Chapter 4: Ghostfeed The shard Rogue slid them had weight out of proportion to its size, like a small truth. Mai jacked it into a dumb reader on the walk back from Afterlife, letting the flow skim her periphery instead of drilling straight through. The HUD painted thin lines in the corner of her vision—hop counts, hash signatures, misdirection that was proud of itself. A ghost route through the city’s rumor arteries. Not just amplification. Architecture. “Talk to me,” Ace said, hands in pockets, eyes on a billboard that tried to sell mercy with a rebate. “It’s a seed path,” Mai murmured. “A way to get a story into the bloodstream so fast it reads as memory. This leg starts in a place called the **Murmur**.” “Bar?” “Basement,” Mai said. “Under a used electronics stall that moves every week and leaves a forwarding address anyway. People with opinions go there to launder them.” Ace smiled with half her mouth. “Our kind of place.” They cut through lanes and footbridges until the market folded around them—tarps sagging under leftover rain, tables with neat rows of parts that might have worked if you apologized. The stall that currently had **MURMUR** painted in marker on a plank pretended to be nothing. Which is a tactic. You get law and predators that way: each assumes the other is already watching. A narrow stair led down. Air cooled to the temperature of secrets. Music hummed like a heart behind drywall. The door at the bottom wore a camera the size of a cigarette burn. “Keep your hands friendly,” Ace said. “I always do,” Mai said, and put hers behind her back anyway. Inside, it was all low light and high cynicism. People hunched over cheap drinks and expensive whispers. An old sound system breathed bass. The counterman wore a face that had seen too many truths to care about yours. He made coffee for people who shouldn’t have it after noon and poured it into cups that had given up. “We want to talk to whoever pays your bandwidth,” Ace said, putting a coin on the bar without looking at it. Padre had reminded her that doors like witnesses. The counterman didn’t touch the coin. “This is a safe space.” “For what?” Mai asked. “For pretending we’re safe.” He slid his gaze past them to the back room door. “Tell your story on stage if you want a free drink. Otherwise you’re tourists with better boots.” A kid with a mic on a stand cleared his throat and delivered a poem about living under a highway that never stopped arriving. People snapped their fingers. The sound was too gentle for the city and that made it honest. Ace leaned a hip on the counter. “We’re not here to sell,” she said. “We’re here to buy a map.” “Maps come with destinations,” the counterman said. “You got one?” Mai set Rogue’s shard on the bar and turned it so the counterman could see the edge glow. He didn’t touch it either. He read the light and the way the light paused at certain intervals and the way certain hashes flirted with being familiar. “That’s a river,” he said. “It runs under the city and sometimes over you.” “Where does it start?” Mai asked. He looked at her like he had once decided who got to live. “Everywhere. That’s what rivers do.” Ace smiled, patient. “Who digs the banks?” “People who sell shovels,” he said, nodding toward a back booth. A woman sat there like a rumor that had learned posture. Thin braids hung along her jaw, a chain of thin chips glittering like cheap saints. Her eyes wore overlays that scrolled without moving. She didn’t look up when they approached. She didn’t need to. “You’re loud,” she said, still reading whatever she’d been reading. “You walk like a headline.” “Compliment?” Ace asked. “Warning,” the woman said, and thumbed off her overlays. Her gaze arrived like a fact. “I’m **Ledger**. I don’t lie to you unless you pay me.” Mai liked her immediately. “We won’t ask you for the truth,” she said. “We’ll ask for a route.” Ledger tapped the table with a nail lacquered the color of good ink. “You’ve stepped on Rogue’s toes already,” she said. “She’ll pretend it makes her taller. Why are you here and not having your hand slapped?” “We were invited,” Ace said. “Cute,” Ledger said, without smiling. “Rogue watered you, then. She didn’t seed.” Ledger reached across the table and palmed the shard like she was feeling its pulse. “This route is an Afterlife cross-connect into the City Grave. It drops into a distribution node called **BARD**. Stories go in simple. They come out with teeth.” “So a myth engine,” Ace said. “Don’t get poetic,” Ledger said. “It’s just code with appetite. It likes narratives that pay rent.” She slid the shard back. “BARD’s not Rogue’s. She pays it to look at her words first. Someone else owns the battery.” “Someone old,” Mai said softly. “Someone who carves channels so clean you don’t see the tool marks.” Ledger tilted her head. “Now we’re getting interesting. Who told you that?” “The city,” Ace said. “It blinks when it wants us to look.” Ledger’s overlays stayed off. Her eyes were very human when she was thinking. “You’re either saints or lucky,” she said. “I have opinions about which is worse.” She nodded at a side door painted to look like it was stuck. “You want to see where the bones bleach? Basement of the basement. I’ll hold your coats.” “What’s the price?” Mai asked. “You bring me back one thing that proves you were there,” Ledger said. “Could be a logline. Could be a burned finger. Could be a name you don’t say aloud. And you don’t die in my bar.” “We’ll try to leave your mortality rates intact,” Ace said. The side door wasn’t stuck. It was heavy with intent. A narrow hall led to a maintenance ladder that had been there before the city knew its own name. At the bottom, the smell changed: dust, old ozone, the acid tang of cheap backups dying nobly. A room sat full of machines designed to be ignored—utility racks, a coolant tower, a fan that knocked every third revolution like an apology. In the corner, someone had wrapped a cluster of servers in a prayer shawl of reflective mylar and added a row of votives anyway. Engineers are sentimental when they think nobody’s looking. Mai crouched. “Hello, you,” she said to the cluster, as if greeting a stray cat. The cluster blinked a rebuke in five colors, then settled into a heartbeat. Lines of code squirmed through the air around it on a small projector like fish in a cheap tank. They were ugly because they had never been asked to be beautiful. They did their work and moved on. “This is a distribution node,” Mai said, hands hovering, not touching. “BARD fork. Caches rumor fragments and assembles them into something with social lift.” She squinted at a tag that blinked and then pretended it hadn’t. “And it’s getting priority packets from—” “From who,” Ace asked. The fan thunked. The door above them whispered. The air acquired the smell of wet leather and unearned confidence. “Visitors,” Ace said. “You get the front,” Mai said. “I’ll parse.” Ace turned toward the ladder and didn’t draw steel. Her hands hung empty and that made them more dangerous. She listened. The footsteps on the rungs were not trying to be quiet. Someone wanted to be heard. A man with a coat too big for his authority came down first. He had two friends who wore their guns like metaphors. They smelled like rain and pride. “This a private tour?” the man asked. “Book club,” Ace said. “You got library cards?” he asked, grinning. “Got a priest,” Ace said. “Better than a library card. He forgives late fees.” He laughed. He had the laugh of someone who’d practiced menace in mirrors. “Cute,” he said, and turned toward the wrapped servers. “We’ll take the pretty one.” “You won’t,” Mai said, without looking up. “If you touch that cluster without cutting the juice in the order it wants, it forgets how to forget. Every story it has ever held will dump onto public channels like a confession with no priest to catch it.” She tapped a virtual layer with two fingers. “Including the ones about your employer.” The man’s grin flattened. “You don’t know my employer.” Mai adjusted a slider with the tip of a nail. “Neither do you,” she said. “But I know his signature.” Ace smiled now, small as a blade left on a bar. “See, here’s the thing. You’re not the interesting part. You’re the part that bleeds to make a point.” He decided to be brave because he’d never learned the names for any other choices. His gun came up. Ace moved left, not fast, just right. The gun tracked the center mass she wasn’t. By the time he corrected, she had his wrist and the wall had his shoulder and physics had his dignity. The second friend tried to be old-school about it and came in swinging. Ace elbowed him in the diagrams. He folded but kept coming, which she respected. She let him hit her and gave him back something he’d remember as weather. “Mai?” she said, not taking her eyes off the man with the big coat. “Almost,” Mai said. Her hands drew patterns in the air as if directing a choir of very anxious small birds. “It’s clean code, Ace. Not old by age—old by lineage. Corporate library vintage repurposed for the street. I’m seeing a stamp for a shell company with too many consonants and a flavor of money that never has dirt under its nails.” “Which corp?” Ace asked. “The one that never admits to having a heart,” Mai said. “They’re outsourcing myth.” “Because of course they are,” Ace said. The third friend had stayed near the ladder to be useful later. He decided later had arrived, drew a knife, and took one step before reconsidering. Violet made herself known—not as a hand on Ace’s spine but as a small admiration for the geometry of the room. It calmed her pulse. It cleaned the edges off her impatience. “Put it down,” Ace said to knife-boy. He did, not because he was brave but because he wanted to go home later to someone who would be disappointed if he got blood on the rug. Ace let him hold onto that future like a rail. The man with the coat spat on the floor beside the wrapped servers, because disrespect is cheaper than courage. “You think you’re special because the rumors say you are,” he said. “You’re not.” “Correct,” Ace said. “We’re not special. We’re busy.” He came for her then, because there are only so many ways men like that know how to end sentences. She stepped aside and let the rack have him. It rang like a bell. Mai winced purely for the hardware. “Please don’t dent my cat,” she said. “It’ll forgive you if we feed it a cable,” Ace said. The fight drained out of the room like heat through a leaky window. The men reconsidered their life choices in a row and left in the reverse order of their convictions. The last one glanced back at the servers and made a note to tell someone smarter. Ace didn’t stop him. Information is a leash once you know which way you’re walking. Mai exhaled. “Got it,” she said. “What’s ‘it’?” Ace asked. “A key,” Mai said, holding up a string of noise that meant a lot to the right ears. “BARD’s internal tag for the account that gets **priority** across all rumor lanes. It routes through three ghost relays and a saint with a broken halo. But the origin? Afterlife. Rogue’s table.” Ace’s brows went up. “So Ledger was right.” “Half-right,” Mai said. “Rogue waters. She doesn’t own the battery. But she has—” Mai’s mouth twisted as she looked at the code’s posture. “—editorial privileges.” “Which means,” Ace said. “Which means she can nudge,” Mai said. “Not control. Not at scale. But she can put her finger on the scale when a story’s weighed.” “That line’s going to make her friends,” Ace said. “Rogue’s friends know that already,” Mai said. “Rogue’s enemies pretend surprise.” They packed the data like you pack a fragile mood. Mai took a small physical proof—a burned-out cache chip from the BARD cluster’s outer ring. Ledger would want a relic. The servers purred as if relieved to have confessed. Upstairs, the Murmur had changed shape without moving. The counterman lifted his chin at the sight of them. “Did you die?” “Briefly,” Ace said. “We got better.” Ledger took the chip, weighing it like a coin you bite to check its lies. She slotted it into a reader on a chain around her neck. The reader warmed. Information hummed. “You were there,” she said. Not a question. “And the engine liked you.” “It just tolerated us,” Mai said. “Which is how I like my engines.” Ledger nodded toward the stairs. “You’ll want to take that truth to the person who pretends she doesn’t curate it.” “Rogue?” Ace asked. Ledger’s smile almost showed. “She’ll call you impolite names if you say ‘editorial.’ Use ‘guidance’ if you want to keep both eyebrows.” Ace touched her own brows. “I’m attached.” They headed up and out. The market had grown a new layer of noise in the hour they’d been under it. A street preacher had acquired a megaphone and less patience. A man sold umbrellas that didn’t hide how you were losing. Kids chased a drone with a net like a myth rehearsal. Halfway to Afterlife, Night City looked at them and decided to clear its throat. Drones lifted from a roofline like a flock that had learned to hate. Not police—wrong color, wrong formation. Not corp—too sloppy. Not gang—too expensive. Their rotors cut the air into quotas. Red dots blinked against stone. Ace’s shoulder lit with a dot. Mai’s cheek took a twin. A third dot found the shard in Mai’s hand and considered it as a target with feelings. “Cover,” Ace said, already counting angles, already measuring the intervals between the drones’ corrections. V wasn’t with them. Padre was far and busy. Rogue was probably pouring a drink she didn’t intend to drink. “Null curtain?” Ace asked. “Against a sky full of eyes?” Mai shook her head. “We’ll black out half the block and buy ten seconds and a riot.” “Ten seconds is a religion,” Ace said. She didn’t get to prove it. The drones staggered mid-flight, their formation hiccuping like a song skipping on a scratched vinyl. A new voice slid into the street like a hand under a door—lazy, amused, amplified through speakers that didn’t admit to having been installed. “Don’t die,” it said, dry as good gin. “I haven’t finished reading you.” Rogue. The drones’ targeting reticules jittered, then re-painted the world with less enthusiasm. One peeled off like a embarrassed gull. Two drifted higher, as if altitude improved manners. A third came lower—too low. Ace stepped under it and grabbed the frame with a jump that would have made the Wake jealous. She twisted. The machine shrieked like a weathervane. Pieces discussed divorce in the street. Mai reached up and clipped the second with a pulse that made its flight computer think it was a toaster. It wobbled away to find a roof to reexamine its choices. The last three made a committee and decided that today was not the day. The voice clicked off with the kind of silence that means someone smiling. Neon went back to writing checks nobody could cash. Ace put the drone carcass down and looked at Mai. “Guidance,” she said, tasting the word Ledger liked. Mai wiped rain off her jaw with the back of her wrist. “Editorial,” she said, because she liked the fight in it. “Afterlife,” Ace said. They made it to the stairs without acquiring more dots. The bouncer pointed at the drone corpse Ace had over one shoulder. “No pets,” he said. “It followed us home,” Ace said. Inside, the room did the turn-and-click sequence again. Rogue had company—a woman with surgeon hands and a man with a tattoo of a map you could probably use to rob a train. Rogue flicked her gaze at the drone like it was a dead bird a cat had brought in. “You bring me trash now?” she said. “Trash tried to bring us in a bag,” Ace said. Rogue’s eyes briefly acknowledged something like approval. “You went to the Murmur,” she said, not asking. “We went under it,” Mai said, and slid the burnt cache chip onto the table. “BARD fork. Distribution node. Your route has **priority** tags.” Rogue took her time looking at the chip, then at Mai. “Careful,” she said lightly. “You’re about to tell me something about myself. People charge for that.” “You nudge,” Mai said. “You don’t own. Someone else has the battery. Corporate lineage. Older than the room’s paint.” Rogue’s mouth ticked. “If I said no, would you believe me?” “No,” Ace said. “Good,” Rogue said. “Because I’m not going to lie to you. Much.” She nudged the chip back with a fingertip. “I water. I prune. I cut when a rumor gets infected. I don’t plant. Planting is for people who think they can manage a forest.” “And the battery?” Mai asked. Rogue’s gaze drifted to a point above their heads where money lives. “If I told you who signs the maintenance checks, you’d go do something noble and embarrass me. So instead I’ll tell you what matters: the battery won’t like what you did to its wires. It will send something that decides it’s smarter than you.” “We like teaching,” Ace said. Rogue’s laugh was a single note. “So teach. But do it fast. The city doesn’t keep questions open long.” She leaned in without moving forward, a trick only certain kinds of people have. “You want my unfriendly advice?” “Always,” Ace said. “Keep Rogue as your fixer,” Rogue said. “Dump Rogue as your editor.” Ace stared at her for half a beat, then smiled. “We write our own paragraphs.” “Good,” Rogue said. “Because the battery’s editor is an algorithm that never learned how to end a sentence.” V ghosted up behind them, late by a minute and early by survival. “You two just made friends,” they said. “Which kind?” Ace asked. “The kind that write your name in red or gold,” V said. “Sometimes both.” Padre’s message found them one more time: > **A child brought a drawing to the clinic. Two lines and a curve. It looked like you.** > **He says the rain was less mean today.** > Don’t break that. Ace folded the shard and the soft line of Padre’s text into the pocket where she kept her bad habits. She looked at Mai. Mai looked back with the settled gaze of someone who had decided what to carry. “Okay,” Ace said. “Let’s go teach a battery about endings.” “Let’s,” Mai said. They turned toward the door that had once been a wall. The room watched like a jury that enjoys its job. Outside, the city rehearsed the part where it pretends it has new rules. Above the avenue, a billboard glitched once—just once—with a thin, stubborn ring of violet around its edge, like a voice clearing its throat before saying **no**.