Morning hit like feedback from fried speakers – sudden, harsh, unwelcome.

  Zara's eyes cracked open to unfamiliar ceiling. Clean lines, recessed lighting, no water stains or exposed wiring. Not her place. Not the warehouse. Her skull felt packed tight, pressure behind her eyes like something swelling against bone, each heartbeat a dull concussion she could feel in her teeth.

  Memory returned in fragments. Neon Hole. Tequila. Kai's preem poison that tasted like engine coolant and made the world around you ring at high frequency. Chrome Dreams – thumping bass penetrating everything. Dancing with strangers while silver eyes tracked her from the bar. More tequila. Smoke. Raven's face when Zara pulled her onto the dance floor – that flicker of something under the Ice Queen mask, gone before it fully formed. The alley behind Chrome Dreams. The confession that made everything wrong – disposable cover, all of them. Diego's fist connecting. Raven bent double, spitting bile. Raven declining her offer to stay with the Phantom with bitter finality. A ride the runner accepted beyond all expectations. Watson's industrial sectors blurring past. Vance’s name - unexpected, out of place. The stop – that fucking pothole – and the argument that became something else entirely – and somehow suddenly made more sense than anything else. Raven's mouth. Warm. Taste of tequila and something chemical. Chrome fingers barely touching Zara’s jaw, trembling.

  The Ice Queen wanted her.

  Then the ride through Kabuki, Raven's hands actually on her waist. The City Center almost quiet. The apartment building rising like an black glass shard. The elevator. This place – corpo sterile and empty as a server room, not a single personal thing in it except the locked door with the red indicator light. More tequila. Raven's clumsy, earnest kiss in the kitchen. The bedroom. Chrome and flesh tracing paths across her skin. Heat building. Then Raven bolting for the bathroom and not coming back for long enough that Zara started to wonder. Waiting. Then nothing. Zara must have passed out.

  She turned her head slowly. Raven lay on the far edge of the mattress, still dressed, one arm hanging off the side. Even asleep she'd put maximum distance between them – curled toward the edge of the bed. Silver hair fanned across the pillow, face slack in a way Zara had never seen on her awake. Younger looking. Almost soft.

  So this was not a dream. She was in the Ice Queen's palace. Zara had kissed the Ice Queen and she kissed her back.

  Zara sat up. Mistake. The room tilted sideways and her stomach lurched, and between her legs –

  Something heavy and wrong. A congested ache deep in her pelvis, dull and swollen, pulsing in time with the headache. Full bladder pressing down on everything, the pressure turning the ache sharp. She squeezed her thighs together, bit down on a hiss. Her underwear felt damp, sticky – all the worst textures.

  She slid off the bed. Bare feet met smooth composite flooring, cool enough to register through the fog in her head. The hallway stretched ahead – several doors, the locked one with its red light still glowing. Second left. She remembered from last night.

  Each step shifted the weight in her pelvis. Everything down there felt swollen and tender, a bruised heaviness that radiated into her lower belly. She passed the bedroom doorframe, then the next door. Got it shut quietly and engaged the lock.

  The mirror showed the weather forecast for today and Zara’s reflection with last night's damage. Smeared lipstick tracing a path from her mouth to her jaw where Raven's clumsy aim had landed. Turquoise hair tangled and dark with sweat. Her torso was bare – she'd lost her top and bra somewhere between the bedroom and Raven's fumbling attempt at undressing her. The holster with her prized Lexington was missing too. But still had her cargo pants on and could feel yesterday's underwear stuck to her skin in ways that were all kind of uncomfortable.

  She pulled down the pants, peeled the underwear away carefully. The fabric resisted, tacky. She saw the stains.

  "Fuck." The word escaped as a whisper.

  The toilet seat was cold. Sitting sent a fresh wave of that deep ache through her pelvis – bladder protesting, everything compressed. She waited. Knew it was going to be bad. Had been bad yesterday, worse each time.

  Her body didn't want to let go. Muscles tensed around the urgency, anticipating what came next. She breathed out, forced herself to relax.

  The first trickle came searing. She doubled over, forearms braced on her knees, hands clenched into fists, jaw so tight her molars almost creaked. The stream strengthened and the burning deepened – not just surface heat but something further inside. She breathed through her teeth in short sharp pulls. Her eyes watered. Somewhere in the middle of it a cramping spasm gripped low in her belly and she pressed both fists against her lower abdomen, riding it out.

  It ended. The burning didn't. She sat there, forearms on knees, head hanging, waiting for the aftershocks to fade from searing to merely awful. Felt like she'd pissed battery acid.

  She stood up. Cleaned herself carefully – the toilet paper rough against angry raw tissue. Stripped off the ruined underwear and buried it in the trash. No way she was putting that back on.

  The tap. Water. She cupped her palm under the flow and carefully drank, but one palmful hit the back of her throat and her body took over – she leaned down, got her mouth under the stream directly, drank in long desperate pulls. Her throat was dry, papery, each swallow scraping on the way down. She drank until her stomach protested with a cold lurch, then stopped, gasping, water dripping off her chin.

  The ache in her lower abdomen had eased slightly now that the bladder wasn't about to explode. But something still sat heavy behind her pubic bone – a swollen, dull wrongness that had no business being there, pulsing faintly like a second heartbeat.

  Her jacket lay crumpled by the door – must've dropped it there last night. She fished out her agent, thumbed the holo display active. Typed with one hand pressing the other against her lower belly.

  peeing all the time burning UTI symptoms

  The search returned a wall of hits. Urinary tract infection was the optimistic pathway – treatable, common, embarrassing but manageable. She scrolled past that into the other results and her stomach clenched. Gonorrhoea. Chlamydia. Pelvic inflammatory disease. Words she knew from clinic posters in Heywood, the ones nobody looked at on purpose.

  Zara killed the holo, splashed cold water on her face. The paracetamol blister was on the bottom shelf of the cabinet behind the mirror, exactly where she'd found it last night. She popped two, swallowed them dry, the tablets scraping down her raw throat.

  Her pants lay discarded on the bathroom floor. She didn't feel like bending down to pick them up – the thought of folding herself in half with that weight sitting in her pelvis made her wince preemptively. She unlocked the bathroom door, padded out bare-assed into the main room. Clothes could wait. She needed to think.

  But the pressure in her skull was interfering with the thinking process. Each thought came sluggish, wrapped in hangover cotton. Zara remembered the unfinished bottle of tequila on the bedroom floor. Found it exactly where she'd left it, next to the bedside table.

  Raven was no longer on the bed.

  She was standing by the window like a frozen process, silhouette sharp against the grey morning light coming through the floor-to-ceiling glass. Night City's skyline looked washed out – drowned in bright daylight. Raven's dishevelled silver hair crowned her like a wrecked halo. She wasn't moving. One palm flat against the window glass, the other arm wrapped across her midsection.

  Zara took a pull from the bottle. The tequila burned down to join everything else burning in her and for a second the new fire overwhelmed the old one. Hair of the dog and painkiller chaser in one.

  "Morning," she managed.

  Raven turned. Her face had gone a shade of greyish green that meant her body was considering options. Silver eyes too bright against the pallor, bruise from Diego's fist darkening along her jaw – it had been red last night, now it was going purple-black at the edges. She opened her mouth. Closed it. Her throat worked through a careful swallow.

  "Coffee maker's in the kitchen," she said finally. "If you want."

  She didn't move. Just stood there, one arm still wrapped around herself.

  Zara leaned against the bedroom doorframe. The tequila was settling warm in her blood, making the throbbing in her head quieter. She watched Raven and tried to figure out what to say.

  Last night had happened. The kiss in Watson, the ride through Kabuki, the agreement – netrunning lessons in exchange for dance lessons. Another kiss in the kitchen. Bodies pressed together on this ridiculously wide bed. All of that had happened.

  Sober Raven stood in the morning, looking like she might pass out or throw up or both, and showing no sign of addressing any of it.

  Did she even remember? She'd been drunk. But Raven drunk wasn't the same as most people drunk – Zara had watched her maintain complete sentences and navigate her tricky locks successfully. The netrunner's brain didn't switch off.

  Zara opened her mouth. Closed it. The silence between them sat heavy with everything neither of them was saying.

  Raven turned back to the window, placing her hand against the glass again. Zara heard a faint sound of metal connecting with hard surface. Heard her swallow again in the heavy silence.

  Zara's agent buzzed.

  She grabbed it from the floor, noting the holster with her sidearm lying next to it. One of her fixer's ID tags flashed across the holo.

  "Talk to me, Archie."

  "That Arasaka authentication job your crew pulled? Word's burning through every fixer in Watson." Archie's voice carried the edge of real excitement – the kind he usually kept bottled behind professional detachment. "Got a client came to me specifically because of it. Wants the Neon Phantoms. Fifty K each."

  The number hit her brainstem before it reached her conscious mind. Fifty thousand eddies. Their cut from the Arasaka job – the biggest score in the Phantoms' short history – had been twenty-five each.

  "What's the job?"

  "Package extraction, Maelstrom territory. Some Kang Tao exec lost a prototype to a pack of borged-out freaks and wants it back before noon. High premium because of the time crunch and because Maelstrom aren't exactly known for their hospitality. You'll need your netrunner on-site – security's all hardwired to their local subnet, no remote access."

  She glanced at Raven, who stopped moving again.

  "Send me details."

  "Already sent. Don't fuck this up, Zara. This kind of rep? Changes everything for your crew."

  The line went dead.

  "Big score just dropped," Zara said. "Extraction from a Maelstrom base in Kabuki. Fifty K each if we deliver before noon. They need a runner on-site – hardwired security, no remote access."

  She left out the part where Raven had quit the Neon Phantoms twelve hours ago. Watched to see if the netrunner would point that out.

  Raven was silent for so long that Zara started doubting whether the netrunner heard her.

  "Fifty thousand." Finally, quiet. Flat. "Kang Tao hardware in Maelstrom hands."

  Not a question. Statement of tactical parameters.

  She turned back to face Zara. Her skin had gone from greyish green to just grey, which might have been an improvement. The arm across her midsection shifted – she let it fall to the side.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  "Go ahead, take a shower." she said. "I need to take care of something first."

  She turned back to that window as if Night City's washed-out skyline genuinely required her attention.

  "Dressing room's through the door left of the bedroom. Take whatever fits." A pause. She swallowed audibly. "Underwear's in the dresser closest to the door."

  Practical. Clinical. No awkwardness in her voice. No acknowledgement that the underwear belonged to a woman Zara had been kissing six hours ago.

  Zara picked up her top from the bedside table where it lay in a formless heap and headed out of the bedroom.

  The dressing room was through the next door down the hallway. Zara stepped inside and stopped.

  Bigger than her entire apartment back in Heywood. Built-in wardrobes lined three walls – sleek panels with recessed handles, all closed. Against the fourth wall, two freestanding dressers flanked a full-length mirror. The windowless space was lit by the same neutral recessed lighting as the rest of the apartment, and it had the same quality – organised, sparse, barely inhabited. Not a speck of dust on the panels that looked untouched. The room smelled faintly of smart-fabric storage chemicals and nothing else. No perfume. No lived-in warmth. Just preservation.

  The dresser closest to the door. Zara pulled the top drawer open. Raven's underwear – all black. No lace, no colour, no bullshit. High-tech fabric with the subtle gleam of moisture-wicking thermal regulation weave. The kind of stuff you saw in specialty catalogues, designed for people who treated their bodies like operational hardware. She grabbed a pair of briefs and headed back to the bathroom.

  The shower was a floor-to-ceiling enclosure of black chrome panels. No taps. No dials. A touch interface set into the wall at shoulder height – icons and numbers that meant nothing to her. She pressed what looked like a power symbol. Nothing. Pressed it again, held it. The showerhead activated at a temperature that nearly scalded her and she jerked back, fumbling at the interface until she found the slider, dragged it down. The water settled to lukewarm. The pressure was steady and even – not the sputtering inconsistency of Heywood plumbing where hot water was a negotiation.

  She washed fast. Soap from a wall dispenser – unscented, medical-grade, the kind that stripped everything without apology. Her hands moved carefully below the waist. The inflamed tissue protested even lukewarm water and gentle touch – a raw, stinging sensitivity that made her hiss through her teeth and finish faster. She rinsed, killed the water, stood dripping in the silence.

  In the niche in the wall, neatly stacked towels of something softer than any fabric she'd touched outside a joytoy's client suite. Syn-silk weave, dense and smooth. She dried off gently – even the towel's softness registered against her skin like a minor assault. Pulled on Raven's borrowed briefs. The tech fabric settled against her like a second skin, cool and frictionless – the kind of garment engineered to disappear once you put it on. She'd worn cheaper versions – but this was probably several tiers above anything she could afford.

  She wrestled back into yesterday's clothes. The top was wrinkled beyond recovery and smelled like smoke and tequila and the Chrome Dreams dance floor. Her jacket went over everything, covering the worst of it. She buckled the holster back on, felt the Lexington's weight settle where it belonged.

  The paracetamol was doing something – the headache almost dissolved, and the pelvic ache had retreated from urgent to merely present. She pulled the blister with the remaining pills from the cabinet and shoved into her jacket pocket.

  The kitchen looked like it had been installed for show and never activated. Counters bare. No crumbs, no stains, no evidence of food preparation ever occurring on any surface. Zara opened the refrigerator. Premium-grade protein packs from All Foods lined one shelf – not the bulking crap sold at street vendors. Vacuum-sealed meal kits with corpo branding she didn't recognise. Nutrient supplement drinks in sleek bottles. A sealed container of what looked like real fruit. Everything organised, everything sealed, everything designed for maximum nutritional efficiency with minimum preparation. The kind of stocked kitchen that said someone had money and opinions about fuel intake and absolutely no interest in cooking.

  The coffee maker dominated one section of the counter. A chrome and matte-black monolith with a touch interface, multiple dispensing nozzles, a built-in grinder, and what appeared to be a water filtration system. The kind of machine that had settings menus and custom profiles and its own subnet address. Zara stared at it. Opened a cabinet above, looking for instant. Found sealed containers of whole beans with Italian labels. Closed the cabinet.

  She examined the food supplies but her stomach vetoed everything with a queasy lurch. The thought of putting anything solid into the system currently trying to dissolve her from the inside out – no. She'd barely kept the tequila down. And she remembered yesterday – running to the toilet every few minutes, each trip worse than the last. The less she put in, the less frequently she'd have to deal with what came out. Simple math.

  She left the kitchen empty-handed.

  Her agent lit up. Group message from Kai.

  "boss lady where tf are you??? wire's freaking (silently) about his bike"

  She typed back: "omw. big score. 50k each. need everyone."

  Three seconds. "HOLY SHIT 50???? OMW"

  Raven emerged from the bathroom. She'd showered – hair still wet, darkened to pewter, slicked back. Dressed in fresh tactical wear, dark fabric, high collar. Her skin still hadn't found its right colour. The bruise on her jaw looked prominent against the pale skin. Her movements were controlled and deliberate – each step placed, each turn of her body measured, like she was navigating a space with invisible obstacles.

  "Ready?" she asked.

  "Always." The lie came easy. "Crew's meeting us at the Hole. Wire's probably planning my execution for not returning his bike."

  "He won't." Raven said it like a weather report. "He owes you his life."

  Zara blinked. That had happened before Raven joined. More than half a year ago, before the Phantoms – right next to her doorstep, shooting and explosions in the middle of the day, some huge guy pinned under a collapsed wall with Scavs closing in. Zara had no business interweaning. Should have closed the reinforced shutter on her window and gone back to sleep. Couldn’t. Pulled her emergency Carnage from under the bed. Blasted a couple of gonks. Tossed a flashbang, screaming like a squad of cyberpsychos. While the chaos erupted, dragged the giant out, through the back door and all the way into the cellar. He’d been barely conscious, she’d nearly torn her back muscles pulling. He'd barely spoken ever since, but his loyalty had been absolute.

  The question was how Raven knew about it. The answer was probably the same reason she knew about Marcus Vance and Archie's comm protocols and whatever else she'd catalogued during her three months of observing the Phantoms from the inside.

  No time to dig into it. Raven was already opening the apartment door.

  They rode the elevator down in awkward silence. Twenty-three floors of humming descent. Raven stood rigid, facing the doors, jaw set, not looking at Zara. Her throat worked every few seconds.

  The garage spread out below the building in grey concrete and monitored shadows. Expensive vehicles in marked stalls. Security cameras tracked them silently. Wire's motorcycle sat where Zara had parked it last night – a solid, unglamorous machine built for reliability.

  Raven walked past it without looking. Three stalls over, she stopped beside an Arch Nazaré.

  Black and chrome, aggressive geometry, the frame low-slung and predatory. Twin exhaust ports with the polished gleam of recent maintenance. The Arch was Night City's apex bike – a two-hundred-thousand-eddie machine that every merc in Watson could identify on sight and most would never sit on. This one had been modified – Zara clocked aftermarket stabilisation hardware, a custom exhaust shroud, and storage compartments that weren't standard.

  "We'll take mine." Raven was already keying the ignition sequence. "You drive."

  "You trust me with your ride?"

  "Yes." She slowly led the bike out of its stall. Handed Zara the handlebars.

  Zara climbed on. The seat geometry was different from Wire's bike – somewhat lower, more aggressive, built for someone who wanted to lean into corners. The engine woke smoothly, a steady vibration that transmitted up through the frame and immediately found the ache in her pelvis. She shifted on the seat. Manageable. Worse than sitting still, but the paracetamol was doing enough.

  Raven slid on behind her. Careful distance – hands finding the rear grip, not Zara's waist. Same arrangement as last night on Wire's bike, same rigid refusal to make contact. Except last night had ended with chrome fingers on her waist.

  "Kabuki's straight north through the interchange," Raven said. "Morning traffic's light."

  Zara kicked the Arch into the street.

  The ride through City Centre was smooth. Corporate district roads well maintained – clean even asphalt, integrated traffic management, the kind of infrastructure that kept the corpo class comfortable. Raven's bike behaved like a different species from Wire's workhorse. Responsive. Quick. Every input answered immediately, the machine interpreting her intentions before she'd fully committed to them.

  Halfway across the Watson bridge, Raven's hand suddenly gripped Zara's jacket. Hard. Chrome fingers digging into the leather.

  "Pull over."

  "We're on a bridge –"

  "Now."

  Zara swerved toward the emergency lane, the Arch's tyres screeching against lane markers. A delivery truck blared its horn as she cut across its path, the sound punching through the morning air. Before Zara had fully stopped, Raven was off the bike, stumbling to the railing.

  She bent over the corroded metal. Chrome fingers wrapped around the barrier. Her body heaved.

  Zara looked away, giving her privacy.

  "You solid?" she called in a moment without looking back.

  No answer. Zara heard footsteps. The bike dipped as Raven climbed back on.

  Then: "Drive."

  Zara drove.

  After a block: "Can you handle the job?"

  "I won't have to." The wind took her words and Zara had to strain to catch them. "You will."

  "What?"

  Zara's hands tightened on the handlebars. She'd never dived the Net. Never worn a netrunning suit. Never interfaced with a cyberdeck beyond basic agent operations.

  "First lesson. You're running the ICE break while I handle support." Her voice remained flat. “Best way to learn. Pressure makes diamonds."

  ***

  North Side sprawled beneath morning smog, all corrugated metal and cracked synthcrete covered in layers of street art – tags and murals and gang markers bleeding into each other until the walls themselves became a kind of language. The Neon Hole sat in a dead-end alley between two ramen joints whose competing exhaust fans created a permanent haze of pork broth and chilli oil. Front gate was open. The rest of the crew already inside.

  Zara drove the Arch through the gate, killed the engine, and climbed off.

  Slowly. Left leg over first, weight on her arms, a controlled dismount forced by the flare in her pelvis - a payback for twenty minutes of navigating through Watson’s potholes. She stood still for a moment, both feet planted, waiting for the ache to settle. The paracetamol was holding but barely – every jostle on the ride had chipped away at whatever buffer the pills provided, and now the dull wrongness was back at nearly full volume, heavy and hot between her hips.

  Stronger shit. She was going to need stronger shit before this job.

  Kai was at his workbench, sorting stim injectors with the manic focus of someone who'd been awake on chemicals for longer than was advisable. Cybernetic eyes flickered with compound data overlays, pupils cycling through magnification levels. Diego sat in his usual corner, cleaning a Militech Crusher that was already spotless, each stroke methodical and unhurried.

  "Boss lady lives!" Kai's optics snapped to her, then past her to the Arch. "Thought you'd flatlined in some corpo bed. Also Wire wants to murder you, but y'know. Quietly."

  Diego looked up. Saw the bike – not his. Raven's. His eyes moved to Raven, who was dismounting behind Zara with the deliberate movements of someone holding herself together by force of will. One nod. Said nothing.

  "Whoa, hold up." Kai's expression cycled from surprise to disbelief, optics whirring through zoom levels like he needed visual confirmation. "That's – look what the daemon dragged in. Thought her highness was done slumming with us street trash."

  "Say that again and I'll demonstrate what done looks like." Raven's voice carried no heat. Just statement.

  "She's consulting." Zara stepped between them before Kai could push his luck. "Fifty K's too much to pass up, even for legends."

  She pulled up the data Archie had sent, holographic details blooming from her agent between them – building schematics, security layouts, timeline markers.

  "Kang Tao exec lost a prototype to Maelstrom. Military bot, bleeding-edge tech. It's stashed in a decommissioned plant they've converted to a base – hardwired security, no remote access to their subnet. Package needs to be out by noon." She checked the time. "Gives us about two hours."

  "Maelstrom." Kai whistled low. "Borged out chrome-sick psychos who tear out their eyeballs and replace their own faces for fun. Half of them can't remember what species they started as."

  "Their netrunner goes by Chrome Serpent." Raven spoke without looking at the holo display. She'd found a wall to lean against, one arm hanging casually at her side, the other resting across her stomach. "Mid-tier talent, but competent with physical architecture. He'll have the subnet locked down tight on-site."

  Zara's eyes narrowed. "You already knew about this job."

  Silver eyes flicked sideways. "Your fixer's communication protocols are porous."

  Meaning she'd been monitoring Archie's comms. Meaning she'd known about the job before Zara's agent rang. Noted and filed.

  "Here's how we play it." Zara highlighted the plant's layout on the holo. "Two entry points – main loading dock and service tunnel. Wire takes overwatch here." She marked a building across the street. "Kai, you're on demolitions. If this goes sideways, I want exits where there weren't any before."

  "And the ICE?" Kai asked.

  All eyes turned to Raven. The morning light from the warehouse's high windows gave her bruised face the yellow-greyish tint of old paper. She remained motionless, showing no reaction.

  "I'm handling the ICE." Zara said it like a decided fact.

  Silence stretched. Even Diego's hands paused on his weapon.

  "Boss lady..." Kai started.

  "Mid-tier. Raven will consult. I execute." She locked eyes with Raven. "I’ll manage. "

  Raven pushed off the wall, walked to the Arch with the kind of care one navigated a mine field. The storage compartment clicked open.

  "You’ll need a suit." She pulled out folded tech fabric and held it out. Black, dense, the subtle gleam of integrated cooling threading and interface ports. High-end from the looks of it, the kind of suit built for serious dives. Custom thermal regulation, biometric monitoring, probably neural signal optimisation woven into the fabric itself. The sort of kit that Raven would keep as backup in her bike – a spare of her own gear, meant for her own body.

  "Should fit well enough," she added.

  Zara grabbed it. The fabric was heavier than it looked, dense with embedded tech. She headed for the questionable privacy of a dumpster alcove at the back of the warehouse.

  The suit felt alive when she pulled it on. Smart fabric adjusting to her body temperature, mapping the topography of her skin, tightening where it found muscle and easing where it found soft tissue. Interface ports lined her spine like chrome vertebrae – cold contact points that pressed against each vertebra and sent a shiver up through her shoulders. Cooling channels lay flat against her ribs. The suit was a bit tight around her hips and breasts – built for Raven's proportions, not hers – but the smart fabric compensated.

  "Boss, you sure about this?" Kai had followed her. He held out a stim injector like an offering, the cylinder glinting under warehouse light. "Got something that'll sharpen your reflexes. Help with the data flow."

  She grabbed it without hesitation. Pressed metal to her neck. The cocktail hit instantly – Kai’s stims usually did. The effect rolled through her in a wave: pain receptors dimming to whispers, sensory input sharpening to crystal edges, the world snapping into a higher resolution where she could count the dust motes and hear Kai's heartbeat and feel the individual fibres of the netrunning suit against her skin. The persistent throb in her pelvis faded to background static – still there, but remote, like a distant signal.

  Better. Functional.

  While she was changing, the crew had taken positions. Kai running final checks on his charges. Diego already moving toward the door, Crusher at his side. Raven stood apart, leaning against industrial shelves, one hand resting on her stomach.