The party rolled on—music bumping, chatter in the air. Pilar kept the chaos alive with his dumbass tricks, pulling laughter from the crowd. David leaned against a car next to Lucy, whispering something that made her smile. Rebecca stood off to the side, arms crossed, watching them with a sharp, unreadable glance.
Nova was on his own. Back against a wall, drink in hand, soaking in the rare moment of quiet. That was, until Maine showed up.
“Hey, kid. You got somethin’?”
Nova didn’t even turn his head. Just looked at him from the corner of his eye and said flatly, “Yeah. Got something. But it won’t last long. Still early-stage.”
“Don’t care. Gimme. Got a job tomorrow. I’ll pay you.”
“No,” Nova shot back, tone cold and dry.
Maine slammed his drink to the ground and grabbed Nova by the collar, pinning him hard against the wall.
“We spared your ass yesterday. You owe me a fix, choom.”
“You think I don’t know the first thing you’ll do is pull some dumb shit?” Nova said, unflinching. “What I’ve got ain’t that different from immunosuppressants. Won’t help in a high-risk run.”
“And who the fuck said anything about a high-risk run?” Maine growled, face inches from Nova’s, voice ice cold. “It’s a missio as simple as snapping your neck right now.”
The music kept thumping, but voices around them faded. Heads turned. The tension had weight.
Nova didn’t argue. Just reached into his jacket, pulled the chip, and handed it over.
Maine snatched it, turned to leave—then stopped, looked over his shoulder, and transfer the eddies to Nova.
“So you can’t say I don’t keep my word.”
“I’m going with you.”
Maine stopped in his tracks.
“This ain’t some kids’ game.”
“You’ve seen what I can do.”
Silence.
“If shit goes sideways,” Maine muttered, “don’t expect me to risk anyone else to pull your ass out.”
And just like that, he was gone.
Nova stood there, heart pacing, mind spinning. He’d never been on a real run—not like this. But he knew. If he didn’t go, Maine and Dorio would die. He thought he’d changed the timeline. Thought he was making a difference.
But it was all playing out the same.
“Nova, you good?” David’s voice cut through the haze as he walked over.
Nova turned, expression serious. “Listen, David… if you care about Lucy—and about staying alive—don’t keep chasing chrome. I know you’ve already got a few pieces. Just train with what you’ve got. You don’t need more.”
“I know,” David replied softly. “You don’t gotta tell me twice.”
“Dorio! Let’s go. We’ve got business to handle,” Maine’s voice boomed in the distance.
“I’ll catch you later, David. Got stuff to do.”
Nova turned and walked off without another word.
Rebecca arrived with a fresh drink, watching him leave. She nudged David.
“What’s up with that guy?”
David kept his eyes on Nova’s back, his voice low. “I don’t know.”
Back in his corner of the city, Nova locked himself in. No distractions. Just him, some worn tools, and a dozen failed chip prototypes.
He pushed himself. Built new ones. Tweaked variables. Reprogrammed feedback loops. Each time, the results were the same—barely any difference in threshold, barely enough to hold back the madness.
But he kept them anyway. Just in case.
Then, his holo lit up—message from Kiwi. Coordinates.
Nova stared at the screen, frozen.
Then, without warning, he slammed his fist into the wall. Hard. The crack echoed.
“I should’ve stopped them from catching Tanaka. I’m such a fucking idiot!” he growled, pacing. “Everything’s still playing out the same ‘cause I didn’t change that one damn thing.”
He stopped. Breathing hard. Jaw clenched. Then slowly, his fists relaxed.
“No…” he whispered to himself. “I can still do something.
Earlier, on other side, Rina was on her own mission. With everything she’d pulled from Ivan’s network, she didn’t want paperwork or public exposure — she wanted him off the board. Didn’t matter if he got fired or exposed; Ivan wanted Lucy to be his tool. He was a lunatic. He planned to weaponize cyberpsychosis and use it to trigger a slaughter inside the corp. With enough chaos in one place and enough bodies, it would be enough to take Regina down — and maybe a whole lot more. But she couldn’t pull that off alone.
Her options were: kill Lucy and any other netrunners left from the experiment, or use Lucy as bait to draw Ivan into a place where he wasn’t so protected. He couldn’t afford to move that many people without attracting attention.
She already knew Ivan suspected her. She’d have to be careful. This wasn’t a sprint — it was a chess game. Every piece moved with the other’s reaction in mind. One mistake, and the king would fall.
Rina hunted both Lucy and Ivan at the same time. She found out Ivan knew about the Tanaka raid and that they’d gotten him. She learned Lucy would have no choice but to dive into someone’s subconscious. She learned one of Ivan’s people was already on the edge of psychosis. It was the perfect moment to strike and take what she needed.
Incoming call: Ivan.
“Rina? Got a job for you.”
Rina waited for the orders with a knot in her throat.
“This girl — Kushinada. I know you know her. I need you to bring her to me. I’ll send the location where she’ll be. She won’t have much backup, but she won’t be completely alone.”
Rina scanned the situation. It was obvious—this smelled like a trap—but there had to be a way to turn it to her advantage.
“All right. But I need gear. I won’t go in empty-handed.”
Silence on the line for a heartbeat.
“Fine. I’ll send every kind of armament you need for this high-priority job.
“One more thing: when you capture her, I must be a ghost. I’ll send coordinates for where I’ll be after I lose anyone who’s tailing me. Repeat: no one can know where we meet. I know Kushinada; you’re not the only one after her. Come alone.”
“Understood. Makes sense. As you’d expect from your right hand. The gear will be in an alley out in Dogtown—no trace linking me to it. You’ll understand.”
“Of course. I’ll be ready.”
The call felt wrong to Rina. Ivan never let her have a say in mission details. She answered knowing damn well he was going to shut her in an instant. But she never planned to be heard, she just wanted to plant a seed that would make Ivan isecure about what to do. Instead, he agreed in some parts and even make "a deal". Something was definitely off.
Rina kept to the shadows, tailing Ivan without letting him know she was even breathing. What she found made her blood run cold—he wasn’t planning a solo pickup. He’d arranged teams, traps, men to ring the meeting point like a noose. The location she’d picked for Lucy would have been a kill box.
“What the hell?” she hissed into her comm, heart punching her ribs. “I never told anyone that drop. What the—?”
Then the light went on in her head. The Zetatech chip. Whatever feed she’d thought was hers had been fed back to Ivan all along. He’d known. Every move. Nothing about this made sense if that trace wasn’t cut.
She didn’t have time to spend tearing the city apart looking for answers. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she went and asked for help.
Nova opened his door like he’d been expecting anyone—half-skeptical, half-amused. “Rina?”
"Yes, you got time?"
“Actually… no, I am working o something,” he said, but the question hung in the air like smoke. “Funny to see a cyberninja knock instead of drop in. What’s up? You need something?”
Rina didn’t mince it. “The Zetatech—it's still linked. It’s been leaking to Ivan. He’s been watching the feed. I think he’s been watching me.”
Nova’s face tightened, then slid into that calm tech’s mask she’d come to know. He waved her inside. “Relax. It’s not broadcasting right now. I’ve got a signal barrier in my unit—Faraday-grade jammer in the venting. Come in, sit. I’ll find the route and burn the trace.”
She stepped over the threshold into his cluttered apartment: blueprints taped to walls, a half-assembled rig glowing on a bench, tools ad other stuff. Nova moved with that easy, confident chaos of someone who’d spent years making the city obey his hands. He ducked under a console, fingers dancing across a console, and pulled up the chip’s handshake trace.
Rina watched him work, jaw tight. For once she wasn’t the hunter—she was the patient, waiting to see if the tech who’d saved her life yesterday could undo what had been done to her. Nova’s fingers flicked, lines of code bled up on the screen, and he hummed, more to himself than to her. “There’s a ghost tether in the broadcast—low-latency, masked as a maintenance ping how couldn't I notice?. Whoever set this up expected someone to scan for it fast. Whoever they are, they’re careful.”
“Can you cut it?” she asked.
He met her eyes for a fraction. “I’ll try. If I can’t sever the link clean, I’ll sandbox it—make it think it’s still talking to you while we reroute everything. But once we touch that feed, Ivan will know something changed. He’ll flush his assets. Also, we might need to take more info from him.
"Believe me. He got nothing more, I got all the intel, all the other stuff is only in his thoughts."
"Well, right, if we are going to expose him we got to cut any trace. ut right now I have something in hands, you'll need to wait when I finish it."
"Roger that. Please make sure there is no one else who can connect to me, it looses all the point of cyberninja."
Nova nodded, and then the apartment filled with the quiet violence of a job starting: keys clacking, modules engaging, a soft electrical taste at the back of the throat. Outside, Night City screamed and bled neon. Inside, two unlikely allies tore the wire out from under a man who’d thought himself invisible.