"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.
They walked out into the living room. Julia grabbed the handles of the heavy canvas duffel bag, slinging the strap over her shoulder, and gripped the handles of two of the large suitcases. Santi, despite his small size, grabbed the handles of the remaining two suitcases, determined to carry his own weight.
They walked out of the apartment, the heavy door clicking shut behind them for the final time.
The elevator ride down to the lobby was slow and quiet. When the doors finally parted, Julia walked directly to the concierge desk. The corporate attendant behind the marble counter didn't even look up from his terminal, his optical implants glowing faintly as he processed incoming data.
Julia pulled a small, silver data drive from her pocket that contained the encrypted access logs, the biometric key codes, and the official surrender of the property. She placed it on the marble counter.
"Apartment 7004," Julia stated, her voice devoid of any emotion. "We are vacating the premises per the termination agreement."
The attendant finally looked up, swiftly taking the drive and slotting it into his terminal. He tapped a few keys, and the screen flashed green.
"Confirmed. Your access codes have been revoked and your biometric data purged from the residential registry," the attendant recited in a bored tone. "You are officially removed from the Charter Hill corporate database. Have a pleasant day in Night City."
Just like that, they were erased. Almost twenty years of climbing the corporate ladder, twenty years of Alejandro bleeding for Militech, wiped away with a single keystroke.
Julia turned away from the desk, guiding Santi toward the expansive glass doors of the lobby. Outside, the relentless, acidic rain continued to fall, washing the neon reflections of the city across the wet pavement. A sleek, armored taxicab was idling at the curb, its heavily tinted windows obscuring the interior.
As the automated doors slid open and the damp, smog-choked air of Night City hit her face, Julia's mind briefly flashed back to the call she had made the previous night.
She had locked herself in the bathroom, using a burner Agent to bypass the corporate communication logs, and dialed a heavily encrypted international number. She had called her parents.
They had lived in Mexico for almost fifteen years now, having fled the suffocating corporate grind of Night City to retire in a small, quiet coastal community far away from the smog and the gang violence.
When her mother had answered, Julia had broken down. She had explained everything: Alejandro's death, her immediate termination, the impending eviction, and the absolute lack of safe harbor for her and Santi. She had begged for help.
Her mother had wept for her daughter's pain, immediately agreeing to let them use the old family property that had been sitting vacant in Santo Domingo for a decade and a half. But then her father took the phone.
"I told you, Julia," her father's voice had crackled over the poor connection, bitter and entirely devoid of sympathy. "I told you the day you married him that the Solo would leave you in the gutter. I knew he was nothing but a street-rat playing dress-up in a corpo suit. He played a dangerous game, and now my daughter and my grandson are paying the price for his stupidity."
Julia had bitten her tongue so hard it bled, stopping herself from burning her current lifeline by defending Alejandro and screaming at her father. She had swallowed her pride and her rage because she desperately needed a roof over her child's head.
"The house is yours," her father had grumbled finally. "But it has been sitting empty in Rancho Coronado for fifteen years. God only knows what state of disrepair it is in. We'll send you the access codes. Keep your head down, Julia."
A quiet moment passed before her father spoke again. "I'm sorry you have to go through this. If you need anything, let us know... Te amo, mija."
The memory of the call faded as the cab's rear window slid open. "I ain't got all day to be waiting around, woman. You gonna get in or what?"
"Ah, I'm sorry, yes," Julia apologized to the cab driver and loaded the suitcases into the trunk before ushering Santi into the backseat, and climbing in beside him, throwing the heavy duffel bag onto the floor space.
"We're going to Rancho Coronado, Santo Domingo," Julia told the driver. "Take the highway toward the badlands. There is an unnamed residential cross-street situated directly between Sequoia Street, Crestmont Street, and Bullard Street. Drop us at the intersection."
"Yeah, I know where the place. Dingy little spot," the driver responded with a grunt. "Time says forty-two minutes, pero solo Diosito sabe si es verdad (but only God knows if that's true)."
The cab pulled away from the curb, merging smoothly into the elevated traffic roads of Charter Hill.
For the first twenty minutes, the view outside the reinforced windows consisted of towering glass skyscrapers, glowing corporate advertisements, and elevated sky-bridges connecting the bastions of the ultra-wealthy. But as the cab descended the massive off-ramps and crossed the municipal border into Santo Domingo, the other side of Night City violently asserted itself.
The gleaming glass and steel gave way to rust, stained concrete, and sprawling industrial complexes. The air outside grew visibly thicker, choked with the yellow-brown smog of the Arroyo factories.
Santi stared out the window, his tear-stained face illuminated by the flickering, broken neon signs of cheap ripperdoc clinics and grimy liquor stores. He was analyzing the architectural shift of the buildings and the disparity between the two places. Charter Hill was built on verticality and optimization, while Santo Domingo was a sprawling, chaotic mess of poverty, pollution, and survival.
The cab navigated the cracked, pothole-riddled streets of Rancho Coronado. The neighborhood was a maze of identical, decaying single and two-story tract homes, originally built in the 2020s for the corporate middle-class before the sector had been abandoned to the gangoons and the working poor. Now it was under the control of the 6th Street gang, whose presence could be seen throughout the sector.
"We're here," the driver announced, and the cab turned off the main thoroughfare and rolled slowly down a narrow, unnamed street lined with cracked sidewalks and overgrown, dead weeds. It pulled to a smooth stop at the curb.
"That'll be 200 eduardos," the driver said.
Julia paid the exorbitant fare, and they stepped out into the humid, garbage-scented air of Santo Domingo. As soon as she retrieved their luggage, the cab quickly sped away, eager to get the hell out of dodge.
She turned and looked at their new home.
It was a single-story brick house, the masonry stained black with decades of acid rain and industrial soot. The front lawn was a patch of hard, dead dirt, and looking up, Julia could see the roof. There were four working solar panels, their glass surfaces cracked but still drawing a meager charge, alongside three entirely shattered, non-working panels that had been utterly destroyed by hail or vandalism.
The property was bordered by a chain-link fence that was rusted through in several places. Through the gaps, Julia could see the backyard. It possessed a detached, dilapidated garage and, crucially, an open, unsecured access point that bled directly out onto Sequoia Street.
Because of that open access, the backyard had clearly become a dumping ground with piles of soggy cardboard, shattered glass bottles, and rusted, discarded cyberware parts heaped near the back door. The stench of rotting trash was overpowering.
Julia looked across the street. Looming over the neighborhood was the short concrete structure of the NC Center for Behavioural Health. The facility looked more like a maximum-security prison than a hospital, its walls topped with razor wire and security cameras panning the street.
Just down the block, lingering near a broken streetlamp, Julia spotted a group of five men. They wore tactical vests, combat boots, and American flag bandanas wrapped around their arms and faces.
6th Street gangoons.
They were passing a bottle of cheap synth-liquor back and forth, their optics glowing in the shadows as they openly stared at the woman and the small boy standing on the sidewalk with a pile of expensive luggage.
Fear spiked in Julia's chest. They were absolute prey out here.
"Grab your bags, Santi," Julia said urgently, keeping her eyes fixed forward, refusing to make eye contact with the gangers. "Move quickly and head straight for the front door."
Santi grabbed his two suitcases and followed her up the cracked concrete path. They stepped onto the small front porch. The wood was entirely rotted, groaning dangerously beneath their weight.
Julia pulled her Agent from her pocket and brought up the digital key her father had sent her, pressing the device against the rusted electronic lock on the front door. The lock beeped weakly, protesting the sudden use after fifteen years of dormancy, and the heavy deadbolt ground against the rusted frame before the door finally clicked open.
Julia pushed the door inward, and they were immediately hit by a wall of utterly foul, stale air. It was a suffocating smell, a mixture of mildew, trapped dust, peeling wallpaper, and something deeply, inherently rancid that made Julia's stomach violently heave. The house was pitch black, the heavy blackout curtains drawn tightly shut over the windows.
"Papi," Julia choked out, pulling her shirt up over her nose to filter the stench. "Wait out here on the porch for a minute. Do not go near the street. I need to go inside and open up the windows to let this air out."
Santi nodded, dropping his suitcases on the porch. He stood perfectly still, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his hoodie, his violet eyes warily watching the 6th Street gangers down the block.
Julia took a deep breath of the relatively cleaner outside air and stepped into the pitch-black house. The floorboards creaked under her boots, and she fumbled blindly in the dark, her hands brushing against dust-covered walls and cobwebs. She navigated by memory from her childhood, moving through the narrow living room and down the short hallway toward the master bedroom.
She found the doorway and stepped inside. The rancid, suffocating smell was infinitely stronger in here. It smelled like copper, rotting meat, and vomit. It was the smell of death.
Julia coughed, her eyes watering as she stumbled across the room, her hands desperately searching for the heavy curtains. She found the thick fabric and ripped it backward, throwing the window open to the gray light of the stormy afternoon.
The dim light flooded the master bedroom, and Julia turned around to survey the room, and the breath was violently stolen from her lungs.
Lying in the center of the rotting mattress was a corpse.
It was a man, though his features were barely recognizable. His skin was a mottled shade of purple and black, bloated with advanced decomposition. He was dressed in filthy, ragged clothing. A crude, rusted cybernetic arm lay limply at his side. Clutched in his remaining organic hand was a heavy, glass hypodermic syringe, the plunger fully depressed. Dozens of empty, crushed ampoules of Black Lace and synthetic heroin littered the floor around the bed. A thick, dark puddle of dried fluids had seeped into the mattress beneath him.
The corpse had been rotting in the suffocating heat of the sealed house for at least a week. Maggots writhed in the sunken hollows of his eye sockets.
A high, terrified scream ripped from Julia's throat before she could stop it.
She spun around, clamping a hand over her mouth as she violently dry-heaved. She bolted from the bedroom, sprinting frantically down the dark hallway and bursting out the front door, gasping desperately for the fresh, rainy air.
Santi jumped, his hand instinctively flying to his backpack where his cyberdeck was stored. "Ma? What is it? What happened?"
"Stay out here!" Julia gasped, leaning over the porch railing and spitting bile into the dead grass. She pulled her Agent from her pocket with shaking, frantic hands. "Do not go inside!"
She dialed the emergency NCPD dispatch frequency. It rang three times before a bored operator picked up.
"NCPD Dispatch. What is the nature of your emergency?"
"I just found a dead body!" Julia cried, pacing frantically on the porch. "I just moved into my family's old property in Rancho Coronado! I opened the bedroom door, and there is a dead man on the bed!"
"Address?" the operator asked, entirely unbothered by the panic in her voice.
Julia rattled off the intersection and the specific block details.
"Copy that. A patrol unit will be dispatched when available. Do not touch the remains."
Then the line clicked dead.
Julia stood on the rotting porch, her arms wrapped tightly around herself, trembling uncontrollably. Santi stood quietly beside her, his small hand reaching out to grip the fabric of her sweater. He leaned against her side, offering what little comfort a grieving ten-year-old could provide.
They waited in the grim afternoon. The 6th Street gangoons down the street eventually grew bored of staring at them and wandered off into an alley, seeking shelter from the worsening rain.
The wail of a police siren echoed through the neighborhood over thirty minutes later.
In the affluent sectors of Charter Hill or Corpo Plaza, a thirty-minute response time for a reported corpse would have resulted in an immediate internal investigation and the firing of the responding officers. In the forgotten, decaying sprawl of Santo Domingo, a thirty-minute response time was considered a miraculous record.
A battered, heavily armored NCPD cruiser pulled up to the curb, its red and blue lights reflecting off the puddles in the street. Two patrol officers stepped out wearing heavy tactical armor and carrying shotguns, their faces hidden behind rain-streaked visors.
"You the one who called it in?" the lead officer grunted, walking up the cracked path.
"Yes," Julia said, her voice shaking. She pointed a trembling finger toward the open front door. "He is in the master bedroom down the hall."
The officers sighed, clearly annoyed by the paperwork. They walked into the house, activating the tactical flashlights mounted on their shoulders.
Julia and Santi waited on the porch, and five minutes later, the officers emerged. They weren't rushing or calling for crime scene investigators or trauma teams.
"Just another street-rat who pushed his luck," the lead officer said, casually adjusting the strap of his shotgun. "Looks like an overdose. Black Lace, probably cut with rat poison. Happens ten times a day in this area. The back door was kicked in, and by the looks of it, he squatted here for about a week or so to ride out a binge, and his heart finally popped."
"What... what are you going to do?" Julia asked, staring at the officer in disbelief.
"Called a meat-wagon," the officer replied, gesturing down the street as a rusted, heavily armored municipal ambulance turned the corner. "They'll bag the body and haul it to the incinerator. You're gonna have to buy a new mattress, lady. And you might want to invest in security for that back door, or the next squatter might not be dead when you find him."
The ambulance pulled up, and paramedics in heavy hazmat gear walked into the house with a black body bag. Less than five minutes later, they dragged the heavy, foul-smelling bag out the front door, tossing it without any care into the back of the ambulance.
The cops got back into their cruiser, and the ambulance drove away. The entire horrific ordeal was processed, categorized, and forgotten by the city in less than fifteen minutes.
Julia stood on the rotting porch of the decaying, garbage-strewn house. She looked at her ten-year-old son, who was staring blankly at the empty street, his genius mind attempting to calculate the unadulterated apathy of the world they had just been thrust into.
Julia let out a hollow, bitter laugh that sounded more like a sob as the rain continued to fall, washing the grime deeper into the concrete. Alejandro was dead, her career ashes, and her family had been reduced to the clothes in their bags, standing on a rotting porch that smelled of dead junkies and stale despair.
What a damn welcome to their new lives.
--------
Run your pockets and hand over the stones.
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