Bora never would have thought that a week could pass so fast and yet feel so long. Now that Siyeon knew her real name, she kept calling her miss Kim and every time she did, the solo felt a strange feeling growing inside. At first she thought it was just a simple crush because, aside from the many grievances she had against the corporate, she had to admit that Siyeon was hot. Furthermore, these days had been quite instructive. She used to see Siyeon as the perfect example of everything she hated about corporates, but the woman she saw for the past days had been different. She was confident and a bit manipulative, sure, but more than anything else she was broken. It became more evident when she went with her to the old clinic in the Japanese district.

It was at the end of a pretty regular day that Siyeon suddenly decided to dispose of the old cyber-arm that was still lying around in her apartment. She took the metal piece and asked Bora to follow her. The former corporate had stayed silent for most of the ride and the solo had respected that. The two ended up in front of an abandoned building of the Japanese district. She looked at the old building, not sure what to do next. Siyeon had stopped next to her and didn’t seem to know what to do either.

“What is this place?”

The corporate woke up from her trance.

“It’s where I used to live. They used to rehabilitate young delinquents and provide basic surgeries for free before the place got attacked.”

Bora looked more closely and distinguished impacts of bullets left on the walls. They used heavy rifles by the look of it, it must have been a massacre.

“Who did that?”

“The militia. The man who ran the place used stolen equipment from powerful pharmaceutical corporations, they didn’t like it.”

The solo could sense the uneasiness in Siyeon’s posture. It was obvious that she had not been here in a while and was probably reliving painful memories. She took it upon herself to lighten the mood.

“So, do I need to assume you were a delinquent Miss Lee?”

The corporate laughed, but the sadness remained in her eyes. “More of a survivor I’d say.”

She had meant this sentence to be cryptic, but Bora knew exactly what it implied. She had read the files that Yoohyeon had sent to her after she asked her to dig into Siyeon’s past. The hacker had warned her that there may be some wrong information because there was no official data about the corporate before she entered Insomnia Corp. but deep down Bora knew these were true.

Lee Siyeon had been raised without implants and sold to a Japanese gang leader when she was fifteen. She had been used for two years before she found a way to escape, sacrificing her arm in the process. Yoohyeon couldn’t find anything for the time period between the moment she was thrown away by her owners and the moment she became a corporate, but some old footage showed a teenage Siyeon still living in the Japanese district. Bora assumed that the young woman lived in this rehabilitation centre during that time.

“Let’s go inside.”

The tall woman finally took the initiative and stepped inside the old clinic. The roof had fallen in certain areas of the main hall and there was shattered glass on the floor. Dried blood was still visible on the walls, the scent of which mixed with the metallic smell of rust and dust. Seeing it so bare, it was easy to notice that the whole building was a small warehouse turned into a makeshift clinic. Something at the centre of the hall caught Bora’s attention. It looked like a gravestone on which was carved something in Japanese. Siyeon read the translation at loud.

“In memory of those who died, the Yoruken won’t fail you twice.”

“Yoruken?”

“The Yakuza clan who rules over the area. When the attack happened, the whole Japanese mafia world reacted. They gathered around the Yoruken and declared war on the corporation who orchestrated the massacre. The streets were painted with blood for weeks until an agreement was reached. This place is a place of mourning for the families of everyone who was murdered. It has been protected by the Yoruken ever since.”

Siyeon reached inside the bag pack she was wearing on one shoulder and took the cyber-arm that was inside. The finger tip of her new mechanic hand dropped, letting a thin laser beam out. The corporate engraved her message on the old cyber-arm and, when it was done, placed it at the foot of the gravestone with other artefacts and objects left by the people who came to mourn. Bora watched from a distance as Siyeon kneeled, joined her hands in a clap and prayed silently.

Siyeon remembered. She had woken up in an alley, alone. She quickly figured they had tossed her up, like a defective toy left behind by its owner. There were other girls to replace her, no one was going to spend money trying to fix her arm, especially since it would need to be replaced by a cybernetic one. The cost of the surgery was too high and she would lose the only thing that gave her additional value, so might as well just get rid of her.

The pain kicked in again. She cried alone in the alley, too afraid to look at her arm. She didn’t remember for how long she just stayed there, but at some point she heard footsteps coming nearer. Someone threw a coat on her shoulders and kneeled in front of her to see her face. The man looked old to her, he was probably in his forties. He took her injured arm carefully in his hands to see the damage, when he was done he looked at her in the eyes with an assertive gaze.

“You’re going to be alright.”

He didn’t seem like the type to sugar-coat things which made his statement even more reassuring. When he saw that the teenager wasn’t reacting, he lifted her up and got her out of the alley.

When she was done praying, she stood up and walked away from the building. The bounty-hunter looked one last time at the foot of the gravestone to read what the corporate had written on the arm: “Amano-san, thank you for everything. Singnie.”

 

***

 

This event had only lead to even more questions from Bora. Siyeon had tried to ignore them, but the solo was very persistent. At some point the corporate figured that it was better to indulge in the bounty-hunter’s inquiries. After living in the same apartment, albeit with a professional distance, they began having almost normal conversations. Bora was always the most curious one, she wanted to know more about that Siyeon she saw back then, the one who pouts when she’s unhappy and smiles genuinely when she finds something funny, but she was rather rare to find.

The conversation would often start when Siyeon was at her desk, working on probably some important data on the smart screen. Bora would be playing some flash game or taking care of her cyber-arms. The bounty-hunter always made sure that the articulations and hidden weapons were as good as new. The corporate had tried to act as if the solo’s questions bothered her, but in truth she quite enjoyed their discussions.

“Why didn’t you stay in the Japanese district?”

“I didn’t want to be part of the yakuza.”

“So you chose to enter a corporation. Very big difference.”

“Will you believe me if I say I wanted to stay away from the violence?”

Bora’s loud laugh filled the apartment. “I can’t believe you were that dumb.”

Siyeon rolled her eyes in annoyance before changing the subject to something that didn’t make her look like a fool.

“Enough about me. You barely shared anything about you since we got stuck in this situation.”

Bora’s eyes widened and her stare went blank for a couple of seconds. It never occurred to her that the other woman would care about her; mostly because there wasn’t anything interesting to say. She grew up in one of the suburban areas near the financial district until some corporation decided they needed the space to build something else. Her family had been evicted and forced to live in the Jungle where criminality and illegality were the norm. Her parents didn’t adapt well but she did. She hadn’t heard from them since she became a bounty-hunter, she was okay with that.

She started by doing team missions with JiU when she was eighteen. They became more than team partners during that time, but there came a point when they both wanted different things and staying together became a burden more than a relief. They were still in good terms though, saving each other’s life does that to people. All in all, SuA’s life was pretty classic for someone living in the City. Bora’s life though started to feel empty, but she never dwelt on those thoughts.

“What do you want to know?”

“Well, I already made research about you, from when you tried to kill me.” She paused and looked intensely at Bora with a little smirk. “So I guess I’d like to know more about your plans. Will you keep accepting missions from the gangs after that?”

“What else can I do?”

“Join Han Dong and be with JiU perhaps.”

Bora had not expected that from the corporate. And she said it with a touch of bitterness too. For a moment her eyes seemed to turn orange, but it had been too fast to really notice it, maybe she didn’t see it correctly. In any case it made Bora scoff.

“No thanks.”

“I thought you two were close.”

“We were. I guess we still are in a way, but we’ve chosen different paths. I don’t want to answer to a single employer, I want to be able to choose who I will work with and what my missions will be.”

Was it a relieved sigh she heard from Siyeon when she said that? She averted her gaze towards the desk where the former corporate was. The woman was reading something on the screen in front of her, seemingly unbothered. Was she happy that Bora and Minji weren’t in a relationship? The solo felt unexpectedly good about the possibility of making Siyeon jealous. She told herself that it was because she had always liked to feel desired, but there was something more, something specific to Siyeon that made her want to feel wanted by the blond woman.

“What about you? What are you going to do after all this is over?”

“I’ll stay here and probably work with the Han family once they take control of the Asian market.”

“So you’ll become a subordinate?”

“I’d rather be an associate.”

“What about Gahyeon, will she stay with you?”

“Gahyeon will stay for as long as she wants and until she’s able to live by herself. She was raised with fear of cyber enhancements to prevent her from getting any before she was sold. She has a lot to catch up with.”

“I’m sure Yoohyeon will love to teach her about that stuff, that brat is a nerd.”

“I’m not sure I can hire her just for that.”

“Well maybe instead of hiring her you could just ask.”

The corporate stopped for a moment, trying to get the difference between the two. Sometimes it was difficult for her to understand how Bora saw things. The bounty-hunter was never alone, she had Minji and Yubin, she met Yuqi during one of her missions, and she also had all the people who respected her and cared for her in their own way. People who lived in her street, people she had saved, people she was still helping for free because what they were doing was important. Siyeon didn’t have that. She had pawns and then she had enemies. All the people who cared for her and whom she cared for belonged to her past, if they ever existed at all. “Asking” was never something that came naturally, she commended or she bought.

“But do you think she would accept if I just asked? I’m her employer not her friend.”

Bora pressed two fingers on the cyber-tech connected to her temple. “Yoohyeon-ha, it’s Bora again. Do you think you could teach a clueless teenager about technology and stuff? No, not right now, but when this mission is over. Thanks, stay out of trouble.” She turned to Siyeon. “She said she’d loved to.”

The corporate laughed. “Always so reckless. But I suppose I have one thing less to worry about now.”

There she was, Bora thought, the woman she had started to like more than she had thought.

“I can teach her self-defence too. That way you won’t be afraid to let her go alone.”

Siyeon’s eyes unexpectedly turned to a deep blue. The solo already knew that the colours of her cyber-eyes depended on her emotions, but until now she had never seen this one.

“Why are you doing all this? I thought you were only in for the money.”

“Aaah”, Bora scratched the back of her neck. “I guess I believe that Gahyeon wants to be reunited with you just as much as you want to get her back. So now I’m helping you both, not just you.”

you still hate me after all.” Her eyes went from blue to deep purple. She wasn’t intimidating or angry, just sad.

Bora pondered. Her life had not been easy, as a consequence she found it hard to relate to people who had a tragic backstory because, in this City, who didn’t have one? Whenever a target tried to make their case it just made her want to shoot them even more. But that was not the case with Siyeon. She never tried to use her past to justify anything, she simply played by the rules and lost. It was irritating at first to see her so emotionless when her employees were being murdered, or when she so casually planned to raid the Wang family with Han Dong. But then Bora saw her holding that old cyber-arm like her life depended on it and suddenly Lee Siyeon seemed so small.

“I hate the corporate you, but I don’t hate you, if that makes sense.”

“It does. For example, I don’t hate you, but bounty-hunter SuA is such a pain in the sometimes.”

“Hey!” Bora threw one of the tools she was using to do some adjustments on her arms in the direction of Siyeon who easily caught it. Those damn cyber-eyes. “I saved your life, so be grateful!” She looked at her now empty hand, realising her mistake. “Can you give it back? I need it.”

“I don’t know… Can I?” Siyeon teased with a smirk, visibly enjoying the situation in which Bora threw herself in.

Seeing that the solo was getting annoyed, she stood from the desk where she was sitting and placed the tool inside of Bora’s hand. Her stare stayed a little longer than it should have on the bounty hunter who did nothing to break the moment while their hands touched. The corporate’s eyes switched to an icy blue - another new colour Bora thought - it gave her an intimidating aura, it felt like the gaze of a predator was resting upon her but instead of feeling threatened the solo felt rather… wanted? When she realised what she was doing Siyeon retracted her hand and turned her face away, her eyes turning black.

At the same time, the new implant that she had installed on her left temple started to flash. The thin threads of light that were running under the skin around it suggested that the implant was connected to a full neuronal system that was installed into Siyeon’s skull and connected directly to her brain.

“The raid has been advanced.”

“What?”

“Apparently there has been some weird activity in the Wang territory. Waiting for too long could be dangerous. Also, Gahyeon’s position has been located, she’s being kept at the Wang Villa.”

“And I suppose you want to be a part of the extracting team.”

“I know Han Dong gave her word, but I prefer to handle this myself, in case we are betrayed and have to run away with her. I’ll tell Yoohyeon to be ready for this eventuality as well.”

“Very well.”

Siyeon was suddenly hit by a wave of anxiety that overwhelmed her. This was it, if the mission succeeded she could be free again. So much depended on the success of the raid, the pressure started to feel heavy on her lungs. A hand rested on her shoulder.

“It’s going to be fine, you hired Yoohyeon and me for that.”

The corporate instinctively put her hand over the other’s, grasping it tightly. A slight smile formed at the corner of her lips. Since when did Bora’s presence started to feel so reassuring?