Chapter 4: And Kind
My mind scrambled. She knew about the gun. She knew I had it. The tired, hungry part of me saw an exit, a transaction. Maybe she was a buyer. The part that lived in the gutter for twenty-two years screamed trap.
I slid out from the shadows, keeping ten feet of greasy pavement between us. The Crusher felt like a beacon against my hip. "Don't know what you're talking about," I said, my voice flat. The lie was tissue-paper thin.
She took another step, that same unsettling smile playing on her lips. "Sure you don't. The tall, skinny kid with trying to hawk a Militech Crusher to every chop shop in Heywood? You're not exactly a ghost, Kai." My name in her mouth was a shock. It sounded foreign, important.
"How—"
"I pay attention." She closed the distance slowly, like approaching a spooked animal. "Word gets around when someone's dumb or desperate enough to be waving a corpse magnet. Which are you?" Her eyes, in the fractured light, were a pale, intelligent gray.
"Both, probably," I muttered. I could feel her now, not just see her. There was a buzz around her, a focused, humming energy that wasn't aggression. It was calculation, wrapped in a dazzling package. Curiosity, sharp and proprietary. A predatory charm. It was intoxicating.
She was in front of me. The scent of ozone and something clean, like rain on hot circuitry, cut through the alley's stench. "You're in over your head. That piece has a tracer. They'll be here soon. And they won't ask questions." Her voice dropped, conversational, confiding. "But I can fix that. For a price."
"What price?" My own voice was a whisper. I was drowning in the sheen of her hair, the perfect curve of her cheek. This was a mistake. A beautiful, lethal mistake. But the ache in my chest, the one that had been there since I first saw her, pulsed in time with her words. A stupid, biological hope.
"A look. Let me see it." Her hand came up, not for the gun, but to my face. Her fingertips were cool. They brushed my temple, trailed down my jaw. It was a gesture of absurd, impossible tenderness in that filthy place. My skin burned. No one touched me.Ever. Not like this. A static hum seemed to pass from her fingers into my blood, a whisper of code that wasn't code. A ghost in a machine that wasn't there.
I fell for it. Not the seduction, but the closeness. The chance to be near that light. I leaned into her touch, a fraction. A sucker's move.
Her gaze shifted, the softness evaporating into a technician's focus. Her pupils seemed to dilate, a faint cerulean ring lighting up around the irises for a split second—a netrunner’s dive interface. She was trying to quickhack me. A ping, a brute-force, a system check—anything to slip a slavedriver or a reboot into my neuralware and freeze me solid.
Nothing happened.
The blue ring flickered and died. Her eyebrows lifted, genuine surprise breaking through the performance. Her fingers pressed against my temple, searching for a port, a jack, any hard point. They found only skin and bone.
"You're… zeroed?" she breathed, the confusion in her voice utterly real. "No chrome at all. Not even a basic operating system link." She looked at me like I was a fossil, a museum piece. A ghost in a different way.
The moment shattered. The spell broke with the violence of a gunshot.
Which was immediately followed by the real thing..
a high-caliber round screamed past my ear and sparked off the pipe behind me with a deafening spang. A second tore a chunk of concrete from the wall by Kira's head. Two figures blocked the alley entrance, silhouetted against the neon blaze, heavy pistols raised. The mercs
Time didn't slow. It shattered.
Kira's surprise vanished, replaced by instant, fluid action."Down!" she yelled, not a scream but a command. She didn't dive for cover. She lunged at me. Her shoulder slammed into my chest, knocking the air from my lungs, and we went down in a tangled heap behind a swollen, reeking dumpster. More rounds thudded into its metal hide, sounding like distant, insane drums.
The impact jarred the Crusher loose from my waistband. It clattered on the wet ground between us. We lay chest-to-chest in the filth, breathing hard. The world was reduced to the stench of garbage, the metallic taste of fear, and the shocking, full-body contact with her.
Her face was inches from mine. In the sliver of light from a crack above, I saw no fear. Only a fierce, blazing intensity. Her eyes locked onto mine. It wasn't a look of connection. It was an assessment, a reevaluation of a resource. Zero chrome. A liability. Or maybe, just maybe, an unexpected advantage.
Gunfire erupted again, closer. They were advancing.
Kira sigh, "Alright Kai, let deal with them first. We’ll talk about our little situation later."