Emmanuel 'Rex' Miller
Warehouse On Hargreaves St. Night City
2074
It smelled like iron and damp concrete down here, only light worth a damn came from the red LED strips cut into the wallss and the blue static haze bleeding off Val's wall monitors.
I was pacing the length of the steel table. Left foot, right foot, keeping my feet moving so the joints didn't lock up. My fingers were locked around my old Militech dog tags, edges biting into my black palms I didn't want to show it but my head was a mess. Angry, mourning, drifting through a red fog.
I fucking hated it, this shit was new to me.
Before Freddie, my brain didn't drift like this, I always had an objective, a deployment map to read, a logistics bottleneck to clear, a personnel issue in the chapter that needed a boot down its neck or a bullet in its head. My mind used to move in straight lines toward an actionable conclusion, a soldier's way of thinking. Militech drills it into you, and the uniform staying off doesn't change the programming. Even running a 6th Street crew operated on the same protocol: identify the threat, assess options, select optimal response, execute.
Now? The gears were slipping, I kept snapping back to that parking lot.
The Trauma Team ping had hit my internal deck at 23:47, a Biomon alert. I paid for that REO subscription out of my own pocket for three years. Freddie argued about it every single time the eddies cleared, told me he wasn't some kid who needed his big brother hovering over his shoulder. Said he was fine, that he could handle the street.
The overlay text in my vision had been simple: VITAL SIGNS ABSENT.
ESTIMATED RESPONSE TIME: 37 MINUTES
I'd torn through Arroyo alone, I didn't call a squad, and I sure as shit didn't wait for the meatwagon to show. As soon as that alert came through and my heart sank into my stomach I hit the ignition and redlined the engine, because the soldier in me needed eyes on the objective, needed it physical before I'd let it be real.
I found Sam first.
His chest was caved in like a cargo truck had used him for a ramp, ribs turned to splinters. A single, clean exit hole right through the center of his skull. It was messy work judging by the trail of blood leading up to his corpse, it would have been a slow death if not for the bullet.
A remorseful killer? Or an efficient one?
Then I found Freddie, or what was left of him.
His torso was just a shredded canvas of entry wounds. Fabric of his jacket was cooked right into the flesh in places. But my eyes didn't stay there. My combat-trained brain had seen every kind of meat-grinder corporate war could offer, but nothing prepped me for his neck.
It just ended.
It was a surgically clean stroke, sliced at a bit of an angle, but there was no fleshy bits where whatever cut him passed, his vertebrae was sticking out of the stump like broken white chalk. The head itself was sitting a meter away in the oil stains, face up. Staring at the neon sky with an expression I couldn't read as anything but shock, I stood over him and felt something heavy shift behind my ribs. I couldn't name it. Freddie was a gonk, spent his whole short life making brain-dead choices that made me want to throw him through a drywall. But right then? I'd have traded everything I'd built in Santo Domingo just to have him back being a gonk.
Twenty-two years old, my brother staring out at the sky because some fuck cut his head off.
I'd stood in that lot for a long time, just me and my little brother's face staring at me in pain because I couldn't protect him, my eyes just staring into his dead ones until I felt something inside my chest crack along a fault line I didn't know I had.
I'd told him a million times, patient, pissed off, exhausted, screaming, fifteen years of the exact same warning. "Stay off the block, stay away from the crews, don't touch the product, don't fly the colors, don't carry any fucking iron if you're going to use it for something gonked." Told him I was neck-deep in this chrome-plated hell so he didn't have to be. "Do you copy, Freddie?"
He'd just give me that sarcastic little nod, the one that meant he heard the words and didn't give a damn. "Yeah, Rex. I copy, whatever you say."
Then he'd go out and do whatever the hell he wanted anyway, because he knew I would always come behind him and sweep up the brass, an older brother's job...
Only this time, there wasn't anything left to clean.
I looked down, my fingers had been digging deep grooves into the edge of the metal table.
Don't even remember gripping it.
My mother's face flashed into my mind, I had made a promise to her. It wasn't on her deathbed or nothing that dramatic, it was just a random Tuesday evening when she had looked at me from across the kitchen table, her tired often vacant eyes drilling me. "You're going to look after him, Emmanuel." she had said when she found out I had joined Street. "You make sure he doesn't turn into you, or your father."
I'd told her yes, meant it too.
Now I'd broken that promise in the worst fucking way Freddie was dead, all he was was ashes, and I was standing in a damp cellar trying to keep my cool before I burnt anymore bridges then I already had.
The anger was a low, constant burn now, just a hum that sat under my ribs like an unexploded artillery shell pressing against my lungs every time I took a breath, first thing you learned in war was to not let your emotions get the better of you.
Right now, holding that leash was getting real goddamn hard, I turned to my runner, asking her for an update to keep me occupied before I did something stupid like charge into Tyger Claw territory and get the fucker myself.
"Anything?" I didn't turn around. Kept my eyes on the solid steel, directing the words toward the dark corner where Valentina '0J0' Reyes had set up her netrunning rig.
'0J0' looked like someone who had spent too long letting the Net stare back.
She was small-framed but sharp in the way broken glass was sharp, all angles, tension, and sleepless focus. One side of her head was shaved close, the scalp broken by thin chrome strips and tiny magenta status lights buried under the skin. The rest of her hair fell in a messy sweep of black, violet, and electric blue.
Her face had that hollow netrunner look I knew too well: pretty once, maybe still pretty, but worn thin by too many nights jacked into places that did not want human minds inside them. One eye was natural, pale and watchful under a smear of blue makeup that ran down her cheek like a synthetic tear. The other was pure hardware, a purple-lit cybernetic lens sitting inside cracked, delicate facial plating that spread around her socket like fractured porcelain.
Fine geometric tattoos climbed her neck, disappearing beneath the sealed collar of her netrunning suit. The suit itself was matte black, skintight, and built like a second nervous system. Interface ports sat at her throat and collarbone like surgical jewelry.
In the red-blue glow of the monitors, 0J0 looked half-present in the room and half-somewhere else entirely, her expression calm, wary, and exhausted in a way that made her seem older than twenty-six. Like her body was sitting in the chair, but the rest of her was already three firewalls deep, fighting daemons in the dark.
Found her through a fixer two years back when I needed a Runner who could install some malware on a Militech stooge and keep her mouth shut, she'd done both. I trusted her the way I trust anyone in this city: as far as the paper trail went, and not one millimeter further.
Her eyes were wide, the white cybernetic lens catching the blue monitor glare. That was her tell. When She goes deep, her lids close and she goes ghost. Eyes open meant she was running a shallow dive, one foot in the meat the other foot in the Net, present enough to talk.
She yanked the interface cord from her neck jack with a wet, metallic click and sank back into her chair.
"I think he's onto us," she said, her voice had that flat unmodulated drone runners get before their brains get used to talking with their actual mouths. "I've got a passive tag on the vehicle registration but nothings pinged and I can't stay hardwired into the city's traffic infrastructure for extended periods to track it manually, even basic netrunning is dangerous, hover too long in systems you shouldn't be and some other runner or a corp daemon notices." She turned her head, looking at me square as she tapped her temple port. "But I've been looking into something strange I noticed a while back, check this."
Her lenses flickered, cybernetics kicked over, and a video feed splashed onto the wall of monitors behind my head.
It was security footage, of the parking space doors at Megabuilding H10, for a split second a silhouette started to roll into the frame, and then the whole feed corrupted into gray static for a moment before going back to normal, the doors vacant again.
"Now, before you say anything," She muttered as another clip popped up, a highway camera showing a bunch of cars moving through traffic, then the exact same five-second glitch. She started cycling through the data, the wall of monitors starting filling up with footage from traffic cams on the arterial roads, alleyway lenses, storefront security systems. Every single one of them had the same five-second blind spot, dropping out at precise, calculated intervals.
"What am I looking at, Reyes?" I didn't turn around to face her I kept my eyes on the static. "Give me the tactical takeaway."
"Those glitches aren't random, they're gaps," she said, her voice dropping into that flat rhythm she gets when she's reading raw code. "Someone is scrubbing their transit route in real time. They tried to spread it out, make it look like random network latency, hell they did a genuinely good job of it, but something felt wrong to me, so I tested a theory."
She threw a map of Night City onto the main monitor, the map was full of marked out circles spreading out, but there were parts on the map where the circles intercepted in such a way that formed a line through the city.
"Line up the deadzones over the past thirty minutes, and the coordinates map a direct trajectory."
The vector illuminated, a neon line bled out from Megabuilding H10, cutting right through the heart of the districts, heading straight for Arroyo, right now it was stopped dead near an expressway junction.
"It might be a stretch," Val said, shifting in her chair. "But in situations like this, a bit of paranoia keeps a bullet out of your chrome cap, for all intents and purposes we should assume he's in Arroyo and based on the timeline, he may have already run into some friction on the approach." She looked up, her cybernetic eyes locking onto the back of my head. "You should check in with your perimeter cre—"
My holophone chimed cutting her off as my optics flared blue and the connection snapped open, it was one of the boys I had keeping an eye out, Roberts.
The voice that came through on the other end was ragged, hyperventilating, and choked with terror. "Boss! Boss, we found the car! The Shion with the plates you gave us!"
"Talk straight, Roberts." My voice came out harshly. "What happened. Did you secure the target?"
"F-fuck no, boss. It's bad, it's real bad. We had the drop on him, but he pulled some Blackhand shit and took out Josie clean through the windshield! Flatlined her Rex! Josie's dead! Pax too! I'm the only one that got out."
My jaw clenched until the bone ached. My fingers found the edge of the steel table again gripping it until the metal groaned under the pressure.
"Where are you? How did he turn the tables on an ambush?"
"The truck flipped, boss. He shot Josie while we were running him down. I got ejected during the roll. I was crawling out of the wreckage trying to get my bearings when I saw him. Pax emptied a whole LMG drum into the bastard's chest. I watched the sparks fly off him, boss. The rounds didn't even slow him down. He just walked right through the lead, like some fucking Saka ninja and cracked Pax's skull open on the asphalt!"
A ragged, wet breath rattled through the line.
"He's a borg, boss. A walking tank it looked like! He put a gun right to my spine and asked where you were. I didn't want to get flatlined, Rex. I had to tell him about the Hargreaves warehouse. I'm sorry, I'm sor—"
I opened my mouth to cut the gonk off, to tear him a new one for selling us out and not having the decency to go out on his sword but my second line chimed.
It was an unknown number, it didn't have an ICON just a line of numbers flashing on the corner of my vision. I stared at the flashing alert.
"Roberts," I said into the first line, dropping my voice into that low, flat register my crew knew meant they were standing on a landmine. "You and me are not done, come back to base you and you better fucking pray your borg friend doesn't show up."
I flipped the toggle on my internal deck, muted the kid, and accepted the second call.
The avatar that cropped up in the corner of my optical feed was bare-bones, a blonde kid in his early twenties it looked like, a fucking pretty boy I wouldn't have even begin to see as a threat if I passed him on the street, but other then his looks the thing that stood out were his black and gold optics that caught the light of wherever the hell he was calling from in a way that didn't look biological.
Didn't need a SIN scan to tell me who I was looking at.
The anger that had been sitting under my ribs like an unexploded shell finally found a trajectory. Locked right onto him.
"Am I speaking to Rex?" The voice that came through carried a slight mechanical undertone, so subtle you'd miss it if you weren't listening for it, but my audio processors were tuned to catch every single decibel right now.
Where the fuck did he get my info from?
"Genos fucking Harker...you've got some fucking balls," I said my voice came out quiet. "Calling me like this."
"..." He said nothing at that for a moment. "I'm calling because I think we should talk before this goes further than it needs to."
"Talk...yeah all right we can talk, but I gotta ask you something first." I let the sentence hang in the air, heavy and poisonous. I leaned over the steel table, staring holes right through his minimal, gold-eyed avatar. "Two nights ago, a parking lot in Arroyo, two people got flatlined. One of 'em was missing the top of his skull cap, and the other had his head cut clean off his shoulders." I paused, my voice dropping into that freezing, sub-zero register. "That your handiwork, choom? You the one who zeroed my family?"
There was a pause at my question and for a moment it seemed like he wouldn't say anything but the borg answered "I want to be clear about what happened," he said. "Your brother and his cousin attempted to steal my vehicle. I tried to de-escalate, I even let them go, but your brother attacked me and I responded automatically," He paused, just a for a moment but it was there. "It was them or me, I picked what anyone else would."
I didn't say a damn thing.
The monitors kept hummed their low-frequency static, out of the corner of my eye, I could see Val had gone completely rigid. Ghosted, probably trying to track down this call.
"Them or you huh," I said finally.
"Yes."
"My brother's killer dials my personal line just to tell me it was survival of the fittest." Still kept my voice down in that flat, freezing register.
"That isn't what I said." He responded calmly.
A bit pissed off at his apparent lack of a shit to give I swore at him. "It's what you fucking meant choom."
"No," Genos said. "It's what you heard, I had to do what I did, but I want you to know I didn't start it." He said. "I'm telling you what so you know the truth rather than a version assembled from secondhand accounts." Another pause. "I know that doesn't land the way you want it to, I know there's nothing I can say that changes what your brother's last night looked like but I am hoping the truth of it can make you see reason."
I looked down at my hands, looked at the deep warped grooves my hands had dug into the table.
A laugh scraped out of my throat., an ugly empty thing.
"There it is...the truth." I nodded slowly. "You think that helps? You think if you arrange the facts nice enough, my brother stops being ashes?"
..."No," He said after a moments pause, "no it doesn't."
"You know what the funny thing is?" My voice had something else bleeding into it now. "My brother was a gonk. His whole life was just a series of terrible cock ups, and I spent ten years sweeping up his brass, I would've kept cleaning up after him until one of us took a permanent dirt nap, because that's what a brother does." I locked my optics right onto his gold gaze.
"He made messes. I fixed them. He picked fights. I ended them. He went too far. I dragged him back."
I lifted my head and locked my optics right onto his gold gaze.
"So you can tell me it was self-defense. You can tell me it was an accident. You can tell me Freddie pulled his own fucking pin and stood there smiling while the grenade went off."
I let the silence stretch.
"I don't give a squatting fuck." He didn't move as I spoke.
"That was my brother," I said. "My blood. My responsibility, if your brother's killer called you right now and gave you this same speech, would you give a shit?"
The line went dead silent for three full seconds. "No," Genos said. "I guess I wouldn't."
"Then we understand each other."
"We do," Genos said. "Unlike most people in this city, I am capable of empathy, which is why I'm extending this branch only once, let this end here, walk away, I walk away, we never have cause to be in the same grid square again. Night City is large enough for both of us to disappear into." Those gold unblinking eyes were rock steady.
I stared at him.
Stared at the face of the monster who'd torn my little brother's head off, sitting on the other end of an encrypted proxy line offering me a way out.
The nerve of this fucking borg.
"I'm going to find out who you really are," I said, my voice dropping an octave going near fucking dead. "Not 'Genos Harker'. The thing under that name and when I do, I'm going to start with every single asset around you. Fuck it, everyone you've talked to, everyone you've bought iron from, everyone who patched your chrome, gave you shelter, answered your call, looked at you twice since you rolled into my city."
I held his digital gaze. "I'm going to put them all in the fucking dirt right next to you, Sanguine sanguis; carne caro motherfucker."
The gold eyes didn't even flicker.
"I see," He said almost sadly. "At least I can say that I tried the peaceful route." He stared dead at me. "See you soon, Rex." The avatar dropped and the line went dead.
Behind me, the high-frequency whine of the server rack took a sharp, jagged dive. A long, wet gasp cut through the dark. 0J0 sat up from her rig, her cyberlenses were still spinning wild.
"Val," I barked, turning on my heel. "Tell me you got a lock."
She didn't answer right away, she just sat rubbing the skin around her neural ports while her brain re-calibrated back to the meatspace. When she finally looked up, she shook her head, her jaw tight.
"Nothing, Rex, total ghost," she spat, her voice scraping like sandpaper. "I threw every icebreaker I had at his routing protocol, tried to back-ping his proxy before the handshake even cleared, but the guy's running some slippery fucking ICE. The moment I tried to scrape his location metadata, it just kept getting cut off, cleaned my cache before I could even tag the node, it was like trying to catch a ghost."
She wiped a smear of sweat from her forehead, her cybernetic eyes dimming down to a dull white. "The guy's got serious eyes watching his six."
"Fuck!" I didn't have time to vent the rage.
I flicked the toggle on my internal comms, unmuting line one, and Roberts' hyperventilating instantly flooded my audio processors again. The kid was sobbing now, his blubbering leaking straight into my ear canal like static through a busted channel.
"Roberts," I snapped, my voice cutting through his panic like a combat knife. "Listen to me, be quiet and listen."
"B-boss... Rex... I'm sorry, I swear I didn't want to give up the warehouse—"
"I said shut the fuck up," I growled. "The warehouse is burnt, but that's fine it's where we want him anyway, we'll handle that. Right now, I need intel, you got a bead on him, you watched him take out Josie and Pax." I said, trying to get as much info from the gonk. "Think like a soldier, Roberts, give me actionable data. What else did you see on him? What kind of iron was he carrying? How heavy was his chrome?"
Genos Harker
I had left the Mizutani behind in a service alley behind the municipal substation at the corner of Almunecar and Cloud Street, three blocks west of the warehouse.
It wasn't a difficult call riding around in a car that had just been involved in a pursuit and a fatality on an Arroyo expressway was the kind of thing that got you noticed even in a district that had a high tolerance for vehicular incidents. More importantly I wasn't comfortable having it anywhere near a netrunner who was actively looking for me, the Mizutani wasn't running the same defenses I was.
My own systems had layers, redundancies, a sandboxed kernel that would give any runner a very unpleasant surprise if they tried to push through it, if they could even find it when it didn't want to be found. The car had a standard onboard system with standard defenses, which meant it had the kind of defenses that existed to make the manufacturer's liability documentation accurate rather than to actually stop anyone.
If Rex's runner got a wireless link to its onboard computer she could turn my own car into a problem before I reached the warehouse door.
So a service alley was my answer near a municipal substation. 6th Street, being a gang, avoided NCPD adjacent infrastructure on general principle which made it the closest thing to neutral ground this deep in Arroyo.
I stood on the edge of the roof I was on and looked east.
Regina's intel had been right. The trace I'd left on the ganger I let walk had done exactly what I expected it to do, which was lead me straight back to wherever he'd run to report in. Hargreaves Street. Rex knew I was coming and had known since the moment that call ended, which meant the warehouse was going to be ready for me.
More ready then it already was anyway.
The other problem was the cameras.
I had been running surface level hacks since Little China, quick blind spots, nothing deep, nothing that required sustained connection to a system long enough to leave a meaningful footprint.
Deeper hacks were off the table. Any sustained intrusion into the local subnet right now would be visible, and a visible intrusion would give them a vector she could follow back.
Which meant I was going to do this the old fashioned way.
I stepped back from the ledge, measured the wind moving between the buildings, and ran, I did not drop back down to the pavement, because the streets were a death trap of open sightlines, cheap optics and overlapping security arcs.
Instead, I hit the lip of the roof at full speed and launched myself across the first gap, even without using my boosters, my cybernetic limbs propelling me with enough force to turn the jump into a flat, violent line through the air.
The next roof came up fast, slick with old rain and coolant residue, so I landed on one hand and both feet, letting my pneumatic joints drink the impact with a soft hiss of venting pressure.
I rolled through the landing instead of stopping, came up under the shadow of a billboard support, and pushed off again before the rooftop gravel finished scattering behind me.
Three blocks east down Almunecar, keeping low, moving fast, using the environment as a series of pathaways to me being nothing but a slipping shadow on the rooftops.
A municipal camera swept across the roofline ahead, its motor rhythm uneven by point-two seconds, so I crossed beneath its blind spot without slowing, planting one foot on the side of a rusted climate-control unit and kicking myself diagonally over a maintenance duct.
I hit the duct with one hand, vaulted low across it, and let my coat snap behind me as the camera's lens passed over the space I had occupied half a second earlier.
The next gap was too wide for a normal jump and too exposed for a climb, which meant it was not actually a gap at all, just a problem with three usable surfaces.
I drove my left foot into the side of a ventilation tower, pushed hard, caught the edge of a suspended cable tray with my right hand, and swung my momentum into a narrow service gantry bolted against the neighboring building.
The gantry flexed under me, metal complaining through the rain, but I was already gone before the structure finished deciding whether it wanted to collapse.
Below, traffic moved in thin tired lines through the wet arteries of Arroyo, headlights smeared across puddles like molten wire.
Above, I moved through scaffolding, ductwork, signage brackets, balcony rails, and the broken maintenance ladders nobody had bothered to replace because people in this city rarely looked up unless something was falling on them.
I dropped from the gantry into a narrow gap between buildings, kicked off one wall, struck the opposite brick with both feet, and climbed upward through momentum rather than grip.
A human body would have torn something doing it, but my chassis made the motion clean, each rebound translating pressure into angle, angle into height, height into forward movement.
I caught the bottom rung of a fire escape with one hand, used the swing to rotate sideways, and slipped through the railing without letting my boots touch the platform.
An NCPD patrol drone passed two streets over, running a lazy patrol pattern above the highway supports, so I flattened myself beneath a hanging sheet of corrugated metal and waited exactly three beats.
Its sensor cone drifted past in my peripheral map, blue and harmless once it was behind me, and I pushed back into motion before the rainwater sliding from the metal edge could hit the ground.
Every jump, every landing, every breath of movement had to match the dead zones between industrial equipment, exploiting the narrow windows of motion between one sweep cycle and the next.
The corporate and municipal surveillance infrastructure running through the western end of Arroyo was dense but predictable, I timed each crossing manually, moved in the intervals, and stayed inside the shadows cast by trash compactors, cable bundles, loading cranes, and the structural supports of the highway overpass that ran above the district like a concrete spine.
At one point, the cleanest path vanished beneath a collapsed section of roof, leaving only a rusted sign frame hanging over an alley full of broken glass and old rainwater.
I accelerated anyway, planted one boot on the tilted roof seam, kicked into the frame, and used the rectangular metal skeleton like a ladder rotating under my weight.
The whole thing tore loose behind me with a shriek, crashing down into the alley after I had already cleared the far wall and landed in a crouch behind a row of old solar inverters.
A shout of suprise sounded from below, a figure then stuck their head out of their window to see what had caused their fire escape to fall "What the fuck!?" I waited until he ducked his head back in with a mutter of "Fucking Arroyo..." and then crossed the next rooftop on the balls of my feet with no more sound than rain sliding over plastic sheeting.
At Brandon Street, the character of the neighborhood began to change around me.
The clinical municipal concrete gave way to something older and more lived in, the infrastructure aging incrementally as I moved east, the signage shifting from corporate to local, the lighting from even and functional to the specific patchwork of a district that maintained what it could afford and let the rest rot.
The air changed too, because the ocean-channel smell that had followed me from the western edge of Arroyo died somewhere near the midpoint of the block, replaced by the industrial composite of the manufacturing sector.
I crossed Brandon by dropping from a rooftop to the side of a pedestrian overpass, running three steps along the vertical support, and catching a ladder bolted beneath the walkway before gravity finished making its argument.
The camera above the intersection swept left, the traffic light flickered red through rain haze, and I let myself fall the final two meters into the shadow behind a transformer box.
Sharp right onto Mission, half a block south, then left toward Hargreaves through a maintenance lane barely wide enough for a delivery drone.
A chain-link fence blocked the lane halfway through, crowned with faulty electrical wire that would have been more threatening if the power conduit feeding it had not been exposed at ankle height.
I stepped onto a dumpster, kicked off the brick wall, twisted above the wire in a clean sideways rotation, and landed on the other side with one hand already catching the drainpipe beside me.
The pipe held for exactly long enough to be useful, which was all I needed from it.
I climbed two stories in four movements, crossed a sagging balcony rail, and dropped onto the roof of a shuttered machine shop overlooking Hargreaves Street.
Then the city light disappeared as if somebody had cut power to the world, the streetlighting functioned in isolated patches and failed everywhere else, leaving the gaps filled with ambient neon bleed from distant signage that made everything visible without making anything clear.
Rusted shipping containers lined both sides of the road in stacked rows, creating a canyon of metal walls that threw back a faint reddish reflection from somewhere deeper in the lot.
I moved along the container tops instead of the ground, boots landing on warped steel, hand catching corners, body staying low enough to break my silhouette against the stacked geometry.
One container shifted under my weight, settling with a hollow metallic groan, and I froze before the sound finished rolling across the yard.
...
"Rex says be on high alert! That fucker could be pulling up at any minute."
"Manyou see how Vince looked? Gonk appearently told him where we were holed up, hope the boss finishes what the borg started."
Nobody looked where I was hiding
...Fuck that was close.
Ahead, against the toxic bruised glow of the Night City sky, the warehouse rose out of the dark, I pulled myself into the shadow of the nearest container stack, dropped into a crouch, and looked at it for a moment.
Lights burned through the upper windows, they weren't the cold regular glow of automated security, but the warmer irregular pattern of occupation, movement, and men waiting with guns.
I could hear voices at the perimeter, and both Regina and my Trojan horse had said twenty.
'Look alive MK' I keyed MK through the internal channel without moving my mouth.
[YES, I AM LISTENING AND WAITING FOR YOUR NEXT INSTRUCTION.]
'I'm going to need you to scout out the surrounding areas, passive scan only, no active network probes, and tell me what you can see from here without touching anything.'
[UNDERSTOOD, SCANNING PASSIVE RF EMISSIONS AND THERMAL BLEED FROM CURRENT POSITION ONLY.]
A pause stretched through the rain, measured in processor cycles and distant footsteps.
[INITIAL COUNT: FOURTEEN HEAT SIGNATURES VISIBLE FROM CURRENT POSITION, WITH ADDITIONAL SIGNATURES PROBABLE IN LOWER LEVELS BELOW THERMAL PENETRATION THRESHOLD.]
[COMMUNICATIONS TRAFFIC IS ELEVATED, WEAPON SIGNATURES ARE CLUSTERED NEAR LIKELY ENTRY POINTS, AND THEIR DEPLOYMENT PATTERN SUGGESTS THEY ARE EXPECTING YOU.]
I kept my eyes on the warehouse and felt something almost like amusement pass through my systems.
'Yeah, I know they are expecting me', I thought watching the light move behind the dirty upper windows.
I checked the Overture and confirmed the cylinder was full, the LMG was slung across my back, the weight of it familiar already.
I looked at the warehouse and let the map in my head assemble itself, twenty people, or more, arranged by a man who had spent his adult life learning how to arrange people effectively in preparation for violence.
A netrunner somewhere inside, one who had been looking for my footprint all evening and would be watching for the moment I made a mistake.
Rifles on the catwalks, probably mines by the doors, hard cover positioned around obvious breach angles, and frightened men placed in places they had been told were clever.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it, Rex.
I took one long look at the map on the corner of my vision, 'MK, find us a way in.'
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Authors Note: That's it for this chapter, We're almost at the end of this arc. Next chapter I'm going to try and make as action packed as I can, give you all the payoff this arc has been building toward. After that I'm thinking of pushing the story forward with a bit of a timeskip, glossing over some of the recovery and operation stuff to get to the next phase of Genos's time in Night City. Let me know in the comments if you think that's the right call or if there's something in that interim period you actually want to see.
As for this chapter, The Seven of Cups is the card of choices, illusions, and emotional confusion. In this chapter, it represents the moment where peace was technically possible, but impossible in practice. Rex and Genos are both offered different cups: truth, vengeance, guilt, mercy, pride, survival, and grief. Genos tries to choose peace, but Rex cannot see it as anything except an insult to his brother's memory.
Rex thinks he is choosing justice, but he is really choosing the illusion that revenge can give his grief somewhere to go. The negotiation fails not because there were no options, but because every option was already fucked to begin with.
As always leave a like and a comment, any criticisms welcome, also I am two chapters on patreon, feel free to join if you're interested in reading ahead, or join for free to gain access to the images I've posted in with every chapter: https: // www.patreon.com/ Maydae010401