The bag over Glitch’s head trapped her breath against her face, and made strands of hair to her sweaty forehead. The bag was more than the absence of sight; it made her feel like she was on the verge of colliding with a wall at any moment or falling down a flight of stairs. Time stretched under the pressure of fear, and she had no idea how far they dragged her through the tunnels, only that they didn’t return to the Night Market.

It was almost a relief when heavy hands - one of them chrome - forced her to her knees. They released her, but when Glitch sat back on her heels, she brushed up against someone’s leg. Glitch strained her ears. She heard people moving around, talking in Korean, with occasional phrases of English mixed in. The few she caught made no sense, references to people or places she didn’t have context for.

A shoe nudged her knee, none too gently. Glitch recoiled and came up against her warden’s leg again.

“Not so tough when you can’t call your corp to bail you out, are you?” a voice scoffed. It sounded like the wolf-helmet guy again.

Glitch’s head whipped around towards his voice. “What corp? Who the fuck do you think I am?” she asked, but the question was drowned out by the thunder of arriving motorcycles. The roar of their engines echoed off the walls and into her bones. When it died, she heard the crunch of feet dismounting onto gravel.

“Hey, Tony!” Wolf-helmet hailed the new arrivals. “I got you something!”

“Yeah? You bring me back something nice from the Night Market?” a voice with a marked Korean accent replied.

Her captor tore the hood off. Glitch blinked and squinted in the sudden brightness of motorcycle headlights parked in a semi-circle around her. She twisted around to get her bearings. Wolf-helmet was to her left, standing with the hood held high and the other hand gesturing dramatically to her face. Bear-helmet with the cyberarm was directly behind her, and Lion-helmet flanked her right side. All of them were looking at the Warelord - presumably Tony - standing directly in front of where she knelt. There were at least a dozen other Warelords present. They hadn’t all arrived on bikes; some of them were drifting around the outskirts of the circle on hoverboards, or had them tucked under their arms.

Tony cleared his throat gently. Glitch realized it had gotten very, very quiet in the tunnel. She looked up at him. Tony crouched down slowly until his head level with hers, giving her a good look at his helmet. Glitch stared. Instead of some snarling animal, he had a crudely drawn smiley-face painted across his visor. Glitch’s mouth went dry and she was seized by the bizarre idea that maybe if she didn’t move or breathe, he wouldn’t see her. Tony studied her for a long moment, then tipped his head back to look at her kidnappers.

“I told you to send someone back when you found her,” he said mildly.

Lion-helmet went utterly still and Wolf-helmet shifted uncomfortably, his shoes making loud crunching sounds on the gravel.

“I thou- we thought it would be faster just to bring her back,” he said.

Glitch tore her gaze away from the smiley face to look up as well. Wolf-helmet rocked his weight back on his heels, and his head turned to the side a little, tucking to protect his neck. Tony wagged his head from side to side and straightened in the same, slow, deliberate fashion. He tapped the side of his helmet and the whole thing unfolded and collapsed into the high collar of his jacket. Tony still seemed to have all his biological limbs, but when he grinned down at her, Glitch saw the entire top row of his teeth was encased in chrome.

“That’s not Nebula,” he said.

Wolf-helmet and lion-helmet both recoiled a half-step from her as though Glitch had just sprouted spikes. Bear-helmet, for his part, stoically held his ground directly behind her, still cutting off escape.

“You said she was latina with a jack!” Wolf-helmet kept backing up toward the rear of the tunnel, as though putting more distance between himself and Glitch would lessen his connection to the situation.

“Looks like there’s more than one.” The silver smile flashed in a grin . “That’s really unlucky for you, ” he said, advancing toward wolf-helmet. “Guess we’re all gonna learn hard lessons today. Like how much I hate being disappointed when someone gets my hopes up.”

Glitch’s head half-turned to keep an eye on Tony’s position. He looked down at her, shook his head and sighed. His hand reached down to sweep aside the hair on the back of her neck. “It’s not even a driving jack. It’s-”

Fear morphed into outrage in the space of a heartbeat. Glitch lurched at Tony, throwing a shoulder into his knees.

“Don’t fucking-” Glitch got out before bear-helmet seized her by the back of the hoodie and shoved her face into the gravel. A heavy boot connected with her side. Glitch curled up, willing herself not to pass out.

“Easy, Gom,” Tony called off bear-helmet before he warmed up to the beating. He was laughing. “And fix her hands, yeah? We’re having such poor manners for our guest.”

A chrome hand closed around her biological ones, and for one horrible second, Glitch thought Gom was going to crush her fingers right there and then. She felt sharp pressure against her wrists and then the zip ties broke and fell away. Gom’s boots settled back patiently to wait again. Glitch unwound herself slowly. A hand dipped into her line of vision, offering her help up.

“Bad luck, meeting like this,” Tony said cheerfully. “What’s your name, lady?”

Glitch considered the hand. The smart thing to do right now would be to play nice and try and get on his good side. Screw that. Glitch ignored the proffered help and got up on her own. Her chin rose.

“I’m Glitch,” she told him.

Tony’s head cocked to one side and his silver grin broadened.

“I was going to say a girl like you shouldn’t go wandering the Night Market alone,” he said as he looked her up and down, his eyes flicking towards the back of her head and lingering on her hoodie. “There’s all kinds of crazies out there…”

Glitch felt the pressure of eyes watching her from all sides. She folded her arms to brace herself against them and set her jaw stubbornly.

“...But now I’m thinking you’re one of them,” Tony finished. “You a Runner, Glitch?”

Glitch eyed him warily. “What’s it to you?”

“You see I have got myself a little situation here,” Tony said. He began to pace in the empty space between her and the rest of his gang, like an actor on a stage about to deliver a soliloquy. “There’s this lady that borrowed something from my boss, Agma, and he needs it back now. But my lady friend, she’s very busy and she has all these big brothers at her corp she can call if she doesn’t feel like taking visitors, so it’s very hard to get an appointment with her. But today,” he stopped his pacing and turned to face Glitch again. “Today she is visiting the Night Market where her big brothers do not dare to go. I or my friends,” he gestured broadly to the surrounding Warelords, “We could meet with her now, except that she is very shy.” The silver teeth flashed. “You smile at her, and she disappears. But you,” he returned to studying Glitch, “are not the smiling sort.”

Tony paused for a moment to let Glitch make the inference.

“So you want me to make the introduction,” Glitch concluded with a slight nod.

He held out both hands in front of him, palms up. “We could throw some cred your way.”

Glitch snorted and reached to pull up her hood again. “You know what the going rate on Runners is? You couldn’t afford me, Tony.” She paused, and then left the hood where it was. “On the other hand...”

She looked at the Warelords with fresh eyes. Only a few of the hoverboarders wore the leather-gi getups like the motorcyclists did and she couldn't decide if it was a status thing, or the hoverboarders just didn’t care if they wiped out as much as the bikers did. They all had animal markings of some sort though - the hoverboarders without helmets wore them painted on headbands, or strips of leather tied to their arms. They favored smaller species - a rat, a monkey, a ferret, and so on. One of them sporting a rabbit headband even had small, silver implants on the side of his head.

Interesting.

With that strong of an animal motif, she was betting they had fixation on territory. Plus, if this gang was outfitting even a few members with cyberware, they were confident they could protect that investment from rivals. Glitch looked back at Tony. He was watching her with matched interest.

“There is something I need,” she said. She gestured to the graffiti on the walls all around them. “These Warelord tunnels?”

Tony’s laugh echoed down the tunnels. A few of the other Warelords looked at each other with nervous smiles. Whatever Tony found funny about the question made the rest of them anxious.

“No, we are on something of an expedition,” he told her. “This is deep Red Boys territory. But they don’t mind so much, as long as we keep moving.”

“I need safe passage to the Lanterntown District, as close to Feng street as possible,” Glitch said, naming a street in the neighborhood next door to hers. “I find this woman for you, you drop me off there. That’s my offer.”

Tony contemplated the proposal for a moment and then looked over his shoulder at the rabbit-hoverboarder. The Warelord didn’t look more than sixteen, maybe younger.

“Hey, Tokki,” he started, “can you…” but the kid was already drifting back and forth on his board with his eyes closed. LEDs in the implants flickered blue and green. He had Takeo King decals spray-painted on his board. Glitch felt an absurd connection to him, like a lost traveler catching sight of a familiar landmark. She curbed the impulse. He probably didn’t even play FightStreet12, just wanted the rabbit image.

“It’s out near the Grays,” Tokki reported after a moment. He opened his eyes. “We can get there okay through The Peace territory.”

Tony nodded. “Scout around upstairs and make sure our girl doesn’t slip out without saying hi, yeah?”

Tokki gave him a two-fingered salute. In his other hand, he wore a glove permanently fitted around what looked like a tall joystick with several glowing buttons running up and down its length. It connected to what Glitch had mistaken for a backpack, but she now recognized as a compact drone. Tokki flicked one of the switches and the drone sprang to life, humming through the air. It pulled taut a cable that ran between itself and the harness strapped to Tokki’s torso. The whole ensemble whizzed off down the tunnel into the darkness, towing Tokki along with it.

Tony extended his hand to Glitch again, and this time, she took it.

“It’s a deal,” Tony said as they shook on it.

Tony started giving out orders in Korean and the Warelords got busy moving out. Glitch considered the logistics of what she was about to do.

“Who am I looking for?” she asked.

“She’s a little taller than you,” Tony supplied. “Latina. Last time I saw her she had white hair. Driver’s jack in the back of her head. Also she swears a lot at you in Spanish when you did nothing wrong.”

“I can find her for you,” Glitch told Tony, “but Night Market’s neutral territory. You’re on your own after I locate her.”

“I know the rules, lady,” Tony flapped a hand at her. He hooked a thumb at Gom.

“You already met Gom,” he said. “He can see you back to the Night Market and make sure you don’t make any more new friends today. Apologies for not walking you over myself, but I have some house business.”

Glitch looked up at Gom. His helmet was gone, collapsed into his collar like Tony’s. He had scars running down the side of his face and neck, like he’d been attacked by an actual bear at one point. The two of them studied each other in silence as bikes roared to life around them. Gom finally inclined his head to her, and then gestured back towards the tunnel they had come from with his biological arm. Glitch mirrored the nod and hoped her misgivings didn’t show on her face. Gom set off, and she followed at his heels, back toward the Night Market.