The garage in Santo Domingo smelled of ozone, burnt solder, and victory.
For three days, I hadn't left the workshop. I had spent every waking nanosecond (and I have a lot of those) hunched over a frame that looked less like a motorcycle and more like a kinetic sculpture of pure speed.
The loot from the Maelstrom chop shop had been the missing link. Those "left-handed gorilla arms"? They weren't just junk; the high-tensile hydraulic fluid inside them was the perfect dampener for a Sparrow's lateral stabilizers. The Militech heavy-lift thrusters, stripped and re-wound with the pure copper I'd "liberated," finally had the power-to-weight ratio I needed.
"Core integrity at ninety-eight percent," Echo reported, his shell spinning lazily near the ceiling. "I've successfully slaved the repulsor array to your internal Exo-processor. It's not quite a neuro-link, but for this universe, it's practically telepathy."
"Let's see if she flies," I grunted, wiped the grease off my metallic palms, and kicked the kickstand—which was just a piece of rebar I'd welded on for aesthetic.
I mounted the seat. The frame hummed beneath me, a deep, sub-vocal vibration that resonated in my chest plating. I twisted the grip.
The garage didn't just fill with noise; it filled with a high-pitched, crystalline whine. The bike didn't roll. It lifted. Six inches of pure, magnetic defiance.
I didn't wait. I hit the garage door remote and punched the throttle.
I was gone before the door had even fully retracted.
The "Standard Sparrow" experience is hard to describe to someone trapped in a world governed by boring things like friction and tires. I tore through the industrial sprawl of Santo Domingo at two hundred miles per hour, three feet off the ground. I wasn't following the roads; I was skimming over them, banking around rusted shipping containers and jumping over piles of scrap.
It handled like a dream—a sharp, aggressive, white-knuckle dream. I leaned into a hard right, the blue-white exhaust of the rear thrusters scorching the asphalt, and felt the familiar rush of the Sol System for the first time since the Vault.
"Stabilizers are over-compensating on the pitch!" Echo yelled over the roar of the wind. "You're going to flip if you hit a jump with that much torque!"
"I can feel it!" I shouted back, a mechanical grin etched into my faceplate. "She's a bit twitchy, but she's fast, Echo! She's a real Sparrow!"
I spent an hour pushing the limits, weaving between the massive support pillars of the megabuildings, feeling the sheer, unadulterated power of the "loot" I had gathered. It wasn't paracausal, but with the way Echo was managing the flight software, it was close enough for Night City.
Finally, I eased back into the garage, the bike settling onto the concrete with a soft, magnetic hiss. I was buzzing. My optical sensors were flaring bright blue.
"I need the torque wrench and the soldering iron," I muttered, already jumping off the seat. "The left thruster is lagging by three milliseconds. I can tune that out. It needs to be perfect."
I ducked into the back room, rummaging through my toolbox, my mind racing with a dozen different ways to optimize the fuel injection. I grabbed my gear and headed back out to the main bay.
I stopped dead in my tracks.
The garage door was still open. The sun was setting over the city, casting long, orange shadows across the floor. And there, straddling my masterpiece, was Dakota Smith.
She wasn't just sitting on it. She was hovering. She had the throttle pinned, the bike straining against the magnetic brakes I'd left engaged, the blue exhaust wash illuminating her weathered face. She looked like a desert hawk that had just found a jet engine.
She glanced at me, her cybernetic eyes reflecting the glow of the bike. Without a word, she disengaged the brake and vanished.
I stood there, holding a wrench, staring at the empty space where my bike had been.
"She's... actually quite a good pilot," Echo noted, appearing at my shoulder. "Her Kiroshis are already attempting to interface with my flight sub-routines. She's currently doing one-hundred-and-eighty through a construction zone."
Ten minutes later, the whine of the engine returned. Dakota roared back into the garage, pulled a perfect 180-degree drift that sprayed gravel against my legs, and brought the bike to a dead stop an inch from my chest.
She didn't get off. She just sat there, her hands gripped tight on the bars, a wild, dangerous glint in her eyes that I hadn't seen before.
"Cain," she rasped, her voice barely audible over the cooling hiss of the thrusters.
"Dakota," I replied, clutching my wrench. "You like the ride?"
She looked down at the matte-black plating, then back at me. She didn't smile, but the air around her practically hummed with satisfaction.
"This is mine now," she said.
I blinked. "Excuse me?"
"I'm the one who gave you the lead on the Maelstrom. I'm the one paying for this garage. And I'm the one who needs to get across the Badlands in ten minutes flat when a deal goes south." She patted the fuel tank or where the fuel tank would be on a normal bike. "This is my finder's fee for your 'loot' problem. Consider us even for the Colby you turned into a trash compactor."
I looked at Echo. Echo's eye did a full, 360-degree rotation of pure "I told you so."
"I was going to tune the left thruster," I said weakly.
"Then get to work, Gunsmith," Dakota said, finally dismounting with a grunt of effort. She tossed me a new, high-end credchip—five thousand eddies. "Because I have a delivery that needs to happen by midnight, and I'm not using a Thorton to do it."
She started walking toward her car, then stopped and looked back at the bike one last time.
"And Cain?"
"Yeah?"
"Build yourself another one. I think I just found our new primary export."