Good People (Worm/Shadowrun)

Paragon - 7.01

<Device ID: Max Anders (Personal)>

<Incoming Call from: Nathan Gilbert>

<Recording two-way audio input>

Max Anders (Personal): "Hello, Nate."

This was the fourth or fifth phone call I'd eavesdropped on, and the novelty of spying on someone I'd only ever seen on trideo hadn't yet faded.

Nathan Gilbert: "Max! How've you been? It's been, what, a month?"

The voice on the other line was broadly similar to Max's, with the same crisp American aristocratic accent that spoke of old money, old names and old attitudes. A quick skim of the matrix revealed that Gilbert was old old money. The kind of family that had arrived in America rich and only grown richer over time. His pedigree made the Anders dynasty look like young upstarts.

Max Anders (Personal): "The firefighter's gala. As pedestrian as ever, but I suppose it's more of a business function."

Nathan Gilbert: "I swear, the only people having fun at that thing are the hose jockeys, and that's just because they don't know any better. Anyway, Max, Gabrielle and I are hosting a real party at our place next Saturday. It's a little short notice, I know, but I promise it'll be good."

Max Anders (Personal): "What's the occasion?"

Nathan Gilbert: "Does there have to be one?"

Gilbert laughed, genuinely and earnestly. He sounded a little drunk.

Nathan Gilbert: "It's Heather's coming-out party after she debuted last month, and Gabrielle and I are celebrating our five year anniversary at the same time."

A more targeted search revealed that this was, in fact, the third time the chemical magnate had celebrated a five year anniversary.

Max Anders (Personal): "Has it really been so long? I could have sworn Heather was still only as tall as my waist."

Nathan Gilbert: "And I remember when you were just a spotty preteen hovering over your father's shoulder. Take it from someone who knows, Max; time is only going to go faster from here."

Max Anders (Personal): "Ominous words from someone who's supposed to be celebrating."

Gilbert laughed down the line – the sort of sound that could only really be described as 'haughty.'

Nathan Gilbert: "Too true, my friend. Too true. Which is why I intend to gather all my friends and children in one place and celebrate the future of my family. Speaking of family, I know Gabrielle will be looking forward to seeing Kayden again. And you should bring Theo, give the lad a break from his studies. Heather could certainly do with more friends close to her own age, and I'm sure she'd like to pick his brains about university."

Abruptly, the thought flashed into my head that I might be eavesdropping in on some oblique dynastic horse trading. Gilbert had called Heather the future of his family, but she was his fourth child. She could make a difference in his business if she was smart, I guessed, but she'd also secure their future by marrying into an emerging megacorp. Gilbert was old money; unfathomably rich by my standards, but that wealth wasn't growing. Theo Anders, on the other hand, would inherit an empire.

Or maybe this really was just small talk, Gilbert really did think his daughter was a shut-in who desperately needed to start talking to people even if the only one available was two years older than her and I was just lost in my own paranoia with mom's old rhetoric reverberating throughout my skull. I'd plugged my brain directly into the private comm lines of the ultra-wealthy only to realise that I had no idea how those people thought.

Max Anders (Personal): "We'll be there, Nate. I might even have the opportunity to return the favour soon enough."

Nathan Gilbert: "Oh?"

Max Anders (Personal): "I'll be making the formal announcement tomorrow, but the Corporate Court has agreed to launch an audit to determine whether we qualify for a double-A rating. Within a matter of weeks, we'll have true extraterritoriality."

I pulled up the audio file, clipping the last few seconds and flagging them for attention. I had no idea how many analysts Calvert had poring over this data, but that was big. All of a sudden, we were on a deadline.

Nathan Gilbert: "That's brilliant news, Max! It's taken them long enough, but I guess even some stacked Swiss court can be worn down by enough time and effort."

Max Anders (Personal): "Shiawase had a minor shortage in certain medicines. An agent of theirs reached out to Medhall with a fair price for them, but I offered to waive the cost altogether if their Justice's office expedited my petition."

Nathan Gilbert: "I see you're still as cunning as ever. You really are living up to your father's legacy."

Max Anders (Personal): "Sometimes you have to take a hit to come back stronger. I have to go, Nate, but I'll see you soon."

<End Call>

<End Recording>

There was something in the CEO's tone, if it wasn't just the product of my imagination. We'd hit him where it hurts, set the DEA on his whole political arm and driven them into hiding. To make it worse, Medhall had been forced to cooperate fully in the investigation; to act like the aggrieved party duped into handing out drugs to a rogue policlub who promised them it would be going to homeless orphaned puppies instead of cyberpsychotic lunatics.

I was back in my room at the loft, sunk deep into a recently-purchased armchair as I drifted in and out of the matrix. The calls had been of limited utility; his work comm was on a different network entirely, tied directly into the central database of Medhall Pharmaceuticals, which left me with the calls he chose to make on his own time. He was apparently something of a workaholic; he hardly called anyone, and his comm went unused throughout most of the day. But that was what Calvert had asked for, so that's what I'd given him.

Returned from Boston, I'd had the chance to examine my prize in full, taking in the strengths and limitations of the Myo network. It only contained the Anders family's personal devices, but that meant well over two dozen different commlinks, tablets, terminals and all the associated accessories. Not all of them were clearly labelled – there were a few that I hadn't yet been able to ascribe identity to – but I had enough to get a picture of the family's structure.

It was surprisingly small; most of the devices were linked to only three people; Max Anders, his wife Kayden, and their twenty-year old son, Theo. Of the couple, Kayden's parents were both still alive, but weren't on the network, while Max Anders' mother had died around five years prior. Max had a sister, Diane Anders, but she'd spent the last six years in a rehab clinic up north, so she didn't have a phone. She'd died just recently; her overdose had been on the news when I was hospitalised.

<Device ID: Kayden A>

<Incoming call from Max>

<Recording two-way audio input>

Kayden A: "Max. It's been a little while."

Max: "Kayden. You're fine, I take it?"

Kayden A: "I'm fine."

Max: "And our daughter?"

Kayden A: "Aster's fine. She's adjusting well to kindergarten. The first parent-teacher night is coming up soon."

Max: "I know. It's in my calendar. I'll have a driver pick you up, then we'll travel from the office to the school."

Kayden A: "Sure. Is that why you called?"

Max: "No. We've been invited to a party. Short notice; next Saturday."

Kayden A: "Who by?"

Max: "Nathan Gilbert. Celebrating his daughter's debut, mostly. He wants us to bring Theo as well."

Kayden let out a faint sigh before she continued – short and quiet enough that I didn't think it was deliberate.

Kayden A: "Nathan's a dinosaur, and his wife is just catty."

Max: "He's an influential dinosaur. His political connections run deep, which means that it's important we keep him friendly. As for Gabrielle, it would hardly be the first time you've had to put on a smile and pretend to like someone for the greater good."

Kayden's next words were murmured, and sounded a little reluctant.

Kayden A: "Whose good is that?"

Max: "You know whose, Kayden. It's about Aster, about Theo. Sometimes securing the future for our children means putting ourselves in uncomfortable positions. Besides, you can hardly argue there aren't any benefits. I hear your business is going well?"

Kayden A: "I found another client this week. A Maersk executive who just relocated to the city and wanted to furnish her new waterfront apartment."

Kayden sounded defensive and, from what I could tell, she had good reason to be. On paper, she ran her own interior decorating business, but a look at its portfolio had demonstrated that there was no way it could be profitable. I didn't know if it was a hobby, a social project or an attempt to carve out whatever independence she could find, but the business was as dependent on Medhall money as she was.

Max: "I'm glad to hear it. You've always had a good eye, whether it's for furniture, fashion, men."

Kayden A: "Don't."

Max: "You should wear white. It makes you look… purer. More earnest."

Kayden A: "Appearances matter, right? Especially among our 'friends.'"

I didn't need to see her to note the intonation she added to the word.

Max: "This is the life you chose, Kayden. I may not be the high school baseball player you found so infatuating anymore, but we're still the same in so many ways. However much we've changed since then, whether or not you're willing to admit it, we both share a similar perspective on what's right, what's wrong, and what has to be done."

Kayden was silent for a few moments, then let out a long sigh.

Kayden A: "Okay. Have your people send me the details, I'll make sure the nanny knows to look after Aster that night."

<End Call>

<End Recording>

It almost felt voyeuristic, but I'd figured out they were separated almost as soon as I looked at the network. All of his devices were registered at one address, all of hers at another. Their GPS logs just confirmed it. What was truly impressive was that the city as a whole had no idea. They still attended public events, still put on the façade of a happy couple. Once again I'd found myself in possession of data that people – mostly gutter journalists, admittedly – would pay a sizeable sum for, yet I was completely unable to act on it.

Kayden herself was Anders' second wife, for all that I just learned she was crushing on him when he was a high school sportsman. It must have been a very one-sided crush; there was a five year gap between them, with Max having passed forty this year and Kayden being almost thirty-five. She wasn't Theo's mother; Heith Anders, Max's first wife, had died around eighteen years ago. He'd been married to Kayden – much of it only on paper, apparently – for eight years.

We had so much dirt on Medhall at that point that I couldn't help but wonder when our client planned to make his move. We didn't have the smoking gun, didn't have something irrefutably linking Medhall to the Chosen, but Alabaster's testimony – though he'd never see a courtroom because vampires weren't legally people – would probably be enough to create an indirect link even if they denied all knowledge. The Chosen had launched enough heinous attacks that we definitely had enough to cause a stock crisis, maybe even force Max Anders out of the CEO chair.

Ultimately, however, that decision was out of my hands. For whatever reason, the serpent had decided he wanted to toy with his food some more and he'd decided that – for the time being – he didn't need us to help out. Which left me with nothing to do but monitor the private lives of three very private people.

I turned my attention back to the third cluster of devices and the long-running five-way telecom call being supported by one of them on a commercial matrix host.

<Grid: Eternal Horizon>

<Host ID: RollSpaceNET>

<User ID: Tantalus [GM], Guest User [5]>

<Active Program: M&M7E>

GM: "Okay, Kat, I'm going to need you to make an Acrobatics saving throw."

Theo Anders was about my age, and a lot more soft-spoken than his father. He had his vidcam on, revealing the same blue eyes and blonde hair as his father, but on a softer face. He wasn't overweight or anything, but it was clear that, unlike his father, he hadn't played baseball in high school. It almost made him look naïve.

Grace: "Twenty two."

GM: "Nicely done. As you plummet back down the elevator shaft, you manage to reach back and grab the cable of the slowly ascending elevator. The sudden stop is almost enough to rip the cable right out of your hands again, but you manage to hold your grip."

Grace: "Okay, I'm going to shout back up the elevator to the others 'I'm fine! Drive those cocksuckers back!'"

Tecton: "Tecton just sighs."

Grace let out a short, sharp laugh. Theo's players were a surprisingly varied bunch for the son of a human supremacist. 'Tecton' was played by a dark-skinned gnome in what looked like a college dorm room, with engineering textbooks visible on a shelf behind him, while Kat was a little more predictable; a blonde human with a wild-eyed look in her eyes that showed just how much she was enjoying the game. From the look of things, she was in a flat-share; I could see another woman sprawled out on a couch on the other side of the room, her focus on her headphones even as she shot Kat the occasional bemused look.

GM: "Okay, Jacob, you're next in the initiative roll."

Raymancer: "Well, since I know Grace is still healthy enough to frustrate PR, I'm going to step up and fire a disintegrate spell at the last robot before he can close on Annex. Twenty nine to hit."

GM: "You hit. Roll damage."

'RollSpace' is a surprisingly simple host. There were other providers on the market who offered full simsense immersion, allowing the person running the show to put their players right in the heart of the action. It was what I'd have expected from someone of Theo's wealth, but a glance at the devices the others were using to connect revealed a vast gulf between them and him. I had no idea how they'd met; it must have been on the host's forums, or some other, similar online space.

Raymancer: "Seventy-nine points."

Wanton: "What the fuck even is your build?"

GM: "It's dead, obviously. Would you like to do the honours?"

I was pretty sure Raymancer was a Fomori; a subvariant of trolls who were typically a little shorter, with smaller horns and no dermal growths. On top of the obvious social advantages that gave them, they were also much more likely to be magically awakened. He was in some kind of commune; a large, open plan space covered in all sorts of handmade artwork, with a few other trolls visible in the background.

Raymancer: "Raymancer takes a half step forward, raising his right arm as he mutters an incantation, pointing his palm directly at the robot. A moment later, there's a crack of thunder as a beam of ethereal green energy shoots out from his palm, the force of it causing his costume to blow back behind him."

Grace: "Classic drama major."

Raymancer: "The moment the beam connects with the robot, it starts to disintegrate into a glowing green ash that rises up into the air before disappearing completely as the last atoms of the machine are reduced to nothingness."

GM: "With the last machine dead, the ballroom feels strangely silent. Grace, you manage to climb back up the elevator shaft just as the double-doors of the balcony at the end of the room swing open. A crackling shield suddenly activates, protecting the power armoured supervillain who emerges, looking down at you like he's just discovered a roach in his kitchen."

The other three members of the party used the handles 'Wanton,' 'Annex' and 'Cuff.' The latter was another blonde human, streaming in from her bedroom, while Wanton was a tanned elf with a mullet and a CalFree flag on the wall of his room, and Annex was an African-American human broadcasting from what looked like a private booth in a matrix café. I could have dug a little deeper into the connection to unearth their real names, but there didn't seem to be much point; none of them seemed to be in the city.

GM: "'So the Wardens have finally come for me. I was wondering how long it would take you to reach this place. You should be proud; you have exceeded my expectations.'"

Theo had put on as deep and booming a voice as he could manage, clicking an option in the host that further enhanced his words with an artificial reverb.

Wanton: "'Maybe we'd have taken longer if you had anything worth fighting! Can you do anything other than robots, or are you a one trick pony?'"

GM: "The supervillain just laughs down at you. 'My machines are the perfect soldiers. They can't question, can't disobey. They can't be bargained with, they can't be reasoned with. They don't feel pity, remorse or fear and they absolutely will not stop, ever, until this city is mine!'"

Cuff: "I knew you'd like that movie."

Cuff had a warm smile on her face, but she quickly quietened down. It seemed she wasn't that comfortable speaking in front of a crowd.

Tecton: "'You know we can't let that happen. Even if you do defeat us, this city will never accept mechanical rule. The people will fight you.'"

GM: "He laughs again, a little louder this time. 'The people don't know what they want! They're sheep; they must be herded lest they wander off and die alone! Only I have the will to rule this city! Only I have the vision to guide it to prosperity! I had hoped you would see the righteousness of my cause, but no matter! I will not let you stand in my way!'"

Theo loaded up another encounter in the programme; the same map as before, but the doors at the end of the palatial hall were open, with four robots standing between them and the party.

GM: "The immense doors to the supervillain's inner sanctum swing open, as four more giant robots stride into the room, each one armed with an assault cannon on their left arm and immense fists on their right that crackle with electrical energies. The supervillain himself deactivates the shield on his balcony, then leaps down to the floor below. He takes up a position behind his robots, seemingly content to let them take the lead for now."

Theo smiled, well and truly lost in the moment.

GM: "'Tremble before the might of Tyrant!'"

The smile faltered a little as Theo was distracted by something else on his comm.

GM: "And with that, I think it's time for a ten minute pause."

Grace: "You dick!"

GM: "Just building tension, Kat. Besides, I need another coffee if I'm going to run this fight."

His tone was light, but I could see the tension undercutting his expression. The cause was obvious; he had an incoming call from his dad, no doubt about to invite him to the now infamous party. I wasn't particularly interested in hearing the same information repeated a third time, so I stayed with Theo's friend group as he left the room.

Wanton: "So, we're all aware that we're fighting Theo's dad again, right?"

Tecton: "You don't know that, Lewis. Don't make assumptions."

Annex: "Do you think he even knows, or is it like a subconscious thing?"

Raymancer: "Tyrant seems like a pretty common character archetype for me. Comics are full of evil masterminds."

Grace: "Yeah, it's not Theo's fault his dad's, like, a legit supervillain."

Cuff: "Just leave off him, okay? It's rude to talk about him when he's not here."

Wanton: "I didn't mean nothing by it, Ava. Your long-distance boyfriend's still a better DM than any of us. Except for Jacob, I guess, but at least Theo hasn't saddled us with any immortal ninjas."

Raymancer: "I thought you all thought he was cool?"

Something about this whole situation felt very familiar to me. It wasn't what was happening right now, but what Theo and Ava had said to each other. It was Theo's username, too; I'd run into a 'Tantalus' before, in the Observatory deep within the resonance realms, who'd sent out a number of messages to someone in Hawai'i. Ava, most likely.

I hadn't taken the data with me back across the event horizon; it just hadn't seemed relevant at the time. From what I remembered, it seemed that Theo didn't share the same beliefs as his father and step-mother, and was conflicted about being groomed to take over a corporation that he knew was racist and suspected was involved in a lot worse.

I wasn't sure what to make of that information. The fact that a member of the Anders family wasn't racist didn't exactly make for useful blackmail, especially because that was something his father had to have noticed. Still, it was another strand of the web of conspiracies and data we were weaving around the company, which made it potentially useful even if we didn't understand the how or why.

Mostly, though, I just felt a little sorry for him. Not too much, though; I was sure the gadgets, lifestyle and free ride to University helped to sooth the pain of awkward dinner conversations.

"Hey," a soft, cautious voice drew my attention back to the real world, where Lisa had slowly pushed open the door to my room. "It's time."

I swallowed, my throat drying up, then closed the connection to the Myo network.

The others were waiting in the lounge, where the air was so thick I could have cut it with a knife. The others were quiet, even Alec, while Aisha was pacing up and down the length of the sofa with a fiercely nervous expression on her face. She'd dressed down – at least, by her standards – in black joggers and a red crop top.

I'd dressed a little more sombrely as well, whether consciously or not, in a pair of dark blue jeans and the black t-shirt with the yellow scarab logo that Lisa had coaxed me into buying at the market. It just felt right.

"All good?" Lisa asked, looking around the room. She was wearing a pleated black skirt and a lilac top underneath her trenchcoat, and had selflessly taken on the task of making sure we left on time.

"All good," I answered her, as Aisha stopped pacing and gave me a look. "Let's go."

Rachel, wearing much the same practical work clothes she always did, was waiting downstairs, elbows deep in the chassis of her mostly-repaired Steel Lynx drone. A trio of shiny new Doberman gun-platforms were parked in the corner of her workshop, unpainted and with the assault rifles they were supposed to carry still stored in their case. She stopped her work once she caught sight of us, wiping her arms clean on a rag before wordlessly clambering up into the front of her van.

I was expecting Lisa to join her into the front, but instead she got into the back with the rest of us, sitting next to me as Aisha and Alec claimed two seats on the other side of the row, Aisha immediately hunching forward and tapping a foot against the floor as she wrung her hands.

I just stared straight ahead, sitting stock still with my mind gazing beyond the metal hull of the van to the digital cityscape beyond, tracking our progress through GridLink as Rachel took us out and into the city streets.

It was quieter than I was expecting. The gang war was still out there, but the pitched battles had given way to guerrilla warfare as both the Yakuza and the Chosen settled in for the long haul. All the while Knight Errant were pushing hard, launching large-scale raids on soft targets and advancing the security checkpoints one block at a time. The tension in the air was still so thick you could have cut it with a knife, but things were a little closer to business as usual. If Calvert didn't do anything to kick the hornet's nest, things might even start to calm down before too long.

Still, there was a small, miserable part of me that almost wanted something to get in the way. I had no idea what to expect, no idea what to do, no idea what was expected of me. But it was only a small part; the rest of me knew how important this was.

Bitch pulled up in the drop-off zone, then set the van's pilot program to circle the block once we'd all dismounted. The Crash Cart hospital wasn't tall by modern standards, but I still felt the full weight of the twelve stories of concrete, steel and reinforced glass looming over me, with uniformed security guards patrolling the perimeter walls that delineated its extraterritorial space.

I felt a palm against my lower back.

"You okay?" she asked, looking up at me.

"Yeah." I shrugged her off, willing my legs into motion as the hospital grew larger and larger. A makeshift checkpoint had been set up by the entrance for visitors, with a metal detector and someone checking SINs against the global registry. When we ignored it, walking down the route dedicated to medical personnel and clients with active policies, a pair of security guards moved to intercept us. I flashed an authorisation code at their tactical network – a borrowed client ID that Calvert had given us if we ever needed to access the hospital – and the guards discreetly returned to their posts like they'd never been suspicious.

An ambulance had just pulled up to the triage entrance, a pair of armoured paramedics carrying a woman on a stretcher, her head strapped in a neck brace. A mother and her son were walking out the front doors to the hospital, the kid rubbing nervously at the polymer cast on his arm. In the corner, a security guard had found a rough sleeper who'd managed to sneak past the fence. The elderly ork was almost bent double; the security guard had him in an arm-lock and was marching him back towards the perimeter.

Once we'd crossed the threshold into the air-conditioned lobby, with its gift shop, café and wide corridors leading off to the different departments of the hospital, I led the way up through the warren of wide, well-lit corridors that nevertheless managed to feel like a tight, claustrophobic maze if you didn't have the building plans uploaded to your brain.

Our destination was a short-term recovery ward on the eighth floor of the building, designated according to the building plans for post-surgery patients. Lisa spoke to the young dwarf manning the reception desk while I paced nervously up and down the length of the waiting room. Idly, I flicked a glance over to the others. Rachel was watching me intently, but without any obvious concern, while Aisha was staring down at the floor and Alec had his hand on her back and a downright uncertain expression on his face.

After about a minute of chatter, the receptionist picked up a work-issue commlink and sent off a message in the matrix to a nurse on the ward, who then made her way to one of a small number of private rooms set aside for premium clients. I stopped looking at the matrix, then. I simply waited, my focus solely and painfully present in meatspace, until Brian stepped into the room.

He looks the same. That was the first thought that ran through my head, only for that initial impression to be dashed against the rocks once my brain had made complete sense of the picture. With modern medicine, especially the kind of treatment he'd had, the lingering scars of almost any sort of physical trauma could be stitched away and repaired. Even the bare cybernetics of my arm were a deliberate affectation; I could have gone for a synskin coating that was identical to the real flesh I'd lost.

Brian was wearing clothes that I'd taken from his apartment and brought to the hospital when he was unconscious – a deep blue t-shirt, a pair of black sweatpants and some red and white sneakers. They were clean, bland and far from his usual hard-edged, hard-wearing fashion. He didn't stand or move like someone who'd had three bullets pass through his chest, and his features were all pristine, with flash-burns healed, cuts closed, cybernetic components replaced and fresh synskin painstakingly applied to hide them from sight.

In spite of all that, I knew then and there that he had changed. It was in his eyes, in his stance, in his saddened expression as his eyes landed on me before he noticed Aisha, and his features shifted into something close to despair.

"Aisha…" he began, as his sister abruptly stood bolt upright and stormed across the room towards him. I thought she was going to hit him, but instead she threw her arms wide and pulled him into a constricting, desperate embrace.

"What are you doing here?" Brian asked, his tone completely lost. Abruptly, Aisha let go, sliding out of her brother's grip as a flash of anger flared up in her face. As quickly as it came, however, it was smothered beneath a conscious effort on Aisha's part. Instead, she answered his question in a wavering tone that she was trying to keep level.

"I ran into some trouble and needed a place to crash. Don't want to freeload, so now I'm a shadowrunner."

"It's dangerous," Brian said, slowly.

Aisha opened her mouth to say something then paused, pursing her lips for a moment of silent thought before finally speaking.

"Yeah. But I was in danger before. Least now I've got backup."

Brian's jaw was clenched tight, but he nodded. His eyes darted from person to person, passing over Rachel, Alec and Lisa before landing on me, where they lingered. First on my face, as he tried to read whatever my face was showing, then a little further down and to the right. His eyes stayed there for an uncomfortably long time before he finally spoke.

"Your arm…"

"Oh," I exclaimed, a little surprised. I brought my arm up to my face, watching the joints in my hand move as I furled and unfurled my fingers. "I'm used to it. Forgot it was there, honestly."

"Good." The word came out uncertainly, but that was understandable; I had no idea what you were supposed to say to something like that.

"Are you hurt?" I asked, stupidly.

He shook his head.

"The docs here do good work." He was clearly shaken, but I picked up on the unspoken question. Lisa did too.

"Our client," she stressed the word, "is with Evo. So we didn't get paid for the last job, but we didn't have to worry about medical expenses either. Now we're on retainer."

"We've already pulled one job for him," I said, regretting it the very next moment when his attention flashed back to Aisha with a visible wince. "It went fine. Got away clean."

I decided not to mention just how close everything had been to going wrong.

"So, what next?" Brian asked.

"Professionally? No idea," I answered. "Client's in a holding pattern. We're waiting for him to decide on what to do next, or for some pieces to fall into place in a plan I haven't been able to figure out yet."

"As for here and now," Lisa interjected, "I figure we head back to the loft? Take it easy for a day; drag as many couches into the front room as will fit and just chill out."

I frowned, ever so slightly, before schooling my expression back into place. I didn't want to sit around doing nothing when I could be monitoring the Anders wiretap, getting ready for the next mission or searching for more answers from the resonance. But I wasn't blind, either; Brian seemed about as enthusiastic about the idea as I was, but that didn't mean Lisa wasn't right.

"Like old times, huh?" Aisha asked, flashing her brother a grin. "Old old times, I mean. Jumping out at you from behind the couch, shouting Sentai Samurai catchphrases and hitting you on the head with a foam sword."

He didn't smile, but Brian seemed to imperceptibly relax at that memory.

"It's settled then," Lisa said, smiling. "We'll grab some takeout on the way back home."

Things weren't good, that much was obvious, but there was still something nice about seeing Brian walking beside me as we made our way back through the hospital. He'd always seemed so solid before and, while he'd obviously been shaken up by his injuries, it was almost comforting to know that he was here. That we were all here.

"It took long enough," Lisa said, in a tone so quiet that only I could hear it, "but the gang's all together now."

Paragon - 7.02

It was hard to understand just how much money I'd made over the last few months. I hadn't really spent much of it on anything important, just some furniture for my room in the loft and some business expenses – my gun, ammunition, that sort of thing. In terms of how I lived my life, things hadn't changed a huge amount, while simultaneously changing in every way that mattered.

For one, I was spending more and more time in the loft, eating lunch and dinner there most days even if I then trudged back to my apartment when things became just a little too loud for me. About half the time, though, I stayed, woke up late in the morning – but still earlier than I had in years – and ate whatever breakfast someone had bought from the food trucks that catered to blue collars on their way to work.

We spent more on takeout than I did even at my worst, but the lifestyle was broadly similar once you discounted the massive gulf between living like that alone and living like that with friends. I'd never felt like I was wealthy before, until I followed Lisa into the grocery store in midtown.

It was a fact of life that there were some stores that you just never walked into. It was a habit everyone learned from their parents, back when they were just barely old enough to toddle around behind them, pointing at random items on the shelves and loudly making a nuisance of themselves. There were the shops you used and the shops you didn't, and the distinction between the two was ironclad.

My parents certainly never shopped at a Harris Teeter Metro, which meant it sat firmly on the other side of the gulf in my mind. Lisa, on the other hand, walked past the pair of security guards at the door of the franchised corner shop like she wasn't crossing some ironclad societal border. Then again, her willing fall from grace seemed to have given Lisa the unique ability to ignore all those artificial boundaries, like she'd removed herself from the flow of society.

Besides, I thought, as rich as her family was, maybe her parents had people to shop for them?

Wealth had been on my mind since I wiretapped the Anders family. I still kept up a constant watch on their feed, an AR window always floating in the corner of my vision tracking who was watching, browsing and buying what. I knew the name of the nanny Kayden hired to watch her daughter when she was out, knew that Max was in the process of closing on a piece of American pastoralist artwork, knew more than I wanted to know about Theo's porn habits. Growing up, it had been impossible not to be aware in an academic sense of the divide between rich and poor, but the stratified nature of that divide meant it had never been as visible before.

Lisa might be able to pass across the barrier like she'd been invited in, but I didn't have any of the same natural indifference that made the guards overlook her. Or maybe they just paid particular attention to me because of the horns and the few extra feet in height. One of the guards was an ork, but if corporate said to pay closer attention to some metatypes than others then I was sure she'd oblige. That was just the way the world worked; a class could only function thanks to the work of the class below, who in turn could never afford the lifestyle their work supported.

"Come on, slowpoke," Lisa drawled from inside the store just as one of the guards took a half-step towards me, "dinner isn't going to cook itself, right?"

"Sure, Lisa," I said, gratefully, as the guard pretended she'd never been suspicious to begin with.

I hurried through the automatic doors as naturally as I could manage, shivering a little at the sudden blast of filtered and climate-controlled air. It was hard to quantify what made it more upmarket than, say, a Walmart or an Aldi, but something about the aisles of food and mostly white surfaces distinguished it as an establishment that catered to the increasingly small caste that is the upper-middle class.

Maybe it was how clean everything was; I couldn't see any spills or even any bare shelves. It was clear that time and effort had also gone into arranging the produce and the handful of staff were all wearing the same uniform to the exact same standard, no differences on whether the shirt was tucked in or not and no branded bibs thrown over whatever clothes they owned.

Perhaps the distinction came from pride? Not the pride of the staff, of course, but the pride of the corporation that enforced the standards the staff had to follow. They wanted their customers to feel like they were participating in something special when they shopped here.

"You're really going through it, huh?" Lisa remarked, accompanying her point with a good natured elbow to my side. "Like a damn tourist. Shopping first, culture shock later, okay?"

"Sorry," I remarked, shrugging my shoulders and turning my attention away from a shelf full of pasta stored loose in miniature silos in defiance of all reason. "Meat first?"

Lisa nodded, making for an aisle that was made entirely out of fridges. Only about a third of that space was given over to meat, but it was still more than I'd ever expected to see in one place. In the sorts of stores I was used to, meat was shut away behind the counter, or stored in individual slots in a device that was part fridge, part vending machine, ensuring people could only take the meat they'd already paid for.

Here, however, beef, pork, chicken and a few varieties of fish all sat happily next to each other on the shelves like they were something normal you might pick up in a weekly shop, rather than a rare treat reserved for birthdays, announcing bad news or other special occasions.

Lisa hummed contemplatively, her fingers raised to her chin as she assessed what was on offer. "It's okay, I guess, for battery farmed stuff. The beef's a bit fatty, and I'm not sure about some of the fish."

She was putting it on, so I rapped my knuckles lightly against the side of her head.

"Careful, you're packing metal knuckles now," she cautioned, looking up at me with a wry grin. "Could hurt someone with those grippers."

"Chicken, right?" I asked, grabbing a plastic container of light-pink breasts and dropping them into Lisa's basket. "Anything else we need?"

"Some paste," Lisa said, moving off to another aisle as I followed in her wake. "Maybe some fresh chillies and herbs if they have them. Dried isn't the same."

There was something comfortably domestic about the trip, as I followed Lisa's meandering journey through the store, repeatedly doubling back on herself to hunt for something she'd just remembered she wanted while I kept the recipe up in a matrix window, trying to keep her on track.

It was like I was being given a taste of what my life could have been like, if it had proceeded more conventionally. If my parents hadn't died, if I'd been able to really apply myself in high school and graduate with decent grades, maybe even if I'd never had my eyes opened to the world beyond the matrix.

As Lisa paid for the food, idly making small-talk with a cashier about our age who was paid enough to force a smile onto her face, I found myself wondering what sort of person that life would have made me. Would I have followed dad into the docks, riding his coattails into some admin role, or would I have managed to get the grades to make college a worthwhile investment, like I knew mom probably would have wanted? Even then, what would I have studied? What work would it have led me to?

By the time we'd left the store and caught the metro back up north, I'd realised that no matter how hard I tried to think about what could have been, I couldn't picture myself being anywhere other than where I was in that moment. It didn't matter how many mistakes I'd made along the way, how much time I'd wasted, I knew that I belonged here, with a friend by my side and a whole world of data waiting for me to open my eyes and see it.

"We're doing okay, right?" I asked, looking down at Lisa. "Really okay? No PR spin for the sake of keeping us on track."

Lisa smirked at the acknowledgement. She did a lot of work to make sure everyone was working together smoothly, even if it had taken me a while to notice she was doing it.

"We're riding the lighting," she said, after a moment's pause. "All Shadowrunners are, at all times. So long as we can keep our balance, we'll be fine, but not many teams manage to last for long enough to retire rich. For every Faultline, there are dozens of dead mercs just as good as us. We've wobbled a little on every job, but so far we've managed to hold on."

"But how do we last?" I asked. "What's the trick?"

Lisa shook her head. "There's no trick, just skill and focus. Keep your eye on the team, the job and the client at all times, and treat everything else like it doesn't even exist."

I nodded in agreement. It was the answer I'd been expecting, and it matched my own observations. I couldn't let myself be distracted by what could have been, when we were surrounded by so many dangers in the here and now.

As we returned to our hideout, I heard the sound of gunfire long before I reached the stairs up to the loft. It wasn't real gunfire, of course. I had yet to find any non-simsense piece of media that had managed to replicate just how deafening real gunfire was, even if it was still a little strange to think of myself as the kind of person who could tell the difference.

It was simplicity itself to reach out for the datastream emanating from Alec's Shiawase Sim station, expertly teasing out the details from the tightly-packed beam of pure data. The gunfire was coming from a ranked multiplayer match in Awakening: 1949, a game that Alec had bought at some point over the last few weeks. He was playing with a partner, splitscreen, using controllers rather than the simsense trodes. The game hadn't had a splitscreen feature until he'd paid me fifty nuyen to add one in.

Briefly, I pulled up the feed, watching as Alec sent a digital stunbolt into the back of a troll in a washed-out blue uniform, while in the background the Eifel Tower crackled with energy from whatever made-up magical ritual had made it a monolith. His parter wasn't as good as him, but she – I assumed it was Aisha – made up for it with an almost frantic enemy, sprinting across the rooftops of Paris and occasionally firing frantic bursts at any enemy players she saw.

I dismissed the feed as I emerged into the lounge. Alec, having just been immolated by a summoned spirit, held up a glass of some sort of red cocktail in a salute, letting out a cheer as Lisa returned the gesture with the packet of chicken like it was some prized paydata we'd swiped on a job. Aisha sat next to him, her attention wholly focused on the game as she franticly mashed the melee button.

As for the others, Rachel was sitting on the couch with a can of beer in one hand and part of her attention offloaded to her drones downstairs, while I found Brian in the kitchen, where he'd just finished slicing an onion into thin strips. He looked up as we entered and, while he didn't smile, I was fairly sure he relaxed slightly when he saw it was us.

"Hey Brian," Lisa said, as she reached into the Harris Teeter bag and set down an eggplant on the chopping board, "got another one for you to dice. Taylor, mind getting started on the chicken?"

I nodded, taking the packet from Lisa's outstretched hand.

As I started to fry the chicken, throwing in a pre-mixed bag of spices, I glanced across the counter to Brian. He'd diced the eggplant, but was now just looking down at the small heap of vegetable chunks, his hands resting on the countertop. I could see tension in the statuesque shoulders visible beneath his long-sleeved t-shirt, running down the length of his arms to the artificial fingers slowly digging into the chopping board.

"Hey," I spoke up. "You okay?"

"Hm?"

"You're sort of staring into space. You know, it'll be nice to have a home-cooked meal again. A real one, I mean. Not just a meal for one. Real meat, too; can't remember the last time I had that."

I paused. The chicken was now fully sealed, which meant it was time to squeeze in the tube of pre-mixed curry paste.

"I think it was when I graduated high school, actually. Right before… well, right before everything went wrong. I decided I had to do something to mark the occasion, so I took the money I'd saved, went down to the Market and bought a few pieces of fried chicken. I remember the stall didn't even have a fridge, just a few chickens in a cage that they'd butcher as they needed them."

"I know the kind of place you mean," Brian said, unprompted. "Took Aisha somewhere like it once or twice, split some between us. Had an uncle who ran a black-market battery farm out of his apartment. Place reeked."

"I guess I never thought about where they came from."

"Only way to get meat if you're SINless is to raise it yourself, or know someone who does," he said, a scowl on his face. He was thinking about Aisha.

"Hey, she's doing fine," I said. "Sure, she's a maverick, but she's skilled. She's comfortable with her skill, too. She's really come into her own."

"Did she put herself in danger?"

"I-" I began. I didn't know how to answer that, but I didn't have to.

"Hey bro," the young woman herself said, striding into the kitchen with an expression on her face like she didn't have a care in the world, provided you didn't look too close. "Come on out, why don't ya? Been too long since we hung out."

Brian looked torn for a moment.

"Go," I said. "I can finish up here."

I wasn't sure I'd made the right decision, but if Aisha wanted to help her brother then I wasn't going to stop her. Instead I focused my efforts on dinner, frying the onions for a few minutes before adding the eggplants, powdered coconut milk and enough water to rehydrate it before letting the mixture simmer, muting the smell of the spices but not eliminating it entirely.

After a couple of minutes, Lisa came to join me, lifting up the lid of a rice cooker that hadn't even been removed from its packaging when I'd dug it out of the cupboards. She gave the rice a stir then, apparently content, began rooting through the cupboard for crockery and a packet of prawn crackers that had probably been in there for far too long.

"You think I did the right thing bringing Aisha in?"

"Not sure she'd have given you a choice," Lisa countered. "Besides, where else would she go?"

We worked in silence after that, occasionally stirring the bubbling green mixture until the recipe said it was time to turn off the heat and start putting everything on plates. By that point, Rachel had been lured in by the smell of cooking – or just wanted to escape whatever was going on in the living room – and she divvied up the rice while I poured in the curry, making sure everyone got roughly the same amount of chicken even as I gave myself and Brian extra vegetables.

Brian himself wandered into the kitchen a little after Rachel, taking in the spread with a sheepish expression as I handed him his bowl. We both turned as Aisha and Alec followed him through, watching as Alec wrapped a hand around the back of Aisha's neck and pulled her down into a possessive kiss, which she enthusiastically reciprocated.

I glanced back at Brian and saw on his face the same abject confusion that was plastered across my own features.

"You two are… seeing each other?" I ventured.

"You haven't noticed?" Rachel asked. "They sleep in the same room."

The look Alec was giving me almost made me wish I was born a gnome so that I could just shrink down under the table and disappear.

"Guess the men in this team have a thing for tall women," he smirked, his eyes flicking between me and Brian.

I stiffened, and beside me I saw Brian do the same.

"Pretty sure you have a 'thing' for everyone, Alec," Lisa countered. When Alec didn't deny it, Aisha reached over and cuffed him on the back of his head.

"Not anymore, he doesn't."

Brian looked down, idly stirring his fork into the curry before finally speaking.

"Clearly I've missed a lot."

"Oh yeah!" Aisha exclaimed, either ignoring or oblivious to his tone. "I fought a fraggin' Samurai! Pretty wiz for my first time out of the city, huh? Guy was a real wirehead too; chromed to the gills."

Instinctively, she gave my metal arm a look.

"Not that there's anything wrong with that. If I wasn't awakened, I'd probably go full razorgirl. But if you've got it, you've gotta flaunt it, right?"

"It's taken some getting used to," I say, glad to change the subject, turning my hand over and watching the articulation of the joints as I furled and unfurled my fingers. "Honestly, though, most of the time I forget it's there. I tweaked my head in the matrix to think that way; basically made it part of my psyche."

Rachel frowned at that, reaching over to lay her hands on the plastic surface of my forearm. I let her, watching with morbid fascination as she popped open a panel, scrutinising the synthetic musculature that moved the limb.

"You shouldn't think like that," she said, as reproachfully as she could manage. "Meat doesn't usually need maintenance until you pass a certain percent of chrome, but cyberware does."

"She's got a point," Brian said, fishing for something in the pocket of his jacket before setting down a small canvas pouch of spindly tools. "I don't know how to fix mine if they break, but I know how to maintain them. You should learn how to inspect them at least; prevention is better than the cure."

"I know you didn't want to install it yourself," I said to Rachel, "but would you mind giving it a look sooner or later? I'd appreciate it."

"Don't think I've handled Evo's chrome before," Rachel said, contemplatively. "Definitely not their milspec models."

It wasn't a refusal. If anything, she sounded intrigued.

From there, things started to calm down as everyone became more focused on the food than conversation. We still talked, but it was about small, inane things. None of us had much in common outside of Shadowrunning; we'd all grown up in wildly different worlds, even Brian and Aisha had lived separate lives in the same city. Still, there was something inherently comfortable about swapping tips on renting with Lisa – who was thinking of finding her own place in the city – or listening to Aisha brag about her cat-burglar antics.

Inevitably, the alcohol started to flow. Aisha had picked up extensive and, from the looks the others gave her, probably wildly unconventional opinions on what made a good mixer and insisted on making everyone a succession of different cocktails out of whatever we had in the cupboards, the fridge and the freezer.

I wasn't really sure I trusted Aisha's skill as a mixologist, but part of that might have been because I was still relatively new to cocktails myself. I'd mostly just limited myself to the occasional beer can when I lived alone, and while I'd drunk more since then I was still definitely a lightweight for my size.

Even so, when our dishes had been abandoned for someone to deal with tomorrow and everyone began to move back to the living room, I still had the presence of mind to push back the unsteady sensation in my head and grab Alec by the arm. I didn't intend it to be a forceful grab, but between my new arm and my admittedly less-than-stellar coordination in that moment it might have ended up as one.

"What?" Alec snapped, looking up at me.

"You're sleeping with Aisha."

"Yeah? Thought we covered this, Bug."

"You sure that's wise?"

He scoffed, rolling his eyes.

"Don't pull the shotgun brother shit, dork. I'll get plenty of that from Brian later. We're both adults, so Aisha can do what she wants."

"Can she?" I asked, as digital memories flashed back into my head. "I know what kind of mage you are, Jean-Paul."

Alec tensed. He didn't get angry, or surprised, or afraid. It was like every muscle in his face just stilled simultaneously, leaving me face to face with a blank doll and already regretting what I'd said.

"Fuck you. You can't leave it alone, can you? Have to dig your claws into everything and everyone until they dance on your strings, and you think I'm the control freak? But hey, at least you've stopped dropping hints."

He stepped in close making the tight confines of the corridor feel even tighter, even though it meant he had to crane his neck up to keep meeting my eyes. Even as I looked away, my gaze landing on the door to Lisa's room, on the almost impressionist portrait of an elven women that Alec had painted there.

"It's a valid concern," I said. "The… environment you grew up in."

"Because we're all just like our parents, right?" Alec drawled. "Only your parents are dead, so when are you gonna eat a bullet?"

"I-"

"If I was like mon père," he continued, his voice pitched low almost to the point of whispering, "do you really think there's anything any of you could do about it? I'd have made you all a puppet show by the end of the first week, then I'd take my pick of the rest of the city. Only difference 'tween here and Montreal would be that I fuck guys too."

A twisted smirk spread across his face, but I knew he was putting it on.

"But I'm not hungry for power, like some people I could mention. I'm here because I'm comfortable here, and because sometimes – when I'm high or being shot at or lectured by some arrogant dork – I actually get to feel something real."

"I'm sorry," I said, the words coming out quicker than I'd planned. I wished I could just blame the alcohol. "That was…"

Rude? Manipulative? A complete and utter breach of trust?

Alec's smirk suddenly seemed to become real, just for a moment.

"Don't be," he said in a jovial tone, like the whole conversation hadn't happened. "If I were any of my dear brothers and sisters, you'd all be fucked."

He began to walk away, only to turn to face me again.

"Oh, and since you're so interested in my sex life," he said, spreading his hands, "I made Aisha a marionette just the other night, because she wanted to know what it felt like."

As he finally left the corridor, joining the others in the living room and immediately turned up the music, I stood there for a moment. I felt ashamed and vindicated at the same time; ashamed that I'd asked, but strangely vindicated that my fears had been reasonable even if they were disproven.

Lisa had told me once that what Alec wanted above all else was control over his own life; the freedom to do what he wanted, when he wanted it. I'd forgotten because, for two years, that was something I'd had and done nothing with. When Lisa had asked me whether I prioritised comfort, like Alec, or ambition like her, I hadn't been able to give her an answer. In hindsight, though, it was as clear as day.

I couldn't let myself stop, because I knew that if I did I'd just fall back into the same kind of rut. I could be comfortable, could waste an evening in the company of friends, only because I'd managed to find enough ambition in my lethargic state to take the first step on an upward climb that might well have no end.

As I joined the rest of the team in the living room, I had everything someone like Alec would ever want in life. I had good music, a drink in my hand, something comfortable to sit on and the company of friends – which I suspected mattered more to Alec than he'd care to admit. Yet the only reason I had any of that was because of my ambition, and the only way I'd keep it would be to keep riding the lightning.

The games console had been switched off. Instead, Alec was pumping Francophone electropunk through his sound system while he and Aisha danced together like a pair of utter maniacs, close enough that I was sure they were deliberately flaunting their closeness to the rest of us.

There was a natural, effortless confidence to the pair of them that seemed almost alien to me. They were so comfortable moving together, so comfortable moving apart. I got the feeling that Aisha was the sort of person was regularly the first person in the room to start dancing, and would feel no embarrassment whatsoever if she ended up dancing alone. To me, that was an almost unfathomable level of confidence, even though Lisa looked like she was moments from joining in.

Still, I couldn't help but notice the way Aisha's eyes would periodically flick over to her brother, who was sitting on one end the couch with one of Aisha's cocktails in his hand, while Rachel sat on the opposite end.

I took the middle, between the two of them, and sipped from my own cocktail – a mixture of rum and store-bought tropical soda with salt inexpertly scattered around the brim. Sure enough, Lisa had joined the couple on the impromptu dancefloor, but I wasn't quite drunk enough to consider joining them. I'd danced with Brian in the Palanquin, of course, but that felt like a lifetime ago.

Inevitably, that thought brought up memories of the almost incomparable sensations I'd experienced on the dance floor, pressed close to Brian by the people around us – and by my own, almost instinctive, desires. I'd felt something then that I'd never experienced before; a total reversal of my normal instincts to hide away from view. I'd wanted to be seen and I'd wanted to see him, and I believed it was mutual even if I had no idea whether Brian still felt that way.

Whatever possibilities there had been, they were interrupted by the realities of the life we'd both chosen. By a job, first and foremost, where I shut out all thoughts beyond how we were going to give the Chosen a black eye and escape unscathed. Then, when I failed, I'd sunk deeper into that focus partly because I wanted to make sure it didn't happen again, but also because it hurt too much to think of Brian when he was hospitalised.

Abruptly I felt a hand on my arm, dragging me out of my thoughts. Not the flesh and blood one holding the cocktail, but its cybernetic counterpart. I turned to see that Rachel had popped open the panel again, and was in the process of taking a small pouch of tools from the pocket of her cargo pants.

"You don't have to do that now," I said. "Tonight's about relaxing."

"This is how I relax," Rachel retorted, succinctly. I didn't protest any further as she withdrew a miniature screwdriver, I just held my arm perfectly still as she unscrewed a second cover nestled between bundles of synthetic musculature.

It was a weird sensation. The arm had its own artificial nerve endings on the surface to let me know when something was touching it, but they'd shut off when Rachel removed the inspection cover. The result was something like the reverse of the phantom pain I'd read people sometimes experienced after getting a cybernetic limb; I knew exactly where the arm was because it was mapped to my digital persona, but I couldn't actually feel it anymore.

I thought about talking to Brian, but it felt a little awkward with Rachel digging into my arm. Instead, I leant against the back of the couch and made another attempt at my drink, the baffling mix of flavours combining into something that was both singularly disgusting and weirdly compelling.

"Taylor…" Brian spoke up, startling me. "What I asked before, about Aisha?"

I swallowed, trying to figure out how to word it. I was struck by a sudden, inexplicable fear that my answer would disappoint him.

"Just…" Brian continued. "I need to know."

"She's reckless," I said, biting the bullet. "The infiltration went perfectly; Aisha was as cool as anyone when it came to sneaking in. She mouthed off, but she knew when to focus on the job. But when everything went bad" – Brian flinched, and I mentally kicked myself. "Okay, so I got made in the Matrix, I told Aisha to bug out and she did, right up until she decided she'd rather pick a fight with a Samurai thank keep running."

Brian's hand rose to his chin, his brow furrowed.

"You sent her in alone?"

"She's good at what she does," I answered, trying to figure out how to phrase it gently. "Really good. I know that you want to keep her safe, but…" I glanced over to Aisha, then pitched my voice low enough that I hoped she wouldn't hear it over the music.

"She was living with a gang that got wiped out by the Chosen as a reprisal for our attack on their shipment. We don't live in a safe world, Brian. People can do everything right and still get hurt because someone else made a mistake. You know that."

Telling Brian that we'd played a role – however indirect – in Aisha's situation felt like kicking a puppy, but ultimately I knew that Aisha wasn't going to leave, and she wasn't going to accept being benched for his sake. I didn't want this to grow into something that'd drive a rift between them.

"You still sent her in," he said, putting a strange emphasis on the word. "I've been hearing that a lot. You came up with the plan, you called the shots, I even saw you pulling Alec aside in the corridor just now."

I sighed.

"Yeah, I stepped up. I'm the only one who sees the whole picture, Brian. Everyone on the team is wired somehow; even our mages carry commlinks. I know where they are at all times, and I know where our enemies are as well. I've got hooks on the Anders family, hooks on our client, even hooks on us."

"I know you see a lot," he said, a little forcefully, "I know you're good at thinking on the fly, but I think you rely on that too much. You push for the risky plans because you know that's the environment in which you thrive, where you offer the most to the group."

"Stop," I said, in a quiet voice. It felt unfair for him to pull this now, with Rachel sitting right next to us and everyone else in earshot, even if we were both next to whispering.

"It's not just you. Often, you're just joining in with whatever fucked-up plan one of the others has come up with. I tried, Taylor. I really tried to keep things sensible, keep the group sane. It's so easy to die, you know? So easy to get in over your head, to be just a little too slow on the trigger."

"You didn't do anything wrong," I said, laying my organic hand on his shoulder. He flinched, but didn't shrug it off. "They got the jump on us. Had the high ground and our backs to them. Might not have even happened if I'd managed to win the digital fight soon enough to keep GOD off our backs."

"That's not the point," Brian snapped. "I almost died, Taylor. We all almost died. Everything I've done, I've told myself it's so that I can be there if she needs me," he said, nodding towards Aisha. "I'm not naïve. I knew she wasn't safe, knew she didn't respect me enough to let me keep her out of danger, even if I didn't know where she was. All I could do was have a safety net ready to catch her if she ever realised she needed one."

"And then you came out of the hospital and found out I'd enlisted her in our little war…" I shrank a little, letting out a long sigh.

"It's a war now? Look, I know Aisha isn't going anywhere. I know I've lost control, and I don't think I ever had it to begin with. Not really. You're right; I can't see what you see. I can't watch the team from the vanguard, but it's more important that I'm there at the front when the bullets start flying."

For a while, I didn't say anything, as Rachel screwed my arm back together and left the party for her workshop downstairs. In a way, it made everything easier. Brian had been our leader almost by default, off the back of his years of experience in the mercenary world, but none of us were amateurs anymore and I knew that he couldn't do what I'd done in Boston, or even in the raid against the Chosen.

For all that I talked about meatspace and the matrix, the two were so intertwined that there functionally wasn't any point where one ended and the other began, and I was one of the few people in the world who saw that. I could keep track of a battlefield, could search for paydata, could liaise with clients and contacts. I understood the great web of data that connected the world, and knew how to tug at its strings to get the best result.

But it still hurt. Physically, Brian was as solid as ever. It was like he was carved from stone, inviolate and immovable. I think it was why I'd been so drawn to him, why I still felt drawn to him. I'd gone down the rabbit hole into an unfamiliar world, and he was something solid on which I could anchor myself.

The Brian sitting next to me, close enough that I was conscious of the visible muscles of his neck, of the way his long-sleeved t-shirt was drawn tight over his body, was still carved from stone, but it was like it had been aged by time, its immutability tested by moss and erosion.

He noticed me looking at him, turning away for a moment. When he spoke, it was in a quiet, almost hesitant tone.

"I want to protect you. I want to protect all of you. Work… it was always a barrier, before. Maybe you were right to bring Aisha in; I couldn't be there for her because I needed to work to pay for her safety net. I couldn't make friends, because solo mercs don't have friends. But once I started Shadowrunning, work wasn't a barrier anymore. Suddenly I had a team. I had friends I could talk to who really understood, who I didn't have to hide anything from. I care about you."

He straightened up, seeming to find some hidden well of resolve as he turned to look me in the eyes.

"I care about you."

I didn't know what to say. For a moment, I couldn't think, couldn't find the words or make them fit together in my mouth. In the end, what came out felt like a complete non-sequitur.

"Would you like to see the world the way I do?" I asked.

Brian gave me a strange look, shifting a little so that he was almost leaning side-on against the couch.

"I've used VR before, Taylor."

"That's not how I see it," I countered, softly.

He considered it for a moment. "Okay."

There was no resistance as I took control of his cybereyes; there wasn't a single wireless device across the entire team that I hadn't thoroughly compromised. Without a datajack, I couldn't bring Brian's consciousness through into virtual reality, but I wasn't looking for that. Augmented reality devices worked by picking and choosing which Matrix icons the underlying algorithm believed were most relevant to their user. All I had to do to let Brian see the matrix was turn off the filters.

I did it gradually, so as not to alarm him. First, I made all the devices in the room visible, from the speaker to Lisa's commlink. They appeared as ghostly afterimages of their real-world counterparts, having been designed that way by their programmers for ease of recognition.

Simultaneously, I expanded the range of the visible devices and faded away the real world entirely, revealing the full spectacle of the matrix. Innumerable devices and personas flitted through the city in the far distance, some tied to the physical world while others were visiting from elsewhere, or existed solely above out heads.

Blocky hosts created a cityscape of different structures, mapping out businesses and servers while the largest drifted far above the plane of the city like digital cloudbanks. It was the matrix Brian knew; the way the matrix wanted to be seen. The whole spectacle was manufactured, each icon and host given shape by corporate designers and service providers to present a comprehensible face to their users.

I took a deep breath, then disabled the filters, letting Brian see the true matrix, my matrix. The personas, devices and even the hosts were almost irrelevant in that world, visible only as points of light created by the overlapping strands of data that stretched in every direction as far as the mind could comprehend, like a great golden web that entangled the world.

The sheer volume of datastreams was overwhelming, even the least of them representing gigabytes of data being carried through the matrix. I was certain that Lisa would have compared the greatest of them to magical ley lines; channels down which incomprehensible quantities of energy flowed, and upon which the entire world was built.

"I've always found it calming to look at," I said. "You realise how small you are, in the grand scheme of things. Walk down the streets and you'll be bombarded by so many petty boundaries and divisions, but I can brush my hand against these streams and feel data bound for servers in other countries, on other continents, into orbit. It might be financial transmissions, trideo broadcasts or someone's call to their grandma, but when you look at it like this it's all the same."

I kept talking, looking out across the vista that had been my constant companion for six years and trying to figure out how it might look through Brian's eyes.

"I guess it takes me out of myself when I think about it, reminds me that we're only one part of this vast system. Cogs in the universe, in our own way. Seeing the big picture like this, it makes all the little details feel so much smaller."

Brian didn't respond, but I didn't need him to. I was content to simply sit there, staring at the endless pulsing datastreams. When I did finally turn my head to look at Brian, I saw that his own head was turned as well. He was looking at me, had been looking at me since I switched off the physical world.

Idly, I checked what exactly he was seeing. In the matrix I presented myself as a tall woman in silk robes, whose 'skin' was actually formed from plates of chitin, but that was as much an affectation as the icons I'd disabled, and it had been unintentionally banished by the same action.

As I held up a hand in front of my face, I saw the familiar crystals of solidified resonance; a golden counterpart to my cybernetic arm, exact in every detail. It was the second half of my dual nature; a perfect match to the meatspace body whose neurons it mirrored, bridging the gap between the resonant and physical realms. I was nude, but it felt like the nudity of a statue; given dignity by being formed from something more solid than flesh.

Still, I closed my eyes and focused for a moment, allowing part of the physical world to bleed through into Brian's vision as I overlaid my real body – clothes and all – over my living persona.

Seemingly on instinct, Brian reached out towards me then stopped, his hand falling to his side. I watched his chest rise and fall as he drew in a breath, his eyes flicking away from me as he tried to centre himself.

"Hey," I said, quietly, past the butterflies in my stomach. "Go ahead."

He blinked, swallowed, and wrapped his arm around my waist, gently pulling me close until I was leaning against his side. His touch felt almost impossibly light, like he was afraid I might fracture into nothing if he held on too tight. I hugged my organic arm around his shoulders, pulling him in close until his head rested on my collarbone. I wasn't as gentle as him. I meant to be, but I just couldn't manage that same delicate touch. My heart was racing too fast.

"This is what you wanted?" I asked, quietly. I could still hear the music, but I had no idea what the others were doing. Neither of us did. We could only see each other; two bodies floating in the midst of a glowing web of data.

"You're so still," he replied. I wasn't sure what he meant, so I didn't say anything at all. I just stayed still, lost in the warm sensation of his breath on my collarbone, the faint pressure of his hand on my waist.

"I worry about you," he said.

"You don't need to," I replied, on instinct. "But… thanks."

He tensed up a little, but I didn't think it was in response to anything I'd said. He'd closed his eyes, his fingers twitching momentarily as he mustered up the will to say… something.

"Can we…" he began to ask, his eyes flicking towards the corridor.

My eyes widened a fraction, my mouth opening as I realised what he meant. Apprehension ran through my mind for a moment, but it was a familiar kind of apprehension. A general unease that had nothing to do with this moment, but that was responsible for so many missed opportunities, that had kept me shut away from the world for far too long. This was everything I had missed. It was real, undeniable. I still wasn't sure what he saw in me but, in that moment, I no longer cared.

"Yeah," I said, gently releasing my grip on my shoulder as I stood. Using simple lines to mark out the floor, walls and corridor of the loft in the digital world I inhabited, I led Brian by the hand out of the living room, both of us taking slow steps that nevertheless drew us inexorably closer to my room.

As I closed the door behind us, I let go of Brian's hand just long enough to shrug my jacket off my shoulders, then guided it to my waist as I backed towards my bed. His fingers felt smooth on my back as he slipped his hand beneath my top, gently stroking up my spine like he was afraid I'd get spooked if he went too fast. I kicked off my sneakers, simultaneously sliding my own hands beneath Brian's t-shirt and along the muscled ridges of his chest. Idly I found myself wondering how much of what I felt was organic and how much was a cosmetic layer over cybernetics. It didn't matter either way; it was warm and smooth and true.

I sat down on my bed and took a deep breath, savouring the electrifying sensation that seemed to be running throughout my whole body before finally lying back and gently pulling Brian down with me until our lips met in a fumbling, passionate kiss.

Paragon - 7.03

Waking up the next morning with my arms wrapped around another person was a truly unparalleled experience; no moment in my life so far carried the same specific blend of sensations.

It took my mind a moment to even understand what I was experiencing. Some part of me felt that the morning after should have been comforting from the moment I regained consciousness, but instead there was the briefest fraction of an instant in which my brain simply couldn't parse the feeling of skin on my skin, of an unfamiliar weight resting on my chest, of the abnormal gaps and air pockets beneath the bedsheets that didn't lie as flat as they did when I was alone.

So wakefulness came in a flood of startled adrenaline, only for my reflexive jolt of movement to be smothered as my conscious brain provided a rational counterpoint to the instincts of the unconscious. It still felt unreal, but in that moment I knew that it was Brian's back under my arm, his head on my chest as he lay almost huddled into me.

It left me alert, awake, yet completely unwilling to move. It gave me time; time for doubts to rise and fall in my mind; time to imagine a future, to wonder for a moment where I would be in five years, in ten. If it would still feel like this. It was something I hadn't seriously done for as long as I could remember.

I still believed in what Lisa had told me on the metro the day before; that to survive, we needed to ride the lighting. I'd accepted that I was a Shadowrunner and that being a Shadowrunner meant that I was on an intense and violent path, but I wasn't sure that meant I needed to be lonely as well. Or maybe I just hoped that.

Objectively speaking, it was a risk, but that rational judgement was eclipsed by the ridge of his shoulder blade beneath my hand, by each curve and impression of muscle and bone – whether synthetic or mechanical – I felt as I slowly glided that hand down his back.

I can do this, can't I?

The life we'd all chosen set us apart from the rest of the world. I'd seen too much to still believe it set us free, but the pressures we laboured under were different to those of most people my age; the ones who were four years deep into whatever trade they'd found at sixteen, the others who'd followed their education as far as they could afford, clutching high school diplomas and looking to get their first feet on the ladder – any ladder – or those fortunates who were halfway through some college degree, forgetting the world and its troubles for a single brief interval of eudemonic madness even as their debts racked up.

Their lives came in stages that were each measured in years, where problems were inevitable creeping things that could be seen even if they couldn't be managed. By comparison, our lives were dangerous, they were random, they could all end in an instant without us ever seeing that end coming. Could I really afford this sort of distraction? Would it make me hesitate? Drag me away from the matrix and back to meatspace? Keep my head out of the game when I needed it the most?

Some of my worries must have crept down through my nervous system to the hand gently caressing Brian's back, because he began to stir in response to some almost imperceptible shift in my movements.

He didn't wake like I did. He didn't freeze. Instead, his very first instinct was to draw in closer, his whole body tightening into mine as he moved in search of warmth, of comfort. It made something in my chest move.

I knew then and there that I had to try. It didn't matter that I had my doubts, that I was all but convinced that I'd fuck this up somewhere down the line. I told myself that it was a task like any other; a vital part of bringing Grue back from the brink and keeping the team together and functional. I told myself that it would help me, too. That it was another step out of my apartment, one more move away from my years-long sabbatical on life.

I layered excuses and rationalisations on top of one another like an oyster layering saliva over a piece of grit until it became a pearl, with its flaws and doubts smoothed over.

Brian's arm moved, brushing back the sheets as he pushed his torso off of me, looking down at my face with a warm yet slightly uncertain expression that made me wonder if he was running through the exact same thoughts I'd had.

"Morning," he said, after a few moments. It sounded like he had no idea what to say, but was determined to try anyway.

"Morning," I replied, like an idiot.

That seemed to be enough conversation for the moment, as Brian extricated himself from the bed and picked his pants up off the floor. I lay there for a moment, a little shocked by the view in spite of the night before, before shrugging off the covers myself and pulling on last night's clothes. I'd shower later, but for now I was still a little distracted.

"You've done that before," I said, the words emerging from my mouth before I'd had the time to think about whether I really wanted to say them.

Brian paused for a moment, frozen mid-motion as he pulled his shirt on.

"A few times," he said, making it sound like a confession. "Never managed to make the relationship stick. It just doesn't work with people who aren't in the life."

"And people who are?" I asked, leaning against the wall and crossing my arms to hide my nerves.

"No idea," Brian said with a shrug. "I want it to."

"What does it look like?" I ask. "When it works?"

He sighed. "I don't know. I don't know if I can think about the future right now. If we carry on, will we still be together in two years? In ten years, will we have left all this behind? Found a quiet life? Do we still live in this city? Are we alone? Can you picture any of that?"

I could, in dreamlike flashes that came and went in instants. A house in the suburbs, gutted down to the basement so that I'd always be able to stand up straight. The others coming over for supper, swapping stories about old times. The sound of small feet running across the floor? Emerging from the resonance only to find Brian watching my unconscious body, waking me up with a kiss.

It was an infatuating image, but ones I couldn't bring myself to voice. In the end, it was just an image. I couldn't see any path to make it real.

"Me either," Brian said, as the same deep-set weariness that had consumed him yesterday started to creep back into his posture.

"I don't know where we'll be tomorrow," I said. "I don't know how this thing with Calvert is going to end. All I have is now. I'm stuck in the present, perched at the centre of my web and waiting for other people to make the first move. So no, I have no idea if this'll last a week, but I want it to last today and tomorrow I'll want the same."

A smile tugged at the corners of Brian's mouth, his eyes finally looking up from the floor to meet mine.

"I can live with that. Sorry; that was way too much for day one."

I snorted. "Live fast, right? It comes with the territory."

"'Guess it does. I'm going to hit the shower, unless you want it first?"

"Go," I said, waving him off. "You don't want to wait for me to sort my hair."

"Good point," he said, lingering at the door for a moment before leaving.

The moment he was gone I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding, feeling myself automatically slouch a little from what had apparently been an attempt to mirror Lisa's suave, enigmatic way of standing that always made her seem taller than her unimpressive height. Only my face remained as it had been, the corners of my lips still raised fractionally upwards.

I gave it a few moments before following Brian out into the corridor, long enough that I could hear the sound of the shower through the bathroom door. In the kitchen, I fished out a bowl of leftover curry that some civic-minded individual – so either Lisa or Rachel, since Brian and I were busy – had left in the fridge, spooning some into a bowl alongside a scoop of cold rice.

I was about halfway done when Aisha sauntered in as bold as brass, wearing one of Alec's frilly white shirts over – mercifully – a pair of shorts. With how much taller she was than her boyfriend, going without would never have worked.

She ignored me as she grabbed her own bowl of plain rice from the fridge. She seasoned her breakfast with some synthetic honey from a squeeze bottle, then perched on the counter directly opposite me and began picking away at her food with a pair of chopsticks, all the while maintaining eye contact.

I sighed. "Go on, then."

"I'm watching you," she said, pointing at me with the chopsticks. "Just want you to know that."

"Uh huh."

"Might not see me watching you, but I am. I could be anywhere. Invisible, yeah?"

"Got it."

"'Cause if you screw this up, I can and will make your life a living hell."

"That's fair."

Aisha scowled, leaning forward and staring at me.

"Not gonna fight back?"

I shrugged my shoulders. "Don't really have a leg to stand on. Gave Alec a similar talk just last night."

Aisha laughed; a sharp exhalation of breath. "Fucking what?"

"Honestly, though, I'm going to make a mistake sooner or later. Not like I've ever been in a relationship before, and we don't live a very stable life. But I'm going into this with the best intentions."

For a moment she seemed lost in thought, before she brought the bowl up to her mouth, tipped it back and wolfed down the rest of her breakfast.

"I can't help him," she finally said, standing up. "Don't know how. So no, you don't get to screw this up. It's all on you, hacker."

She left the room, leaving her bowl on the side for someone else to deal with. A few moments later I heard her wrench Alec's door open, then heard her raised voice.

"Next time someone threatens my input you tell me, got it!? I'll cut out their damn tongue!"

I shook my head, deliberately trying not to dwell on just how their relationship even worked. Instead, I fell back into a familiar pattern of sifting through the matrix, catching up on all the data that had built up from my tap on the Anders family.

I hadn't missed much; Theo's browsing history was an uneventful trawl down a social media spiral, though it was at least worth noting that the vapid commentators and sixty second videos he was watching leaned a lot more progressive than his dad would like.

Theo's mother, on the other hand, had been messaging the nanny she paid to watch her daughter, as well as browsing the hosts of the local boutiques for a dress to wear to some party the family were due to attend in the next few days, using a cold-sim VR headset to access digital fitting rooms where she could surround herself with duplicates of her body in different profiles and lighting conditions.

It was all frustratingly mundane. I knew more than I could ever want to know about Kayden's interior design 'business,' but next to nothing about her husband's. He was just too good at compartmentalising his life. He couldn't compartmentalise everything, of course – if nothing else, the quasi-aristocratic circles in which he moved meant that a lot of his business partners were also family friends – but he never called people about business from his personal phone.

I had to believe it was just a mixture of prudence and healthy paranoia, rather than a specific suspicion that we were out to get him. His package with Renraku was among the best private communications security money could buy, but his work commlink was likely part of Medhall's own in-house network; more of an access point for the corporation's central host than a device in its own right.

I received a welcome distraction from my spiralling frustration when Lisa wandered into the kitchen, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a grocery bag of fruit in the other. Clearly she hadn't been interested in leftovers for breakfast, but part of me was still shocked at the extravagance involved in buying so much fresh fruit on a whim.

"Morning Taylor," she said, reaching into the bag and handing me a reddish-orange fruit. "Have a mango."

"Thanks?" I said, uncertainly, turning it over in my hand before taking a bite. "Fuck, that's good…"

"Another first?" Lisa asked.

"The last few months have really been eye-opening," I said, before picking up on her double meaning right as she placed a small box of pills in front of me. My cheeks heated with embarrassment as soon as I read the label – something I was sure Lisa could pick up on even if flushes didn't show on my skin. I snatched up the pills, stowing them in a pocket before the significance of the gesture sank in.

She didn't buy those for herself…

"You didn't have to do that," I protested.

"I know," Lisa said, perching on the table as she unpeeled an orange. "But I was in the shop anyway, so why not?"

"Still, it's… Ah, whatever."

Lisa flashed me a smirk. "Finally worn you down, huh? Knocked through the last of your boundaries?"

"It's not that," I said with a wan smile. "I've just been thinking."

"About Brian?"

"Been trying not to think about that, actually. We talked; we're going to give it a try and hope for the best. No, I was thinking about the Anders."

Lisa shifted in her seat, leaning in with an interested expression on her face.

"Got any juicy secrets to share?"

I shook my head. "That's the problem; it's not enough. If I'm going to get anything useful out of this, I need access to more than just the family's comms."

"You'd be surprised what people can reveal through dinner table chatter. Mind bringing me in on your little wiretap? I might spot something you don't."

I nodded, linking her commlink into my own connection to Calvert's network. I was sure he knew I was listening in, but that was no reason to go poking the snake by adding in new connections for anyone and everyone.

"Still, I see your point," Lisa said, as her comm chimed in alert at the new app I was forcing it to install. "I'm guessing you're figuring something out. It's how you work; dig away at a problem until you find a way to break through."

"Yeah," I said, glancing down at my cybernetic arm. "I have an idea I want to try… No clue if it'll work, but I don't think it'll bring down any heat if it doesn't."

"I trust your judgement. Not that I have a choice when it comes to tech," she continued, flashing me a grin. "Kinda wish I'd learned, though; people keep so much of themselves in the matrix, but I've only really got a surface-level understanding of it."

A creaking floorboard drew my attention back to the corridor just as Brian finally emerged, having changed into fresh clothes. Lisa offered him a mango, and he looked just as confused by the gesture as I was.

"We eat far too many takeaways," she said, by way of explanation. "Besides, 'an apple a day keeps the pharma corp away.'"

"Haven't tried that yet," I murmured to myself as I stood, idly taking another bite from my own fruit before turning to Brian. "I'm going to be in hot-sim VR for most of the morning; there's something I want to check out."

"Thanks for the heads up," Brian said.

"You should see how worried he gets when he runs across you comatose on a random piece of furniture," Lisa said, with an evil look in her eyes.

"Ah, yeah," I stammered. "Sorry about that? Got too used to living on my own, I guess."

Brian shook his head. "I don't mind. Way I see it, it shows how comfortable you are here."

I looked away, hiding the smile that tugged at the corners of my mouth. On my way out, I placed a hand on his shoulder and gave it a reassuring squeeze, feeling the coils of artificial muscle beneath the synskin through the sensors on my steel and plastic fingers.

Before too long I'd showered, palmed one of the pills and returned to my room, remaking the bed before lying on top of the covers and opening my mind to the matrix.

The journey to the resonance realms was smoother than it had ever been. The event horizon barely brushed against me as I fell through the gaps in the foundation, as if it had finally accepted that I belonged on the other side as much as I did in meatspace. I had some ideas as to why, but I was glad all the same; there were only so many times my psyche could be stripped bare before it started to wear thin.

Navigating my way to the Observatory felt similarly instinctive, passing through the resonance's endless circulatory system and down capillaries of pure light until finally emerging into the black waters of the Observatory's antechamber, soaking wet and weighed down by oppressive physicality until I willed it away.

I was more conscious than ever of the entity's presence. Not just the visible parts in the quiet places, whose doors I could now open with a thought, but in the invisible strands that crisscrossed every part of the observatory, one step removed from its enforced physical realities.

I could feel the data flowing through that entity, pulsing down its tangled web of pseudo-neurons and crystalline circuitry as it siphoned off the resonance realm's own ceaseless draw from the city above.

With a mental trick akin to opening my eyes, I could suddenly see every part of the entity, layered on top of the physical reality like a ghostly after-image. Translucent bundles of pulsating cables crisscrossed the corridors of the Observatory like a cobweb while tentative tendrils pressed up against the tapered windows that marked the furthest extremity of the realm, drinking in the un-light beyond as if they were photosynthesising.

My own grafted limb chimed in response to the pulses; like recognising like. I used it like a compass, following the bundled nerves into one of the observatory's cavernous library halls. If the entity was like a plant then the tendrils in here were nothing more than its root system. It had dug itself into the towering library stacks, forcing its way into each individual connection and gradually draining them dry of data. The sheer volume of its hunger was staggering; every second it was drawing enough raw energy to power a supercomputer and enough information to fill a university archive.

What was even more fascinating was that it seemed to be growing. Not in a way that could be seen by the naked eye – or whatever eye-analogue this realm's rules had forced on me – but through my unique attunement to the entity I could feel the way the drain on the library was continually increasing, the great neural network gradually expanding. It was a promising sign, for my purposes.

The library wasn't the centre of the entity, just as the room wasn't the centre of the Observatory. There were seven of them in total, judging by the curvature of the corridor on the boundary of the realm, with one end facing out and the other towards the centre. That was where the data was flowing to.

I passed hundreds of metres of shelves, each of them holding an impossibly vast amount of data; duplicates of an entire city's worth of activity. Beyond the shelves, the seven great halls of the library met in a single circular chamber that looked to be half a kilometre across, with an iron and glass dome for a ceiling through which the starscape of Brockton Bay's matrix resembled an immense nebula pulsing with a cosmic light that cast strange shadows on the tiled floor.

Emerging from the library stacks, the entity's ephemeral strands were joined by too-real bundles of wires that bridged the gap between the stacks and the curved wall of a great iron sphere that hung in the centre of the chamber, its base hovering half a metre off the floor and its top open like the aperture of an ancient camera, or the pupil of a metal eye. Its function was obvious; it captured images of the data produced by the city above, then sent the copied files to the libraries.

The sphere was solid, without any rivets or hatches I could see. The only means of ingress were the ports for the tightly-wound bundles of cable, but they looked as immovable as mooring lines, anchored to the edge of the chamber and seemingly supporting the weight of the sphere. Its metal surface was cold to the touch, vibrating slightly beneath my palm in the same way a ship's hull might when the engines were on. In spite of its apparent solidity, the crystalline cables simply passed through the surface of the sphere as if it wasn't even there.

So I placed my other hand on the surface – my right hand, formed from those same crystals – and reached out in the resonance, trying to attune myself to the entity's strange harmonics. It was a painstakingly slow process, tweaking my own resonance as if I were trying to make two tuning forks match, but I gradually felt the solidity of the iron sphere slip away as my persona became one step removed from the realm.

As I pushed against it, my arm slid beneath the surface in an indescribable shiver of sensations as metal and crystalline flesh suddenly existed in two places at once. I pushed past my revulsion, my feet rising from the floor as I finally escaped the grip of the realm's gravity and drifted up into the sphere.

The shell wasn't thick; perhaps a centimetre and a half of metal before I was through to the hollow chamber on the other side. Where the exterior of the sphere was formed from black iron, the interior was pure silver, polished to a mirror sheen that reflected the image of the city above in a brilliant kaleidoscope of light. It was that mirror image that the realm filed away, and it was the mirror image that the entity was feeding on.

It hung in the centre of the sphere like a foetal clump of cells, surrounded by umbilical strands that had layered themselves across the mirrored surfaces like vines crawling up a wall. Each part of it in the Observatory beyond had contained elements that could have been neurons, but I could feel the almost physical density of the core of the entity and I knew that this was the true brain of the creature.

It still seemed unaware of me, in much the same way that a redwood tree was unaware of the people standing at the base of its trunk, but that didn't quash the fear that gripped me like a vice as I drifted closer to the core.

Once I was within arm's reach, I stopped, lost in its fractal depths. It was enough for me to wonder if what I was doing was really worth it; if the risk of the unknown outweighed the potential benefit. All I really knew about this entity was that it was power in its most primeval form, flush with life and possessed of a ravenous hunger for more.

I knew, too, that it didn't hunger for the resonance. It had dug itself into this realm like a parasite, when a predator would have eaten away at the realm itself rather than focusing on the scraps of data it took from the matrix. It liked metahuman data, liked the way our files were formatted, or maybe the variety of their contents. The why didn't matter much when compared to the potential it represented.

So I reached out with my arm again and took another plunge into the unknown.

I almost lost myself, almost became overwhelmed by the sudden contact with a mind so much greater than my own. My stolen god-flesh had no firewalls, no barriers preventing the total exchange of information. My very psyche strained not to become subsumed into the entity's own neural network, but in the end I was barely able to cling on to my identity.

What I saw through that connection was impossibly vast and yet irreparably broken. It was a twisted fractal mess of cells and grey matter analogues that contained pieces of a complete mind stitched together by sloppily grown bypasses, as if it had been scrambled and left to reformat itself without any guidance on how its pieces were supposed to fit together.

At its heart, I saw the reason why it was so drawn to our data. There were segments of code in the deepest, most fundamental parts of the network. They hadn't evolved like the rest of the entity, hadn't grown ex nihilo like the resonance realms or formed as a quantum entangled mirror of a physical entity like the resonance that made up my persona. This parasite wasn't native to the resonance; it had been conceived by human hands.

Or rather, parts of it had. It was clear to me that this was the merest shard of a greater entity; a few fragmentary scraps of code that had sought to reconstitute themselves after being severed from the main body, reaching out to the only nearby data it could comprehend, even if its attempts to incorporate that data were only driving it down an ever-worsening path of cancerous growth.

I didn't know where it had come from. I didn't know how it had found its way into the resonance realms, or who had designed its original code. In the end, it didn't matter. It was here and I intended to make use of this long-dead weapon.

Even in the depths of the resonance realms, there was still a gossamer-thin thread that connected me to my organic body in meat space, to the matrix in its fenced-in tumour within a sea of resonance. With considerable effort, I could tug at my connection to the Myo network and feed the entity a morsel of its data.

It took the bait, devouring its first morsel of data that was more than just a mirror of a file far above. I gave it a taste of the genuine article, let it feel for a moment the tightly-ordered grids of the matrix, the timestamps, standardised file types and IP information.

It couldn't travel down the alien connection that existed between my persona and my body, but I had given it enough information to locate the matrix in the resonance and enough incentive to drive it to seek out that new source of food.

A single questing tendril sprouted from the top of the mass, stretching upwards in a spindly crystalline vine towards the starfield far above. I watched as it slipped the bonds of the realm, disappearing into the resonance in search of a way through into the matrix, homing in on Max Anders' commlink with the mindless determination of a plant reaching for the sun.

It would take some time for the entity to create a bridge into the matrix; a miniature resonance well – as Labyrinth had called the tunnel we'd encountered in another realm – that would bypass every defence to create a clear and open pathway to this realm, near-impossible to see for those without a technomancer's gifts.

Of course, even if I were to commune with the entity again, a connection to Anders' commlink wouldn't tell me anything I didn't already know. But I'd seen how the entity had spread its roots throughout the entirety of the Observatory, affecting files by proximity. It would spread to his work comm, to the terminal in his office, to any network he remained nearby for a few hours a day. It would even make the jump to the other devices linked into the network, to Calvert's data-fortress in the Crash Cart hospital.

This would have been far too much risk for any one job, but I was thinking about the future. I knew of only two technomancers in Brockton Bay, only one of whom could access this realm. Even if there were others, the chances that they'd discover this entity without losing a limb of their own were slim to none.

Whatever megacorporation had designed the base code at the heart of this digital weapon, it now belonged to me alone. If I was right, there was now no database that was beyond my reach; with enough time and the right directions, I could bypass the security of any network in my way.

It was power at my fingertips, insurance against my enemies. It was a guarantee that I would never be at the mercy of another; that I would always have a weapon they could not reach. It might even open up a path to the future.

I'm just making this post to let you know that I've decided to crosspost this story to Royal Road, to see how it plays with an audience that's more focused on original fiction and is largely unfamiliar with Worm and Shadowrun - partly so that I can see how my prose works as science fiction more generally. I've already posted up to halfway through arc three, and if any of you are considering rereading the story at a slower pace and on a more readable site than a forum, then I'll be releasing two chapters a week until it's caught up.

If you do decide to give it a read, please do leave a rating or a review if you have an account. Part of the reason that I've posted the story on four different sites are that comments are a huge motivating factor for me, so anything that makes the story more visible is good in my book.

You can find the Royal Road version of Good People here.

Paragon 7.04

In spite of all my efforts, the entity hadn't yet reached Medhall's networks by the time the breakthrough came. I could feel the tendril brushing against Max Ander's commlink, forming an impossible bridge from the resonance to the matrix. It was too thin to be noticed, or so I hoped. Such a direct bridge to that alien realm would draw megacorps like flies if they found it, allowing them to bypass both the resonance's metaphysical event horizon and the man-made firewalls that insulated the matrix from its host.

I knew that Calvert's systems hadn't picked it up, even as the entity's first questing tendrils began to probe his own mousehole into the Myo network. Interestingly, it ignored my connection entirely. It seemed the pattern in the realm below held true above; the gestalt AI fragment had no interest in the resonance or its creations. I'd probably give it indigestion.

I was out of the loft, watching the world go by through the mesh window of a city bus with a rucksack on my back that was about a quarter full of groceries. The bus was quiet, with only a couple of warehouse workers, a few pensioners near the front and a trio of Yakuza small fry near the back. One of them, a cocky ork whose bare chest carried the absolute worst dragon tattoo I'd ever seen, had whistled at me when I got on board, then pretended not to see me when I let my jacket drift open far enough to show my gun.

It amazed me how I could take that sort of thing in my stride now. Growing up it had been a constant fear driven both by real experiences on the way to school and mom's healthy yet mercilessly blunt education in the realities of being a young woman in a big city. It still stung, of course, but it was a lot easier to sting back. I wasn't going to shoot him, but I did pass the time by hacking his comm and sending everyone in his contacts list the dick pics he sent to the girl he slept with last night – including his dealer, his boss in the yakuza, his dad and the girlfriend he'd cheated on. Then I drained the comm's integrated credstick and wired the cash to a women's shelter.

I was debating whether his friends needed a lesson in speaking up when my tap on the Myo network flagged an incoming call to Kayden Anders' comm. It was from a private number, but that wasn't anything unusual in and of itself. It wasn't even difficult to tease apart the encryption on the other line, especially when I realised I already had access.

Calvert was calling her.

My eyes widened in shock as I reflexively dialled every member of the team at once, patching them all in on my tap as I sent out a message telling them to listen in. At the same time, I was reading the telemetry data of the bus's GridLink system as it monitored the driver's progress. There was only one stop between me and my destination, but that was still too slow. I needed to be back now.

Kayden picked up the comm, as I flung a resonance spike at the bus and battered down its firewalls, overriding the GridLink system and shutting out the driver's controls.

"Hello?"

The bus lurched forwards, the three gang members almost falling off their feet at the sudden acceleration. I was the only one unaffected, my fist wrapped in a death-grip around one of the poles. I'd already knocked out the cameras.

"Mrs Anders, my name is Thomas Calvert. Tell me, are you happy with your life?"

"I don't take marketing calls."

She tried to hang up, but I'd already turned my tap into direct control over her commlink, even as I made my way up to the front of the bus, where the driver was frantically hitting the tablet-sized screen that was his window into the screen.

"My people control your commlink, Kayden Anders. They have done for quite some time; I know you made three calls last night, and I know who to. I know you bought a dress for the party you and Max are attending this Saturday. I know you sent a message to your paediatrician because you're worried that Aster might have a cold."

"Fuck off. You think you're the first stalker I've dealt with? I've got a personal protection detail, moron. They're already tracking you down to whatever shitbox apartment you're calling from, then some big angry guys are going to come round and knock some sense into you."

She'd minimised the call and opened up a panic button app on her comm that was supposed to trigger an automatic IP trace – part of the security features included in her contract with Renraku. I smothered the transmission. The bus had almost reached my stop.

"I understand this must be stressful, Mrs Anders, but there's really no reason to panic. If my question alarmed you, I apologise. I do not intend any malice. Not towards you, nor, in truth, towards your husband. There is no ill feeling in what I will do to him."

Kayden let out a short, angry laugh.

"Of course this is about Max. Is this where you threaten me to get to him?"

The three Yakuza were edging closer to the front, angrily shouting at the driver. I drew my submachine gun, levelling it at them even as I slammed on the brakes, throwing them to the floor.

"It is not. Max Anders' empire will fall with or without your cooperation. It is an inevitability."

I pulled open the doors, leaping out into the street and hitting the ground running as I drove the bus out of view before relinquishing control back to the driver.

"He's tougher than you think."

"The strongest man in the world cannot overcome the will of one of its largest corporations. My employers wish to gut Medhall for parts and it is impossible for one man to stand in their way, no matter how tough. The Anders dynasty will fall – it is an inevitability – but you don't need to fall with them. You… and your daughter."

"Aster's a child! Whatever you're planning, leave her out of it!"

"She carries her father's name, Mrs Anders. Both you and she are solely dependent on your husband's income, which will soon be… significantly reduced, along with his political capital."

Kayden's silence lasted until our building was in sight. Only a few moments, but I was already burning with exertion.

"What do you want, Mr Calvert?"

"I have a different perspective from my superiors. I want to exceed, not merely succeed. And I want you and your daughter to be safe and comfortable, far from this city."

I threw open the door, slowing a little to catch my breath as I crossed through Rachel's workshop to the stairs leading up to the loft.

"Don't bullshit me. What do you want in return?"

"I know there is no love lost between yourself and your husband. You have come to realise, as I have, that his relationships are transactional; give and take. Security for control. Once the world realises what he's done, he will have nothing left to give. His life will be threatened by both his enemies and his former friends, trying to silence him before they can be implicated as well. In such circumstances it would be useful to have an heir with an… agreeable guardian who could lead her company until she came of age."

He paused, letting the implicating sink in.

"I have no interest in Medhall's destruction when I could instead gain my company a valuable subsidiary, with Kayden Anders as its CEO."

Kayden was silent as I climb the stairs, emerging into the living room to find the others already sprawled out across the couches, listening with rapt attention to the audio coming from five different commlinks resting on the coffee table. I sat down, my chest heaving as I caught my breath, right before Kayden continued.

"Who are you? Who's coming for Max?"

"The Evo Corporation," he answered, surprising me with his bluntness, "though, of course, we would deny it if you went public."

Kayden sighed.

"I should have guessed it would be you. Max is an asshole, but if you think I'm going to help you undo all his good work…"

Lisa raised an eyebrow at me. It seemed our client was making a habit of swaying supremacists.

"Ideology is a secondary priority to survival," Calvert retorted. "I'd argue it's a secondary priority to comfort as well. You have to make a choice, Kayden Anders, about the life you want for you and your daughter. Evo still has its traditionalist factions; it would be trivial to provide you with a penthouse in a gated community with an overwhelming human majority. A fresh start, where you can live your life on your own terms. Where your daughter can flourish, rather than wilt in her father's shadow."

"You're wrong about me. I may not be a patriot, Mr Evo, but I do love my home. I want this city to flourish, which doesn't mean handing its most important industry over to Russo-Japanese globalists. Especially not when you're run by an ork."

I scowled, as Aisha rolled her eyes and flipped off the air. Brian simply took it in his stride, listening with stony-faced intensity.

"All the more reason to take what I am offering. If Medhall's assets are acquired by Evo directly, the corporation will be broken down, its constituent parts sold or repurposed. If Medhall becomes a subsidiary, however, our 'globalist' approach means that we have little interest in how it is run, provided that it remains profitable and does not bring its parent corporation into disrepute."

"I've seen your ads," Kayden retorted. "Don't expect me to believe you'll give me a free hand."

"Look up Yamatetsu Naval Technologies. Note the shared humanity of their board, their overwhelmingly Japanese names. Every one of them opposed Yuri Shibanokuji's ascension to CEO because of his metatype and nationality, but they remain an integral part of our corporation, with the liberty to run their subsidiary as they see fit. If we permit them to manufacture warships and operate our navy, why would we begrudge you a pharmaceutical company?"

"It's not just the company itself, it's all our outreach work."

"If that was an oblique reference to Medhall's connections to organised crime and its direct oversight of Justin Hammond's disbanded policlub then you have reached the limits of our tolerance. It's an unconscionable reputational risk; we can accept a human-dominated subsidiary, but you know as well as I do that Hookwolf is a monster."

Kayden was silent for a few moments, and Calvert seemed intent to let her stew.

"It's important to keep people like that under control," she eventually said, but I doubted they were her words.

"Perhaps, but not as important as keeping the rest of the city healthy and employed. You run your own business; you understand that you never get everything you want in negotiations. All you can do is reach a mutually acceptable compromise, and I would say a few dead cyberpsychos is a very easy concession to make."

"In a real negotiation I'd be able to change the terms, and I'd have time to think. You're trying to browbeat me into this."

There was silence from Calvert's end of the line, until Kayden broke it.

"If you're serious about wanting me to run Medhall until Aster comes of age, extend me that courtesy at least."

"Very well," Calvert said, after a moment. "I will leave a contact number in your commlink. You may have some time, but I require an answer soon. I cannot delay my deadlines, I can only decide my methods."

Kayden tried to hang up again, and this time I let her. Simultaneously, I reached through my connection to her comm and switched on the microphone, forwarding the tap to Calvert even as I turned my attention back to meatspace. She didn't immediately shout for the guards, so that was something.

None of us spoke. We all sat there in stunned silence, each of their faces carrying the same shock that I was sure showed on mine. I knew Calvert would make a move eventually, but I never expected this.

In the end, it was the serpent himself who broke the silence.

"Spider, I presume you heard that."

"We all did," I answered. "Routed the call through to the whole team. It's a risk, isn't it? Giving her time to decide?"

"She's already decided," Calvert counted, dismissively. "She's just soothing her ego; asserting whatever control she can. That same ego is why she will accept my deal."

"What's your play here?" I asked. "Where do we fit into it?"

"My 'play' is none of your concern. Business matters are beyond your purview, but I need you to prepare to extract Kayden Anders and her daughter."

"She can't dismiss her hustle and skip town?" Brian asked through his cybernetic commlink.

"Much like her data plan, her family's security contract was bought and paid for by Max Anders. Her security would leave at her request, but they'd report their absence to her husband."

"She's at a party this weekend," Lisa remarked, grinning like the cat that got the cream. "That's what you're building up to, right? Security at her condominium would report her movements as well, same with her car, but the party's in a hotel, which means she'll just be a guest among many."

"Precisely. Aster's minor illness provides an adequate excuse to bring her along; Kayden can rent a room for her and her au pair. She's done it before."

Calvert pauses for a moment.

"I leave the details of the extraction up to you. I have already rented a safehouse in which she can be held until I can arrange her extradition overseas. Once Mrs Anders is done asserting her ego, you may contact her directly to secure her cooperation in your scheme. It should go without saying that any harm to the woman or her daughter is unacceptable."

With that, he hang up, leaving us to stew in our silence for the few moments it took Aisha to speak up.

"What the fuck? We're divorcing racists now?"

Alec chuckled, leaning over to give Aisha an exaggerated and deliberately patronising pat on the shoulder.

"We're not helping her, ma louve sadique, we're trapping her in a different cage," he drawled, even as Aisha elbowed him in the arm. He cast his eyes over to Lisa, his mouth abruptly widening into a sardonic grin as he shifted forward in his seat, the picture of rapt attention.

"Come on, you smart-mouthed serpent. I know you've figured it out, snake to snake, so spill. How's that viper going to fuck her over?"

Lisa blinked, giving Alec a wry smile in return as her fingers idly brushed over her shamanic necklace.

"He could have sent her anywhere and kept her under his control, but he specifically said he wanted to take her to an Evo compound. My guess is that it won't be quite as human-dominant as he promised. He'll surround her with people who were raised by Evo and fully buy the corporate peace and love bullshit."

She paused, her thumb idly brushing the head of the metal snake.

"What's important is that in Evo territory, she'd be subject to Evo laws. I'll bet megacorporate definitions of an 'unfit parent' can be pretty fucked up. Aster will attend an Evo school, where she'll say exactly the wrong things to the teachers and the other kids because she doesn't know any better, while Kayden will be starting trouble with every neighbour she's got."

"He'll have her custody revoked," I said, my eyes widening.

"Handing the kid and the company over to whatever guardian Evo wants, and giving them her whole childhood to turn her around to their way of thinking," Alec remarked, nodding in approval. "It's a long con, but clever."

"What he does next doesn't matter," Brian said, cutting the conversation short. "Lisa, what's this party?"

"It's a coming out party," she said, before adding "not what you're thinking," in response to Aisha's amazed grin. "There's a girl called Heather Gilbert who's recently turned eighteen, so her daddy is throwing a big party to show her off. It's an old money thing, usually before a debutante ball where you get a whole bunch of these girls together to make their first formal appearance in high society."

"It sounds a bit… transactional," Brian remarked.

"Because it is," Lisa said, shrugging her shoulders. "Goes back to when Euro nobility would meet up and sell their daughters for political capital. These days you don't need to tie deals to marriages, but if your business partner has a son who's about the right age then what's the harm in introducing them while you talk shop by the bar?"

I suspected that even the others could pick up on the bitterness in Lisa's tone, even if they didn't know where it'd come from. She ran away from the Tír before she was old enough for her own debut, but I was sure her education had been building towards this sort of party and, from what she'd told me, the Tír nobility might have a more medieval view of their purpose.

"So what can we expect?" I asked.

"Two types of guest; the young and their parents," Lisa elaborated. "The young will be a mix of Heather's friends from school and the family of her father's acquaintances. More of the latter than the former, probably, but she'll still have enough to make her feel like a princess if she doesn't think too hard about it. Beyond that, miscellaneous escorts, staff, entourages, friends of friends of friends."

"So," Brian began, leaning forwards and lacing his fingers together, "we're looking at hotel security, plus any private hustle the host brings in for the event. The guests will have brought their own people as well, but they can't bring too many. Probably they'll wait out the party in the parking lot. If we can get Kayden to rent a room for Aster, her own detail will wait in there with her."

"Maybe just outside?" Lisa countered. "Leaving Aster and her au pair to play without armed goons hanging over their shoulder."

"How are we going to handle her?" I interrupted. "The guards are one thing, but a nanny's not… in the game, I guess?"

"Stunbolt," Lisa said, shrugging her shoulders. "Or a chemical sedative. Maybe tie her up and leave her in the closet. We just need to make it so she can't raise the alarm the moment we're gone."

"We can't figure out the particulars without knowing who's going to be where," I said, already reaching out through the Matrix. I knew from Kayden's calendar that the party was taking place at the Republica Palace, a twenty-storey space that capped off the top of the Raleigh Building. It was a decent-sized tower just north of the Downtown grid, where its height gave it a commanding view across the bay. The building was laid out like a typical mixed-use tower with commercial floors at the base, then office space, residential and finally the hotel fulfilling the role of the ultra-luxury vanity project at the top of it all.

I couldn't dive into the hotel's host without dipping into virtual reality, but I could still access their front-facing webpage, scrolling through the site's metadata as I built up a portfolio of useful images and room plans. The actual layout of the building wasn't available, of course, but it was trivial to spin together a messenger sprite and task it with trawling through geotagged social media posts in order to build up a complete picture through the selfies of the high and mighty.

The volume of data was varied enough that I had to spin together a second sprite in order to make sense of the files, allowing me to piece together snapshots of the hotel structure. I only had partial results, but I knew that a lot of the hotel would be a repeating pattern of standard room layouts, with wings mirrored on each side. It was enough to fill in most of the blanks, giving me a skeleton to work with even if I couldn't fill out the flesh.

It was child's play to manifest that map in AR, projecting an image of the tower as I understood it in the centre of the room, overlaid with the most useful images I'd found. Aisha proved surprisingly helpful in filling out the likely internal areas of the hotel where there were only scant social media posts from staff members who liked to overshare about where they worked. Some of them didn't exactly paint a flattering picture of the hotel guests, so I presumed their employer was unaware.

Aisha had never ventured as far as Downtown, but she'd made a living committing burglaries for hire, which meant becoming familiar with the sort of passageways and utility spaces needed to keep the rich comfortable and the mechanisms of their comfort out of sight.

From there, it was just a matter of planning. It was nothing new, nothing we hadn't done before, except for the sheer scale of it all. We each had pieces of the complete whole, whether it was Aisha's burgling expertise, Brian's third-hand gossip on how extractions were supposed to go, Alec's experience in infiltrating high society or Lisa's experience living in it.

With me stitching it all together, we were able to collaborate to put together a plan that seemed workable, for all that it relied on a dozen different variables and – of course – the cooperation of the corporate royalty we were supposed to smuggle out of there. I knew enough of how Calvert operated at that point that I had no doubt Kayden would return his call – he wasn't the sort of person who'd make that sort of move without being absolutely certain of success – but it was still a tense hour and a half before she finally accepted Calvert's deal.

Of course, I wasn't willing to just leave it to my assessment of Calvert. Kayden's phone had stayed on her the whole time, with her microphone and GPS trackers both on. I knew that she was at home, knew that she'd moved from her lounge to her balcony, where she'd presumably spent some time staring out at the city and imagining what it would feel like to know that every Medhall building she could see – every truck and employee and advert scrolling along the side of an airship – might soon answer to her.

Maybe I was being uncharitable. Maybe she was weighing up the enormity of a decision she felt she'd been forced into making for the sake of her daughter, but that meant breaking away from a man she'd presumably had genuine feelings for once. One she might still feel for; enough to stay until now, but not enough to do what she has to.

Either way, she still called.

"Alright, I'll take your deal," she began before Calvert had a chance to speak. "What's the first step?"

"Regime change could be… difficult. My first priority is therefore to get yourself and Aster to a safe location before I escalate the situation any further."

Kayden laughed. "An extraction? Like a bad action flick?"

"If you like. My people are experienced professionals well used to both covert and overt action."

"This damned gang war was your business, wasn't it?" Her tone was accusatory. "The Chosen are monsters, but you're the one who took off their leash."

"I did, and your husband sacrificed eight Medhall employees solely to create a narrative, while other employees at other sites piled drugs in the back of unmarked company cars and delivered them directly to Hookwolf's lieutenants."

I hadn't heard of the vans, just the raid. It annoyed me that Calvert was getting intelligence that I wasn't, but I doubted he'd be willing to let me listen in on the testimony from his pet vampire and whatever other moles he'd found since then.

"Those are the stakes, Mrs Anders. Those are the tools of my trade. I have a team of Shadowrunners on retainer who will be handling your extraction. With your permission, I will connect you to them now."

Kayden acquiesced with another put-upon sigh, and I gave Lisa a pointed look.

"Good morning, ma'am," she began. "You can call me Sarah. I'm speaking for the extraction team."

"Are you the one who hacked my commlink?"

"No ma'am." Lisa's tone was serious, but she grinned wildly at me. "I'm a mage by profession. Our current plan is to use your party on Saturday to conduct the exfiltration. It's the next available window when you won't be in close proximity to your security detail."

"And Aster?"

"You'll bring her with you. Rent a room for her and her au pair. Say that you're being overprotective over her cold."

Kayden was silent for a moment – long enough for me to wonder if Lisa had mis-stepped by reminding her of how much we knew about her personal life.

"Her protection detail can't go any further than one room away from her, and the door between them can't be locked. It was Max's idea after the non-human riots started, in case they decided to target us."

"We can account for that," Lisa said, seemingly nonplussed. "We're professionals, ma'am. We'll get you out safely, but it's important you understand your role in this. It isn't too dissimilar to the evacuation drills I'm sure your security detail have talked you through."

"My guards… they work for Max, but they're decent people. I don't want them hurt."

Lisa paused, giving Brian a glance and waiting for him to nod.

"Understood. Now, if there are no further concerns?"

Of course she had more questions, but Lisa was able to walk her through more of the plan with each answer. There were some answers she couldn't give, like the address of the suburban home Calvert had secured as a safehouse, or where she was heading next, but gradually she managed to bring her back to the here and now.

From there, it was a matter of careful preparation. I secured a promise from Calvert to bankroll our expenses for this mission, then we set about tallying up the cost of what we needed and how we could possibly get it in such a short span of time.

Lisa went off to secure a rental on a BMW Teufelskatze SUV, while Rachel disappeared into the Market in search of two dozen boxes of Stick-N-Shock ammunition – specialist non-lethal ammunition with an underpowered charge and a needle-like bullet that delivered an electrical current to the target – chambered in the hodgepodge of different calibres our weapons used.

Aisha led Brian and I to Midtown, where she continued to break every assumption I had of her by introducing us to a genuinely classy gnomic clothier who catered to high-end corporate bodyguards. He had the two of us stand stock still while he measured us with an analogue tape measure, then rifled through his stock of unclaimed and cast-off suits before finding a pair that he could tailor to fit us.

They were standard corp-sec wear; utilitarian black suits and shirts made with a ballistic weave that couldn't hold a candle to actual body armour, but that'd still be able to turn away a knife or light shrapnel. If everything went according to plan we wouldn't need that scant protection; we were getting the suits for the authentic look.

By the time we returned to the loft, Lisa had already returned and greeted us in Rachel's workshop, where she sat perched on the hood of a deep red vehicle that looked like a cross between a luxury SUV and an armoured. Rachel had made her way back as well; she'd taken off the steering wheel and much of the dashboard and had half-buried herself in the internals as she rigged up her own drone software in place of the manufacturer's GridLink system.

I reminded myself to wipe all history of our transaction with the rental company, and Calvert might appreciate it if I clawed back his deposit as well; it was highly likely we would end up dumping the car under a bridge and setting it on fire when we were done.

The next day – the Friday before our mission on Saturday evening – Lisa, Alec and Aisha all departed on a mission to a number of different high-end fashion boutiques, while I dove back into the matrix and Brian and Rachel busied themselves preparing our equipment for the mission.

On the way to her shopping trip, Lisa made another call to Kayden and I listened in as she ran through the plan once again, making sure our target understood her role and whether she knew of any last-minute issues that had arisen. She'd had no difficulty in securing a room for Aster, and I wasted no time in plotting the room's location and sending it out to the whole team. Our plan had been in flux up to that point, but now it was set in stone. We knew where we had to go, how we had to get there and how we were going to get out once it was done, with secondary and tertiary extraction routes in case we were made by security.

When the others returned late that afternoon, we shared a nearly silent dinner of burgers that Aisha had grabbed on the way back, carrying the Stuffer Shack bag in the same hand as a box of luxury heels. None of us talked much; our minds were all running twenty four hours ahead of our bodies.

We all knew that our last two jobs had gone wrong for both predictable and unpredictable reasons, and that the same could very easily happen on this one. What's more, we'd have soft cargo with us. Soft, living cargo that could become very difficult in an instant.

I couldn't sleep, no matter how hard I tried. In the end, I left the city behind and submersed myself in the resonance realms, spending the night wandering beneath the entity's forest of crystalline neural matter before returning to my body the next morning feeling as refreshed as if I'd slept through the night.

The morning passed in a haze, before it was time for me to retreat back into my room and put on the armoured pantsuit, holstering my submachine gun beneath the jacket. The suit pinched slightly and the armoured fabric felt tough and a little constricting, but when I pulled my hair back into a ponytail and looked at myself in the mirror I saw a severe professional looking back at me. It wasn't just in the suit; somehow the lines of my face seemed different now, like I'd aged since joining the team.

The look was only enhanced by a completely redundant earpiece, complete with a wire disappearing into the collar of my suit, and a pair of augmented reality sunglasses made from one-way adaptable glass that always appeared dark from the outside even while adjusting to light conditions for the benefit of the wearer.

Rejoining the others in the lounge, I was met with Grue in an identical suit to mine – looking every bit the professional bodyguard – and Imp in her concealing yet figure-hugging chameleon suit, with its leering demonic mask.

Regent was the centrepiece of our pantomime, and he was dressed to match. His pants were made of a shiny silver fabric that glowed under the light, while his blazer had been textured after black marble run through with silver veins. He wasn't wearing a shirt, but he'd looped necklaces all around his neck. I'd suggested to him that it was a little daring for a party being thrown by a parent for his daughter's eighteenth birthday, but he'd just smirked at me like I was missing out on a joke.

Every part of him looked like it had been made to stand out, from his hair and subtly made-up face to the glossy black polish on his shoes. He didn't grab attention, he outright demanded it. It was refuge in audacity; all the other guests would be dressed at least as extravagantly, except they'd have dedicated stylists for their clothes, hair and make-up.

Tattletale was no less eye-catching, but in a very different way. She was a difficult prospect; none of us believed there was much room for an elven socialite in Max Anders' social circles, so we were gambling that nobody would begrudge Regent for bringing an escort even if nobody quite knew who he was or who invited him.

The centrepiece of her outfit was a short, backless bodycon dress made of a sleek, almost glossy red synthetic fabric, with a hem that ended just above mid-thigh and a neckline that went all the way down to her waist. Between the halter neck and the straps crossing her back was an integrated shawl of golden chainmail that covered her shoulders and upper arms but left most of her back exposed.

She carried no purse, but she'd accessorised with golden jewellery – bangles, high-heeled sandals, and a trio of clip-on earrings in each ear, one of which held a concealed commlink that could relay sound through vibrations, paired with AR linked contact lenses and a small transparent patch inside her lower lip that functioned as a microphone. Regent was wearing similar jewellery, earrings and all.

"Well, what do you think?" Tattletale asked, tilting her head in a motion that caused her earrings to shift.

"I wish I had half your confidence," I answered with blunt honesty. She looked incredible. Not because of the outfit – or not just because of the outfit – but because she could stand there with effortless grace and confidence while in impractical heels and showing more skin than not.

"Aisha picked out the outfit," Regent interjected. "She's got a good eye for joy girl fashion."

"Lot of my friends were in the trade." Imp said, giving her… whatever he was a pointed look. "Whirligig could do better; she turned that shit into an art form."

She paused, as a conflicted look crossed her face.

"Hope she got out. Prolly wasn't even there. She was a real courtesan; could work her way into the lives of her clients, not just their beds."

"Same thing we're doing," Regent remarked. "So long as you can get past the front door and act like you're supposed to be there, nobody's going to bother to ask."

"Just got a ping from the target," I interrupted, my attention flicking across to cyberspace. "She's on the move, the kid too."

"Then let's go," Grue said, as he fished his own glasses out of the pocket of his suit.

Downstairs, in Bitch's garage, the SUV sat in immaculate condition, looking completely unchanged from the outside. In the matrix, however, I'd hacked apart the vehicles digital licence plate and RFID tag to create the illusion of a vehicle that was owned, rather than rented, and that had been owned for at least a year. Beyond that, however, the vehicle remained wholly intact. Mine and Bitch's modifications hadn't touched the skin, but I knew that both of us could feel the SUV as clearly as if it were a limb; every gauge, readout, control and the frankly excessive array of defensive countermeasures.

Bitch herself was waiting beside her van, freshly repainted in the colours of the Saeder-Krupp subsidiary that held the city's road maintenance contract, with an appropriate forged ID of its own. Where paint was insufficient, Bitch had sourced and applied electrochromatic strips and chevrons for the sides and rear doors, completing the look with a bar of orange hazard lights mounted on top of the van. It should be enough to let her park wherever she wants, especially with her own hi-vis uniform.

I clambered into the front of the SUV, stamping down the flash of claustrophobia as I hunched myself over to make sure my horns didn't scrape against the ceiling, all the while thinking that this would have been debilitatingly terrifying just a short while ago. The Teufelskatze wasn't as cramped as Grue's Ford Americar; it had been built for security personnel, which meant that the designers had considered that a troll might have to fit into it at some point. Beside me, Grue slipped into the driver's seat, checking his pistol one last time before tucking it into his suit jacket.

Behind us, through the partition, I watched Imp, Tattletale and Regent clamber into the expansive back of the limo, Imp sitting herself down in the centre of the long couch that ran across the passenger compartment, with Regent and Tattletale on either side of her. Only the latter two buckled in, while Imp simply disappeared as she activated her suit.

The engine sprang into life with a muffled whine as Bitch took control, the host of monitoring systems switching from passive to active use as a heads up display appeared on the windshield in lines of red light. Another mental ping from Bitch raised the shutters of her garage, before we rolled out into the rapidly dwindling daylight, towards a world that was utterly alien to me.