Chapter 7: The Tower
I had always wondered why people stayed, in places like this.
It was something that had nagged at me whenever I watched a superhero movie or read a comic, this inexplicable human stubbornness in the face of obviously uninhabitable conditions. Why did people stay in Gotham when a man dressed like a bat was the most reliable law enforcement the city had, and a clown with a gas problem could clear out an entire neighbourhood on a random Tuesday? Why did people rebuild Metropolis every time something fell out of the sky and levelled three city blocks? Why did anyone wake up, look at the place they lived, and consciously decide that this, specifically this, was worth staying for?
I had never had a satisfying answer to that.
The highway dropped me off of the elevated interchange and into streets of Santa Domingo that sat lower and wider than the ones I had seen from a distance, the architecture here functional and unadorned, the kind of buildings that had been designed by someone whose only brief was to fit as many people inside them as the structure would physically allow.
Cooling towers rose above the skyline in clusters, industrial grey against the evening, venting steam that caught the last of the light and turned briefly gold before dissolving into the smog above.
Santo Domingo wasn't what a person imagined when they thought "Night City" there was no neon or glamour but a particular bluntness of a district that had been rebuilt, demolished, and rebuilt again so many times it had stopped pretending to have an aesthetic.
From what I remembered and my VI was currently feeding me in real time, it was one of the oldest parts of Night City, old enough that it had been called Santo Domingo before Night City had fully decided what it wanted to be, old enough that it had survived the 4th Corporate War more or less intact simply by virtue of not being important enough to bomb.
That distinction had not served it especially well in the aftermath. When the war ended and the city started counting its displaced, Santo Domingo had become a provisional camp for tens of thousands of people who had nowhere else to go, a sea of temporary structures and desperate arrangements that had covered every available surface for years before the corporations moved back in, cleared everything out, and started the cycle again.
No trace of the camps remained. The corporations had seen to that.
What remained instead was what I drove into first, coming off the highway interchange at the eastern edge of the district, the approach road depositing me into Rancho Coronado before I had fully registered the transition.
Houses.
Actual houses, single storey and detached, set back from the road behind small yards that in another context, in another city, in another century, might have been considered pleasant. Red tile roofs catching the last of the afternoon light.
Porches with rocking chairs. The street layout was different from anything I had driven through since leaving the Badlands, narrower, arranged in the cul-de-sac geometry of mid-twentieth century American suburban planning, the kind of layout that assumed cars and assumed families and assumed a particular version of stability that had never quite materialized in the place it had been transplanted to.
The corporate dream for this neighbourhood had been legible and sincere, in its way. Build the factory in Arroyo, build the houses next to the factory, give the workers everything they needed inside a single self-contained zone so they never had to interact with the rest of the city at all. The brochures had probably written themselves. Tree-lined streets and backyard pools and a school within walking distance and good jobs a short drive away. The twentieth century American dream, reconstructed on the edge of a dystopian megacity next to a landfill, with all the sincerity that implied.
The funding and the will had both run out somewhere between the concept and the execution. What existed now was the half-finished version of that dream, houses that were real but smaller than advertised, infrastructure that worked but only barely, a suburb that functioned as a suburb in the same way that a photograph of a meal functioned as food.
The disrepair was there if you looked for it, a roof patched with mismatched material here, a fence leaning at an angle that suggested it had been repaired once and then given up on, a yard that had been concreted over by someone who had run out of patience with whatever had been growing in it. Garbage AVs made their runs overhead on a schedule that nobody seemed happy about, occasionally shedding debris across the rooftops below.
But people lived here. That was the thing. People genuinely, voluntarily lived here and had constructed something out of the compromised materials they had been handed. Lights were on in windows. A group of kids were doing something complicated and competitive on bicycles in a cul-de-sac, the argument about the rules audible when I stopped at a red light.
A woman was sitting on a porch that was sagging slightly on the left side, talking on an Agent, apparently unbothered by the sagging. A man in factory coveralls was walking home with his head down and his hands in his pockets, moving with the specific purposeful exhaustion of only someone working a dead end job could relate to.
The 6th Street gang provided security here because the NCPD had decided long ago that Rancho Coronado was too far out and too low priority to justify the resources. In practice this meant the neighbourhood was safer than it had any right to be, and that the residents had developed the kind of relationship with the gang that people develop with any authority they didn't choose and can't remove, a working accommodation built on mutual interest and the understanding that causing problems for each other cost more than it was worth.
Their tags were present but not aggressive here, less territorial declaration and more ambient reminder, the difference between a posted sign and a painted wall.
I drove through slowly, watching the neighbourhood settle into its evening routines, and tried to imagine living here. A small house. A porch. Neighbors who nodded at you because they recognized you rather than because they were assessing whether you were a threat. A bar nearby. A school down the road.
It is not as bad as I thought it would be...
I filed it away and kept driving, the road out of Rancho Coronado dropped back into something that felt substantially more industrial. Arroyo was a different beast all together, the houses giving way to larger structures, the residential density thinning and then disappearing entirely as the industrial logic of the district reasserted itself around me.
A fully automated factory sat behind razor wire to my left, its lights running cold and blue in the growing dark, the hum of its operations audible even through the car's insulation. Directly across the road from it, close enough that you could theoretically throw something from one property to the other, was a building that had clearly been in the process of being constructed for some time and showed no particular signs of ever being finished.
Exposed rebar jutted from the upper floors like broken teeth. The ground floor had been colonized by the 6th Street gang, their tags bright and deliberate across the concrete, territorial flags planted in soil that the corporations had temporarily abandoned. I could spot some of them through the gaps in the hoarding as I drove past, draped across dilapidated couches arranged around burning oil drum fires, beers in hand and rifles across their laps.
A couple of them tracked the car as I passed, not with hostility exactly, more the reflexive attention of people who had learned to log everything that moved through their space and decide later whether it mattered. I kept my speed steady and my eyes forward.
It was honestly a bit disconcerting, how many people just walked around openly armed out here. I knew it intellectually, my recollections of the game and the cultural database had made that much clear enough, but knowing a thing and seeing it were different in a way that the software hadn't fully accounted for. Back home the sight of a rifle in civilian hands in the middle of a residential area would have had half the street calling emergency services. Here it was furniture, a background detail. As unremarkable as the oil drums they were sitting around, which said something about the city that I was still in the process of deciding how to feel about.
Not that I have much room to talk, I'm basically a fucking Nuclear bomb.
That was Arroyo's rhythm. Something new going up next to something abandoned next to something that had been neither built nor demolished but suspended in permanent in-between, the corporate equivalent of a half-eaten meal left on the table. The road I was on ran between a logistics center whose loading bays were still active, trucks moving in and out with mechanical regularity, and a stretch of derelict warehouses that 6th Street had made their own, their vehicles parked outside with the casual confidence of people who had decided that unused property was available property.
An industrial lot came into view on my right as I made a turn, vast and sprawling, its compressed and discarded containers catching the evening light in dull metallic gleams. Somewhere beyond it the old power plant rose against the sky, its chimneys trailing thin smoke, the Petrochem-Betterlife logos illuminated and persistent in a way I was coming to learn that corporate branding always was in this city, present long after everything around them had been stripped away.
The streets themselves were in the condition that streets reach when they are used heavily by people who have no reason to maintain them. Cracked and patched and cracked again, wide enough for the industrial traffic that still moved through them in the early hours, flanked by the accumulated improvisation of decades, power conduits bolted to building facades, ventilation housings welded onto structures never designed to accommodate them, each addition solving an immediate problem with no reference to any larger plan.
The 6th Street presence out here was different from what it had been in Rancho Coronado. Less ambient, more structural. They held the abandoned factories and the heavy equipment yards, the spaces that the corporations had vacated and not yet reclaimed, and they held them the way people hold things they have decided belong to them, with the settled confidence of prior claim.
The active corporate sites, the Arasaka factory deeper in the district, the Petrochem operations around the power plant, ran their own private security in a state of armed mutual tolerance with the gang, each side maintaining a clear understanding of where the other's lines were and what crossing them would cost.
I had the unconfirmed 6th Street flag on my SIN. Out here, that was worth something real. Not enough to walk into one of their buildings expecting hospitality, but enough to give me some leeway, and not just in this district, anyone who bothered to look too deep wouldn't randomly mess with me, and for those who did.... well odds were I could take them.
I pulled over at the edge of a wide stretch of open ground that sat between a derelict warehouse and a still-operational metalworks, killed the engine, and sat for a moment looking out at Arroyo spreading away in every direction. At the edge of the lot, catching the last of the evening light, stood a Data Terminal.
I knew what it was before my systems finished identifying it. A heavily armored concrete pillar, thick enough to survive the kind of casual civic violence that Night City generated as a byproduct, its surface scarred and tagged but fundamentally intact. The screen on its face glowed softly.
Post-DataKrash survival engineering, the city's answer to the question of how you provided public network access when the network itself had been turned into a weapon by a dead man in a refrigerator.
A local node. A data pool. A hardwired connection to a localized slice of the city net that existed behind enough physical and digital armoring to make casual intrusion more trouble than it was worth.
I thought about my surroundings as I got out of the car. Heavy metallurgy and broken ambitions and a gang holding the ruins together with zip ties and territorial instinct. Corporations rebuilding and demolishing on a schedule that served their accounting departments rather than the people who lived around them. A district that had been promised renewal so many times that the word had stopped meaning anything.
And yet.
People worked here. People went home from here, down the road to Rancho Coronado and its sagging porches and its concreted-over yards and its kids arguing about bicycle rules in the cul-de-sacs. People had built a life in the gap between what this place had promised to be and what it had actually become, and they had done it without anyone's permission or assistance, which in this city was the only way anything worth having ever got built.
I still wondered why they stayed.
It couldn't be because the city was good to them, because the systems running it had any interest in their wellbeing. Maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe they stayed because the same density that made it dangerous made it alive in a way that nowhere quieter and nowhere safer ever quite managed. Because you could disappear here, or reinvent yourself here, or build something in the gaps that the corporations and the gangs and the municipal neglect had left between them, and the city would not particularly care either way, which was its own kind of freedom.
If I thought of it like that, then Gotham made sense. So did Metropolis. So did every fictional hellhole that people inexplicably refused to abandon, every city that ground its residents down and kept them anyway, every place where the rational decision was to leave and almost nobody did.
"Alright," I said quietly, to my VI.
I should really give it a name.
I made my way across the lot to the terminal, checking the sightlines out of habit. The nearest 6th Street cluster was half a block away, close enough to notice me but far enough that what I was doing wouldn't register as anything worth interrupting, just someone using a public terminal, unremarkable by any measure. I positioned myself with my back to the wall beside the terminal, blocking the view of what I was doing from the street, and with a muttered apology to the infrastructure of Night City I pulled the maintenance panel off the back with two fingers and found the hardwired cable coiled inside.
"This isn't the global net," I said quietly, more to organize my own thinking than to inform my VI of something it didn't already know. "But local network access is a lot safer than going in blind and it'll help us get more situated. Just be careful of possible intrusion attempts."
There was a half-second pause, deliberate this time, not processing lag.
[ACKNOWLEDGED. LOCAL NETWORK CLASSIFIED: LOW-RISK / HIGH-NOISE ENVIRONMENT.]
"Yeah, I got that," I said dryly. "I'm more concerned about the parts that aren't noisy, You have no frame of reference for what's out there, you mess up and it's my life on the line."
[CLARIFICATION: HOST IS CONCERNED ABOUT LOW-SIGNAL HOSTILE CODE EMBEDDED WITHIN HIGH-TRAFFIC DATA STREAMS.]
"…Yes."
[THEN YOUR CONCERN IS VALID.]
I snorted faintly. "Comforting."
[PROPOSED SOLUTION: SEGMENTED ACCESS. ALL INCOMING DATA ROUTED THROUGH VIRTUAL MACHINE INSTANCE. HARD BARRIER BETWEEN HOST FIRMWARE AND EMULATED ENVIRONMENT.]
"I'll take your word for it, again don't mess up." I warned it.
[VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT: COMPLETE.]
[ISOLATION LAYERS: ACTIVE.]
[FAILSAFE: IF BREACH DETECTED, INSTANCE WILL BE TERMINATED.]
"Terminate as in—"
[TOTAL PURGE.]
"…Right. Good." There was a beat.
[ADDITIONAL NOTE: IF HOSTILE ENTITY ENTERS VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT, IT WILL PERCEIVE ITSELF AS HAVING GAINED ACCESS.]
I blinked. "Wait. You're… trapping them?"
[AFFIRMATIVE.]
"…That's—"
[EFFICIENT.]
"…Yeah. That's one word for it." I seated the maintenance cable into my port with a soft click. The terminal's local data pool opened up around me like a room I hadn't known existed.
It wasn't the net as it had once been, the vast interconnected sprawl that Bartmoss had broken and NetWatch had walled off. This was something smaller and more deliberate, a curated local network of screamsheets, municipal data, local business registries, classified listings, community message boards that had the particular texture of communications written by people who expected their neighbors to read them.
Current gang activity warnings posted anonymously and read by everyone. Factory shift schedules. Apartment listings with prices that varied enormously depending on which building you were willing to live next to.
A 6th Street community noticeboard that was technically a gang communication channel and practically functioned as a neighborhood watch, complaints about noise and requests for information and the occasional announcement of a barbecue that everyone within three blocks was apparently invited to whether they wanted to be or not.
My VI began pulling and sorting, filing information against the cultural database, building a more granular picture of the district than anything the software install had provided on its own.
Property rates. Security patrol patterns. Which blocks had functional street lighting and which had learned to get along without it. The going rate for a furnished room by the week in Rancho Coronado versus the unfurnished alternatives in the Arroyo megabuildings. A surprising amount of practical intelligence, available to anyone willing to stand at a concrete pillar and pay ten eddies a minute for access.
I let it run and turned my attention to the larger question.
Where to sleep.
This was not a trivial problem. A week in a Badlands motel was one thing. Indefinite occupation of Night City was another, and the two had entirely different requirements. I needed somewhere that would not immediately attract the wrong kind of attention, somewhere that would not drain my twenty five thousand eddies faster than I could replenish them, and somewhere that would not put me inside the operational territory of anyone who would make my life complicated before I had a chance to make it complicated myself.
Watson was the obvious first instinct, the way it was for most people who arrived in Night City without a corporate sponsor or a pre-existing network. Cheap enough to get started in, diverse enough to disappear into, the Maelstrom presence in Watson keeping the more aggressive corporate security operations from treating the streets like their private property.
The problem with Watson was the same thing that made it accessible. It was where people ended up when they didn't have better options, which meant it was also where people looked when they were trying to find someone who didn't have better options. I had a clean SIN and twenty five thousand eddies. I could do better.
Pacifica was out. The cultural database was unambiguous on that point and my own common sense confirmed it. The Voodoo Boys held that territory with the particular intensity of people who had watched every other institution abandon the place and decided that if the neighbourhood was going to survive it was going to survive on their terms.
They were very hostile to outsiders by default and more relevantly they were deeply and professionally suspicious of anyone whose tech they couldn't read. I already knew no one would be able to identify what tech I was sporting. Walking into Pacifica with that particular quality was the kind of thing that ended conversations before they started and sometimes ended the person having them.
Heywood had the Valentinos, and the Tyger Claws had significant presence in the parts of the district that bordered Japantown. Neither was insurmountable but both required a level of established relationship I didn't have yet. The Valentinos in particular operated on a social logic that rewarded community embeddedness, the kind of trust that accumulated over time through consistent presence and demonstrated reliability. I had neither. Not yet.
The City Centre and Corpo Plaza were simply not realistic. The corporate security apparatus in those areas was a different order of magnitude from anything operating in the outer districts, full NetWatch integration, biometric checkpoints, infrastructure that would look at my spoofed SIN and start asking questions I wasn't ready to answer.
Even the residential sections orbiting Corpo Plaza ran regular scans as a matter of course. I would stand out the way a fire stands out in a dark room, not because anyone was specifically looking but because the environment was designed to notice anomalies and I was nothing but.
Westbrook was interesting. Japantown specifically, where the Tyger Claws ran the streets with the confidence of people who had a corporate patron and knew it. Arasaka's shadow fell long over that part of the city and the Tyger Claws operated with a corresponding latitude that most gangs didn't enjoy.
The upside was that Westbrook tolerated a certain level of unusual, the money flowing through Japantown attracting enough strange people on legitimate and semi-legitimate business that one more unusual presence didn't register as a threat.
The downside was Arasaka. Any district operating under that much Arasaka influence was a district where Arasaka had eyes, and I had Kuseno's legacy sitting dormant in my architecture like a landmine I couldn't fully defuse. The last thing I needed was to set up base somewhere that increased the probability of that particular connection being made.
Which brought me, by a process of elimination that I found both logical and mildly irritating, back to where I was already standing.
Santo Domingo. Arroyo specifically.
The data pool had given me enough to work with. The pros were straightforward. The 6th Street flag on my SIN read correctly here, legible to the neighbourhood in a way that would reduce friction without connecting me to anything I didn't want to be connected to.
Rent in Arroyo was cheap by Night City standards, genuinely cheap rather than cheap-with-hidden-costs, the corporate owners keeping rates low enough to retain the Arroyo workforce without actually investing anything in what they were offering in return.
The distance from Corpo Plaza and Westbrook kept me out of the heaviest corporate surveillance corridors. And having Pacifica next door meant, if worst came worse, I had a quick getaway route to the combat zone.
The cons were also straightforward. The 6th Street presence meant operating under a degree of gang oversight whether I wanted to or not, nothing aggressive, nothing that would interfere with day to day life, but present and worth factoring in. The corporate security that substituted for actual policing here answered to property owners rather than residents, which meant its priorities were not my priorities. And the district's general state of managed decline meant that any resources I needed beyond the basics would require me to go elsewhere, which meant moving through the city regularly, which meant exposure.
On balance the pros outweighed the cons. Not dramatically, but enough.
The specific question of where in the district had one obvious answer, obvious enough that I had been circling it without landing on it directly.
Megabuilding H4. The data pool had given me the basics and the cultural database and my own past recollections filled in the rest. Megabuildings in Night City were not apartment blocks in any sense the word implied elsewhere. They were cities within cities, self-contained ecosystems of human density stacked vertically until the engineering said stop.
Over eight thousand apartments in a single structure, varying in size and quality from the crammed lower floors where the cheapest rents compressed the most people into the least space, up through the mid-level units with their own bathrooms and kitchens and wall-mounted vending machines, to the upper floors where the word luxury got used without obvious irony.
Food courts. Market stalls. Gyms. Entertainment hubs. Parking. Everything a person needed to never leave the building if they decided not to, which if what I remembered was true, some never did.
That density was exactly what I needed. Eight thousand apartments meant tens of thousands of residents meant a volume of foot traffic and ambient human noise that swallowed individual presences completely. One more unusual face in a megabuilding that housed a small city's worth of unusual faces. I could move through that building, come and go at any hour, receive deliveries and have visitors and do any number of things that might look strange in a quieter context, and the sheer weight of everyone else doing their own version of the same thing would absorb it without a ripple.
The smokescreen of other people. Cheap, effective, and already paid for by the rent.
I disconnected the cable from my neck and replaced the maintenance panel with the same two fingers I had used to remove it.
"I really need to get this whole incompatible hardware situation figured out," I muttered, brushing dust off my jacket. "And see to getting myself repaired."
[AFFIRMATIVE. CURRENT STATE: SUBOPTIMAL.]
"Yeah," I said. "I know." I turned back toward the car. And stopped.
[SYSTEM WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED INTERACTION WITH VEHICLE DETECTED.]
"It doesn't help much if you warn me after the fact," I muttered.
[CORRECTION: WARNING ISSUED AT FIRST DETECTABLE EVENT.]
[REAL-TIME VEHICLE LINK UNAVAILABLE.]
[CAUSE: AUTHORIZATION CHIP NOT INSERTED.]
I scratched the side of my head. It wasn't wrong. Without the chip slotted in, the car wasn't mine in any functional sense. No live telemetry. No intrusion alerts until I was physically close enough to see the problem myself. No remote lockout, no system override, no access to the onboard suite.
Just a very expensive object sitting in a very hostile city.
"We need to fix that," I murmured.
[PRIORITY LOGGED.]
Two men.
One at the driver's side door, working something into the seam of the frame with the focused concentration of someone who had done this before and expected it to take about thirty more seconds. The other standing at the passenger side, scanning the lot with the jittery awareness of someone running lookout for the first time and finding it considerably more stressful than anticipated, his hand hovering near a cheap pistol tucked into his waistband with the barrel oriented directly toward his own femoral artery.
Its literally only been like 20 minutes, how am I getting carjacked already?
I couldn't take chances. My alloy could handle a lot, but all it took was one well-placed round through the eye socket and my brain became expensive slurry. I let the systems run as I started walking.
[SEARCH EYE: ACTIVE]
[ENVIRONMENTAL SCAN: INITIATED]
[THERMAL IMAGING: ONLINE]
[ULTRASOUND MAPPING: ONLINE]
[CROSS-REFERENCING LOCAL DATA: IN PROGRESS]
The thermal map assembled itself over my vision, painting both men in the palette of recently active bodies, elevated heart rates, the heat differential of hands that had been gripping things. The ultrasound layer added depth, filling in the shapes beneath clothing, the hard lines of concealed objects rendered in clean white against grey.
"Careful on the Citinet," I said quietly as my VI used the previous terminal connection as a springboard into the local city infrastructure. "Don't get cocky."
It didn't respond with words. What it showed me instead, in the corner of my vision while I took the next two silent steps toward my car, was a rapid-fire sequence of deflected intrusion attempts, automated anti-breach protocols from the local net bouncing off the virtual layer one after another at a rate that was considerably faster than I had expected it to be capable of. Each one hit, found nothing it recognized, and fell away. The VI logged them without breaking stride.
I filed that away for later and kept walking.
Alongside the deflections, a data packet assembled itself from the node access, and in it, timestamped from two hours earlier, was security footage from a Budget Arms Slaught-O-Matic vending machine three blocks away. The nervous lookout, purchasing a single-use firearm, whilst muttering to himself "Man fuck Rex, what does he know...won't even lend me his iron, I'll fucking show him."
The Search Eye narrowed on him first.
[SUBJECT 01: SCANNING]
[HEIGHT: 178CM. BUILD: LEAN. ESTIMATED AGE: EARLY TWENTIES.]
[CYBERWARE DETECTED:
[NEURAL LINK (Standard Grade)][PERSONAL LINK (Right Wrist, Retractable)][KIROSHI OPTICS MK.1 (Optical Zoom x2, Digital HUD)][SUBDERMAL CHIP SLOT (Neck, Single Port)][BIOMONITOR (Subdermal, Pulse Tracking).]
[THERMAL SIGNATURE: ELEVATED. STRESS INDICATORS PRESENT.]
[WEAPON IDENTIFICATION: SUBJECT 01]
A wireframe overlay traced the outline beneath his jacket, the geometry hard and angular against the soft contours of someone who had not been carrying weapons long enough to wear them naturally.
[MATCH FOUND.]
[BUDGET ARMS SLAUGHT-O-MATIC, SINGLE-USE VARIANT.]
[WEAPON CLASS: DISPOSABLE LOW-COST FIREARM.]
[RELIABILITY: INCONSISTENT. ACCURACY: POOR.]
[INTENDED USE: CLOSE-RANGE LETHALITY.]
[NOTE: PURCHASED APPROXIMATELY TWO HOURS PRIOR AT NEARBY VENDING UNIT.]
I almost laughed. A vending machine gun. He had bought a vending machine gun for this.
The Search Eye moved to the second man, who had made enough progress on the door seal that he was muttering quiet encouragement to himself, the personal ritual of someone who had done this enough times to have one.
[SUBJECT 02: SCANNING]
[HEIGHT: 182CM. BUILD: HEAVY. ESTIMATED AGE: MID TWENTIES.]
[CYBERWARE DETECTED: LEFT ARM, FULL REPLACEMENT.]
[MANUFACTURER: ADRELEV.]
A brief notation followed, the VI's version of a footnote.
[ADRELEV: MASS-MARKET CYBERNETICS MANUFACTURER. FUNCTIONAL, NO-FRILLS DESIGN PHILOSOPHY. COMMON AMONG CONSTRUCTION WORKERS AND MIDDLE-CLASS REPLACEMENT CASES. PRIORITIZES DURABILITY OVER PERFORMANCE. NO COMBAT OPTIMIZATION DETECTED IN THIS UNIT.]
[THERMAL SIGNATURE: CONTROLLED. STRESS INDICATORS: MINIMAL.]
[CROSS-REFERENCE: LOCAL NODE QUERY RUNNING]
[WEAPON IDENTIFICATION: SUBJECT 02]
[KNIFE: FIXED BLADE, 18CM. CERAMICIZED EDGE DETECTED.]
[SECONDARY: CONSTITUTIONAL ARMS UNITY. HIDDEN HOLSTER, RIGHT HIP.]
Another notation.
[CONSTITUTIONAL ARMS UNITY: COMPACT .45 CALIBER SEMI-AUTOMATIC. 12-ROUND MAGAZINE. HIGH FIRE RATE FOR CLASS. INEXPENSIVE MATERIALS, SIMPLE CONSTRUCTION. COMMON STREET SIDEARM. CONSIDERED RELIABLE DESPITE LOW PRESTIGE. TYPICALLY CARRIED AS BACKUP RATHER THAN PRIMARY.]
[SAFETY: ENGAGED.]
[ASSESSMENT: SECONDARY WEAPON FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY. PRIMARY THREAT IS BLADE.]
[COMBINED THREAT ASSESSMENT: LOW.]
[ENGAGEMENT RECOMMENDATION: APPROACH WITH VISIBLE WEAPON. VERBAL DETERRENCE FIRST. DEMONSTRATE CAPABILITY WITHOUT INITIATING FORCE. PROBABILITY OF COMPLIANCE: 64%.]
I looked at the two of them for a moment, the entire scan having run in the space between one step and the next. The experienced one still working the door with quiet professional focus. The nervous one scanning the lot and somehow still not having looked in the direction of the person who had been walking toward him for the past thirty seconds.
Sixty four percent.
I reached back and drew the Overture from the inside holster of my jacket, stepped up behind the lookout, and placed the barrel against the back of his head with a precision that left no room for misinterpretation.
He froze so completely he stopped breathing.
Across the car, the experienced one heard something, or felt the change in the air, and straightened slowly, turning to find the situation considerably different from the one he had left. His hand moved toward his hip.
"You do that," I said conversationally, "and I'm going to redecorate the general area with your friend's brain matter. Not that he appears to be using it." I kept my gunmetal arm completely still. I wasn't entirely sure I had it in me to actually pull the trigger unprompted, but they didn't know that, and the arm wasn't shaking, which was the part that mattered.
His hands came up. His eyes went faintly luminescent as his system ran a scan.
[SCAN ATTEMPT DETECTED.]
[RESPONSE: SPOOFED CIVILIAN PROFILE TRANSMITTED.]
"Look choom," he said, voice measured, the tone of someone switching from one mode to another with practiced ease. "No harm no foul, alright? We didn't know this belonged to someone who ran with Street. We were just trying to make a quick payday."
"Sam." The lookout's voice had gone very small. "Sam don't let him kill me please."
"Chill out Freddie, I've got this." Sam's eyes stayed on me. "Look man, Genos, right? We run with Street too. I was just showing my cousin the ropes, doing his brother a favour. Rex, you know him? You have to if you ran with Street. He's been with the chapter out of Arroyo for ten years." He spread his hands slightly, a careful gesture, the kind that communicated openness without lowering the hands. "Killing that kid is more trouble than it's worth. For both of us. Just let us go alright?"
I held it for a moment.
The thing was, he had a point. If this Rex was a genuine 6th Street member, then shooting his brother in a parking lot on my first night in the city was exactly the kind of thing that would pull a thread I had spent considerable effort weaving into place.
I wasn't actually 6th Street. Doing anything that exposed that, that put my SIN and my cover story and everything Dakota had built for me under scrutiny, would be a waste of everything I had done in the past week to get to this point.
I took the gun off the back of Freddie's head.
He exhaled like a man who had just been told he didn't have a terminal illness.
"Get out of here," I said. "Before I change my mind."
"Yea choom, we'll delta." Sam was already moving, collecting Freddie with one hand on his shoulder, steering him toward the lot exit with a brisk efficiency. "No bad blood."
I watched them go. Fucking Night City.
I pulled out the key fob, turned back to the car, and put my hand on the door handle. In the matte black finish of the panel, my reflection looked back at me, gold eyes, silver chassis, looted jacket hanging open at the chest.
In that same reflection, over my shoulder, I saw him.
Freddie.
Pink vending machine gun in his hand, already moving, already committed, the particular forward lean of someone, bracing themselves before pulling the trigger.
"Freddie don't!" Sam's voice, distant, sharp, too late.
What happened next I cannot fully account for.
I turned. My left hand found the gun by the barrel and wrenched it sideways as it discharged, the shots going wide, one, two, three in quick succession into nothing. My right arm was already moving, passing the level of his neck in what should have been a deflection, a push, something that ended with him on the ground and me getting in the car.
The arm blades deployed.
I hadn't told them to...or I don't remember doing so, I just knew I flexed my actuators in a certain way and in the gap where reflex lived, the blade was out and through before I had consciously registered they were moving. I stood there.
My right arm was at my side, the blade still extended, red against the silver of the housing. The gun was in my left hand. The lot was quiet except for the distant sound of the city going about its business, entirely indifferent to what had just happened in this particular corner of it.
"Wha—" I started to say in honest pure surprise, my sentence was cut off by the sound of his decapitated head hitting the ground with a heavy meaty thud.
Author's Note:
That's it for Chapter 7, The Tower, hope you enjoyed it.
A lot of infodumping in this one, I know, sorry about that. I needed to establish the geography and the logic of the city before throwing him into it properly, and I hope the back half made up for the front. I also needed a way for Genos to get his whole "I have never killed anyone" thing resolved as quickly and as naturally as possible, and a nervous kid with a vending machine gun in a parking lot felt about as Night City as it gets. Cherry popped, consequences established, a few things set up for later. I think it landed, but let me know in the comments if you disagree.
As for the chapter name, The Tower in tarot represents sudden, unavoidable change. Not the change you plan for or see coming, the kind that is thrust upon you without warning or consent. The phone call that changes everything. The foundation you were building on turning out to be cracked. In Genos' case it's accidentally decapitating the little brother of a gang chapter leader while he was in the middle of planning to move into the area that gang controls. The Tower doesn't ask if you're ready. It just falls.
If you're enjoying the story and want to read ahead, I'm currently two chapters ahead on Patreon(Maydae010401), so if you want early access that's the place to be. Ko-fi is there for tips and commissions if you want to support the writing without the subscription.
As always leave a like and a review if you enjoyed it, and any criticisms on what I could do better. See you in the next one.