The op went clean.
The client lay beneath the surgical hood, breath steady, pupils tracking the calibration grid. I—Rocky, "L" on clinic forms—parked the micro-arm and rotated the chair. The ocular implant pinged green across five tests: focus, low-light, glare, color, and motion. I locked it in the socket with a soft click, then ghosted a line of bio-glue around the seam. No blood, no drama—just precision and practice.
"Take a blink," I said. "Follow the dot."
The dot strolled left and right across the HUD. The new eye stayed with it, smooth as a maglev. When the client's smile reached both cheeks, I checked the chart again, keyed a serial into the system, and moved to phase two.
Left arm replacement.
The old limb had been a lawsuit waiting to happen—cheap pistons, stripped bearings, casing held together with tape and prayer. I powered it down, cut the anchors, and eased it off the brachial plug. The room filled with the low mechanical vernacular of surgery: suction hiss, tool tchk, pump whirr. I seated the new forearm—Gorilla Arms grade, matte black with a hint of green undercoat—then telescoped the elbow to match the man's reach. Diagnostics danced. Tendon emulators matched his preferred tension profile. The patient shivered once when the handshake took; then his bio-readings settled into a comfortable valley.
He flexed. The metal whispered. "Feels… better than new."
"Because it is new." I smiled behind my mask and pressed a neuro-stim tab to his tongue—gentle rise, no jitters. "Anesthesia's about to fade. Sit tight while the world stops wobbling."
I announced the end of the operation and wheeled him to recovery. Paperwork, wipe-down, tray into the sterilizer; clinic rhythm returned to idle.
Something in my chest didn't, though.
A prickle ran along the spine—not the electric aftertaste of chrome, not the fatigue that comes at the end of a double shift. More like the air-pressure dip before a storm. It was the second time today. I told myself it was braindance hangover. Stayed up too late watching archived fights, rewinding the footwork until the pixels broke into squares. Simple, explainable, ignorable.
"Any more appointments?" I called toward the office.
"Nah," came Vik's voice, half buried in accounts. "It's late. Pack it up."
We've got a ritual after close. I cleared the table, ran the surfaces a final pass with disinfectant, and crossed to the training corner. Gloves. Wraps. Mouthguard. I stripped off my shirt and let the clinic's cool air kiss the heat off my skin. The left arm wore no bionic skin tonight; chrome breathed better bare. The Gorilla Arms chassis caught a slice of neon from the alley and sent it skating along the knuckles.
Vik padded over, lacing his gloves. In a former life he'd worked rings the way surgeons work thoracic cavities: patient, precise, vicious when needed. Now he kept the edge sharp because Night City punishes dull knives.
"Weekly rounds," he said, touching gloves. "Try not to bleed on my floor."
I snorted. "If I knock you down tonight, I get half your trophies for the new clinic."
"Trophies are dust collectors. Earn 'em and take 'em, kid."
We warmed up—rope, shadow, slips—and set our lines in the space we clear after hours. The clinic hummed around us: air recyclers, the distant NCART rumble, a soft ping as the autoclave finished a cycle. I set my feet and let the chatter in my head flatten into calm. Jab, jab, step. Vik's guard was high and lazy, which is to say it wasn't lazy at all. He taught me how to read shoulders, not gloves; how to watch hips, not hands. He didn't teach mercy.
Leather greeted canvas. Bang, bang, bang. The bag would have winced if it had nerve endings.
We went live.
He probed with a jab, I answered with a counter right. He rolled, hooked my elbow, tested range. I crowded. He changed levels. The dance became the only language in the room. For long minutes we traded edge without a single clean break. Breath burned even, legs sang the good ache, the world narrowed to half-beats and the precise width of a glove.
Then the feeling returned—hard and sudden, like a cold nail tapped between the eyes.
It wasn't fear. It was information without a sender. My attention hiccuped, a frame drop in the film of focus.
Vik didn't waste the glitch. His hook curved over my guard and kissed my cheekbone hard enough to draw static in my left ear. Another body would have respected the moment and reset. Vik extended the moment into a lesson. He pressed, hands rain-fast, rhythm ugly. I defended on autopilot—parry, step, shell—but he'd found his entry and turned it into rent.
The floor found my back.
Ceiling lights spun until I blinked them into place. Vik's face leaned into view, upside-down, amused. He offered a glove. I took it and let him lever me up.
"Mind on the canvas?" he asked. "Or on your fancy grand opening?"
"Neither," I said, and tasted copper. "Just a weird feeling. Twice today."
He squinted. "Get sleep and stop diagnosing ghosts. You live long enough to use what you've learned—that's the only metric."
I laughed and nodded toward the sink. "Copy. I'll clean up and call it."
We stripped the gloves and were halfway through the wipe-down when the clinic buzzer brrped and Misty's name bloomed on the console with a text preview:
Delivery guys at the door. I'm sending them down.
"I've got it." I tapped approval on the access control. The steel door below Misty's Esoterica rolled its lock with a pawl-clack and opened to the alley.
Three men in service blacks stepped in, shoulders squared, eyes scanning automatically. Two pushed a heavy cargo crate on a mag-dolly. The lead carried a reader slab and an expression that said he'd once had hopes for his life.
Suppliers. We'd been waiting on a batch of mid-tier optics, some hand hardware, a box of cyberware attachments that would let us mod last-gen arms without screaming at the firmware. The crates had our clinic code sprayed on the side and the shipper's seal intact. Still, new gear draws predators. The last time a pack of Scavs misjudged this address, they left with cyber dentures and a lesson about underestimating clinics in Watson.
The lead clocked the training corner, the sweat, the two big men—one with chrome showing—and swallowed. His smile practiced itself into existence.
"Evening, Mr. Viktor," he said, using the name on the invoice. "Shipment for you—optics, arm kits, and plugin modules. Here's the manifest." He held out the slate.
Vik dried his hands and took it. His eyes flicked down the list with the same focus he used on sutures. "Set it by the back bench," he said. "We'll break it down tonight."
The men wheeled the crate into position. I set a shock sensor on the lid, walked a scanner over the seals, and checked for passive bugs out of habit. Clean. My skin prickled anyway.
The nail-between-the-eyes sensation returned. The room dimmed a fraction, as if my awareness were a camera adjusting.
[Module Detected]Target: Supply Chain • Receiving • VerificationName: Auto-Audit (Serial/Seal/Firmware)Apply Patch? Y/N
No one else could see it. No one else ever did. A corner of my mind pressed Y like a reflex, and the scanner chirped as if agreeing to something I hadn't told it. The slate in Vik's hand beeped with a new overlay: cross-checking serials to manufacturer databases, flagging a mismatched seal date on one box.
"Good catch," Vik murmured, not looking at me. "This one's out of order."
The delivery lead paled. "We, uh, had to re-pack a damaged pallet—"
Vik's mouth didn't smile. "I like my shipments whole." He tapped the mismatched crate. "Open this one first."
They popped the locks. Inside: the right optics in the wrong foam, the kind of detail only clinics and thieves notice. Vik logged a note and—because he is not cruel to working stiffs—let them chalk it to warehouse slop with a warning to tell their boss we check everything twice.
They left fast. The door sealed with that satisfying pawl-clack. I set tools beside the crate and breathed out a long line of air I didn't realize I'd been holding.
"See?" Vik said quietly. "Sleep. No ghosts. Just work."
"Yeah," I said, though the blue rectangle in my head still glowed like a neon bruise. "Just work."
The city outside hissed with wet tires and frying oil. Inside, the clinic smelled like disinfectant and victory. We grabbed pry bars and started breaking the shipment into parts piles—optics here, anchors there, a fresh stock of ocular couplers that would make tomorrow's clients very happy.
Tonight, I told myself, I would actually sleep. Tomorrow, I'd pretend the patch notes weren't writing themselves.