[attr="class","prism-textbox"]
“Unit S-I5 to NCPD, we have apprehended the suspects. I repeat, Unit S-I5 to NCPD, we have apprehended the suspects.”
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.
“We’re taking the suspects to the station, over.”
“How many are there?”
“Four, sir. Looks to all be edgerunners.”
“Of course they are.”
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.
“Got names for them?”
“One of them calls themself Q-Bit, sir. Damn sure they’re a netrunner. Got a rockerboy named Kitty with them, plus a solo called Archon.”
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…”Why on earth would Humanatech supplies be found in the fringes of a firefight?
“Didn’t you say there were four?”
“The last one’s with another team, sir.”
Especially when Humanatech has, curiously, been catching his attention as of late.
“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.
“Another solo. Handle’s Nightshade. He’s been around the mill a few times.”
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.
“Take them all in for interrogation. We’ve got a long night ahead.”
“Of course, sir.”
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.
