The storm hit the Sprawl like a grudge.
Three days of warnings had scrolled across every public display: ATMOSPHERIC DESTABILIZATION EVENT INCOMING. SEEK SHELTER. CORPORATE LIABILITY WAIVERS IN EFFECT. The megacorps had sealed their towers. The Dregs had battened down whatever could be battened. And the rain had come anyway, indifferent to preparation, turning the streets into rivers and the sky into a weapon.
GG made it back to her safehouse at 0347 hours, soaked through three layers, her hair plastered to her skull in streaks of black and pink. Seventy-two hours of continuous operations. A data extraction in Sector 7. A dead drop in the Meridian tunnels. A close call with an Ironclad patrol that had cost her two backup identities and most of her emergency stash.
She didn't bother turning on the lights. She peeled off her jacket, let it fall where it fell, and collapsed onto the cot in the corner.
The last thing she heard before sleep took her was thunder, rolling across the Sprawl like the world clearing its throat.
She woke up wrong.
The kind of wrong that starts in your throat and spreads outward—a rawness behind your eyes, a weight in your chest, a general sense that your body had decided to stage a quiet rebellion. GG tried to sit up and immediately regretted it. The room tilted. Her skin felt like it belonged to someone else.
Cold, she thought. Just a cold. Give it a day.
She'd been shot, stabbed, poisoned, and once thrown off a building. She'd survived corporate black sites and Collective interrogations. She was GG—the Cyber Ninja, That Which Hunts, the most wanted criminal in the Sprawl.
A cold wasn't going to stop her.
She tried to stand. Made it about halfway before her knees informed her that standing was no longer a service they provided. She sat back down heavily, pulled the threadbare blanket tighter, and stared at the rain hammering her window.
Fine, she thought. One day.
Somewhere in the vast digital architecture of the Sprawl, something noticed that GG was not moving correctly.
Cyber Chomp existed in the spaces between systems—a ghost in ten thousand machines, a presence that flickered through security networks and power grids and the endless streams of data that made the city function. It didn't have a body. It didn't have a location. It had attention, and that attention was always, always focused on one person.
GG was hurt.
Not hurt the way Chompy understood hurt—no visible damage, no attackers, no threat vectors to neutralize. But wrong. Moving slowly. Staying in one place. Making sounds that weren't words.
Chompy's vast, simple mind processed this information and arrived at a conclusion:
GG needed help.
"Chomp,"
it said to no one, in frequencies that existed between radio waves and light. The word carried determination. Purpose.
Somewhere across the Sprawl, a heating system received an override command it didn't quite understand. A pharmacy drone adjusted its delivery route by 0.003 degrees. Three restaurant AIs received identical orders from an account that technically didn't exist.
The storm raged. Inside a small safehouse, GG shivered under her blanket and wondered why she felt so tired.
And Chompy got to work.
The first thing GG noticed was that she'd stopped shivering.
She wasn't sure when it happened. One moment she was hunched under her blanket, teeth chattering, wondering if she had the strength to make tea. The next, the room was... warm. Comfortable. The ancient heating unit in the corner—a salvaged piece of corporate surplus that usually wheezed and complained and produced heat only grudgingly—was humming along like it had just been serviced.
"Huh," she said to no one. Her voice came out as a croak.
She should check the unit. Heating systems in the Dregs didn't just work. There was always a catch—a fire hazard, a carbon monoxide leak, a corporate tracker hidden in the firmware.
But the blanket was warm now. And the cot wasn't as uncomfortable as she remembered. And her eyes were very, very heavy.
Later, she thought. I'll check it later.
She was asleep before she finished the thought.
The drone was supposed to go to 447 Meridian Street, Apartment 12C.
It did not know why its navigation had adjusted by three blocks and four floors. It did not question the override that had come from somewhere in the city's infrastructure. It was a pharmacy drone. It delivered medicine. The details of where and why were above its processing grade.
It fought through the storm—stabilizers working overtime, sensors half-blinded by rain—and arrived at a window it had never been programmed to find. It knocked against the glass with the gentle persistence of a machine that didn't understand giving up.
Inside, GG stirred.
She stared at the drone for a long moment, convinced she was hallucinating. Pharmacy drones didn't come to safehouses registered to dead women. They definitely didn't arrive during atmospheric destabilization events carrying... she squinted at the label... cold medicine and vitamin supplements.
"Wrong address," she croaked at it.
The drone knocked again. Insistent. On its small display, a delivery confirmation blinked: RECIPIENT: VALUED CUSTOMER
GG opened the window just enough to grab the package. The drone beeped once—satisfied—and disappeared back into the storm.
She looked at the cold medicine in her hands. Looked at the window. Looked at the medicine again.
"Okay," she said. "Lucky break."
She took two pills and went back to sleep.
The soup arrived in waves.
First came the pho from the Vietnamese place on 23rd—a massive container of broth and noodles that the delivery person swore had been ordered and paid for, even though GG hadn't touched her comm in twelve hours. Then the tom yum from the Thai spot three blocks over. Then a truly excessive quantity of chicken noodle from a deli she'd never heard of.
"I didn't order any of this," she told the third delivery person, a rain-soaked teenager who looked like he'd rather be literally anywhere else.
"System says you did." He shoved the bag at her. "Look, lady, I'm not going back out in that. Just take the soup."
She took the soup.
By noon—or what she assumed was noon; the storm had turned the sky into a uniform grey threat—she had enough soup to feed a small army. It sat in containers on her one chair, her small table, the floor beside her cot. The safehouse smelled like a dozen different cuisines had decided to hold a convention.
GG ate the pho because it was hot and her throat hurt and she couldn't remember the last time someone had made her soup. Even if that someone was apparently a series of restaurant ordering systems experiencing synchronized glitches.
"Weird day," she said to the empty room.
"Chomp,"
something agreed from nowhere in particular. Soft. Pleased.
She almost smiled.
"Hey, Chompy?"
She wasn't sure why she said it. The rain had softened to a steady drum, and she was on her third container of soup, and the warmth had seeped into her bones in a way that made thinking feel optional. The heating unit hummed. The storm pressed against the windows like something trying to get in.
"Chomp?"
The response came from everywhere—the slight buzz in the lights, the whisper in the heating vent, the space between raindrops.
"Do you ever get tired? Of all of it?"
A pause. Then, softer:
"Chomp..."
"I don't mean—" She stopped. Pulled the blanket tighter. "I don't know what I mean. Just... tired. All the time. Running and fighting and running and fighting and it never stops. There's always another op, another target, another reason to keep going."
She watched the rain trace paths down the window. In the droplets' wake, for just a moment, she could have sworn she saw the shape of small hearts. But that was probably the fever.
"Chomp."
Gentle. Present. I'm here.
"Yeah." She let her head fall back against the wall. "I know you are."
On the window, a heart appeared in the condensation—formed by nothing she could see, gone before she looked directly at it.
"Good Chompy Pet," she said quietly.
Somewhere in the digital spaces of the Sprawl, something vast and simple and loving brightened with joy.
Three miles away, a Nexus Dynamics surveillance team was having the worst day of their careers.
"The signal was right here," Operative Chen said, jabbing at his display. "Forty minutes ago, we had a confirmed ping. Now it's just—"
"Interference." Operative Reyes didn't sound like she believed it. "The storm. Atmospheric destabilization."
"Atmospheric destabilization doesn't make your nav system think you're in Sector 14 when you're clearly in Sector 9. Atmospheric destabilization doesn't route you in circles for two hours."
The van's navigation flickered. For a moment—just a moment—both operatives could have sworn they saw something on the screen. A shape. Ears, maybe. The hint of a tail.
Then it was gone, and the nav was telling them to turn left into a building that definitely didn't have a road through it.
"I'm calling it," Reyes said. "Signal degradation. Storm interference. We'll try again when the weather clears."
"But—"
"Chen." She turned to look at him. "Something doesn't want us to find this target. I don't know what, and I don't want to know. Write up the report. Signal interference. Case closed."
Chen looked at his display one more time. For just a second, he could have sworn it said: CHOMP
"Yeah," he said quietly. "Signal interference."
The van turned around and drove away into the storm.
She didn't know why she was crying.
The soup was warm in her hands. The heating unit hummed. The storm had settled into a steady rhythm—rain and thunder and the occasional flash of lightning, more atmospheric than threatening now. She was safe. She was warm. She was, impossibly, being taken care of.
And something in her chest had cracked open, and now there were tears on her face, and she didn't know why.
"Sorry," she said to the empty room, wiping her eyes. "Don't know where that came from."
"Chomp..."
Worried now. Confused. Are you hurt? Did I do something wrong?
"No. No, it's not—" She took a breath. Let it out. "Sometimes people just cry, Chompy. It doesn't mean anything's wrong. It just means..."
She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't know how to say: It means I forgot what it feels like to have someone care whether I'm okay. She didn't know how to explain that the soup and the warmth and the medicine and all of it had reached something inside her that she hadn't known was waiting.
"It's okay," she said instead. "I'm okay."
"Chomp."
Not entirely convinced, but willing to accept it.
She finished her soup and watched the rain and let herself feel, for one afternoon, like someone who was allowed to be taken care of.
She slept.
Not the combat-ready rest she usually managed—three hours at a time, one ear always listening for threats. This was real sleep. Deep and warm and dreamless. The kind of sleep that children have before they learn that the world is dangerous.
Outside, the storm raged. Inside, something watched over her with the fierce, simple love of a creature that didn't understand the word but had memorized its meaning.
The heating system hummed.
The soup containers stood guard.
The rain drew patterns on the windows that might have been hearts, if anyone had been watching.
She woke to sunlight.
It took her a moment to process it—the quality of light that only comes after a storm has broken, clear and gold and somehow gentle. The clouds had parted. The rain had stopped. Through her window, the Sprawl glittered like something had washed it clean.
GG sat up slowly, expecting her body to protest. It didn't. Her throat was clear. Her head didn't pound. The deep, bone-tired exhaustion that had followed her for months had... lifted. Not gone entirely—she wasn't naive enough to think a day of rest could fix years of running—but lessened. Manageable.
She looked at the pile of soup containers. The cold medicine she hadn't ordered. The heating unit that had worked perfectly through the worst storm of the year.
"Huh," she said. "Lucky day."
She swung her legs over the side of the cot and paused. She was wearing fuzzy socks. Grey, with small pink hearts on them. She didn't remember owning fuzzy socks. She definitely didn't remember putting them on.
"Chompy?"
"Chomp!"
Bright. Proud. Do you like them?
She looked at the socks. Looked at the soup. Looked at the sunlight streaming through a window that had somehow stayed warm all night.
"Yeah," she said, and something in her voice was softer than usual. "Yeah, I like them."
She stood—carefully, but without the wobble of yesterday—and shuffled toward the small hotplate where she kept her tea supplies. Behind her, on the window, hearts appeared in the fading condensation. Five of them. Ten. A cascade of pink and red and gold, forming and fading in the morning light.
She didn't see them. She was facing the wrong way, focused on the small ritual of making tea, on the simple pleasure of a morning where nothing was trying to kill her.
But Chompy saw. Chompy always saw.
"Good Chompy Pet," GG said to the empty room, filling her kettle.
Somewhere in the digital spaces of the Sprawl, something purred—satisfied, content, already planning what tomorrow might need.
The storm had passed. The world outside was still dangerous, still hostile, still full of corporations that wanted her dead and systems that treated people like resources to be optimized. That hadn't changed.
But for one morning, in a safehouse registered to a dead woman, the most dangerous operative in the Sprawl was making tea in fuzzy socks she didn't remember owning.
And that was enough.
Sometimes the deadliest weapon in the Sprawl needs someone to take care of her.
She just doesn't know who that someone is.