StarWaves - Chipping In! 47

Sorry for the wait on this one. 

There’s a short R-18 section in the middle. 

Chapter 47:

– John Welles –

The bouncer stepped aside for me before I'd even reached the bottom of the stairs. It was still a weird feeling, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a good one.

"Don't let it go to your head," Cortana said, appearing at my shoulder in her netrunner bodysuit. "It's already crowded in there, and I live in it."

The Afterlife was as packed as usual for this early in the night. The real drinking wouldn't start for another few hours, so most of the crowd was still in the working stage of the evening. But there were smaller time fixers murmuring in corners, solos comparing scars, and a table of netrunners sitting in total silence, probably having the loudest argument in the room. 

A few heads turned as I passed. Someone muttered "Bartmoss" into their drink, and I pretended very hard not to hear it. Being able to pick out a whisper from thirty feet away had turned out to be a mixed blessing.

Claire spotted me from behind the bar and was already smiling by the time I got there. She set down the glass she'd been polishing and leaned on the counter. "What can I do for you, John Welles?"

"Nothing to drink, thanks," I said. "Could you just let Rogue know I'm here?"

"Just like that, huh?" Her smile widened a little, but she didn't make me explain. Her eyes turned orange for a second as she sent the message.

My enhanced hearing caught what came next, all the way from the booth at the end of the bar. It was a squeak. A small, high, and undeniably cute squeak.

I stared at the bottles behind Claire's head and tried to process that.

"Did the most feared fixer in Night City just—"

"John is here!?" Rogue's voice was pitched low enough that nobody without military-grade hearing would've caught a word of it. "Hey, quickly clean all of this up, you lazy assholes! No, not there, move! Who left that on the table?!"

What followed was the unmistakable noise of frantic cleaning. Glass clinked against glass. Something heavy got shoved under something else. Someone said "Sorry, boss" three times in a row.

I raised an eyebrow as a couple of people hurried out of her booth with their arms full of bottles and glasses, both wearing the blank, careful expressions of men who had decided not to ask questions. 

Claire watched them go. Then she chuckled, picked up her glass again, and tipped her head toward the end of the bar. "She's ready for you now…"

I walked over, trying to get my face under control and only partly succeeding. 

Rogue was leaning back in her booth with one arm draped along the top of the seat, the picture of a woman who had been sitting there, bored, for hours. It would've been a much better performance if the table in front of her hadn't still been wet from being wiped. Up close, she looked more nervous than I'd ever seen her, which was remarkable, considering that I had recently watched her fail to get a sentence out in my mother's living room.

I checked the nearby tables out of habit. Her people had cleared out a wide, quiet circle around the booth, and with the music thumping overhead, no one was close enough to hear us.

I smiled at her. "It's good to see you, Abuela," I said quietly. "You didn't have to clean up for me.” 

Though. It was cute.

Rogue managed to give me half a pout and half a glare, a combination I doubted anyone in the Afterlife had ever seen on her face or would have survived mentioning. "I have no idea what you're talking about," she said.

"She has a rag in her left hand," Cortana observed.

Rogue followed my eyes down, then calmly slid the rag out of sight under the table without changing her expression. She cleared her throat and patted the seat next to her, and for all the ice in her voice, there was something in the gesture that wasn't cold at all. "Sit down, kid," she said. "...Next to me."

I sat. 

Rogue was obviously happy having her grandson next to her, though I got the impression she'd have shot anyone who said so. She kept her eyes on the room and her expression bored. Then, without looking at me, she scooted a bit closer, as if the seat had just happened to get shorter on her side.

"Fifty-three years of ruling Night City's underworld," Cortana said, settling cross-legged on the edge of the table, "and her big move is the middle-school seat scoot."

I bit the inside of my cheek and decided to start with the thing I'd promised to pass along.

"Mama told me to tell you something," I said, keeping my voice down. "You can come over for dinner whenever you want. It's an open invitation, for familia."

Something moved at the corner of Rogue's mouth. She picked up her drink, looked into it, and set it back down without taking a sip. "That's what Guadalupe wants," she said. "What about you?"

"What about me?" I asked her.

"Don't play dumb, kid. It doesn't suit the family." Her voice was as dry as ever, but she still wasn't looking at me, and her thumb had started moving back and forth along the rim of the glass. "You got handed a grandmother out of nowhere. And I know what I’m like more than anyone. …So, how do you feel about me showing up at your table again?" she asked.

"I'd like that as well," I said to her. "I'd like to get to know you more, too."

Was it still weird as hell that Rogue was my grandmother, this new life? Yes, but I was over the shock of it at this point. 

For a moment, she said nothing at all. Then she lifted her chin, and I watched the Queen of the Afterlife drop back into place, one piece at a time, though not quite all the way.

"Hmph," she said. "Then maybe I will stop by more."

"Maybe you should."

"If I have the time."

"Sure."

"I'm very busy..."

Rogue took a long drink, as though that settled the matter, then set down the glass and turned to face me properly for the first time since I'd sat down. Her eyes had gone sharp again. It was a look that had sized up a lot of people over a lot of years, and I had to fight the urge to sit up straighter. "So," she said. "Why are you here?" A pause followed, barely a second long, and she looked faintly annoyed with herself for needing it. "Not that I'm not happy to see you."

"Awwww."

Cortana, please.

I straightened up anyway and tried to look like someone who belonged in this booth for business reasons. "I want to start taking more high-paying jobs," I said. "I know you can't be seen handing me anything just because of who I am, and I'm not asking you to. But I think I've earned a look at better work, and I've got a crew to feed. That includes the driver you stuck me with, by the way, who called you several things on the way into town that I won't be repeating."

"I'm sure she did," Rogue said with a grin and looking completely unbothered. She gave me a slow nod, and I could see her already sorting through contracts somewhere behind her eyes. "That's a reasonable thing to ask. Anything else?"

"Yeah, actually." I cleared my throat and scratched the back of my neck. There was no smooth way to say this, and Cortana, the traitor, had suddenly gone very quiet and very interested in her fingernails. "Would you happen to know where a guy could buy jet fuel?"

Rogue's eyebrow climbed slowly. "Why," she said, "do you need jet fuel?"

There was probably a clever way to answer that. I looked for one and came up empty.

"I—uh, happen to own a stolen Arasaka tactical AV," I said. "I've been flying it around a bit, and now it's down to less than half a tank."

For a moment, nothing about her moved. Then Rogue tilted her head back and stared at the ceiling, like whatever god looked after old fixers might be up there among the pipes and could explain herself.

"Of course he owns something like that," she muttered. She stayed that way for another second before bringing her gaze back down to me. "Do I even want to know the rest of the details?"

I thought about it. "Probably not."

She agreed. "No. I don't think I do."

"She's taking it well," Cortana said. "Although I notice you left out the part where it's parked in a ghost town and commuting to a mutant-infested mountain."

I'm pacing myself.

Rogue took a drink, a longer one this time, and set the glass down with the air of someone moving on for the sake of her own health. "Jet fuel's not as locked down as you'd think," she said. "Not for the upper end of this city, or for anybody with the right connections. Half the rich assholes in Westbrook have their own AVs, and they don't fill them up by hand. There's a whole quiet supply chain to keep those people in the air." She shrugged one shoulder. "So yes, I can get it for you. But it isn't cheap. An average tank runs about ten times what you'd pay to fill up a car."

Ten times didn't sound so bad. I'd just spent more than that on Jackie's motorcycle, twice, and Cortana's shopping list had recently included the phrase "ten million eddies."

"Thanks," I told Rogue. "Seriously."

She waved that off with two fingers. "Now, about those high-paying gigs." She turned toward me. "Are you ready for that kind of work? Because here's what nobody at that bar is going to tell you, since half of them are too dumb to have figured it out. The more a gig pays, the more dangerous it gets. Nobody hands over that kind of money for easy work. They pay it because the last crew didn't come back, or because they're expecting that you won't." Her eyes didn't leave mine. 

I realized she wasn't really asking me as a fixer.

…Cortana. Can you kill the cameras on this booth? Just for a few seconds.

She didn't ask why. She'd already felt the reason come together in my chest.

"You got it," she said softly.

A small icon blinked at the edge of my vision, then another, then a third. Rogue's own security feeds looped back on themselves without so much as a hiccup. Somewhere in the building, somebody watching a monitor would see a nineteen-year-old and an old legend talking business, the way they had been a moment before.

I leaned over and wrapped my arms around my grandmother.

She went completely rigid. She was smaller than I'd expected and for a second it was like hugging a loaded weapon that hadn't decided how it felt about me. Her arm was still stuck out awkwardly along the back of the booth.

"I'm not going to be some gonk who gets himself killed," I said quietly, close enough that nobody else could have heard it over the bass. "I'm going to live a long life, with my familia and my girls. That's the whole plan. But I need these gigs to do it."

I felt her breath catch. She didn't say anything. Then, slowly, as if she were working out the mechanics of it from an old manual, one hand came down and patted me on the back. It patted me twice. After a moment's consideration, it did so once more.

I took about five of them. Then Rogue's palm landed flat against my chest and pushed me firmly back to my side of the seat. By the time I could see her face properly, she'd arranged it into something dry and unimpressed, although she didn't quite manage to do anything about her eyes. “Ok, fine…”

Cortana was leaning against the Cthulhu when I reached the parking lot with one ankle crossed over the other and her arms folded, as if she'd been waiting there for an hour instead of riding in my head the whole time. The red neon from the Afterlife's sign should have been shining on her skin. 

Instead, she made it shine, because she knew I'd notice.

She gave me a soft smile. There was no smirk in it for once. "That went well."

"It did," I admitted.

I stopped beside her and looked back at the old stairwell down to the club, where a couple of posers were arguing with the bouncer and losing. I probably had a dumb smile on my face.

She pushed off the car and tilted her head toward the car door, already moving on to the next item, the way she always did once she'd given me a moment to enjoy the last one. "So. It's still early. Do you want to swing by Lizzie's and see Judy? We could talk to her about the braindance idea while it's fresh. The sooner we know whether she'll edit for us, the sooner I can start recording you properly."

I thought about it while I dug out the key shard. 

"Let's save that for tomorrow," I said. "Maybe after the surgery, once Vik's got the new deck slotted in my brainstem."

Cortana was already in the passenger seat when I dropped behind the wheel, her boots up on a dash they couldn't actually touch. "Home, then," she said. "And V is expecting certain things from you tonight…"

(R-18 Scene)

The next morning…

I woke up slowly, with a long, satisfied groan already rolling out of me before I knew what had caused it.

There was a wet, steady, unbelievably pleasant pull between my legs, and it took my brain a few more seconds to connect the two. 

"Good morning," Cortana said, somewhere in the back of my mind. She sounded dry and only half annoyed. "Before you ask, she started six minutes ago."

I blinked up at the ceiling. Morning light was coming through the bulletproof glass, and the sheets at the bottom of the bed had a very distinct outline under them. The outline moved. It rose and sank, unhurried, and every time it sank my toes curled.

I got a handful of the sheet and pulled it off.

V was stretched out between my legs, completely naked, up on her knees and elbows with her ass in the air. 

Her black and red hair had fallen over one side of her face. 

Below it, those pouty lips were wrapped around my cock, sliding down it, tight and wet and in no hurry at all. She looked up at me through her lashes without stopping. Her eyes crinkled at the corners. She knew exactly how long I'd been awake.

"V," I managed, and my voice came out as a croak. "Fuck."

She came up slowly, keeping the suction until the very last second, and let the head slip free from her lips with an obscene little pop. A thin line of spit still connected us. 

She licked it away, wrapped her hand around my shaft, and gave me the smile she usually saved for people she was about to rob. "Good morning, John," she said, her voice husky. "This is a thank-you for rocking my world last night. I still can't feel my legs."

"You—you don't have to—" I groaned.

"I know I don't." She pumped me, slow and firm, and her thumb circled under the head until the rest of that sentence left me for good. "That's what makes it a thank-you."

She lowered her head and pressed a soft kiss to my balls, and then another. She took one into her mouth and rolled her tongue around it, and all the while her hand kept moving, slick with her own spit, twisting a little on every upstroke. 

A groan came out of me that I would've been embarrassed about if I'd had any blood left in my brain. My hips came up off the mattress on their own. V hummed against me, pleased, and pressed her free hand flat on my stomach to hold me where she wanted me.

She could do that. Even with everything Cortana had done to me, I could've picked V up with one arm, but I stayed exactly where she'd put me.

V dragged her tongue up the length of me, from root to tip, in one long, deliberate lick. She held my eyes the entire way. Then she tucked her hair behind her ear so I could see everything, opened her mouth, and took me back in, and this time she wasn't slow about it. 

She sank down until I hit the back of her throat, came up, and went down again with real enthusiasm, her lips stretched tight and her cheeks hollowing with each pull. Her hand followed her mouth, and the wet sounds filled the room. Her hips swayed a little in the air behind her, as if she was enjoying this every bit as much as I was.

I got my fingers into her hair, and she moaned around my cock. My fingers tightened in her hair, and I pushed her head down.

She went without the slightest resistance. 

Her lips slid all the way to the base and stayed there, and I felt her throat flutter and squeeze around me as she swallowed. 

The sound she made was muffled and wet and unmistakably happy. 

I eased up to see if she needed air, but she stayed down on her own. Those red eyes rolled up to meet mine, watering a little at the corners and full of wicked delight, and she pushed her head into my palm as if asking me to do it again.

So I did.

I held her there and rocked my hips up into her mouth, and the room filled with noise. There was a wet, sloppy gagging, a string of greedy little moans, and the slick sounds of spit running down my shaft and over her fingers. It dripped off her chin onto my thighs, and she didn't seem to care. 

Her ass was swaying harder now, and she was humming around me with each bob of her head, and every vibration ran straight up my spine.

Pressure gathered low in my stomach and my thighs went tight.

"V," I groaned, loosening my grip. "V, I'm about to—"

She pulled back at once. Her lips came off me with a messy, gasping pop, and she sucked in a breath, flushed and grinning, with spit shining on her chin. 

Before I could miss her mouth, both of her hands closed around my shaft, slick and tight, and started pumping me hard and fast. She pushed herself up on her knees and leaned in, and she aimed the head of my cock squarely at her chest, at those large, perky tan tits, with her nipples already hard.

"Come on, John," she purred. "All over me!"

That did it.

The orgasm hit me. The first spurt splashed across her breasts. She gasped and laughed, delighted, and kept right on pumping. The second hit a bit lower. The third and fourth followed, thick and heavy, painting her tits white and running down the curves of them, and still it kept coming, pulse after pulse, each one dragging more pleasure out of me than should've been physically possible. 

It streaked across her stomach and dripped from her nipples. Her hands never stopped, milking me through it, slowing only when my hips finally began to shake.

Inside my head, Cortana made a small, broken sound and went completely silent.

I collapsed back on the bed with my chest heaving and my ears ringing. It took me a while to get my eyes to focus.

When they did, V was still kneeling between my legs, breathing hard, with most of her upper body covered in white. She looked down at herself, then back up at me, and one eyebrow slowly rose. "Well," she said, a little hoarse. "Somebody's augmentations are certainly working."

…I didn't remember deciding to move. 

One moment I was flat on my back with my ears ringing, and the next I'd pounced.

V let out a playful yelp as I rolled her under me and her back hit the mattress, and she bounced once and started laughing. 

It was a low, breathless, delighted laugh, and it faded as I braced my hands on either side of her head and looked down at what I'd done. She was covered in me, glistening on the slopes of her tits, sliding slowly down her body. 

I'd have thought that coming that hard would've settled me for a while. It hadn't. Seeing her like that was so hot that my cock had never bothered going soft.

"Refractory period: effectively none," Cortana said faintly, still sounding a little dazed. 

V stared up at me. The laughter had left her face, and what remained stopped me for a second, because she wasn't performing or teasing now. Her eyes were darker and soft and full of love and lust, both of them at once, and she wasn't trying to hide either one. 

She reached up and brushed my hair off my forehead with two fingers. "Well?" she whispered. "You just gonna look at me?"

I got my hands on her thighs, those toned, tan thighs that I'd seen kill a man, and I pushed them apart. She let them fall open, biting her lower lip. She was soaked, her darker pussy lips slick and swollen, and she'd obviously enjoyed herself just as much as I'd thought she had. 

I took myself in hand and dragged the head of my cock through her wetness once, watching the pale length of me against her skin, and she shivered from head to toe.

Then I slid inside her.

She moaned and her head tipped back into the pillow. 

I sank in slowly, inch after inch, feeling her stretch and clench around me until my hips were flush against hers. Her nails dug into my shoulders. She was so hot and so tight that I had to stop and breathe for a second.

"Fuck," she gasped. "Fuck, I'll never get used to that. Come on, John. Don't you dare be gentle, I told you I couldn't feel my legs, not that I—"

I drew back and slammed into her, and she lost the rest of the sentence.

I didn't work up to it. I just started fucking her, hard and fast, my hips snapping forward and the whole bed shifting under us with every thrust. 

The sound of skin on skin filled the room. Her tits bounced with each impact.

I came down onto my elbows and covered her mouth with mine. She kissed me back hungrily, moaning straight into my mouth, and her legs came up to lock around my waist, her heels digging into my ass to pull me in deeper.

"Yes," she panted against my lips. "Yes, yes, there, don't stop—"

I didn't stop.

I shoved my arms under her knees and folded her in half, pinning her thighs against her chest until her ass came up off the mattress, and I drove down into her so deep that her mouth fell open without a sound. 

Then the sound came, ragged and filthy, and it didn't let up. "Oh, fuck, fuck, that's it, fuck me, fuck—"

Her cunt was gripping me so tight that I could feel every flutter of it along my shaft. I pulled nearly all the way out and watched her pussy cling to me, wet and swollen, my cock shining with her from root to tip, and then I rammed it back in and felt her whole body jolt. 

Wet slaps echoed off the walls. The headboard had started knocking in a steady rhythm.

"You like that?" I panted, a little amazed to hear it come out of me.

V was breathless with sweat and cum shining all over her. "Listen to you. You gonna talk dirty to me now, baby corpo?" She clenched her pussy around me on purpose, hard, and I groaned. "Do it, then. Tell me whose pussy this is."

"Mine," I growled.

"Damn right it's yours. So fucking use it!"

I used it. I let go of one leg and got my hand around one slick, heavy tit, squeezing it and pinching the nipple until she hissed and bucked up against me. My own cum smeared under my palm. I'd have felt strange about that a month ago. Now I just squeezed harder. 

She began moving her own hips, grinding herself against the base of my cock with every one of my thrust.

I found the spot I knew she loved at this point and started hammering it with my cock. 

V's eyes flew wide open. "There, there, there, oh my fucking God—"

I pounded that one spot without mercy. Her thighs started shaking. Her nails raked down my back, and they'd have drawn blood a few weeks ago, now they only left hot lines across my skin. 

I could hear how wet she was, each thrust a sloppy, obscene squelch, and I could feel her dripping down over my balls and soaking the sheets underneath us.

Then she came! She threw her head back and screamed my name, and her pussy clamped down around me in hard, rhythmic spasms, milking my cock so tightly that I almost couldn't move. Her whole body bowed up off the bed. 

I kept fucking her through it, forcing my way in and out of that clenching heat while she shook and swore and clawed at me, until her scream broke up into choked, helpless whimpers.

"Too—oh, fuck, John, too much, I can't—don't stop—"

My rhythm fell apart. I shoved in as deep as I could get, once, twice, a third time, with my balls drawn up tight and my jaw clenched, and I buried myself to the hilt and came. 

It tore out of me, pulse after thick pulse, flooding her until I could feel it spilling back out around my shaft and running down the crack of her ass. 

V moaned weakly and locked her legs tighter, holding me in place, her pussy was still twitching around me as I emptied everything I had into her.

When it was finally over, I dropped onto my elbows, shaking, with my forehead pressed against hers and both of us gasping for air. We were sticky and soaked. The room smelled like sweat and sex.

V's eyes opened slowly. She looked completely wrecked but she was grinning. "Okay," she croaked. "Now I can't feel my legs..."

(R-18 end)

When I came out of the shower with a towel around my waist and steam rolling out behind me, V was sitting on the edge of my bed.

She'd showered too, somewhere else, by the look of it. She was wearing her own white bathrobe. It was tied so loosely that it was basically just a suggestion. 

I smiled at her and leaned against the bathroom doorframe. "That was one way to wake me up," I said.

"You're welcome." She stood up and sauntered across the room, taking her time with her bare feet. 

She stepped right up against me, slid her arms around my shoulders, and kissed me.

It was slow and warm and unhurried. Her fingers played with the wet hair at the back of my neck.

"I didn't want you nervous for your surgery later," she whispered against my lips.

So that was what this morning had been about.

"Well," I admitted, "that certainly worked."

"Damn right it did." She looked very pleased with herself. "I'm an excellent corrective measure."

She drew back just far enough to look at me, her arms still around my neck. "I love you, John," she said.

I could tell she really meant it.

I reached up and touched her face. My thumb brushed across her cheekbone, and she leaned into it a little, as if she didn’t know she was doing it.

“I love you too, V,” I said. “I really do.”

Her breath caught.

“I know we haven’t been together long,” I went on, because I was apparently going to say all of it now, whether or not it came out well. “It’s been, what, a month? It’s stupid. Anyone sane would tell me it’s way too fast. But I mean it. I’m not just saying it because you said it.”

We’d said it before, of course. Usually during sex.

This was different. 

Cortana was silent in my head. I could feel her there. She wasn’t sulking or keeping score. She was just letting me have this moment with V.

Thank you, I thought, as quietly as I could.

She didn’t answer. A little warmth pressed against the back of my mind for just a moment, and then it was gone again.

V’s eyes glistened. For a second she looked like she might say something else, and then she didn’t. She let out a long happy sigh. 

I wrapped my arms around her. Her robe was soft and damp under my hands, and her heart was going faster than it had been during anything else we’d done that morning.

We stood like that for a while.

Then she patted my chest twice and pulled away, and by the time she’d lifted her head, most of the old V had slid back into place, with her chin up and the corner of her mouth curling. 

Her eyes were still wet. She didn’t bother doing anything about it.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s get dressed and have breakfast. Then I’ll drive you to Vik’s clinic.” She retied her robe, which improved the situation by almost nothing, and started toward the door. Halfway there she looked back over her shoulder. “In your car, obviously.”

“You just want an excuse to drive my car.” I rolled my eyes playfully. 

“Why do you think I said I love you?” She winked and went out. I stood in the middle of my room, wearing only a towel and a very stupid smile, and listened to her bare feet padding down the hall.

…V drove my car like she was trying to seduce it. She had the seat pushed back and one hand draped over the top of the wheel, and she took the on-ramp out of Heywood so smoothly that I barely felt the shift. She hadn’t stopped smiling since I’d handed her the key shard. She’d put on those tight black leather pants she knew I loved, and in the morning light she looked like an ad for something I couldn’t afford.

I watched the city slide past for a while before something from breakfast finally caught up with me. “Hey, where was Lucy this morning?” I asked. “Her door was open, and she wasn’t at the table.”

That had been hard to miss. Mama always looked personally wounded when someone skipped her breakfast, and she’d put Lucy’s plate away with a lot more force than the plate deserved.

“Relax, she’s fine,” V said. “She’s with her mom—Kiwi.” She changed lanes without looking, or at least without appearing to. “They’re finally dealing with that Faraday guy’s last safehouse, plus any other failsafes that bastard left behind. She should be back later tonight.”

I let out a breath. Faraday had been dead for a while now, but I’d feel a lot better once the last of his traps was in pieces.

V glanced over at me and slowly licked her lips. “Which means I had you all to myself last night, this morning, and most of today,” she said, sounding extremely pleased with the arrangement. “Funny how that worked out.”

I smiled at her. “I’m always happy to be with you, V.”

“She’s not the only one here!”

V’s hands twitched on the wheel, and the Cthulhu drifted an inch to the left before she caught it. 

Cortana was sitting in the middle of it with her arms folded and her chin up, projected straight into both of our optics. “Still here,” she said. “In case anyone forgot.”

V recovered fast. By the time she looked up at the mirror, the smirk was already back, though I knew she’d be annoyed about that twitch for the rest of the day. “Oh, I didn’t forget,” she said sweetly. “So, did you like the show? How would you say it compares to Lucy on the couch?”

Cortana opened her mouth. Nothing came out. Her blue cheeks slowly turned a deep shade of purple, and then she was gone, leaving the back seat empty.

V laughed all the way to the next exit.

…V parked the Cthulhu with one last loving pat on the dash, and I followed her across the street and into Misty's Esoterica.

The shop smelled like incense and melted wax. Misty was in the back, lighting a row of candles and murmuring something under her breath. I couldn't place the language. It might have been a Hindu prayer, but even with everything Cortana had put in my head, I wasn't about to bet on it.

She finished the last candle, shook out the match, and turned around with a smile for both of us. Then her gaze settled on V and stayed there. "Look at you," Misty said. "You're positively glowing. Someone must have had a very good night." Her eyes slid over to me, and I'd known her long enough now to recognize the look of a big sister who had just spotted an opening. "And how was your night, little brother?"

I cleared my throat. "It was—uh. Fine."

"We fucked all night, and it was amazing," V said, as casually as if she were reporting the weather.

"Subtle," Cortana muttered.

Misty's cheeks went slightly pink. "V! Language, please. There are candles lit." She swatted V on the arm, took a moment to collect herself, and turned back to me. "Vik's all set up downstairs. He's ready for you whenever you are."

That wiped the embarrassment right off my face.

I'd been through this clinic more times than I could count by now. But the fact that I was still about to get what amounted to casual brain surgery was still a bit freaky…

I took a breath, reminded myself that I trusted the people who'd be doing the work, and headed for the back stairs anyway.

I was halfway down when the giggling started behind me. Misty had dropped her voice to what she probably thought was a safe whisper, and V was answering in the delighted tone of someone with a lot of material to share. 

Thanks to my enhanced hearing, I caught every word of it…

“All right, kid,” Vik said as I walked into the clinic. “Let’s see what you got for me.”

I set the hardened case on his table. Before I could reach for the latches, Cortana took care of it, and the locks popped open on their own with a soft hiss.

Vik leaned over the case, got a good look at the cyberdeck nestled inside, and let out a long whistle.

“Arasaka make,” he said. “I sent you back a message about uncertified hardware, and you bring me...” He trailed off, frowning, and bent closer. His optics whirred as they adjusted. “No. Wait a minute. Only the casing’s Arasaka. Everything else in here is completely custom.” He looked up at me over the rim of the case. “Who the hell made this thing?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He grabbed a tablet off his tray, ran a cable into the deck’s diagnostic port, and started pulling up the specs. I watched his face while the numbers scrolled across it. For a few seconds, he looked like any other tired ripperdoc reading any other spec sheet.

Then his eyes went wide.

“What the hell, John?” He scrolled up, checked something, and scrolled back down, as if the numbers might have been kind enough to change. “These stats are insane.”

“Thank you,” Cortana said, appearing at his elbow with her hands clasped behind her back. “He may continue.”

“It was a gift,” I told him, trying to sound like this was a normal thing for a person to say. “From my girlfriend. Cortana Halsey.”

“All right, kid, seriously,” Vik said, still bent over the deck. “When the fuck do I get to meet this girl? Because she’s a certified genius.” He scrolled down another page and shook his head. “No. Genius doesn’t even begin to cover it.”

Cortana stood right beside him, close enough to read over his shoulder, and he had no idea she was there. “Yes,” she said. “Good. Praise me more.”

I decided to ignore that and nodded at the case. “So you can install it, right?”

Vik finally looked up from the tablet. He didn’t say anything for a moment. He just gave me the look of a man who had put my skull back together on more than one occasion and was wondering how I’d forgotten.

“Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?” he said. “Of course I can install it.” He unplugged the cable and set the tablet aside with a good deal more care than he’d picked it up. “The full procedure shouldn’t take more than an hour. But it’s gonna be sitting on your brainstem, so it’s lights out for you.” He crossed to the counter and started laying out the anesthesia distributor, and I looked over at the chair I’d woken up in more times than I wanted to count.

I took off my jacket.

I lay back in the chair and held out my arm before Vik had to ask. He crossed the room with the syringe in one hand, swabbed the crook of my elbow, and slid the needle in with the ease of a man who’d done this to me too many times to bother with a warning.

“So,” he said, nodding toward the case as he pressed down the plunger. “A piece of hardware like that ought to have a name. Your girl call it anything?”

I opened my mouth and realized I had no idea.

Cortana had come over to stand at the side of the chair. She put a hand to her chin and tilted her head, gazing at the ceiling as though she were giving the matter serious thought for the very first time. I could feel through our shared mind that she’d picked the name days ago.

“Tell him it’s the Halo Mark I,” she said. Her eyes slid down to meet mine, and the corner of her mouth curled. “Call it a little inside joke.”

I couldn’t help it. I grinned up at the ceiling lights, which had already started to look a little softer around the edges.

“She calls it the Halo Mark I Cyberdeck,” I told Vik.

“John? How are you feeling?”

I opened my eyes for the second time that morning and shook my head a little. The anesthesia was already on its way out. Between my new metabolism and Cortana chasing the last of the drugs through my bloodstream, I went from groggy to fully alert in the time it took to blink at the ceiling.

Vik was standing right beside me. He put a hand on my bare shoulder before I could do anything stupid. “Take it easy,” he said. “Sit up slow.”

“I feel fine, though,” I told him as I sat up.

“That’s just the drugs wearing off.” He snorted at his own joke, then gave my shoulder a pat and let go. “Everything went great. Surgery was a complete success. But of course it was, since I’m the one who did it.”

“You’re the most humble ripperdoc I know, Vik.”

“I’m probably the only ripperdoc you know,” he shot back. “Or at least I’d better be. Don’t you dare go to some sketchy hole like Doc Borg’s, the way your friend David did. That gonk kid was half a corpse by the time I got a look at him.” He picked up his tablet and jabbed a finger toward the back of my neck. “Now run some tests on that deck. I want to see everything working before you walk out of here.”

“I’m way ahead of you, Viktor.”

Diagnostics were already flashing across my vision. Lines of data poured past, faster than I’d ever seen her process anything, with whole subsystems lighting up green before I could read their names. Somewhere in the back of my head, Cortana had started to giggle. It was the delighted, slightly alarming giggle of someone going through a very long list of things she was now allowed to do.

I’d have enjoyed that more, except something else had caught my attention.

My optics looked a little strange. There was nothing wrong with them, exactly. It was more that the room had gotten sharper while I was out. I could count the individual scratches on Vik’s instrument tray from across the chair, and the fine print on a pill bottle on the far shelf was as easy to read as a billboard. And I was able to see all of this without even zooming in like I would usually need to. 

I turned to look at Vik. He scratched his cheek, and for a guy who’d just been bragging about himself, he looked oddly shy. “Noticed already, huh?” he said. “Yeah. I gave you a little gift while I was in there. Upgraded your optics to some Kiroshi Mark IVs I just got in.” He shrugged, as if that were no big deal. “They’re not the kind of thing I can usually get in a clinic like this, but I lucked out.”

Optics and cyberdecks worked as a pair. I’d learned that much over the past month. The deck did the hacking, but the optics were how you saw what you were hacking, and to get anywhere near the full potential of one, you needed the other to keep up. Vik had known exactly what he was putting in my head and exactly what it needed to see through.

“Thanks, Vik,” I said, and I meant it. “Seriously.”

I pulled up my account and wired him a chunk of eddies while he was still fussing with his tray.

His tablet chimed. He glanced at it, then looked again, and his eyes lit up. He grabbed for the edge of the counter and nearly missed it.

“Holy shit, kid,” he said. “This is fifty thousand eddies.”

“You earned it.” I swung my legs over the side of the chair and stood up. “You do amazing work, Vik, and you’ve saved my life more times than I can count. Besides, you’re family.”

For a moment, he just looked at me. Then he let out a long sigh and shook his head, muttering something about the two Welles boys and what they were going to do to his blood pressure.

He rummaged through a drawer, came up with a small inhaler, and pushed it into my hand. “Two puffs now, and two more tonight after you eat,” he said gruffly. “Now get out of my clinic before I start tearing up.”

It was a little late for that. I could already see some wetness under the edge of his glasses, but I knew better than to mention it. I took my two puffs, slipped my jacket back on, gave him one last nod, and headed for the stairs.

I came back up the stairs and into the shop through the back entrance, and it was obvious that the two of them had kept busy during my surgery.

Most of the lights had been turned down. 

Misty was kneeling in front of a pentagram board ringed with candles, with a spread of tarot cards laid out across it, and V sat cross-legged on the floor on the other side. I’d never seen V sit on anything without first working out how to get off it in a hurry, but she looked perfectly comfortable there, leaning over the cards with her chin in her hand.

I stopped by the beaded curtain and kept quiet. Misty had her fingertips resting on one of the cards and that faraway look on her face. I’d learned not to interrupt that look, even if a certain AI thought the whole thing was statistically meaningless.

“Good things are coming into your life,” Misty said softly.

“Coming?” V’s eyes flicked up and found me in the doorway. She gave me a slow, flirtatious wink. “I’d say a few of them already showed up.”

She turned back to the cards as if nothing had happened, while I tried to look like a man who hadn’t just been ogled in front of a sacred pentagram.

Cortana appeared at my shoulder with her arms crossed and glared down at the spread. “Bad fortune,” she said. “Come on, Misty. Flip one over. Give her a Tower, or some cups with swords in them, or whatever that one is with the guy lying face down.”

Weren’t you just telling me this stuff was all statistical anomalies?

“It is. I want the anomaly to be bad.” She sniffed. “She hogged you all last night and all of this morning. The universe owes me a little something.”

Misty finally sensed me standing behind her. She looked over her shoulder, and her whole face lit up as she got to her feet.

“You’re okay!” she said. “Vik said it went well, but I wanted to see for myself.”

I found myself wrapped in a hug before I could answer. It was a warm, firm, and very sisterly hug, and she smelled like incense and candle smoke. She held on for a second longer than she needed to, then pulled back and looked me over, checking something around my head that only she could see.

“It’s been a while since I last read for you,” she said. “Do you want your fortune told while you’re here?”

V cocked an eyebrow and looked up from the floor. “He’s had his fortune read?” Her gaze moved from Misty to me, and I watched her interest sharpen. “Nobody told me that. What did it say?”

I coughed into my fist. “...Maybe that’s not important.”

“Oh, I think it’s extremely important,” Cortana said.

Misty gave me a teasing look, and I knew I’d already lost. She turned back to V and clasped her hands in front of her, the picture of innocence.

“The last time I read his cards, they showed that he had a very hectic love life ahead of him,” she said. “I drew the Lovers three times in a row.” She paused and glanced at me sideways. “I might have drawn it even more than that, but I only have three of them in my whole deck.”

V stared at her. Then she looked at me, and a huge, delighted grin spread across her face.

Cortana said flatly, “Why does anyone have three? There’s supposed to be one. I’ve checked how this works online.”

I’d have liked to know that myself, but I was busy looking for a hole in the floor to climb into.

“How about we take a rain check on that?” I finally managed to say. “I actually have another errand to run today.”

Misty gave me a cute little pout. “Fine,” she said. “You might have escaped for now, but I’m coming over tonight to spend time with Jackie anyway. I can bring my deck with me and do it then.”

“Great,” I said, after a slight pause.

Misty and V both snickered.

V got up from the floor, strutted over to me, and ran her hands slowly along my shoulders. It looked like flirting, and it was, but her fingers kept moving until they reached my collar. She pulled it back and tilted my head to one side, and I felt her thumb brush carefully around the edges of the port at the back of my neck. She inspected it for a few seconds, and all the teasing left her face while she made sure everything was okay.

Apparently satisfied, she turned my chin back toward her and stared closely into my eyes. Hers narrowed.

“Your eyes look even bluer than usual,” she said. A smile slowly spread across her lips. “Did you get new optics?”

“They were a gift, actually,” I said. “From Vik.”

Misty let out a sigh behind us. “That old man and his charity.”

“I know,” I said. “But I’m not going to take advantage of him. I made sure I paid him for the new eyes anyway.”

“That’s my little brother,” Misty said, giving me one last pat on the back.

V laced her fingers through mine and sauntered out of the shop, towing me along behind her.

There were two unconscious bodies lying on the ground right next to my car.

They were sprawled across the pavement by the driver’s door, twitching a little, and one of them still had a lockpick clutched in his hand. 

I just let out a sigh. People need to stop fucking trying to steal my ride. 

V was less restrained. She let out a few colorful curses in Spanish, some of which she’d clearly learned from Mama, and flung a hand at the street around us.

“Only in Night City,” she said, “would two gonks try to rob a car in broad daylight in front of all these people.”

A small crowd of onlookers had gathered around the Cthulhu to enjoy the show. Every one of them suddenly found somewhere else to look as her gaze swept over them. A guy at the noodle stand got very interested in his noodles. They may not have known who she was, but something told them not to get caught staring at her.

In the back of my mind, Cortana was cackling. She was trying to be subtle about it, and she was failing. “If you thought those daemons were dangerous before,” she said, “just wait until you see what I can cook up with the RAM in this new deck.” Her tone was light and delighted, and then it dropped a little. “Nobody gets to touch what’s ours.”

I was back in the passenger seat when V pulled away from the curb, leaving the two would-be car thieves to sleep it off on the pavement.

“So, where to next?” she asked. She slid me a sideways look. “Or were you just lying to Misty to get out of having your fortune read?” She let out a small shiver that I don’t think was entirely for show. “Not that I’d blame you. That woman’s scary accurate with her predictions.”

I wondered what Misty had predicted for her. I’d only heard the end of it. I thought about asking, then decided that, for both of our sakes, I probably shouldn’t.

“No, I really do have an errand,” I said. “I want to act on what you suggested at the gym yesterday. I want to go see that BD editor, Judy, down at Lizzie’s.”

V swung out around an ugly van, hit the clutch, and shifted gears with a little more force than the Cthulhu had earned. She clicked her tongue in annoyance.

“Judy?” she asked. “That fake lesbian slut…”

I sputtered. “What!? Where the hell did that come from?”

“She kissed you the last time you saw her!”

“That was to keep our cover! We were infiltrating a casino!”

“Mm-hm.” V didn’t take her eyes off the road. “I’m sure that’s the excuse she used to get away with it.”

“Damn right,” Cortana said from the back seat, where she had reappeared with her arms folded. “There was tongue, John. I was there. Nobody needs tongue for cover.”

I rolled my eyes and sank a little lower in my seat. Neither of them sounded all that angry. V’s mouth was twitching at the corner, and through our link, I could feel that Cortana was having a wonderful time. My girlfriends were being more playful than possessive.

Mostly.

We parked in the lot outside Lizzie’s. At eleven in the morning, it was empty.

We walked over to the front door, where a single familiar figure was standing guard with a baseball bat resting on her shoulder. Rita glanced at V, gave her a brief nod of professional respect, then let her eyes wander over to me. They took their time. They moved up and down my body shamelessly and in no hurry at all, lingering in a few places before finally settling on my face.

“I wonder if we just found our first victim to test out some new quick hacks on?”

Please don't… 

“Hey, I think I recognize you, handsome,” Rita said, smiling around the toothpick in her mouth. “Weren’t you the guy who rescued our girls as a favor for Judy?”

I nodded. “It wasn’t really a favor. It was a full-on gig.”

“Right, that was it.” She shifted the bat to her other shoulder and leaned against the doorframe, not getting out of the way just yet. “So, what can I do for you?”

“I’m here to see Judy.”

Rita kept giving me that teasing look. “Does Judy know you’re coming?” she asked. She wiggled her eyebrows. “Or is this a surprise visit?” Then she glanced at V and tilted her head, sizing up the leather pants with an expert eye. “Although, I’m pretty sure your friend’s more Judy’s type,” she said. “We’ve tried setting that girl up with a whole bunch of guys, and she’s turned down every last one of them.”

An evil smirk spread across V’s face.

I knew that smirk. I’d last seen it right before she took a car salesman apart. I opened my mouth, but V had already stepped closer to Rita and lowered her voice, as if the two of them were old friends sharing a secret.

“See, that’s funny,” V said, “because the last time we saw Judy, she planted a very passionate kiss on my boyfriend here.” She shook her head sadly and put a hand over her heart. “Right in the middle of a casino. Obviously trying to steal him away from me.”

Rita’s eyebrows shot up. The toothpick stopped moving. Slowly, a delighted smirk that matched V’s spread across her face. “Is that right?” she said.

V nodded shamelessly. “Tongue and everything.”

Oh my God…

“I love this woman,” Cortana said. “Don’t tell her I said that.”

“V,” I said. “That was for—”

V patted my chest without looking at me, and I shut up. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I could see it in Rita’s eyes. By tonight, every girl in Lizzie’s was going to have heard a whole bunch of rumors at Judy’s expense, and each version would be better than the last.

We headed into Lizzie’s, which, as expected, was almost completely empty. A handful of joytoys were sitting around or lying on the couches, lazy in the way people are at the wrong end of their workday. A couple of them gave us curious looks as we passed. Some of the others gave me a very different kind of look, one that traveled slowly and made me shiver a bit. 

I had the distinct feeling that I was in danger.

“The only ones in danger here are them,” Cortana grumbled.

I could feel something warming up at the back of my neck. I reminded her, once again, not to test out our new deck on anyone in here. There were plenty of dumb gonks out in Night City. I was sure they’d be happy to give her all the opportunities she could want.

“Fine,” she whined. The warmth faded, though I noticed it took its time.

We headed for the back stairs and went down into Judy’s basement office. Judy wasn’t alone when we got there.

Judy was in the middle of a sentence, and she didn’t sound happy. “I left that place for a reason, and you should too,” she was saying. “You don’t have a future at Clouds. Just quit and come work here instead. We could spend a lot more time together.”

“Judy, we’ve already been over this. The money I’m making at Clouds is far more than anything the Mox could offer me,” another voice went on. “Besides, do you really think they’d let me go so easily?” the woman talking to Judy asked.

She looked to be in her early thirties, tall and curvy, with an hourglass figure, a narrow waist, full hips, and long, toned legs. Her skin was pale and flawless. She had a sharp, refined face with high cheekbones, full lips painted a dark berry, and blue hair cut in a sleek bob. Her black cocktail dress had thin metallic accents, a plunging neckline that showed off her large breasts, and a high slit that bared one thigh above a sheer black stocking. She stood on a pair of black stilettos as though the concrete floor of a basement under a brothel were a red carpet.

Holy hell, I thought.

“Eyes up, Spartan,” Cortana said. For once, she didn’t sound like she expected it to work.

Next to me, V’s stride hitched. It was barely noticeable, but I knew what V looked like when she was surprised, and I’d just seen her do a double take.

The woman turned her head. Her cool, pale blue eyes moved over us beneath heavy, smoky lids, with a knowing look that made me feel as though she’d already read my file and found it amusing. She smiled.

“Oh, it looks like you have some visitors, Judy,” she said. “But I don’t recognize them.”

Judy turned around, and her annoyance gave way to surprise.

“John? V?” She pushed her chair back from the rig. “What are you two doing here? Is everything all right?”

Neither of us answered right away. Judy followed our eyes to the woman beside her, and her surprise didn’t last very long. She rolled her eyes so hard I could practically hear it.

“Yes, she’s incredibly beautiful,” she said. “This is my best friend, Evelyn Parker. She has that effect on people. Now, can the two of you stop staring? It’s rude.”

Evelyn giggled. It was a soft, unhurried sound. “I don’t mind,” she said.

I finally blinked.

Holy shit. This was Evelyn Parker.

She was way hotter in real life than she’d been in the video game. Maybe that actually made sense, now that I thought about it. She was supposed to be the most beautiful woman at Clouds. She was supposed to be the woman Yorinobu Arasaka couldn’t stop bringing back to his penthouse, so attracted to her that he spilled all his secrets to her without an ounce of shame. Back when I was playing the game, I’d always thought that part was a bit strange. She’d been attractive, sure, but not heir-to-a-megacorp, tell-her-everything attractive.

I got it now…

“Oh, you get it now?” Cortana grumbled. “How nice for you. Would you like a moment alone with your new understanding…?”

I didn’t mean it like that…

I forced my brain back online and turned to Judy. "I actually came down here with V to talk to you about a BD opportunity," I said. "It's something that could make all of us a lot of eddies."

Judy's and Evelyn's eyes both lit up at that last part.

"And now she's interested in you for your money… Good work…" 

"Sure, I don't mind hearing you out," Judy said. She lifted one finger before I could get any further. She pointed it at me, then swung it around to point at Evelyn. "But first, you can help me settle an argument with my gonk friend over here. Evie's being an idiot."

Evelyn sighed and examined her nails. She looked as if she'd heard that diagnosis many times and hadn't found it persuasive yet.

Next to me, V tilted her head. "What's the problem?"

"The problem is that Evie still wants to keep working at Clouds," Judy said. "Every time I try to convince her to quit, she brings up the money. Sure, she might not make as much somewhere else, but her job would be a hell of a lot less dangerous."

I wasn’t sure what to say. I couldn’t exactly tell them how Evelyn’s job at Clouds was going to play out without spilling a whole lot of knowledge I had no business having.

Had she even met Yorinobu Arasaka yet? Maybe not. But she could very well meet him soon, and that would lead to the Voodoo Boys contacting her, and then to her trying to steal the Relic out from under everyone. And after that, she’d end up dead. I looked at the woman in front of me, alive and amused and examining her nails, and I couldn’t think of a single thing to say with all of that in my head.

V spoke up instead.

“You actually work at Clouds?” She sounded honestly shocked, and I don’t think she was putting it on. She was looking at Evelyn the way she’d looked at the Valentino’s knee right before she kicked it yesterday. “Do you know how dangerous that is for the girls there? Do you know what happens when a girl can’t perform anymore? Or when she stops bringing in enough money for the managers to want to keep her around?”

Evelyn’s eyes narrowed a little, though her smile stayed in place. “And what would you know about any of that?”

“I used to work in Arasaka Counterintelligence,” V said flatly. “Clouds was where we stole corporate secrets by the bucketful, from rich gonks who didn’t know how to keep their mouths shut around beautiful women. So I know pretty much everything that goes on there.”

That made Evelyn and Judy both blink. Judy had known about Arasaka, but she clearly hadn’t known this part. She turned to look at Evelyn.

For the first time since we’d walked in, Evelyn looked nervous. Her smile had thinned, and her fingers had gone still against the edge of the rig. “What are you talking about?” she mumbled.

“Clouds doesn’t let its women retire,” V said. “It doesn’t let them leave, either, not even when they’ve stopped bringing in money. A few get sent to a chop shop and broken down for their doll chips and whatever other parts are worth selling. Most of the time, they get sold into literal sexual slavery and shipped out of Night City.”

She said it in the same cold, even voice she’d probably used to write the reports.

Judy and Evelyn both gasped. Judy recovered first. She rounded on Evelyn with a glare that could have stripped paint.

“You need to get the fuck out of that place,” she said. “In fact, don’t even bother going back.”

“And what the fuck am I supposed to do then?” Evelyn snapped. The smooth voice had cracked right down the middle, and what was underneath it sounded a lot younger and a lot more scared.

I didn’t really know anything about this woman, apart from what a video game had told me. But I knew where she was headed, and that almost made me want to offer her a job at Mama’s bar, the same way I had with Gloria. That had worked out pretty well, after all.

“Careful,” Cortana said. “I can hear you adopting her.”

Before I could say anything, I glanced at V and saw that her eyes were roaming up and down Evelyn’s body once again. There was no attraction in it this time. She was analyzing her, in the way she’d once gone over that Herrera at the showroom, looking for what was actually under the paint.

“Hmm,” V said. “You ever shot a gun before?” She folded her arms. “How would you like to join my partner’s and my crew?”

I turned to stare at her. V wanted Evelyn Parker to join her and Jackie!?

XXX

A/N: And that’s Chapter 47! John finally gets his new deck, Rogue proves that even the Queen of the Afterlife can panic-clean, and Cortana now has enough RAM to be a real danger to anyone who touches the Cthulhu. 

And yes, Evelyn Parker has officially entered the chat. Considering how her story goes in the game, this should go very smoothly for everyone involved. Right?

Let me know what you think of V’s offer, it isn’t just for charity either. There’s a bunch of seduction gigs she knows John wouldn’t be comfortable with her taking but she has no problem throwing a former joytoy at them. 

Written: 10/30/2026