Cyberpunk: Edgerunners never gave Kiwi's betrayal a motive — her death only makes sense if you go back to Maine

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners premiered on Netflix on September 13, 2022: ten episodes from Studio Trigger and CD Projekt Red, directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi from a story by Bartosz Sztybor, Jan Bartkowicz and Łukasz Ludkowski. Street kid David Martinez joins Maine's crew of mercenaries in Night City. Kiwi is the crew's netrunner, the masked hacker who mentors Lucy, voiced by Takako Honda in Japanese and Stephanie Wong in English. Edgerunners 2, a standalone story with a new cast, premiered on October 20, 2026, so the first season's open questions are still open.

What the show gives you

Kiwi's one rule is the advice she gives Lucy: "never trust a soul in Night City." In episode 8, she breaks it from the other side. She sides with Faraday, the fixer now working for Arasaka, and helps him trap Lucy in a warehouse. No scene ever explains why, and the writers have never said.

The motive is in the show, though. It's just in episode 6.

Go back to Maine

Episode 6 is Maine's last job: abducting Arasaka executive Tanaka and breaking into his head. Kiwi jacks in to hack Tanaka's cyberware, and in the middle of the dive, Maine's cyberpsychosis kicks in. He loses control and injures her. Lucy takes over the dive. Tanaka dies, the alarms go off, Maine kills Dorio by accident, and then blows himself up so David can escape.

Kiwi had already watched one crew leader lose his mind, and she was the one he hurt.

That night leaves Kiwi with three problems, and Faraday's offer solves every one of them.

• Arasaka. Kiwi was on the crew that kidnapped an Arasaka executive and got him killed. Faraday tells her she's been pardoned for her part in Tanaka's death, and offers her a corporate job and a payout on top.
• David. By episode 8, David leads the crew, wears Maine's arms, runs a Sandevistan and has just killed an innocent lab worker. Kiwi has seen this exact slide before, from inside the dive.
• Lucy. Episode 9 reveals that Lucy killed Tanaka herself, to stop Arasaka from making David a test subject for its cyberskeleton. Tanaka's death set off the chain that killed Maine and Dorio, and Faraday pins those deaths on Lucy's scheme. Kiwi agrees with him, and pulls the missing data and Lucy's past straight out of her memories.

Read that way, Kiwi isn't selling out Maine's crew. Maine's crew died in episode 6. She's getting off the ship before the next captain sinks it.

Why her death closes the loop

The deal that's supposed to save her is the thing that kills her. Arasaka wants nobody except Faraday walking around knowing about the cyberskeleton, and Kiwi knows. In episode 10, she has second thoughts, agrees to one last meeting to collect her money and leave town, and Faraday shoots her.

She gets away, bleeding, into an alley, and calls Falco with the coordinates of Faraday's aerodyne and Lucy.

"I taught Lucy to trust nobody in this city, it's about time Faraday learns this important lesson," Kiwi tells the crew.

Faraday's hired guns find her and finish the job. She takes one of them with her, hacking his head until it blows. The tip she sent is what puts David on the road to Arasaka Tower.

Don't miss: David's death in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners — is he really gone, or could he have survived?

The backstory the show leaves out

The anime only hints at where Kiwi's rule came from. The Cyberpunk Red tabletop supplement Edgerunners Mission Kit fills it in. She was sold to a corporate factory as a toddler, because small hands were useful for implant work. When she refused to marry the foreman, she was sold to a brothel. A client tore away part of her jaw, which is where the mask comes from. She taught herself netrunning and burned the brothel and the factory down with their owners inside.

Maine is also the character Sztybor put the most of himself into. "Maine, because he's me," Sztybor told Anime Corner. Kiwi had a fan at the top too. Asked in his Reddit AMA to name his favorite character, Imaishi answered in one word: "Kiwi."

For the record: when Cyberpunk 2077's 2.0 update in 2023 added niches for the Edgerunners crew to the game's columbarium, Lucy's inscription for Maine, Dorio and Pilar read "You were the only family I ever had." Her inscription for Kiwi reads "You taught me to never trust anyone in NC."

Previously we wrote: Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku: restart death list — all 13 in the order they go, and the three who walk out