Chương 19: Growing Up Fast II

Julia held him on the kitchen floor for a long time, the ambient hum of the neon lights outside casting long shadows across the room. The fight had drained the last reserves of her energy. She knew she should force him to delete the daemon, to pull the plug and burn the chip. But as she held her son and felt the agonizing throb of her own overworked joints, the harsh reality of Night City crushed her moral high ground. They needed the scratch. Without it, they were one bad month away from living in an alleyway.

"Okay," Julia whispered weakly, conceding defeat to the city that had already taken so much from her.

"Okay, mijo. But you must promise me that you will not take any more risks. You will not push it further. You have to learn to keep your head down."

"I promise, Ma," Santi said softly. Later that night, Santi lay in the dark of his bedroom. The house was quiet, save for the faint, muffled sounds coming from the master bedroom down the hall. Julia was crying, letting out soft and broken sobs. He could hear her whispering into her pillow, cursing Alejandro's name in the dark. She cursed him for his obsession, for his secrets, and for dying. She cursed him for leaving her alone to raise a child who was too smart for his own good in a city designed to chew him up.

She hated their situation, and she hated the fact that she had been forced to accept stolen money from her thirteen-year-old son just to survive. Santi lay perfectly still, staring at the ceiling. His hands clenched into tight fists at his sides, his fingernails biting into his palms. Silent tears rolled down his cheeks, soaking into the pillowcase. He didn't resent his mother for crying or for the things she said. He understood the variables of her grief perfectly.

But hearing her broken spirit ignited a cold resolve deep within him.

'I will fix this,' Santi promised himself in the dark.

'I will make enough eddies. I will build an empire of scratch so massive that she will never have to pump gas or stand behind bulletproof glass ever again.' The slow trickle of the [RatATax. exe] wasn't going to be enough to help him achieve this. He needed to get stronger. He needed to get smarter. The year came to an end, and Rancho Coronado was plunged into the bleak, smog-choked spring of 2066. And although time moved forward, it didn't have the ability to heal wounds, at least not in Santo Domingo.

Here, it merely calloused over them. As the months dragged on, the dynamics of the street began to violently shift. Jax and Leo turned sixteen, an age that, in the affluent sectors of Charter Hill, was reserved for corporate internships and private driving lessons. However, in the sprawling gutters of the 6th Street territory, sixteen was the age of conscription. The change wasn't sudden, but it was true.

Leo swapped his hand-me-down jackets for tactical vests adorned with the stars and stripes motif of the 6th Street gang. Jax stopped chewing on flavored plastic and started chewing on stim-sticks, and before anyone knew it, they were both carrying iron. Santi was sitting on his porch one humid July afternoon, manipulating a string of code on his cyberdeck, when Leo and Jax swaggered up the cracked sidewalk. Maya was trailing behind them, looking distinctly uncomfortable with the new dynamic.

"Yo, ghost-boy," Leo called out, his voice deeper and laced with a new, forced swagger. Santi looked up and immediately noticed the heavy, unnatural bulge beneath the waistband of Leo's tactical pants. Having made some research into weapons, he recognized the print of a BudgetArms Slaught-O-Matic, a cheap, polymer one-shot pistol. Jax had a similar bulge beneath his jacket.

"Hey, Leo," Santi replied casually, closing his deck.

"Nova threads. You boys officially flying the colors now?"

"Gots to, choom," Jax said, puffing his chest out slightly.

"Neighborhood's getting hot.

'Tino scouts been pushing up past the Arroyo border, and the LT's are handing out more responsibility. Testing loyalty, you know? Gotta be able to defend the block." Santi nodded slowly, understanding the sociological tribalism that drove the boostergangs, but the cold logic of it escaped him. Dying for a patch of irradiated dirt seemed like a gonk idea.

"Just watch your backs," Santi advised neutrally. About a month later, in August, Leo's older brother, Mateo, who had been serving a ten-year sentence in a corporate-contracted municipal lockup for grand theft auto, died. He wasn't a ganger or anything. He was just a desperate kid who had boosted the wrong Rayfield Aerondight. The news of Mateo's death hit the street fast since he hadn't been killed by the guards or a rival car-theft ring.

He had been zeroed in the mess hall by a deranged, heavily chromed Valentino who was serving life for a mass-casualty cyberpsycho incident. The 'Tino didn't know Mateo, and he didn't care that Mateo had no gang affiliations. The Valentino had simply found out Mateo was from Santo Domingo, which to him meant 6th Street territory, so he drove a sharpened toothbrush through Mateo's eye socket purely out of geographical spite. Violence for the sake of violence.

The death fundamentally broke something inside Leo, and the swagger he once carried vanished, replaced by volatile rage. He became a live wire, completely unpredictable. The grief, instead of making him sad, had made him paranoid and hyper-aggressive. Two weeks after the funeral, Santi was walking through one of the alleys near Megabuilding 07, carrying a box of scavenged micro-processors he had found near a dumpster, when he came across Leo, who was sitting on the hood of a rusted car.

He was staring blankly at the brick wall, his hand resting heavily on the grip of the pistol tucked into his waistband.

"Hey, Leo," Santi said softly, approaching his choom with caution. He noted the elevated heart rate visible in the pulse of Leo's neck.

"You okay, choom? Do you know if Jax is around? I wanted to see if he had any spare copper wiring." Leo's head snapped toward Santi, the pupils in his bloodshot eyes dilating with cheap combat stims.

"What did you just ask me?" Leo snarled, his voice a dangerous hiss. Santi stopped walking.

"I just asked if Jax was around, Leo."

"What do you think you, gonkhead? Think I'm his fucking keeper?!" Leo roared, sliding off the car hood. In a blur of motion fueled by the stims, he drew the polymer one-shot and shoved the barrel directly into Santi's face, pressing the cold plastic against the bridge of his nose. The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. Santi froze as his Neural Link instantly initiated a combat-threat analysis. Distance: Point blank. Weapon: BudgetArms Slaught-O-Matic.

Caliber: 9mm caseless. Firing mechanism: Unreliable, but currently active. Probability of lethal trauma: 98%.

"Leo, put the iron down," Santi said, the neural link suppressing the biological panic, forcing a terrifying, cold detachment into his tone.

"The safety is disengaged, and you have five pounds of pressure resting on a hair-trigger. You are experiencing a misdirected grief-response."

"Don't give me that corpo-bot psycho-babble bullshit!" Leo screamed, his hand shaking violently, the barrel rattling against Santi's skull.

"My brother is dead! You don't know shit about the street, ghost-boy! You just sit on your porch and act like you're better than us! I should flatline you just to see what color you bleed!"

"Leo! What the fuck are you doing?!" Jax came sprinting around the corner of the alley, his eyes wide with panic. He threw his massive bulk into Leo, knocking the taller boy sideways and causing the gun to be fired into the air with a deafening CRACK. The bullet ricocheted off the brick wall and rained dust down onto the pavement. Leo hit the ground hard, dropping the weapon.

He scrambled backward, pulling his knees to his chest, and burst into harsh, ragged sobs, the stims crashing out of his system and leaving nothing but the broken, grieving sixteen-year-old underneath. Jax kicked the gun away and looked at Santi, his face pale.

"Delta, Santi. Just delta! He's hexed out of his mind! Go!" Santi didn't argue. He picked up his box of micro-processors, turned on his heel, and ran away without looking back. The childhood pack was dead, murdered by the gravity of Night City. The inevitable conclusion to Leo's downward spiral came in October of 2066. The crisp autumn air was heavily tainted with Arroyo smog when Maya found Santi sitting on his back porch, her face streaked with tears, and her clothes disheveled.

"He's zeroed, Santi," Maya sobbed, collapsing onto the wooden steps beside him. Santi stopped typing on his deck as a cold, hollow feeling settled in his chest.

"Leo?"

"Yeah," Maya choked out, burying her face in her hands.

"The gonk completely lost his mind. He stole an assault rifle from a 6th Street stash house last night and drove a stolen Thornton straight into the Glen. Into Heywood." Santi's eyes widened as he processed the information. The Glen was deep Valentino territory, meaning that Leo dove headfirst into a suicide mission.

"He walked into a crowded taqueria and just opened fire," Maya cried, her shoulders shaking violently.

"He actually zeroed two of them before they even knew what was happening. But... but they had smart weapons, Santi, and they had heavy chrome. They shredded him before he made it back to the street. NCPD didn't even bother calling trauma and just bagged him." Santi stared out at the rusted chain-link fence of the backyard. Leo was dead. A kid he had played kickball with, a kid who had hyped him up to jump across rooftops, was lying on a slab in a morgue, turned to Swiss cheese because he couldn't process his grief.

Santi stood up, his deck slipping from his lap. He walked inside the house and went into the bathroom, locking the door. He gripped the edges of the cracked porcelain sink and looked at himself in the mirror. He was weeks away from turning fourteen. He was an early bloomer, standing at five-foot-eight. His shoulders had broadened from hauling mechanical scrap, and his arms held a lean, wiry strength.

If you ignored the lingering softness of his childish face and the striking, curly white hair, he had the silhouette of a grown man. In the eyes of the street, he was no longer a child, but rather, a potential target. The anger hit him then, crashing onto him like a violent tidal wave. It was different from the grief he had felt for his father. Alejandro's death had been a corporate execution, a consequence of doing something behind his bosses' backs. But Leo's death was just the street being the street.

It was the meat-grinder claiming another piece of fodder. And worst of all, it was entirely preventable, born of weakness and a lack of self-control. Santi gripped the sink until his knuckles turned white, the porcelain groaning under the pressure. The system was designed to crush the weak. His mother was breaking her body for minimum wage because Militech blacklisted her, and no other corporation would touch her with a 10-foot pole. She lacked power.

Leo was dead in a gutter because he lacked discipline and self-control.

'I will not be weak,' Santi swore to his reflection, his violet eyes burning with a terrifying, absolute intensity.

'I will not be a victim of Night City. I will forge myself into a fucking weapon that will cut down any gonk who tries me.' Santi's resolution required immediate, actionable protocols. He already had the means, since, over the last year, the trickle from [RatATax. exe] had accumulated significantly.

To avoid arousing suspicion, Julia had legally opened a baseline municipal bank account under Santi's SIN, citing it as a repository for the money she gave him to buy "tinkering supplies" and offline educational modules. Santi had carefully, meticulously siphoned a portion of the clean, crypto-washed scratch from the hidden cred-chip into that legitimate account.

He had the scratch, and by now, his Neural Link had forced his brain to basically evolve above that of most netrunners, housing a bandwidth capacity that rivaled even the elites. He just needed the data, and he needed to learn how to use it properly. He stopped going into the alleys to look for scraps or to help Maya boost cars or to shoot bottles with Jax.

He locked himself in the dilapidated, detached garage in their backyard, clearing away the piles of soggy cardboard and rusted scrap that had been left to rot in there, creating an empty, concrete dojo. He logged into the legitimate, corporate-sanctioned educational networks using his SIN. He didn't buy extreme XBDs or cheap entertainment virtus, choosing to spend exorbitant amounts of eddies on high-end, unfiltered skill-acquisition Braindances. But unlike most BD's, these weren't simple visual recordings.

They were raw telemetry downloads designed for corporate security forces and elite athletes. Because of his carbon-nanotube mesh Neural Link, Santi began absorbing the BDs natively. He bought modules on Krav Maga, close-quarters combat (CQC), and tactical firearm manipulation. He bought advanced modules on Net-architecture history, Black ICE counter-measures, and polymorphic viral coding.

He would slot a combat BD, and his Neural Link would instantly translate the recorded muscle memory, proprioception, and kinetic balance directly into his own motor cortex. He would stand in the empty garage for hours, his eyes glowing softly beneath the silver halo of his wreath. He would then take them off and perfectly mimic the devastating strikes, joint locks, and evasive footwork of professional killers.

He practiced until his physical body was slick with sweat and his muscles burned, forcing his body to catch up with the downloaded knowledge of his brain. When his body reached physical failure, he would sit cross-legged on the concrete floor and plug his personal link cable into a heavy server rack he had managed to cobble together, and wage digital war in the Net.

He hunted heavier, more complex corporate ICE in the public sectors, treating the security algorithms as sparring partners, slowly learning how to break them. And once he had broken them, he would analyze their structures and build his own defensive daemons from their shattered code. On November 26th, 2066, Santi turned fourteen. Santi spent his birthday in the freezing, unheated garage while Julia was working a double shift to cover the holiday rush at the gas station.

He was shirtless, his lean torso drenched in sweat in the biting cold. He stood in the center of the concrete floor, executing a high-speed CQC sequence he had downloaded from a Militech operative's training module with a bit of clumsiness. He threw a combination of elbow strikes and knee drives against empty air, and though not perfect, his movements possessed a terrifying fluidity that no fourteen-year-old should have any right possessing.

He finished the sequence with a spinning back-kick, exhaling sharply as the vapor of his breath plumed in the freezing air. He lowered his guard, his chest heaving in rhythm, and looked at his hands. Unlike most people, Santi had a sharp memory and was able to recall the times when his hands had been too small to type on his father's keyboard, the hands that Leo had held a gun to, the hands that were currently skimming corporate money to keep his mother alive. He looked at himself in a leaning mirror.

Santi Reyes was just fourteen years old, but he was no longer a kid.