The Morning After

In the darkness, a swirl of voices growing louder. The sound of Astrid’s mother singing her to sleep, the sound of little Thea weeping softly in Astrid’s arms, Siyanthini's moans of pleasure, the sickening sound of breaking bones as Moses Reed’s face explodes in a rain of blood…

 
Astrid started awake to see greyish sunlight filling the room. In the corner of her cybereye, the biomonitor readout plotted a graph of her sleep cycles the past few hours, and a reminder to rest for a few days to fully recover. A sharp wince of pain from her right side as she tried to sit up was a more effective reminder.
 
She was lying on the couch in Arjay’s office above the Triangle with the sounds of the early lunch crowd starting to file in downstairs. A worn India Sherpa-style blanket was tossed over her, and Arjay was sitting at his desk working his laptop, talking away on a call, and constantly shifting his attention—Astrid idly wondered if the man still talked in his sleep like he did when he was a boy.
 
Astrid reached over with her left hand, activated the medscanner in her cyberarm, and slowly ran it up and down over her side under her shirt. The display in her cybereye showed it was healing, with no sign of infection, but the inflammation and bruising was likely the reason it still hurt. She lifted up her top to check the bandage, and noticed it has been decorated with an intricate graffiti-style image of a band logo.
 
“What the fuck…” she whispered to herself trying to recall exactly how she had ended up in Arjay’s office. She recalled the fire-fight, going to the concert was super excited about, and a lot of partying. Something about the other guys talking up her pulling out the bullet fragment from her side in the middle of the chaos, and asking her to show off the bandage as proof. Astrid vaguely recalled some green-haired woman taking way too much interest in it—oh right, Thresh had also been kind of creepily entranced earlier too. “Damn BD freaks,” she thought.
 
At least she’d done the work herself getting that fragment out. Back at Rushlight, whenever staff was injured, they liked to have the noobs do the work to get practice on people who weren’t paying top-dollar for theirs services. In retrospect, Xenos could have handled it, but doing the work herself meant the scarring will be minimal and the chemskin self-knitting should take care of the rest in a few days.
 
Anyhow, she didn’t recall partaking in the party drugs, but she definitely took something strongish for the pain which is probably why the evening was a blur. She did remember not wanting to go all the way out to her place, and Arjay guiding her back to his office in the early hours.
 
Sitting up carefully, and slowly rolling her shoulders and arms to stretch them, she caught Arjay’s eye during one of his brief moments of transition. He smiled and nodded over towards a large “to go” disposable carafe of coffee and some protein packs sitting on the desk, and went back to his business. Astrid acknowledged with a grateful if weak smile and slowly made her way over. She noticed the branding of the carafe and figured Box had probably supplied it from his day-gig.
 
While sipping coffee and enjoying some much-needed food, she ran through her Agent’s calendar and news feeds. Naturally, there wasn’t a damn thing about a firefight in D-town in the primary newsfeeds—the big media outlets couldn’t be bothered to look under a highway—but there was a story about the incident in the neighborhood blog noting the businesses that were damaged by fire and contact IPs for donations if anyone was able to help them get back on their feet. The only other mention of it was Arjay’s personal feed promoting links to his “show”.
 
Reviewing her schedule, Astrid did have few patients coming in today, so she folded up the blanket, straightened up the couch, cleaned up her breakfast and gave Arjay a quick kiss on the head before heading out. She grabbed up her backpack as she headed downstairs. Walking past the lunch regulars in the Triangle, she headed towards the back of the building to her clinic.
 
OK, “clinic” was too strong a word. It was probably a vehicle garage at some point, but now it was a make-shift infirmary and repair shop. As she opened the door, she reached into her jacket pocket to pull out a hemostat that was still pinching a bullet fragment. Giving it a quick rinse, she dropped it into a glass jar along with a few other bullet fragments, some metal shrapnel, and a broken knife-point—her “collection” from over the years at Rushlight and since coming back to D-town.
 
She settled down at her makeshift workbench—a old door over a couple of metal saw horses—and unpacked her backpack’s content for the day’s work. She offered regular cyberware maintenance and tune-up, basic health services, and meditation practices and therapeutic conversation for coping with the alien feelings cyberware users had on a daily basis. It wasn’t a tenth of what you could get at even a mediocre city clinic, but it was for most in D-town better than nothing.