The silence in this fraggin' bolthole is worse than the drekstorm we left behind. It’s the kind of quiet that lets the bio monitor pings hit like a frag grenade against my cerebral cortex. Mouse hasn't twitched in ten minutes, and her respiration is a wet, hitching glitch, a system error in a meat bod that was never spec’d to soak this much feedback. I reached out to check her pulse, and my digits came away slick and charcoal-dark. In the guttering amber glow of a failing emergency light, the claret doesn't even look red; it looks like leaked industrial lubricant. I tried to slop some expired med-gel over the flechette holes, but the nanites are just spinning their wheels, unable to knit together a spark that’s already halfway into the Ultraviolet.

That slaggin' optical chip taped to my chassis feels sub-zero now, like a shard of ice trying to hollow out my chest. We traded every scrap of karma for this paydata. We burned the street doc who fed us the intel, we ghosted the clean getaway, and looking at Mouse... I think we just traded her soul for a handful of bits. I’m down to four rounds of APDS in the mag, enough for a loud exit or a quiet suicide. My ASIST jitter is spiking at 12%, making the walls of this crawlspace leak digital static, and still, there’s no handshake from Kestrel. Just the hollow wind whistling through the Redmond ruins like a banshee looking for a meal.

I keep catching the scent of cherry blossoms, a fragged ol'factory processor, or maybe just a cruel joke from my sub-conscious about that Neo-Tokyo pipe dream. The toxic drizzle is starting to seep through the ferrocrete overhead, dripping onto my Cyber-6 with a rhythmic tap that sounds like a countdown. I used to think the sprawl was a playground where a chrome-head could outrun the Megas if they were chipped high enough. But the sprawl doesn't have an airlock; it just has deeper levels of Hell. Right now, we’re at the bedrock, buried under a billion nuyen worth of corporate drek that doesn't mean a ghost of a thing to a decker who can't jack back in.

"Kestrel, you fragging vulture," I rasp into the dead comms, my voice cracking through the static. "Slot the invite. Slot it now or I’m geekin' the next suit that walks through that door and taking the whole block with me." The only feedback is the distant, rhythmic thrum-thrum-thrum of a combat drone circling above like a shark in the neon-tinted dark. I pulled Mouse closer, feeling the heat bleed out of her chrome. The dawn is coming, but it isn't bringing the sun. It’s just bringing more shadows to hide the bodies.