Chapter 15 - Chapter Fifteen

David woke up to the buzz of his slate and rubbed his eyes before he even checked, half expecting another shard job ping from Lucy or a reminder from Vera about delivery routes, but instead it was a message flagged urgent from the clinic itself, and when he opened it his heart jumped because the first line said, "Gloria Hernandez has regained consciousness, partial recovery observed, patient stable," and for a long second he just sat there staring at the words, then scrambled to throw on clothes and head for the van depot, telling Vera he was taking a personal stop and she waved him off without asking because she'd seen him grind through shifts with nothing but worry behind his eyes, and he ran the blocks faster than he should have with the Sandevistan thrumming in his spine until he was through the clinic doors, badge beeped, and sprinting down the familiar hall to her room, where she was propped up with lines still running into her arms but her eyes half-open, not drifting anymore but focusing when he came in, her fingers twitching in a way that wasn't random, and when he said, "Mom," she turned her head and managed a cracked smile that made his chest hurt. The nurse explained quietly that she wasn't out of the woods, she was weak and would need weeks of therapy, but her responsiveness was a sign that the coma had broken, and David sat by the bed and held her hand and tried not to cry because Night City didn't let you cry for free, and he told her all the things she'd missed in the simplest words he could manage: how he'd picked up a job with Vault-Tec Medical doing deliveries, how he'd made friends who looked out for him, how the city outside was changing with real food and animals creeping back, how he was okay, really okay, even if he skipped classes sometimes, and she whispered in a rasp, "Classes?" and he said, "Yeah, I'll catch up, don't worry about it," and squeezed her hand to cut the thought before it turned into a scold. She asked small questions between long breaths—"Still living at home?" "You eat?" "Safe?"—and he answered yes to all of them because that was the truth in pieces, and when she asked, "How pay bills?" he told her about the delivery job, about the overtime, about the clinic being fair, and left out everything about shards and chrome and Maine because she didn't need that weight yet. A stray puppy padded into the hall with a volunteer chasing after it, a fluffy mutt with a patched coat, and Gloria laughed weakly at the sight, asking the nurse if pets were allowed, and the nurse shrugged and said, "As long as it doesn't bite the wires," and David promised to get her something soft to keep around when he wasn't there. For the next hours he sat and just talked to her, simple things like Vera's nagging, Rebecca's rabbit, Lucy's quiet smile when she got away with something, and Gloria listened like every word was worth more than gold because in her world time had stopped and now it was moving again, and she didn't want to miss any of it. Around them the clinic halls buzzed with regular patients, some poor, some Corpo, all getting the same paperwork and the same polite voices, and David noticed it fresh through her eyes—how weird it was that a place in Night City felt safe, clean, and fair—and he wondered what she would think if she knew the deeper layers, the Aperture labs under the floor, the Black Mesa shipments leaving through side gates, the fact that Kevin wasn't just an aide but something else entirely. Meanwhile across the state Kevin sat with Angela in the command room going through reports from the synth deployment teams, corridors of green now linking zones together, rainfall measured in places that hadn't seen it in decades, Nomads already sending footage of animals drinking from streams, and Angela said, "They'll credit Biotechnica eventually, won't they," and Kevin smirked, "Good, let them, better a known devil than questions that get too close," and turned back to the schematics of the new city they were quietly populating with Gen 3 synths seeded with false nomad memories, ready to be the citizens when the time came. In Night City proper, word was already spreading about the recovery of Gloria Hernandez, not on the Net but among the people who worked the clinic halls, patients who'd seen her unconscious for weeks and now saw her smile, and it added one more layer of trust to the place's reputation, that even long shots weren't hopeless there, and that mattered more than ads. Maine heard about it from Lucy, who heard it from David, and he told the crew at a food stall that it was "good for the kid, keeps his head in the game," and Dorio agreed, while Rebecca rolled her eyes and said, "As long as he doesn't get soft," and Pilar muttered something about "moms are moms" and got smacked by Dorio for being an ass. David kept splitting his time between routes, jobs with Maine, shard runs with Lucy, and hours at his mother's bedside, and for once it felt like he wasn't being crushed, like he had more than one reason to keep moving. The clinic staff kept his mother on a slow program, drip feeds replaced with nutrient bags swapped on schedule, physical therapy scheduled for when she could stand, and David memorized all the instructions like his own homework, catching the nurse when they forgot a detail, helping move her arms gently when the aide was busy, making sure she drank water even when she tried to wave him off, and the staff didn't argue because seeing a son show up every day was rare enough. Kevin checked her file once through the internal system, just another name in the anonymized feed, noted stable progress, and moved on, because she was just one patient among many but also the one patient whose son was unknowingly straddling the line between two worlds. Angela asked him one night, "Do you ever worry they'll connect the dots," and Kevin shook his head, "Not yet, not while the dots are so far apart, and by the time they're close we'll be ready." Back in the ward, Gloria dozed with Buddy the puppy curled against her leg and David leaned back in the chair, staring at the ceiling, thinking about all the noise the city kept making about new cities, new roads, Corpo probes, failed infiltrations, and how none of it mattered as much as the sound of his mother's breathing, steady and alive, and for the first time in months he let himself believe maybe things could be better, at least for a little while.