Claire Russell

Claire Russell tends bar at the Afterlife, the Watson club where Night City’s mercs come to drink and find work. Regulars know she remembers every order, and she keeps up the bar’s custom of naming cocktails after local legends, based on what they actually drank and only once they are dead. Claire used to be a Militech engineer before quitting to open her own garage in Arroyo, Santo Domingo. Her database entry notes that she is a trans woman who has never installed a single piece of cyberware.

V gets to know her properly in The Beast in Me, a side job that opens after Double Life. Claire competes in illegal street races run in pairs, with a driver and a gunner. She is a gearhead and a shooter rather than a driver, and her previous partner was killed in a race the year before, so she asks V to take the wheel. Across four races in the city and the Badlands, some of them in her truck, the Beast, V learns about Dean, the husband who stood by her through her transition and with whom she used to race.

Outside the game, Claire appears in the anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and has a cameo in issue 4 of the Cyberpunk 2077: Blackout comic.