Chương 34: Healing I

"The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn The darkness was thick and suffocating, yet it carried a strange, narcotic warmth to it. I found myself floating in a void, disconnected from the reality of my own physical body. The edges of my consciousness were blurred by whatever cocktail of synthetic painkillers and anesthetics was currently pumping through my veins. For a long stretch of time, there was nothing but this heavy blackness.

No neon lights bleeding through the smog, no frantic, flashing alerts on my internal HUD, no microscopic digital stutter.

Just a vast, quiet nothingness. Then, slowly, the physical world began to bleed back in, starting with the smells. The astringent bite of industrial antiseptic mixed with the faint tang of ozone and old blood was a scent that let me know I was in Vik's clinic. I recognized the low and steady hums of the medical monitors as well as the rhythmic beeping tracking a heartbeat that I distantly realized was my own. But, with the return of my senses also came the pain.

And though the drugs were doing their job, dulling the worst of it, there was a deep, pervasive ache radiating from the center of my chest. It felt as though a concrete block had been parked directly on top of my sternum, and every shallow breath I drew required a conscious, labored effort, the expansion of my lungs pressing painfully against a ribcage that felt completely unstable. But I didn't open my eyes yet. I didn't want to.

Opening my eyes meant returning to the meatspace, returning to the reality of the blood, the brains, the echoing gunshots, and the crushing weight of what I had done. So I stayed in the dark, letting the painkillers drag me back down into the numb abyss. But as I hovered there on the edge of sleep, I heard a sound slowly drift into the quiet space of the clinic.

It was a soft voice, incredibly gentle and melodic, singing with a tune I had never heard before, a melancholic but soothing lullaby that seemed to wrap around the cold edges of the clinic and soften them.

"Dear friend across the river..." I recognized that voice almost immediately. It was my mother's. And though she hadn't been working for a while now, I could recognize that exhausted rasp it usually carried after a long shift, knew the anxious tone it took on when the rent was due. But I had never heard it like this. I had never heard her sing. Her voice was pure and laced with heartbreaking sorrow.

"My hands are cold and bare..." As she sang, I felt the feather-light touch of her fingers on my chest. She was sitting right beside the surgical chair, her hand resting gently over my heart, carefully avoiding the thick layers of bio-monitors and bandages wrapping my shattered ribs. She began to trace a slow pattern against my skin in a rhythm, her fingertips tapping lightly in time with the mournful beat of the melody she was singing.

"Dear friend across the river... I'll take what you can spare..." The sensation was surreal, and the slow tapping of her fingers, synchronized with the angelic, yet sorrowful tone of her voice, pulled me out of the traumatic loop playing in the back of my mind. The flashing red lights, the roar of the Sandy, the metallic click of the empty revolver, they all began to recede, washed away by the simple warmth of my mother's presence.

"I ask of you a penny... my fortune, it will be..." Lying there in the dark, with the heavy drugs in my system and my mother singing over me, I felt my goals, along with the crushing reality of Night City, fade away. For the first time in what felt like a lifetime, I didn't feel like Ghost. I didn't feel like a prodigy carrying a piece of technology with more raw processing power than most electronics in his skull. I didn't feel like a killer. I felt small. I felt safe.

I felt like a kid again, wrapped in a protective bubble where responsibilities, gigs, rent, and my father's corporate conspiracies simply didn't exist. I was just a boy, and my mother was there to make the monsters go away.

"I ask you without envy... We raise no mighty towers..." Her voice never wavered despite the quiet grief underneath, and the tapping on my chest felt like an anchor tethering my fractured consciousness to the physical world, keeping me from drifting too far out into the dark.

"Our homes are built of stone... So come across the river... And find the world below." She ended the song, fading it into a soft hum, the final words she had said lingering in the quiet air of the clinic. The tapping of her fingers had slowed, eventually coming to a rest over my heart, and the warmth of her palm seeped through the thin medical gown I had been dressed in. I laid there for a while, savoring the peace of the moment before the real world inevitably crashed back in.

I finally spoke, keeping my eyes firmly shut.

"I've... I've never heard you sing before, Ma." My voice was a hoarse croak, and the simple act of vibrating my vocal cords sent a dull ache through my sternum. I felt her hand flinch slightly in surprise, sending an echoing sound from the rustle of fabric in the quiet room as she shifted her weight. She moved from where she had been sitting at my side, leaning over me until I could feel the warmth of her breath against my face.

I slowly blinked my eyes open, and thankfully, the fluorescent lights of Vik's clinic had been mercifully dimmed. The first thing I saw was my mother leaning over the surgical chair. Her dark hair was disheveled, falling in messy strands around her face. Her eyes were bloodshot, swollen, and rimmed with dark circles of exhaustion.

She let out a choked gasp the moment she saw my eyes open, before leaning down and pressing her lips firmly against my forehead, holding the kiss there for a while as her shoulders shook with silent sobs.

"Santi," she whispered, her voice cracking.

"Oh, mi niño... you have no idea. You have absolutely no idea how scared you had me." She pulled back just enough to look me in the eyes, her hand moving to cup my cheek, her thumb gently stroking the uneven patches of stubble along my jawline.

"Vik called my Agent in the middle of the night," she continued, her voice trembling.

"He told me you were in his clinic. He told me you were badly hurt. Santi... what happened to you? What did you do to end up like this?" If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. The guilt crashed over me.

For the past year or so, I had done everything in my power to ensure she never had to worry again, installing new solar panels, clearing any debts she had accumulated, which weren't much, and my greatest achievement yet, getting her to quit her two miserable jobs. I was supposed to be the provider now, the untouchable "Ghost" who had never messed up. Yet here I was, strapped to a ripperdoc's table, my chest crushed, forcing her to endure the very nightmare I had promised myself to protect her from.

"I'm sorry, Ma," I rasped while weakly gripping her wrist.

"I'm so sorry I made you worry. It was... a gig. A gig went sideways on me." Her eyes widened, panic immediately tightening the lines of her face.

"A gig? Santi, who did this to you? Is someone coming for us? Are we in danger?"

"No," I said quickly, forcing as much conviction into my voice as my chest would allow.

"No, Ma, nobody is coming. It's over. The gig is done, and there's nobody coming from us, I promise you. I made sure of it." She let out a shaky breath, some of the immediate panic leaving her eyes, but the deep, maternal worry remained firmly in place.

"What happened, Santiago? Tell me." I swallowed hard, the taste of old blood and adrenaline still coating the back of my throat. I didn't want to tell her. I wanted to protect her from the things I had done. But looking into her terrified, tear-stained eyes, I knew I couldn't lie to her, at least not right now. The illusion had been broken for both of us. So, I told her. I started from the beginning.

I told her about the anonymous drop, the forty thousand eddies sitting in escrow, and the arrogance that made me think I could handle a job that looked too good to be true. I explained the honeypot on the Net, the white architecture of Subnet 4-Alpha, and the sudden realization that I had walked directly into a trap. I could see her grip on the side of the medical chair tighten as I described the physical necessity of the run, driving the Galena through the rain to the abandoned warehouse in Arroyo.

I told her everything.

"He had a Sandy, Ma," I whispered.

"I had the Kerenzikov, which allowed me all the time in the world to see it coming, to process what he was doing, but my body was too slow, and I panicked. I forgot that I was a runner, that I could've sent a bunch of quickhacks his way before he hit me. And when he did, it felt like the world ended." Tears spilled over her eyelashes, silently tracking down her cheeks as she listened to the story of how her fifteen-year-old son had his ribs shattered by a merc.

As I pushed further into the story, recounting how I remembered that I was a runner and had basically hit the man with a digital shotgun blast, I felt my chest begin to tighten. The emotional detachment I usually maintained during a gig was rapidly failing me as I was reaching the end of the narrative. I felt as if the reality of what I had done in that server room was rising up to choke me.

"I disabled him," I continued with my trembling voice.

"I overloaded his optics, his auditory dampeners... he dropped his gun, and he fell. I could have run, Ma. I could have just run away. But..." My throat closed up. The image flashed behind my eyes again in great detail. The metallic click of the revolver no longer firing because I had run out of bullets, the heavy stench of ozone, and the spray of synthetic fluid and blood across the ground and the humming servers.

"But I didn't," I choked out, hot tears suddenly pricking the corners of my eyes.

"I picked up his gun. And I... I shot him. I shot him until the gun was empty. I killed him, Ma." I couldn't hold it back anymore, and an agonizing sob tore itself from my chest, sending a white-hot spear of pain through my sternum, but I didn't care. I squeezed my eyes shut as the tears flowed freely, the guilt, the fear, and the absolute horror of the fact that I had come so close to dying consumed me. I expected her to pull away with horror in her eyes.

She was a good woman, a woman who had tried so hard to shield me from the rot of Night City, and I had just confessed to executing a helpless man on a dirty concrete floor. I expected her to look at me and see a monster, to realize that her son was too far gone, his soul already claimed and corrupted by the relentless, grinding jaws of the city of dreams. But she didn't pull away. Instead, she leaned down, wrapping her arms carefully but firmly around my neck, burying her face into my shoulder.

She didn't even reprimand me or gasp in horror or tell me I had lost my way. She just held me, her own tears soaking into the fabric of my gown.

"Shhh," she hushed.

"It's okay, mi niño. It's fine. You're alive. You're breathing. That's all that matters. It's okay."

"But I'm a killer, Ma," I sobbed, the words tasting like poison.

"I blew his brains out..."

"Listen to me, Santiago," she said, pulling back just enough to force me to look at her. Her eyes were burning with sorrowful intensity that I had never seen in her before.

"Nobody in this city has clean hands. Nobody. You think you're the first person forced to cross that line to survive? You think I haven't had to do things that keep me awake at night?" I stared at her, the shock momentarily overriding my panic.

"What?" Mom let out a shaky breath, wiping a tear from her cheek.

"When your father died... when things got really bad before I got the job at the CHOOH2 station... there were men who thought a grieving widow with a young boy was an easy target. They thought they could take what little we had left. Well, the bastards thought wrong." She didn't elaborate, and she didn't need to. The implication hung heavy in the air between us. My mother, the woman who sang lullabies and worried about my protein intake, had blood on her hands, had killed before.

"She's right, kid," Vik said as he stepped into the dim light, wiping a streak of grease from his hands with a ragged towel. He looked utterly exhausted, his posture stooped, and the lines on his face carved deep by years of patching up the broken pieces of Night City's cast-offs. Vik walked over, leaning against the edge of a medical tray. He looked down at me, his expression caught somewhere between pity and understanding.

"There are no saints in the City of Dreams, Santi," Vik said, his tone downtrodden and heavy with the weight of his own ghosts.

"Before I set up this clinic, I decided to spend my life putting people back together... I... Your father and I took people apart. I've taken my fair share of lives. More than I care to count, and more than I'll ever be able to wash off." He tossed the towel onto the tray, crossing his arms over his chest.

"This city is a meat-grinder that strips away your choices until you're only left with two options. You either pack your bags, leave the neon behind, and take your chances in the Badlands... or you kill the person trying to kill you. That's it. That's the whole equation. You did what you had to do to walk out of that place breathing, so don't let the guilt of survival eat you alive, because if the city had its way, it would gladly finish the job."

I listened to Vik's words as he laid the unforgiving philosophy of Night City bare. I looked at him, a man I respected and trusted implicitly, a man who saved lives daily but admitted to taking them just as easily. Then I looked at my mother, whose fierce love for me had driven her to commit the ultimate sin. And slowly, the crushing weight of the guilt began to ease.

I wasn't a monster, but rather just a product of my environment, a survivor in an ecosystem that actively demanded violence as the price of admission. Hearing their confessions, realizing that the two people I trusted most in this world carried the exact same dark stains on their souls, brought a strange, twisted sense of comfort. I took a deep breath, testing the limits of my fractured sternum. As the panic subsided, a moment of profound clarity settled over my mind.

The trauma that had seized me, the paralyzing terror that caused me to drop the gun and sob on the floor of the server room, hadn't actually come from the act of taking a life. The gonk was a merc trying to zero me, so zeroing him was simply a necessity. The real source of my breakdown was the visual. Watching the back of the Solo's skull detonate, seeing the grey matter and blood splatter across the server racks and the floor, had triggered the deepest, darkest memory I possessed.

It had perfectly mirrored the image of Jax, my first real choom, blowing his own brains out. It was the unfiltered PTSD of a childhood trauma I had never truly processed. Understanding the root of the panic somehow made it manageable, allowing me to categorize the trauma and file it away in my active memory, accepting the brutal truth of the city I called home. To survive, I had to be harder. I had to be colder, no, that would make me a psychopath... I had to become indifferent.