"City chews you up and spits you out."
- Johnny Silverhand
---
A loud knock echoed through the apartment with a rhythmic pounding that demanded compliance.
Julia flinched, her heart slamming against her ribs. She took a final, shuddering breath, locking her grief away in a dark box. She stood up, smoothing the wrinkles from her skirt, and walked to the entryway.
She pressed the release button, and before the door had finished opening, three fully armored Militech spec-ops soldiers pushed right past her, their combat boots tracking wet mud onto the hardwood floor. They raised their assault rifles, their tactical lights sweeping the corners of the apartment as they moved with mechanized efficiency to secure the perimeter.
"Hey! What do you think you're doing?!" Julia shouted, projecting a perfect mask of indignant outrage. "This is a private residence! You have no right to barge in here!"
The armored soldiers completely ignored her protests. Two of them fanned out down the hallway, opening the doors to the bedrooms and the bathrooms.
A single man stepped through the front door, moving at a measured pace. He wore a sharp, charcoal-gray corpo suit, his tie perfectly knotted. His eyes were cold, augmented with subtle chrome plating that gleamed in the apartment's lighting. He stopped in the entryway, looking down at Julia with an expression of absolute indifference.
"Julia Reyes," the Agent stated, his voice flat. It was a statement of fact, not a question.
"Yes," Julia demanded, crossing her arms defensively. "Who are you? Why are your men tearing my home apart?"
The Agent clasped his hands behind his back. "I am a representative of the Militech Internal Affairs and Asset Management division. We are here executing a standard corporate repossession protocol."
"Repossession?" Julia acted flawlessly, letting her face drop in confusion. "What are you talking about? Where is Alejandro? Let me call my husband, he manages the mid-level subnets-"
"Your husband is no longer employed by this corporation," the Agent interrupted, his tone devoid of any empathy. "Alejandro Reyes committed a severe breach of his contractual obligations this afternoon. He engaged in unauthorized espionage, destroyed corporate property, and initiated lethal force against Militech personnel. Consequently, his contract has been permanently terminated."
The word hung in the air, and Julia let her defensive posture crumble. She brought her hands up to cover her mouth, her eyes widening in perfectly executed horror. The tears that flooded her vision were entirely real, fueled by the crushing confirmation of her loss, but she masked the grief as sudden, debilitating shock.
"Terminated?" Julia choked out, her voice trembling. She stumbled backward, leaning against the wall for support. "What... what do you mean by that? Are you saying they fired him?"
The Agent stared at her weeping form, completely unmoved by the display of human emotion. "I believe you understand exactly what I mean, Mrs. Reyes. Alejandro Reyes resisted apprehension, and you can imagine what followed."
A loud, shattering sob ripped from Julia's throat as she let her real emotions out, sliding down the wall until her knees hit the floor. She cried for the man who had loved her, the man who had tried to build a fortress for their son, and the husband who had died alone in some dark place. She wept openly, burying her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking with the violent force of her grief.
The Militech soldiers returned from the hallway. One of them tapped the side of his helmet, reporting to the Agent. "The office biometric seal is engaged. Scanners indicate a localized EMP discharge inside the room. All hardware is fried, and not a single bit of data is recoverable."
The Agent offered a single, tight nod. He looked back down at the weeping woman on the floor.
"Due to the extreme severity of your husband's actions, Militech has conducted an immediate review of your own employment status," the Agent continued, his voice cutting through her sobs. "You are hereby stripped of your clearance. Your position as an administrative secretary within the logistics division is officially terminated, effective immediately."
Julia looked up, her face stained with tears. "You're firing me? But I didn't even do anything!"
"Guilt by association is a standard metric," the Agent replied coldly. He adjusted his cuffs, his gaze sweeping over the living room, lingering briefly on the boy sitting on the sofa with the braindance wreath covering his eyes. "Furthermore, this apartment is a subsidized asset provided exclusively to active Militech management personnel, which you are not. You and your son have exactly forty-eight hours to vacate the premises and turn over the access keys. If you are found within this sector after the deadline, you will be arrested for trespassing on corporate property."
The Agent didn't wait for a response, simply turning on his heel and walking out the door. The three armored soldiers fell into step behind him, their boots marching down the corridor.
The door clicked shut, leaving a sobbing Julia alone on the floor. The blaring orchestral music of the fictional space battle continued to play on the television, a surreal soundtrack to the complete and utter destruction of their real world.
---
The forty-eight-hour eviction window provided by Militech was a cruel countdown that hung over the Charter Hill apartment like a guillotine. Over the course of those two agonizing days, the high-end corpo residence had been stripped of its soul. Stripped of the warmth that the Reyes family had once provided it.
The living room was barren, devoid of the scattered datapads, the half-empty coffee mugs, and the heavy leather jacket that usually hung over the back of the sofa. By the morning of June 5th, 2063, the only things left in the center of the room were four large, rigid suitcases and a single, heavy canvas duffel bag.
Inside the duffel bag, buried beneath tightly folded clothes, Julia had secured three thousand physical eurodollars in rolled cash, an untraceable credit chip loaded with another ten thousand eddies, and the encrypted data chip containing the blueprints to Santi's brain Neural Link and anything else Alejandro had found and stored in it. She had been locked out of her and her husband's savings, losing access to over a million eddies that could have greatly helped their current situation.
Julia stood in the center of the living room, wearing a faded dark sweater and durable cargo pants, a stark departure from the tailored corporate skirts she was accustomed to wearing for over the course of almost two decades. Her eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with deep shadows. She hadn't slept. She had spent the last forty-eight hours navigating a nightmare while simultaneously drowning in a silent, suffocating grief.
"Santi," Julia called out, her voice raspy and devoid of any energy. "It's time to go. The cab is waiting for us downstairs."
But there was no response from the hallway. Julia closed her eyes, letting out a trembling breath, and walked down the corridor, pushing open the door to her son's bedroom.
Santi was sitting on the edge of his stripped mattress. He wore a heavy black hoodie, his knees pulled up to his chest. His small hands were gripped white-knuckled around his offline cyberdeck. His violet eyes were fixed intensely on the blank wall opposite the bed, but he wasn't really seeing it. He was lost in a frantic, desperate internal nightmare.
"Papi, please," Julia said softly, stepping into the room. "We can't be here when the corporate security detail arrives for the sweep. We have to leave."
"No," Santi whispered, his voice trembling violently. He didn't look at her. "We cannot vacate the premises just yet. We have to wait for Pa."
Julia felt a twisting pain in her chest. Two days ago, in the immediate aftermath of the EMP and the Militech raid, she had told him that Alejandro had been killed. But Santi's mind had simply refused to accept her words. Without a body, without a confirmed visual confirmation of death, his brain had categorized her words as a flawed assumption. He had spent the last two days desperately clinging to the denial, building elaborate, frantic theories to explain his father's absence.
"Santi..." Julia started, stepping closer.
"He has to come back, Ma," Santi interrupted, his voice cracking, losing all clinical vocabulary as the raw plea of a ten-year-old boy took over. He looked up at her, his violet eyes swimming with heavy tears. "He told me he had a new program for me. He promised. He said he compiled a new ICE framework for me to train with and play with in the sandbox. He wouldn't just leave without giving it to me. He has to come back."
"My sweet boy," Julia murmured, kneeling in front of him. She reached out to touch his knee, but he pulled away, shaking his head.
"I checked, Ma! I checked everything!" Santi cried out, fat tears slowly making their way out of his eyes, spilling over his lower lashes and tracking down his pale cheeks. "I bypassed your restrictions yesterday. I used a ghost-line to dive into the local subnets and searched the entire Westbrook grid. I ran algorithmic sweeps through the municipal security cameras, looking for his biometric signature, for the specific MAC address of his internal optics, but I couldn't find him on the Net. I couldn't find his signature anywhere! He's just... he's hiding. He's using a cloaking daemon. He has to be."
Santi sucked in a ragged, wet breath, his small shoulders shaking. He looked at his mother through teary, desperate eyes. "Where is Papi, Ma? Please. Just tell me where he is hiding so we can go get him."
Julia felt herself dying inside. For forty-eight hours, she had let him hold onto this tiny, fragile sliver of hope because she hadn't had the strength to crush it. She hadn't possessed the sheer cruelty required to sit her child down and thoroughly dismantle his denial.
But the clock had run out, and they had to leave. She couldn't just drag him into the unforgiving streets of Night City while he was still waiting for a dead man to rescue them. So she took a deep breath, forcing herself to commit the most painful act of her entire life.
"He isn't hiding, Santi," Julia said, her voice dropping to a trembling whisper. She grabbed his shoulders, refusing to let him look away. "Your father is never coming back."
Santi blinked, a nervous, watery smile twitching on his lips. "You're... you're not funny, Ma. That's a bad joke. Pa is a Solo. He's too fast. He's coming back."
"I am not playing, Santiago!" Julia sobbed, the dam finally breaking. Tears flooded down her face, her voice rising in a desperate crescendo. "He is dead! They killed him in the street! He is gone!"
Santi froze. The nervous smile vanished.
"I received a memo from Militech Internal Affairs this morning," Julia cried, her hands gripping his shoulders so tightly her knuckles turned white. She forced the brutal reality into the open, knowing it was the only way to short-circuit his denial. "They informed me that the remains of the 'terminated employee' have been processed. Do you know what that means, Santi? They burned him. They burned your father to ash. They are going to deliver his corpse in a cheap metal urn to our new address in three days. That is all that is left of him! A box of ash!"
The words assaulted the boy with no remorse. The mention of the urn and the bureaucratic finality of the corporate memo were data points he could not ignore. It was an undeniable, indisputable fact.
Santi stared at her, his lips parting, and his small heart shattering into a million pieces.
A sound escaped Santi's throat, sending a wail of pure agony that didn't even sound human. The cyberdeck slipped from his numb fingers, clattering uselessly against the hardwood floor.
He threw himself forward into Julia's arms, who wrapped them around his small, shaking body as they collapsed together onto the floor of the empty bedroom. Santi buried his face in his mother's neck, his small hands clutching the fabric of her sweater as if he were dangling over a bottomless abyss. He wept with the fierce, devastating intensity of a child whose universe had just been violently ended.
Julia held him, rocking him back and forth on the floor. She let her own emotions be rawly released, her sobs echoing against the bare walls. She cried for Alejandro's stupid, reckless obsession. She cried for the smell of his leather jacket and the deep, rumbling sound of his laugh. She cried for the total destruction of their family, mourning the brutal, merciless machine of Night City that chewed up good men and spit them out as ash.
They stayed on the floor for a long time, the digital clock on the wall blinking as the time ticked down to the final twenty minutes of their eviction notice, but Julia ignored it. She let her son cry until his vocal cords were raw, until his small chest was heaving with exhaustion, and the tears had soaked completely through the collar of her sweater.
Eventually, the violent sobs subsided into heavy, ragged hiccups. Santi's grip on her sweater loosened slightly. His cheek was pressed against her collarbone, his eyes swollen and red.
"I... I want Pa," Santi mumbled weakly, his voice barely a whisper.
"I know, my sweet boy. I know," Julia murmured, pressing her lips to the top of his white hair, tasting the salt of her own tears. "I want him too. With all my heart... But it is just you and me now, and we have to be strong for him. We have to survive this because that is what he would have wanted. He built your Neural Link so you could survive. But we have to go, Santi. If we stay, the people who hurt him will come back and hurt us."
Santi took a shuddering breath. The mention of the people who hurt his father sparked a tiny, microscopic ember of resolve in his shattered mind. He didn't have the emotional capacity for anger yet, but the instinct for self-preservation, hardwired into his intellect, slowly booted back up.
He nodded against her chest, a small act. "Okay, Ma. We can go."
Julia helped him to his feet. She wiped his face with the sleeve of her sweater, offering him a sad, watery smile. She picked up his cyberdeck from the floor and placed it carefully into his backpack, zipping it shut and sliding it over his shoulders.
---
Tax season, pay with your stones!
The infamous P@treon exists for those of you who want to read ahead.
patreon .com/Crimson_Reapr (Don't be a gonk, remove the space)
They get around 3 long-form weekly chapters (4.5-6k words each).