Chapter 17 — There Are Always Unexpected Events in Buying and Selling
The highway out of Santo Domingo cut a raw line through the waking city, a ribbon of cracked asphalt and gutter detritus. Neon halos from tower ads smeared across windshields as two cars carved their way toward the industrial fringe—fast, hungry, and dangerous in the way the night had taught them to be. Engines droned like distant thunder; the air tasted of oil and ozone.
In the rear seat of the trailing car, Adrian sat rigidly in the passenger position, chin tucked, eyes sweeping the horizon like a man who had learned to read danger in streetlights. Pilar drove, hands steady on the wheel, one chrome gorilla-arm thumping a low rhythm on the console in time with the bass bleeding through the stereo. In the back, Rebecca lounged with her feet up, chewing bubblegum with a contented snap. A Shingen V-type submachine gun lay across her thighs; a Technica Omaha pistol—plain, lethal—rested beside it.
Rebecca's Omaha had the signature looks of black-market trade: solid, serviceable, no Mox-stylings. Adrian's own pistol, in contrast, still bore a pastel axe decal and the telltale tokens of the Mox—gifts, debts, and a complicated past. The two guns were family enough to make Rebecca grin.
Sasha sat composed in the middle seat, a delicate laptop balanced on her knees, the cord tucked into the socket on her arm. Her fingers danced across keys as if coaxing a sleeping giant; every line of code she wrote was a soft, precise blade.
Across from her, Kiwi—new, cold, unreadable—had her red trench coat agape and a small deck attached to the lines at her neck. She closed her eyes and let the gear hum into her; she was not the type to blend into a group with chatter. She plugged in and went inward, the quiet kind of preparation that meant the city in her head was already running a hundred different attack scenarios.
Adrian watched them all with the soft detachment of someone who'd been trained to notice. These were not friends in the harmless sense—Maine's crew were family by proximity and necessity: loud, messy, lethal. They traded favors and bled for each other. In this life you were as safe as the people who had your back.
The squad channel lit up in translucent print in Adrian's vision.
> Maine: Adrian, Sasha brief you? You know the job?
Adrian did not hesitate. "Extract from Sixth Street territory. Alive—€120,000. Dead—€50,000. Standard pickup, high risk."
Maine's laugh came through like a gunshot. "Then we take the high pay. If nothing goes sideways it's a payday." There was a confidence to him that made people either lean in or lean away.
Dorio's voice cut through with a different tone: practical, weary. "Calm it, Maine. Sixth Street's not street trash. They train like soldiers. They fight like them, too. It's one thing to steal a bag in the valley. It's another to walk into a nest that's got its teeth in."
She wasn't being dramatic—Dorio had the posture of someone who'd learned the hard way that bravado and steel weren't the same thing as tactics. She was big, and her muscles flexed under that red windbreaker like a living machine. She could split your skull with a hand and then offer you a smoke to calm the shock.
The Sixth Street Gang's reputation wasn't rumor or bravado; it was institutional memory. Born from veterans who never hung up their uniforms after the Fourth Corporate War, Sixth Street had turned city blocks into barracks, warehouses into recruitment centers. They had numbers, denominations, a chain of command, and a willingness to burn what they didn't like. For mercs, they were not a convenient target—they were a test.
Maine gave a contemptuous snort. "We're mercs. We take job, collect creds, and live to fight the next day. Middleman covers us if it gets messy."
"Middlemen lie," Pilar grunted, his prosthetic hand idly checking a selector switch on a grenade launcher strapped across the back seat. "Creds are cold, promises are heat. Heat fades."
Rebecca yawned, twirling an empty magazine between her fingers. "Calm your chrome, Pila. We get paid and buy booze. That's the arc of life."
The hum of the engine was a metronome. Sasha's fingers never stopped. Then she looked up with the air of a woman who'd seen a map in the dark and already memorized every alley.
"We're close," she said. "Security cams line the road from here. We'll need to park and go in on foot. Cameras are industrial-grade—loops, redundant feeds. Not a simple blind."
Maine killed the engine and grinned, the expression raw and a little reckless. "Get out here."
The two cars rolled to a stop and the team spilled out. The late morning was bright with a sliver of sun, but the air still held the damp of yesterday's rain and the pulse of the city's underbelly. From their vantage, the garage sat on a lower slope like a low-toothed maw. Painted across the battered sign was a skull with a gold six and three little stars—Sixth Street's mark.
Maine lit a cigarette with an actor's flourish, smoke curling between his fingers. "The middleman says: extract, drop at a bar in Heywood, call the number. Job's done." He passed the cigarette and smiled, which meant he was trying—failing—to make the job sound simpler than it was.
Pilar swore under his breath. "Heywood? Why the hell are they involving Heywood? That's Valentino territory."
Dorio's scowl deepened. "Exactly. If the client wants the target in Valentino turf after we pull him from Sixth Street—sounds like an attempt to pass the heat. It's not a straight handoff; it's a setup."
"Middlemen dress the truth up nice," Maine said. "They dress it up pretty and hand you a knife."
Rebecca popped a gum bubble and made a face. "Then we cut the pretty fabric and take the knife."
Kiwi, who had been silent and watching, cracked one eye open. "You want me out of the job? Because I can sit this one and still get creds."
"No," Maine said. "We need you. All we need you to do is not dial a funeral."
Kiwi's mouth didn't move, but the little corner of her lip curled. She was a recent addition—not just to the team but to the emotional calculus. She smoked slower than anyone else; her cigarettes didn't seem to be for nerves but for timing. She spent half the morning with her eyes closed and the other half in the Net. She'd scanned Adrian once—once really—and then looked away as if she'd seen something she didn't want to name.
When Maine looked at Adrian, he looked past the rookie's plain skin and sober build and saw the same thing that made other people glance twice: speed. Raw, unnerving speed that didn't come from chrome legs or battlefield software. Maine had watched Adrian move once—during a drunken arm-wrestle in the container—and the memory had lodged like a challenge. Adrian had bested men who were prosthetic-glory incarnate. For a merc with an appetite for upgrading, a baseline human with that kind of body was a curiosity worth betting on.
"Roll," Maine said—Maine's lips forming the old name familiar to some in the city. "You'll run the insertion. Sasha ghosts the cams. We go loud when you signal. Dorio and I will hit the front to draw eyes. Pilar covers on approach. Rebecca—you make the scene dramatic."
Adrian—Roll once in a different memory—nodded. "Got it."
It was the first true acceptance of a mission where the stakes felt defined to him, not just something scribbled on a pay sheet. He felt the HUD ping in his mind—soft, systematic—then display:
> [Bounty Mission Detected: There Are Always Unexpected Events in Buying and Selling]
Accept / Decline
His finger brushed the acceptance. The system always presented the same cynical prompt in this city: expect the unexpected. He accepted.
> [Mission Accepted]
Danger Level: Medium
Objective: Locate the target held by Sixth Street and extract.
Reward: +0.1 to two random attributes.
Note: This is Night City. Simplicity is an illusion.
He felt the breath of everyone in the team like winds converging.
"Alright," Sasha said, tipping the laptop closed and speaking with a rhythm that belonged to people who lived in networks. "I'll loop the external cameras for twelve seconds. You'll get a thermal map of the vents and maintenance shafts. There's a service panel above the men's room connected to the vents. Slip in. The target should be in bay three."
Kiwi flicked ash and added, "If their net is as beefy as it sounds, I'll be there to pick up any hot pieces that burn out. You get one window, Roll. Make it clean."
Adrian tightened his jaw. He had learned the value of windows. He had also learned that when tech and territory collided, windows closed faster than anyone expected.
Maine clapped his hands and grinned. "Then what are we waiting for? Let's move."
They moved like a unit; there was muscle memory in the choreography. Rebecca vaulted a guardrail and hopped to the bottom of the slope, fingers splayed on the Shingen like she was warming a child. Dorio and Pilar checked their weapons. Kiwi slipped a deck into a muddy pocket and closed her eyes for a heartbeat, the way surgeons take a last breath before practice. Maine's cannons were a ritual—he snapped the barrels into place, the hydraulics whining as they nested under his forearms.
Adrian launched—fast, efficient, his body a living spline of motion. He dropped to the incline, slid along jagged concrete, and raced the piping along the lower slope. As he moved, alpha-lens feeds flickered where Sasha's fingers hacked the edge—cameras tilted, images looped into harmless static. A street light blinked twice like a wink. Twelve seconds of absence. Less, really; the city compressed and expanded through the timing.
He reached the back of the repair shop and scaled a drainpipe, hands finding purchase in rust and flaking paint while his core balanced the weight of human strategy. He slipped into a maintenance hatch and into the duct system. Metal sighed around him, cold and fetid. He inched along the grille, cradled by the building like a live thing. The Net overlay Sasha pushed to his retinal display traced the path as a ghost—a hopeful map.
On the front, Dorio and Pilar pushed the door like actors in a fake fight. Dorio's voice shook off a laugh as she called into the reception. "Inspection! Where's your head mechanic?"
The man working behind the counter glanced up, stony. He'd seen Dorio around—they were all familiar, in a city like this, where reputations preceded even faces. The feint worked. Heads turned toward the front. The shop became a stage.
Adrian slithered through the vent and dropped into the men's room mechanics panel. Scramble without noise. He moved down a corridor, taking bearings from Sasha's overlay—bay one, bay two, bay three. The air in bay three smelled of oil and cheap cigarettes. A man sat on a milk crate smoking; a small crate of data drives lay open at his feet, the kind of hardware that bought silence and bribed forgetfulness.
Adrian stepped. He felt the mission tighten like a trap as the target lifted his head. The man's eyes were empty in an old exhaustion that comes from carrying secrets. Adrian reached for him; the man looked as if he might leap, he might beg, he might fight. Instead, the man's visor flashed, and a face appeared on it—a corporate emblem like a guillotine of patience.
Alarms slashed the humidity. The external camera feed loop flicked—Sasha's handiwork dissolving like smoke. Whoever had been inside had flipped a kill-switch—someone had been waiting for that crew. The hole they'd planned to slip through was welded shut by betrayal.
Sasha's voice came sharp and flat. "They've got an override. Someone tripped a backdoor we didn't close."
Kiwi's reaction was immediate, the way cold steel snaps in response to heat. "I'm on it. If they've got a deep core we'll need to peel layers. Cover the target. I'll open a decoy node and ghost a reflection."
Maine clicked over the earpiece. "Pull the target and go—now." No hesitation. No moralizing. Just that shallow mercy that gets mercenaries home.
Adrian took the man by the collar. He felt the man quake under his grip, felt the old timbers of terror. The rear exit screamed after them: hands, boots, the sound of men moving to intercept. Sixth Street's muscle had been sleeping inside the garage all along. They weren't a shopfront. They were a fort with a courier's front.
Gunfire opened like a second language. The plan collapsed into improvisation. Dorio and Pilar provided a brutal, beautiful diversion. Maine's cannons turned the air into a hail of hot intent—controlled, terrifying, precise. Rebecca moved like a small, feral shadow, weaving bullets and fury. Kiwi clawed through the network, a ghost in the wires, redirecting feeds and carving windows. Sasha, for all her kittenish calm, was burning capacity to keep them blind.
Adrian bolted through the chaos with the man clamped under an arm. They stumbled into the alley where the cars were staged as backup. Pilar hunkered under the van's arch, throwing a shoulder to shove an already-hard engine into motion. The van jerked, slipped, and launched them down the broken artery of the street.
Explosions painted the edge of the confrontation like punctuation—somewhere, an ignition blew a courier van to flaming metal confetti. The Sixth Street veterans surged. A drone dove low and spat fire like a rabid animal. The van fishtailed. Maine cursed and drove like the city wanted the end faster. For a breath, the world was a strip of flame and smoke and a blur of neon.
Inside the van, breath came hot and ragged. Blood tasted like the metallic coin of work. They had the man. The payout would be negotiated through a cleaner's clean hands, but thanks to the man's frozen face, the run had become more than a simple grab. They had a story now—a dangerous one with edges.
Kiwi exhaled like someone who had run a marathon inside a circuit board. "I carved us a window," she said. "Not clean, but enough. We got a trace trailing us—somebody pinged the middle, but I ghosted our signature. They'll think we doubled back. They won't be on our heels a minute longer."
Sasha's fingers tapped like rain on glass as she stowed the last of her logs. Her voice was small. "There were four netrunners. One flagged an override. Whoever was watching us from the inside had a core—something corporate. This wasn't just guard detail. This was a courier for a corp upload."
Maine's gaze cut across the crew like a blade. He looked older in the cut of his face, as if the morning's heat had settled permanently where his jaw clenched. "We got what we came for," he said. The words were tight. They had the currency of truth and the weight of decisions.
Adrian sat back, the target's breath a ragged rhythm against his shoulder. He let the city slide around him—the fragments of a fight, the staccato of voices, the soft chitter of a deck cooling—and felt a small, strange thing rise inside him: a discomfort about what they'd become. They were mercs because the city demanded it, because the economy of survival had to be paid in action rather than prayer. But today's job left something sour in the air. There had been layers that revealed someone else's hands—big hands—from corporations that didn't like dirt and preferred the cleanliness of absolution. Sixth Street wasn't a random nest. It was protection. Someone in the city wanted that man protected badly enough to flip a switch and betray a job.
Maine's face softened for the first time, in a way the others all felt. He looked at Adrian and there was an unspoken thing in the look: respect. Not for the extraction, but for the apprentice who'd stepped into a maelstrom and come back with the prize.
"Next time," Maine said, and it sounded like an agreement with himself more than anyone. "Tell me if we're making a stray run point man."
Adrian gave the tiniest of wry smiles. "Next time I wear a suit."
They laughed then—short, brittle, something that drew a thin line between relief and the shared recognition that they'd just been given lease on another day. The van's aging engine sang as Santo Domingo swallowed them up, neon and concrete and the smell of other people's bad choices chasing them.
Somewhere in the city, fixers rewired their plans. Somewhere, Sixth Street would nurse its wounds and ask for answers. Somewhere else, the person whose data had been the prize would be processed into a new chain of custody, their fate traded in a room that smelled like cologne and betrayal.
And Adrian, who had just moved through the belly of a ready-built war, felt the soft brush of an unfamiliar resolution. They had the creds today. They had the scars. In this city, the two were the same coin. He didn't know yet what the new coin would pay for, or how many times he could flip it before the city came collecting in a way that couldn't be outrun.
Night City always made room for the unexpected. Today's lesson had been simply that: a reminder, rough and immediate, that even the best-laid loops could be cut.
The van rolled on, toward a safehouse and the next negotiation, toward the faint possibility that this particular job might not mark an end but might change the measure of what they protected—each other—or what trade-off they were willing to pay for remaining alive.
Beyond the window, neon bled across the horizon. Inside the van, bodies breathed and boots thudded. Their laughter died, and planning whispered back into life again. The city pulsed, untamed and vast, and the crew—tired, hungry, dangerous—breathed in unison, ready to survive the next ask.
Some things in Night City would always be sold. The price, as they knew too well, always came with a twist.