After some time, the crew scattered to their respective bolt-holes, sliding back into the shadows to dodge the heat the only way they knew how. Nova made it back to his workshop, towing a still-catatonic Rina behind him. He leave her in her bed and shrugged off his jacket, holding it up to the dim blue light. The back was completely shredded, riddled with clean bullet holes and soaked in dried blood.
"They would’ve come looking for me over this thing eventually anyway," Nova murmured, turning to inspect the raw, jagged Y shaped chrome webbing across his back in the mirror. There was no running from it. "I just hit fast-forward."
He surveyed his workbench—a graveyard of custom gadgets, cracked chips, and jury-rigged hardware. Looking back at everything he’d managed to build since arriving in this godforsaken city almost felt surreal, like some kind of cosmic joke or a script written by fate itself.
"Maybe I could actually pull off a decent life if I just outran the truth," he told himself, running a hand over the cold metal of the table. He let out a long breath. "Let's see what I can salvage for her," he added, turning his focus to the intricate code locking Rina's mind.
Meanwhile, David and Lucy had holed up together in their house. Night had fallen, but the neon arteries of Night City pulsed relentlessly, casting a synthetic glow that tried—and failed—to swallow the darkness underneath.
Lucy bolted awake, a phantom chill pulling her from sleep as if something vital was missing. She slipped out of bed, padding downstairs to find David sitting in the dark, staring blankly at the static of the flickering television.
"Something wrong?" Lucy asked quietly. "Is Nova’s chip acting up?"
"Huh? Oh, no. That's not it," David replied, shaking his head. "I was just… thinking about what we talked about. What are you hiding from me, Lucy?"
Lucy’s eyes widened in shock. She hadn’t kept secrets to push him away; she did it to keep him breathing. But Nova’s words echoed in her head—you can't keep him in the dark forever. A single conversation could change the board.
"Look…," Lucy finally broke, laying out everything she’d uncovered in the Arasaka files regarding David's custom-built destiny. "That's the reality of it. We have to get out of this city. Maybe then it'll be harder for them to dig their claws into us."
"But Lucy… what about your dream of going to the moon?"
"That isn't my dream anymore!" she snapped softly, cutting him off. It had never been about the stars; it was just a fantasy, an escape hatch to keep from going insane in this trash heap of a city. "I have a new purpose now. And if you're not by my side, going to the moon would just feel like a hollow, empty trip."
David listened, the final pieces clicking into place. A soft, genuine smile broke across his face, and an invisible weight lifted straight off his chest. A surge of raw, unstoppable momentum flooded his veins. He felt invincible.
"We can't just run, though. Not with Arasaka breathing down our necks," David said, his voice hardening with absolute resolve. "If we want to live, we have to finish them."
"What! Are you out of your mind! How are you gonna do that?"
Working on fumes and zero sleep, Nova managed to jury-rig a custom deck chip designed to jack straight into Rina’s neural port and untangle the fucked-up mess wired into her brain. He slotted it home and dived into the stream. It was an absolute labyrinth—a parasitic architecture chewing away at her memories piece by piece with every forced command.
"Sick, twisted bastard," Nova muttered, his jaw tightening as he waded through the corrupted data. It took hours of precision micro-surgery in the net, dismantling the kill-switches and piecing together the fragments before the virus could wipe her clean. Fortunately, he’d caught it just before the damage get all of her.
Right as he pulled the deck, Rina bolted upright, gasping as if she’d just been hauled out of a freezing drowning tank. Her breathing came in ragged, hyperventilating gasps, her heart hammering against her ribs like a runaway piston.
"Welcome back among the living. Feeling a bit of déjà vu?" Nova offered, trying a weak, dry joke to break the ice since they'd been down this road before.
Rina remembered. She didn't laugh. Instead, she pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around her legs, fighting tooth and nail to keep the tears back. She lost the battle. She shattered right there. The suffocating weight of having been used as a disposable weapon for as long as she could remember finally crushed her defense mechanisms. She used to bottle everything up, keeping it locked away behind a wall of silence, but holding onto that much poison was tearing her apart.
"I'm so sick of this," she whispered, her face buried in her knees. "I've never been anything more than a tool."
Nova didn't offer empty platitudes. He just sat down right beside her, letting the silence settle.
"I said it before, but I'll say it again: I've got your back."
A faint, trembling smile touched Rina’s lips against her knees. For the first time in her life, she leaned into that reckless, bleeding-heart heroism of his. For the first time, she trusted someone. And for the first time, she allowed herself to just be human.
"There's nothing I can do about the chunks the virus ate, Rina. Though... considering who put it there, I doubt those memories were exactly a walk in the park. Luckily, it was still in its early stages before I fried the code, so it didn't wipe you clean. Everything from the past few years should still be locked in place."
Rina reached blindly into her own mind, testing the edges of her memory. Everything from her childhood looked like a smear of black oil—blurry and hollow.
"It's true..." she murmured, her voice small. "I can see a figure, I think it was my dad... seemed like a caring, loving father. But... there's nothing else. Just a ghost standing in the dark."
Hearing that, a sharp, dangerous idea sparked in Nova’s head. But he kept it locked down, giving nothing away.
"Well, talk about a cruel joke," Nova said, trying to steer the mood with some grim banter. "The virus had a real talent for eating the good stuff first."
"Mhm... everything went straight to hell after my dad died anyway," she replied bitterly. Without those anchors, a sudden wave of existential dread hit her. "Without those memories... am I even still me?"
Nova looked her dead in the eye. "You're whoever you decide to be for as long as you're breathing. The past is just scrap metal."
Rina turned his words over in her mind. The realization burned away the numbness, replaced by a sudden, fierce fatigue. She was done taking orders. Done being some corporate proxy's meat-puppet. She wanted out. She wanted her own choices, even if they were small ones.
"Let's get the hell out of this shithole city!" Rina said, looking up at Nova, a desperate, fragile spark of hope in her eyes. "We could head out to the badlands, take odd jobs, and just... live. Quietly."
Nova smiled—a soft, warm expression that didn't quite reach his eyes. He loved the thought. It was the dream every edgerunner bled out for. But he knew the math, and it didn't add up to a happy ending.
"You can get out of this city and start fresh, Rina. But Arasaka’s already got my scent. If I go with you, I just drag the cross right to your doorstep. You'd be living on borrowed time," Nova said, his voice flat and absolute. "If I want a quiet life, I have to burn the threat down to the foundation first."
Rina stared at him, recognizing the sheer, suicidal magnitude of the look on his face. "And what the hell do you plan on doing?"
Almost at the same time as David talking to Lucy, they both said the same thing
"I'm gonna burn this city."