Raven stood near the bar rigid as carved ice. The kind of stillness that made Zara think of a Sandevistan a half-second from triggering. Made her forget about the discomfort that was ruining her plans for the evening.

  Only Raven’s eyes moved.

  Silver irises tracking the crowd — scanning, locking, releasing, scanning again. Not the lazy drift of someone watching dancers. This was systematic. Operational. Zara had seen Raven do this during gigs: mapping a room's threat vectors before deciding whether to stay or leave.

  Then those eyes found Zara. And immediately broke away. Like touching a live wire. Her chrome fingers clenched at her sides, released, clenched again.

  Three months, Zara thought. That was how long the legendary Raven had been running with the Neon Phantoms, and Zara still couldn't read her. The whole arrangement had never sat right — still didn't, if she was being honest. ICE Queen was famous for working alone, for refusing crew affiliations, for turning down contracts that most runners would kill for. The amount of times she made exceptions was probably less than the number of fingers of one's hands. Yet she had said yes to Zara Morrison, nobody merc from Heywood, over cheap bourbon at the Afterlife.

  Why?

  Zara had buried the question. ICE Queens’ reputation opened excess to jobs they could only dream about. And Raven delivered. The new gigs they began getting contracts for since December were going smoother, paid better, and the Phantoms' reputation was climbing fast enough to give her vertigo. You don't interrogate a winning streak. You ride it.

  And with time the suspicion had quieted to background noise — nearly gone, especially tonight, when they scored their biggest job so far, especially with Raven actually joining them for celebration for the first time. Coming to the club. Accepting drinks. Following the crew into Watson's neon like she might actually be integrating.

  But then followed this strange behaviour. And now the old unease was crawling back up Zara's spine, forcing the haze in her head to clear enough for the concern to trickle in.

  "Raven." She stepped into the netrunner's line of sight.

  "Zara." Too quick. Sharp, like a reflex rather than a greeting. Raven's usual flat composure was there, but so was tension. Hairline fractures running through deceptive calm — visible only if you'd spent three months learning the topography.

  "You clean up fast." Zara kept her voice casual, studying Raven's face. The pallor was still there. But five minutes ago the netrunner could barely walk a straight line, and now she was standing like she'd been carved from the same synthcrete as the walls. "Five minutes ago you could barely stay on your feet."

  "I wasn't drunk." Flat. Clipped. Dismissal with a razor edge of annoyance.

  The tequila in Zara's blood wouldn't let that slide.

  "Right. So what was that routine back there? Fucking performance art?"

  "Enhanced balance systems don't malfunction from alcohol."

  Zara watched Raven's chrome fingers — still clenching, unclenching, clenching. The netrunner's eyes slid sideways again, tracking something across the room that Zara couldn't identify. Or looking for an exit route.

  "Then what the fuck was it?"

  She'd never seen Raven drunk in three months. She'd seen her exactly once outside of a gig — that time at the Neon Hole three weeks in, which didn't count, Raven had sat on a crate and worked her holo-displays the entire time excavating something from a couple of antic decks they stumbled over during a gig. Tonight was different. Raven followed like a normal human being who socialised with other human beings.

  And then the stumbling. Those glassy eyes — that specific quality Zara saw post-dive: the unfocused shimmer of someone whose consciousness had been somewhere else entirely. Then the abrupt recovery. The snap back to control, as if someone had flipped a switch.

  The question Zara'd learned to stop asking — why is she really here? — was suddenly screaming.

  "You know what," Zara said, voice dropping. Careful. The way you handled something that might blow up in your hands. "I've been wondering about something for a while. Three months, actually."

  Raven's eyes came back to her. Stayed.

  "Why us." Zara held the gaze. "Legendary netrunner. Famous for working solo, reflecting invitations. Nine years of that reputation. And you take a gig with a crew of nobodies for twelve and a half K."

  "Your operational approach presented—"

  "Don't." Zara shifted her weight, felt the familiar press of the Liberty's grip. Not reaching for it yet. Just aware. "Don't give me the 'promising tactical profile' speech. Not tonight."

  Raven's mouth closed. Her silver eyes held something Zara couldn't name — and that was wrong too, because Raven's eyes never held anything. They reflected. Calculated. Assessed. They didn't hold.

  Zara's fingers brushed the Liberty's grip.

  Everything she'd just witnessed — the uncharacteristic socialising, the fake drunkenness, the stepping outside, the recovery that was too fast — assembled into a shape she didn't like. Her mind was unable to put the puzzle together, wasn't offering a single clean theory. Just a cold certainty lodged beneath her ribs: ICE Queens' been running something. All night. Maybe longer.

  What had Raven been doing when she stepped out for a "smoke"? When her eyes went glassy near the toilets? The stumbling that looked like post-dive neural lag — was it? Chrome Dreams' subnet was right there. Every club in Watson ran one. A netrunner of Raven's calibre could jack in through half a dozen entry points without anyone noticing, run operations while looking like she was just drinking at a bar.

  What kind of operations?

  Half-drunked paranoia supplied the worst options. Monitoring Phantoms' comms. Scrapping data. Planting something in their systems — a daemon, a backdoor, something that would activate after she vanished. Tonight of all nights. The night they'd just painted a target on themselves by hitting that Arasaka subsidiary. Perfect timing for a clean exit.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  Raven hadn't moved. Even her chrome fingers were now still at her sides, which was somehow worse than the clenching.

  "I need something to drink," Raven said. Not quite flat. Was there a hint of emotion underneath? Zara couldn't say for sure.

  "No. You need to answer the question."

  Silence. The bass from the dance floor vibrated through the walls, deep enough to feel in Zara's molars.

  "Not here," Raven said.

  The words sank into the space between them. Not here. Not a deflection — Raven deflected with technical jargon and flat dismissals, not requests. This was deliberate. So Raven wanted to talk. She maybe even wanted to talk all night, just hadn't found the opening.

  Or wanted Zara outside where there were fewer witnesses to whatever came next.

  "Stay put," Zara said. She turned and pushed back through the crowd.

  ***

  She found Kai first. He was in the booth sampling his own creations, cybernetic eyes flickering through chem-readouts.

  "Something's off with Raven." Zara kept her voice under the bass line. "Back me up."

  Kai's eyes stopped flickering. He looked at her face and whatever he read there killed the party behind his pupils. "What kind of off?"

  "The kind where I need you and Wire watching my six."

  She didn't wait for a response. Diego was two tables over, tequila bottle in front of him, shoulders loose — comfortable in his skin the way mercs got after enough close calls. Zara caught his eye, jerked her chin toward the bar. Something in her expression must have registered because he left the bottle, stood up and fell in beside her without a hitch.

  When they came close, Raven’s gaze caught them. Silver eyes reading the approach — three together, the body language of people who'd done this on jobs.

  Recognition settled on Raven's face. As if she'd been expecting this and had only been uncertain about the timing.

  She straightened from the bar and walked toward the exit before Zara could say anything. She assessed the situation and chose her ground. Or chose the moment she'd been building toward all night.

  Zara followed. Kai behind her. Diego last.

  ***

  The alley behind Chrome Dreams was narrow, cracked synthcrete, lit by a murky green neon sign advertising a ripperdoc two streets over. The light made everyone look like they'd been dead for a week.

  Raven turned to face them. Her back was to the brick wall, hands loose at her sides. The club's bass was muffled out here, replaced by Watson's ambient — distant sirens, the hum of drone traffic, someone yelling in Japanese three blocks over.

  "Why are you acting like I just caught you with your hand in our data vault?" Zara stopped two metres from the netrunner. Close enough to read her face, far enough to react.

  A sound escaped Raven's throat — not quite laughter, more like air leaking through punctured metal. "Of course I have everything from your data vault. I'm Raven."

  Zara felt the anger rise before she could stop it.

  "That's not what I—"

  "You're not entirely wrong though." Raven's voice flattened to its usual dead register. "I was planning to use you."

  For a second nobody moved. Zara heard Kai's sharp intake of breath behind her.

  "The Arasaka job was real. You didn’t even track what those chips are really worth." Each sentence as if forced through something resistant. "But the original plan was to use you as operational cover. When corporate heat escalated — I extract. You absorb the consequences."

  "Wire, no!" Zara lunged forward.

  Too late. Diego moved faster than the words left her mouth. His fist caught Raven across the cheekbone — she'd turned her head a fraction, started to flinch, and the blow skidded off bone instead of connecting with her jaw. Enough to snap her head sideways. His right arm drove into her gut.

  Raven doubled over, but Zara saw her chrome fingers moving in a sharp, precise pattern.

  Diego froze mid-motion. Not just his arm — everything. His whole body locked, servos seized, optics gone dark.

  Raven didn’t do anything else. Just held him glued to a spot, trapped by his own chrome.

  She tried to straighten, made it halfway up, then doubled over again and vomited across the alley's grime.

  "Military ice," she said between ragged breaths. "Cute."

  She stayed hunched, one hand braced against the wall.

  "Don't try this again." Her chrome fingers moved and Zara heard an audible click.

  Diego's systems unlocked. He staggered half a step, blinked as optics rebooted, flexed chrome fingers — confusion flickering across his features as if his systems just came back completely rewritten.

  Raven straightened slowly. Wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her cheekbone was swelling where Diego's fist had connected. She looked smaller in the murky green light. Barely any visible augmentations, nothing like the legend the merc gossip described.

  But her hands were steady.

  Zara's gut was running ahead of her brain. Rage said: she admitted it. But underneath — the instinct that had kept her alive through seven months of gigs that should have killed her — something didn't fit.

  Today. At the subsidiary. There was a moment during the exit, when Raven had all the chips and was alone for more than 10 minutes. They got cut off by a patrolling drone and had to wait for the path to clear.

  She could have vanished. Could have even alerted the drone and left the Phantoms to hold the corporate heat. The plan she'd just described — extraction at maximum chaos — that window had been wide open six hours ago.

  She'd walked right past it.

  "Bullshit." Zara could no longer stay quiet. She has to say it."If we were expendable, why didn't you ghost us six hours ago?"

  Raven pressed her hand against her abdomen.

  "I had a plan. It’s history now. Scrapped." She gestured at the vomit on the synthcrete. "You got your hit. Call it even."

  "That's not an answer."

  "Just let me be. For fuck's sake." The flatness cracked — not emotion, but effort. "Your gig cost me more than I expected. You had no idea how close your sorry arses came to being blown apart today. I wanted to keep it that way."

  Kai blinked. "You... protected us?"

  "You deaf or just slow?" Silver eyes closed for a moment, then looked at Zara. "I scrapped the original plan. Neon Phantoms turned out more promising than I originally calculated."

  Coming from Raven, that was practically top-tier street cred.

  "Satisfied?" Raven peeled off the wall, careful. "I need to extract. Night clubs aren't my operational environment exactly."

  She was leaving. Zara watched her take two steps toward the alley's mouth and felt the same pull she'd felt three months ago at the Afterlife. That gut instinct that bypassed every rational objection. Grab it. Don't let it walk.

  "Stay."

  Raven stopped. Didn't turn.

  "Stay with the crew. For real this time. Permanently."

  Now Raven turned. Zara read the stillness the way she'd learned over three months. Not calculation. Surprise. Hesitation.

  "I work alone."

  "You've been working with us for three months. And you just said we were worth protecting." A step forward. Not aggressive. "Looks to me like someone who doesn't actually want to leave."

  Silence stretched.

  "No." Clean. Final. Whatever hesitation Zara had glimpsed — gone, replaced by ICE Queen's unapologetic finality. "Tonight was the last job."

  Should have stung more. Would have, if her gut wasn't saying something the words contradicted.

  "At least let me drive you home. Gesture of good faith."

  Raven stared at her, silver eyes calculating.

  A single nod.