Strong Enough 3.4

Refugee 3.4

Refugee 3.4

You can corner little rats easily in Arasaka tower. Taylor knows that, the lessons written on her skin with bruises.

She feels dirty, physically unclean, when she places a hand on the freshie’s chest and shoves him into the empty break room. She picked this one because the cameras don’t work. Emma cleared it for her with a winsome smile to the security guard, and a lie about ‘class projects.’ Emma is too fucking good at that, but the two of them are light on advantages and high on complications.

Complications like this kid pushing BDs with her face in it.

“Sit down.”

“I don’t take shit from—”

Taylor’s eyes flash solid red, and he jerks back. “Sit down,” she said. “Or I will continue this discussion with the understanding that you don’t have shit to say.”

The kid sits on the old swivel chair. It wheezes, servos clicking once before giving up.

Taylor walks up to the prefabbed deck, and leans against it. She looks down on him. Despite his earlier fear, the kid has the guts to glare up at her beneath his gelled-up hair. His fade reveals a lack of visible neural implants, and from the way Taylor shoved him around, kid isn’t packing any chrome worth mentioning.

“Where’d you get the BD?” Taylor asks.

Fresh glares. “I’m no snitch, lady.”

Taylor holds back a sigh. After letting slip about the BD, he’s been surprisingly tight lipped. “You’ve seen me.” She leans forward, looming over him. “You’ve seen what I can do.”

“And I sent a message to my guys who scrolled that BD.” He crosses his arms, and even though he’s afraid, he doesn’t budge. “If I get zeroed, he’ll post it all over the fucking net.”

“I don’t believe you have guys,” Taylor says. “I don’t believe they care enough about you to make an enemy of me.”

He swallows, throat bobbing. “Then do it. Cause I ain’t got anything else to say to you.”

Fuck but why does it have to be one of the scholarship students like her. Some greased up ‘Saka legacy would be convinced of their own immortality, but a few broken bones would break that façade just as well. Some kid from the streets? He knows she can kill him and get away with it, he’s lived with that his entire life.

Today he decided he doesn’t care.

“Hard way, then.” Taylor stands. The kid tenses in the chair, hands gripping the seats. She’s not afraid, he can’t move fast enough to hurt her. “Have you taken enhanced interview techniques yet?”

He blinks in surprise. “The what?”

“They teach you how to torture people here.” Taylor tilts her head. “Crazy, isn’t it? You must not have signed up for that elective.”

“Fuck you.”

Taylor does sigh this time. People who swear take longer and she doesn’t have the time.

She’s about to discover if she has the stomach.

The kid lunges, the world burns away its colors, leaving only steel behind. She places a hand on his shoulder, and pushes him into the chair.

Time snaps back as he hits the chair and the chair hits the wall. Taylor leaves her hand extended: letting him stare, letting him realize just how fucked he is.

The door opens behind them. “Hey there.” Emma slips in, all smiles and glimmering eyes. “Sorry for the hold up.”

Taylor tilts her head, just enough to hold them both in the corners of her vision. The kid tenses again, but doesn’t move. His eyes are locked on hers. Smart.

“I was just about to start,” Taylor says.

“I’ll fucking scream,” the kid adds.

“Hey, there’s no need for any of that!” Emma puts on a shocked expression, one Taylor has seen dozens of times. It used to earn them stolen cookies, until Emma turned it to more vicious ends. Taylor’s gut clenches, to see Emma’s skills aiding her once again. “This was all just misunderstanding.”

“She was gonna flatline me!”

“Cause she thought you were threatening to expose her.” Emma walks forward, pushing Taylor’s arm back to her side. “Maybe you were a plant, or something. But you’re not a plant, are you, David.”

David pauses, words stuck in his throat as Emma casually strolls past his name as it hangs in the open air. “How was your first semester, Martinez? I bet your mom was super proud when you got in.” She sits on the desk, all smiles, all cheer. “My dad didn’t even show up for the entrance ceremony.”

David glares, eyes flicking back between Emma and Taylor, but he doesn’t move. “…What do you want?”

“Want?” Emma shrugs. “What I want is for all three of us to walk out of this room without any fuss. But…what we need is the deets of whoever scrolled that BD.” David doesn’t say anything. “If people in this tower see it, we die, David.”

Taylor’s head snaps to her once friend, as Emma shrugs nonchalantly.

“So that’s your leverage, David. We really need that BD—be willing to give you a lot for it.” The pleasant expression drops from Emma’s face. “But we’re not leaving without it.”

David shifts in the chair. “You’ve…you’ve got some nova speedware,” he says. “Thought the guy in the BD was just crashing out but…are you two like, some real ass cyberpunks?”

“That’s right.” Emma smiles again. She leans back on the desk, crossing one leg over the other as she pretends not to notice David’s gaze flicker for just a second. “And that other guy. The cyberpsycho? He was too. Part of our crew, before he went off the edge.”

Emma, Taylor decides, is taking some extreme liberties with ‘their’ history, but David is leaning forward, listening, invested. No single thing makes Emma sound trustworthy. It’s a culmination of a hundred little things she spent years practicing, all the little tricks she used to make Taylor’s life miserable.

“You knew him?” David asks. He sounds sick at the thought.

“And that’s why we need to know who scrolled him,” Emma says.

Emotions twist over the kids face, and Taylor can only watch as Emma effortlessly wraps him around a finger. Slowly, she drips out little bits and pieces of what Taylor told her, in the few weeks since they moved into Megabuilding D-1. She worms more drips and drabs out of David: his life, his history, why he’s selling X-BDs. Emma takes those little bits and bobs weaves them in: makes it sound like he’s not betraying a friend, makes it sound like they’re not bribing and threatening him.

Taylor takes slow, deep breaths.

So does David, looking down at his hands, leg bouncing against the floor. “Look,” he says. “I…ain’t gonna roll on my choom. That’s not who I am.” Loyalty. How rare.

Emma starts to speak, and then Taylor raises a hand.

David tenses, eyes flicking up.

“He rolled on Maine, didn’t he?” she asks.

He jerks.

“You wouldn’t be so conflicted, otherwise.” Taylor says. “You heard that, you tensed up.”

Emma noticed as well, she hammered David’s guilt earlier. That’s what got them here.

David looks away, leg bouncing even more rapidly. He looks so out of place in the slate gray uniform, so out of his depth.

“…Yeah.” The word escapes him like a gasp. “He said…he said when Maine came in for chrome, he installed a top shelf virtu recorder, to scroll the BD.”

“Maine’s ripper—” Taylor stands, spinning. “Fucking!”

“Hey,” Emma says. “It’s okay.”

It takes Taylor a second to realize the other woman isn’t talking to her. She’s comforting David, who’s gone ashen, face drawn, shoulders tensed. Taylor slowly turns back to them as Emma placed a hand on his shoulder.

“You didn’t tell us anything we wouldn’t have found out for ourselves,” Emma says. “This isn’t on you.”

“Yeah, it is.” David eyes them both up. “If you find him, it won’t be for a talk.”

“No,” Taylor says. Emma shoots her a look that reads ‘stop messing up my plan,’ but Taylor doesn’t care. This kid deserves that much at least. “There are some bad rippers in this city. But ones that record your last moments to sell? We usually don’t call them docs. We call them scavs.”

David swallows. Scavengers. They’re the only group in Night City with a lower reputation than Maelstrom, and Maelstrom just got killed to the last screaming, red-eyed man.

“Ripping everything of value out of a person is exactly what scavs do best,” Taylor says. “Is your friend a scav, David?”

He shakes his head, mute.

“Cause if he is, you don’t want to be associated with him.”

“I—” David bites his cheek. “Fuck, man. I just.”

“You needed the scratch,” Taylor says. His head jerks. “I’ve been there.” She still is, and so it’s almost fitting that another problem has dropped into her lap, one that offers a payout if she snips it fast enough. “But money’s worthless if we’re dead.”

David clenches his hands. “…When are you going?”

“You’re not gonna tell him,” Taylor says. She’s not asking.

He skips right past the question. “I need to…”

Taylor raises an eyebrow. “Why does it matter?” she asks. “He told you; he told you what he did to my friend before you showed up at school today. You didn’t care.”

“Well I fucking do now!” He half stands. Taylor takes a step forward. He’s not cowed. “I practically signed Doc’s sentence. Least I can do is…is be there.”

Taylor thinks about shoving him back into that chair again, or through the wall, but this time Emma interrupts. “Find us after classes.” Her eyes flash once. “Parking garage.”

He swallows. “Got it.”

What follows is the longest day of Taylor’s life. Emma spends it fighting tooth and nail for her social status. She clings to influence by a thread, and Taylor doesn’t have the will or the power to intervene. A part of her still wonders what comes after Emma stabilizes her position—Taylor doesn’t doubt that she will. How much of their renewed relationship is regrowth, and how much is muscle impulse spasming through dead tissue?

For today, they have other dead things to unearth.

David meets them at the parking garage. He eyes Taylor’s ruby red Quadra appreciatively, before he remembers what will follow. Anxiety bubbles inside of him, pressing against the edges of his too small uniform. The kid has surprisingly broad shoulders for a street rat from Santo.

Emma got his entire file for them before the end of second period. Arasaka security is the best in the world.

Taylor wonders if David will lie, will try to divert them or convince them to spare his friend. Instead, he shoots her the deets for a hole in the wall of a ripper clinic in Arroyo, and a quiet request to let him talk first.

“Sure.” Emma reclines in the passenger seat. “You get one shot, since you’ve been such a big help.”

“Don’t fucking patronize me,” David snaps.

Emma raises an eyebrow. Then she slips on a pair of mirrored shades and ignores him. Night City traffic being what it is, they would have made it there faster if they took the monorail. For some reason, no one expresses interest in conversation. In the mirror, Taylor sees David sit, half hunched over. His eyes dart up occasionally, but it’s a different tension she reads in him than before, one that becomes clear when she sees his lips moving. He’s practicing what to say.

By the time they arrive he has not found the words.

The clinic is a one room job. It juts out of a filthy hallway like a tumor, door open, arms hanging from the ceiling like butchered bodies. Emma stutters half a step when she sees them, hand latching tight around Taylor’s wrist. With the low light and the body twitching on the table, it looks just like that bombed out room that Maelstrom dragged her to. The place where Dorio died.

“Keep watch,” Taylor tells her. Emma lets out a breath, and lets go. She slips her hands into her purse, where she keeps her pistol.

Only after that does Taylor realize that the twitching body on the table is the ripper. He’s got his pants pulled halfway down his stringy thighs. A cybersucker automatic sex toy is strapped to his dick. It’s on.

Taylor seriously reconsiders the ‘let David talk to him’ plan.

“Oi, Doc.” David pauses just over the threshold, fingers tense. “Doc!”

“Eh? Gimmie a second, Davey.” Doc twitches, humping the air. “Almost—gh—done. Ahhh.”

Taylor thought she felt unclean before, how foolish. In Night City, one can always sink further beneath the muck.

The man grunts and levers himself upright in his chair. Taylor almost shoots him at the sight of his face, a metal visor with blue, telescoping lenses. Only the color saves him from a brutal end. He stretches, leisurely runs a hand through greasy blonde hair.

“Brought me a pretty bird, Davey?” The man leers. “Here for some of my…special touch?”

David looks over at Taylor. She waves a hand.

“Doc.” David swallows, squares up, faces forward. “She’s from the XBD, the newest one.”

“Ah, I got you, man.” Taylor watches the lenses twitch and track down to her legs. But not afraid. Taylor wonders if its because his synapses are burned out. “Can get you into some real films,” he said. “Make you a star.”

Taylor closes her eyes, when she opens them again, they’re red. “Running out of time, David.”

“Look, Doc. Who’d you sell the chips to?”

“Oh, here an’ there.” Doc waves a hand, fingers clicking. “It’s my business model, distribute widely.”

“But you still have the virtu. The original.” David takes a step forward. “I know you don’t sell that shit.”

Taylor tilts her head. Without a virtu, it’s basically impossible to scroll off more copies of a BD. Even if they can’t get the extras…well, how much reach does someone can someone like this jerkoff have, really?

“And what’s it to yah?” Doc frowns. “Ah, I see. You don’t want to be a star, do you, birdie? Well, I can sell you the virtu.” His fingers rasp as they rub together. “But it’ll cost yah.”

“How much?” Taylor asks.

“Oh, how’s 10k sound?”

David chokes back a curse.

Taylor folds her arms. “I’ll give you five hundred for it.”

“Ah, but why would I do that, when I could make five thousand selling my newest masterpiece?” Doc asks.

“Doc, did you watch your own reel?” David leans closer, half edging away from Taylor. “She zeroed that borg like nothing.”

A sour grin oozes over Doc’s face. “Oi, oi, Davey. What are you bringing a customer here for, if she ain’t gonna play ball?”

David straightens his back. “Because she knew the borg.”

“Oh?” Doc shrugs. “Don’t see how that’s my damage, man.”

“You juiced his chrome. Just so you could get that virtu!” His voice comes out in a sharp hiss.

Doc clicks his tongue. “Been saying too many things to the wrong people, Davey. And why do you care? Just this morning weren’t ‘cha calling it all preem, when you watched the sample copy. Thought you loved the gore, loved wallowing in it. Or was I wrong, Davey boy?”

David swallows once again. Back firming. “He trusted you.”

“Yeah, and you gotta be careful who you trust in this town.” Doc glares at David. “Like you, little gutter rat. Get yer ass outta my shop.”

David shakes his head. “Doc, you gotta—!”

The doc swings, and David staggers back just in time to dodge a metal fist. “Come in here talking about trust, when you bring some fuckin’ cunt right to my door? Out! Both of yah!”

Taylor sways to the side, letting her Burya flash in the open air. “Five hundred eddies, doc. Last chance.”

The man glowers for a moment more. Before spitting on the floor. “Last chance, huh? Fine. I got the only copy, so I don’t wanna see your face ‘round here no more after we’re done.”

“Agreeable. Show me the virtu.”

“…Right, right. Let me just—"

There’s a click and hiss as a mechanical turret pops from the ceiling, barrels already beginning to whirl. Fire rushes down Taylors back, grey veil dropping over the world. A single bullet creeps closer to her head, hissing through the air of a spiral of expanding gas. The barrels of the machine gun creak and groan as they twist by a fraction of a degree.

It feels almost leisurely, compared to the things that have tried to kill her recently.

She slips past the impotent bullet as she pulls out her revolver. The scorched steal glints in the light. She holds it aloft, over her head, and lets time catch up just enough for the chambers of her gun to spin.

Five times she pulls the trigger. Five times bullets tear up through the automated turret and its metal housing. Five times it sparks and shudders. Then it sags in its casing, guidance systems twitching one more time.

Taylor straightens her arm right in front of her just as the last chamber clicks into place. Her palms sting, but her eyes are dry.

“What a shame,” she says. “That you have the only copy.”

The man opens his mouth: to beg for once, to swear again. Taylor will never know. She pulls the trigger a sixth time. The sixth bullet throws the ripper’s head back and shatters his eye visor. Pieces of glass and chrome plink against the dirty floor of the clinic.

At his waist, the cybersuck continues to work as rigor mortis sets in.

“Fuuuck.” David half looks away, before forcing himself to stare, to internalize his part in it. Then his gaze returns to Taylor. “So that’s how a cyberpunk does things, huh?”

She shrugs, emptying her gun and slipping the casings into her pocket. “Some of us.” In a stolen moment between heartbeats, she reloads the revolver. David blinks once as time snaps back just as she snaps shut the revolver. “Having second thoughts?”

He sucks in a breath, draws himself up—noticeably shorter than her—and squares his shoulders against the world. “No. He made a choice. So did I.”

Taylor can almost respect it. Then David turns and throws up on her shoes.

She sighs, but slips her revolver away and pats him on the back. “Thought you’d have a stronger stomach, after watching so many XBDs.”

“It’s the fucking smell.” David wipes his mouth. “Fuck.”

She chivies him out of the room. Emma waits in the hall, pistol in hand, one glance over her shoulder and a wrinkled nose says volumes in the silence and gun smoke. The gun goes back into the purse, no one comes to check the bullets.

“Anything worthwhile?” Emma asks.

“Not unless you want to cart out shitty second-hand chrome,” Taylor says. “But feel free to grab his chips.”

“Not that desperate, yet,” Emma mutters.

Taylor shrugs. “Kid?” she askes.

“Dirty money.” He rubs his face with both hands, before finally straightening again. “Fuck I really did need the scratch, tho. ‘Specially with all these new fees.”

Taylor waits for the moment they both look away to slip back inside and yank the chips. She’s back in less than a heartbeat, neither the wiser. Because Taylor is that desperate. She’s the one managing their money.

Emma half turns, eyebrow raised. Taylor distracts her with a tilted head, eyes flicking to David’s back.

“Seriously?” Emma asks.

David glanced at them warily.

“Loyal. Quick talker. Decent under pressure.” Taylor ticks off numbers on her fingers. “Decent at all.”

“Is that it?” Emma asks.

“What are you talking about?” David asks.

“…Lucy says we need one more for the job. And he comes with his own uniform,” Taylor replies.

Emma blows out a breath. “That bitch.”

“Wait.” David turns around to face them. “You talking about me?”

“One job.” Taylor holds up a finger. “As a thank you for being straight with us, and an apology.”

He frowns. “What’s the job?”

Emma smiles. She knows they’ve got him just as well. “We’ll explain in the car,” she says.

David very pointedly doesn’t look over his shoulder. “You’re not worried about the other chips he sold?”

“What are we going to do?” Emma shrugs. “Hunt down everyone who slings XBDs in Arroyo? That’ll only show people that there’s something worth looking for. Less you think he minted a few hundred.”

“Nah. Doc’s—Doc was cheap. Shit’s always niche, anyway.”

“There you go,” Emma says. “In a few weeks, no one will even remember watching it.”

“Yeah?” David presses a hand to his face. “Don’t know how I’ll forget.”