Into Motion

Slurp. The spaghetti bolognese clings to Go-Go's lips as she sucks it down like she's stripping meat from a crab leg, staining her pink mouth tomato-red. Goro's teasing stare softens into something dangerously close to affection when she glares back. "The hell you lookin' at?! Lemme eat gulp in peace, 'kay?" Flecks of noodle and ground beef escape her defensive snarl.

"Nothin', nothin'. Just… you got a little—" Now he pulls off this move from a famous TakTok´s flirting guru. Goro pulls back the napkin—now smeared with sauce from wiping her lips—and locks eyes with her, his grin all teeth.It's the kind of move that'd get a lesser man slapped: equal parts playground tease and back-alley charm, toeing the line between "I dare you" and "try me." He winks. 10/10. A true player. Pressure? What pressure?. But whether it's pretty privilege or the way his dumb jokes have carved a hole in Go-Go's armor, she blushes instead of breaking his fingers. "Just… gimme the damn napkin. I ain't a baby."

He winks again.

Go-Go chokes on her food mid-swoon, shooting him a look of pure what-the-actual-fuck. For some reason, his genius escapes her. Salvation comes via the ping of a new message—Hector.

She scans the text, spine straightening. "We got work. Again." A beat. "Gotta dig up everything on Blondie before midnight. 'Cause there's a meeting." Goro exhales hard, arranging his utensils into a perfect we're-done-here cross. A waiter materializes with the check, smelling their urgency.

"Street gossip won't cut it. I know a 24/7 café—low profile," Go-Go says, already mentally mapping the job. Fear of Hector? Maybe. But burying whatever that was between them under workaholic ruthlessness? Definitely.

Goro checks his knockoff watch. "2:20 PM. We got under four hours." He hesitates—he's a call-in-favors guy, not a data miner—but Go-Go's already typing. "Think I can pull it off… but I'll need your help."

Eyes lit up for redemption, Goro snaps a mock salute. "Aye-aye, Captain."

Go-Go stifles a laugh. Bad idea. Lately, every dumb joke of his hits like a grenade—not because he's funny, he's painfully average, but because crush logic is a hell of a drug. 

The café is a neon-lit crypt, one of those 24/7 otaku bunkers where keyboard warriors wage digital wars under the glow of manga posters peeling at the edges like dead skin. The air smells of instant ramen broth and the sour tang of unwashed hoodies, the walls vibrating with the drone of overworked cooling fans. Cubicles line the space like confession booths—each housing its own sinner: a data leech torrenting celebrity nudes, a blackmailer cropping dick pics with sacramental focus, a kid grinding Korean MMOs with bloodshot eyes.

Go-Go slaps a wad of crumpled bills on the counter. The receptionist—a girl with chipped violet nails and a vampire BL fanfic plastered to her face—slides a keycard across the laminate without looking up. Her acrylics click against the counter like cockroach legs.

Cubicle No. 6 waits at the end of a hallway lit by flickering LEDs that buzz like angry wasps. The sliding door sticks halfway, groaning as they force it open. Inside: two frayed floor cushions and a desktop computer older than Goro's arrest record, its CRT monitor glowing like a haunted TV in a J-horror flick.

To their left, a man with a fast-food sheen to his skin sorts through stolen OnlyNuts content, labeling folders with the precision of a museum curator ("Cosplay_Angels_Vol.42"). To their right, a freelance extortionist saves a cheating politician's hotel selfies to a USB drive, his grin all yellow teeth and bad intentions.

Go-Go boots up the machine, her fingers dancing across the grease-smeared keyboard. "Bulletproof setup," she says, pulling up a command prompt. "All traffic gets shredded through three VPNs and—"

Goro nods like he understands, but he's too busy studying the constellations of moles on Go-Go's face—one beneath the right corner of her lips like an ink smudge from a pen pressed too hard, another on her left cheekbone, faint as a fingerprint. Symmetrical, he thinks. Like a fucking painting.

"What've we got on Blondie?" she asks, snapping him back.

"Uh… psycho, blond, treats his sawed-off like it's his firstborn?"

It's enough. She digs up news scraps—a liquor store robbery here, a shot-up bodega there—until a pixelated CCTV still appears: Blondie mid-shooting spree, his face half-shadowed by a hood. "Now for the magic," she mutters, jamming in her thumb drive.

The program's her Frankenstein monster—50% stolen traffic-cam AI, 30% facial-recognition scrapers, 20% code she wrote between adrenaline crashes. As it chews through data, they kill time with mobile games and Goro's very short horror story:

"Got locked in a yakuza meat freezer once. Six hours hugging a severed head so I wouldn't freeze. Worst part? It talked. Said I had nice eyebrows."

Go-Go snorts so hard her soda comes out her nose. "Bullshit."

"Swear on my mama's grave. Dude had standards."

PING. The computer speakers crackle to life—the process is complete, the results barely usable. Apparently, dyeing your hair blond is trendy in some countries, so filtering by language still leaves them with a thousand accounts to manually sift through. "Remember when you said you'd help me?" Go-Go pouts, batting her eyelashes like a wronged puppy.

Goro's never spent this much time on his phone—hell, he didn't even have a Y (formerly Witter) account until today. Five hundred profiles later, Go-Go finishes her half. Goro, barely through his first 250, hands over the rest. But they don't have to wait long. "Oh… OH." He jabs at a screen name. Go-Go snatches his phone, plugs the account into her rig, and—after scrolling through two months of drug-fueled ramblings and paranoid rants—there it is. A photo of his shotgun.

The weapon is a brutal little bastard—a sawed-off so short it looks like it's missing chromosomes, the barrel hacked down to a snub nose barely longer than the grip. The stock's been replaced by a pistol handle and a vertical folding front grip, turning it into a one-handed nightmare that spits fire like a dragon with a smoking habit.

"That's… really fucking short," Goro muses. "Like, four shells max short—"

Go-Go's gasp cuts him off. She's leaning so close to the screen her nose almost touches it, eyes wide as saucers. "We—we did it!" And then, without thinking, she launches herself at Goro, arms around his neck, laughing into his shoulder. Their victory hug lasts a second too long. Then two. Then their eyes lock. Lips hover, magnets drawn by some dumb, inevitable law of the universe.

THUD. A fist pounds the cubicle wall to their left. "Shhh!" hisses the OnlyNuts pirate.

The spell breaks. They spring apart like they've been tasered, scrambling to pack up. "Got him," Go-Go texts Hector, her fingers trembling.

The trip to the bar is deafeningly silent—until Go-Go, ever the pragmatist, decides unresolved sexual tension is worse than murder charges.

"I think maybe we should—" Goro starts.

"Not. A. Word." She grabs his collar and kisses him—hard. What begins as a shut-the-hell-up peck melts into something softer, then hotter, until they're full-on making out in the subway car, all tongue and teeth and zero shame.

"This is public transit!" screeches an old man.

Go-Go flips him off without breaking the kiss. Goro, ever the people-pleaser, mumbles an apology against her lips.

The car's empty—schoolkids are long gone, no minors in sight—but they pull apart anyway, flushed and giggling like teens who just discovered necking.

Then it hits him.

Oh. Fuck.

His actual girlfriend—the one he's been officially dating for six months—is gonna skin him alive. Worse: Esen, his best friend and lieutenant of their ultra-violent crew, will peel his dick like a grape if he finds out Goro's not just banging his little sister… but cheating on her too.

Technically, he's cheating on his gf with Go-Go, not the other way around, but—semantics won't stop a knife.

Go-Go, blissfully oblivious, bites her lip. "Secret boyfriends are fun," she whispers, tracing his jaw.

Goro sweats like a bomb just started beeping in his chest.

Before stepping into the half-empty bar, they took a deep breath, smoothing out their expressions like crumpled paper. Nothing happened. Nothing at all.

"Boss," Go-Go announced, voice steady, "got what you asked for. You're gonna love it."

Hector barely glanced up, his focus locked on a notebook scribbled in a language no one recognized—Spanish. "Right now, I'm thinking ahead. Meeting's at 8. Could you… put together a presentation?" He left the words hanging, a lazy command disguised as a question.

"Could you. Like I have a choice," Goro thought. "Yeah, boss."

In the backroom, the pair hunched over Go-Go's tablet, stitching together a slideshow with floral transitions and grainy surveillance stills. Their professionalism lasted all of ten minutes. Alone in the dim glow of the screen, the silence gave way to lips and hands, their bodies gravitating like planets with no sense of orbit.

Creak.

The old wooden floorboards—loyal as a guard dog—warned them of approaching footsteps. They broke apart just as the door swung open, revealing Esen and his crew spilling inside like a pack of wolves.

Greetings were exchanged, jokes half-heartedly thrown, but the air had shifted. Goro and Go-Go moved like actors in a bad play, their "normal" so exaggerated it screamed guilt. Hours blurred with drinks and forced laughter, the tension easing only when liquid courage took the wheel.

Then Hector strode in, and the room snapped to attention.

"You first," he said, nodding at the duo.

Goro took the lead, presenting the tablet like a holy relic. "Found Blondie's Y account. Dumbass is getting his roots touched up tomorrow at a salon a few blocks from here. Place is clean—no Oriken ties. Shouldn't be more of his own guys there."

Hector's approving glance was all the praise they'd get. "T-Bone, KK—you're on snatch duty. Bring him here. Got a car lined up, maybe a little extra for you two." The chosen men grinned, their first kidnapping gig tasting like victory.

"Spiky, Ome—dump the last of the Dustfire. Flashbang stock can wait. Tonight changes everything." A chorus of nods.

Then Hector's phone buzzed, an answer. "Gengis," he called, tossing Esen a fat roll of cash. "For the car." A second, slimmer roll followed. "And the surprise. Deliver it straight to me."

Esen frowned. "Who the hell is Gengis?" His silent internet search yielded nothing.

"Any of you drive?" Ginger raised a hand, and they were off, coats swirling behind them.

Now, Hector turned to the sales team. "Our supplier's meeting me tonight. Move all five doses, and I might secure more. Don't fuck this up." He pressed the Dustfire into Ome's palm—a pittance in quantity, a mountain in risk. Then, with ceremony, he unveiled Hisori's revolver.

"You know how to use this?"

Ome nodded slowly, cradling the gun like a newborn.

The gun was a retired cop's keepsake—a snub-nosed relic with a square grip that fit the hand like a knuckle-duster. Its blued steel bore the scratches of a long career, the barrel so short it looked like it'd been bitten off. The rounds inside were old-school thick, each one a promise to punch a hole the size of a whiskey cork through anything unlucky enough to catch its aim.

Ome tested the weight. It felt like bad luck.