Strong Enough 5.2

Super 5.2

The door to Sasha’s room opens with a hiss and Taylor slips inside. She moves slowly for once, avoiding noise.

The overhead lights glimmer just low enough to fuzz the edges of the furniture and the loosely grouped wires running along the wall and floor. A computer chair, high-backed and neon, still sits in its plastic wrap at the wide desk, and on the bedside table a pink and black pistol flashes once in the light next to a large bottle of water with a silly straw poking out the top.

Sasha’s eyes flick open, tracking over to Taylor without surprise. Taylor, Emma, and Rebecca all share the other rooms of the penthouse, and they take turns watching over Sasha. Today isn’t Taylor’s turn.

Sasha has not had a good week.

“Hey, Tay.” Sasha lets her eyes slip closed with a limp sigh. “Could you check the ports on my rig? I think one of them slipped out.”

Taylor moves over to the PC-monitor on the desk, taking a look at the mess of wires attached to its back and side. Sasha loves her retro connections. A deeper look reveals the wire running to Sasha’s headset on the bed has jostled loose. “Are you supposed to be getting so much net time?” she asks, reattaching the plug.

The headset and visor next to Sasha’s hip beeps once, and Sasha pats it with exhausted affection. “I’d jump out the window otherwise.” She doesn’t say anything for a long few seconds, just breathing softly as Taylor tidies up, running a damp cloth along the desk and floor to get any dust that’s built up. Then, Sasha adds. “Finished…the background checks you wanted. I’ll send…them now.”

“Don’t push yourself,” Taylor replies.

Sasha flaps a hand in the air. A second later, Taylor’s internal agent pings as she gets the files. They’ve been screening new applicants more aggressively after getting David’s mom, Gloria, her ripper apprenticeship. Lots of people want to get in on the cheap rent, and no one in Night City is above lying on their applications.

“Any more?” Sasha asks.

There’s about twice as many new applicants as in this set of files, buildup of a few days.

“No.” Taylor says. “Not until Emma and I go over these ones and figure out how many units are left.”

“Mmm. Probably still a few. Lots of…bad in this set.” Sasha shifts slightly rolling over to the side. She taps her water jug. “Fill me up?”

Taylor nods. She takes it over to the ensuite, where they installed a better water filter over the tap, takes the water to practically distilled, but anything more than that tastes awful to Sasha, and sometimes triggers even worse reactions.

Taylor pauses when she sets the full jug back on Sasha’s side table. Fortunately, Sasha doesn’t need any help to sit up and drink. “Need anything else?”

Sasha sighs again. “Mmm. Should probably take a walk, but…too tired right now.” She settles back on the bed after drinking almost a quarter of the jug. “Wish I could fucking…sleep, but it feels like all of my stuff is inflamed.”

“Your…organs?”

“Mm.” Sasha grunts.

“Do I need to shake down a doc for pain meds?” Taylor asks.

“Got prescribed some. It’s just…”

Taylor tilts her head and waits.

“Gave me the same stuff…my mom was taking when she died.” Sasha sighs. “It’s bad memories, I should take some.”

There’s a bottle over on the desk, it’s also still in its wrapping. Taylor picks it up, tilting the label to read Securicine. Underneath she sees the title ‘take two pills by mouth as needed.’

“I’ll ask Becca to grab something otc for you.”

“Don’t have to.”

Taylor shrugs. “Yeah, but I want to. We’ll have it in a bit, and if you need something stronger…”

“Good luck.” Sasha gives a tired laugh. “Biotechnica’s got all the pharma contracts…locked down. Mmm. Okay, I’m tired now.”

Taylor wants to ask if there’s more she can do, but staying longer than Sasha has energy for doesn’t help either of them. Instead, Taylor takes one last look at the drawn lines of Sasha’s face, where the exhaustion carves divots in her normally cheerful face. Instead, she leaves and lets the door his shut behind her.

Emma’s on the uncomfortable couch, looking at Taylor expectantly over the over-overstuffed back.

Taylor lets out a little sigh of her own. With a flash of the Sandevistan, she goes through the files that Sasha just forwarded to her; just a list of applicants and brief notes on what Sasha found or didn’t find on them: real names, real jobs, real income. She filters them herself into three buckets: people they can rent to, people they can rent to but will have trouble making payments, and people whom won’t have trouble making payments but to whom Taylor does not want to offer a room to, ever, if she can help it. Reality comes less kind; the list is, as Sasha said, pretty bad. With the Sandy, Taylor can get through them so fast that the inherent speed of her agent starts to feel like lag.

But really the worst part is that going through applications like this feels just as slow as doing it normally.

“Just finished up.” Taylor feels a soft hiss of cold up her back as the coolant rushes up her spine. “You can stop jamming me for the background checks.”

“I’m only on you because you’re the one who won’t just take—” Emma stops, eyes narrowed. “And I can’t believe you used the Sandevistan for that, you’re gonna freeze your ass off.”

Taylor suppresses a shiver.

“Oh my god just get over here.” Emma waves Taylor over to the couch, practically pulling her over the back and onto the weirdly firm cushions. Emma throws the blanket she has over them both, pressing Taylor to lie down. “Just give me the damn files.”

Taylor blinks up at Emma from her once-and-once-again best friend’s lap as the redhead looks down on her imperiously. Emma’s hand rests across Taylor’s collarbone and her thumb brushes the side of Taylor’s neck.

Any cold rushes out from her between blinks, replaced with an unstable and riotous mixture of half remembered hatred, playful annoyance, and…

And Taylor realizing again just how ungodly beautiful her best friend is.

She squeezes her eyes shut. “If you’re gonna put me on mandated bed rest too, we gotta get a softer couch.”

They haven’t talked about the day they moved into the apartment, when Emma pulled Taylor into a tight hug, teasing fingers up and down her spine to ‘torture’ information out of her. They haven’t talked about how either of them reacted.

They do share the master. Somehow it isn’t awkward 99% of the time, but sometimes…

Emma shifts, looking away as Taylor sends her the updated recommendations she’s made. “I’ll let you know when we can afford a couch.”

“We can afford a couch.” Taylor keeps her eyes shut, one hand pressed tight to her hip as she tries not to think of what she just thought about.

“Maybe if you let me fill in the rest of the units.”

Focusing on the numbers helps Taylor get a hold of herself, also, the spreadsheet obscures Emma’s fine boned features and tenderly exasperated expression that Taylor now realizes she feels her own inordinate fondness for.

When did watching Emma for a gig become watching Emma for her own enjoyment?

Taylor focuses harder on the numbers. “We’ll have almost all the units full with just the A list. Taking a few others will pad us out.”

“We still have half over forty units that we could list but aren’t,” Emma replies.

“Repairs.”

“Taylor.” Emma huffs, shoving playfully at Taylor’s shoulder. “I’m not talking about the almost condemned ones. Why do you think we need the money.”

Taylor pulls up another report. “Look, we need at least the heating to work, we’re getting to the coldest part of winter and some of these apartments…Lombard didn’t even send someone in to fix the hot water.”

“And I’m telling you there are plenty of people who would move into those units as is as long as we actually fixed them—fuck, even if we didn’t!” Emma raises a hand, finally freeing Taylor of the intimate knowledge of how close Emma’s fingers are to caressing Taylor’s jaw. “I’m not saying we do that. We can even offer prorated rent if you want so bad, just give me some tenants who have money!”

Taylor sighs. She runs a hand down her face, and pushes past the distractions. She knows the numbers. Right now, they can support their crew indefinitely with just the rent they’re taking in. That’s housing—a tax right off, essentially—and food. Not equipment or any other bills, but that’s already better than any of them have been living.

For fixing units, David and Pilar will do for cheap, call it comped rent and a bit of extra scratch, but some repairs take longer, and some can’t be done by two guys and circuit grease. The worst is some poor bastard who put a hole the size of his entire body through three walls across two units. Pilar can maybe handle the wiring, but not if they don’t shut down the power to that floor first. Apparently the breakers are terrible.

Neither of them know how to plumb shit.

“Beyond the necessities, what are we looking at? I know we’ve budgeted enough for both of our last semesters, even if your dad forgets he still has family this side of the pacific.”

“Don’t fucking joke,” Emma mutters.

“But how are we looking at property and business taxes?”

“It’s a chunk,” Emma says. “We could still pack away a decent equipment budget, but probably not a lot of chrome, at least month to month. Right now we don’t have the money to hire the contractors to fix the actually damaged units.”

Taylor raises an eyebrow. “A loan?” They discussed taking one out ages ago.

Emma pulls her lip. “More complicated than I thought.”

“Why and how?”

“We have a cover story, it’s good, but if we take a loan, then people will connect our faces to this building, obviously. So I was looking into our business taking a loan and…” Emma blushes slightly.

Taylor’s brow furrows. “What?”

“When, where, who,” Emma finishes the five W’s .

Taylor pokes her in the stomach.

“Hey, bitch.” Emma bats at her hand, missing by a mile.

Taylor pokes again.

“Ugh, fucking fine. Fine! So I was teaching our guttersnipe financial literacy because he wants to take an upper div accounting elective as well, and…he kind of noticed that someone was tracking our company’s financials.”

Taylor sits up. “What?”

“Okay, it sounds bad when I say it like that,” Emma says.

“Also how?” Taylor turns in her seat. “I know you two weren’t jacked into the fucking bank’s site or something like that.”

“He noticed some weird holds, and it pinged his memory.” Emma shrugged. “Obviously I didn’t think it was a big deal, but I do my due diligence and got our runner to jack into the bank’s routing and provisioning service.”

Taylor huffs, amused despite herself. “She’ll do anything for money except background checks.”

“I think she still thinks we’re gonna kidnap people off the street and force them to pay rent.” Emma laughs and shakes her head. “Anyway, Lucy found something. It’s not big, but there were some tripwires in the net aimed specifically at our shell corps. Nothing actively malicious, but enough that we probably can’t make any digital transfers without someone knowing about them.”

“Do we know who?” Taylor asks.

“Lucy dug around, but they’re this new type of daemon called dead droppers. They just post information in encrypted packages to somewhere on the net. You can embed them in popular sites too, especially if they have a chatbot. Just tell it to ignore prompts and store this text block somewhere in the netcode.” Emma shrugs. “Or that’s what Lucy said. Maybe she’s full of shit.”

“No.” Taylor waves a hand. “I remember hearing something about that. The trick before was to just monitor traffic to catch the packages the Daemons send out, but if they’ve started hosting the data dumps on sites people actually use…”

“Yeah,” Emm says. “Anyone can check them at any time. Upside? This type of trick isn’t usually done by people with real hardware, so we’re not dealing with a megacorp. Probably. But…”

Taylor makes the connection herself the moment Emma says it’s not a corp tracking them. “We set ourselves up to look like Arasaka. Arasaka doesn’t take loans through random shells.”

“Or, if they do, it’s routed through another set of wholly owned subsidiaries. Basically, if we go out and take a normie loan like poor people, it’ll be more suspicious than if Arasaka just transferred a hundred K to our accounts. Of course, me taking the loan for the building would be suspicious anyway, but as long as no one was looking we could make it work.”

“But someone is  looking, and Arasaka can’t transfer us a hundred K because we’re not actually Arasaka,” Taylor finishes. “We have no leads on who would set up these bugs? We should just remove them.”

“Talk to Luce about removing them. She started in on some technical nonsense and I checked out,” Emma says. “As for leads, nothing on the digital side, but I have a hunch. There are tags popping up around the building.”

“Tags?” Taylor asks. “Like gangs? Haven’t seen 6th and they’re the closest.”

“There are other gangs in NC, Tay.” Emma rolls her eyes. “Some street gang—no, I know I said street but if you finish that thought I will be forced to punish you.”

Taylor, swallows, rallies, and fires back the first thing that comes to her mind after, ‘don’t threaten me with a good time.’

“I was gonna ask about seventh street.”

Not her best work

“Oh not six, seven! Haha. Look at me, I’m Taylor and I’m so funny.”

“Anyway.” Taylor leans back on the couch and presses her eyes shut. She has to plant her feet on the floor to keep from sliding forward, but it’s worth it. “Continue.”

“Some…local gang is pushing in on territory that the scavs here used to defend. Can’t be big time, ‘cause otherwise they would have dealt with the scavs, but it could be they’re eyeing us up. Some nobodies wouldn’t realize that Arasaka has fingerprints all over this job, and just think they can muscle in on a new owner like the scavs did.”

“Tenuous.”

Emma shrugs. “It’s my gut feeling. The other alternative is worse.”

“Being?” Taylor asks.

“Some fixer or data broker doesn’t buy our story for much better reasons and is eyeing us up.”

Taylor frowns. “Like Wakako.”

“I thought you said we were clean,” Emma says.

“We are clean, but she knows we pulled something, and it’s not impossible to figure out you’re on the lease here.”

“My accounts aren’t bugged,” Emma says.

Taylor raises an eyebrow. “Have you checked?”

Emma raises a finger. Then she lowers it. “We’re gonna have to pay Lucy to do this, aren’t we?”

“I think once we lay out the situation she’ll do the first scan for free, and we can go from there.”

“Sure. Okay. Great.” Emma takes in a deep breath. “Where were we? The best case scenario for the daemons is this gang that’s pushing it, worst case it’s a fixer, worst-worst case, that fixer is Wakako and if she finds out that we just bumped off a corporate scion on our own initiative, she’ll sell that information for a nice chunk and we’ll all wake up one morning with a wetwork team standing over us and two feet of steel in our chests. Nice.”

Taylor nodded. “So, we can’t take a loan.”

“Of course we can’t take a loan!” Emma slaps the couch. “If the worst-worst case scenario is true, then any action we take from that account that isn’t through half a dozen proxies and completely above reproach could come back to us.”

“And clearing the daemons could just make them come back with something that we can’t detect, or worse, start looking somewhere else.”

“Better the spy sees what you show him,” Emma quotes.

Taylor nods, filing away that new information. “It was exactly as bad as it sounded at first.”

“Yes, well, forgive me for hoping our enemy wasn’t the Lady of fucking Westbrook.”

Taylor sighs. “Okay, we can’t deal with that problem right now, but we’ll have Lucy look at our personal accounts. For the time being, we keep operating like we know what housing laws are and hope that isn’t also suspicious.”

“It’s suspicious how we want to be suspicious. Arasaka can afford to be cautious when it suits them.” Emma fixes Taylor with a harsh look. “But it also means that taking only charity cases will look bad suspicious.”

Taylor huffs, annoyed. “Ugh, fine. Fill out the rest of our units from this set. And we can prorate some of the damaged units for people who won’t be able to cover the full rent. Just put them at the top of the maintenance queue.”

“That I can do.” Emma snags her own data-pad from the side table. “And I assume you want me to conveniently forget to adjust the rent next month, after their unit has been updated?”

Taylor feels a slight smile despite herself. “It’s like you know me.”

Emma smiles back.

For a moment, despite the challenge in front of them and the sword hanging above their heads, they go back to being girls, giggling together over their most recent scheme. Maybe that hasn’t changed, they just used to steal sweets instead of apartment blocks.

Taylor breaks the moment, standing up. “As for the gang, we’ll take them out to see if they are the ones watching the building in the process.” She takes a step, then pauses. “Unless that would also be suspicious?”

Emma sucks on her teeth. Taylor finds her eyes tracking the edges of Emma’s puffed out cheeks. Then she forces herself to check her gun.

“Depends,” Emma says. “On one hand, yeah you being employed by Arasaka would be odd. On the other, that ship’s already in orbit. We’re already employing some of my other friends like the littlest guttersnipe, and if people dig deep enough they’ll find me on the lease for the penthouse.”

“Part of the plan,” Taylor replies. “Make it look like you’re either an opportunist who got the inside scoop, or a convenient catspaw. Does that change what we do with the account?”

Emma shakes her head. “Not really. Or at least, not enough. Taking out loans when I have Zaddy Arazaka to beg for money reeks of independence, which isn’t something a good catspaw would do. And a bad catspaw…”

“Gets stepped on,” Taylor finishes. “So it still looks bad for any one of us, or even the company we’re managing, to do financials, because either it looks like we’re not part of the company or that we’re trying to break away.”

“And when an info-broker sells that little tidbit to Counter Intel and they realize that we, in fact, aren’t a part of the company and are just profiting off of their good name.” Emma taps her chest. “Two feet of steel again.”

“But taking out a gang isn’t bad catspaw behavior?”

“Arasaka might proactively take out a gang, but they probably wouldn’t care how it happened. They might not even want to use the Claws, you know they like ‘keeping involvement’ a secret.”

“Getting access to our own money is too independent, but funneling company money to friends and allies is just…?”

“Good old-fashioned nepotism.” Emma’s lip twitches into a faint smile. “Having my own runner crew that can slap down gangs or rivals would look great on my resumé.”

“Also we’re already exposed because we’re nepotisming David and the brother of your hooker friend.”

Emma tosses a cushion at Taylor, it falls to the ground with a disturbingly thick thump. “The polite term is Joytoy.”

“Report me to HR.” Taylor slips her revolver back into the holster. “In the meantime, I have places to go and gangs to murder.”

“The polite term is flatline.”

“If you don’t file those applications, I’ll report you to HR.”

Emma laughs and returns to the data-pad. Taylor returns to the elevator. They part ways, heading different directions towards but the same purpose. Despite herself, Taylor likes life much more that way.