Chương 63: One Step Closer

The Edge Net occupied a ground-floor storefront on the eastern edge of the Kabuki Market, sandwiched between a braindance editing suite and a ripperdoc clinic that advertised discount Kiroshi installations on a flickering neon sign. The storefront was narrow and packed from floor to ceiling with netrunning hardware, custom ICE packages, daemon compilers, and cyberdeck peripherals that you could not find on the open market without either knowing the right people or being the right people.

The interior was dimly lit by strips of cool blue LEDs running along the ceiling and the ambient glow of dozens of display screens showing real-time Net traffic visualizations, ICE integrity monitors, and what appeared to be a rotating catalog of custom quickhack suites organized by function and threat level. A woman stood behind the main counter at the shop's entrance, adjusting the leads on a disassembled cyberdeck with a pair of precision tweezers and a magnifying loupe clipped to a headband above her right eye.

She was in her mid-thirties, short, and of Japanese descent. Her hair was dark and pulled back in a functional knot, and her hands moved with the steady precision of a watchmaker.

"Yoko," Sasha called out as they entered, her voice carrying a warm familiarity. The woman looked up from the deck, her eyes flicking from Sasha to Santi and back with a quick assessment. Her gaze lingered on Santi's eyes, and she scanned him, but she ran into a garbled mix of words that made it impossible to determine his identity from a simple scan.

"Sasha," she said, setting the tweezers down and pushing the loupe up to her forehead.

"Thought you were taking a day off."

"I am," Sasha said.

"But I wanted to introduce you to someone. This is Santi, a choom of mine. We met in the Net a few years back." She gestured toward Santi, who was standing two steps behind her and taking up what felt like an unreasonable amount of the shop's narrow floor space.

"Nice to meet you," Santi said, nodding to Yoko.

"Santi," Yoko repeated, raising a brow.

"Welcome to the Edge Net. You an edgerunner or a netrunner?"

"A bit of both," Santi said.

"But I lean more to the netrunning side of things."

"Good. Then let me give you the rundown." She leaned against the counter with her arms folded.

"This shop exists for people who prefer face-to-face biz, and for those who want a vendor they can trust. Everything I sell is tested, verified, and clean. I don't do corp-flagged firmware, recycled ICE with expired authentication certificates, or secondhand daemon packages that have been cracked and repackaged by some Westbrook script-kiddie who's going to sell your entry signature to the highest bidder the moment you jack out." She gestured at the rows of hardware lining the walls.

"I've got some custom decks, peripheral modules, ICE suites, quickhack compilers, Net architecture consulting, and diagnostic services for rigs that have taken damage. If I don't have it in stock, I can source it within a week. If I can't source it within a week, it doesn't exist, and whoever told you it did is either lying or trying to sell you something that will burn your frontal cortex."

"Nova," Santi said, and he meant it. The shop was clean, organized, and stocked with hardware that his Kiroshis were tagging as mid- to high-tier on every visible shelf. A place like this was run by someone who clearly knew what they were doing, and it was worth more than its inventory. Sasha leaned against the counter beside Yoko, her shoulder almost touching the vendor's, and her expression carried the satisfaction of someone presenting a trusted resource to a trusted person and waiting for the two to connect.

"The reason I wanted to bring him along," Sasha said, "is because he's a wiz in the Net. Genuinely. And I figured that since you prefer face-to-face for biz, it might be helpful for you to know someone who could take a second look at things if you ever need an extra pair of eyes on a piece of hardware or a fresh perspective on an ICE architecture. He's the best I've ever worked with."

"Really?" Yoko raised an eyebrow and looked at Santi again, this time with a slightly different quality to the evaluation.

"I've never heard Sasha hand out endorsements."

"She's just being generous," Santi said.

"No, I'm not," Sasha said with a firmness that surprised him.

"You've long surpassed me, so quit being modest when I'm vouching for you."

"I'll keep it in mind," Yoko smiled, her expression carrying an understated seal of approval.

"It's nice of Sasha to bring her input around." Something about the way Yoko said "her input" made the air shift among all three of them, and Santi watched as a visible flush climbed Sasha's neck and settled across her cheekbones.

"We're not... It's not like that," Sasha said quickly.

"We're just chooms."

"Sure," Yoko said, her smile remaining unchanged.

"You..." Sasha said.

"You're implying things."

"I said 'her input,'" Yoko said.

"I don't know what you heard, but that's not an implication." Santi looked up at the ceiling. The ceiling suddenly became a very interesting ceiling. It had LED strips and ventilation ducts, and absolutely nothing to do with the conversation that was currently making his ears warm.

They stayed at the Edge Net for another twenty minutes, browsing the inventory, discussing a new daemon compiler package that Yoko had sourced from a Japantown developer, and establishing the baseline of a vendor-client relationship that Santi suspected would prove useful in the future.

Yoko gave him her contact, told him the shop hours, and said that if he ever needed diagnostic work on his Paraline, she could accommodate the hardware despite it being Militech and despite the fact that Militech hardware was generally a pain in the ass to service without corpo diagnostic tools. They left the Edge Net at just past three in the afternoon, stepping back into the noise of the Kabuki Market.

"Thank you," Santi said.

"For the intro." Sasha shrugged, the flush having receded, but the residual self-consciousness lingered as she was deliberately avoiding eye contact.

"She's good people. And you need a vendor who isn't going to sell your rig specs to a fixer the moment you walk out the door." The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

They stood at the intersection of Sagan and Cartwright for a moment, the pedestrian traffic splitting around them like water around a rock, and the unspoken thing that lived in the pauses between their sentences pressed gently against the air between them and was, once again, not acknowledged.

"I should head back," Santi said.

"Yeah," Sasha agreed.

"I've got a subnet crawl queued up for tonight. Client wants a clean pull on a Kang Tao logistics manifest before Friday."

"Be careful, and stay safe," Santi said.

"Always am," Sasha said.

"Yeah, right," he scoffed.

"That's fair," she admitted, and smiled at him with unguarded warmth. She turned and walked into the crowd, and Santi watched her go, his eyes subcounsously drifting down to her hips.

"Hate to see you go," he muttered to himself.

"But I love to see you leave." His eyes trailed back up to her hair and followed her until she disappeared into the flow of bodies moving through the Kabuki Market's arterial corridor. Then he turned and started walking. The Kabuki Market was only a few blocks from the building, and as he cut through the residential stretch of Northside separating the market district from the industrial zone where his warehouse sat, his Agent pinged. Incoming call: El Capitan. Santi stopped walking.

He had not spoken to El Capitan in over half a year, and the Petrochem corpo's name appearing on his incoming call list was surprising to say the least. He accepted the call.

"Ghost?" El Capitan's voice came through energetically.

"That you?"

"No, this is a Buck-A-Slice," Santi said flatly. There was a moment of silence on the other end, followed by a muttered "Shit" and then an embarrassed inhale.

"Aw, sorry about that. Damn, wrong number, let me just..."

"I'm messing with you," Santi said. The silence held for another half-second before El Capitan let out a barking laugh.

"You son of a... Okay, okay. Haha, funny, real funny."

"What can I do for you, Cap?" Santi asked, resuming his walk.

"It's not every day you get a call out of the blue from a vendor you had a single transaction with."

"Yeah, about that. I got a question for you, Ghost, and I need you to answer me honestly." El Capitan paused, and Santi could hear the man adjusting something on his end.

"Are you in the market for a way to manufacture your own engine block?" Santi stopped walking again, as, for the first time in months, his attention narrowed to a single point.

"I'm listening," he said.

"I knew you would be," El Capitan said, his voice shifting from casual to business mode with ease.

"Okay, so here's the deal. I've got my hands on a package of used equipment, all of it operational and ready to install. I got an engine CNC machine, a gear cutter, a glass press, a scrap-fab equipment maker, and a furnace with welders. The CNC alone is worth the call, but together? Together, you're looking at a full-scale fabrication setup.

You could build an engine block from raw stock, machine your own transmission gears, press your own windshield glass, fab your own body panels, and weld your own chassis reinforcements from scratch." Santi's mind was already running the calculations, mapping the equipment list against the Mustang's rebuild requirements. The CNC machine alone would let him manufacture a new engine block from raw metal, to his own specifications, with tolerances that no aftermarket supplier in Night City could match.

The gear cutter would handle the transmission and differential components. The glass press could produce a reinforced windshield and window panels to whatever specs he wanted. The scrap-fab unit would let him fabricate body panels, brackets, mounting hardware, and structural reinforcements. And the furnace and welders would give him the thermal processing capability to heat-treat, temper, and join every component he produced. It was, in literal terms, a door to doing the entire build himself.

Every bolt, every gasket, every bearing surface, every piece of the car that was currently nothing more than a rusted shell sitting on his ground floor. The full automotive resurrection would be executed by his own hands, on his own equipment, in his own building.

"How much?" Santi asked.

"The CNC runs one-fifty," El Capitan said.

"Gear cutter, eighty. Glass press, eighty. Scrap-fab, fifty. Furnace and welders, forty-five. That's four-oh-five if you're buying à la carte." Santi did the math in the time it took El Capitan to finish the sentence. It would cost him a little over one hundred grand more than his current balance.

"But," El Capitan continued, pausing theatrically, "if you're buying the full package, bulk rate, one transaction, I'll do the whole thing for three-fiddy flat." The equipment would've cost him millions if it were brand spanking new, which was why he had never considered doing the job himself. But with a price tag of just three-fifty for what was supposed to be four hundred and five, the deal sounded more like a bargain, which raised questions about its quality.

"You said it was used," Santi said.

"But how used. Like, am I just throwing eddies into a fire, or is it worth it?"

"C'mon choom," El Capitan said with an audible smile.

"You know I only sell preem stuff. I would never scam anyone out of their hard-earned eddies. They're in great condition, the only thing is that these machines were discontinued almost twenty years ago. So they're just old and don't really serve any purpose."

"Uh-huh," Santi said.

"I'll take your word for it, but I still want some images confirming their quality."

"I'll send those over in a bit," El Capitan said.

"I've got two-ninety liquid," Santi said, because there was no point in pretending otherwise.

"Two-ninety won't cover it," El Capitan said.

"And before you ask, no, I don't do installments. This is used industrial equipment from a decommissioned Petrochem fabrication facility that was dismantled under an asset liquidation order. It's clean, and it's sitting in a warehouse that I'm paying rent on every day it stays there."

"How long can you hold it?" Santi asked.

"A month," El Capitan said.

"After that, I've got two other buyers I've thought of lined up, both of whom are less charming than you and both of whom have deeper pockets. I'm only extending this olive branch to you because you have something that I would love to see tear down the streets one day. And also get a ride in it too." Santi was sixty thousand eddies short and had thirty days to close the gap.

Regina's NCPD gig was sitting in his queue at thirty-two thousand, which would bring his total to three-twenty-two and leave him needing roughly twenty-eight thousand more, a manageable amount at his current operational tempo and the expanding pool of fixers who had started sending work his way. But the real question was whether the machines were worth more than the money they cost.

If he bought them, he would have the equipment to rebuild the Mustang entirely from raw materials, on his own terms, in his own shop, to specifications that would fit his imagination. He would also have a permanent fabrication capability that extended far beyond a single car, allowing him to modify weapons and cyberware and, maybe even, expand his line of business to custom vehicle components for clients.

The machines would pay for themselves pretty quickly if he used them for commercial work, and they would give him a capability that almost no solo in Night City possessed. And more than all of that, more than the ROI projections and the operational utility and the long-term asset value, they would let him build the car with his own hands. That was the itch. The unscratchable, bone-level itch that had been sitting in his chest since the day he had found the Mustang.

This car was his, and it would be built by nobody else.

"Hold it for me," Santi said.

"Holding requires a deposit," El Capitan said.

"No such thing as a free meal."

"How much?" Santi asked.

"Slide me ten K," El Capitan said. Santi did not hesitate and routed the transfer of ten thousand eddies to the anonymous bearer address that El Capitan had transmitted alongside the request. Transfer authenticated: 10, 000 eddies. Destination: Anonymous bearer instrument. Remaining balance: 280, 000 eddies. On the other end of the line, El Capitan received the confirmation, and Santi heard the man let out a self-directed curse.

"Fucking gonk. I should've asked for fifteen."

"I told you to work on your prices last time we talked," Santi said.

"And keep your word."

"Yeah, yeah. You've got a month," El Capitan said as the playful regret vanished from his voice.

"If I don't receive the remaining three-forty thirty days from today, I'll be moving to another buyer."

"You'll hear from me," Santi said and ended the call.