“From where you’re kneeling, it must seem like an 18-carat run of bad luck.”

  I left Kabuki before the stairwell heat turned into irritation. The Galena’s door seal peeled off my fingers with a faint tacky pull.

  Every time I climbed into the shitmobile, my hand remembered Rayfield leather and my brain tried to play the highlight reel. I hated it. I hated that it still worked. I gripped the wheel hard enough to crease the synthskin on my new arm. “Doesn’t change shit,” I muttered, and I started the engine anyway.

  The map on my lap was charcoal on cardboard, folded too many times, soft at the creases. A bad habit from a good job. I had a route scribbled for the Municipal Landfill, and a second line that meant nothing unless the first one paid out. The first one was the one my brain kept looping back to: the freezer, the deck, the relic of a dead netrunner legend waiting under a pile of junk.

  The sky stayed bright, the ground stayed cracked and stubborn. The Galena rattled in the door panel at certain speeds. My new arm sat heavy on the wheel, too clean, too responsive, the new firmware smoothing my inputs in a way that made my stomach tighten.

  The landfill stank hot and chemical. Then the mounds came into view, piled trash and crushed sheet metal, and the scav birds working the ridges with patient little hops. I parked where the ground looked solid and still sank a little on the first step, dust giving way to soft rot under the top layer.

  Different places. Same vibe. Last time I was face-first in the dirt. If I ever saw Jacket again, I’d make it count. Fucker.

  I moved slowly, scanning for anything that looked too deliberate: a fridge outline, a sealed container, fresh cuts in the trash that meant someone had dug recently. The Kiroshi zoom whined in my skull when I pushed it, and the image sharpened a fraction too late each time. I kept my hand off Talon’s sling.

  There were people here. A pair of figures by a bulldozer, a guy on a heap with a long tool that could have been a gun if I squinted wrong. The wind shifted and brought voices as chopped syllables, then took them away. I stayed on my own ridge, kept the trash between us, and climbed down into a shallow trough where old appliances had been dumped together. Rusted doors hung open. Foam insulation had been clawed apart.

  I found fridges. Dozens of them. Spent hours sweating through rust for nothing.

  I walked a grid with the cardboard map in my pocket and the sun beating down. I counted steps from a bent road sign. I matched a ridge line. I watched my shadow shorten and then start to stretch again, and the only thing I collected was sweat and grit in my teeth.

  Then it clicked: I was early. Spring next year. Even then, I’d give it margin. I stood on the glass slope and let the anger settle. Nowhere to put it. Nowhere useful.

  “Fuck,” I said. “How did I miss that?” I punched a metal sheet nearby.

  Of course I was early. Of course I didn’t check the schedule. Same way I used to assume someone else had read the goddamn documentation. I walked back to the Galena with my shirt stuck to my spine. The birds watched.

  I drove west until the skyline came back into view, then south, toward the coast. The buildings changed shape, unfinished shells with exposed concrete and missing glass. Street level looked like a resort plan that got abandoned and looted. Paint peeled. Old ads flapped loose. Someone had pasted new symbols over old corpo paint. The Arasaka logo still bled through in places. For half a second my brain tried to boot a memory that wasn’t useful: menus, loading screens, Silverhand grinning like the world owed him money. “Heh.” Cache junk. I kept driving.

  I parked near the pier and walked the last stretch, keeping the Omaha’s weight in mind even though I didn’t have it yet. I held onto that.

  The pier boards were sun-warped and damp around the edges. Wind pushed spray up through gaps. I found the body where the shard said it would be, tucked where the tide didn’t fully claim it, skin the wrong color, pockets turned out with the efficiency of someone who didn’t care about the person attached to them. The flies didn’t buzz here. The water kept slapping the pilings, constant hiss and slap.

  I felt like a grave robber. Whatever. Night City runs on recycled corpses.

  The shard case was still there, jammed into a jacket seam. I pulled and the seam held. I pulled again and it tore, cheap plastic biting into my fingertips as it finally came free. I kept my eyes on the angles around me while the Kiroshi overlay dragged the text into focus. The message was simple. Smug, like they thought being vague was a personality. Under the southernmost pillar. Ringroad. Overpass connecting Heywood to Pacifica. Bring lungs.

  I walked back to the car, drove the line, and found the pillar. It was concrete stained by rain and soot, the underside of the overpass and a strip of shallow water where the tide pushed in. I climbed down, boots slipping once on algae-slick stone, and took the plunge before I could talk myself into delaying.

  Cold water punched the breath out of me and replaced it with panic for half a second. I forced it down and went under. For a second I thought of drowners, pulling you where you can’t swing back. Nothing touched me. Just algae brushing my boots. The Kiroshi struggled with the glare and the murk. Everything turned green and particulate. My fingers ran along the base of the pillar until they hit something that didn’t belong, a hard edge tucked into a recess, plastic against concrete. I tugged it free and felt the weight shift in my hand, heavier than it looked, but manageable.

  When I came up, my lungs burned and my hair dripped into my eyes. I hauled myself onto the stone and cracked the case. The seal fought me, then gave with a wet pop.

  Inside was a credstick wrapped in tape, two sealed stim packs with faded print, a small coil of fiber cable, and a handful of ceramic chips in a bag that rattled when I shook it. Nothing cursed. Just kit. I stripped the tape off with my teeth, and slid the credstick into my pocket where it could warm against my hip. The stim packs went into the med pouch. The cable went into the tool roll I kept telling myself was an investment.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  I sat there dripping under the overpass and let the water run off me for a bit.

  West Wind Estate waited farther down, a patch of Pacifica where the concrete got fancier and the decay got more deliberate. The tunnel mouth cut through a rise, and the road above it had a narrow ledge where someone could stand and watch cars pass below. The air smelled of damp concrete and old smoke. I climbed the slope in short steps, keeping my breathing under control, and found the corpse where the guide in my head insisted it should be. A body slumped in a fold of shadow, clothes stiff with salt, eyes turned toward the tunnel as if they’d been waiting for someone who never came.

  The pistol lay beside them on the ground, half-hidden by dirt. Militech M-76E Omaha, scratched and scuffed, still intact. I picked it up and felt the balance settle into my palm, heavier than the bargain iron I’d bought earlier, smarter in its weight distribution. The mag seated clean. The slide had grit under it, so I worked it twice until the motion smoothed. My new arm made it easy. That bothered me. I ignored it.

  I didn’t leave empty-handed. That mattered more than how I felt about the ease.

  By the time I swung back north, the sun had started dropping behind the city’s dirty glass, turning everything amber. I drove under the overpass and found Charter Street by the way the concrete pillars changed, the way the shadows pooled under pillars where people slept.

  The blue shipping container sat near the memory said it would, shoved under the highway in a strip of dead space that the city forgot to police. Somebody had tried to make it into a shelter. A torn tarp. A shopping cart. A line of burned candles that had melted down into the corrugated metal. The container’s paint had chipped into scales.

  I kept my steps quiet and my head up. I listened for breathing that wasn’t mine, for the tiny scrape of someone shifting weight behind cover. The only sound was traffic far above and the soft tick of a loose piece of metal tapping in the wind.

  Billy Bell lay inside. The body had been there long enough that the skin had gone dull. The jacket was open. The chest looked wrong, punctured and collapsed. Blood had dried into the ridges of the container floor and turned brown-black. The scav work on him was lazy, which meant either the killer had been rushed or the killer thought nobody would come back for leftovers.

  I knelt and searched him anyway, fingers moving fast and practiced in a way I refused to examine. His pocket held the shard case. Cheap. Smudged. I wiped it on my pants and slotted it into my palm.

  Then my fingers hit the deck.

  It wasn’t tucked deep. It was in a sling bag that someone had been too stupid or too impatient to strip, still resting against his hip. Compact casing, Seocho Electronics, with a hairline crack along one edge and scuff marks that looked fresh. A “brand new cyberdeck” that had lived a hard day. I held it with both hands and felt the weight settle into my wrists, all hard edges and weight. It didn’t hum. It didn’t light. It didn’t do anything at all, which was the only reason it stayed in my hands.

  I wrapped it in foil-lined plastic from my kit, folded the edges tight, and shoved it deep into my bag where it could sit dead and quiet. I would take it to Vik. I would let a professional tell me which part of it wanted to eat my brain.

  Only after it was sealed away did I slot the shard.

  The text scrolled across my vision, a transcript rendered in cheap punctuation. Billy bragging. Ibby warning. A junkyard deck. A plan to go online because arrogance felt better than caution in the moment. My mouth twitched, and a single thought came up.

  Bartmoss.

  Then I looked down at the corpse again, at the cheap name on the shard header, and the thought didn’t hold.

  “Sure,” I murmured. “Saint Billy Bell.”

  The overlay hit me hard enough that my knees loosened.

  ENGRAM RARITY: COMMON

  AUTO-SLOT ASSIGNMENT:[01] JUNKYARD NETRUNNER [COMMON]

  PERK POINT: 1

  CAP EXPANSION:

  INTELLIGENCE: 3 → 5

  LEVEL: 3

  LEVEL REWARD: PENDING

  ATTRIBUTE POINT: 1

  PERK POINT: 2

  SYNERGY ENGINE: ONLINE

  My vision fuzzed at the edges. For half a second I couldn’t remember the year—just the shape of a keyboard under my fingers and a laugh that wasn’t mine. Then the container snapped back into place: rust, blood, and my own breathing.

  Pain flashed behind my eyes. The world narrowed to the container walls. My new arm tightened on my thigh until the synthskin creased. I forced a breath in, held it, let it out slow. The Kiroshi whine spiked when the overlay recalibrated and then settled into a steady low hiss.

  DRIFT: PRESENT (MODERATE)

  STATE: NOMINAL

  PERK ACQUIRED: BUFFER DISCIPLINE

  PERK POINTS REMAINING: 1

  It felt wrong, the way the knowledge tried to seat itself. It wasn’t a clean download. It was muscle memory without muscles, pathways warming up that didn’t belong to my life. My fingers wanted to check ports I didn’t have yet. My eyes wanted to measure signal strength in a space that smelled of death. I stayed still until the urge faded enough that I could move without it dragging me.

  Footsteps scraped outside. Close. Lazy. Like they’d already decided how this went.

  I killed the shard and stood. Bag up. Omaha low.

  Two voices. One talking too much. One talking like it cost money.

  “—told you he’d come back,” the loud one hissed.

  “Shut up,” the other said. “Listen.”

  I stepped out.

  Pipe guy blinked at me like his brain had to buffer. Skinny, wired, eyes too shiny. He had a length of pipe in his hand and a grin that kept slipping off his face.

  “Ah—fuck,” he said, laughing once, sharp. “Look at this. Look at this. Chrome-boy ain’t him.”

  “You recordin’ me?” he snapped. “You got optics on? Don’t fuckin’ look at me like that.”

  Waistband didn’t laugh and didn’t move. Just looked at my hands, my bag, my distance. His hand hovered near his waistband like it lived there.

  “Bag. Now,” he said. “Hands where I can count ’em.”

  Pipe guy started talking around him, like noise was armor. “Naw, naw, don’t do that tough-guy quiet shit—listen, choom, you walkin’ out with a bag in our underpass, you pay. That’s not personal. That’s rent. That’s—” he snapped his fingers twice like he could conjure logic, “—that’s how it is.”

  “Move,” I said.

  Pipe guy’s grin twitched. “Oooh, listen to Mr. Fuckin’—what, you some kinda solo? You some kinda—”

  “Bag comes off,” Waistband said, finally adding a second sentence. Voice flat. Mean. “Or you bleed on the floor with your friend here.”

  Pipe guy leaned forward, sniffed hard, eyes flicking to my arm. “Raven firmware?” he said, too interested. “Shit’s smooth. Shit’s expensive. You got money. You got loot. Don’t act broke, chrome-boy.”

  I closed the distance.

  Pipe guy’s mouth stayed open like he couldn’t stop. “Hey—hey, don’t you—don’t you get close like—”

  I caught his wrist and kept turning until something in him popped and he screamed. The new chrome arm took the strain. Flesh would’ve given out.

  The pipe hit concrete with a clank.

  Waistband froze mid-reach. He didn’t flinch. He measured.

  I kept the Omaha low, pointed at the idea of him. “Don’t,” I said. “I’m already having a bad day.”

  Pipe guy spat a laugh through his teeth. “This psycho—” He grabbed my strap.

  I let him pull, yanked him off-center, and drove my knee into his thigh.

  I didn’t stomp him. I stepped back, eyes on Waistband’s hand.

  “You didn’t see anything,” I said.

  Waistband stared at me like he wanted to gamble.

  Then he swallowed it. Nodded once. I was already moving when Pipe guy found his phone with shaking fingers, pride leaking out of him.

  “Yeah—yeah, I got him,” he hissed, too loud, words tripping over each other. “Long hair. Green eyes. Chrome arm. Militech popper—yeah, yeah, he’s got the deck, he’s got something—headed north under the stack. Tell ’em hurry the fuck up, he’s—”

  Traffic swallowed the rest, but I’d heard enough.