The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:

Novices Nicholas Robeson and Rokfour

Operative Armando Valencia

Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.

---

When the full tally resolved in my overlay, the number sat somewhere between seventy-five and ninety thousand eddies, depending on where the variable-priced materials landed.

"Grand total," Orsen said, scrolling to the bottom of his tablet. "For everything on your list, in the quantities you need, at a bulk rate and through a single transaction. I’m looking at somewhere between seventy-five and ninety thousand. Call it eighty-two as a round middle number. Final price depends on the exact weights once we put it on the scale, but that’s the neighborhood."

Eighty-two thousand eddies, and I only had twenty-seven thousand and some change at the moment. A fifty-five-thousand-eddie gap between where I was and where I needed to be, and that was just for the raw materials. That number didn’t account for the consumable tooling, the cutting fluids for the CNC, the welding gas, the replacement bits, dies, and grinding wheels that I would burn through. It also didn’t account for the building’s monthly operational costs. And it sure as hell didn’t account for the new chrome I’d been quietly putting off, the upgrades I needed if I wanted to stay competitive in this damned city.

But the materials were here. Right here.

"Can you hold it?" I asked.

Orsen tilted his head. "Hold the whole inventory?"

"I don’t have eighty-two on me right now," I said, because there was no point lying to a man who was about to do business with me. "But I can have it. I just need a few weeks to pull the eddies together. And I’d rather buy the whole thing in one shot than nickel-and-dime you for the next six months."

Orsen considered it, scratching the back of his head where the extended length of the bowl cut fell past his collar.

"Here’s the thing," he said. "I can’t sit on this forever. This is a lot of capital tied up in a tarp, and I’ve got other buyers who’d take pieces of it. But..."

He looked at the pile, then up at me, then at Judy, who had stopped sorting her copper to watch the negotiation. "Judy vouched for you, and you clearly know exactly what you’re doing, which is more than I can say for ninety percent of the people who come out here thinking they’re going to build something. So I’ll make you a deal. I’ll hold the full inventory for a month. If you come back with the eddies, then it’s yours. If you don’t, then I start selling it off, and you buy what’s left."

"A month," I said.

"A month," Orsen confirmed. "And I’ll throw in the delivery, because hauling all those thousands of kilos worth of stuff in the back of a G240 is going to destroy that poor car’s suspension, and I happen to have access to a truck that won’t."

"You’d got yourself a deal," I said, and extended my hand, which Orsen took and shook.

"Pleasure doing biz," he said. "Now I really hope you come back with the eddies, because I just turned down a corpo procurement guy for two sheets of that AR plate last week, and if I lose this sale, I’m going to feel very stupid."

"You’ll get your eddies," I said.

"That’s what they all say," Orsen said cheerfully. "Right before they ghost me and I have to climb a mountain to feel something."

By the time Orsen and I finished hammering out the terms, Judy had her own materials sorted into her crate, a careful selection of copper wiring, polymer stock, and a few sheets of high-gauge metal for the junction boxes she still needed to fabricate for her firetruck. She hauled the crate over to the shop’s weigh station, set it on the scale, and Orsen tallied it up on his tablet.

"Eight hundred and forty," Orsen said.

Judy transferred the eddies without argument, the transaction confirming on both their overlays.

"Pleasure as always, Judy," Orsen said.

"Try not to die before I come back," Judy said.

"I make no commitments I can’t keep," Orsen said, and grinned at her.

We loaded Judy’s crate into the back of the Galena, and Orsen walked us to the edge of the dirt clearing, his oil-stained jumpsuit hanging off his hips.

"Thirty days, choom," he said to me. "I’ll be here. Probably. Unless the scooter finally wins."

"The modular terrain traversal platform," I said.

Orsen pointed at me with both hands, beaming. "I knew I liked you."

I pulled the Galena out of the clearing and back onto the dirt access road that led to the highway, watching Trey’s Salvage shrink in the rearview mirror. I now had thirty days to get the scratch I needed.

"He’s a lot," Judy said, breaking the silence as we merged back onto the highway.

"He’s exactly what you said he was," I said.

"Which was?" She asked.

"A guy who knows which parts of the mountains have the best metal," I said. "You undersold the personality, though."

"You can’t sell the personality," she said. "You have to experience it raw. Like the scrap."

The drive back to Watson was rather quiet, and it gave me time to do the math, and the math was not encouraging. I needed an extra fifty-five thousand eddies, and that was before I factored in everything else that was pulling at my accounts like a tide.

The building had monthly operational costs that did not pause just because I was distracted. Power, water, network infrastructure, security subnet maintenance, and the steady bleed of running a fortified three-story facility with a climate-controlled server room and twelve turrets that needed periodic recalibration. The fabrication equipment was going to burn through consumable tooling once I started cutting, the cutting fluids and welding gas and replacement bits, and the Widowmaker itself, beyond the raw materials, was going to need components I couldn’t fabricate from scrap, such as the electronics, the sensors, the turret hardware, the things that had to be sourced rather than made.

And then there was my chrome.

I had been putting it off for months, telling myself that my current loadout was sufficient to keep me competitive. But the truth was that the city was an arms race, and standing still was the same as falling behind. The other runners were upgrading, and the corpo ICE was getting meaner, and recently, the gigs were getting harder.

Three competing financial demands, all of them urgent, all of them pulling against a balance of twenty-seven thousand eddies that felt smaller every time I looked at it.

I needed to pull some gigs.

When we got back into the city, I helped Judy haul her crate up to the second-floor unit, and then made my way to my server room, settled into the dive chair, and reached out to Padre.

"Ghost," he said. "I was beginning to think you had found God and given up the work."

"Not quite, Padre," I said. "I’m looking for gigs. Whatever you’ve got that needs my skill set."

There was a pause on the other end.

"I wish I had better news for you, mijo," he said finally. "But the well is dry on my end right now. With the war and everything getting closer, the only work that has been crossing my desk lately is muscle work. Nothing that needs a runner of your caliber. I will not endanger you by handing you a gig where the rest of the crew is swinging fists."

"So nothing right now," I said.

"Nothing right now," Padre confirmed. "It comes in waves, Ghost. You know this. Last month there was work. This month the city wants blood instead of data. Give it time, and the kind of work you do best will come back around. It always does. I will not have you sitting idle waiting on me. A runner who does not work gets hungry, and a hungry runner makes bad decisions. Go find your eddies elsewhere for now. When I have something worth your time, you will be the first call I make."

I leaned back in the dive chair and let out a slow breath. Not the answer I’d wanted, but an honest one.

"I appreciate the straight talk, Padre," I said.

"Always, mijo," he said. "God watch over you. And Ghost? Whatever you find to fill the gap, keep your head. The dry months are when runners take stupid work because the eddies look good. Do not be one of them."

"Understood," I said, and the connection closed.

I stared at the ceiling for a moment. Padre was a dead end, at least for now. The well was dry, and the only thing crossing his desk was the kind of work I had no business taking according to him, though I was more than fine swinging my fists and beating the shit into some motherfuckers. Which left me exactly where I’d started, except with a clearer understanding of the corner I was backed into.

The deeper problem wasn’t that Padre had nothing. It was that even when the heavy work did come back around, I wasn’t chromed for it. I needed better chrome, and to buy better chrome, I needed eddies. And to get the eddies, I needed work that paid decently without requiring the chrome I didn’t have yet.

So I reached out to Regina Jones, who replied faster than Padre had.

"Ghost," she said. "Didn’t expect to hear from you so soon. Thought the NCPD pull would hold you for a while."

"I’ve got expenses," I said. "What do you have?"

"A few things," Regina said. "Nothing flashy. A couple of corporate subnet breaches, a data verification job, a competitive intelligence pull for a mid-tier client who wants to know what their rival’s R&D division is working on. Clean work. Your specialty." A pause. "But I’ll be straight with you, the pay’s not going to set you free. These are bread-and-butter gigs. Five to eight thousand a pop, maybe ten if the verification job goes deep. Solid scratch, but not the kind that funds whatever it is you’re clearly trying to fund."

"I’ll take them," I said. "All of them. Just send the deets over to me."

"Done," Regina said, and I heard the soft chime of the contracts dropping into my queue. "Listen, Ghost. You’re outgrowing my baseline work. I can keep feeding you these, but you and I both know you’ve got a ceiling I can’t raise at the moment."

"I’m listening," I said.

"There’s a fixer I know," Regina said. "Goes by Dino Dinovic. He operates out of Heywood, mostly, but his reach goes citywide. He runs high-profile data theft, corporate espionage, the kind of jobs where the target is a hardened corporate vault, and the payout has an extra zero on it. But he’s selective and doesn’t take walk-ins or waste time on runners who can’t deliver. I can vouch for you, and he’ll probably take a meeting, but I make no promises."

High-profile data theft and Corpo espionage. The kind of work that lived in the Net, where my custom firmware had an unfair advantage.

"What’s the catch?" I asked.

"The catch is that Dino plays in deeper water," Regina said. "Bigger targets, bigger risks, bigger consequences when something goes wrong. The corps he steals from have the resources to hunt down whoever hit them... This isn’t like skimming an NCPD server. If you fuck up and get flagged, you will be hunted down by a corporate ICE division that has the budget to find you."

I thought about it for a moment before nodding.

"Set up the meeting," I said.

"Figured you’d say that," Regina said. "I’ll reach out to him. Give me a day or two. In the meantime, run the gigs I sent you. And Ghost? When you meet Dino, don’t oversell yourself. He hates that. Let the work speak. He’ll figure out whether he has work that fits you or not."

"Understood," I said. "Thanks, Regina."

"Don’t thank me yet," she said, and the connection closed.

---

I’m not a stripper, but I like it when y’all make it rain on me..... ayo.

The infamous P@treon exists for those of you who want to continue reading ahead during this hiatus.

patreon .com/Crimson_Reapr (Don’t be a gonk, remove the space)

They get around 3 long-form weekly Chapters (4.5-6k words each (Though currently that number has dropped because of work and other unforeseen circumstances)