The clink of glasses and low thrum of a jukebox track filled the air as the late-morning lull settled over El Coyote Cojo. I was halfway through wiping down the front bar when Rebecca slid behind me.
"You ever think about making money that isn't just tips?" she asked casually, snatching a straw from the dispenser and chewing the plastic end. I glanced over my shoulder. "Every damn day." She grinned, sharp and knowing. "Thought so. I talked to Pilar."
I stopped, rag mid-swipe. Rebecca leaned on the counter, voice lowered. "He put in a word with Wakako. Figured you might want something more...in your lane."
Wakako Okada. Old-school. Efficient. Deadly had many kids who were high ranking in the tiger claws. Before I could respond, a familiar voice cut through the jukebox buzz.
"Yumi!"
Mama Welles.
I straightened and turned, wiping my palms on my apron. She stepped in from the side door, her warm smile was something I had finally gotten used to. She walked up with a slight sway to her steps. "How are things, mija?"
"Good," I said reflexively. Then caught myself and softened my tone. "Really. Just... thinking of shifting lanes soon."
Her brows lifted just slightly. "Leaving us?"
I smiled, small but sincere. "Not right away. Just thinking bigger. Not that I am not grateful for you giving me this job, Mama Welles."
She gave me a once-over, eyes pausing at the fading bruises under my collarbone, then moving to look at my jaw. "You'll go where you need to go. Just don't forget where home is, sí?"
"I won't," I said, and meant it.
She reached out and squeezed my shoulder. "You're good at hiding pain, niña. But you're not the only one who's seen that look in the mirror."
Then she was gone, heading toward the back with the basket, humming some old bolero under her breath. Rebecca raised an eyebrow when she was out of earshot. "Still want in?"
I nodded once. She smirked. "Good. Wakako'll call soon. When she does? You answer, and hey, congrats, I heard you did a stellar performance." She punched my arm while I couldn't help but blush.
"Bye-bye now," She waved and left.
A few hours later.
The after-hours quiet of El Coyote Cojo felt boring. The tables were wiped, the neon beer signs clicked off one by one, and the last of the barbacks had already ghosted out the side door. My shift was done, final shift, final paycheck, so I locked the door behind me and exhaled.
I checked my stats to see how far I had come.
Body: 7
Reflexes: 11
Technical Ability: 12
Cool: 10
Intelligence: 14
Funny to see my progress like this, but it was a way to kill time when my optic HUD flared to life.
UNKNOWN: PRIORITY-A.
I answered with a blink.
A 3D image snapped into existence. A woman, older, with short steel-gray hair, lips pressed into something not quite a smile. She wore a charcoal kimono with subtle red trim. Wakako Okada. Never met a fixer face-to-face. But I knew enough to keep my mouth shut.
She took a drag from a slim, dark cigarette, exhaled slowly. Her gaze was direct and impassive. "Yumi Reyes," she said. "Pilar Hernández says you're reliable. I only trust a man's word when he's staked his name on it. So, understand you shouldn't waste my time and his reputation with failure."
I gave a short nod. "Understood."
"Good." She flicked two fingers, and a burst of data cascaded across my HUD. A dossier, black-and-red overlays. Maps. A blurry image of a woman in a filthy jacket.
Yulia Krause.
Former editor at Blisswave, some braindance boutique, until she went on her own, making BD's for degenerates with wallets. She'd gotten her hands on something she shouldn't have: a BD shard starring the wrong girl in the wrong place. Now stuck out in the Badlands with a group of scav's.
Okada's lips curled at the edge. "This BD is… delicate. Its owner, someone whose name will not pass my lips, would pay dearly to see it sent to them."
"And you want me to get it back," I said flatly.
She tilted her head, a faint glimmer of amusement in her eyes. "Of course. Along with the one who has it. Alive is better. Dead is… inconvenient. A bonus if you keep her breathing and call me for pickup. But no alarms. No witnesses. Do you understand this word?"
"Hai," I said low voice. "I understand."
Her eyebrow twitched. But she moved on fast. "Pilar says you're no stranger to violence. I hope he didn't exaggerate. Outside the city, Scavs are… not picky about who bleeds."
I flexed my leg, feeling the faint whirr of the implant servos shift beneath my skin. "I can handle it."
"I found nothing of interest on you, Miss Reyes. The only reputation to speak of is that of a Courier. I don't normally work with useless people."
I took a breath, let it out slowly. "I'm far more useful than you could imagine, Okada-san. Allow me to show you."
She studied me another second, one last flick of those dark eyes, then flicked her wrist. "Good, I trust Pillar, don't let me down. The files are yours. You have four hours. Don't waste them."
The hologram winked out with a click, leaving me alone in the alley. I leaned on a wall for a second. Four hours. In and out. No alarms. Keep the girl breathing, or at least in one piece. If I fucked this up, Pilar's name took the hit too. That wasn't an option.
I called up the file again, fingers drumming the edge of the bar as I scanned.
Yulia Krause. 35 kilometers southeast of Rancho Coronado, hunkered in a decommissioned AV-breaker yard. [I know there is no such place, but let me make this up.]
Twenty-plus Scavs. I flexed my hand. I didn't know shit about fixers, but I knew enough about raids so I had to be smart about this. And I knew enough to know that I'd be paid well.
I shoved off the wall. The street was wet from an earlier drizzle, not enough to soak anything, just enough to smear light across every puddle. I stood there for a second. I rolled my shoulder once, checking for tension.
I looked left. Looked right.
And thought: Walking's out. Fuck that.
Wakako gave me four hours. That place, Krause's last known? Was southeast, could I run it? Sure. I had implants. But arriving drenched in sweat and adrenaline was dumb.
Bike, then. I started walking. The alley beside the bar smelled like last night's tequila and old soy grease. Light from the nearby sign buzzed, and two cracked-out joyboys huddled under a tarp. One of them was talking to a rat. No judgment. This was Heywood.
I cut through the back of the noodle stand across the street, ignoring the guy who shouted "Kitchen's still open!" at my back. From there, it was a tight squeeze behind the dumpsters and out toward a side road that hooked around the long row of tenement towers.
That's where I found it. Leaned against a lamppost, some faded-out courier's ride, rear tire still half-inflated, frame tagged with pink stripes that looked hand-drawn. Cute, if you were into DIY aesthetics. It wasn't locked. Just had one of those junk-code tags hanging off the handlebar.
"IF YOU STEAL THIS, I HOPE YOU DIE."
I smirked. "Already have once."
The pedals were stiff but moved. I swung my leg over and shoved off, wheels groaning once before falling into rhythm. The tires thumped against a pothole and nearly sent me ass-first into a mail drop, but I adjusted, rebalanced.
I pushed through the first few blocks of Heywood. Traffic lights bled color into my eyes. The occasional gangster on a corner watched me roll by, some of them laughing, I know I look dumb.
The further I got from El Coyote, the thinner the crowd. The thicker the noise. I passed a building still flickering from a breaker fault, every third light in the hallway upstairs flashing. Next to it, a newsstand with four rows of digitabs playing a mix of corpo ads and stock crashes, plus some hollow-eyed anchor talking about public safety funding cuts. I saw a some woman walking a man like a dog.
I kept going. At a red light, I coasted. Neon graffiti pulsed across a billboard—someone'd looped a burning chrome skull over a Holosilk ad for perfume. Scent of the Wastes, it read. I snorted. Probably what half the Scavs out in the sticks actually smelled like.
The wind picked up again, brushing against my face with just enough chill to wake me more than any coffee. My knuckles tightened on the grips. My thighs didn't burn. The implants kept the strain low, but my shoulders were starting to feel the weight of everything I wasn't saying.
I coasted through a green, past a boarded-up laundromat someone had tagged with the words: FUCK THE PROCESS. BE THE END.
The road ahead darkened as the city started bleeding away. I checked the time with a blink. I still had just under two hours. I shifted forward on the seat, put more weight into my legs, and let the city drift behind me. The fixer expected results.
No more neon signs, no more corner dealers, no more dull hum of Night City's underbelly. Just the creeping stretch of cracked asphalt, weather-battered signs, and the faint buzz of my thighs kicking the pedals into overdrive.
Out here, there weren't street lamps, just broken towers, old freight tracks, and half-dead power pylons. I was out of the city limits now. No checkpoint, no official border, but you feel it.
The air dried. The light flattened. Even the wind changed. I passed a billboard frame long since stripped for parts, with nothing but the word "FORGOTTEN" scrawled across the empty backing in what looked like dried blood. Or cheap paint.
Same thing out here.
I popped the collar on Jackie's old bomber, tucked my chin down, and kept pedaling. Distant vehicles carved dust trails that faded into nowhere. I kept to the edge of the road, sticking close to the remains of an old rail line. Every so often, I passed what used to be a roadside stop, nothing but a ruined gas station or a leaning diner husk tagged with warning symbols. Mostly warnings in red: "SCAV ZONE," "DEAD INSIDE," and one that simply read "RUN."
My HUD pulsed the waypoint again, a dull flicker at the edge of my vision. Still four kilometers. Maybe five, depending on terrain. The bike wouldn't make it all the way, not on these dunes. Sure enough, the tires hit soft dirt and started to sink.
I hissed through my teeth and ditched it, letting it fall onto its side with a soft whump. I adjusted my gloves and broke into a jog. My legs took the strain easily.
Running out here was different. Wind scraping sand across metal. The hiss of the sun on solar panels. The faint, high-pitched whine of surveillance drones a hundred meters up. Most were scav-built, runts with salvaged optics and barely enough range to transmit, but some weren't.
At one point, I passed an overturned van half-buried in sand, its windows shattered and frame rusted. Flies buzzed around the inside. No bodies. But blood in the sand had dried in long black smears.
I didn't stop to look closer. The terrain started to roll up into jagged little hills, former dumpsites, now reclaimed by wind and time. I ducked under a broken fence and pulled up the map again. I was getting close. The AV-breaker yard Wakako mentioned should be just over this next rise.
I crept forward, dropping low as I crested the ridge. Half-sunken cargo containers, tilted towers of scrap, a blown-out AV husk in the center, its tail section split like a peeled can. Old comm towers flickered with jury-rigged lights, and half a dozen solar panels blinked in idle power mode, suggesting recent activity. Tents made from mesh and tarp dotted the inside.
And people. Scavs. Maybe ten, I could see outright. It could've been more inside the containers or beneath the scaffolding. My pulse slowed on command. Legs crouched into position. I pulled up the drone feed Wakako included—no live visual, just static photos taken two days ago.
Yulia Krause was holed up in that AV's cockpit. Her hair looked stringy. Her face, thin. Tired. Desperate. I marked three likely approach routes. None of them were good. One exposed, one fenced off, and one crawling with Scavs. My HUD flickered with a soft wind advisory, gusts starting to pick up from the east.
And then I spotted it. Something new. A black SUV, parked outside the edge of the camp. Not scav trash. Corporate. Glossy finish, armored plating still intact. No tags. No tire trails. I ducked lower and watched.
It wasn't there in the briefing photos. Which meant someone else had arrived, and they weren't with the Scavs. I narrowed my eyes, watched the sun dip behind a bank of dust clouds, casting the whole yard in a red-orange sheen.
A glint on the SUV's hood. A movement on top.
A sniper?
This just got complicated. I slid back down the hill into the ditch below and adjusted the gear strapped under my jacket. Quiet. That's what Wakako wanted.
I rolled my neck. Checked my pistol. Hacked a signal ghost from my system, ready to loop cams and mislead thermals. Four hours was now less than one. I popped a slow exhale between my teeth and stared back up at the yard.
[[One problem, the dice gods are not happy cause I rolled three 1's back to back.]]