End of The Line // 0x46 // Stasis

"Can't move. Can't call out. Can't jack in. Fantastic. What else can go wrong?"

The voice behind her answered, as if reading her thoughts - which, Void realized with a fresh spike of unease, she very well might have been. "You're thinking very loudly," she murmured, her breath still warm against the shell of Void's ear. "All that panic. All that static. Very flattering, honestly. Most girls don't get this wound up around me until I've at least bought them a drink."

Void tried to speak. Her jaw moved, but the sound that came out was a rasp - her vocal cords obeying, barely, but her tongue and lips still sluggish, like the signal from her brain was traveling through mud.

"Shh, shh, shh." A finger - thin, cool, with a nail chipped - pressed gently against Void's lips. "Don't strain yourself. Your nerves are still rebuilding. Whoever implanted this did good work, but that little meltdown at the airport? All that screaming inside your own skull? Your neural bridge took a beating."

The finger traced downward, over Void's chin, along the line of her jaw. Very deliberate in its motion. A touch that wasn't asking permission because it already knew the answer didn't matter.

"Okay. This is happening. Some psycho is touching my face while I lie here like a ragdoll. Keira would be losing her absolute shit right now. Keira would already be... No. No, don't think about Keira. Don't think about how she'd look at this. Focus. Find an angle. There's always an angle."

"I know who you are," said the voice, and the casual intimacy of it made Void's stomach tighten. "Knew it the moment you stepped off that plane. You're someone who's been rejected so many times even death itself wanted to spite you. Very distinctive. Very..." She paused, searching for the word. Void felt the woman's lips curve into a smile against the curve of her ear. "...appetizing."

"Appetizing. Fan-fuckin'-tastic. I've been unconscious for god knows how long, my systems are fried, I'm probably about to be dismantled into parts, and this woman thinks I'm a snack. Night City special."

The arm around her waist shifted. The weight withdrew - not leaving entirely, but repositioning. Void felt the mattress shift as the woman behind her propped herself up on one elbow, and then her other hand found the hem of Void's shirt.

"Let's see what we're working with," she breathed.

Her fingers slipped beneath the fabric. Not rough, or hurried. The touch was almost reverent, tracing a line across Void's stomach just above the waistband of her pants. Void's skin prickled, goosebumps rising in the wake of those fingers like a confession she hadn't meant to make.

"Don't react. Don't give her the satisfaction. This is purely tactical - she has the advantage. You're immobilized. Assess. Adapt. Do not-"

The fingers traced higher. Along her ribs now, feather-light, mapping the landscape of her torso like she was reading an ancient language.

"Mmm~ You're fit," the woman observed, and there was some real appreciation in her voice - the lack of performativeness in it all made Void feel good, even if she didn't want to admit that, it was a voice coming from someone who actually liked what she was finding. "Not gym-fit. Not corpo-fit. The genuine type. Your body's just... Earned. You know what I mean? Like it's done things. Survived things."

Void's heart rate ticked up. She could feel it in her temples, in her throat, in the places where the woman's fingers hadn't even touched yet.

"It's just a physiological response. Adrenaline. Cortisol. The body reacting to an unknown variable. Doesn't mean anything. Doesn't mean I'm-"

"You're blushing," the woman observed, and the delight in her voice was unmistakable.

"Fuck."

The hand withdrew from beneath her shirt - but only to find new territory. Fingertips brushed across Void's collarbone, tracing the hollow of her throat, then up the side of her neck where the pulse beat traitorously fast beneath her skin.

"I've been watching you," continued the woman, as if she were discussing the weather. "Not in a creepy way... Welllll... Maybe a little creepy. But Night City's a small town when you know how to listen... I picked up chatter about a new player the moment you touched down. No chrome, all alone... Attitude and a story of a dead ganger on the curb outside the airport." She chuckled softly - a thin, bright sound, like glass tapping glass. "That was you, right? The ganger? Impressive, really... You've got that effect on people. They want to protect you. Or hurt you. Sometimes both at the same time."

Her fingers had reached Void's hair now. They paused there, hovering, and Void could feel the anticipation in the space between touch and not-touch.

"And this," the woman breathed. "This is just... unfair, really."

Her fingers sank into Void's hair without haste. Nails grazing the scalp with just enough pressure to send a cascade of sensation down Void's spine. The woman worked through the tangles with surprising patience, separating strands of magenta, letting them fall through her fingers like she was handling a treasure no Corpo suit could afford.

"She's playing with my hair. She's... This is- I don't even let Kei do this without warning. Keira. Fuck. Keira would-"

"It's so soft," the woman murmured, almost to herself. "How is it so soft? You've been in Night City for a few nights now... The air here is basically acid. And yet..." She wound a lock around her finger, tugging gently, just enough to tilt Void's head back a fraction. "It's like cotton candy. Like a sunset you can touch. Like-" She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice had dropped to something rawer, less practiced. "Like the color I wanted my hair to be, once. Before I decided on pale green. Magenta was my first choice, you know. But I couldn't make it work with my physique. You've got to be strong to wear a color like this. It's not a color that favors the meek."

"She's complimenting my hair like I'm some kind of a religious icon. I'm immobilized in a stranger's bed, and she's waxing poetic about my fucking hair. Keira, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. This isn't- I'm not-"

"You're thinking about someone else, aren't you?" said the woman, and her fingers stilled in Void's hair. Not accusing - observing. "Someone who's not here. Someone who should be. Someone you feel guilty about, even though you're not doing anything wrong. I see it in your eyes."

Void's breath caught.

"It's okay," the woman continued, resuming her slow, patient stroking. "I don't mind. Guilt's just love with nowhere to go, right? You wouldn't feel it if you didn't care. And you care so much, don't you? I can see it. The way you hold yourself. The way you looked at people. You're all serrated edge on the outside, but underneath it all?" She leaned closer, her lips brushing the shell of Void's ear again. "Inside, you're just a soft heart with titanium teeth."

"A heart with teeth. Great - a poet. A crazy, hair-obsessed poet who's currently got me pinned like a butterfly. This is fine. Everything is absolutely fucking fine."

The woman withdrew her hand from Void's hair, and Void found the absence wrong. Which was absurd, which she refused to examine, which meant nothing except that her nervous system was clearly still misfiring from the neural collapse.

The mattress shifted again. The woman was moving - climbing over her, Void realized, the relatively frail weight repositioning itself until it settled directly on top of Void's hips.

And then she was looking up at her.

"Hey there, hackergirl," she said, settling onto Void's hips and tightening her thighs around them just enough to state "mine for the foreseeable future."

"Fuck me sideways..."

"Here... Just so you're not staring at the boring ceiling all the time." The shift in weight brought her fully into the ambient amber glow for the first time, and she repositioned Void's head just enough to take in the woman straddling her.

The first thing she noticed, because it was impossible not to, was the light.

Fine lines of it traced paths beneath the girl's skin, emerging from beneath the collar of her black crop top and running up the sides of her neck in parallel tracks. Not surface-level glow strips or tattooed circuits - something embedded deeper, the light diffusing through the thin membrane of her skin like sun through frosted glass. The lines pulsed in slow waves of yellow-green, shifting through gradients of chartreuse and pale gold, their rhythm matching the heartbeat Void could feel through the weight settled on her hips. At her temples, the lines branched into fractal patterns that disappeared into her hairline, and along her cheekbones, they traced the elegant architecture of her face, like someone had drawn her skeleton in light.

"She's lit up like a christmas tree. An insane, skinny christmas tree sitting on my stomach. Keira would already be reaching for a wrench."

"You're only seeing the top half," said the girl, catching Void's gaze and holding it. "There's more. The lines go all the way down. Spine, ribs, hips-" She bit her lower lip and traced a finger down her own sternum as she spoke, following the path of one glowing line as it descended. "-but you'll have to earn the rest."

"Earn it. Good fuckin' joke. She says that like it's a given. Like I'm going to be here long enough to- Nope. Not engaging. Don't think about it."

"My name's Rez," she said, without changing the sweet tone of her voice, somehow getting even more unapologetic. "I'm very good at four things: annoying the suits, fixing broken chrome, finding lost souls, and making girls forget their own names."

She reached up with both hands and pushed her hair back from her face, and Void's attention snagged on the chaos of it. Yellow-green - as advertised - the same shade as the LEDs, but louder, more aggressive, as if the color had been chosen to make sure anyone looking didn't miss it. It was cut in a choppy 2020-era scene-kid shag, razored short at the back and longer in the front, where uneven bangs swept sideways across her forehead and immediately fell back into her eyes the moment she released them. Black roots showed at the part - not from neglect, Void recognized, but from the kind of life where touch-ups happened whenever there was time and money, and neither came often. A few thin braids were tucked behind her left ear, threaded with beads that looked like salvaged resistors, and when she tilted her head, something tiny and silver chimed from within the strands - a bell tied into her hair. A warning... Or an invitation, Void figured.

She leaned forward then, planting both hands on either side of Void's shoulders, and the LED matrices along her cheekbones flickered into a new pattern - something like a heart, broken and reforming, over and over.

"You've been out for about twenty-eight hours. In that time, your neural architecture tried to eat itself, your motor cortex went into cascade failure, and Militech showed up at the airport looking for their stolen prototype."

Up close, her face was all sharp angles and too-big eyes, the kind of face that photographs well from certain angles and betrays every emotion it's ever felt from others. Her irises were pale and watery green, almost translucent, and they moved constantly - flicking from Void's eyes to her mouth to the scar at her temple and back again, cataloguing details, as if she was memorizing them. Dark circles sat beneath her lower lashes, not the tired kind but the chronic one, the type that said sleep was a negotiation she usually lost. A fine, white line traced from the corner of her mouth to her jawline on the right side - old, well-healed, a scar someone had taken care to close properly. Someone had loved her enough to make sure it didn't heal ugly.

When she smiled - a little too wide, slightly crooked, the grin of someone who'd learned to use joy as a weapon - Void caught the glint of a tongue stud.

"I'm the reason you're not in a corpo black site right now, having your brain extracted and your body dumped in the bay."

Void kept staring at her.

"You're..." Her voice scraped out, barely a whisper. "...very colorful."

Rez blinked. The LEDs along her temples flickered - surprise, perhaps, or delight. Then she let out a chuckle evolving into laugh, that same thin, bright sound as before.

"Did I just say that out loud? That was stupid. She's going to think I'm an idiot. Or brain-damaged. Which, technically, I might be. Fuck."

"You?" Void managed, still staring up at the glowing, grinning apparition straddling her waist. "Out of everyone? Saved me?"

"I know, I know." Rez sat back, releasing Void's shoulders, and spread her arms wide as if presenting herself for inspection. The crop top, already precarious, slipped further - revealing more of the circuitry tracing her sternum, the vine-like tattoo curling around her ribs, the way her collarbone sat sharp beneath skin that seemed almost translucent in the amber light. "I don't look like much. Thin. Crazy. Probably the kind of girl your mother warned you about."

"My mother didn't warn me about anyone. I don't even have a mother. I have Aura's half-remembered childhood and a list of coping mechanisms. Neither of which prepared me for... Whatever the fuck this is."

Rez dropped her arms and shrugged, and the LEDs along her neck rippled into a cascade of descending lights, like an electric waterfall. The motion drew Void's gaze down to her hands - those thin, scarred knuckles, the chipped yellow-green polish, the callused fingertips of someone who worked with machines that could kill her if she touched the wrong wire.

"But I was there. At the airport. Waiting for a friend who never showed - story of my life, really - when I heard the commotion." She leaned forward again, lowering her voice conspiratorially, and her bangs fell across her eyes in a way that would've looked ridiculous on anyone else. On her, it just looked like chaos finding its natural resting state. "Airport security called the pigs first. Standard protocol when someone faceplants in the middle of the terminal and starts bleeding from the nose. The badges showed up maybe ten minutes later. Scanned you. Detected the Militech hardware. And you know what they did?"

Void tried to answer, but her vocal cords refused to comply again.

"They backed off," Rez continued. "Called it in. Said it was above their pay grade. And then-" She made a little explosion gesture with her fingers. "-Militech agents. On-site in under five minutes. Do you know how fast that is? For a Corpo response? They wanted that prototype of yours back so badly they probably broke half a dozen traffic laws getting there."

"Militech. At the airport. Of course. Of-fucking-course. Reyes said he disabled the tracking layers. Did he miss something? Or did the system meltdown broadcast our location?"

"Anyway," Rez went on, "I saw the agents. I saw you on the ground. I saw the way they were looking at you like they found a million eddies just laying there. And I thought to myself: 'Rez, there is no way in hell these corpo fucks are going to let that pretty girl walk out of here with her brain still in her skull.'"

She tapped her temple, and the LEDs embedded beneath her skin pulsed in time with the gesture.

"So I did what I do best. I made a scene. Set off a fire alarm. Hacked the PA system. Broadcast some very loud, very obnoxious Tinnitus music through every speaker in the terminal. By the time the agents figured out what was happening, I'd already pulled you into a maintenance corridor and called for transport. I poked around your beautiful system a little as I waited, too."

She paused, tilting her head and chuckling, "sorry, not sorry." The LEDs shifted to a slow, gentle pulse.

"Your other half. The one you were fighting. Aura?" Rez's voice softened slightly, losing some of its manic edge. "She's quiet right now. The system's still rebuilding her partition. But she'll come back one day. Systems like yours don't just delete things. They're designed to preserve. She'll be annoying you again before you know it."

"She knows about Aura. She knows about the partition. She knows- how much does she know? How long was she watching? Was I really out for almost two days?"

Void found her voice again. Barely. "I don't... Believe you."

Rez's smile didn't falter. If anything, it widened.

"Yeah," she said. "I figured you wouldn't."

She leaned forward - slowly, giving Void plenty of time to anticipate what was coming. Her chest pressed against Void's as she lowered herself, forearms braced on either side of Void's head, and the scent of circuitry mixed with citrus filled Void's senses entirely again.

"You're as trusting as my lovely sister," murmured, her cheek brushing against Void's. The contact was electric - skin against skin, the faint warmth of her subdermal LEDs felt just beneath the surface. "You two are going to get along so well. Or kill each other. Maybe both."

She turned her head and pressed a kiss to Void's cheekbone. She lingered there for a longer moment. The kind of kiss one could only respond to with mute acknowledgment.

Then she moved higher. Another kiss, this one on Void's forehead. And another. Each one placed with utmost reverence, a rhythm to them, like she was counting out a heartbeat against Void's skin.

"She's kissing my forehead. This is... This isn't right."

Void felt it then - a faint pressure at the back of her neck, right where the surgical scar was.

"You know the tragedy of bodies?" Rez whispered, her lips ghosting along the curve of Void's jaw. "They keep us apart. Even when we're tangled up, even when there's nothing between us - there's still skin. Still distance." The personal link slid home with a soft, resonant click. Her breath hitched - not Void's, but Rez's, a tiny gasp of something that sounded almost like relief. "But this... This is the good stuff. The place where distance is a foreign concept..."

Rez disconnected, and Void felt the change immediately. The muscles in her neck, which had been dead weight moments before, responded - sluggishly at first, then with growing certainty. She could turn her head. She could look at Rez directly, rather than just dead-staring her like a paralyzed doll.

She turned her head and met Rez's eyes. The LEDs were doing that broken-heart animation again, green and gold fractals chasing each other beneath translucent skin.

"Bubble...gum?"

"Mm-hmm!" Rez grinned, and the lights along her cheekbones flared bright for just a moment. "Because of the hair. And because you're probably sweet on the inside, even if you don't want anyone to know it."

She pulled back slightly, still straddling Void's waist, and tilted her head. The LEDs cycled through a new pattern - a shape that loosely resembled a question mark.

"So," she said. "Still think I want to kill you?"