“Are you sure about this?” Whippoorwill brushed a strand of pink hair out of her face, shifting the car into park. “That building looks like warcrime wrapped in a maintenance violation and dipped a dumpster. Any information broker that can’t afford to move out of a place like that isn’t going to be worth a bent credit.”

Kat undid her seatbelt, looking out her window at the building where she’d agreed to meet the broker. It was a squat two story building, the ground floor occupied by a decrepit pawnshop plastered in neon advertisements right next to windows guarded by bars and metal shutters. The upper story didn’t even have windows. Whatever paint had once covered its walls was faded and washed away by constant rain, revealing bare concrete, and in spots, the rebar.

She’d seen worse buildings in the Shell around Schaumburg, but they were either unoccupied or little more than squats for junkies and scavengers. Between the obvious structural failures, blessedly unidentifiable stains, and numerous bullet holes, it might honestly have been the most suspect business that Kat had ever seen still in operation.

“I don’t know Whip. Maybe ‘The Copper Spook’ likes the anonymity?” She shrugged.

“We still need a name for me.” Whip responded with a sigh. “I killed like three guys in the Field Tower raid. Given the mission’s difficulty and global importance, Merrimac and Hestia were pretty clear that I’d earned a name in there.”

“You did.” Kat shrugged uncomfortably. “You just weren’t really in a state to go through with all of the pomp and circumstance after the operation. In fact, I seem to recall you disappearing entirely a day or two later.”

Whippoorwill stared out the car’s windshield at the blur of neon and the crush of bodies in the distance that was Chiwaukee’s nightclub district

“That’s a fair charge.” Whip leaned back into the torn and faded polyester of her seat. “I still need to be named. It has to come from someone in my crew rather than be self-administered. I’m pretty sure that means you Erinyes.”

“How about Buttercake?” Kat asked, throwing her friend a sly grin. “I think it fits.”

Whippoorwill lurched forward, sputtering and choking.

“Like the character from Chibi Princess Cats?” Whip’s former nonchalance disappeared as the girl frantically shook her head. “Dear God, no. If anything I’m Chiffon or Saffron, at least they had good costumes when they transformed.”

“Chiffon it is,” Kat replied agreeable. “I always did think she had the best transformation sequence of the three.”

“No you can’t, I-” Whip stopped halfway through her denial. Glancing at Kat’s grinning face in the dark cab of the car.

They both started laughing at the same time. Kat, in relief at finally seeing a smile on Whippoorwill’s face once again, but for Whip it was pure catharsis. After months of dour silence and struggling to grapple with Xander’s absence, everything just burst out at once, spurred on by Kat’s prodding.

“Fine.” Whippoorwill wiped a tear from her eye. “I’m Chiffon now, but you should fully expect revenge for this. When you least expect it, I’ll be there.”

“I’ll be waiting.” Kat winked at her opening the door to the car and ducking outside. She paused for a moment, a collection of emotions running over her face before she leaned back in with a wistful smile. “And Chiffon? It was good to hear you laugh.”

Then Kat was moving toward the decrepit building, trying to hide the relief on her face as Whip chuckled behind her. She’d always been shy, but the constant morose expressions and brooding silence had gotten to Kat. Still, she’d set her friend up with an apartment nearby, God knew that Whip could afford it, so hopefully she’d be able to intervene if the hacker started falling into another depressive funk.

She rapped her knuckles against the metal reinforced door. A second of silence later, just as Kat was preparing to make her presence known again, the lock opened with a ‘chnk’ that echoed down the mostly empty street.

Kat glanced back and forth, the neon signs on various storefronts the only proper light due to multiple shot out streetlights, before pushing the security door open and stepping inside. Automatically, her eyes shifted to the muted grayscale of Nightvision, activating the perk to compensate for the store’s almost pitch black interior.

The shop’s wares, mostly modified firearms and cyberware of dubious providence, were all locked beneath steel and bullet proof glass cages. Kat frowned as she walked past a chrome hand covered in serrated blades, shaking her head. As imposing as the cyberware might be, she couldn’t help but imagine how difficult it would be to eat breakfast while using it.

A burst of static startled Kat, jolting her into the air. Sheepishly, she put her knife away as a voice spoke over the intercom.

“Erinyes?”

She nodded, taking note of the four cameras that blanketed the showroom floor, the red lights below their lenses sweeping over her like beady, inquisitive eyes.

“We can conduct our business from here,” the modulated male voice continued over the store’s speaker system. “You come highly recommended.”

“I should hope.” Kat snorted. “I saved the Goddamn world from an alien invasion. For free. I didn’t even get a novelty t-shirt out of it.”

“I’ve seen the video,” the voice replied dryly.

“Great.” Kat crossed her arms, continually scanning the pawn shop. As much as she put on a brave front for Whip, she only knew this broker via reputation. Without Xander around, she was too unplugged from the Chiwaukee underworld to even find someone to vouch for him.

“Copper Spook I presume?” She asked, looking up and into one of the cameras. “People seem to think that you’re the goto name for leads on jobs.”

“They’d be right,” the voice drawled. “The only thing you’re missing is that for the right price, I can dig up any secret in Chiwaukee. If I don’t know the answer, I can find it. If I can’t find it, it doesn’t exist.”

Kat bit her tongue. Online chatter identified Spook as a low end fixer. He had contacts, but they were mostly amongst the smaller gangs and rookie solo operators. For all of his swagger, Kat was out of his league and both of them knew it.

“Well.” Kat renewed the mana to Mirage, ensuring that the magic blurred and distorted her features. “As you’re probably aware, I am good at what I do, but I find myself between crews. What do you have by way of gigs for an infiltrator?”

“One infiltrator,” Spook mused to himself. “Let me see if there’s anything on hand.”

He left her in the dark for almost a minute, muttering into his mic while Kat stood uncomfortable and alone in the dark pawnshop. She ran her fingers over the contoured grip of her knife in its concealed sheath.

“Here’s one,” she glanced up as the broker spoke up. “A rush job. It looks like a senior manager has had some information taken from her. A runner is moving it to an exchange point in Hayek park, but the client can’t get anyone there in time.”

“So just the runner and their handler.” Kat paused for a second to chew on her lip. “Will there be anyone else on site or is the job just menacing a noncombatant in a mostly empty park?”

“I, uh-” Even through the vocal modulation, she could hear Spook scrambling for an answer, stripping the interaction of any professionalism it might have had.

“Probably not?” The broker ventured, only to catch himself. “No, there won’t be anyone there. Just the runner wearing a green windbreaker and a middle aged man reading a newspaper. He should be the runner’s handler.”

Kat closed her eyes, forcing herself to pause before she responded. God, she missed Xander. Even if he managed to turn everything into a joke, at the end of the day, the job got done. If they had to move fast and with incomplete information, Kat would know before she started a mission. None of this amateur hour bullshit-

“What’s the pay?” She looked up at the camera. “And what’s your cut?”

“Two thousand credits, and I get a ten percent broker fee, payable upon delivery of the information. Non-negotiable.” Even through the modulator, Kat could hear the smugness in Spook’s voice.

She struggled to keep her face even as she let out a slow shuddering breath, her fingers stroking the hilt of her knife once more. The offer was shit. An agent with one quarter her experience would command a higher commission, and ten percent was abject robbery for a broker that couldn’t provide accurate information.

Still, he had Kat’s back up against a wall. Her only other option was Belle Donnst, the cold blooded and ruthless executive that originally set Xander and the ChromeDogs up. She knew Kat’s value and would love to have her on hand. If she went back to Belle, Whip and her would be paid handsomely and sent on missions that were both challenging and interesting.

Unfortunately, Belle’s attention came with a price. The woman was ambitious and far too smart to put herself at risk. Any job worked for her would come with the operative bearing all of the risk. If Kat or Whippoorwill were compromised for any reason, Belle wouldn’t hesitate for even a fraction of a second to cut them loose and throw them to the sharks.

“Fine.” She spat the word out. “I’ll be back with the data. Have the money ready.”

The door unlocked as she approached it once again, hinges groaning as she pushed it open and stepped out into the night air. A quick once over to assure she was alone later, and Kat hurried across the street to slip into the car with Whippoorwill.

“So,” she let the Mirage slip from her face, replacing it with a grin. “Chiffon. Did you-”

“Yes,” Whip turned the key in the ignition, sending the car sputtering to life. “I got into his security system. It was barely even protected. There’s no way he wrote that code. Most of it was copy pasted from smartpanel operating systems three generations old. He didn’t even bother to patch any of the security exploits that plagued the old iGlass 2200 models. I was in so fast that I spent half of the time you were in there reading his e-mails-”

“We’re going to Hayek Park.” Kat nodded toward the mostly abandoned street as Whippoorwill pulled a U-turn, taking them away from the distant light and noise of Chiwaukee’s downtown district. “Don’t park the car right away. Spook didn’t seem that confident about the background information on the job and I’d like to case the place a bit before actually committing myself.”

“Anyway.” She turned to look at Whip while the other woman drove. “What were you able to find out while I talked to Spook?”

“You were right,” the pink haired girl grunted as she pulled them off of a side street and onto an expressway. “He does live above the pawnshop. He has his rig and servers up there. Bad business if you ask me. All of that pretending to be mysterious only to put yourself at risk from an upset client anyway.”

Kat nodded thoughtfully as Whip kept talking.

“He was lying through his teeth about that job though. The offer has been in his inbox for over a week and it mentions you by name. The delay in relaying it to you was him sending something off to the client through a secure messaging service.”

“Did you get a chance to see what it was?” Kat asked with a frown.

“Nope.” Whippoorwill shook her head. “It had enough security that I wasn’t going to risk it with a tenuous wireless connection. That said-”

“If it was secure and his system wasn’t,” Kat finished for her, “that means that the client is probably a real player even if Spook is just a nobody.”

Whip just nodded and drove as Kat chewed her lip and thought the situation over. Every instinct in her body was warning her about this job, but at the same time, she needed to re-establish herself in the industry. Pretty much everyone had seen the video of Xander and her fighting their way through Field Tower, but she still didn’t have the contacts and support team that she would need to become a full solo operator.

Whippoorwill was a start, but if she was going to do this on her own, Kat would need to program several more names into her smartglass. For one, she needed someone trustworthy that she could use as an intermediary with the corporate world. She’d had hopes for the Copper Spook, but this mission assured her that he would be a stepping stone to a more competent broker at best.

Other than that, she was still sorely lacking. Kat would need a source for equipment that might not be available legally, a fence for stolen information, a team of associates that could provide trustworthy backup on bigger jobs, the list ran on and on.

The only real alternatives to establishing her own network were Belle, retiring from the game, or joining one of the smaller crews that the ChromeDogs had splintered into. Crews that would only remind her of Xander’s sacrifice while frantically exploiting his and her reputation to earn a couple of extra credits.

“We’re here,” Whip’s words’ jerked Kat out of her reverie.

She willed her eyes to switch into Nightvision. The dark park brightened until Kat could see everything while Whippoorwill slowly drove her car past. On a park bench across from a statue of Friedrich Hayek, a man nervously rustled a newspaper, the glint of a metal handgun in his lap.

They kept moving, and Kat’s mouth thinned into a line. A trio of men and a woman huddled behind a nearby public bathroom. All of them were armed, and the woman's face was over half chrome. Twice while the car circled, one of the men peeked his head around the corner, checking in on the ‘handler’ with a newspaper.

Finally, after almost circumventing the park they drove past a van, pulled over by the side of the road with its rear doors open. Inside, a slim man in a green windbreaker and a baseball cap was smoking a cigarette while chatting with another heavily chromed individual.

Kat shook her head, motioning for Whip to keep driving as she turned grimly to her companion.

“You said that Spook had an e-mail with my name on it waiting when I walked into that shithole of his?”

Whippoorwill nodded, brushing a couple strands of pink hair from her forehead as she pulled them away from the street that circled the park.

“Fuck it.” Kat shrugged. “I’m amped and ready to go for a mission and this is an insultingly bad set up. What do you say we go and ask Mister Spook who put him up to it?”

“Honestly?” Whip asked. “My only real concern is that this is some sort of double play. The e-mail was only the biggest of the red flags that he was flying.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.” Kat settled back into her seat, letting her eyes return to normal. “Still, I haven’t publicly announced that you’re working with me, and I don’t think I actually used Nightvision on the Field Tower broadcast. It’s entirely possible that he just didn’t know that you would dismantle his network from the car and that I would be able to make the goons he sent to ‘disrupt’ the exchange.”

“Regardless.” She grinned at Whip. “I can’t think of anything more fun than letting you tear his network apart again so that we can download all of those ‘super elite secrets’ he claims to have. Bet we can auction those off for more than the two thousand credits he used to bait this entire farce.”

“Just be careful,” Whippoorwill sighed, a long suffering smile on her face. “I know better than to hope that you’ll keep this quiet, but at least keep it safe.”