For the next three days, the world felt completely different.
Jax locked himself inside his house and refused to come out. Maya and I took turns going over there. I brought him real, high-protein synthetic meat my mother had cooked, leaving it in secure containers on his porch. Maya brought him blankets and tried to talk to him through the door, but he never answered or opened the door. And the food containers were pulled inside during the dead of night when nobody was watching, but other than that, the house was like a tomb.
There was no code I could write to fix this. My genius, my combat training, my processing power, it was all completely useless in the face of human grief. I was slowly making my way to becoming a god in the machine, but in the meatspace, I was just a boy watching his friend shatter into a million pieces.
On the morning of the fourth day, freezing rain turned the streets slick.
I was walking down the sidewalk toward Jax's house, my hood pulled up against the rain. As I approached his yard, my eyes caught a shape resting on his front porch. It was a small, plain brown cardboard box, most likely his mother's ashes.
My stomach twisted into a tight knot. The city hadn't even bothered to hand-deliver it. Some overworked courier had just dumped a woman's remains on her porch like a package of cheap kibble.
I walked up the steps and reached down to pick up the box. It was shockingly light. Anaya Reinoso's entire existence, her decades of labor, her love for her son, reduced to a few pounds of gray dust in a cheap plastic urn inside a cardboard box.
I stood in front of the door, holding the box against my chest. I raised my hand and knocked, fully expecting to be ignored again. But ten seconds later, I heard the metallic scrape of the deadbolt sliding back, and the door creaked open a few inches.
Jax stood in the doorway, and the sight of him made the breath catch in my throat.
He looked like a corpse that had been reanimated by a glitching neuro-processor. In just three days, he had visibly lost weight, the flesh around his cheeks sinking inward. His eyes were surrounded by bruises, and they were bloodshot and completely devoid of light. He hadn't slept or showered. He just stared at me with the blank, empty expression of a zombie.
"Hey, Jax," I said softly, my voice barely above a whisper.
I didn't wait for him to invite me in, and pushed the door open slightly, stepping into the threshold, and wrapped my free arm around him, pulling him into a tight, fierce hug. He was stiff, his arms hanging uselessly at his sides. He didn't even attempt to hug me back. He just stood there, staring blankly over my shoulder.
"I'm here for you, choom," I whispered into his shoulder. "Whatever you need, I'm here for it.... My mom said you can come stay with us. You don't have to be alone in this house. We'll figure something out. Just know you're not alone."
I pulled back, looking into his dead eyes. I slowly raised the cardboard box, holding it out to him.
"This... this was on the porch," I said gently.
Jax looked down at the box. His hands trembled slightly as he reached out and took it from me. His thick fingers gripped the cardboard, the only emotion he had the energy to show since his tears had clearly run out days ago. He just stared at the municipal stamp.
"Jax?" I prompted, trying to keep the connection alive. "Do you want me to come in? We can just sit. We don't have to talk."
Jax slowly looked up from the box, his hollow eyes meeting mine.
"No," Jax whispered. "I need... I need to be with my mom right now. Just... just give me a minute, Santi."
Before I could say another word, he stepped back and softly pushed me out, closing the door shut right in my face. The deadbolt clicked into place with a loud snap.
I stood on the porch for a minute, the freezing rain blowing under the awning and hitting my back as a deep, unsettling chill radiated outward from my chest. My mind was screaming at me. The absolute lack of emotion, the isolation, the flat, dead tone of his voice... it was the exact psychological profile of someone who had reached the bottom of the abyss and stopped fighting.
I turned around slowly, my heart hammering frantically against my ribs. Down the street, I saw Maya stepping out onto her porch. She was wearing a bright yellow raincoat, holding a steaming mug of synth-caf. She locked eyes with me standing on Jax's porch. I smiled and waved her over, and just as she had begun casually walking toward me-
BANG.
A deafening sound rang out, making me flinch so hard that my teeth clicked together. The world around me seemed to instantly sever its connection to the normal flow of time, and everything shifted into a hyper-focused state of slow motion.
The sound hadn't come from the street or some gonk's passing car. It was a single gunshot that rang out from directly behind me, echoing from inside Jax's house.
Down the street, Maya froze, the mug of synth-caf slipping from her fingers and shattering against the concrete of her porch. Her eyes went wide with terror before she started moving again. First, a slow, hesitant walk, and then a frantic speedwalk toward me, her mouth forming my name, though I couldn't hear it because it felt like I was in a different dimension.
My Neural Link flared, forcing my body to send a surge of adrenaline into my bloodstream. My body moved before my conscious mind even fully registered the command, and I spun around and grabbed the doorknob. Jax hadn't fully turned the deadbolt, meaning that the lock hadn't fully caught.
"Jax!" I screamed as I shoved the door open and sprinted into the dark living room. I skidded to a halt in the center of the room as the thick and suffocating, acrid stench of cordite and the undeniable, sweet-copper smell of fresh blood assaulted my senses.
The image that met my eyes burned itself permanently into my retinas.
Jax was sitting on the faded, stained sofa. Or rather, what was left of him was sitting there. His body was slumped backward against the cushions. In his left hand, resting gently on his lap, was the cheap plastic urn he had pulled from the cardboard box, his thick fingers wrapped protectively around the container holding his mother's ashes.
His right arm was limply dangling off the side of the sofa, and still hooked around his index finger by the trigger guard was the iron frame of a cheap 6th Street pistol. The upper half of Jax's head was simply gone.
The hollow-point round had entered beneath his dense jawline and violently detonated as it exited the crown of his skull, painting the wall directly behind the sofa in an abstract spread of blood, brain matter, and splintered bone. Viscous chunks of brain slid slowly down the cheap, peeling floral wallpaper, leaving thick, wet trails. The blood was pooling rapidly on the sofa cushions, dripping in a steady rhythm onto the floor.
I couldn't breathe. I couldn't blink. My brain was frantically trying to categorize the trauma, my Neural Link analyzing the blood splatter patterns, calculating the trajectory of the bullet, processing the structural damage to his skull. It was trying to turn my dead best friend into data to protect my sanity, but the humanity in me, the boy who had hung out with him for the past four years, screamed in horror.
My knees felt weak, and I felt as if the world was spinning around me, the edges of my vision blackening as the reality of the gore threatened to pull me under.
That was until I heard the heavy, frantic footsteps pounding up the steps of the porch behind me.
"Santi!" Maya's voice shrieked, hysterical and breathless. "Santi, what was that?! Was that a-"
She breached the threshold of the front door, stepping into the hallway directly behind me.
My reflexes overrode my shock. I couldn't let Maya see this. If she saw this, it would fuck with her exactly the same way it was fucking with me.
I spun around just as she tried to push past my shoulder into the living room and threw my arms out, catching her around the waist, and used my momentum to violently drive her backward toward the front door.
"No!" I screamed, my voice cracking. "Maya, don't look! Don't fucking look!"
"Let me go, you gonk!" she fought me, her hands clawing at my jacket, trying to crane her neck over my shoulder to see into the living room. "Where is he?! Let me see him!"
"He's gone, Maya!" I said as tears began to burst free from my eyes, blinding me as I pushed her backward out the front door. I wrapped my arms around her in a suffocating bear hug, burying her face into my chest, dragging her away from the open door, stumbling backward until we were both standing in the freezing rain.
Maya fought me for three more seconds before the strength completely abandoned her body. The smell of the cordite and the devastation in my voice were more than enough for her to process what happened without needing to see the gore.
She collapsed against me, her legs giving out. I held her up, wrapping my arms around her trembling body as she buried her face into my chest and let out a scream of pure heartbreak.
I stood in the freezing rain of Rancho Coronado, holding the sobbing girl while the blood of one of my first friends slowly dried on the walls behind us. The pack was dead. Leo had died because he couldn't control his anger. Jax had died because the city had stolen the only thing he loved, leaving him with nothing but a gun.
Night City had claimed another life.
---
One Month Later. February 2067.
A heavy pounding on my front door broke my focus. I blinked, pulling myself out of the diagnostic code I was compiling on my deck, and looked up at the ceiling. The house was quiet, and my mother was still working her shift at the gas station.
I set the deck down on the kitchen table and walked to the front door, and pulled the deadbolt back, opening the door.
Maya was standing on my porch. The biting February wind whipped her dark hair around her face. She was wearing a winter coat with a scarf wrapped tight around her neck. Her eyes looked tired.
"Hey, Maya," I said softly, stepping aside. "You want to come in? I think mom's got some synth-caf I can make you. It's freezing out here."
She didn't move to enter. She just stood there, her hands shoved deep into her coat pockets, looking at me with a quiet sadness.
"I can't, Santi," she said, her voice tight. "I don't have time."
I frowned. "Time for what? Are you running an errand?"
"No," she shook her head, looking down at her boots. "My grandparents... they're done, Santi. After what happened to Jax... after Leo... they can't take it anymore. We're leaving."
The words hit me like a physical blow to the chest. "Leaving? Leaving Rancho? Where are you going?"
"Atlanta," Maya said, finally looking up to meet my eyes. "My grandfather has a brother out there. It's... it's a different zone. Less gangs. Less... death. They packed the car this morning, and we'll be hitting the interstate in ten minutes."
I was completely blindsided. I had spent the last month isolating myself, diving into the Net, exhausting my body in the garage, just trying to punch and code my way through the trauma of Jax's suicide. I hadn't even checked on her and had just assumed she would always be here.
I had only known her, Leo, and Jax for four years, ever since my mom and I got dumped in Rancho Coronado when I was ten. But out here, four years was like a lifetime. Plus, they were the ones who taught me how to actually survive the street, how to speak the way I did, how to become a human.
"You're moving to Atlanta today," I repeated numbly, the reality struggling to set in. "You're just... delta-ing out of Night City."
"I have to, Santi," Maya whispered, a single tear escaping the corner of her eye, quickly wiped away by her gloved hand. "I can't walk down these streets anymore. Every time I look at the alley, I see Leo. Every time I look at that house, I hear that gunshot. If I stay here, this city is going to eat me alive just like it ate them."
She stepped forward, closing the distance between us, and threw her arms around my neck. I froze for a second before wrapping my arms around her back, holding her tight. She smelled like cheap vanilla soap and freezing rain.
"You're the smartest person I know, Santi," she whispered into my ear, her voice cracking. "Please promise me you won't let this place kill you, too. Promise me you'll survive."
"I-.... I promise, Maya," I murmured, my throat tight. "I won't let this city take my life."
She pulled back, offering me a sad, broken smile. She reached up, gently touching the side of my face, before turning around and walking down the steps. She paused and turned around to face me. "I'll be seeing you, ghost-boy."
I let out a bitter chuckle and stood on my porch, the freezing wind biting at my face as I watched her walk away. I watched her climb into the back seat of an old, battered Thorton Galena G240 packed to the brim with luggage. A few moments later, I watched her grandparents climb into the front.
The engine coughed to life, and the car pulled away from the curb, rolling slowly down the cracked asphalt of the Street and heading toward the massive, elevated ramps of the interstate that would take her thousands of miles away from this cursed city.
I didn't move until the taillights of the Galena vanished entirely around the corner, swallowed by the gray smog of Arroyo.
I turned around, walked back into my house, and locked the deadbolt. The silence that had previously adorned the living room now felt heavy and suffocating.
I walked into my bedroom and sat down on the edge of my mattress. I looked at the cyberdeck sitting on my desk, the neural port behind my ear throbbing with a dull ache. I looked at the floorboards where the cred-chip holding thousands of stolen corpo eddies was hidden. Finally, I looked at my hands, calloused from hours of hitting concrete and empty air in the garage.
I was getting stronger physically, and I was getting faster on the deck. But I wasn't some heavyweight Solo who could snap a man's jaw with a single punch, and I sure as hell wasn't a legend who could slice through military ICE without breaking a sweat.
Pa was a Corpo, and he was dead. Leo was a ganger, and he was dead. Jax was dead. And now Maya, the last person I considered a friend, was gone. And I barely spent any time with Ma.
For the first time in my fourteen years of existence, despite the infinite connections of the Net and the millions of souls trapped in Night City, I was completely, utterly alone.
---
I appreciate the donation of 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).