Cyberpunk 2077: V

Chapter 53: Stress Relief

"You sure you're okay, V?"

V looked up from the worn diner tabletop, jumping slightly.

"Huh? Oh... yeah, yeah, I'm good."

Jackie and Misty exchanged a concerned glance.

"Dunno, V," Jackie drawled, brows furrowing. "You been spacin' out all dinner, pickin' at the table... And you just look—"

"Exhausted," Misty piped up, her worried eyes scanning V's face.

Exhausted was an understatement. V felt completely drained. Who wouldn't be, after the kind of day she'd had? Running around Night City chasing cyberpsychos and dealing with horror-movie-level encounters really took it out of a girl.

She glanced down at her hands, only now realizing that her finger had been absentmindedly digging into the fake plastic wood of the table, carving something. A strange symbol. V had never seen it before, but just looking at it made her spine shiver. She quickly moved one of her empty coffee mugs over it, blocking it from sight.

"Hey, Tony!" V called out, waving to Antonio at the grill. He looked over his shoulder with a grunt.

"Another round of coffee—black."

Antonio gave a brisk nod, set down his spatula, and moved toward the ancient coffee machine on the counter. It probably hadn't been cleaned in at least twenty years, but that was what made the synthbeans taste so good.

"That'll be your fourth cup, chica," Jackie lectured. "Ya can't outsource sleep. You been havin' nightmares and runnin' around this damn city non-stop the past few days. Ya gotta rest. Ain't healthy, especially since we got the big gig comin' up! Need you to be tip-top for that—can't have the Nomad Ninja snoozin' on the job!"

At the mention of the nightmares, a flicker of guilt passed through Misty's face.

Jackie's tone was light, but V caught the frustration underneath. The gig was just a couple of days away. Their gig, with the big "G". Jackie's dream gig. And here she was, looking like a rat that got run over by a Kaukaz truck. Not exactly confidence-inspiring, but V didn't feel all that confident right then and there after the events of the day.

After dropping off the latest psycho with Regina's driver, Jackie had called her up, insisting they grab dinner—non-negotiable. V agreed immediately. She was hungry and thirsty, and she needed a distraction.

Ever since the encounter at the tunnel cap earlier—that weird psycho with the burning cyberware, the red-dripping servers, the echoing laughter—V hadn't been able to shake this eerie, crawling sensation. It was like an ice shard was lodged between her shoulder blades, freezing cold while something else burned its way deep into her chest.

Anger.

The Glitter distribution investigation that V had unwittingly started was getting to her. Regina didn't help by sending her articles or reports that she found in her own investigation. The stuff was worse than V thought, worse than what the news outlets were reporting. Hell, they were barely talking about it unless there was a blood involved. 

As V drove back to Vik's, she set her autoscroller searching the darker edges of the Net for info herself. What she found made her teeth grind. Indie blog posts, subnet tabloids; page after page about gonked-out addicts who kept coming back for another hit of Glitter, their dealers hiking up prices until the desperate ones turned to stealing, robbing... even killing. And the desperate aching cries of those who try to quit, literally unable to because (as V and Regina found out) it was literally engineered to stay with you forever...

By the time V parked in her spot down the alley from Vik's, her hands had started shaking with rage.

So here she was, trying to unwind with Jackie and Misty—and doing a piss-poor job of it.