Chương 56: Snowballing I

"Only the dead have seen the end of war." - Plato Santi waited until the renovation was finished. The full project had taken just over four months from purchase to completion, and during that time, Santi made the trip from Rancho Coronado to Northside Watson almost every day, checking in on the progress, coordinating with the crews, and personally configuring the security subnet's ICE architecture.

By the time the last turret was tested and the final camera was calibrated, the building was unrecognizable from the abandoned shell he had first walked into.

Of course, that was from the interior only, since Santi didn't want to attract the wrong kind of attention by beautifying his building's facade. The ground floor was clean, open, and functional, the four bay doors operational, the concrete floor sealed and polished, the cargo lift restored, and the cavernous warehouse space fitted with modular workshop infrastructure and proper industrial lighting.

The mezzanine catwalks gleamed with fresh railings, and the remainder of the second floor had been converted into a proper operations center. The moldy rooms had been rebuilt, their walls knocked down to make a large space for a server room with climate-controlled ventilation. The second floor now also boasted a planning space, an armory, and dedicated storage. The blast-rated interior doors had been restored and fitted with biometric locks. As for the third floor, it was a livable apartment.

It had three bedrooms, a common area that had been converted into a massive living room with a functioning kitchen, 3 individual showers per room with hot water, and windows that caught the Northside skyline from every angle. Overall, it was quite the restoration. So, when Santi sat Julia down at the kitchen table of their home in Rancho Coronado on a Thursday evening in late June, he felt confident.

Julia had just gotten home from running errands, and he had made some coffee, the real kind, not the synthetic garbage, which he had splurged on from a vendor in Little China specifically for this conversation because he knew she was going to need it, though looking back at it now, maybe coffee wasn't the best option.

"Ma, I need to talk to you about something," Santi said, sliding Julia a mug of coffee across the table. Julia looked at the coffee, then at him, and her eyes narrowed as she read her son's face.

"Is this real coffee? You know, your father did the very same thing when he did something very good or very bad. So which one is it?"

"Little bit of both," Santi admitted.

"Right. Let's get the bad news out of the way first," she said, wrapping her hands around the mug. Santi took a deep breath and just said it bluntly.

"I spent all my money."

"Huh?" Julia blinked.

"All of it?"

"Every single eddie," Santi confirmed. She set the coffee down and folded her hands on the table, her expression shifting into the calm that came before the storm.

"Andrés. You made over eight hundred thousand eddies. Where did eight hundred thousand eddies go?"

"I bought a building," Santi said, swallowing hard as his mother just did something she had never done before in his life, and that was calling him only by his middle name. The silence that followed pressed against the walls of the small kitchen and made the ticking of the clock above the stove sound louder than it ever should have.

"A building," Julia repeated slowly.

"A three-story building in Northside Watson," Santi said, and he could hear how insane this sounded coming out of his own mouth. He was a sixteen-year-old sitting at his mother's kitchen table explaining that he had blown nearly a million eddies on commercial real estate that wouldn't even serve a purpose other than being a home, a place of storage, and a hideout.

"It's near the Charter Street data term. Twenty-something thousand square feet. It's got a ground-floor workshop with four armored vehicle bays, a cargo lift, catwalks, the works. Second floor is an operations center with a server room. Third floor has three bedrooms, a kitchen, showers, and running hot water. I've had the entire thing restored, rewired, replumbed, and outfitted with a security system."

"A security system," Julia echoed.

"Yeah. Things like cameras, biometric locks, and..." He hesitated for a moment before saying the last bit.

"Turrets." Julia closed her eyes.

"Twelve turrets, to be exact," he continued, since stopping now would only make the inevitable worse.

"They're concealed anywhere, from vents to window frames. They're smaller caliber and have motion tracking. They're also retractable and are tied into a central security network that I can control through my Neural Link. The building is basically a fortress, Ma." Julia opened her eyes and looked at him with an expression he had never seen before. It wasn't anger or shock.

It was a mixture of exhaustion, disbelief, and something that might have been reluctant admiration fighting for space behind the maternal concern.

"Why?" she asked simply.

"Because the war is coming, Ma." Santi leaned forward, his hands flat on the table.

"The NUSA is pushing hard west. They've already taken everything east of the Rockies, and Myers isn't going to stop. If she pushes into Northern California, Night City becomes the front line. And when that happens, every gangoon, corpo, police, and military unit operating in this city is going to be fighting for territory. This house... This house won't survive if it comes down to that, and trust me, it will." Julia was quiet for a while, sipping her coffee and staring at the mug.

Santi had no idea how much time had passed since either one of them spoke a word when she finally looked up at him.

"You want us to move," she said.

"Well, yeah," Santi said.

"I want us to be safe."

"This is my parents' home, Santiago," Julia said while biting her lower lip in thought.

"Your abuelos left me this house. It served us as shelter when we had nowhere left to go. Where I spent a good part of my early twenties." If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. Santi knew this was coming, since no house was simply just a house. It was the last physical connection to a family that Night City had dismantled. Her parents had moved back to Mexico City just over thirty years ago.

The house was the only piece of them that remained in Julia's daily life, aside from the chats they rarely ever had. Asking her to sell it was asking her to sever one more thread connecting her to the people she loved.

"I know, Ma," Santi said quietly.

"And I'm not asking you to forget any of that. I'm asking you to let me keep you alive long enough to make new memories."

"Ay, Jesús. Santiago, tengo 39 años," Julia wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

"For someone living in Night City, whose life expectancy is only 53 years, how much more time do you think I have?" Santi stayed quiet at her remark, which made Julia sigh.

"Alright, let's say I theoretically agree to moving, how much do you think we could even get for the house?"

"Honestly? Maybe seventy to eighty thousand if we sell it on the open market," Santi said.

"But I'm pretty sure we can get much more if we find a private buyer who wants to stay off the deed registry. After all, the neighborhood isn't exactly appreciating in value."

"And the building," Julia said.

"You said it had three bedrooms?"

"Yup," Santi nodded.

"And you'd get the biggest one. Corner unit on the third floor. It has windows facing south and west, which would allow you to get morning light, real morning light, Ma. Not the filtered stuff we get through the smog down here." Julia looked at him for a moment, and Santi could see the calculations running behind her eyes. She was measuring the weight of what she was being asked to give up against the weight of what she might gain. A son who had just spent every eddie he had to build a place that could protect her.

"If I sell this house," Julia said slowly, "your grandparents need to know. And they need to agree. This is their home, mijo. I need their blessing."

"That's fair," Santi agreed.

"And I want to see the building," Julia added.

"Before I agree to anything, I want to walk through it myself."

"You bet. We could go tomorrow morning if you'd like," Santi said. Julia picked up the coffee and took a long sip. Then she set the mug down, folded her hands again, and fixed him with a stare that carried the full weight of a mother.

"Now. Back to other pressing matters," She said.

"You spent eight hundred thousand eddies... In four months."

"Give or take a few days," Santi said.

"Que El Señor tenga misericordia," Julia muttered, shaking her head. They sat in the kitchen for another hour, drinking coffee and talking about the building, the neighborhood, the security systems, and the war that had almost marched all the way to Night City.

Julia asked questions that Santi answered honestly, including the ones about the gangers in the back alley, the ones about the mold remediation, and the ones about how a sixteen-year-old had managed to purchase commercial real estate without a single government agency noticing. By the time she went to bed, she hadn't said yes to the idea of selling the house and moving, but she hadn't said no either.

Julia said yes three days later, though she didn't exactly use the word "yes." She had simply walked into the kitchen at nine in the morning, set her empty mug in the sink, and told Santi to get the car. The drive from Rancho Coronado to Northside Watson took forty-five minutes with traffic, and Julia spent every single one of them gripping the passenger-side door handle of the Galena.

She wasn't nervous about the way Santi drove, since he had become an adequate, if occasionally aggressive, navigator of Night City's chaotic roads. But she was nervous about what she was agreeing to. She hadn't said a word the entire ride, but once they crossed the municipal border into Watson, she opened her mouth.

"Your father would have done the same thing, you know," Julia said quietly, watching the industrial sprawl of the Northside roll past the window.

"He would have bought a building with all of his money, filled it with guns and turrets and computers, and then sat me down with a cup of coffee and acted like it was the most rational decision in the world." Santi glanced at her, catching the faint and bitter smile on her face. He didn't respond, choosing instead to listen and let silence serve as his acknowledgment of a comparison he wasn't sure was actually a compliment.

They arrived at the building just past eight, the morning light cutting sharp lines across the open lot surrounding the structure. The exterior looked exactly as it had when Santi had first scouted it. The faded blue and weathered grey paint had been left untouched, the windows still appeared dark and uninviting from the street level, and the surrounding lot remained a stretch of cracked earth and dead weeds. From the road, it looked like what it was supposed to look like, which was nothing worth a second glance.

Julia stepped out of the Galena, pulling her jacket tighter against the morning chill since it was a surprisingly cold day. She stood there for a quiet moment, looking up at the building that her son had spent every single eddie he had risked his life to earn.

"It looks like it's about to collapse," she said.

"That's the whole point, Ma," Santi said, walking toward the grey-side entrance, pressing his thumb against the new biometric scanner recessed into the reinforced door frame, and inputting a sixteen-digit access code through his Neural Link. The heavy hydraulic locks disengaged with a sequential thud that was satisfying to the ears, and the door swung inward on quiet, freshly greased hinges. Julia followed him inside, and the moment she crossed the threshold, she stopped walking.

The contrast between the exterior and the interior was like night and day. The ground floor stretched out before her in an open expanse of sealed and polished light colored concrete, bathed in warm industrial lighting that hung from the newly painted steel ceiling beams. The four armored bay doors sat closed along the front wall, each one large enough to house multiple Galena's. The cargo lift occupied the far corner, its platform flush with the floor and its safety rails gleaming under the overhead lights.

The mezzanine catwalks wrapped along three walls above them, their railings catching the light in a way that made the space feel like the interior of a moderately funded military facility.

"Dios mío," Julia whispered. Santi led her through the ground floor, explaining the layout with a matter-of-fact efficiency as if he were giving a safety briefing. He showed her the four individual bays, pointing out the heavy-gauge steel of the roll-up doors and the electromagnetic locks that secured them. He demonstrated the cargo lift, riding the platform up to the second floor with Julia gripping the railing and looking down at the shrinking ground level with wide, disbelieving eyes.

And once they reached the second floor, her brain reset once again. The climate-controlled server room was humming faintly behind its blast-rated door, which could only be accessed through a biometric lock that Santi opened with a retinal scan, a palm print, and another sixteen-character alphanumeric code transmitted through his Neural Link. The planning space beside it was large and clean, its walls painted a neutral grey, its floor sealed, and its overhead ventilation running quietly.

"What is this for?" Julia asked, gesturing at the planning space.

"Operational planning," Santi said.

"You're sixteen," Julia reminded him.

"It'll come in handy someday," Santi replied.

"Plus, planning ahead is the difference between surviving and becoming a statistic." Julia didn't argue with that and instead opted to just look at the room in silence while processing her son's ambitions. But when they climbed the stairwell to the third floor and Santi pushed the door open to the living quarters, the protective mask Julia had been wearing since they left Rancho fully slipped.

The living room area was spacious and flooded with natural light from the south-facing windows, and the kitchen was fully equipped with appliances that actually worked and were connected to plumbing. The corner bedroom Santi had designated as hers was the largest of the three, its windows framing a view that had a clear line of sight of the corporate skyline beyond.

The morning sun poured through the glass, painting the walls in warm light, and for the first time in nearly eight years, Julia stood in a room where she didn't have to squint through smog to see the sky. She stood at the window for a long time, one hand pressed against the glass, her reflection staring back at her from the reinforced and tinted surface. Santi stayed in the doorway, watching her shoulders rise and fall with slow breaths, and he could see the exact moment the decision crystallized behind her eyes.

"Okay," Julia said, visibly fighting to keep herself pride contained.

"I had already talked to my parents, and they were fine with this. So, call your fixer buddy and put the house on the market."