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Judy always liked the rain. Not that it ever did much to slow the chaos of Night City, but the way it blurred the neon into glossy streaks, the way it blunted the traffic and the yelling and the gunshots, just a bit… Rain was a welcome friend and an ally in a place where Judy was getting damn close to having neither.
She leaned on the windowsill and watched droplets trail down the glass, colliding and combining, pooling in the gap beneath the pane before tumbling three stories down to join the mud in the complex’s parking lot. The skyline beyond—the city’s rotted core—was an indistinct mess of gray and black in the evening gloom. Her Watson apartment felt a world away.
V was out there somewhere, a speck in another galaxy. To Judy, though, Judy and her fucking stupid satellite of a heart, always desperate for something to orbit around, V was the sun. A dying star headed straight for supernova. But Judy knew herself—she wouldn’t even try to get out of the way.
She pressed her forehead against the cold glass and sighed, her breath leaving a brief circle of fog. Real bad habit, letting women obliterate her. Maiko, Evelyn… now V. Leopard can’t change its spots, right? She sighed again, brushing her hand over her back pocket, where her cigarettes were supposed to be but weren’t. Wasn’t fair of her to lump them all together like that. V didn’t want to hurt her. Ev probably didn’t want to hurt her, either; it was the city’s fault, taking her over, wrapping its maw around her and clamping shut. But maybe that was just what Judy needed to tell herself to grab what fractured sleep she could each night.
God. Didn’t matter anymore, did it?
Downside of rain: made her think too much. A smoke would clear your head, said her lying addict gonk brain. It hadn’t shut up since Evelyn’s death, since that grief-fueled smoke on the roof, when she drowned in the artificially saccharine flavor of Ev’s cigarettes, holding in each drag until it burned, like a part of Evelyn could live on inside Judy’s chest.
Three years of clean lungs thrown out the window. Figuratively clean, anyway. Breathing NC air wasn’t much better than sucking down cancer sticks—the gutted remains of the Environmental Protection Agency had to make a new air quality index tier just for Night City—but at least she’d been good about not adding to the damage. So much for that.
She could still smell Maiko’s menthols in her couch, even after cleaning it twice with every kind of disinfectant she could find. The stale reek was just another reminder of how Maiko fucked them all over, how she sat there and rolled her eyes at their tiny spark of hope while she worked out exactly how to take Clouds for herself.
Fuck. Maybe a cig would clear her head. V didn’t smoke, did she? Never said anything about Judy taking it up again, but she rarely joined in. It was a dumb thing to cling to, but it made her feel different from the other girls. Because she was different, wasn’t she? She had every reason to be selfish, every reason to hate Evelyn for that heist, every reason to take off after Ev died, to leave Judy to pick up the pieces on her own. But she didn’t. She wasn’t like them. A sun, Judy reminded herself. Not a black hole.
The door clicked open as Judy was reaching for the pack of cigarettes on the counter.
“V!”
V looked like shit, no two ways about it. She was soaked and shivering, her fuchsia mohawk now the color of a bruise, sodden and plastered to her skull. Did she walk here? The cigs forgotten, Judy crossed the room to the doorway, shutting the door with a wave of her hand toward the sensor before cupping V’s clammy cheek in her palm. V threaded her fingers through Judy’s, a flicker lighting in the hollow pits of her sleep-starved eyes. She was too pale under the freckles blanketing her face and chest; even her tattoos seemed leeched of color. Too much like how she looked on the dock, after she passed out inside Laguna Bend’s sunken church and Judy, through the sheer power of terror and adrenaline, dragged her back to the surface. Too much like Evelyn in the bath—no. No. Judy took a deep breath, shoved her heart down from her throat. They weren’t the same.
“Should’ve checked the forecast before taking the bike today, huh?” V said, tugging Judy back to the present. Her voice sounded like a misaligned actuator.
“Why didn’t you find a place to stay until the storm passed?”
V shrugged. “Wanted to see you,” she replied, as if that were a perfectly logical reason to ride a motorcycle in the pouring rain.
“Hope I’m worth the trip, then.” Judy tilted her head up to kiss her. V’s mouth, at least, was warm. “But my grandma’ll come down from Oregon to kill me if you get muddy water all over her floor. Let me grab a towel.”
A few minutes later, V’s clothes were in the wash, and she was moderately more dry than when she arrived. The floors were safe. Abuelita would be appeased. Judy dug up one of her shirts and a pair of shorts for V to wear—she wouldn’t have said no to V strolling around in the buff, but somehow she doubted V was in the mood. V seemed pulled in two directions: despite the way her entire body drooped with exhaustion, her individual movements were quick, almost frantic. She rubbed the towel over her head like she meant to rip the skin from her scalp.
“Hey, take it easy,” Judy said, as gently as she could, and took the towel from V’s hands.
V stared back at her, a muscle fluttering in her jaw, eyes glazed and distant, as if she were lost in a braindance. Judy froze, breath dying in her lungs, until V blinked a few times and seemed to return from whatever hell her mind had sent her. “Sorry,” she murmured, working her fingertips in hard circles against her temple.
Ev had looked at Judy like that, the day they brought her home. “Bad day?” Judy asked, casually. She hid her shaking hands under the towel.
“Yeah, I—” V stopped herself, swallowed, blinked more. Was she swaying on her feet? “Yeah.”
“When’s the last time you slept?”
“A while.” Judy was no ripperdoc, but given the fully-loaded bags under V’s eyes, she guessed that translated to at least two days. “I’ve tried, just… can’t seem to close my eyes for more than a few minutes. Too afraid.”
“Afraid? Why?”
V answered in a whisper, her gaze trained firmly on the floor, “That I’m gonna fall asleep and not wake up.”
The resulting pang of sympathy felt like a shiv between the ribs. “Shit, V,” Judy breathed, chucking the towel into the corner and pulling V into her arms. “You can’t just not sleep.”
Given the kind of jobs V worked, being tired was as much a death sentence as the busted chip in her head. React a half-second too slow in the middle of a firefight, and that would be it. Done. Judy learned as much when she was tweaking the dolls’ behavioral chips for combat. But even the sharpest augmented reflexes weren’t enough to keep Tom from getting flatlined, were they?
“I know,” V mumbled into Judy’s neck. “But…”
Circling her fingers around V’s wrist, Judy stepped backward toward the bedroom and gave the most encouraging smile she could muster. “Come on.”
V didn’t resist. “Sure seem to like draggin’ me to bed with you.”
Judy clutched the note of mirth threaded through that quip like a lifeline in a riptide. “Yeah, well, the bed’s a good place to be. ‘Specially,” she added slyly, “with someone else.”
A flush bloomed hot across her cheeks as she remembered the night in Laguna Bend—how the remnants of the dual braindance had sent echoes of V’s desire reverberating through Judy’s mind, refracting back and forth between them with every touch, like light through a diamond. The finest of her smut BDs could never come close to that level of intimacy.
It had been sublime. For a few hours, she’d been able to forget about her failed revolution, about Maiko’s silver-tongued lies, about Evelyn’s blood coating her bathroom floor. When she woke the next morning to see V sleeping peacefully next to her, it felt… good. Different. Like she had found a singular answer in an ocean of uncertainty, like the ground beneath her was now a fraction more solid. And maybe, she dared to hope, V felt the same.
With a little coaxing, V got into bed, grumbling amiably when Judy climbed in beside her and pulled the covers over them both. To Judy’s surprise (and mild frustration), V didn’t immediately fall asleep—instead, she kept her eyes open, unmodded slate blue irises twitching minutely, studying Judy’s face from hairline to chin and back again, like she was searching for something.
Better than the dead-eyed stare she had earlier. Judy used her hand to mirror V’s inspection, gliding her thumb over V’s lips, her fingertips along the curve of V’s jaw, the stubble of her shaved hair, the crest of her cheekbones, over the grisly scar streaking down from her right eye like a bloody tear. Judy had never asked where it came from—she assumed it, like the others decorating V’s torso, was a souvenir from her rough upbringing in south Heywood. A knife fight, maybe, for fun or profit. Or, knowing V, for fun and profit. As for why V never bothered to have a ripperdoc smooth it over, well… it did lend a certain air of don’t-fuck-with-me.
In a world of perfect fabricated faces, Judy found it painfully attractive.
V was the first to break the silence. “Talk to me? Please?” she asked softly, tentatively, like it was a lofty request.
“‘Bout what?”
“Where do you wanna go? When all this”—and there was a mutual understanding of what all this meant—“is over?”
“Hmm… not sure, really,” Judy mused, her fingers tapping a disjointed beat against the chipware sockets behind V’s ear. “Haven’t made up my mind yet. Out east? Gotta be somewhere on the coast that’s not nuked to hell or flooded, right? Or maybe—doesn’t even have to be that far, you know? Just… away from here. Somewhere quiet. No crowds.”
How many times had she fantasized about it? Whenever something went wrong, every time the city tore off another piece of her, she retreated into toothless daydreams of a seaside cottage with murals painted on its walls and the sounds of crashing waves leaking through its windows.
She’d talked to Ev about it. Constantly. Even now, Judy wasn't sure if Evelyn had just been humoring her or not. Ev’s responses had ranged from enthusiastic agreement—helping plan their eventual escape from NC down to the finest detail—to utter indifference, barely managing a nod and a weak smile in Judy’s direction. Never amounted to anything, anyway. Regardless of Evelyn’s true feelings, their schemes existed solely in the realm of hypothetical. Someday…
With V, though… there was nothing hypothetical about her. The plan now had a deadline, which cranked the emotional track weaving through Judy’s limbic system to new and dizzying heights. V hacked seamlessly into Judy’s imaginings: she pictured them sharing breakfast, refurbishing scrap bots for cash, making trouble and kicking ass whenever and wherever it was required. Christ, how was that for a niche BD idea? Domestic Fantasies for Lovesick Lesbians. She’d make a fucking killing.
V seemed to be considering it, her brow furrowed in thought. “Quiet and no crowds, huh? Can’t even imagine. Cities are all I’ve ever known. Every time I’ve traveled outside them, the silence feels… unreal.” She gave a short, breathy chuckle. “Freaky shit.”
After fifteen years in Night City, Judy guessed it’d be freaky shit to her, too. Which only made her want it more. “If you get homesick, we can stand in the yard and shoot guns in the air while screamin’ our damn heads off. It’ll be like you never left.”
“You’d take me with you?”
“Told you I would,” Judy chided, and every sunken dream started bubbling to the surface: “I’ve got some money saved up. We could buy a little house. Something cozy, nothin’ too fancy. As long as I’ve got my studio, I can work, so eddies wouldn’t be an issue. Hell, you’ve parsed enough virtus—bet I could get you a gig tuning ‘em, if you wanted. Or whatever; doubt you’d have any trouble finding jobs. Maybe we could get a cat, or…”
She came back to Earth to find V watching her intently, wearing an expression Judy couldn’t begin to place. Shit. She fucked up. Too much, too soon. Why did she always do this? “V? You all right? Did I say something wrong?” she asked, then braced for disappointment.
“No,” V was quick to reply, shaking her head as much as the pillow against her cheek allowed her. “It’s fine. I just… I want that. All of it. And that scares me, too.”
“Why?”
“Because I won’t… I won’t be able to—” V’s words collapsed into a harsh sob. “Fuck.”
Judy’s mind filled in the awful gaps automatically: V didn’t believe she would live long enough to see that future. “Don’t think like that,” she demanded, fear sharpening her tone to a brittle edge. “We’re gonna find a way to fix it.”
Made the same promise to Evelyn, didn’t you? False hope, that was all she could offer either of them. No matter the amount of chrome, people weren’t bots or cars; couldn’t just whip out a voltmeter and some fresh fuses when the mind was fucked. Even Judy’s vaunted editing skills—effortlessly conjuring emotions with a precisely placed arpeggio, a burst of color, a whisper of some nostalgic scent—were useless outside a BD wreath. What else did she have?
Nothing. Not one fucking thing. She entwined their fingers together under the blanket and waited, completely helpless, for V to stop crying.
After a short while, she did, blowing her nose with a tissue snatched from Judy’s nearly-empty box on the floor. Then she said, voice hoarse, “I came from fuck-all, you know?” Judy nodded, knowing all too well. “Didn’t have a pot to piss in. Nothing to eat unless I klepped it. I just… I wanted more. I used to think, like, ‘Just a little more scratch, one more rung up the ladder, and then I’ll be happy.’”
Judy ran her thumb over a stray tear resting on V’s upper lip. “You’re not the only one chasing that dragon. I think every poor kid’s had those dreams at some point.” Judy certainly did. Maiko did, too—even made her dreams a reality, and it only cost every scrap of dignity and integrity she possessed.
“Sure, but what is any of that worth when I’m gonna die?”
“You won’t die.” If she said it enough, would that make it true?
“I will. Don’t know when, but—” V cut herself off before Judy could argue further, then continued, “Point is, I’ve been trying to get into the major leagues my whole life. But maybe… maybe the game’s not even worth playing.”
“The prizes do seem kinda shitty.”
“Yeah, it’s—” V suddenly grimaced. Her jaw went rigid, breaths hissing unevenly through her teeth, and her hands, so hyperflexed each tendon was like a titanium cable under her skin, grasped at nothing.
Judy did the only thing she could think to do: wrapping her arms around V, she held her as tightly as she dared, as though she could absorb V’s convulsions into her body. At least now, she thought with a grim satisfaction, she’d be ready if V’s face started leaking blood. The first time it happened, when V passed out on her couch in a pool of red, had been a less than pleasant surprise—despite the shots of tequila she tossed back to dull her anxiety enough to clean up, Judy didn’t sleep a wink that night.
But V’s infiltrator was apparently feeling merciful. The attack stopped as soon as it began, and she sagged into the mattress. “Fucking prick,” she gasped between coughs. “Can’t stand the idea that I might not wanna fuckin’ blow myself up like he did.”
Judy could almost hear him, like he had jacked their underwater braindance connection and crept into her own mind. She hated him. Never seen him, only heard him once, but just knowing what he was doing to V, knowing he could be lurking in the background when Judy touched her… it made her skin crawl. It enraged her. Yet for all her fury, it was nothing compared to how V must feel, forced to play host for an intractable digital parasite.
“Fuck him, and fuck his opinions. They aren’t worth shit,” Judy said, facing away to discreetly blink back a late-arriving rush of tears.
The imaginary cottage beckoned to her, its door open wide. She let herself walk in. Everything drifted into place, data pulled from countless previous reveries: the well-worn couch in the corner next to the case of bookshards; the salt-stiffened multicolored rug under her boots; the tiny breakfast nook adjacent to the tiny kitchen, where Evelyn used to sit, where V sat now, a mug of coffee steaming between her palms. She looked up at Judy and smiled, genuine and warm. Here, V was free—from Night City, from Johnny, from pain. Sunlight breached the windows, dappling the floor with gold. The air was damp, briny and cool, beautifully quiet. Judy stood in their fake house and breathed fake air until her heart felt a little less like it was cracked in half.
When Judy finally summoned the strength to face reality again and opened her eyes, V was motionless beside her, her own eyes closed. Judy reached over to gingerly place her hand between V’s shoulder blades and waited until she felt V’s ribcage expand and contract.
She watched the distorted swirl of shadows against the far wall cast by the ceiling fan in the other room, mulling over their earlier conversation. Did V really want to give up the chase for glory? It was hard to imagine. The constant need for more was bred into the city’s concrete and steel bones; nobody came to NC without succumbing to it eventually. And V was no wide-eyed tourist—she was born here, raised by the streets, cradled in filthy back alleys and bathed in neon glow. This was her home. Why would she let it go? For the sake of Judy’s half-baked dreams? Maiko couldn’t. And something told her Evelyn wouldn’t have either, even if she’d gotten the chance.
But V was different.
Leaning forward, Judy pressed a kiss to V’s forehead. V responded with a barely conscious, contented sigh and wiggled closer, wedging the top of her head under Judy’s chin. There was something soothing about the rhythmic tickle of her breath against the base of Judy’s throat. As long as it didn’t stop, they could keep treading water in Night City’s swiftly rising toxic tides.
They still had time.