Chapter 8 - Chapter Eight

David woke up the morning after surgery with a stiff ache between his shoulder blades and a low throb in his chest that wasn't pain so much as a reminder that something new lived under his skin, and when he rolled to sit up he felt the weight of the mount along his spine like a thin bar pressed against muscle, present but not sharp, and the aftercare sheet on his shard told him to drink water, walk slow laps, avoid strain, and not to activate for twenty-four hours, which he followed even though the itch to test burned at the edge of every thought; he shuffled the first lap around his apartment, counted ten breaths at the window, took another lap, then sat and watched the city move while his hands shook and finally steadied, and when the clock cleared the mark the next morning he stood in the empty hall outside his door, exhaled once, thought the command the techs had trained into him, and felt the world drop into that hollow quiet where motion sharpened and the hum in the walls stretched thin, and he took a single step and cut it off again, chest tight but not stabbing, heart beating a little faster and then settling, and he grinned at nothing because it worked, because it was his now, because he wasn't guessing anymore; he messaged Vera to say he was cleared for light duty and she told him to meet the van an hour early for a short talk, and when he climbed in she looked him over like she was checking for cracks, said "You look vertical," and then lowered her voice and told him the rules for living with chrome while working a public job, keep your pace normal in the open, never flex in a hallway camera, treat the Sandevistan like a seatbelt not a show, and if he ever felt heat behind his eyes or buzzing in his teeth he was to sit down and call it in because pushing through was how people woke up on the floor with a collapsed day; Atlas nodded once from the back and added that micro-activations saved lives when used for small corrections, not heroics, and Kite said the fastest way to get robbed was to look proud of being fast, which made David snort but the point landed. The first route back felt like learning to walk with a new stride, not because the work changed but because he had to concentrate on not doing more than he needed to do, forcing himself to let the elevator doors close at normal speed, matching Vera's pace at crossings, holding the tablet steady without catching every dropped pen or swatted fly with a burst he didn't need, and halfway through the morning he got his first chance to use the unit in a way that would never show on a camera: a fourth-floor door swung open while he was sealing a cooler and a kid bolted out chasing a ball toward the stairwell, the ball clipped David's boot and rolled just enough to trip the kid's toe, and in that two-count he thought the command, blinked through the space, stopped the kid with a hand on the shoulder, and let the timer fall away as the mother gasped and thanked him, nobody the wiser, Atlas watching from down the hall with a neutral face and a small nod on the way back to the van; David felt the tick in his chest afterward but the ache faded quick, which matched what the techs had said about his reinforced heart and lungs, the upgrades he hadn't asked for but now appreciated. At the next building a man at the end of the corridor tried to square up halfway through their knock, a lazy hand hanging open at his belt where a cheap piece sat half-hidden, and Vera answered it by shifting to show the delivery badge clear and loud, saying the client's full name in a voice that carried, and the man's eyes measured the van logo, Atlas's posture, the quiet way Kite tilted his head, and the math came out wrong for him, so he swallowed whatever stunt he'd been considering and stared hard at the floor until they finished and left; back in the cab Vera said, "That's how we like it," and tapped the dash twice like she was knocking salt off her fingers. Days built a rhythm around the new hardware: morning runs with stops stacked across zones, mid-shift returns to load cold-chain packs, afternoon loops through towers with elevator problems, and every time David felt the itch he kept it to controlled bursts, catching a sliding cooler before it hit the ground, sidestepping a trash cart in a narrow hall, pivoting out of a stairwell when the door below blew open in a sudden argument, the kind of moves that read as luck or reflex on a camera but kept bones intact; at night he sat with his mother and talked about little things because big ones sat heavy, telling her about a security guard who fed stray cats by the ambulance bay, or a kid who drew a picture of the van and stuck it to the door with two pieces of tape, and he let her believe he was still keeping up with classes because she smiled when he said "assignment" or "lecture," and he wasn't going to take that away from her while she was clawing back from a coma, so he talked around it and promised himself he would say the full truth when she could walk a lap without needing to sit down. The first post-op check at Aperture hit at the end of the week and he sat under scanners while a tech he hadn't met before read out numbers and asked him to squeeze a handgrip until his forearm trembled, then had him breathe deep while the EKG ticked and the monitor printed a strip of tidy spikes; she explained that conduction across the spinal graft looked clean, no hotspots, no abnormal latency, resting heart rate improved slightly from baseline, no arrhythmia, and she pushed a minor calibration to the unit to smooth the power curve so activations landed without that first harsh jolt, a firmware bump that felt like shifting from gravel to level road; when she offered enrollment in the field-data program again he signed for it, not because of the bill credit alone but because steady oversight made sense in a city that punished guessing, and she gave him a small disc to clip inside his jacket that logged usage and vitals during runs without broadcasting to anyone but the clinic, which made Vera happy because it meant one more set of eyes on him if he needed help. At the end of the consult a different staffer handed him a sealed envelope with a card identical to the one he already carried, same rule as before—call, say his name, then zero for yes or X for no—and told him that if anyone hassled him about the surgery or tried to leverage the fact he was now running with chrome, he should use it and someone would be there fast, and he tucked the spare into a book on his shelf at home because backups kept you from bleeding later. Kevin watched that data roll in from his underground console under a neutral label that did not say "David," only a subject code and timestamp charts, lines that showed micro-activations clustered during delivery windows and clean rest profiles overnight, nothing that spiked like a user pushing for thrill, and he nodded at Angela when she stepped in behind him to check the graph, telling her the unit behaved as designed under field conditions, no nervous system instability, no arrhythmia on stress push, and she said the reinforcement algorithm looked good, then suggested a tiny tweak to reduce heat during consecutive bursts, which he approved because increments won fights later when the big moves ran out; they ate a late meal at the steel table in the lab, two bowls from the vending system with extra seasoning thrown in, and he told her he planned to start quietly seeding stabilized crops to a handful of community kitchens through the clinic's supply program to see how quickly they took root in the market without drawing a line back to his name, and she agreed, saying credibility grows when food shows up on time and tastes right. Midweek the route put Vera's van into a block south of the freeway where the first patches of green had turned into a narrow strip of grass along a sidewalk, and David caught himself staring at a pair of birds hopping near a bus bench because birds had stopped being a normal thing years ago and now here they were pecking at crumbs like they owned the fence, and Kite joked that he'd seen a kid try to feed one and the bird had stolen the entire bun and flown off like a thief, and Atlas said good for the bird, and Vera kept them on schedule because deliveries didn't make themselves even when the air smelled a little cleaner. The next run into that zone gave them their first brush with the kind of pressure Maine had warned crews about in other parts of the city, not that David knew Maine yet but the pattern was the same: at the end of a dim corridor a pair of men in cheap jackets stood half blocking a door and told Vera they were collecting "permit fees" for deliveries in the building, low voice, eyes sliding, one hand in a pocket where nothing good lived, and Vera's answer was textbook, "We're contracted medical, not vendors, step aside," even as she shifted the clipboard and angled her body to show the van logo on her back and the badge at her chest, and David used a thin burst to get from behind her to the door with the package in hand, knocked, and had the client signing before the men finished their first sentence, and Atlas stepped into the space left by that move, not touching them, just existing in a way that suggested touching would end poorly, and Kite made a show of filming the floor and the door numbers and the ceiling cameras for "audit," and the men found somewhere else to look and somewhere else to be and the short problem dissolved into hallway air; back in the van Vera told David he had walked the line right, not showing off, not inviting a fight, just being faster than laziness, and he said "seatbelt not a show" and she said "exactly." Evenings turned into a repeatable pattern: check on his mother, bring real food from a stall instead of paste, sit until the nurse asked him to let her rest, then walk home the long way because the air outside the clinic felt better than the air in his apartment, and in the small hours he practiced activation in the empty stairwell, ten steps at a time, pushing the window just enough to learn how to stop on a dime without the crash that came from overshooting, building control the way you learn any skill, repetition without drama; twice he caught himself thinking about telling Gloria the full truth about school and both times he swallowed it because he saw how proud she looked when he said "schedule" and he couldn't take that from her while she was still trying to stand on her own, so he told himself he would say it when she could sit in a chair without needing the wall to get back up. Kevin and Angela kept pace underground, the first pallets of stabilized produce leaving the hidden facility on a plain truck with a rented plate and a forged invoice line that read "donation," and two days later a community kitchen posted a short thank-you on a feed with a picture of a crate of greens, no tags to any company, just a caption that said "fresh," which was enough for him because you don't need credit when the plan is to change the baseline; he also signed off on a quiet upgrade cycle for Black Mesa's guard teams, standardizing drills and swapping some armor plates for lighter versions that let the guards move faster in tight halls, and Angela reviewed the logs, noting which patrols needed a different route to break predictable patterns, small edits that kept the public face boring and the internal posture sharp. At the end of the second week Aperture slotted David for a supervised field session behind the clinic, a longer test than the first, this time with cones and a timing course and a medical tech on a bench watching his heart rate and respiratory numbers on a slate, and he learned what his new limits felt like under pressure, three runs in a row without the edges of his vision tunneling, clean stops, no shakes in his hands afterward, recovery time shrinking from minutes to less than one if he breathed slow and drank water, and the tech smiled behind her mask and said, "You're taking well to the unit," which he clung to because in this city praise was rare and felt real when it came with data; she reminded him to rest between heavy days, to log any headaches or chest tightness, and to avoid long activations inside crowded spaces because panic spreads fast when people think time just broke around them, and he said he understood because he did. On a quiet Sunday he took the van route alone with Vera while Atlas and Kite rotated off, running only low-risk drops to regulars, and they stopped at a stall for broth on the way back, steam curling up into air that smelled like rain instead of smoke, and Vera asked how the unit felt now that the fear had burned off and he told her it felt like the city finally stopped shoving him late to every door, and she said good, hold on to that feeling, it will keep you from thinking the chrome owes you something, and he nodded because he could see how easy it would be to let speed turn into arrogance, and arrogance into a target. By the time the month closed he could move through a hallway without thinking about how the unit sat on his spine, the faint glow on his back had faded to a pattern only visible when light hit just right, and he had added a new habit to his nights—double-checking the emergency number card in his wallet and the spare in the book, telling himself he would never need it while also counting the seconds it would take to pull it if someone knocked wrong on his door; when he finally slept hard enough to dream, the images were simple: clean hallways, steady hands, his mother laughing at some joke he couldn't hear, and a stretch of street with green at the edges where there had only been cracked concrete before, and he woke with the kind of focus that had a direction instead of just speed. The city did not change for him, not really, but the shape of his days had, and that was enough for now—deliveries done right, checkups logged clean, a body that answered when he asked, a mother who squeezed his fingers stronger each visit, and a plan that stayed quiet: stay useful, stay small in the places that draw eyes, stack money without bragging, and keep the people who matter breathing; on the screens below ground Kevin closed another data window and told Angela the same thing he had told her on the first day they powered the lab lights, "Keep it holding," and she said, "It's holding," and the week turned over without fireworks, which in Night City counted as a win.