Chapter 8 — You Haven't Told Me How Much Money You Plan to Give Me
Night had soaked the city in acid neon. The Biotech compound rose ahead like a clinical cathedral — glass panels reflecting holo-ads, chrome girders cutting the sky into geometry, logos blinking like patient monitors. From the overpass, holographic koi arced through the night, scales refracting light into shards that danced on the wet pavement. It all looked beautiful until you remembered beauty in Night City usually meant someone else's death.
Adrian crouched low behind an industrial planter, rainwater beading on his jacket. Sasha was a hair's breadth away, lit by the pale glow from her deck, fingers moving in a blur over tactile keys. Her pink coat was incongruous in the compound's sterility, but there was no irony in her posture — every muscle coiled, every breath measured.
"West gate camera," she whispered. "Hall 2. Ninety degrees. Northeast has another. Kill those, and I can juice the elevator lock. Crack time: ninety seconds. Elevator to fourteen: thirty. Window: two minutes, tops. Pilar—status?"
The comm feed ticked to life with Pilar's clipped voice. "Jammer on standby. Five-minute lock. After that, they'll get alerts. You've got five to work the hole and get out."
Five minutes. Adrian let the number land like a weight. In a videogame it would be a neat countdown; in the city it was a puckering line across your throat.
Sasha glanced at him once — dark pupils catching neon. "Stay close. No sightseeing. When I'm in the car, you hold the door. If anything moves, ping me. Don't talk. I encrypted the channel." She snapped the deck shut with a soft metallic kiss.
Adrian put a hand over his radio, thumb brushing the safety on his sidearm. "Copy."
Then, with the silent choreography of practiced thieves, Sasha tapped a key. The camera above the west gate hiccupped, its servos stuttering, a single twitch and then stillness. The red LED blinked twice and died.
She moved like water. Two-meter wall scaled in three movements — a coil, a launch, a roll. Adrian followed, light on his feet; the system's small boosts and his own reflexes doing the work where muscle alone would fail. He'd trained, fought, and slept on concrete; stealth felt like another language he'd learned to speak.
At the entrance she produced a slender tool, Ripper chrome flashing between her fingers. The implant at her fingertips hummed as it bit through insulation and metal like a surgeon. Steam beaded from the cat-port vents at her temples; the tiny white puffs looked absurd under the utilitarian lights.
"Door." Her voice was breath and machine.
The latch gave, a soft hydraulic sigh. They slipped in.
The lobby was a study in sterilized arrogance: polished floors, a waterfall of corporate PR looping on an overhead holo, security scanners slotted like teeth. Cameras watched everything like omniscient constables. Sasha moved with practiced invisibility, fingers ghosting across the panels to keep the feeds blind. Two twitches, two dead eyes.
Adrian's ears keyed into every noise — a distant chuckle, the hum of a refrigeration coil, the whisper of a guard's boot on tile. They passed a receptionist's station where a holo-smile greeted them, cheerful and hollow. Corporations loved their manufactured warmth; it made them easier to break.
At the elevator Sasha reached into her coat and produced a black box no bigger than a deck of cards. With a deft insertion and the Ripper's blade she sliced into the panel, hot arcs licking at the metal. Her deck drew from the exposed cluster — a quiet bloom of code — and she whispered to it like a lover coaxing a stubborn machine.
She shot him a look, nodding once. "Now."
He planted himself against the elevator doors like a stone. If anything happened, he was the anchor. If they failed, he'd be the person people remembered, not the code. The metal sighed and the doors parted.
Sasha slipped in and vanished upward.
The minutes slugged by. Below, the hallway lights hummed white. Adrian flexed his fingers inside his gloves, listening to the city leak through the comm. Pilar's voice was a steady metronome of status updates; Maine's presence fuzzed warmth into the static. He felt small and monumental in the same breath.
"Fourteen," the elevator chimed, polite and complacent.
When the doors opened, Sasha flowed out like a shadow that remembered sunlight. She darted between patrols, eyes scanning, hips angled with lethal intention. At the target door she crouched, input the passcode the fixer had given them like a prayer. It accepted the code. The lock gave with a clinical chime.
Inside, a bank of terminals and clusters of research equipment hummed in a cold ballet. A wall screen displayed "SECURICINE — R&D PORTAL" in polished type. Sasha dropped like a cat into the swivel chair and peeled off her coat with a breathless efficiency. The pink helmet clacked down next to her, cat ears ridiculous and defiant.
"R&D logs. Alcohol-2 accounts… located," she sang, hands moving. The deck's glow painted her face blue; for a moment she looked almost small.
Adrian kept watch by the door, sensing everything like a second skin, hearing the lift of a pen at the far end of the hall, the shuffle of a late-night janitor's steps. He could stall forever in that posture, freeze the moment into a long sigh. But the clock ticked.
Sasha's fingers flew. She hummed a single stupid little tune that haunted him — childish and steady. He'd heard it earlier and somehow, in that tune, she'd seemed less like a netrunner and more like someone who'd once had a life that wasn't only code.
Her screen scrolled. Her smile blinked; she was bright and brittle. Then the word Securicine wavered in the corner of the monitor in stark black. Something small and human tightened her mouth.
She dove into files. At first it was clinical: manufacturing schematics, batch numbers. But then line after line rose like a buried scream: flagged malfunctions; internal docs advocating for recall; a reply from a name that made Sasha's breath snag — Norman: Deny recall. Proceed.
There was a time she'd traded hope — sold a drug with promises to people who trusted her. The memory of a mother with a fragile smile, taking a pill as recourse, flashed hot and quick behind her lids. The memory of a hospital room that smelled like lemon cleaner and failure followed, sharp as a blade. Sasha's hands went cold.
"Status?" Maine's voice snapped through the channel. Tension threaded it.
"Almost done," she lied — for half a heartbeat. Then she whispered: "Not exactly. I found something else." Her fingers moved faster, pulling out reports. "Malf rank: neurodegeneration risk. Docs requested recall. Exec: deny. Proceed."
Adrian's jaw went tight. The city's stories muttered through him — most corps had a buried file for covering sins. Securicine's popup was not supposed to be a moral moment; it was a data point. She should upload and disappear. Instead, Sasha stared at the line that named what had stolen her childhood.
On his left, Pilar's voice spiked with impatience. "Sasha, you've got one minute before the jammer times out."
Her breath caught. She made a decision that felt huge and small at once. She hit keys, not to exfil the target file but to copy the internal report, append evidence, and redirect.
"Uploading to 54NEWS tip line," she murmured into the mic. "For public record."
A tone beeped: upload progress 80%. Pilar cursed — the jammer's clock wasn't a rumor, it was a razor. The siren that followed was immediate: lights switched to red, a klaxon keened through the vents, and outside, steel boots quickened.
She slapped the data cable into the port and jammed another command to the uplink. The last percent crawled up: 95, 99, 100. The status blinked Upload Successful. For a sliver of a second, the data — the truth — would breathe beyond the corp's walls.
A security unit crashed the doorway. It was a silent cylinder the size of a man, servos whining, optics focusing in a sick mechanical blink. Sasha flicked her ripper out of her sleeve, a thin blade that could strip wires and hide data like a scalpel for code. She sent the first bot into a seizure with a quickhack — Cyberpsychosis — and it spasmed, spinning on its treads. Sparks spat like angry tiny suns.
But one of the bots adapted fast, guns whipping up and firing. A round shredded Sasha's shoulder in a bloom of pain. Her body snapped back; glass shattered as a gust of wind and splintered light took her toward the window.
Adrian saw the motion clear as an x-ray. Instinct, empathy, whatever cruel wiring had lodged in him — he moved.
He dove.
The air went thin with adrenaline. He punched through the space between Sasha and the shattered frame and wrapped his arms around her as the world pitched outwards. For a heartbeat they both hung in a dangerous lull — plastic, metal, rain, neon falling below like a river of fire.
"You haven't told me how much you plan to give me," he said, voice rough, half-joke to keep their pulses from drowning.
She blinked, disoriented. Blood slicked her shoulder, eyes water-bright and shocked. For a ridiculous second she might have laughed.
He hauled both of them back through the broken window, into the shocked interior. Pilar's jammer flared like a dying heartbeat outside. Maine's truck was a canon arriving in the distance, tyres screaming on slick concrete.
"Get her out," he ordered to the comm. No one argued.
Sasha's grin was small and expressed more than data ever had. She was breathing hard, the kind of breathing that had a price and a bargain embedded in it. She looked up at him, pale and equal parts furious and grateful.
"Are you insane?" she rasped, trying to sound angry but failing.
Adrian shrugged, kneeling to check her shoulder. "Maybe. Maybe I like being paid in gratitude."
Pilar's voice flooded the channel: "Extraction inbound. Maine's on approach. You good?"
Adrian swallowed. "We're getting out. Hold the line."
They moved like clockwork after that — a practiced chaos. Dorio and Rebecca drew attention in the lobby with a staged diversion: laughter and a barbed comment, a missed order that turned into a shouting match, and then Dorio's hand flashing steel that kept security busy. Maine's truck slammed in; the rest of the crew's silhouettes poured into the compound. The bots were brutal and relentless, but pain pried doors open and metal folded under pressure.
They piled into the truck with the speed born of rehearsals and near-death habits. Sasha leaned back, helmet off, hair matted with blood and rain. Her fingers fluttered across her deck like a benediction, checking the upload status again. The tip line confirmation blinked at her — receipt acknowledged. Somewhere, someone would read and maybe act.
Adrian watched her in the rearview: small, dangerous, alive. He felt the weird, stubborn warmth that came when you'd done something rash and human. The city would change nothing because of one upload, and maybe everything because people had seen what had been hidden.
They disappeared into the neon blur, sirens and lights reflecting off their sweat-streaked faces.
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[Quest Update — Data Heist: Biotech]
Primary Objective: Retrieved Biotech classified files — COMPLETE.
Bonus Objective: Protect Sasha — COMPLETE.
Rewards: +0.10 Reflexes; +0.05 Composure.
Hidden: Bond Strengthened (Sasha ↔ Adrian).
Status: Extraction successful. Consequences: High (Corporate interest increased).
Adrian slid back his hands and looked out at the river of neon. The system panel blinked like a truth he couldn't ignore. He had changed a line in the script. Whether it made him a hero or a target, Night City would adjudicate soon enough.
Sasha turned her head slowly and met his eyes, those catlike pupils narrowing to human pupils for a flicker. "About time you asked," she whispered, voice rough. "Don't spend it all on heroics."
He tried to smirk. The smirk felt brittle but honest. "Wouldn't dream of it."
Outside the truck, the city kept breathing — indifferent, hungry, and beautiful in its cruelty. Inside, the crew laughed and cursed and licked their wounds, a messy family forged in neon and gunfire.
Adrian felt tired and electric and strangely steady. The heist had been a single arc in an endless night, but it had also been a pivot: he'd reached into the abyss and pulled something — a person, a secret — back into the light.
Night City didn't hand out absolutions. It handed choices. He'd picked one tonight.
And somewhere on a far-off corporate server, a message blinked: Unauthorized leak detected. Initiate trace protocols.
The city noticed their trespass. The city would come for them. But for now, under the neon and the rain and the hum of the truck's engine, they were alive. That would have to be enough.