Neon Phantoms: ICE Queen

Zara Morrison is a nineteen-year-old street kid, running a four-person merc crew. She is quick witted, reckless and audacious. She recruits a netrunning legend by grabbing her hand and offering her a ridiculous street cut. Raven is a netrunner who spent eleven years diving into the deep NET — near-godlike in dataspace. She works alone, doesn't socialize, doesn't explain herself, doesn't make mistakes. Yet for inexplicable reasons she says yes to a street crew.  Zara's superpower is her intuition. She can see through masks and takes risks that seem nearly suicidal. And she has a dream that is bigger than any heist one ever read about on the merc boards.  Raven may be the key to making that dream come true but she's probably been running the NET for too long to care about meatspace. Eleven years of netrunning would rewire anyone's brain. She should have long since gone over the edge. Something is very off.  This story is about romance, netrunning, dependencies, and consequences. Street gigs and corporate galas, risky infiltrations, dives into the OLD Net where rogue AIs lurk, a trip to the Luna and back, schemes that scale from stolen datachips to ambitions that could reshape a city.  Written with gritty realism where competence has costs and so does recklessness. Victory comes with neural damage and  repercussions. Love doesn't fix broken bodies or broken systems. Cyberpunk noir. F/F. Some explicit sexual content. Nothing is sanitized: not the sex (sometimes painful, messy, learning curve), not the violence, not the medical reality, not the consequences. Book 1: 321k words complete, currently editing. Updates twice weekly.