I started playing the original Cyberpunk game all the way back when it was a box and three handbooks, and I've loved it ever since. When I first stepped into the Night City of Cyberpunk 2077, it felt like coming home. This short story, Hollow Boy, is my first fanfic set in the Night City of the CDPR game. I want to tell the story in stages, and will be adding to it every couple of days. I hope that those who read it, enjoy it!
Hollow Boy
Chapter One
“Kei,” came the voice, along with an insistent shove. “Kei.”
That couldn’t be Gata, thought Kei muzzily. She knows better.
“Get lost,” muttered Kei. She pushed her head deeper into the foam pillow.
“Kei, you need to wake up right now. It’s about Lil Ton,” said Gata.
“What the hell.” Kei pushed herself up and half out of her sleeping bag, running a hand over her face. Her mouth tasted like an ashtray, and she didn’t want to know what her hair looked like. Kei yawned, and scratched her armpit.
“Smokes,” she said. Gata, perched near her like some kind of anxious forest simian, pulled a pack of New Yuans and a lighter from Kei’s jacket, handed them to Kei.
Spark. Drag. Breathe. Kei blinked, rubbed her eyes “So what about Lil Ton?” she demanded.
“He got got, Kei. Sometime last night.” Gata’s face seemed to bounce along her eyeline.
“Ah, Jesus.” Kei took another drag, ran her hand over her face again. “What the hell, G. Who did for him?”
“Nobody seems to know. But that’s not the worst part,” said Gata.
“How can Lil Ton being dead not be the worst part?”
“It’s messed up, Kei. You need to see.”
The sounds of the day were beginning to come through the walls of the boathouse where Kei flopped. “I can’t leave now, Gata,” said Kei. “There’s working stiffs out there, doing their, y’know, jobs and whatever. Might not be too happy about me living here, and this is the best squat I’ve had in six months. That’s why I lay low during the day, only come out at night.” A thought struck her. “G, when did you come in here?”
Gata looked down. “Like, ten minutes ago.”
“Damn!” Kei swore. “Well, that’s goodbye to this place, then.”
“Nobody saw me come in,” said Gata defensively.
“Trust me,” said Kei, rolling up her sleeping bag and looking for her boots, “Somebody saw.” She pulled on her camo pants and began lacing her boots. “Gimme five minutes to grab my gear,” said Kei, “then we’ll go see Lil Ton.”
* * *
“No,” said Kei, “that’s just messed up.”
She stood with Gata in front of the open cargo can. The taggers had already been making their comments on the scene with spray paint. Not all their words were kind.
Lil Ton, or what was left of him, was spreadeagled on the floor of the can. It looked like a nail gun had been used on his palms on his bare feet to anchor him to the metal. That wasn’t the worst part.
His abdominal and chest cavities had been scraped hollow, like some kind of horrible dugout canoe. That was the worst part.
No blood anywhere in the can. Flecks of red meat inside the massive open cavity where Lil Ton’s insides used to be, but no blood in the can itself.
Against her will, Kei’s eyes were drawn to look at Lil Ton’s expression, and that was when she had to turn away and puke.
Afterwards, Kei sat on a concrete barrier overlooking the water, and she couldn’t stop her shoulders and arms from shaking. In a reversal of their usual roles, it was Gata rubbing her back and muttering reassuring words.
“Sorry I gave you a tough time, G,” managed Kei. “You were right to come find me straight off. Even in Northside, the cops can’t leave him there for long. And if I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
“Who the hell would do that to somebody, Kei?” asked Gata. “Scavs? Some new Maelstrom initiation?”
Kei shook her head, looking out at the water and trying to flush the memory of Lil Ton’s expression from her mind. “Scavs would have taken his eyes, knee joints, would never just waste the hands and feet. Maelstrom…I don’t see it. Gonna ask Barkbite, though, just to make sure.”
“You’re gonna ask around about this?” exclaimed Gata, her eyes wide. “Something like this, sounds like time to get gone.”
Kei turned and stroked a hand affectionately along Gata’s olive-skinned cheek. “Goddam, G. We’re dock rats in Northside. Where the hell else is there to go?”
* * *
Kei walked through the dockside flea market, eyes darting back and forth. The sight of Lil Ton’s body had dialled her normal caution up past eleven. Some kind of full-on freak haunting the docks? she wondered. Somebody I know who snapped and went max twitch? Suddenly, the faces of people she had seen every day for years seemed like dangerous strangers.
With a nervous glance behind her, Kei hopped onto the rusted back stairs of PieZ. Jimmy Trip, the kid who ran the place for his doped-out folks, had always had a bit of crush on Kei. Not enough to let her eat for free – biz was biz – but enough to save leftovers for her, and throw in the occasional Nicola that “fell out of the machine.”
Kei gave the back screen door her usual double-tap and waited. It wasn’t long before Jimmy scoped her and gave the door a push. “You’re up early,” he said as she slipped in. “Keep to the corner, outta camera range. The franchise sees you here, they give me crap, maybe pull my license.”
“I know the drill, Jimmy,” drawled Kei, trying to sound more casual than she felt. “How’s biz?”
“Quiet,” said the teen, not looking up from the premade food he was loading from boxes on the floor into the fridge. “Nobody wants a pie for breakfast, not even the calzones. Past the morning synth-caf rush, so now it’s just prep and inventory.” He straightened. “I heard about Lil Ton. I’m real sorry, Kei.”
“Same here, Jimmy. What are people saying?” Kei perched on the stool Jimmy kept in the camera’s blind spot and tried to ignore the hunger pangs she was feeling as she looked at all the food in the pantry.
“This one’s real messed up. Nobody’s sure. Doesn’t stop ‘em guessing, though.” He glanced over at Kei. “Got some overstock from yesterday’s order. I’d just have to throw it out anyway. You want it?”
Kei gave a little smile, careful not to look too grateful or worse, desperate. “You’re a prince, Jimmy Trip.”
The teen tried to hide his blush and gave a little shrug. “Doin’ me a favour. Saves me on garbage fees. Ten minutes, okay?”
“Thanks.” Kei stood up and opened the door, standing half in, half out. “So what are they guessing, Jimmy?”
The teen paused, not meeting Kei’s eyes. “That Lil Ton was turning tricks, got picked up by a freak.”
“If that was a john,” said Kei grimly, “the pros of Northside are in even more trouble than usual.”
* * *
Jimmy might have called it overstock, but to Kei, the food tasted pretty damn fresh. She felt rather than saw the skinny girl appear behind her.
“Plenty for both of us, Gata,” said Kei, pushing a pie across the patio table. It wasn’t technically true, but looking out for your chooms was an unwritten code of the street. Gata pulled out a rusty chair and dug in enthusiastically. People might refer to Kei as slender, but nobody called Gata anything but skinny. Sometimes it looked like the only thing holding flesh and bone together was a kind of perverse optimism. That, and a doglike devotion to Kei.
“So did Jimmy know anything about…y’know, Lil Ton?” asked Gata, in between bites.
“Nah,” replied Kei. “Word on the water says it might have been a twitchy john, but that doesn’t scan to me. Do you know if Lil Ton was turning tricks?”
“Not that I heard,” said Gata, gulping down jellied fruit and dough. “Any turning pro without Riker’s say-so is gonna get a red smile, and Riker has no time for anybody that hangs with you. If you guys are still beefing, that is.”
“Huh,” said Kei dismissively. “That loser still thinks he owns a piece of my ass.”
Gata looked at her friend, wide eyed. “You better watch it, Kei. People take Riker seriously now. He hears you talking about him like that, maybe he pays you a visit.”
“We’ll see. I got that boy’s number, don’t you worry. But what the hell are we gonna do about Lil Ton?”
Gata swallowed, frowned. “What do you mean? Do?”
“He was a choom, Gata. He was one of us. And our boy got messed up.”
The skinny girl looked down at the gooey mess in front of her, tracing her finger in the pie filling. “What can we do, Kei? Street ate him up. He’s gone.”
“No way,” said Kei firmly. “If some john did go twitch on him, we’d light him up. Some Maelstroms did some kinda job on him, maybe one or two go missing. Some Pacifica boys pulled some freaky voodoo shit, we drop a bumboclaat. We don’t just hang our heads and thank plastic Jesus that it was him and not us, like we’re goddam victims or garbage like that.”
Gata looked up at her friend, uncertain. “For real?”
“For real,” answered Kei. “You telling me if some jerk clips me tomorrow, it’s just so long? Loved ya, now you’re gone? Or do you say, ‘That was my friend, and she mattered.’ Lil Ton matter to you?”
Gata looked down, sucked jelly off her finger, looked up. “Yeah. For sure. He mattered to me.”
“Then we have to make sure somebody knows he mattered. That he had people,” said Kei fiercely. The more she talked about it, the more she could feel the anger boiling inside her. She wasn’t sure if it was for her friend, who sure as hell didn’t deserve to go out like that, or at the thought of Kei herself getting zeroed, and the world not even noticing.
Kei stood up. The hell with this. They were gonna make sure that people knew; that people knew you couldn’t just do…whatever the hell they had done to Lil Ton, and then go on like it didn’t matter.
“We’re gonna find out, G,” she said. Gata stood up nervously. “We’re gonna start asking around for real. That means it’s time to tool up. Go strap on whatever you have. I’ll meet you back here in an hour.”
If things got bad, real bad, then Kei always knew there were two things she could do. The first was go to her stash, which was for emergencies only. Inside a battered backpack was a Unity 9mm pistol, two clips of ammo, a battered old external cell phone, and all of Kei’s savings.
The second thing she could do is power up the battered cell phone and dial the one number in its primitive memory.
She looked at the phone for a long time, weighing the heft of it in her hand. Finally she sighed, and slipped the phone into the front pocket of her camo pants. The pistol went into her belt, right in the small of her back. Her puffy jacket would hide it. The old K-Bar knife, that went with Kei everywhere, was tucked into her right boot. The backpack and the eddies returned to her stash spot.
Kei walked along the docks with a casual swagger that she did not feel. She knew, like any dock rat knew, that half of avoiding becoming somebody’s victim was making sure not to walk like a victim. Still, sometimes that was easier said than done. She couldn’t shake the mental picture of Lil Ton, nailed to a cargo can, looking like something in a meat processing plant.
Who does that to somebody?
Kei had seen a lot of things, living on the streets. It tended to rob you of illusions about what people could do to other people. It was why she made damn sure she had a safe place to sleep at night.
Dammit. Kei remembered that Gata had ruined the safety of her flop, and that she had no safe place to sleep tonight.
Just another thing on my goddam list, she thought. She’d have to find a safe place to stow her sleeping gear, see about maybe arranged shared watches with Gata wherever she was squatting.
The rest of Northside seemed to be settling into its rhythms. Robotrucks pulled away from warehouses in a steady stream, carrying cargo cans to wherever their ultimate destinations might be, Night City just one stop on the long journey of microchips or stuffed animals or vibrators from production to retail. Kei had been witness to enough cans “getting lost” in the stacks (and then opened up) to know that their products were almost infinite in variety.
The few dockworkers who still had jobs sat far above the action in their enormous gantries, surveying the constant processes of loading and unloading by robotic cranes and delivery systems moving like worker ants from container ship to warehouse and back. Human involvement was only required in the event of certain kinds of accident, like a can slipping out of a crane’s grip and plummeting into the water or smashing spectacularly onto the concrete.
Although it was rare, it still happened. Some dock rats waited patiently for these events, scuttling from their hidey holes to scavenge whatever spilled out of a fallen can. Sometimes a second can would fall, set off by the first, and leave a red stain where the scavengers had been.
Risks of the game.
I guess maybe that’s what’s bothering me, realized Kei as she walked back to the flea market. Everybody knows that the game has risks. You get got, that’s your hard luck. But what happened to Lil Ton, that’s not part of any game I recognize.
“Hey, Lorelei,” she said, walking up the stall of the women who sold factory-reject clothing. Some cargo inspectors liked to check the stuff right out of the can, and substandard clothing, with missing zippers or a misspelled brand name or whatever, was sold on the megacheap to people like Lorelei. The inspectors wrote the stuff off as rejects and pocketed the profit.
“Hey Kei,” smiled the woman. She was a part of what Kei thought of as old school Northside; Lorelei had been selling clothes at her stall for as long as Kei could remember. She was visibly older now, her dreads more grey than blonde, but retirement plans weren’t a thing for people like Lorelei. “Just got some new ziptops yesterday. You like?”
The elderly clothes seller held up a pretty sweet looking jacket, all reds and blacks. Above the familiar swoosh was written, “Nuke – Just Do It.”
Kei laughed. “Yeah, can’t see the bosses wanting that in their flagship stores. Appreciate the sentiment, though.”
“Twenty eddies for you, sweetie.”
“Sorry, Lorelei,” answered Kei, shaking her head. “Other priorities right now. You hear about Lil Ton?”
Lorelei’s face fell. “Oh, sweetie. Yeah, I heard. How awful. That poor boy.”
“You hear any talk about likely suspects?” asked Kei, trying to sound casual.
The clothes seller wasn’t fooled, however. “Kei, you be careful. The kind of person who’s going to do something like that is very serious, sweetie. Not the kind of person you want to find.”
“So you don’t think it was gangers?” persisted Kei.
Lorelei shook her head. “If it was Maelstrom, they’d have their tags all over it. And if it was another gang doing that in Maelstrom territory, they’d be tooling up right now.”
“Maybe they are.”
“Trust Lorelei, sweetie. They’re not.” The old woman smiled briefly, then looked directly at Kei, her expression serious. “Trust Lorelei on this too, sweetie. Don’t go looking for who did this. I know Lil Ton was a choom for you, but you should let it go.”
“Would you? If he was your choom?” asked Kei, and walked off.
First Gata, now Lorelei. People telling her to back off. The hell with that. Your friends were supposed to have your back, to look out for you, to step up if you got dropped; otherwise, what was the damn point?
The thought of just disappearing, sinking into the water without even a ripple to show where you’d been, make Kei shudder. She pulled out the battered cell phone from her pants pocket, examined it. She held the ‘on’ button, just checking to see if the battery still works, she told herself. The phone powered up with a cheery tone, the screen lighting up.
Kei stared at it for a long time.
“Hey, Kei,” came Gata’s shy voice from behind her. Kei quickly pocketed the phone and turned to face her friend.
“Hey, G. You tooled up?” Kei regarded her friend critically. If she was carrying, it didn’t show.
Gata blushed. “Kinda. No iron, but a shockrod strapped to my arm inside my sleeve.” She lifted her left arm.
Kei sighed. “That’ll have to do. Just don’t jolt yourself readjusting your ponytail or anything.”
Gata nodded unenthusiastically, as if that possibility had not occurred to her. Her hand automatically went up to check her ponytail, but she stopped herself. “Where we going first?” she asked.
“Let’s see if we can find Barkbite.”
Hollow Boy
Chapter One
“Kei,” came the voice, along with an insistent shove. “Kei.”
That couldn’t be Gata, thought Kei muzzily. She knows better.
“Get lost,” muttered Kei. She pushed her head deeper into the foam pillow.
“Kei, you need to wake up right now. It’s about Lil Ton,” said Gata.
“What the hell.” Kei pushed herself up and half out of her sleeping bag, running a hand over her face. Her mouth tasted like an ashtray, and she didn’t want to know what her hair looked like. Kei yawned, and scratched her armpit.
“Smokes,” she said. Gata, perched near her like some kind of anxious forest simian, pulled a pack of New Yuans and a lighter from Kei’s jacket, handed them to Kei.
Spark. Drag. Breathe. Kei blinked, rubbed her eyes “So what about Lil Ton?” she demanded.
“He got got, Kei. Sometime last night.” Gata’s face seemed to bounce along her eyeline.
“Ah, Jesus.” Kei took another drag, ran her hand over her face again. “What the hell, G. Who did for him?”
“Nobody seems to know. But that’s not the worst part,” said Gata.
“How can Lil Ton being dead not be the worst part?”
“It’s messed up, Kei. You need to see.”
The sounds of the day were beginning to come through the walls of the boathouse where Kei flopped. “I can’t leave now, Gata,” said Kei. “There’s working stiffs out there, doing their, y’know, jobs and whatever. Might not be too happy about me living here, and this is the best squat I’ve had in six months. That’s why I lay low during the day, only come out at night.” A thought struck her. “G, when did you come in here?”
Gata looked down. “Like, ten minutes ago.”
“Damn!” Kei swore. “Well, that’s goodbye to this place, then.”
“Nobody saw me come in,” said Gata defensively.
“Trust me,” said Kei, rolling up her sleeping bag and looking for her boots, “Somebody saw.” She pulled on her camo pants and began lacing her boots. “Gimme five minutes to grab my gear,” said Kei, “then we’ll go see Lil Ton.”
* * *
“No,” said Kei, “that’s just messed up.”
She stood with Gata in front of the open cargo can. The taggers had already been making their comments on the scene with spray paint. Not all their words were kind.
Lil Ton, or what was left of him, was spreadeagled on the floor of the can. It looked like a nail gun had been used on his palms on his bare feet to anchor him to the metal. That wasn’t the worst part.
His abdominal and chest cavities had been scraped hollow, like some kind of horrible dugout canoe. That was the worst part.
No blood anywhere in the can. Flecks of red meat inside the massive open cavity where Lil Ton’s insides used to be, but no blood in the can itself.
Against her will, Kei’s eyes were drawn to look at Lil Ton’s expression, and that was when she had to turn away and puke.
Afterwards, Kei sat on a concrete barrier overlooking the water, and she couldn’t stop her shoulders and arms from shaking. In a reversal of their usual roles, it was Gata rubbing her back and muttering reassuring words.
“Sorry I gave you a tough time, G,” managed Kei. “You were right to come find me straight off. Even in Northside, the cops can’t leave him there for long. And if I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
“Who the hell would do that to somebody, Kei?” asked Gata. “Scavs? Some new Maelstrom initiation?”
Kei shook her head, looking out at the water and trying to flush the memory of Lil Ton’s expression from her mind. “Scavs would have taken his eyes, knee joints, would never just waste the hands and feet. Maelstrom…I don’t see it. Gonna ask Barkbite, though, just to make sure.”
“You’re gonna ask around about this?” exclaimed Gata, her eyes wide. “Something like this, sounds like time to get gone.”
Kei turned and stroked a hand affectionately along Gata’s olive-skinned cheek. “Goddam, G. We’re dock rats in Northside. Where the hell else is there to go?”
* * *
Kei walked through the dockside flea market, eyes darting back and forth. The sight of Lil Ton’s body had dialled her normal caution up past eleven. Some kind of full-on freak haunting the docks? she wondered. Somebody I know who snapped and went max twitch? Suddenly, the faces of people she had seen every day for years seemed like dangerous strangers.
With a nervous glance behind her, Kei hopped onto the rusted back stairs of PieZ. Jimmy Trip, the kid who ran the place for his doped-out folks, had always had a bit of crush on Kei. Not enough to let her eat for free – biz was biz – but enough to save leftovers for her, and throw in the occasional Nicola that “fell out of the machine.”
Kei gave the back screen door her usual double-tap and waited. It wasn’t long before Jimmy scoped her and gave the door a push. “You’re up early,” he said as she slipped in. “Keep to the corner, outta camera range. The franchise sees you here, they give me crap, maybe pull my license.”
“I know the drill, Jimmy,” drawled Kei, trying to sound more casual than she felt. “How’s biz?”
“Quiet,” said the teen, not looking up from the premade food he was loading from boxes on the floor into the fridge. “Nobody wants a pie for breakfast, not even the calzones. Past the morning synth-caf rush, so now it’s just prep and inventory.” He straightened. “I heard about Lil Ton. I’m real sorry, Kei.”
“Same here, Jimmy. What are people saying?” Kei perched on the stool Jimmy kept in the camera’s blind spot and tried to ignore the hunger pangs she was feeling as she looked at all the food in the pantry.
“This one’s real messed up. Nobody’s sure. Doesn’t stop ‘em guessing, though.” He glanced over at Kei. “Got some overstock from yesterday’s order. I’d just have to throw it out anyway. You want it?”
Kei gave a little smile, careful not to look too grateful or worse, desperate. “You’re a prince, Jimmy Trip.”
The teen tried to hide his blush and gave a little shrug. “Doin’ me a favour. Saves me on garbage fees. Ten minutes, okay?”
“Thanks.” Kei stood up and opened the door, standing half in, half out. “So what are they guessing, Jimmy?”
The teen paused, not meeting Kei’s eyes. “That Lil Ton was turning tricks, got picked up by a freak.”
“If that was a john,” said Kei grimly, “the pros of Northside are in even more trouble than usual.”
* * *
Jimmy might have called it overstock, but to Kei, the food tasted pretty damn fresh. She felt rather than saw the skinny girl appear behind her.
“Plenty for both of us, Gata,” said Kei, pushing a pie across the patio table. It wasn’t technically true, but looking out for your chooms was an unwritten code of the street. Gata pulled out a rusty chair and dug in enthusiastically. People might refer to Kei as slender, but nobody called Gata anything but skinny. Sometimes it looked like the only thing holding flesh and bone together was a kind of perverse optimism. That, and a doglike devotion to Kei.
“So did Jimmy know anything about…y’know, Lil Ton?” asked Gata, in between bites.
“Nah,” replied Kei. “Word on the water says it might have been a twitchy john, but that doesn’t scan to me. Do you know if Lil Ton was turning tricks?”
“Not that I heard,” said Gata, gulping down jellied fruit and dough. “Any turning pro without Riker’s say-so is gonna get a red smile, and Riker has no time for anybody that hangs with you. If you guys are still beefing, that is.”
“Huh,” said Kei dismissively. “That loser still thinks he owns a piece of my ass.”
Gata looked at her friend, wide eyed. “You better watch it, Kei. People take Riker seriously now. He hears you talking about him like that, maybe he pays you a visit.”
“We’ll see. I got that boy’s number, don’t you worry. But what the hell are we gonna do about Lil Ton?”
Gata swallowed, frowned. “What do you mean? Do?”
“He was a choom, Gata. He was one of us. And our boy got messed up.”
The skinny girl looked down at the gooey mess in front of her, tracing her finger in the pie filling. “What can we do, Kei? Street ate him up. He’s gone.”
“No way,” said Kei firmly. “If some john did go twitch on him, we’d light him up. Some Maelstroms did some kinda job on him, maybe one or two go missing. Some Pacifica boys pulled some freaky voodoo shit, we drop a bumboclaat. We don’t just hang our heads and thank plastic Jesus that it was him and not us, like we’re goddam victims or garbage like that.”
Gata looked up at her friend, uncertain. “For real?”
“For real,” answered Kei. “You telling me if some jerk clips me tomorrow, it’s just so long? Loved ya, now you’re gone? Or do you say, ‘That was my friend, and she mattered.’ Lil Ton matter to you?”
Gata looked down, sucked jelly off her finger, looked up. “Yeah. For sure. He mattered to me.”
“Then we have to make sure somebody knows he mattered. That he had people,” said Kei fiercely. The more she talked about it, the more she could feel the anger boiling inside her. She wasn’t sure if it was for her friend, who sure as hell didn’t deserve to go out like that, or at the thought of Kei herself getting zeroed, and the world not even noticing.
Kei stood up. The hell with this. They were gonna make sure that people knew; that people knew you couldn’t just do…whatever the hell they had done to Lil Ton, and then go on like it didn’t matter.
“We’re gonna find out, G,” she said. Gata stood up nervously. “We’re gonna start asking around for real. That means it’s time to tool up. Go strap on whatever you have. I’ll meet you back here in an hour.”
Post automatically merged:
Post automatically merged:
If things got bad, real bad, then Kei always knew there were two things she could do. The first was go to her stash, which was for emergencies only. Inside a battered backpack was a Unity 9mm pistol, two clips of ammo, a battered old external cell phone, and all of Kei’s savings.
The second thing she could do is power up the battered cell phone and dial the one number in its primitive memory.
She looked at the phone for a long time, weighing the heft of it in her hand. Finally she sighed, and slipped the phone into the front pocket of her camo pants. The pistol went into her belt, right in the small of her back. Her puffy jacket would hide it. The old K-Bar knife, that went with Kei everywhere, was tucked into her right boot. The backpack and the eddies returned to her stash spot.
Kei walked along the docks with a casual swagger that she did not feel. She knew, like any dock rat knew, that half of avoiding becoming somebody’s victim was making sure not to walk like a victim. Still, sometimes that was easier said than done. She couldn’t shake the mental picture of Lil Ton, nailed to a cargo can, looking like something in a meat processing plant.
Who does that to somebody?
Kei had seen a lot of things, living on the streets. It tended to rob you of illusions about what people could do to other people. It was why she made damn sure she had a safe place to sleep at night.
Dammit. Kei remembered that Gata had ruined the safety of her flop, and that she had no safe place to sleep tonight.
Just another thing on my goddam list, she thought. She’d have to find a safe place to stow her sleeping gear, see about maybe arranged shared watches with Gata wherever she was squatting.
The rest of Northside seemed to be settling into its rhythms. Robotrucks pulled away from warehouses in a steady stream, carrying cargo cans to wherever their ultimate destinations might be, Night City just one stop on the long journey of microchips or stuffed animals or vibrators from production to retail. Kei had been witness to enough cans “getting lost” in the stacks (and then opened up) to know that their products were almost infinite in variety.
The few dockworkers who still had jobs sat far above the action in their enormous gantries, surveying the constant processes of loading and unloading by robotic cranes and delivery systems moving like worker ants from container ship to warehouse and back. Human involvement was only required in the event of certain kinds of accident, like a can slipping out of a crane’s grip and plummeting into the water or smashing spectacularly onto the concrete.
Although it was rare, it still happened. Some dock rats waited patiently for these events, scuttling from their hidey holes to scavenge whatever spilled out of a fallen can. Sometimes a second can would fall, set off by the first, and leave a red stain where the scavengers had been.
Risks of the game.
I guess maybe that’s what’s bothering me, realized Kei as she walked back to the flea market. Everybody knows that the game has risks. You get got, that’s your hard luck. But what happened to Lil Ton, that’s not part of any game I recognize.
“Hey, Lorelei,” she said, walking up the stall of the women who sold factory-reject clothing. Some cargo inspectors liked to check the stuff right out of the can, and substandard clothing, with missing zippers or a misspelled brand name or whatever, was sold on the megacheap to people like Lorelei. The inspectors wrote the stuff off as rejects and pocketed the profit.
“Hey Kei,” smiled the woman. She was a part of what Kei thought of as old school Northside; Lorelei had been selling clothes at her stall for as long as Kei could remember. She was visibly older now, her dreads more grey than blonde, but retirement plans weren’t a thing for people like Lorelei. “Just got some new ziptops yesterday. You like?”
The elderly clothes seller held up a pretty sweet looking jacket, all reds and blacks. Above the familiar swoosh was written, “Nuke – Just Do It.”
Kei laughed. “Yeah, can’t see the bosses wanting that in their flagship stores. Appreciate the sentiment, though.”
“Twenty eddies for you, sweetie.”
“Sorry, Lorelei,” answered Kei, shaking her head. “Other priorities right now. You hear about Lil Ton?”
Lorelei’s face fell. “Oh, sweetie. Yeah, I heard. How awful. That poor boy.”
“You hear any talk about likely suspects?” asked Kei, trying to sound casual.
The clothes seller wasn’t fooled, however. “Kei, you be careful. The kind of person who’s going to do something like that is very serious, sweetie. Not the kind of person you want to find.”
“So you don’t think it was gangers?” persisted Kei.
Lorelei shook her head. “If it was Maelstrom, they’d have their tags all over it. And if it was another gang doing that in Maelstrom territory, they’d be tooling up right now.”
“Maybe they are.”
“Trust Lorelei, sweetie. They’re not.” The old woman smiled briefly, then looked directly at Kei, her expression serious. “Trust Lorelei on this too, sweetie. Don’t go looking for who did this. I know Lil Ton was a choom for you, but you should let it go.”
“Would you? If he was your choom?” asked Kei, and walked off.
First Gata, now Lorelei. People telling her to back off. The hell with that. Your friends were supposed to have your back, to look out for you, to step up if you got dropped; otherwise, what was the damn point?
The thought of just disappearing, sinking into the water without even a ripple to show where you’d been, make Kei shudder. She pulled out the battered cell phone from her pants pocket, examined it. She held the ‘on’ button, just checking to see if the battery still works, she told herself. The phone powered up with a cheery tone, the screen lighting up.
Kei stared at it for a long time.
“Hey, Kei,” came Gata’s shy voice from behind her. Kei quickly pocketed the phone and turned to face her friend.
“Hey, G. You tooled up?” Kei regarded her friend critically. If she was carrying, it didn’t show.
Gata blushed. “Kinda. No iron, but a shockrod strapped to my arm inside my sleeve.” She lifted her left arm.
Kei sighed. “That’ll have to do. Just don’t jolt yourself readjusting your ponytail or anything.”
Gata nodded unenthusiastically, as if that possibility had not occurred to her. Her hand automatically went up to check her ponytail, but she stopped herself. “Where we going first?” she asked.
“Let’s see if we can find Barkbite.”
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