North Oak's marble and glass slipped away behind tram glass, I traded them for grime and neon and the sticky noise near the Mox. By the time I hit street level, it was around 4 am. Girls smoked by the entrance, laughing at some drunk corpo trying too hard. Normal Night City shit.
I crossed the street instead. Back corner had the usual cluster of nests—homeless sleeping under plastic tarps and old holo-banners. I gave them a wide berth. No need to screw with someone else's bad night. The alley stank of piss, beer and noodles. My room was up on the second floor. I walked over there, tilted my head up, eyed the ledge, then just double-jumped, hands catching the railing and I pulled myself over.
I walked out the room I came in, memorys of how this use to be my home, As i walked I looked at the doors that had once been locked, the ones i had opened long agoe. Finally I reached what use to be my room. Sliding door was still half-open on its broken track. I shoved it aside with my shoulder and stepped in.
Same as I'd left it: mattress, crappy table, my radio in the corner playing low, some old chrome guts scattered from whatever hack job I was halfway through before everything got better slightly. I shut the door behind me, even though anyone who could get up here could also kick it in.
"Home sweet biohazard," I muttered. A shape peeled itself off the shadow next to the window.
"Not bad," Scarecrow said, like he was inspecting a lab instead of my sad little nest. "Secluded. Poor ventilation. Very Arkham."
"That's what you open with?" I dropped my jacket on the chair. "You judging my ventilation right now?"
"For what we're about to do?" he said. "Definitely."
He smiled when he said it. It wasn't comforting.
I rolled my shoulders and exhaled. "Alright. Let's make your juice."
He gestured lazily at the empty table. "Show me your toys, girl."
I reached into the interface in my head, pulled up storage. The vials and canisters were where I'd left them, I had taken these from the raid, figured I needed them more then those scavs. I selected what I needed and let them drop into reality, one after another, onto the tabletop with soft glass clicks.
A solvent bottle. Two reagent vials. A zip of powdered compound that looked like powdered sugar from hell. A small field burner and a cracked beaker, Tubing and Improvised clamp.
Scarecrow drifted closer, hands behind his back, peering like a professor.
"Basic blend," he said. "We'll keep dosage low. No need to jump straight to Arkham riot levels."
"I'm okay with that," I said. "What's first?" He tilted his head.
"You tell me," he said. "dont tell me you have already forgotten what I told you."
I bit down on the urge to snap. He wasn't wrong. "Fine," I said. "Base solvent, low heat. Dissolve the powder first, then the two liquids. One drop at a time, so it doesn't go volatile. Slow stir so it doesn't clump."
His grin widened under the hood. "Good girl."
I turned the burner on, a little blue flame whispering under the beaker. Poured carefully, watching the meniscus, the smell started as something sharp and chemical, like bad cleaner.
"Mask?" I asked, not looking at him. "Are we doing this safety-first or full Gotham?"
He moved around the table, almost a glide.
"You're not aerosolizing at scale," he said. "We're testing, not gassing a subway. Keep your face out of the steam, and you'll be fine."
"You sure?" I asked. "Because lung damage is not on my wishlist tonight."
"You want to be a symbol of fear in a city of walking chrome nightmares," he said, amused. "And you're scared of one test batch? Stir."
I hated that it worked on me. I grabbed the glass rod and started stirring. Powder swirled, then sank, turning the clear solvent a weak, tea-stain yellow. The smell thickened. Not terrible. Not good.
"Heat up," I murmured, mostly to myself. "We need it to gas at room temp, not just when it's boiling."
"That's it," Scarecrow said. "Raise the temperature, watch for the phase change."
We worked in a weird rhythm. My hands, his muttered corrections. Adjust a flame. Tilt the beaker so it doesn't hot-spot. Tap a bubble away before it pops. Tongue stuck in the corner of my mouth, I reached for the second vial.
"This one's the trigger," I said. "Drops pH, changes the binding, lets it vaporize off surfaces. We add too much, it destabilizes." My hand was steady. That's the fucked part. I wasn't nervous yet. Just focused. I let one drop fall into the mix.
The entire beaker shivered like it was alive. Color deepened, yellow sliding into a dirty, muddy orange-brown. A curl of vapor rolled up from the surface, thicker, hanging in the air instead of fading. The smell jumped from "chemical" to something else. Basement flood mixed with hospital and something rotten sweet, like fruit left in a hot car.
My throat twitched. Scarecrow said nothing. He just watched. I leaned back, away from the plume, and dropped the last reagent in. It hit the surface, and spiderwebbed veins of darker color shot through the liquid. The beaker almost thumped in my hand.
A bigger puff of vapor rolled out, hit the underside of the shelf, and curled back toward me. "Shit—" I twisted, but it was fast. The cloud licked across my face and up my nose.
It was like someone shoved cold fire straight into my sinuses. My eyes watered instantly. Reflex made me suck in a breath to cough— and I dragged the gas down deep into my lungs. It tasted like wet concrete and copper and old panic.
I dropped the beaker. Glass shattered on the table, contents splashing up, more vapor billowing. I stumbled back, hacking, hand clamped over my mouth way too late. "You—" I tried to say you said it was fine, but all that came out was a strangled wheeze.
My heart slammed into overdrive. Vision jittered. The room tilted sideways, then snapped back. My skin felt too tight, like all of me was trying to jump out of itself. "Fuck—fuck, no, no—"
Breath got shallow and fast all on its own. I knew what a panic attack felt like. This wasn't that. This was like having one stapled to my brain with rusty needles. My fingers wouldn't cooperate. I fumbled for the window, and shoved, but it felt like the room stretched, the handle skidding away from me with every blink.
Scarecrow stood exactly where he'd been. Still. Hands behind his back. Head slightly cocked. His silhouette was wrong now. Taller. Thinner. Rope at his throat, twitching like a living thing. My knees hit the floor.
The radio in the corner crackled. A song cut mid-chorus, replaced by static, then a voice—
"…breaking news out of Gotham—"
No. That wasn't right. That channel didn't exist here. There was no Gotham news in Night...The walls rippled. Paint peeled backwards, colors draining out. The concrete stretched up into bricks, old and damp, tagged with symbols I hadn't seen since ... That gang's colors. I blinked hard, tried to clear my eyes, and when they opened—
I was in the alley again. The one where I found Diego. Same stink of garbage and stale beer. Same broken streetlamp flickering, casting that sick yellow cone over the puddle. Except there was more blood this time. It ran in thin rivers, snaking around my boots, reflecting light in a weird, too-red way.
I looked up. They were there. All of them. Ten guys, same cheap jackets, same smirks. Except their faces weren't blurred by hoods this time. I saw every detail. Teeth. Scar lines. The one who'd hit on me before, his gold tooth catching the light.
Diego lay at their feet. Except he didn't look like he had that night. That night he'd been bloody, swollen, awful, but still…. Here, he looked wrecked. Skin grayish, eyes open but empty. Skull dented weirdly on the side. His fingers twitched.
I tried to move. My legs didn't respond. My body wasn't obeying me; it was just there, locked into whatever the gas wanted. "Diego—" I croaked. He didn't look at me. His eyes rolled up, looking somewhere over my shoulder. Looking at nothing.
I knew this wasn't real. I knew. I'd seen him in a hospital bed, not like this. This is Scarecrow doing, this is the gas, this is fake fake fake—
One of the gangsters turned his head, and the motion was wrong, like his neck was on a hinge. His eyes slid over me, then past me, and focused on something in the dark.
"Shoulda been faster, chica," he said, but his voice came out layered, his accent glitching into others. "Shoulda been here." On the last word, his mouth didn't match the sound at all. I couldn't answer. My tongue felt thick. The alley stretched. The walls pulled away and rose higher, twisting, the brick pattern crawling like centipedes. The men around Diego blurred at the edges and then snapped back into clarity, but their faces were different now.
Same jackets, same bodies.
Different heads.
One had my father's face.
He looked exactly like the picture Mom kept in the back of that one drawer—young, tired, smile lines around the eyes. Except now those eyes were dark and empty. He looked down at Diego like he was something spilled on the floor.
My stomach flipped.
"Papa?" I whispered.
He didn't react. He just tilted his head. Another one turned, and it was my mother. Hair tied back the way she wore it, cleaning, expression flat, mouth pressed into that tight line that meant she'd been crying and didn't want me to see.
She looked straight at me this time. "You took his gun," she said, in her voice, perfect. "You took his things.."
"I—" My throat closed. "I didn't kill him. He was already—"
The guy with Diego kicked him in the ribs. There was a wet crunch. Diego didn't make a sound. His head lolled, eyes rolling toward me finally. His pupils were blown wide, swallowing the color.
"Yumi," he said, except the sound came out of all their mouths at once. "Why didn't you come sooner?"
The fear hit like a second wave. My skin crawled. My fists clenched so hard my nails bit into my palms, but I couldn't feel the pain, just pressure.
"I came," I choked. "I did. I found you. I called the ambulance. I—"
Blood bubbled out of his mouth. Not like I remembered. This was too much, too thick, spilling over his lips and down his chin in ropes. It hit the puddle and spread, black under the streetlamp. He smiled. It was the same smile he had when he'd talked about Night City, about builds and perks and the stupid "cool" stat.
"You left me," he said, still smiling. "You went to another world. Without me."
His face flickered. For a second, he was Sasha, lying there instead of him, half-jacket on, hair damp from the rain outside Biotechnica. The bruises on her face matched the ones he'd had in the hospital. Then he flickered back.
The brick behind them peeled open like a wound, showing hospital white. The alley stretched forward until it was a hospital corridor, then twisted sideways into my old apartment hallway. Doors lined up on either side, some open, some closed.
I heard beeping. Monitors. That stupid tone that only means one thing when it flattens out. "No," I said. "Stop. Stop it." The floor under my boots turned to hospital tile. The air got cold, that disinfectant cold that sinks into your bones.
My mother stood at the far end of the hall now. No gang colors, just her faded sweater, the one she wore when she hated the world. "You always knew you were selfish," she said. "You just finally found a god who agreed with you."
My father appeared beside her, hand on her shoulder. "We gave you a home," he said softly. "You gave us heart ache."
I squeezed my eyes shut. Useless. When I opened them, the hall had changed again. These were lined with niches like the Columbarium in North Oak. Hundreds of little Sasha plates, repeated, stacked, formatted in different languages like some glitching UI. Her picture was the same in all of them, smiling, cats in arms.
Every slot was full. In some, the name said SASHA YAKOVLEVA. In others, it said DIEGO REYES, or MOM, or DAD, or random girls from the Mox I'd barely talked to. One of them said YUMI REYES in clean corporate font, just to round things out.
I stumbled forward, reaching for the nearest one, and my hand went straight through the plaque. It was like dipping my hand in ice water.
My breath hitched. The air felt thick, like syrup, every inhale an effort. The corridor narrowed around me, pressing in. Something moved at the edge of my vision. Tall. Wrong. It walked over there, long legs stepping between the rows of niches, coat skimming the floor. I didn't look directly at it. I didn't have to. Every part of me already knew what it was.
Red leather. Red helmet.
Red Hood.
My chest tightened for a new reason.
He stopped a few steps away, helmet tilted down to look at me. The visor was blank, no shine, no reflection. Just a red hole.
In Gotham, he'd pulled his helmet off at the end. I'd seen his face. Tired eyes, stubble, that mix of anger and pity. Blood dripped from his gloves. Not a puddle. A steady, slow stream, running off his fingers and pooling around his boots. The smell hit me—iron and cordite and alley rain.
He lifted his hand. In it was the gun my father used to keep in the duffel bag. Same nicks. Same worn grip. He turned it and offered it out to me, barrel pointed at my face, handle toward my hand.
My fingers twitched like they wanted to take it. Like they remembered the weight. The nights I'd walked Gotham's alleys, counting bodies under my breath. One, two, three—
The bodies blinked into view behind him. All the gang members I'd shot. They stood upright, but their heads hung loose, bullet holes caved in, blood frozen mid-drip. Their eyes were all the same, now. Diego's eyes. Sasha's eyes. My eyes.
"You did this," a chorus said. Red Hood didn't speak. The sound came from everywhere. "You did this for him. You did this for you. You liked it."
I shook my head. My teeth were chattering. "I didn't like it," I said, but it sounded weak even to me. "I— I did what I had to do. They would've kept killing. They—"
The bodies all took one synchronized step forward. The corridor shrank more. The ceiling lowered until it was almost brushing my hair. The plaques vibrated on the walls, that flat monitor beep rising in pitch until it was one long electric scream.
The gun in Red Hood's hand… changed. The metal warped, segments sliding over each other like wet clay until it was no gun at all. It turned into a mask. My mask. The Blood Cat one. Cat ears, armored plate, the vents where the heat escaped when I worked too long.
Except this one was cracked down the middle, charred at the edges, dripping tar-black fear gas like condensed sweat. I stared at it. The tar guttered in thick drops, each one hitting the floor and splattering into little copies of itself that crawled back toward my boots.
The urge to put it on was overwhelming. Like if I took it and put it over my face, everything would make sense again. Like the world would snap back into something I could control. My feet moved forward without permission. The mask dangled from his fingers. Close enough now I could see my reflection in the cracked visor—eyes wide, pupils blown, sweat sticking my hair to my forehead.
Behind that reflection, deeper in the glass, I saw something else. Not Night City. Not Gotham. Something darker. A room with no walls, no floor, no ceiling. Just hanging bodies swinging slowly in an invisible breeze.
Everyone of them wore my face. My stomach lurched. I doubled over and dry-heaved. Nothing came up. The gas didn't let me have that little mercy. When I straightened, the hallway was gone. I was in my old apartment kitchen.
Mom stood at the stove, cooking rice like it was any normal Tuesday. Papa sat at the table, reading the paper. For a second, my heart hurt with how much I wanted to walk in, drop my bag, and complain about school.
Then I saw the details. The rice pot was boiling over with blood, not water. It ran down the sides and hissed when it hit the burner, filling the room with metallic steam. The paper in my father's hands was blank. Just white. No print. As I watched, words bled up from underneath, forming one line over and over: YOU KILLED FOR FUN.
My brother's controller wasn't a controller. It was my gun. The one from the duffel. He clicked the cylinder open and shut like it was nothing. None of them looked up.
I tried to speak. My voice came out small. "Mom?"
She stirred the pot, slowly. Her hand shook. She didn't answer.
"Papa?" I tried. "Diego?"
Nothing.I walked closer. My boots squelched in the blood pooling on the floor, but they didn't react. I reached out, fingers inches from my brother's shoulder. He looked up so fast I flinched.
His face was… wrong. Half of it was him the way I remembered, goofy and tired. The other half was smashed in, bone showing, eye gone. The two sides didn't match when he spoke.
"Why didn't you stay?" he asked. "I couldn't," I said. "I was dying. I— I made a deal for you. You woke up. You're okay."
He blinked slowly. The ruined eye oozed something thick. "But you're not here," he said. "You left Mom alone. You left me alone. You're off playing hero with cats and guns and masks."
"I'm not a hero," I snapped. "I'm—"
"A killer," Papi said, calm, without looking up from the paper. Mom finally turned. Her eyes were empty sockets. "You were always good at leaving," she said, voice soft. "Leaving home to walk the streets all night. Leaving school. Leaving us. Now you leave the world."
"I didn't choose this," I said. "I died. I bled out in an alley. I—"
"Choice or not," Papi murmured, "bullets go where you aim them."
The walls started to breathe. In-out. In-out. The whole kitchen pulsed. Cabinets expanded and shrank, counters bowing. The microwave door opened and closed like a mouth laughing at me.
I backed up until my shoulder hit the fridge. When I looked at it, the magnet calendar was there. The one Mom used to track shifts and appointments. Every square just said FUNERAL in red ink.
The fridge door swung itself open. Inside, there was no food. Just my Blood Cat mask on a shelf, sitting in the middle of the cold metal box like it was on display. It was coated in frost. Each breath I took fogged around it, but the frost never melted.
I reached out. My fingers closed around it. The surface was rough, like bone, not composite. It felt like it had weight. I dragged it out, and it left a smear on the shelf, like it had been sitting in something.
My hands shook. I tried to drop it. It wouldn't fall. It fused to my palm, material running up my fingers like liquid tape. I screamed and tried to claw it off with the other hand, and that one got stuc,k too. The mask crawled up my wrists, wrapping around bone, slithering up my arms like a living thing.
Mom, Dad, and Diego just watched.
The mask crept up my neck. Cool. Almost gentle. It flowed over my jaw, my cheeks, sealing my mouth shut. My breath hit the inside of it, hot and sour. I could feel my heart beating against the inside of my ribs like it wanted to crack them.
In the reflection on the oven door, I saw myself change. Armor layered itself over my chest, shoulders, ribs. Dark plates. Scratches from blades I hadn't met yet. My eyes behind the mask glowed that same predator-yellow I'd seen on some cyberpsycho once.
They looked… relieved. "That's better," Papi said. "Now you look like what you are." The kitchen folded in on itself. The floor turned into a rooftop. Wind slammed into me, icy and wet. Rain hit my face or the mask. I staggered, boots scraping on a ledge.
Biotechnica tower loomed around me, glass and steel and corporate smugness. Alarms wailed. Red light pulsed. Sasha hung in mid-air in front of me. Not falling. Not standing. Just frozen halfway through the drop, hair blown straight up, eyes wide and bright and scared in a way I'd never seen.
I reached for her. My hand passed through. Her mouth moved. No sound. Then, slowly, she turned her head, unnatural in mid-air, so she was looking right at me. Her pupils were slits. Like a cat's. Like mine. "I stayed," she mouthed. The word echoed in my skull anyway, bypassing my ears. "I stayed for my mother. Im just like you."
"I—" I swallowed, throat scraping raw inside the mask. "I didn't know—"
"If you'd come," she said, eyes never blinking, "if you'd called, if i had never met you id still be alive—"
The building jarred. A gust of wind slammed against us, and then she fell again, the freeze-frame breaking. I lunged, grabbed nothing. She dropped past me, down, down, down, disappearing into the fog, leaving a red smear on the glass that looked a lot like my hands when I pulled the trigger too slow. I looked over the edge.
The ground was a mess of bodies. Gotham's gang. Night City scavs. Diego. My parents. Sasha. All piled, overlapping, limbs at wrong angles. Every time I blinked, they changed places. My stomach heaved again. Nothing came up. I couldn't breathe. The mask squeezed tighter, sealing around my face until it felt like my skull would crack.
Behind me, boots hit the roof. Heavy. Confident. I didn't have to turn to know exactly who it was. Red Hood. Gotham's monster. Except when I turned, it wasn't just him.
Half his jacket was swapped with mine. One arm was his leather and red armor, the other was my patched-up Night City coat. One leg was his boot, the other was my cyber leg. Our guns were welded together into some ugly double-barrel thing.
Two halves of the same piece of shit. He walked up beside me, side by side, and looked down at the pile. We stood there for a second. Everything went quiet. Too quiet. No sirens. No wind. No tower hum. Just our joined breathing inside the mask. He lifted his hand—our hand—and pointed down.
"They're all you," the silence said. I looked closer. It was true. Every corpse down there, every broken body… had my face. My hair. My eyes. Some masked, some not. Some with bullet holes in the forehead, some with broken necks, some burned black.
I couldn't move. The fear wasn't sharp anymore. It wasn't scream panic. It was deeper. Colder. Like this was just a thing that was, had always been, and I was only now seeing it. I tried to rip the mask off again. My fingers scraped at it. Nothing. My nails bent. Skin tore. No sensation but pressure and a distant hot throb.
"How many more?" the world asked, in all their voices at once. Diego's, Mom's, Dad's, Sasha's, Red Hood's, mine. "How many more do you need before you understand? Things like us, dont deserve love."
I didn't have an answer. I backed away from the edge, heart pounding so hard I could hear it in my teeth. The roof under my boots turned soft. Asphalt became flesh. Each step left a footprint etched in skin. I looked down and saw veins pulsing under the surface. The entire building was made of people.
Their faces pressed out of the concrete like things trying to get free, mouths open, hands reaching. Every time I stepped, I crushed a nose, a jaw, an eye. Their fingers clawed weakly at my ankles, leaving no marks, just cold.
"Stop," I croaked. "Stop it. Stop—"
The word dissolved into static. The sky above went black. No stars. No city glow. Just a hole. Something tall and thin and familiar uncurled itself in that darkness, but I didn't look up. I couldn't. If I looked, I knew I'd see burlap and rope and eyes so bright they'd burn through me.
I dropped to my knees instead, fingers digging into flesh-roof, and the bodies below laughed without moving their mouths. Laughter echoed off the inside of my skull, too loud, too bright. I squeezed my eyes shut.
Sasha's face burned against the inside of my eyelids. Diego's. Mom's. Dad's. The gang. Red Hood. All of them layered on top of each other, flickering like some fucked-up glitch slideshow.
And under it all, buried deep, a small, clear thought tried to surface through the noise, Fear gas isn't supposed to do this?This is wrong, that little thought said. This is someone else's hand on the switch.
The mask tightened again, like it didn't like being doubted.
The laughter cut off. Silence dropped. Heavy. Absolute. I opened my eyes. I was standing in a room with no doors and no windows. Just black walls, black floor, black ceiling. No corners. No lines. Just smooth nothing. In front of me, three chairs sat in a row.
Diego on the left.
My mother in the middle.
My father on the right.
They all looked alive. Healthy. No bruises, no blood, no missing eyes. Just… them, the way they should've been. They were bound to the chairs with thin red ropes that looked like veins. My hands were empty.
Something heavy settled into them. I looked down. A Gun. The old revolver. Loaded. The cylinder already clicked into place. My fingers fit the gripped it. I tried to drop it. My muscles didn't respond.
Diego smiled at me. It was soft. The way he used to smile when he caught me watching him play, and pretended not to be embarrassed.
"It's okay, hermana," he said. "You're good at this."
Mom nodded once, eyes gentle. "You have a talent."
Papa leaned back in the chair like it was any Sunday. "Make it count, mija."
My arms came up, slow, like someone else was moving them. The barrel leveled beside my head, My finger twitched on the trigger. I screamed. No sound came out.