Midnight.

The neon’s humming a different tune tonight.

I spent the day prepping the kit. The Cyber-6 is purring, & I swapped those last APDS rounds for a fresh brick of HE-concussion & a new smart-link processor. If I'm hitting an Evo lab, I need my optics running at 0.01 latency, no room for digital ghosts when you're dancing through corporate ICE.

Kestrel sent over the schematics for the Redmond facility. It’s a fraggin’ fortress, buried under three levels of reinforced ferrocrete & guarded by enough bio-sculpted muscle to start a small war. But they’ve got a leak in their secondary cooling manifest. A tiny, 2-bit glitch that Mouse would have found in her sleep. I’m going to use it to pry that place open like a tin of soy-meat.

The cherry blossom scent is gone. In its place?

The sharp, clean ozone of a hot deck & the cold, metallic tang of readiness. I realized something while I was calibrating my servos. I’m not grieving anymore. I’m processing. Every time I slot a fresh clip or run a diagnostic, it’s a tribute to the best decker who ever burned a grid.

The Megas think they can just write us off as "collateral drek" on a ledger. They think they can spend lives like small change & keep moving.

They’re about to find out what happens when the collateral decides to collect interest.

I’m jacking in at 02:00. If Kestrel plays me, I’ve got a data-bomb rigged to his personal comms that’ll fry his cerebral cortex before he can say "handshake."

Time to show Evo that some shadows have teeth.