The Outskirts of Night City.
Four months later.
“That took way too long,” Tony commented on their journey, tinkering for the umpteenth time with the engine of his new car, which had been cobbled together from a random assortment of junk.
“Omnissiah is going to grumble,” Lucy agreed.
Unlike Tony, she was busy handling their vehicle’s computer, scanning it for viruses and errors.
Unfortunately, secondhand hardware dictates its own rules, and a buildup of system errors was far from the worst that could happen.
Then again, thanks to Tony’s and Lucy’s skills, their ride was running in better shape than many modern cars straight off the assembly line.
“We should have just gone through official channels.”
“Well, who could have foreseen that kind of force majeure?” Tony shrugged.
“On the bright side, we definitely covered our tracks. And the Aldecaldos turned out to be good people.”
“Uh-huh,” Lucy agreed, a small smile playing on her lips.
“It was fun.”
Tony had originally planned to reach Night City via public transit, but he had fatally underestimated a few things about the US.
The first was its fragmentation.
Even though Militech and the NUSA had gathered a significant percentage of the pre-war American states under their wing, they hadn’t taken them all, meaning the general tension at borders and annexed territories was genuinely cause for concern.
Tony would have taken the risk had he known where a strike might come from, but that was the catch—even the locals didn’t know what might suddenly snap in the head of the next self-proclaimed ‘patriot,’ disgruntled citizen, or psycho.
That left transport…
and that’s where things got bleak.
Washington was on one end of the country, and Night City on the other.
It seemed like a breeze on paper—just hop on an orbital shuttle and you’d be in the City of Dreams in a mere couple of hours, if not sooner.
But unfortunately, security in the aerospace sector was downright paranoid, and slipping past the guard checkpoints unnoticed was out of the question.
Buying tickets, on the other hand, was expensive, and Tony had no desire to hand his location to Arasaka on a silver platter.
There was no doubt they would find out; transport corporations were perfectly willing to sell their clients’ travel data for the right price.
That left the old railway network, which even in its best years was utterly trashed, good old planes…
or going by car.
Tony chose cars; the chances of survival were much higher that way.
He found a broken-down vehicle, rented a garage, upgraded it to handle desert conditions, increased its autonomy, and in the meantime, Lucy searched for a nomad clan that fit their needs.
The task was anything but trivial.
Unsurprisingly, nomad clans aren’t exactly eager to post their internal business out in the open; quite the opposite, they try to share as little as possible about the family’s state of affairs.
Yet, the young girl managed brilliantly, scratching three clans off the list out of the seven within their reach.
From there, it was a simple matter of getting into the car, packing enough water and provisions, and finally catching up with the chosen nomad clan.
The choice fell on the Aldecaldos; these folks stuck to honest business dealings, and overall turned out to be reasonable people who balked at dirty ways of making a living, such as human trafficking, drug manufacturing, and the like.
The trip itself was educational in its own way, good for personal growth, but most importantly, it offered an excellent way to clear Lucy’s head.
She had finally accepted that she would never see Poland or her home again, never embrace her mother, lounge in her own bed, or visit her favorite ice cream parlor.
The little girl endured this realization with difficulty but without histrionics, quickly accepting both her new reality and the fact that her year-long nightmare was behind her, trying to find something good in the present while timidly looking toward tomorrow.
As for Tony, he genuinely unwound his soul while working with his hands among the Aldecaldos.
Being a genius engineer, he frequently helped the clan mechanics with repairs, pitched a couple of interesting modifications, and drew up several blueprints.
The Aldecaldos particularly appreciated his blueprint for an atmospheric water generator, which outperformed their current models two and a half times over at the exact same production cost.
He also visited the lovely ladies, having a pleasant time.
Their journey had been delayed by sandstorms, breakdowns of vital vehicles—such as the mobile medical unit—and Wraiths who had managed to screw over the corporates from Biotechnica so badly that the latter locked down nearly all exits from the state the clan was in, forcing them to wait out the blockade.
During this time, Lucy joined the workflow as well, helping the nomads with the software for their vehicles—which often carried mounted guns—updating certain programs, and replacing jury-rigged setups with more advanced models.
Meanwhile, people kept trying to punch Tony in the face for his antics, and by no means was it always over philandering.
Tony, after all, possessed a rather sharp tongue, and during his four months with the clan, he had thoroughly annoyed all the mechanics and engineers, crushing their self-esteem into the dirt without mincing words.
Nomads are simple folk, and when they can’t outtalk someone, they resort to fists.
“Maybe you’ll cross paths again,” Tony offered supportively, ruffling Lucy’s hair.
“I heard the Aldecaldos are thinking about permanently settling down in the outskirts of some city to carve out a niche in transport, security, and smuggling. Night City is very convenient in that regard.”
“The trick is surviving until then,” Lucy disagreed.
The Aldecaldos were merchant-nomads.
Roll into one city, buy whatever is cheap there, drive to another city to sell it at a premium, repeat.
They rarely lingered in one spot for long, because it was simply practical.
By cruising between cities, they avoided making permanent enemies, could afford to act bolder around state elites without worrying about the fallout, and in the event of a serious conflict, they could simply pack up and vanish without taking any losses.
Consequently, Lucy seriously doubted that the nomad clan would change its way of life without a genuinely massive reason, and Tony didn’t bother trying to change her mind.
Time would tell who was right.
“The engine is shot, but it’ll last another couple hundred kilometers. After that, metal fatigue will take its toll and it’ll fall apart. How about your end?”
“All done here too,” Lucy chimed in with good news.
“It’s best not to turn on the autopilot, but the targeting system, radio, and GPS will work fine.”
“Then let’s roll and see where Omnissiah set up camp for us,” Stark decided, taking the wheel.
Back in Poland, he had sent Omnissiah ahead to Night City as a stowaway to lay the groundwork for their relocation.
As a robot, she didn’t require oxygen and had easily made it to the city inside the cargo bay of an atmospheric shuttle, just an hour after Lucy’s rescue.
From there, it was a matter of technical execution—hack the city grid, scout the chosen district, and look for real estate within it.
The robo-girl had delivered on her assignment…
while systematically wiping out almost all the gangers, junkies, and miscellaneous criminal scum in Megabuilding H10 along the way.
For the first time, the poor local cops discovered that they could be grabbed by the balls over bribes just to make them conscientiously do their jobs in one specific neighborhood.
At first glance, Omnissiah’s choice might seem strange, because knowing Tony and Lucy, they would inevitably try to get their hands on a proper workshop and would need space, otherwise it would mean welcoming clutter and creative chaos into their actual living quarters.
But the clever AI had covered this angle too, buying up six apartments at once on the top floor of the tower and already carrying out some renovations, which included upgrading the wiring to a higher quality, installing a couple of automated turrets, and putting in new doors that couldn’t be hacked with a calculator.
The tower itself was selected based on several criteria.
First and most important, right across from it was a diner where the neighborhood cops loved to hang out.
Second was its close proximity to a trauma center where a good insurance policy could put a person back on their feet regardless of the severity of injuries, provided the brain remained intact.
Third was the Kabuki Market, a favorite shopping spot for netrunners.
And finally, the relatively weak grip of gangs within the megabuilding’s zone and its adjacent areas.
The district itself shared space with the Afterlife club, the gathering hub for Night City’s elite solos and a neutral territory where negotiations could be held even with a bitter enemy with the guarantee that no ambush awaited (at least inside the club itself; what happened outside its walls was a separate conversation).
As one might guess, those elite mercenaries were a proud and sharp bunch, so their conversations with petty gang punks were short and usually fatal, which forced the local gang bosses to maintain at least some semblance of order among their people, keeping them from starting random chaos for no good reason.
That was already a plus.
Then there was Kabuki.
A market meant money, and the market for viruses, combat daemons, and guns was a lucrative business.
Money, as everyone knows, loves quiet, so the gangsters there tried to keep themselves in check and avoid drawing unnecessary heat, maintaining order with a soft touch here and an iron fist there.
As for the other two neighboring sub-districts, gangs had no interest in them.
Watson was a poor district, excluding the docks, which in theory should have seen considerable money moving through them, but the issue lay in the last sub-district…
where the Konpeki Plaza was located and corporate troops from Arasaka roamed everywhere.
Arasaka had a very short way of dealing with pests, which meant only scattered Maelstrom gangers—the particularly unhinged varieties—ventured to cause trouble there, and even then, their kind didn’t live long; either their own people killed them out of fear of the fallout, or wealthy corporate fat-cats turned mercenaries loose on them.
All in all, Omnissiah had gathered quite a bit of data before settling on their place of residence.
Living right in the Corporate Center would have been better, but there was too much corporate scrutiny there, and drawing extra attention from them was undesirable—even when you didn’t have a bullseye on your back as a person who had derailed a strategic program and shared it with third parties.
“So this is our new home?” Lucy asked when they pulled up to the massive reinforced concrete box—essentially another city within a city, just compact, devoid of cars and shopping malls.
“Temporary, most likely,” Tony noted.
Currently, he had a little over half a million eddies in his pockets.
The sum seemed substantial enough to live off of for more than a year, but renting a place in the Corporate Center could easily eat up anywhere from ninety to a hundred and fifty thousand eddies, depending on what you leased.
This wasn’t even factoring in the simple reality that Tony flat out didn’t know what to do next, where and how to move, or what goal to strive for.
In fact, Stark currently faced exactly two paths: claw his way to the top, carving his own path through mountains of corpses, or simply escape to Mars, whose colonization given the technologies he knew wasn’t all that difficult a task.
The initial colonies could be built underground, safe from temperatures and radiation; the main challenge was finding subterranean water and setting up a filtration system.
Both options were equally intriguing and possessed their own pros and cons, but the hurdle lay in that very same capital.
Never mind the personnel and the initial colony residents—cloning was always an option—but putting together a fully fledged space expedition with all the required hardware cost astronomical money that Tony lacked, and he wasn’t in a position to earn it through honest labor.
Or rather, he wouldn’t be allowed to.
“But those are future Tony’s problems,” Stark thought, finally parking his clunker.
“It’s…kinda cozy here,” Lucy offered supportively, peering through the elevator grate as glowing neon signs for various establishments flashed by.
“…” Tony, however, remained silent, his attention drawn more to the patches of soot and stale blood that no one had bothered to wash away.
Then there was the trash—tons of garbage that apparently no one collected, which had already begun blocking the stairwells, making elevators the only guaranteed method to reach the desired floor.
Tony shook his head in disappointment.
The locals lived inside an engineering marvel, a structure equipped with full social utilities whose population was so immense that the administrators’ authority could easily be compared to that of a mayor.
And what did he see?
Filth, ruin, and degradation.
On one hand, it was expected; on the other, he had still hoped for a better sight, since the people living in these places were far from the poorest, possessing decent incomes.
No matter what anyone said, the apartments here were well-appointed.
Even the studio units were more than spacious, featured their own bathrooms, and could easily be remodeled into extremely small two-room apartments.
Eva Barnes.
Night City.
A few weeks later.
Semi-abandoned, left for the gangs to scavenge, it had become a literal breeding ground for crime, drug addiction, and a safe spot for a stash of any size.
You could bring a nuclear bomb here and no one would find it.
Every gang in Night City loved spots like this, but this specific location had been taken over by Scavengers—the most despised gang of them all, the absolute worst of the worst, yet the most resilient.
Bereft of a patron from above, lacking a unified leadership or any semblance of rules, Scavengers functioned more as a category of petty gangs rather than a fully fledged organized crime group, dedicating themselves to kidnapping and harvesting people.
In an era of advanced medicine and widespread poverty, it was far easier for many individuals to pay for a spinal cord stolen from someone else than to replace it with a much more reliable implant that carried zero risk of rejection.
Young solos lacking enough eddies for licensed chrome were perfectly willing to turn to Scavengers, sometimes even maintaining contacts with them and tossing them some meat to butcher from time to time for a small percentage.
After all, if you need to eliminate a target, why not do it with a bit more profit for yourself and collect eddies not just from the contract, but from the corpse too?
And unfortunately, Eva Barnes had ended up in the clutches of precisely these kinds of freaks.
Eva was born and raised in Night City.
She never knew her father, but her mother had been a Mox, working for the gang and remaining in good standing, which allowed her to bring her daughter to work and ask the other girls to keep an eye on her.
Not the best environment for a kid?
But it was safe.
While the Moxes didn’t belong to the big leagues of the underworld—lacking even their own territory to squeeze for protection money, nor did they particularly strive for it—they held onto their own establishments tightly, fought desperately for their own people, and finding a traitor in their ranks was a monumental task due to their high solidarity.
True, they would never stand a chance against real gangs backed by corporate sponsors or cartel connections, but it didn’t stop them from being fierce enough that people preferred not to mess with them.
It was a situation where the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze; the hypothetical casualties simply didn’t justify the profits gained in the event of success.
Eva would have likely become one of the working girls herself, if not for two factors in her life story that prevented it.
The first was the girl’s wild temper.
She kept herself somewhat in check around her own people, but with outsiders, even when trying, she inevitably bared her teeth and flashed her thorns, showing her strength in every possible way.
And the young Mox possessed plenty of strength; proper training, good genetics, an absence of bad habits, and growing up around gangers who didn’t mind teaching the kid a few moves had done their job, shaping the whore’s daughter into a tiny killing machine that required careful and gentle handling…
like a grenade with a damaged fuse.
The second factor was the death of her quite beloved mother at the hands of a client—the exact event that utterly severed any hypothetical desire Eva had to become a prostitute, no matter how good the money was.
So, the still young Eva joined the ranks of the Mox enforcers, proving herself well in turf wars, showing no fear of blood, and generally never running from a fight.
It took Eva a mere six months to earn the moniker ‘Mad Bitch Barnes’ for her hair-trigger readiness to reach for a gun, her love for heavy weaponry, and her total disregard for consequences.
Bringing a forty-millimeter grenade launcher to a turf dispute in downtown, right in a residential block?
Why the hell not?
Unloading an entire extended magazine of a light machine gun into a crew that only hypothetically wanted trouble?
Absolutely no questions asked!
She also possessed an incredible combat instinct, managing to squeeze out her maximum in every firefight, making her a valuable asset to the gang even without top-tier chrome.
All in all, if not for her age and temper, she would have had every chance of becoming a captain by now.
But as things stood…
she likely never would.
“God, if I make it out alive, I swear I’ll find the rat who sold me out, cut their balls off, and make them eat them,” Eva thought, lying like a motionless doll with a virus shard jammed into her neural port.
Granted, she didn’t harbor much hope, since she had fallen into the hands of completely unhinged Scavengers.
How did she know?
They hadn’t used her.
The girls from the gang often told her about the nuances of Night City’s criminal underworld, paying special attention specifically to the Scavenger gang, since that was who they frequently clashed with while protecting, avenging, and rescuing their girls from their greedy clutches.
Stripping away a bunch of details, unsavory specifics, and downright nauseating moments, the victims of these harvesters could only hope for two fates.
The first: they would have all their chrome ripped out and then get harvested for organs, perhaps after having a black-market braindance recorded from them.
The fate of ninety percent of all their victims.
The second, ‘luckier’ fate, reserved only for beautiful girls: they would be used long enough for someone to manage to save them.
The prospect was downright awful, vile, and generally no one with a sane mind would want it, but for the Moxes, it represented a real chance to survive such a shitty situation.
After all, the Moxes truly tore throats out for their own, especially when dealing with scum like Scavengers.
And Eva, for the record, didn’t wear bras—not because she was some kind of pervert or flat-chested, but because standard sizes simply couldn’t fit her girls!
And custom orders were expensive!
While the Moxes paid better than regular grunts in other gangs, it wasn’t that much better!
And it wasn’t like she had an ugly face or was overweight; quite the opposite.
Her waist could be wrapped around with two palms (physical exertion and a forced diet worked wonders), and her face was sweet, requiring no makeup to look exceptionally beautiful and attractive.
Because of this, she only had two possibilities left: either the Scavengers who snatched her were entirely impotent, or they had sunk so deep into their line of work that they had stopped viewing their captives as human beings.
It was the professional hazard of all such crews; sooner or later, their sanity would start slipping like a cyberpsycho’s, and the people on the operating tables would start being perceived as something akin to cattle.
And this particular warning sign told her that her girls stood almost zero chance of breaking her out in time, leaving the promising Mox with no hope left whatsoever.
Bang!
— a gunshot echoed somewhere in the adjacent room.
Or did she?