I haven't touched the deck. Haven't even scraped the dried claret off my Cyber-6. Feels like a fraggin' sin to scrub away the last bit of her meat-space existence in this drek-hole. Burned the old bolt-hole & ghosted to a new squat in the Puyallup Barrens—the kind of pit where the sulfur fog is thick enough to choke a Great Dragon. Keeps the corporate bloodhounds off the scent, or maybe they just figure a hollowed out street sam isn't worth the AV fuel.

That slaggin' optical chip is still taped to my ribs. Every time I move, the edge bites into the flesh, a sub-zero reminder of the Karma we spent. I haven't slotted it. Haven't fenced it. Kestrel finally buzzed the comms three solar days ago, acting like the radio silence was just some "static on the grid." I didn't give that vulture a single word. Just let him listen to the rhythm of my respirator until he got the message and jacked out.

The ASIST jitter is a permanent hum at the base of my skull now—redlining at 15%. The sprawl looks like a low-res, pirated sim-feed; colors bleeding, edges pixelating into digital static. My sub-processor is still looping that cruel cherry blossom joke, but now the petals are falling over burnt ferrocrete and empty soy-kaf canisters.

Spent eighteen hours yesterday staring at a file of her on my internal display. Not the "pro" decker persona, but a candid I snapped when she was coming down from a three day dive, a smudge of real choc on her lip. I’m starting to lose the audio-log of her laugh, the way it used to cut through the sprawl’s white noise like a hot laser.

Down to three rounds of APDS. Pawned one for a fifth of synth-whiskey that tastes like industrial solvent and regret.

The dawn's coming up again. Still no sun. Just more gray, more shadows, & the cold fraggin' truth that the bedrock goes a lot deeper than I thought.