[DESTINATION: VIKTOR VEKTOR'S CLINIC, LITTLE CHINA, WATSON]
[ESTIMATED WALKING TIME: 34 MINUTES]
[ALTERNATIVE: NCART FROM EISENHOWER STREET, 12 MINUTES]
'Train,' I thought.
[REDIRECTING.]
I turned back toward the Eisenhower Street station, hands in my jacket pockets, thinking about the dead Tyger Claw on the floor of the chop shop.
Three bodies in two days. At this rate I might start having to start charging crematoriums commissions for all the business I'm giving them.
The station stairs were the same rusted grating as before, the same strip of sky visible at the top, the same smell of ozone and salt from the docks cutting through everything else. I took them two at a time without thinking about it and emerged onto the platform just as the northbound display ticked over to three minutes.
I stood at the edge of the platform and looked out at Northside spreading away from the elevated rail in every direction. The cranes and the processing facilities and the stacked containers at the Ebunike docks catching the midday light in hard angles, the whole district wearing its function on the outside the way working places always did.
The docks, and not far from them, a specific location I remembered at the sight of all the shipping freighters I saw along the shore.
Adam Smasher's hideout.
And in that hideout, in whatever state fifty years of neglect and one extremely possessive cyborg had left it, was a 1977 Porsche 911 Turbo in a Kristall Silber Metallic paint, that had belonged to Johnny Silverhand before it had belonged to the man who killed him.
Though speaking of Porsche, how come Silverhands car is the only one with a brand that I recognized as having been real?
'MK,' I thought, watching a cargo AV make its slow way between the dock cranes in the middle distance. 'Whatever happened to Porsche? The company.'
The response assembled itself with the efficiency of a system that had been indexing the Citinet data since Arroyo.
[PORSCHE: NONVIABLE POST-COLLAPSE.]
[STATUS: DEFUNCT.]
[BY THE TIME OF THE FOURTH CORPORATE WAR AND THE SUBSEQUENT GLOBAL ECONOMIC COLLAPSES, TRADITIONAL LEGACY AUTOMOTIVE MANUFACTURERS WERE LARGELY NONVIABLE. MOST WENT BANKRUPT. THE REMAINDER WERE ABSORBED BY MEGACORPORATE ENTITIES OR DOMESTIC MANUFACTURERS. PORSCHE AS AN INDEPENDENT BRAND CEASED TO EXIST IN ANY MEANINGFUL COMMERCIAL SENSE BEFORE THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY IN THIS TIMELINE. THE MARKET IT OCCUPIED IS NOW HELD BY QUADRA, HERRERA, AND RAYFIELD.]
I watched the AV disappear behind a container stack. 'Jesus,' I thought. 'So if someone had an original Porsche from the seventies, running and intact, what would that even be worth?'
[ESTIMATED VALUE: €$1.5–2 MILLION.]
[HIGHER AT PRIVATE AUCTION.]
[HISTORICAL PROVENANCE WOULD INCREASE VALUE SUBSTANTIALLY.]
'Provenance,' I repeated internally. 'You mean like, say, documented prior ownership by the most famous rockstar in Night City history.'
[THAT WOULD BE CORRECT.]
'There's no way,' I thought. 'There is absolutely no way Johnny Silverhand spent two million eddies on a car.'
[ARCHIVAL SOURCE: KERRY EURODYNE AUTOBIOGRAPHY.]: "Man, Johnny knew how to stick it to the man. I remember one time we were so off our rockers, we carjacked this one EBM suit off this preem antique ride." ]
[SUMMARY: VEHICLE WAS STOLEN FROM EURO BUSINESS MACHINES EXECUTIVE.]
I stared at the platform for a moment. Then at the docks. The train was two minutes out. I could see its lights in the distance, the elevated line curving toward the station from the south.
The thought arrived fully formed and entirely coherent. Get off at the next stop. Go back down to street level. Find Smasher's hideout, which I knew the approximate location of due to having come to loot the place in the video game several times.
Borg vs. Borg
Take the car. Sell it to Rogue, or Kerry, or any of the rich Samurai superfans this city was full of who would understand the value of it better than anyone else alive and would have the network to move it discreetly. Walk away with enough eddies to fund Viktor's work twice over and still have money left for problems I hadn't encountered yet.
I stood with the thought for a full thirty seconds.
Then I let it go.
The problem wasn't Smasher specifically. That was the thing I had to be honest with myself about I could probably take him. The game version of Adam Smasher, the one I had encountered through V's eyes, was a known quantity. A full conversion, Arasaka's personal instrument of mass violence, the man who had killed Johnny Silverhand, to most people he would be the boogeyman.
In the game V had fought him in the Dragoon frame, the one Arasaka deployed for standard operations, and it had been the hardest fight in the game for good reason.
But this wasn't the game, and even though I wasn't most people.
The problem was that the Dragoon was not the only frame Smasher had access to. The Dai Oni. I turned the name over in my mind with the respect it deserved. It never showed up in the game, but I remembered it from the tabletop lore, a frame that had been described in the source material as an army-killer, a 10 feet mech designed not for individual combat but for the erasure of organized military resistance. That was fifty years ago. Fifty years of Arasaka R&D. Fifty years of whatever improvements a corporation with essentially unlimited resources and a very personal interest in keeping their most valuable weapon operational had applied to a platform that had already been described, half a century before the present moment, as something you brought out when you wanted to end a battle rather than win one.
I had no idea what that looked like now. And that was before I got to the second problem, which was not Smasher at all but the people behind him. Arasaka did not respond to threats the way individuals responded to threats. Arasaka responded to threats the way a corporation responded to threats, with disproportionate resource allocation and absolutely no ethical constraints on methodology.
I had read enough of the cultural database to understand what that meant in practical terms. Orbital platforms. Mass drivers. The specific corporate calculus that looked at Night City and its millions of residents and concluded that the acceptable loss threshold for eliminating a sufficiently dangerous target was higher than any individual life or collection of lives would suggest.
They had done it before. They would do it again.
I was good. I was genuinely, quantifiably good, in ways that this world hadn't encountered yet and didn't have a category for.
I was not good enough for that. Not yet. Not at thirty percent capacity with damaged boosters and arm blades that deployed when they felt like it and a list of repairs that Viktor hadn't even seen yet.
The train arrived. I got on it.
There was a version of this where I stuck it to the man in the most literal possible sense, where I walked into Adam Smasher's hideout and walked out with Johnny Silverhand's car and sold it to Rogue for two million eddies and used the money to become the problem this city deserved.
That version required me to be whole. I wasn't whole yet.
I found a position by the center rail and let the train carry me north toward Little China, toward Viktor's clinic, toward the first step of a very long list.
The docks disappeared behind me. The car could wait.
The train arrived with its familiar displacement of hot ozone air, the doors opening with the pressurized hiss of a system that had been doing this ten thousand times a day for decades and expected to keep doing it indefinitely. I stepped in, found a position near the center of the carriage, and gripped the chrome handrail as the doors sealed behind me.
Nobody looked at me twice.
Or rather, a few people looked at me once and then made the conscious decision not to look again, which in Night City was the closest thing to invisibility available.
The train climbed toward the elevated section and the city opened up through the glass, different angle from before, the midday light flattening the neon into something more honest, the towers losing some of their drama without the dark behind them. Still impressive. Still overwhelming in the specific way of things that had been built without any single organizing vision, just accumulated ambition stacked until it achieved something that resembled grandeur from a distance.
My mind was on Viktor.
I had seen him in the game the way I'd seen everything else, through a screen, through V's eyes, through the comfortable distance of someone who was watching rather than participating. A big man in a small clinic underneath a building, quiet and competent and possessed a moral seriousness that stood out in this city for how closely he adhered to it.
He was good people, or at least I hoped this version of him was. In twenty minutes I was going to walk through his door as myself.
Not V. Just whatever I was, a body that no diagnostic in this city had been able to make sense of, carrying a list of requirements that was going to require him to do things he had almost certainly never done before.
I thought about Laura in the Badlands basement. The way she'd pressed her hands flat on the desk after the install and looked at me like a problem she wasn't allowed to solve.
Viktor was going to have the same reaction.
The difference was that depending on how this meeting went I would be giving him full access to my schematics, so we could start integrating my hardware, I had already done most of the technical heavy lifting, I just needed someone competent enough to help me perform the surgery.
The intercom crackled. "Next station: Kabuki."
One more stop.
I loosened my grip on the handrail slightly and watched Little China come back into view through the glass, the layered signage and the steam from the food stalls visible even from the elevated rail and the particular color the district took on in midday light, warmer than Northside, more human in scale despite the megabuildings rising above it.
Home, or the closest available approximation.
The train slowed. I moved toward the doors.
It was a different atmosphere at midday. The shift workers were mostly gone, replaced by the strange in-between ecosystem of people who moved through Night City during the hours that didn't properly belong to anyone.
A pair of NCPD beat cops stood near the carriage doors in scuffed tactical vests—one normal-looking one and one with what looked like a pair of Gorilla Arms augments. Neither looked especially alert. The unaugmented one was scrolling through his agent while the other watched the platform with a tired thousand-yard stare, then at the sight of me he tapped his partners shoulder and their attention was on me.
Near the opposite end of the platform stood a construction worker in a Samson frame. The hulking, eight-foot-tall full-body conversion loomed over the civilian commuters like a piece of active heavy machinery. Shaped like an oversized, hyper-muscular powerlifter made of industrial steel, its massive, blocky silhouette was coated in a chipped, matte hazard-yellow paint.
Thick hydraulic pistons hissed quietly with every slight shift of its weight, and exposed fluid lines snaked between reinforced joint brackets and heavy composite plating. Its faceless head was a rugged, blocky dome, devoid of human features save for a bank of reinforced sensor pods and glowing optical lenses shifting behind built-in welding filters.
Resting at its sides were massive, heavy-duty gripping vices textured with high-friction rubber, the forearms visibly retrofitted with the bulky housings of integrated pneumatic rivet guns. The machine's wide, flat feet remained planted heavily against the concrete platform, ready to anchor its massive weight at a moment's notice.
An exotic sat stretched across a bench like she owned it, skin patterned in black and orange tiger stripes beneath translucent synthskin, feline optics reflecting softly in the train lights whenever she turned her head. Cosmetic whisker implants twitched subtly along her cheeks as she scrolled through messages projected against her retinal display, one clawed finger tapping impatiently against the seat in time with music only she could hear.
Across from her, a man with silver chrome replacing the entire lower half of his jaw argued loudly over holo with someone about shipping rates in Heywood while absentmindedly scratching at exposed interface ports near his neck. Next to him sat a woman in an immaculate black business suit whose eyes flickered every few seconds with internal notifications, her expression carrying the particular dead exhaustion unique to middle management in a corporate dystopia.
Nobody looked at me twice.
Or rather, they looked once, caught my eye and quickly looked the other way.
'It's strange, isn't it?' I thought, watching the officer with the Gorilla Arms continue tracking me from the corner of his eye. 'That construction worker looks like he could tear a car in half and use the engine block as a stress ball, but they're staring at me like I'm about to ventilate everyone in this station.'
MK responded immediately.
[VISIBLE INDUSTRIAL CYBERWARE.]
[PREDICTABLE THREAT PROFILE.]
[SUBJECT DESIGNATED: SAMSON FRAME-LABOR-CLASS INFRASTRUCTURE.]
[LOW PRIORITY.]
I glanced again toward the Samson-frame worker as the massive industrial conversion shifted its weight, hydraulics hissing softly beneath layers of scarred yellow plating. Nobody on the platform looked remotely nervous around it despite the fact the thing could probably fold a human being into a cube accidentally.
'Meanwhile I walk around looking like a Terminator fucked a Final Fantasy protagonist and suddenly everybody gets tense.'
[CORRECT.]
I snorted quietly. 'You know, one day I'd appreciate you disagreeing with me on principle.'
[THAT WOULD BE INEFFICIENT.]
I made my way down the stairs and onto the streets. MK continued a moment later, almost like it had decided additional clarification was warranted.
[THE SAMSON FRAME IS SOCIALLY LEGIBLE.]
[ITS PURPOSE IS OBVIOUS.]
[LIFTING. CONSTRUCTION. INDUSTRIAL LABOR.]
[YOUR AUGMENTATION PROFILE LACKS SIMILAR CLARITY.]
I looked down slightly at my own reflection in the carriage window. Gold eyes. Exposed black-silver chassis beneath the sleeveless jacket. Combat-grade shoulders and arms that looked purpose-built to break bones efficiently.
Fair.
[ADDITIONAL FACTOR: USER MOVEMENT PATTERNS.]
'...What about them?'
[EXCESSIVELY CONTROLLED.]
[ABNORMAL WEIGHT DISTRIBUTION.]
[CONSTANT ENVIRONMENTAL SCANNING.]
[DIRECT EYE CONTACT WITH POTENTIAL THREATS.]
[COMPARISON: PREDATORY.]
I stared ahead for a second. 'Jesus Christ, you make me sound like a cybernetic skinwalker.'
[CLARIFICATION: USER PRESENTS AS HIGHLY CAPABLE OF VIOLENCE.]
[THIS PRODUCES DISCOMFORT IN BASELINE OBSERVERS.]
'Funny thing is I'm actually making an effort to look approachable.'
[CURRENT RESULTS: LIMITED.]
That actually got a chuckle out of me.
Unfortunately, that only seemed to widen the subtle gap in the sidewalk traffic as I walked, pedestrians unconsciously drifting another half-step further away from me like schooling fish sensing a larger predator entering the water.
I watched one guy glance at me, notice the glowing eyes and visible chrome, then immediately decide the opposite side of the street had suddenly become very interesting.
'Okay, fuck you too.'
[ADVISORY: PLEASE STOP SMILING TO YOURSELF.]
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Misty Olszewski
Misty's Esoterica, Little China, Watson, Night City.
2074
13:47
Something was different about today.
I couldn't help but realize this as I shuffled my tarot deck again. I am many things but I am not the kind of person who confuses the metaphorical with the literal, who mistakes the language of symbolism for a claim about physical reality. The cards do not move on their own. They do not whisper. They do not know things I don't know.
What they do is reflect.
That is the thing most people misunderstand about tarot, the thing that makes the chrome-heavy, hyper-rational residents of Night City dismiss it the way they do for anything that can't be quantified or monetized or installed via a ripperdoc.
They think it is about prediction. About claiming to know the future. About the kind of mystical certainty that the city has long since burned out of most of its residents along with everything else soft and slow and patient.
It isn't about any of that, they are about paying attention.
The cards reflect the interior state of the person holding them, the anxieties and hopes and unresolved contradictions that the conscious mind is too busy or too defended to look at directly. A good reading isn't prophecy. It is a mirror held at an angle that shows you the part of yourself you can't see straight on.
I have been doing this long enough to understand the difference, and to understand that the difference matters enormously. I had pulled the same three cards from three different shuffled decks.
Death.
Change
I look at the holographic image of the lone skull headed figure licking a brandished sword. Most people flinch when this one flickers onto the screen. They see a weapon, they think of the cyber-psycho massacres or Arasaka hits. But I look closer at the card at the gradient of purple and reddish-pink wires hooked into its skull. It is the card of becoming. It means a difficult, immense transition where a piece of yourself must be lost so that something new can rise to take its place.
Whoever this is for is about to have their old identity stripped away like discarded chrome.
The Chariot.
Survival
The image shows a sleek, armored combat vehicle charging ruthlessly forward. There are no horses here; instead, the driver is aggressively steering the ship through absolute chaos, pulled simultaneously by forces of light and deep corporate darkness. It's pure, high-octane Night City momentum.
The pace of this change isn't going to be a gentle meditation; it's going to feel like a high-speed AV chase or a gunfight in the rain. It's sensory overload, survival on a knife's edge, and the sheer adrenaline of forcing opposing forces into submission through sheer willpower.
The Sun.
Joy
A vibrant, blinding golden circle illuminating a stark, noble rider. It represents success, freedom, and a bright future, the ultimate luxury in a city built on broken dreams. The contrast is beautiful. The violent shedding of the old self and the chaotic, dangerous ride of survival aren't destroying this person.
They are going to walk through fire, yes, but they are going to step out into absolute clarity. Joy. Abundance. Total alignment with who they were always meant to be.
I hear the plastic beads at the doorway rattle, a sudden draft cutting through the heavy incense. A shadow falls across the threshold.
He comes through the door with barely any sound, and I register him in layers the way I register everyone, the chrome first because it is impossible not to, the sheer extent of it registering before anything else does, both arms from shoulder to hand, and from what I can see, a full conversion at the chest and neck, and from the hydraulic sounds I can hear as he takes a step into the store, his legs as well.
Then his face.
Young, more pretty than handsome, like those J-pop idols that are always all over the screamsheets, and his eyes, gold orbs on a field of black, they like all of him are also cybernetic.
He looks around the shop the way people look around spaces they're trying to read, taking inventory, building a map, and underneath that, almost invisible to most people, a weight.
He is carrying something heavy.
Not the chrome, the obvious physical weight of a chassis that is probably more chrome than flesh. Something interior, the kind of weight that doesn't show up on any diagnostic and doesn't respond to any upgrade.
I have seen it before. I see it regularly, in this shop, in this city, in the parade of people who come to me with practical requests wrapped around something they haven't admitted to themselves yet. The fixer who needs a supplier recommendation and actually needs someone to tell them it is alright to be tired. The merc who wants a reading and actually wants permission to stop. The corpo dropout who says they want incense and actually wants to sit in a room where nobody is going to tell them what to do.
Night City is extraordinarily good at producing people who need somewhere to put things down and have nowhere to put them.
I smile at him. "Genos Harker," I say. "You're early."
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Genos 'Harker'
Misty's Esoterica, Little China, Watson, Night City.
13:56
"Hey, Misty was it? Yeah, I figured since I was the one asking for help I'd at least do the decent thing and show up a bit earlier." I said, trying to keep my tone as neutral as possible staring at the décor...For some reason I was nervous about talking to her. Not in a romantic way or anything like that. I just wanted her to like me, which was a strange thing to want from someone I was pretending not to know.
It was genuinely strange, maintaining the act. Misty was one of the few people in this city I had something approaching a pre-existing relationship with, even if that relationship existed entirely on my side of things and had been mediated through a screen. I knew the broad shape of who she was. I knew she was good. I knew she mattered to the people around her in ways that the city didn't particularly reward or acknowledge.
Which meant the least I could do was not walk in and immediately make her feel like I'd been watching her.
She stood and moved toward the wall of dream catchers and synthetic incense I had been staring at while I processed the interior of the shop.
"Vik's finishing up," she said. "He'll be ready in a few minutes." She gestured toward one of the two chairs beside the counter, both of them clearly chosen for comfort rather than any interest in aesthetic consistency. "Sit. Can I get you anything?"
"No, I'm alright, wouldn't want to put too much weight on your furniture." I paused. "Though the place smells nice. Do you sell incense? I recently moved into a new place and I thought maybe I could get something to..." I trailed off. "Clean it out, I suppose."
What the hell am I even saying.
She smiled at that, small and genuine. "You don't have to buy anything just because you're here to see Vik, you know?"
"I know that," I said. "I'm actually interested. This is the first place I've been in this city that doesn't smell like smog or machine oil or whatever that chemical undertone is that follows me everywhere. It's soothing. I'd like my place to be like that."
"...You're from around here are you?" I stiffen at that a bit, but let her continue on. "Most people from Night City, even the corpos have this stick to them,"
"What you can see my chakras or something?" I asked...only a little bit sarcastically.
She smiled at that.
"Not exactly," she said, moving toward the incense wall without having to look. "It's less mystical than that. It's just that Night City does something to people over time. The way they hold themselves. The way they talk. There's a specific kind of guardedness that develops here, like scar tissue, you stop noticing it after a while because everyone around you has it too." She ran her fingers along a row of paper-wrapped bundles, selecting without apparent deliberation. "You don't have it yet."
"Yet," I repeated.
"Yet," she confirmed, without particular judgment in it. Just an observation, offered and left where it landed. I watched her pull three different bundles from the wall and set them on the counter by the register, I followed her to it, curious on what she had to say. She stood them up one by one, holding each one briefly before placing it.
"This one is palo santo," she said, indicating the first. "Synthetic, obviously, everything botanical in this city is, but the compound profile is accurate enough that it does the same work. Good for a new space. Clears out whatever the previous person left behind." She moved to the second. "White sage blend. Stronger. If you want something that announces itself." The third. "This one is cedar and lavender compound. Better for sleeping, if sleeping is something you do."
"I'll take all three," I said.
She looked at me. "I told you, you don't have to buy anything."
"I know. I'm buying them because I want them."
She held my gaze for a moment, something moving in her expression, and then she shook her head once in the way of someone making a decision. "You said you're new to the city. Consider it a housewarming gift."
"I can't just—"
"You can."
"That's not—"
"Genos." I stopped.
She smiled. Small and settled.
"Fine," I said. "But I'm getting one of those dream catchers." I nodded toward the wall of them, handmade by the look of them, intricate geometric patterns in thread and wire that caught the shop's warm light in thin bright lines. "And you do readings, don't you?"
Something shifted in her face, surprise I suppose. "I do," she said.
"Then I want one of those too."
She looked at me for a moment longer than the question warranted, but whatever she was thinking I couldn't gleam from her face. Then she set the incense bag aside, promised it would be waiting after my appointment, and reached under the counter for a deck of cards.
Not a standard deck. Holographic, the images rendered in deep saturated color that shifted slightly as she handled them, the artwork dense and deliberate and clearly the product of someone who had thought carefully about what each image was supposed to communicate.
She began to shuffle with the practiced ease of someone for whom this was as natural as breathing, the cards moving through her hands in a smooth continuous arc.
"The thing about readings," she said, eyes on the cards, "is that most people look at them and see old world superstition. Something from before the corps, before the chrome, before all of this." She gestured vaguely at the city outside the window without looking up, to the strip club literally across the street. "They think it's quaint at best. Delusional at worst."
She set the deck on the glass table between us. "But the tarot doesn't predict the future. It's a map. A mirror for the soul."
I rested my fingers on the edge of the table.
"The Major Arcana represent archetypes," she continued, her voice taking on the quality of someone who had said this many times. "They tell the story of a journey we all take. It's called the Fool's Journey. We all start as The Fool, innocent, naive, reckless, walking straight toward the edge of a cliff without looking down. And as we live, as we fight through life, we meet the other cards. We meet authority like The Emperor. Mystery like The High Priestess. Temptation like The Devil."
She looked at me then. At my eyes, the gold and black of them, and unlike most people she didn't flinch away from them. She just looked, steady and direct, like the unsettling qualities of them were simply features of the person she was talking to and not a reason to look somewhere else.
"The cards don't force a destiny on you," she said. "They don't care about corporate contracts or how much chrome you're carrying. They show the energies shifting around you. The paths available. The choices you haven't made yet. The parts of yourself you're trying to ignore." She tapped the deck once. "When a card flips it's not the universe telling you what to do. It's giving you a framework to understand your own chaos before it hardens into something you can't take back."
The city hummed outside. The synthetic incense put its warm compound into the air. "They don't tell you what to do, Genos. They just make sure your eyes are open when you finally do it."
She cut the deck and began to lay the cards out one by one, face down, in a line across the glass between us. Five of them. She set the deck aside and looked at the spread for a moment, her hands still, and then she turned the first one over.
The Fool.
A figure at the edge of something vast, one foot already over the precipice, face turned upward, a pack slung over one shoulder with the confidence of someone who either didn't know or didn't care what was below them. The holographic rendering gave it depth, the drop beneath the figure's foot stretching away into something that wasn't quite darkness and wasn't quite light.
"The beginning," Misty said. "Not ignorance, exactly. More the specific freedom of someone who hasn't been told yet what's impossible. The Fool doesn't walk toward the edge because he's stupid. He walks toward it because he hasn't learned to be afraid of it yet." She looked at me. "In a reading this position means a journey is just beginning."
She turned the second card.
Death.
The holographic skull-headed figure, sword raised, the gradient of purple and deep red in the wiring visible through the rendering. Around it the suggestion of things ending, structures folding, the old giving way with the specific violence of things that don't give way gently.
Most people flinched at this one. I didn't.
"People always react to this card," Misty said, watching me not react. "They see the skull and they think the reading is over." She shook her head. "Death in the tarot doesn't mean an end. It means transformation. The irreversible kind. The kind where something you were before this moment cannot survive intact into the moment after it." She paused. "Something about you has already changed. Something that can't be undone. And the card is telling you that more of that is coming, that the process isn't finished, that you are somewhere in the middle of becoming something you don't fully recognize yet."
She turned the third.
The Tower.
A structure struck by lightning from a clear sky, figures falling from the upper floors, the expression on their faces somewhere between terror and the specific release of people who had been waiting without knowing they were waiting for exactly this.
"Upheaval," she said. "Sudden and structural. The kind that doesn't ask permission and doesn't care about the plans you'd made around the assumption that things would stay the way they were." She studied the card for a moment. "But look at the figures falling. They aren't falling to their deaths necessarily. They're falling away from something that was already wrong, already cracked at the foundation, already unsustainable. The Tower falls because it has to fall." She looked up at me. "The question this card asks is what you build after."
The fourth card.
The Sun.
Gold and vivid and almost aggressively bright against the other cards, a figure on a motorcycle. The light in the rendering was warm rather than harsh, the kind that illuminated without blinding.
"This one is the card people want," Misty said quietly. "Clarity. Success. The joy of being exactly where you're supposed to be, doing exactly what you're supposed to be doing, with nothing between you and the thing you're moving toward." She traced the edge of it without touching. "It doesn't come easy in a spread like this one. Everything before it, the Fool's recklessness, the Death of what you were, the Tower's destruction, all of it is the price of this. You can't arrive at The Sun without walking through what precedes it." She looked at me. "But it is there. In the spread. Which means the capacity for it is real."
The fifth card.
The World.
A figure at the center of a wreath, arms open, surrounded by the four corners of something vast and organized and complete. The rendering gave it weight, the sense of something achieved rather than something promised, a gravity of an ending that was also a beginning.
Misty looked at it for a long moment before she spoke.
"The World is the last card of the Major Arcana," she said. "The end of the Fool's Journey. The point at which everything experienced, everything survived, everything lost and found and remade, becomes coherent." She paused. "It is the card of someone who has the capacity to change things. Not just their own life. Larger than that." She looked at me, and for the first time since she'd started the reading her voice carried something different in it.
"Great change. The kind that moves through a world and leaves it different on the other side."
The shop was quiet. "But," she said, and the word landed carefully, "the World doesn't say what kind of change. That's not how the cards work. The capacity for transformation on that scale, it isn't inherently good or inherently bad. It's just large." She looked at the spread, at all five cards laid out between us in their sequence. "The Fool walks toward the edge. Death remakes him. The Tower strips away everything false. The Sun gives him clarity and direction." She looked up. "And then The World asks what he does with all of that."
She folded her hands on the table. "The journey is just beginning, Genos. And where it ends depends entirely on the choices made in the middle of it."
The shop was dead quiet, an I was sure I was staring at her gobsmacked, I wasn't sure what I had expected from a tarot reading. Something performative probably, the Night City version of a horoscope, vague enough to mean anything and specific enough to feel personal.
Before I could even begin to try and come to terms with whatever the hell just happened, her eyes light up in a glow, The faint luminescence of an incoming call, the tell that cyberware gave away whether people wanted it to or not, her focus going briefly elsewhere before returning.
She listened for a moment.
"Yes, he's here." A pause. "Not for long no." Another pause, shorter. "Alright, I'll bring him."
"Vik's ready for you," she said, standing and gathering the cards back into the deck with practiced efficiency, each one disappearing into the stack without ceremony. She picked up the paper bag with the incense and set it on the counter beside a dream catcher she'd apparently already selected, the geometric pattern of it catching the shop light in thin silver threads.
"Those will be here when you're done," she said.
Then she came around the counter and held the beaded curtain aside with one hand, the gesture entirely natural, the gesture of someone who had done this a thousand times, who had stood at this threshold between the public space of her shop and the private space of what lay beyond it and ushered people through it toward whatever they had come here for.
"Come on," she said. "I'll show you the way."
"Uhhh...yeah, thank you Misty."
Hidden Knowledge
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Authors Note: Thats it for chapter 11! Hope you liked finally meeting Misty.
As for the chapter name: The High Priestess in tarot sits between two pillars, one light and one dark, acting as the threshold between the known and the unknown. She represents intuition, hidden knowledge, and the things that exist beneath the surface of what can be quantified or explained.
She is the keeper of what isn't said out loud. She sits at the threshold between what is known and what isn't, between the surface of things and what runs underneath them. That's the energy of this whole chapter. Misty reading cards that map an arc Genos can't confirm or deny.
Next chapter we finally get into Viktor's clinic properly, and I think those of you who have been waiting for that conversation are going to enjoy it.
Quick heads up on scheduling, I have exams in two weeks so I'll be slowing down a little. I'll still be uploading, just not as frequently as I have been. I'm planning to pick the pace back up around the 7th of June once things settle down, so bear with me in the meantime.
As always leave a like and a comment if you enjoyed it, and any criticisms on what you didn't. Ko-fi for tips and commissions, Patreon for early chapters.
See you in the next one.