The foot traffic was normal for this time of day, which is to say there was a steady stream of pedestrians on the catwalk. Hally weaved between them as they made their slow motion way with the herd. She was already almost a hundred meters from the stairs when the Sandy cut off. The world rubber-band snapped back into place, and Hally stumbled with an undignified yelp of surprise, trying not to topple forward. 

It’s a testament to the temperament of NC citizenry that only a few passersby reacted to the sudden apparition of a bloody school girl with more than a moderate increase of walking pace. While her fellow man debated over whether or not she was “their problem,” Hally was trying to control a rampant twitch in her left forearm. She had the presence of mind to keep walking, and join the flow of traffic as she examined her arm. The baton almost slipped from her twitching grip, and she realized that there was blood on her hand. Her own blood, it had flowed down her arm from her shoulder, where the blade had cut her. With a mental command, Hally brought up a heads-up-display for her biomon onto her optics, and noted that her pain editor was doing a lot of work. All of the work, actually. 

Her fingers fumbled the switch on her baton, and she had to cradle the Tyger Claw’s stolen club in her elbow so that she could work the catch with her right hand, collapse the baton, and put it back in her pocket.  From a different pocket, she pulled out a slim pocket medkit and selected a compact airhypo. She pulled back her uniform jacket and shirt(a cumbersome task with the club still in her arms) and jabbed herself somewhere she guessed was near the wound. It was not lost on her that the task would have been easier if she had let herself feel the pain. Instead of doing that, she finally relented and looked over her shoulder, trying to peer past fellow pedestrians to see what was happening down on the street. The Tyger kids were nowhere to be seen, and she almost missed Papa Tyger, as he got into the passenger seat of a Mizutani Shion(she thought it might be the same model she owned). The car drove off, and Hally wondered if she had at least scared them off for the day. 

She almost laughed as she turned to keep walking. The bleeding had at least stopped for now, and she would see a ripperdoc soon, but in the meantime she pulled a bandage from the same medpack and slapped it a little haphazardly over the wound. The techfabric of the bandage automatically formed a seal, and applied antiseptics to the wound. She had felt a little silly when she’d packed all her gear for this job. It had been a thoughtful mental list of things she thought she might need, and she had wondered all the while if Morgan Blackhand ever did anything that gonk. But her gear was right. She’d had what she needed, and had even acquired a weapon by disarming a mark in the field. The mark had been a child, and the weapon was, now she looked at it, a cheap thing of heavy 3D printed resin. But she hadn’t done too bad, really. And if the Tyger Claws really were leaving for the day, she’d even actually [i]accomplished[/i] something. The kids were safe for a day, and a message had been sent that they weren’t unprotected.

But there was something else. Hally thought back to what they had wanted. They would surely have taken any money a student had, but that wasn’t what they’d actually asked for first. They had been after data. When she had been a student of the original Arasaka Academy, her father had warned her about schemes like this. Targeting the children of wealthy or influential people, collecting any and all raw data they can, picking through it to learn net architecture and encryption types, and try to find vulnerabilities to exploit. Except, of course, the kids going to the new and improved AAcademy didn’t have rich or influential parents to gain access to via netrunning shenanigans. So what was the game? And what was her next step? The solo would call their fixer, right? She opened her a message window in her optics display, and subvocalized a message to Ken. 

“Mister Ikari, I have an update for you.”