Night City, 2077
The Merrimac’s taillights smeared across the wet street, red streaks swallowed by the downpour until they vanished around the corner. Deathwing stood beneath the flickering glow of the neon signs that surrounded the Afterlife’s parking lot, optics whirring as he watched them fade. Just another pair of ghosts slipping into the sprawl. He spat onto the concrete, lips curling. Let Ares play house. Let Sofie cling to him like a lifeline. They’d never understand what it meant to walk free, unchained, chrome singing in your blood.
He tilted his head back, let the city’s neon smear across his vision, and laughed low in his throat. Night City was alive tonight—breathing, pulsing, burning. And he was part of it.
Turning on his heel, Deathwing stalked back toward the Afterlife’s front entrance, boots crunching on broken glass, optics drinking in the thrum of mercs drunkenly spilling onto the street. He didn’t bother going back inside. Instead, he passed the doors and took the open footpath tunnel leading away from Ares’ exit, humming under his breath. Chippin’ In was still pounding in his head. He drummed the rhythm out with his chrome fingers against his thigh as he walked.
At the far end of the tunnel, the rain thickened, pooling around his boots. He slipped a slim device from his jacket pocket, tapping the screen a few times before his internal Agent lit up his vision. The line hissed once, then cleared.
“I have it,” Deathwing’s grin returned, teeth glinting. “Hacked her partner, just like you told me to. They didn’t even notice. I got what you asked for—more, maybe. You’ll have it soon enough.”
The voice that answered was unmistakably corporate—smooth, but impatient. “You’ll leave the device at the Columbarium in North Oak in a niche marked for Ella Halsey. Code’s uploading to your Agent now. Deliver it there, walk away, and payment clears within the hour.”
Deathwing grinned, rain dripping off his jaw. “Easy as that huh? Slot it and stroll? Don’t worry, Lex. It’s on its way.”
“I expect no delays,” she said. Her voice was sharp.
“Yeah, yeah,” he drawled, optics clicking as they searched the street around him. “I hear you loud and clear.”
He killed the line before she could get another word out, letting the hiss of dead air hang a moment. The device in his hand was waiting for him to peek inside. He turned away from the glow of the street and angled toward the underbelly of the city. The Columbarium could wait. He had a hideaway waiting—a cluttered, chrome-strewn bolt-hole where the city’s noise was dulled just enough for him to think. That was where he’d peel the layers back, see what Lex wanted so badly she’d offered him as much for this data as he would have been paid in a year working for the Wire Hounds.
* * *
The hideaway wasn’t home. Home was for people who needed comfort, who hung pictures on the wall and curled under blankets to pretend the city wasn’t gnawing at their bones. Deathwing needed none of that. His place was a nest of parts and scraps, the guts of cyberware and weaponry spilled across every flat surface. Broken implants and scorched chips were scattered like dead insects. The air reeked of machine oil and the faint copper tang of old blood. A partially shredded mattress sagged in the corner, a shrine to exhaustion more than rest.
He dropped into the metal folding chair in front of the table upon which sat his cyberdeck. He plugged the hacking device into the handheld computer as it unfolded. Once the data-thief was connected, he left the system to start peeling it open. Progress bars flickered and crawled, streams of encrypted script spooling across the screen as the daemons inside the deck worked. Pulling his personal link cable from the palm of his carbon-black cyberarm and jacking into the cyberdeck, he leaned back, arms spread across the chair, optics flickering with every update.
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Data crawled into shape—names, logs, transaction trails. And there she was. Sofie Arnesen. Not just a former netrunner for the Wire Hounds, nor just Ares’ shadow clinging to him through every fight, but a ghost with a pedigree that stank of the towers. Lex had given him a quick profile when he’d taken the job: Corporate-born, heir to Ymir Skandatek, dragging the company along in a one-eighty following her ascension to the top of the tower. And yet, here she was, among the lowly dogs at the bottom of the pile—hiding, first among the Wire Hounds, and now the Afterlife Mercs. She wasn’t even in the same hemisphere as the corp HQ. No, she was a stray that had slipped the leash and somehow managed to tie it around her handler’s throat, taking control before she was caught. His laugh came out full of irony and iron, echoing off the walls.
“Ares,” he muttered, the name tasting like rust. The proud Nomad, the disciplined Hound, playing husband while he shared a bed with a corpo princess and ran errands for Rogue. A neat little picture. He could almost see it framed on some condo wall in Corpo Plaza—smiles, vows, the whole domestic fantasy.
He leaned forward as his mood grew ever more sour. “You were supposed to be better than that, brother,” he spat the words like a curse, optics narrowing as the lines of code continued to unfurl. His chrome fingers tapped against the table in a slow, metallic rhythm. He disconnected his personal link from the cyberdeck as he fell headfirst into ranting out loud to no one. “Nomad blood in your veins, Wire Hounds steel in your bones, and you bent the knee to a corpo princess anyway? Share her bed like it makes you whole?”
The thought clawed at him, resting in a place he couldn’t reach. He and Ares weren’t so different—cut from the same cloth, abandoned by clan and city alike, left to stitch together new lives from the scraps. Both had stood in ruin, staring down the choice to keep walking or be buried with the dead. They were kin in that way, whether Ares admitted it or not.
And yet, Ares had turned his back. Not on Deathwing, necessarily, but on the truth. “Instead of burning the system that tried to chew you up, you slipped its leash around your own throat! All because that blonde bitch flashed her eyes at you and whispered some bedtime story about rebellion from the inside!” Deathwing laughed, shaking his head as he stood violently and shoved the chair aside before he began to pace the cramped room. “There is no inside. There’s only the boot, and those it crushes—and you’re smiling while it’s on your neck!”
He stopped and turned, shaken out of his rage as the cyberdeck chimed, another packet of decrypted data sliding into view on the small screen. He retrieved the chair and sat back down, plugging back into the deck.
More logs. More trails. Proof, as far as he was concerned, that Sofie’s blood was still corporate blue no matter how deep she tried to bury it under grit and street cred. He grinned at the thought, sharp teeth gleaming in the dark room. “And you think she’s saving you, choom? Think she’s leading you out? All she’s done is clip your wings.” If Sofie had truly wanted to take down part of the system, like Ares’ data indicated that he thought she did, she would have dismantled the corp instead of taking control. New direction or not, a spinning gear is still part of the machine.
The deck’s glow shifted, strings of code rearranging into something heavier, something buried deep within Ymir Skandatek’s vaults. Deathwing’s optics dilated, soaking in the sudden flood of restricted files. His lips peeled even further back, his grin growing ever wider.
“Oh ho ho! Here we go!” He leaned closer, voice dropping into a reverent whisper as his fingers twitched across the keys. “Show me what your princess is hiding.”
The machine spat up lines of script that bled across the screen, some whole, others mangled by packet loss, half-chewed like bones pulled from a grinder. Project directories branched and collapsed, naming conventions that meant nothing at first glance, then sharpened into something that stole his breath. A single word kept surfacing through the ashes, over and over, like a brand.
PROSOPON.
The word burned through the static again and again, stamped across reports, flagged in system alerts, repeated like a warning. Status logs scrolled past: None of it clean, none of it stable—but all of it definitely real.
Deathwing mouthed the name, savoring it as though it were scripture. “Prosopon…” The grin cracked wider, optics jittering as if they couldn’t decide which line of code to worship first. He caught snippets, fragments stitched together by his own fevered imagination:
He laughed again, the loud sound rattling off metal walls. “You’ve been keeping a god in a cage, princess? And nobody told me?”
Leaning back in his chair, he spread his arms wide, letting the glow of the deck paint his face like firelight. His laughter softened into something closer to awe. “This is it. This is the chrome high, the thing beyond the edge. A system that can command, contain, control—hell, remake the world if it wanted. And you it.”
He licked his teeth, whispering the name once more. “Prosopon.” His grin sharpened hungrily. “You’re caged in the dark, but don’t worry. I’ll soon be tearing the cage door from its hinges.”
