy apartment, and all his riches, let the media swoon over the orphan boy who lost his rich parents at 22, only to inherit their whole empire. No troubles. Nothing to starve him into a slow, unremarkable, nameless death sentence.



Everything Kai Hamasaki despises about Night City, wrapped up nice and pretty in a human form.



But they’re here now, and he can’t ignore the burning buildings Jamie’s devoted himself to rushing into. The delicate tightrope he balances, knowing the proverbial abyss waiting for him below. The rich boy chooses this, absolutely; gambles identity, association, political belief, and causes with damn near reckless abandon. All because he thinks that he can outsmart every other force there is, and if he dies for this, then let it be doing the important thing.



Night City is home only to the terrible and the tragic. And Jamie is a good person, who believes in truth, justice, and fighting the good fight. And so, there is only one way for his story to go.



It terrifies him.



He wants to tell him to go back to the nice and easy, to take his hand and beg him to run away with him beyond these borders, go as far as they can go where the corporations and the conspiracies and the gangs and the cyber won’t find them. Try to see what country they can disappear to, rewrite their passports until it gets them a small house in the fringes of nowhere and plant a garden, have a pet, whatever other domestic bullshit can be had in this time. In this year. In this lifetime.



Instead, Nightshade sighs, and knows come heaven and hell and all the storms after, their work isn’t done.



“Need me to bring them to you, once they’re free?”



“Depends — did your sparkling personality win them over enough to trust you? Please don’t say it did too much, I’ll get jealous.”



“Jamie.”



It’s baffling, how easy it is to love him, despite how Nightshade knows this story will go.



“I love you too, Kai.”



Somewhere, distant from his voice, Nightshade hears the ping of money sent.



“Time for us to figure out what Humanatech’s got in store, yeah?”



"Yeah. To shutting another corp down."



"That's the most romantic thing you've said to me."



"Jamie."



Not a few minutes later, an officer unlocks his door, and he knows it's back to work.

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