Chapter 3: A Cold Rebirth.

The Shards of Freedom.

Chapter 3: A Cold Rebirth.

Missy Biron, Vista.

Night city, 2074

Cold.

That was the first thing she noticed.

Not the kind you felt around winter in Brokton Bay. This one was absolute, crawling through her veins, pressing on her chest, sinking into her bones. She almost laughed, at least a part of her wanted to.

Guess this is hell, she thought dimly, almost in amusement. Makes sense. I’ve done enough to deserve it.

She really had. Civilians saw heroes as paragons of justice, people who could do no wrong, even after the skeletons of the Protectorate came to life. And they did try, but Earth Bet was not a place for the weak.

Vista did it all, without question. She followed her orders, no matter how hard they were, no matter how fair they were. She fought against the gangs ever since she was a preteen; she fought to her last breath if the situation required. She killed when there was no other option.

In a better world, a hero would never have to lower themselves to such lengths, but that was the truth of her world. At least it was over.

There was peace in the thought. A dark one, but peace all the same. At least it was over, she repeated in her mind like a mantra. At least she hadn’t left Chris behind. She’d stayed. She’d done one thing right.

She couldn’t lose another one. Not after so much. And especially not Chris.

Then something happened.

Her fingers… they moved.

A single flex, weak but something undeniable. Her brow furrowed in confusion. Fingers shouldn’t move in hell, right? She didn’t believe in the existence of the soul, and even if she was wrong, she doubted that souls felt what she just felt.

It was just… so real.

Her body shivered violently, lungs dragging in air like a drowning woman. Her lungs burned, the cold bit her nude body… and it wasn’t until then that she realized that she was alive.

Tears stung before she could stop them. She didn’t even know why… relief, fear, confusion, everything all at once. She tried to speak, but her mouth didn’t open. Her head throbbed with the mother of all headaches.

Chris… Chris. She wanted to shout. If she was alive… maybe so was he? Oh god… maybe they both survived.

Something sharp pricked her arm. The wrong arm.

Her mind froze. She’d lost that arm… she doubted she could ever forget the flash of light, the cauterized wound, the smell of burning flesh. It had been gone. Gone.

But she felt something prick on her arm. She felt liquid slide under skin that shouldn’t exist. Even if it felt different than usual, she could feel something.

Did Tattletale manage to get them to Panacea? She remembered that the blonde villain was close to them before she lost consciousness. Even if she wasn’t paying much attention as she tried to save Vanguard.

Her pulse spiked, and she could feel her heart racing so hard she thought it would burst. She tried to move, and for a moment thought she was hallucinating… then her hand moved. Her left hand.

She pinched herself with it. Hard.

Pain flared across her thigh… but the feeling of her hand felt…

“No…” she whispered, shaking her head. “No, no, no!”

Her eyes flew open, the room coming into focus all at once, dim lights, humming machines, and a musty smell around the room. The sound of her own ragged breathing.

She was half-submerged in a tub filled with melting ice. Around her, sensors and cables snaked out from her body to half a dozen monitors. Beside her, another tub… Chris, still and pale but breathing, a faint, but noticeable rise every couple of seconds.

“Chris,” she gasped again, her throat burned in pain.

Before she could stand up, some movement at the corner of her eye alerted her that she wasn’t alone. Three figures looking at her, one in confusion, frozen in place, one in pity, and the final one as if he was looking at something impossible.

The first was a man with broad shoulders, a bit taller than Chris when he hunched over himself, something Vista tried hard enough to change over the decade they knew each other. He had strange markings on his face, looking almost as if they were under his skin. He looked like a gangster, if she was honest with herself.

His eyes were cautious, but not hostile. Vista didn’t fail to see how he shot an appreciative glance up and down at her, before he controlled himself. At that moment, Vista didn’t care about the show she was probably giving the three of them. She just needed answers.

Vista’s eyes sharpened as she noticed the weapon on his waist.

The second was a woman dressed in black and silver, gothic but soft, her expression wide-eyed and worried. The look on her face made Vista pause. She wasn’t cautious at all, just… looked in relief. She had some kind of big sister energy around her, much like Viky, after they got closer after Dean’s death.

The years had dulled the pain that came from said memory, her first crush. She remembered how devastated she was after that, how she clung to Viky since they shared the pain. She had been jealous of the other blonde for a long time, but she learned that she was such a good person, and Dean was lucky to have her.

That also made her and Chris’s relationship grow closer. He made sure she didn’t spiral into depression, and she made sure he didn’t lock himself tinkering some madness in his workshop.

And the last one had to be the doctor. He looked like some of the back-alley doctors Lung’s gang used to have at their disposal, dressed in a button-up, one of his arms filled with tattoos. Stained shirt and jeans with blood, his dark eyes hidden behind some glasses.

He was glancing at her with an open mouth.

Vista blinked at them, trying to process, trying to categorize threats and safety. She’d always been good at that… but her headache was killing her.

Then her gaze fell to her left arm.

Not flesh.

Not her arm, her mind shouted. A cybernetic arm connected to her shoulder

Her breath hitched. Then came the tremor.

“No…”

The panic struck without warning, overwhelming her.

Her chest tightened, her lungs refusing to draw air. Every instinct screamed at once… wrong, wrong, wrong. Her hands clawed at the edges of the tub, sending ice scattering everywhere.

No… this couldn’t be happening to her. She had hated the mere idea of doing something like this ever since she saw what Defiant had done to himself.

“Girl, calm down!” someone shouted… the gothic woman, maybe. Vista’s vision was swimming.

Hands reached for her, gentle, just like Viky’s, Vista deliriously thought.

She flinched away, her heart pounding so loud she couldn’t hear her own thoughts.

She couldn’t breathe. The weight of the arm… that thing, made her stomach twist. She could feel it move, hear the artificial things hum from the inside, feel the disconnect between what she was and what she’d become.

Her breaths turned to sobs, then to gasps.

“Take it off!” she screamed hoarsely, “Take it off, please!”

“Easy, kid,” the doctor said quickly, his voice reminded her of Assault when he acted serious, he lifted his hands in surrender, “You’re safe, alright? You’re safe. Just breathe. Don’t move too fast. Your stress level is climbing too high.”

But she couldn’t. The world spun, her vision flickering between the faces. From the doctor to the woman, then the man with the gun.

She had to get Chris out. She had to move. She had to pull that arm away from her, even if she had to cut her own shoulder once more.

Then, as suddenly as it started, her strength failed her. The panic was still there, but buried under pure exhaustion. She collapsed back into the tub, ice water sloshing over the edge.

Her last clear thought before the darkness crept in again was that she could still feel Chris nearby. A faint pull, like a heartbeat next to hers, as if she could feel it inside her head.

Then everything went black.

Jackie Welles

Night City, 2074

For a second, he forgot how to breathe.

The moment that girl’s eyes had snapped open, something in him just… stopped.

He’d stared into chromed-up bastards and the worst Night City had to offer, but this was different. He had even seen a couple of gonks going psycho, but even they didn’t compare.

Not even the things he saw Arasaka do in Mexico compared to the pure, unadulterated terror that filled his veins at that moment.

The look she gave wasn’t human… it was something else. Something that made every cell in his body scream to look away. The woman was a beauty that couldn’t be denied. But something inside his very soul shouted at him to look away before she could take offense.

Around twenty years old, give or take. Perhaps a year younger, but a single glance froze him in place. The only thing he could imagine causing something similar would be to stand in front of someone like Rogue Amendiares, if he ever reached that point.

His lungs finally remembered their job, dragging in air like he’d just finished a marathon.

Sweat rolled down his temple. He hadn’t even realized he was holding his iron until the weight of it made his hand tremble. The muzzle was aimed straight at the ice tub.

For a moment, he hesitated. He didn’t understand what happened, but perhaps it would be a good idea to just… end it before it could bite them on the ass.

Perhaps it was misogynistic of his part, but if this woman made him feel this way, what would the clearly hardened gonk on the other tub make him feel? She looked so… soft when she was unconscious, cute, in a way that wasn’t common in Night City. Like she wouldn’t harm an ant.

Not like the scarred man next to her.

“Chingada madre…” he whispered, forcing himself to lower the weapon, “What the fuck was that, Vik?”

The ripper didn’t answer right away. He just leaned against the counter, rubbing his face like he’d aged ten years at the last minute. Misty was kneeling beside the girl’s tub, tucking a towel over her chest, whispering something soft and useless.

“She’s alive,” Viktor said finally, his voice sounding almost tired, “Both of them are. That’s about all I can tell you.”

“She was having a clear panic attack,” he continued thoughtfully, “About as bad as I’ve seen. Hell, I know solos and ex-militaries from the war who have something less worrying than this one. I have no idea what could have caused this.”

“Poor thing,” Misty whispered, tucking the girl’s hair behind her ear, “I can’t imagine what they went through.”

Jackie holstered the pistol, though his hand stayed close… just in case, he said inside his mind, “Alive, sure. But what the hell are they? Some Samurai? Black ops from the NUSA?”

Vik sighed, “We don’t know, choom. They dropped here last night… literally dropped,” he snorted almost in amusement, even if it didn’t reach his eyes, “half-dead, if you can believe it. Burns, organ damage, missing limbs, if you can believe it. No IDs, no implants, no data.”

He shook his head in disbelief, “Ganic, both of ’em, but… not anymore.”

“Not anymore?” I found myself asking.

“Vik had to replace some parts to save them,” Misty said quietly, still looking at the blonde, “Her arm, her skin, a few stabilizers. She was the one who was more damaged from the outside, but the other one was the hardest to keep among us. A lot of his organs were failing, and he had lost a lot of blood. The armor he was wearing made me think he was some kind of borg.”

Jackie glanced at the other tub, at the guy who was still unconscious. His chest rose and fell, slow and even. Jackie didn’t know if he wanted to be here when he woke up.

But what Misty said sent alerts through his mind.

“Show me what he was wearin’,” Jackie said, his tone shifting into something more.

Something he had practiced when he followed V as a backup in some missions. The authority didn’t come to him naturally, but he liked to think he was getting the hang of it.

Vik blinked, his face showing confusion, “What?”

“The armor, Vik. Whatever that chrome cocoon was. You still got it, right?”

A reluctant nod, “Yeah. Over there, at the back.”

They walked to the far side of the room. The armor stood propped against a rack, barely holding the parts together. It was scorched, melted, and jagged at the edges where Vik had likely cut through it to get the gonk out. It looked like it had been built to survive a bomb and respond in kind after that.

Jackie whistled low, his head running a mile a minute, “Dios mio…”

Together, they hefted it upright. Even stripped down, it was heavy. Dense in a way that said military-grade, but nothing he’d ever seen before. Hell, he didn’t even know what kind of metal it was made of. It looked like some kind of alloy, but nothing he had ever seen before.

Cables, servos, coolant lines, some kind of hydraulics packed tight as if someone tried to cram a full mech into a man’s skin. Just hearing that was absurd, but not as much as the fact that clearly someone had succeeded.

“Shit’s heavier than a fucking car engine,” Jackie muttered.

Vik crouched, poking around the inside, “Look at this beauty… everything’s modular. Look over there, the panels look as if you can swap them easily.”

Jackie nodded, frowning, “No visible make or serials. This isn’t corpo… not even Militech or Arasaka. Those bastards print their logo even on the most secret cyberware they can, showing off.”

Jackie frowned, feeling a pit in his stomach, “You check it for trackers, Vik?”

That froze both of them. Misty turned her head slowly. Vik’s expression went from tired to pale in half a heartbeat.

“…not yet,” he admitted.

Jackie’s jaw tightened as he felt a fat drop of sweat running down his brow, “Then do it. Now.”

They scrambled onto it.

Vik grabbed a handheld scanner, waving it across the armor’s frame, while Misty used a smaller device to check for transmissions. The seconds crawled, the soft hum of the scanner mixing with Jackie’s pounding heartbeat.

Finally, the device chirped once, then went silent. No signal.

“Nothing,” Vik said, sighing in relief, “Not a blip. Either it’s off-grid… or too advanced for me to read.”

“Then let’s pray it’s off-grid, choom,” Jackie muttered, holstering the pistol for good this time.

They stood there in silence for a moment, the only sound the quiet rhythm of the machines keeping the pair alive. The two strangers slept peacefully, their faces calm, but Jackie wasn’t sure if the crisis was over for the three of them.

Misty broke the silence, looking hesitant, “Jackie.”

He turned to her.

“You can’t tell anyone about this. Not Padre, not V, not your mother… anyone. The less people know, the better for them… and for us.”

He stared at her for a moment, “Misty… come on. You can’t be this naive. Whatever tech they’re packin’? It’s gonna bring eyes we don’t want.”

Her voice hardened, “Promise me.”

It was such a rare sight that it brought him to a stop.

He hesitated, then looked at the sleeping pair again. Two strangers from god knows where, one of them missing an arm yesterday, now lying there like nothing happened. The air in the clinic felt heavier, making it hard to breathe. The memory of the woman’s glare almost sent him to overdrive once more.

Jackie scratched the back of his neck, “It would be cleaner to end it here, you know. Make it quick. Drop ’em out in the Badlands, no one would know. I don’t know who’s backing them, and what they would do to us.”

“Jackie!” Misty’s voice cracked, eyes wide with disbelief, “How can you even say that…”

Perhaps I had spent too much time with V, and I felt shame rising inside my heart just as I finished the sentence. But I honestly feared what Vik and Misty had brought to their doors.

Hell… Vik almost nodded before the same shame I felt appeared on his face.

“I’m just sayin’,” he snapped, but there was no heat in it, just weariness, “You don’t know what they’ll do when they wake. How can you be sure they won’t decide to silence us?”

“I can’t,” she admitted softly, “But I won’t start by killing the people we tried to save.”

The look she gave him… the sheer disappointment in her face hit harder than any punch during Vik’s training.

He winced, turning away. “Fine. You win. I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

He ran a hand over the scorched armor, feeling the jagged lines and melted plating.

“Still, this tech…” he muttered, “This ain’t corpo, I’m sure we would have heard of it by now. Hell, it’s cleaner than anything Arasaka brought down to Mexico with V. Maybe even better. I haven’t told you all the details, but believe me, they sent the best they had for that mission.

Vik glanced at him, his lips twitching in amusement, “You think it’s alien, choom?”

Jackie let out a low laugh, sounding brittle than what he wanted, “After what we just saw, I ain’t ruling shit out, choom.”

He turned back toward the tubs, watching the two strangers breathing in sync, feeling as if he was watching something important.

“Well… wherever they came from, I’m sure we’ll know when the time comes. I just hope we survive it.”