The House of the Reapr welcomes a new Novice, along with the OperativeAndrea Latson, to its ranks. Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
AN: Well, you guys didn't quite reach the 120 stone goal on WN, but I'll be kind and donate the remaining stones since y'all got it up to 117. So, two chapters for y'all today. As the House grows, so do its goals. The next goal will be 200.
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"Guess I meant… a happier ending… for everyone involved."
- V
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June 3rd, 2063
A relentless, acidic downpour battered the reinforced glass of the Militech tower. The storm drowned Corpo Plaza in a suffocating gray wash, turning the sprawling metropolis into a blurred, weeping smear of neon and shadows.
Alejandro Reyes sat at his workstation in the mid-level management sector, staring blindly at the scrolling data feeds on his monitor. He was running entirely on fumes and black-market stims. There was a bone-deep fatigue that had settled into his marrow over the past few months, slowly rotting his focus from the inside out.
His nights were spent locked in his home office, diving into the corrupted, encrypted telemetry he had pulled from the data shard. At this point, he was chasing ghosts in the static, searching for the digital signature of the things the entity that lurked beyond the Blackwall had dragged with it. But the current hunt was yielding nothing but fragmented data, and whatever luck he used to possess during his initial dives had completely abandoned him.
His work performance at the corporation had inevitably slipped, and the razor-sharp instincts and meticulous efficiency that had defined his long career were dulling to a dangerous degree. He was beginning to miss vital operational deadlines, overlooking minor security flaws in the subnets he managed, and allowing low-level runner trash to probe the outer defenses of Militech's local servers.
The digital abyss was consuming his waking thoughts, leaving only a hollow shell to clock in at the tower every morning. He tasted synth-caf and metallic blood on his tongue, his organic hand trembling slightly as he reached for a datapad when his Agent vibrated against the desk, breaking the monotonous hum of the office. An incoming message flashed on the screen with a high-priority corporate sigil. It was a direct summons to the sixtieth floor.
Alejandro rubbed his tired hazel eyes, letting out a slow breath as he stood up and adjusted the collar of his tailored suit. He ran a quick internal diagnostic on his combat chrome, ensuring his matte-black chromed right arm was fully responsive. He checked his concealed Lexington pistol, confirming it rested securely in its shoulder holster before walking to the executive elevator.
The sixtieth floor was filled with hushed opulence, and the air smelled of expensive air purifiers and genuine leather. The solid mahogany door at the end of the hall slid open smoothly as Alejnadro approached, revealing the expansive corner office of Benedict Miller.
Benedict was a sharply groomed man in his mid-forties. He wore a bespoke suit that cost more eddies than a Watson street-rat would see in a lifetime. His silver-flecked hair was perfectly styled, and his eyes held the cold, calculating emptiness of a man who measured human lives strictly in profit margins.
"Ah, Mr. Reyes," Benedict said smoothly, gesturing to the plush leather chairs positioned opposite his massive desk. "Take a seat. Would you like a drink?"
"I'll take one, sir," Alejandro replied, maintaining his professional facade as he sat down, keeping his posture relaxed but his awareness fully engaged. He scanned the room instinctively, noting the reinforced security cameras and the subtle automated defense turrets hidden in the ceiling corners.
Benedict walked over to a crystal decanter and poured two generous measures of real, aged scotch into polished glasses. He handed one to Alejandro before taking a seat behind his own desk and taking a slow sip, his eyes studying Alejandro over the rim of the glass.
"How are things at home?" Benedict asked, his tone deceptively casual. "How is Julia? And the boy... Santi, right? He must be about ten now."
"He's doing great, Mr. Miller," Alejandro answered easily, taking a sip of the burning liquor. He carefully guarded the truth, knowing any slip could put a target on his son's back. "He's a smart kid, doing well with his private tutor and all. Just a normal boy, really. If anything, he's spending too much time watching old cartoons and drawing pictures. You know how it is."
"I do," Benedict smiled thinly, setting his glass down. "Children are quite a significant investment. They require a stable environment to yield a positive return. We pour resources into them, expecting loyalty and competence in the future, wanting them to carry our legacy forward... Speaking of returns, Alejandro... your recent quarterly metrics have been brought to my attention. You're slipping. Badly."
Alejandro set his glass down on the desk, keeping his expression neutral while suppressing the sudden spike in his heart rate. "I know my numbers have dropped recently. I've just been dealing with some added responsibilities at home, and as of late, my family has required more of my attention. It has left me a bit distracted, but I assure you, it's a temporary dip. I'll pick up the slack by the end of the week."
Benedict laid his hands flat against his desk and nodded his head. He then stood up, walking slowly over to the floor-to-ceiling window, his hand clasped behind his back, staring out at the rain-slicked skyscrapers of the city. He let out a long sigh that echoed in the quiet office.
"You know... I liked you, Alejandro," Benedict said softly, addressing his reflection in the glass. "You were one exceptional asset, a worker who did exactly what he was told to do, executing orders without any questions. You were a remarkably reliable instrument for Militech."
Alejandro frowned as he felt a cold knot forming in his stomach. The fact that there had been a sudden shift in Benedict's tone and that he was referring to him in the past tense sent an unconscious signal to his combat implants, which flooded his system with a micro-dose of adrenaline, preparing his muscles for sudden violence. "I still am that asset, Mr. Miller. I just need a week to balance my schedule."
Benedict turned around slowly, his face was devoid of any former warmth.
"Did you really think we wouldn't find out?" Benedict asked, his voice tinged with disappointment.
Alejandro maintained a blank expression, trying to play dumb. "Find out about what, exactly?"
Benedict sneered as he walked back to his desk. "Please do not insult my intelligence. A week ago, our internal NetWatch division caught a ping that was highly encrypted, masked through a dozen proxy servers, stripped of local routing data, and scrubbed of nearly all identifying markers. It was, quite honestly, a masterpiece of digital camouflage, one we wished wasn't true. We spent days trying to verify the origin point and tracing the breadcrumbs through the dark subnets."
Benedict leaned forward, planting his hands on the desk once again. "You were diving behind the Blackwall from a terminal registered to your residential grid. Just why would you do that, Alejandro? Even after the events that went down ten years ago... events you were directly involved in and responsible for. You executed every single person involved in that op to bury the secret on Militech's behalf. You washed the blood from your hands and took a desk job to hide in plain sight. So tell me, why risk the wrath of this corporation to poke the hornets' nest again?"
The air in the office turned to ice. The jig was up, and Militech knew everything.
But Alejandro didn't waste his breath on an answer or a defense as his instincts screamed at him. He threw himself sideways out of the leather chair and dove hard for the cover of a thick marble structural pillar in the center of the office.
While he was doing so, the mahogany doors slid open, and a blonde-haired woman in a corporate skirt suit strode through the doorway. She raised a Militech pistol and opened fire the second she cleared the threshold.
Alejandro was fast, but he couldn't outrun a wall of lead. As he launched himself through the air, a high-caliber round caught him in the left bicep. The brutal impact spun him mid-dive, tearing through muscle tissue and spraying hot blood across the pristine carpet. Before he even hit the floor, a second bullet punched through his side, glancing off his subdermal armor, but still managing to fracture one of his ribs, sending pain through him.
He grunted in agony, hitting the ground hard, and rolling frantically behind the marble pillar as a hail of armor-piercing rounds shredded the leather chair he had occupied a fraction of a second earlier. The air filled with deafening gunfire, pulverized leather padding, and the acrid stench of cordite.
"Watch the fucking leather!" Benedict's angry shout came a second later as four fully armored Militech spec-ops soldiers flooded into the room behind the woman. They wore matte-black tactical gear and full-face visors, carrying high-capacity assault rifles.
Alejandro ignored the screaming pain in his side and the blood pouring down his left arm. He drew his Lexington from the shoulder holster in a single fluid motion. He popped out from the left side of the marble pillar, locking onto the lead spec-ops soldier and squeezing the trigger twice. Two rounds punched perfectly through the soldier's visor, dropping the man instantly as a spray of red mist exited the back of his head.
"Suppressing fire!" the woman barked, ducking behind the oak doorframe.
Alejandro recognized her voice immediately, after all, he had trained her. It was none other than twenty-eight-year-old Meredith Stout, one of Militech's rising agents.
The remaining soldiers unleashed a barrage of rounds toward Alejandro, the marble pillar chipping and sparking, showering Alejandro in sharp fragments of stone. He pressed his back flat against the cover. He had 18 rounds left in his magazine. He hadn't expected a full hit squad to try and whack him in the middle of the management sector.
Another soldier tried to flank him from the right, moving quickly across the open floor. Alejandro shifted his weight, swung his weapon around, and shot multiple times, one of the rounds impacting the man directly in the throat. The soldier collapsed, clutching his neck as blood poured freely through his fingers and onto the expensive carpet.
Two more armed troops immediately rushed through the doorway to replace the fallen. Alejandro cursed under his breath. He was shot and trapped in a highly structured kill box. He needed to somehow break their formation.
"Why fight it, Reyes?" Meredith called out from her cover, her voice dripping with venomous arrogance. "There is no way out of this room! You're dead meat!"
Her arrogant taunt gave him the exact opening he needed. She had leaned out slightly to yell the words, exposing her midsection.
Alejandro whipped around the right side of the pillar and opened fire. He hit two of the spec-ops soldiers, though their armor caught the bullets. But they couldn't do anything as one of the rounds made its way toward the blonde corporate rising star.
The stray bullet caught Meredith Stout squarely in the stomach, causing her to let out a shocked gasp that sent her pistol clattering to the floor. She collapsed against the doorframe, clutching her bleeding abdomen, her face turning pale.
"Kill that fucker!" Meredith screamed through her teeth, sliding behind the wall and into cover.
Alejandro pulled back into cover, his HUD flashing a critical warning. He was down to a single bullet in the Lexington's chamber.
He was cornered and bleeding profusely from multiple gunshot wounds as spec-ops soldiers slowly moved his way in a tight tactical formation to sweep the pillar. He had a few seconds before they rounded the marble and filled his body with lead.
Alejandro looked across the room toward Benedict Miller, who was standing calmly near the back wall, observing the execution of his former asset with more annoyance over the ruined furniture than interest. The executive hadn't even drawn a weapon, assuming his soldiers would finish the job.
Alejandro gritted his teeth, furiously cursing himself for his own idiotic mistakes. How could he slip up so badly? How could he let his obsession blind him enough to let them track his dive? He had put Julia and Santi in extreme danger. If he was going down, he was taking the arrogant bastard with him.
He lunged out from the left side of the pillar, exposing himself to the advancing soldiers. He ignored the rifles tracking his movement and raised his pistol, perfectly lining up the iron sights with Benedict's smug face before pulling the trigger.
The final round left the chamber with a deafening crack, traveling across the office and striking Benedict precisely between the eyes. The man's skull erupted in a shower of bone fragments, brain matter, and blood, the gore blasting against the wall behind him. Benedict's corpse crumpled to the floor, his head striking his own knees before slamming backward onto the floor, spilling the parts of his brain matter out of the hole.
A rifle round slammed into Alejandro's thigh, almost dropping him to one knee, and another round grazed his cheek, tearing the skin away. But he kept his momentum as the spec-ops soldiers closed in, their rifles raised to deliver the killing blow, and grabbed the steel-framed executive chair sitting near the pillar, hurling the furniture with every ounce of strength he had left toward the floor-to-ceiling window.
The glass was reinforced, but it was only reinforced from the outside-in, meaning that the impact of the steel frame shattered the pane completely with ease. A massive gust of howling wind and freezing rain blasted into the opulent office, scattering confidential paperwork into the storm.
Before the Militech soldiers could realize what he was doing, Alejandro dropped out of the gaping hole, falling out of the sixtieth-floor window into the gray, churning sky of Night City.
The wind roared fiercely in his ears, and the rain whipped his face. He watched as the concrete streets of Corpo Plaza rushed up to meet him and twisted his body mid-air, swinging his fully chromed arm and driving his metal fingers directly into the exterior glass and steel framework of the Militech tower.
The friction was agonizing, his chrome shrieking against the building, protesting the immense strain and pulling at the connection by his shoulder. Sparks flew in a blinding shower, mingling with the rain. The drag threatened to rip his arm directly from his shoulder socket, tearing the artificial muscles and straining the mounting brackets. As he went down, he left a deep, jagged, hand-sized scar tearing down the facade of the skyscraper.
Sixty floors above, Meredith Stout dragged herself to the broken window, clutching her bleeding stomach with one hand. She raised a pistol with her other hand, leaning dangerously over the edge, and fired wildly down into the storm.
The bullets sliced through the rain. One managed to catch Alejandro in the calf, punching clean through the meat, while another skipped off his chromed shoulder plate, jarring his grip. He gritted his teeth against the pain, continuing his screeching, sparking descent.
Eventually, he hit the ground hard. His knees buckled under the force, and a sharp crack echoed from his ribs as he rolled to disperse the landing, tumbling into a pile of discarded trash bags.
He lay in the rain for a moment, his body broken and bleeding from half a dozen wounds, but he forced himself up. He was running purely on combat stims and sheer willpower, limping into the labyrinth of side streets, desperately seeking the shadows to hide from the corporate security drones that would surely be swarming the plaza within a few minutes.
He navigated the twisting alleys, leaving a trail of diluted blood in the puddles as he made his way toward Mbole Ebunike St, moving away from the prying optics of the corporate center. The rain washed the grime and blood from his face.
Once he thought he was reasonably safe, he stopped for a moment, leaning against a damp brick wall, gasping for air. His lungs burned, but he still needed to warn his family before Militech dispatched a squad to Charter Hill.
Alejandro accessed his internal interface, bypassing his damaged optic sensors, and compiled a highly encrypted, priority-one ping, routing it directly to Julia's personal Agent in their apartment.
Julia. They found out. Get the data chip from the office, hit the EMP to fry the servers and the terminals. Grab Santi and run. Don't look back, I'll contact you when it's safe. I love you both. This message will delete within a minute of you opening it.
He authorized the transmission and sent the ping successfully.
Alejandro let out a ragged breath, thinking he was safe for the moment. He thought he had bought enough time to find an underground ripperdoc, patch his bleeding wounds, and disappear into the badlands to meet up with them later.
He pushed himself off the brick wall and began to cross the dark street, letting his shoulders relax for a fraction of a second when the blinding glare of high-beam headlights pierced the rain, and an armored Chevillon Emperor 520 Ragnar roared down the asphalt, its engine screaming as the driver gunned the accelerator, hydroplaning slightly on the wet street.
Alejandro turned his head, his pupils constricting against the harsh light. He didn't even have time to raise his arms, as his body was too damaged for sudden responses, and a split second later, the grill of the SUV struck him.
The impact shattered his remaining ribs and fractured his spine. He was thrown violently through the air, crashing down onto the wet asphalt, sliding across the rough ground, his body coming to a halt near the flooded gutter.
He lay flat on his back. He couldn't move his legs. He couldn't feel his left arm at all. His blood flowed freely from his shattered body, mixing with the dirty rainwater and swirling down into the city drains.
He heard as the armored SUV screeched to a halt nearby, one of its doors swinging open.
Meredith Stout stepped out into the rain. She was limping badly, her corporate suit soaked with blood from the gunshot wound to her stomach. She held a pistol in her right hand. Her face was twisted into a mask of pure, unadulterated rage.
She walked over to where Alejandro lay broken on the street and stood over him, the rain plastering her blonde hair to her skull. Her breathing was ragged, her free hand pressing a combat dressing against her abdomen.
Alejandro stared up at her, but there was nothing he could do. He couldn't fight anymore, and the combat stims had burned out, leaving nothing but cold, paralyzing agony. He looked past the furious corporate agent, staring up at the gray Night City sky.
Memories flooded his fading consciousness. In the back of his mind, he saw Julia smiling at him across their kitchen table before having a child had even been a topic they discussed. He saw Santi's striking white hair and violet eyes playing through his head. He remembered the day they had brought the boy home as if it were just yesterday. He had bought them time. He had managed to prepare his son as best he could. He had done what he had to do.
"Did you really think we wouldn't be able to track our property?" Meredith asked, her voice tight with pain and anger. She aimed the barrel of the pistol directly at his face.
Alejandro remained silent, memories replaying in his head as the rain fell softly against his skin.
Meredith's anger flared even hotter. His silence pissed her off even more than getting shot, and embarrassing her in front of a squad of grunts ever did. "You should know this better than anyone, Reyes. No one runs from Militech's grip. No one."
Her arrogant words finally prompted him to react. Alejandro turned his head slightly, locking his fading hazel eyes on the ambitious woman. He saw the ruthless corporate machine staring back at him, young and eager to climb the ladder over a pile of corpses, just like he had been years ago.
"I've already been... on the other side of that gun..." Alejandro coughed, blood spilling over his lips. He offered her a bloody, defiant grin, refusing to give her the satisfaction of his fear. He made the effort to move his chrome arm and raise it to give her the middle finger. "Just wonder how long it'll be before they decide it's your-"
Meredith didn't let him finish the thought, pulling the trigger. The gunshot echoed through the empty street, and silence fell for a second. Then she pulled it again, and again, and again, emptying the entire magazine into his head in a fit of rage. The rounds pulverized bone and chrome alike.
When the slide locked back on an empty chamber, Alejandro Reyes was zeroed. His head was left as nothing but a ruined mess of bloody mush and shattered chrome in the pouring rain.....
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The simulated sun of the African virtual safari beat down on Santi's skin, radiating a programmed warmth that felt indistinguishable from reality. He stood in the tall, dry grass of the digitized savannah, analyzing the majestic stride of a massive bull elephant. The commercial braindance wreath rested securely around his temples, feeding sensory data directly into his cortex and bypassing his optical nerves entirely. He was mapping the emotional resonance of the recording artist, categorizing the feelings of awe and profound peace the original creator had embedded into the raw data stream. It was a fascinating exercise in understanding organic emotional variables.
In the physical world of the Charter Hill apartment, Julia was standing in the kitchen, pouring a glass of sparkling Real Water.
Her Agent buzzed on the marble countertop, and Julia glanced down, expecting a routine notification from her superiors at the Militech logistics division. However, the screen illuminated with a highly encrypted, priority-one ping with no sender identification and a decryption key matched Alejandro's unique local signature.
She tapped the screen and watched the text that appeared on it.
Julia. They found out. Get the data chip from the office, hit the EMP to fry the servers and the terminals. Grab Santi and run. Don't look back, I'll contact you when it's safe. I love you both. This message will delete within a minute of you opening it.
The glass slipped from her fingers and shattered against the tiled floor, sending water and sharp crystalline shards scattering across the kitchen.
A suffocating cold seized Julia's chest, and the air seemed to vanish from her lungs. She stared at the glowing text on the Agent, reading the words over and over until the harsh reality of the message carved its way into her bones, and the message ultimately self-deleted.
Alejandro was compromised, and the corporation had found out about his search beyond the Blackwall. The "I love you both" part of the message was stripped of all his usual Solo bravado and corporate confidence, something that confirmed her deepest, most paralyzing fear.
Her husband was most likely already dead. She could feel the brutal truth of it anchoring itself in her soul. Alejandro would never send a message telling her to run without him unless he was already beyond saving.
She felt panic hijack her nervous system and sprinted into the living room. Santi was resting peacefully on the plush sofa, completely submerged in the virtual safari, a serene expression smoothing out his usually analytical features.
Julia grabbed the silver halo of the braindance wreath and ripped it roughly from his head. Santi gasped, his body jerking upward as his consciousness was violently yanked from the sun-drenched savannah and slammed back into the dim, neon-filtered lighting of their apartment. He blinked rapidly, his violet eyes wide and disoriented.
"Get up!" Julia screamed, her voice cracking with fear. "Santi, get up right now!"
"Ma?" Santi asked, blinking rapidly as his eyes adjusted to the dim lighting of the apartment. He looked at her shaking hands and the wide panic in her eyes. "What's going on? What's the emergency?"
"Go to your room!" Julia grabbed his shoulders, physically pulling him up from the sofa and pushing him toward the hallway. "Pack your cyberdeck! Pack the wreath! Grab a backpack and put your clothes in it right this second! We are going on a trip!"
Santi stumbled slightly, catching his balance. He turned to look at her, his brow furrowing in confusion. "A trip? Ma, we didn't plan anything. Where are we even going? I don't even know what to pack right now."
"Do it now, Santi!" Julia shrieked, tears finally breaking free and spilling down her cheeks. "Do not argue with me! Just pack your things!"
Santi flinched at the scream. He had never seen his mother lose control like this. The sheer panic in her voice overrode his confusion, and he gave a quick, worried nod before sprinting down the hallway toward his bedroom to do what she asked.
Julia turned and ran in the opposite direction, skidding to a halt in front of Alejandro's home office. She pressed her thumb against the glass and leaned in for the retinal sweep. The security protocols recognized her secondary clearance, and the seals hissed, allowing the solid door to slide open.
The room was freezing, dominated by the humming towers of super-cooled server racks Alejandro had been using for his illicit dives. Julia rushed to the primary air-gapped terminal. She didn't know the first thing about coding or Net architecture, but she knew exactly what her husband kept hidden. She reached behind the primary monitor, her fingers frantically searching the dark casing until she felt the small, concealed release latch. She pressed it, and a tiny compartment popped open.
Resting inside was the data chip that contained the blueprints for the carbon-nanotube mesh currently woven into her son's brain, along with God knows what else. Julia snatched the chip and shoved it deep into her undergarments, pressing the cold silicon flat against her skin where no corporate security scan would casually search.
She turned her attention to the wall beside the terminal and saw where Alejandro had installed a physical failsafe exactly for this scenario. She flipped the red protective cover up and slammed her palm against the manual EMP detonator.
A deafening crack echoed inside the sealed room as a localized electromagnetic pulse ripped through the office. The humming server racks instantly died, and the monitors went completely black. A loud sizzle of frying circuits filled the air, immediately followed by the acrid, toxic stench of burning silicon and melted copper wiring. Everything inside the room was permanently zeroed.
Julia spun around, abandoning the ruined office. She sprinted into her own master bedroom. She dragged a large canvas duffel bag from the closet and threw it onto the mattress. She ripped open her dresser drawers, grabbing handfuls of clothing, completely ignoring color coordination or logic. She grabbed a stash of physical eurodollars Alejandro kept hidden in a hollowed-out book along with a chip that contained 10,000 untraceable eddies. She threw it all into the bag, her hands shaking so violently she could barely work the zipper.
She grabbed the handles, ready to run, when her mind completely halted. The frantic, animal-like panic froze, suddenly replaced by a cold wave of pure corporate logic. She was a secretary at Militech. She understood how the machine operated.
Militech owned the streets of the corporate center. They monitored the transit networks. They controlled the airspace. If a low-level administrative assistant and her ten-year-old son suddenly vanished into the night just hours after her husband went rogue, it would instantly confirm her complicity. NetWatch would flag their biometric signatures at every checkpoint, and Corpo hit squads would hunt them relentlessly through the badlands.
Running was an admission of guilt. Running would paint a permanent target on Santi's back. Therefore, the only play they had left in the book was absolute ignorance.
Julia dropped the duffel bag and unzipped it, pulling the clothes back out. She meticulously folded every shirt and placed them exactly where they belonged in the dresser drawers. She returned the physical currency to its hiding spot, including the credit chip. She smoothed the wrinkles out of the bedsheets until the room looked undisturbed.
She walked out into the hallway and approached Alejandro's office. Thin wisps of foul-smelling smoke were leaking from the edges of the doorframe. She pulled the door completely shut, ensuring the biometric lock engaged and secured the room. She moved to the apartment's environmental control panel on the wall and manually bypassed the automated settings, forcing the air scrubbers to maximum capacity. The ventilation system roared to life, aggressively filtering the stench of burnt wires out of the living space.
Julia closed her eyes, forcing herself to take long, agonizingly slow breaths. She had to bury the grief and the fear, becoming nothing but an empty vessel.
She opened her eyes, her expression settling into a rigid mask of forced calm, and walked into Santi's bedroom.
The boy was standing by his bed. His backpack open, his silver Moore Technologies braindance wreath carefully nested inside. He was currently organizing his silver personal link cables, trying to fit a few pairs of jeans into the remaining space.
"Santi, stop," Julia said quietly, her voice dropping to a steady tone.
Santi paused, a cable still wrapped around his fingers, and looked up at her, completely thrown by the sudden shift in her demeanor. "You just screamed at me to pack, Ma. I was trying to figure out which cables I need and grab my clothes."
"I know what I said, papi," Julia murmured, stepping into the room. "But we are not going anywhere right now. We are staying here."
Santi's brow furrowed in genuine confusion. "But you were scared and crying."
"You're right," Julia admitted, swallowing the massive lump of grief lodged in her throat. She fought her own emotions, desperately maintaining eye contact to project stability for her son. "I was wrong. I got a message from your father, and I panicked. I wasn't thinking clearly. I am sorry for yelling at you."
Santi tilted his head, noticing the slight tremor in her hands and the redness around her eyes. "If Pa sent a message that made you panic... is he okay? Did something happen to him?"
"It just means we need to wait," Julia lied smoothly, moving to the bed. She began pulling his clothes out of the backpack, setting them back on his dresser. "Help me unpack this. We need to put everything exactly back where it was."
Santi did not understand the contradictory commands, but he recognized the necessity of following her lead. He silently unpacked his cyberdeck and his coiled cables, placing them back on his desk.
Julia took his hand, her grip tight, and led him back down the hallway into the living room. The environmental scrubbers had successfully eliminated the smoke, leaving the apartment smelling of recycled air.
"Sit down," Julia instructed, guiding him to the sofa, passing him the braindance wreath for him to put on. "Put this back on, and continue doing exactly what you were doing before I interrupted you."
Santi stared at the silver halo, then back at his mother. "Ma, putting this back on doesn't make any sense right now. Let me jack into the local subnets. I can ping Pa's deck, or look for news feeds to see what's wrong."
"No," Julia said firmly, placing the wreath directly into his hands. "You will not touch the Net or look for him. You put this on, and you stay in the simulation until I tell you to take it off. Do you understand me?"
The authority in her voice left no room for negotiation. Santi nodded, slipping the metal band over his head and aligning the internal diodes with his temples. He activated the sequence, and his consciousness slipped away from the uncertainty of the living room, returning to the programmed warmth of the virtual savannah.
Julia watched his body relax as the simulation took hold, and turned away, grabbing the remote control for the wall-mounted screen. She navigated the media library, bypassing the news feeds and the corporate propaganda channels, and selected an ancient, two-dimensional movie file Alejandro had downloaded years ago. Star Wars.
The iconic yellow text began crawling up the starry screen, accompanied by the blaring, triumphant orchestral score as Julia sat down on the opposite end of the sofa. She pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around her legs.
She stared at the screen, watching laser blasts exchange between fictional spaceships. She sat there acting as if nothing had happened, pretending she was just a normal corporate employee enjoying a quiet afternoon with her son.
Though inside her mind, she was screaming. She was going completely crazy, tearing herself apart with the knowledge that her husband's body was likely thrown somewhere in the pouring rain, while the people who killed him were undoubtedly marching toward her front door.
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I don't need it... I don't need it... I don't need it... I don't need it... I NEEEEDDDD IIITTTTTT. I demand thy stones, give it here!
For those of you who want to read more, we're currently up to chapter 16, but the goal is to make it a nice 15 ahead (there are also advanced chapters for my novel To Conquer The Stars, of course.)
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