"Fuck you," Cinderella spits with a gasp, glaring up at me with a smile dancing along the curve of her lips, a lolling slick of saliva dripping down her chin. This close, I can see that familiar electricity in her eyes, the violent, violet sparkle of one singing a duet with the fierce blue of the other.

Still, her own smile invites a twisted grin of my own, echoes of my old boyish smirk still there beneath the edges and the armor. Even now, even with the sight of her jacket hanging open around her shoulders and a lurid, swaying strand of spit connecting her lips to me still. Even with the flat red glare of a mark on my visor, crosshairs still helpfully pinging gently away like some obscene halo around her defiant gaze.

The card that had slid out of the Commissioner's terminal was simple, stark, and to the point in the way the man in the tank rarely ever was. Crisp red lettering on white, the Commissioner turning his head vaguely in my direction, limbs withered and swaying in the gel currents, blind eyes staring out through cables and wires instead onto the City, from a million irises. The usual, in other words - an audience with a man-made oracle, a badge bolted to the tank not unlike my own, and a card with instructions.

"Fuck you," I tease back, wrapping my fingers a little tighter around the back of Cinderella's scalp, shocks of white sprouting from between the coal-black knuckles of my gloves like grass after a poison rain.

This is what I live for, stolen in the moments between chases and silence, between the slow death of a thousand days in a cramped apartment that never sees true dark, bathed in neon from above, and the iron lightning of the job. Even the white-hot song of engines firing overhead, of hitting the ground running, red and blue lights shimmering from Lady's rotors whirring overhead and pointing me toward the latest mark, never reaches deep down into my guts and sets them alight like this. Like her.

I'd seen what a bad jack could do to a person - worse than K3, worse than meth, and a damn sight uglier when someone mixed all three together in the pursuit of an untouchable high. He'd sounded like that before he looked it, the telltale, haunted staccato of his speech the first thing I noticed when the door blew off its hinges. Bloodshot eyes, the sickening jerk of wires ripping loose from a second-rate implant, and the motion of his hands. Always the hands, flickering in the dark space between the scared eyes of the girls behind him - thin, I remember, far too thin - and the gun resting on the table.

There aren't any more words, not anymore, Cinderella's jeans shoved down around her ankles and my fingers disappearing wetly into the sort of rough, curling slide I'd learned got a jolt, two months and change ago. Not that I'm any better position to speak, labored breath fogging my helmet's screen as her own body works wonders they still haven't quite gotten a synth to manage.

I'd wondered about her, at first. Why the card had only said Illegal. Why the Commissioner had reached out his blind hand and moved me into position, to that house, to her, with all the ugliness and terror of that place, and put her name on the card, not his.

You learn to see things, in this line of work - the shine of a sign off the jagged edge of a broken bottle, the slow thump of blood in an addict's temple, magnified by the system. It happened in glacial time, then, the flare of a gun and the slow arc of blood leaping out, before I saw her. Silhouetted in the flashing lights from outside, wreathed in the smoke drifting back from her outstretched arm, and entirely too calm for someone caught between the hammer of the law and, judging from the steel and carbon around her neck, the sort of person who was even worse than that.

I'd wondered, at first.

But now, each scattered answer only makes it matter less.

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