Chapter 23 - Chapter Twenty Three

Word spread fast even in a place as numb to news as Night City, and within a week the joke on every block turned into a plan people actually followed: if you were hungry and short on eddies you didn't need to haggle over vat-kibble or stale paste anymore, you went outside the city and came back with something real, and the first ones to do it were the ones who always moved first when survival was on the line—the poor, the gigless, the homeless, the folks living in stairwells and under overpasses—who started slipping through the gates at dawn with plastic-stock pistols from vending machines, slings, old bows, or just a bundle of wire for snares, and returned at dusk with rabbits, squirrels, wild greens, and armfuls of fruit they swore they'd never seen growing here in their lifetime; soon it wasn't just individuals but little groups, friends, neighbors, whole families heading out together with bags, buckets, and repurposed water jugs, following the green belt that had crept up to Night City's edge, stopping at the streams to drink water that didn't taste like metal and didn't leave a film on their tongues, washing faces and filling containers while they laughed at nothing in particular, the sound of people realizing the world had given them one good thing and trying it out like a new pair of shoes; street vendors caught on immediately, because a hustler's eye spots a pattern before a corpo analyst writes a memo, and they started buying small game and produce for cash or barter, turning it into skewers, stews, and salads that actually had crunch, setting out signs you hadn't seen since the old days—"fresh today," "wild-caught"—and customers lined up even when the sun was brutal, paying a handful of eddies for a bowl that didn't come from a printer, with some stands adding a small canopy and a bucket of stream water so people could rinse their hands without worrying about rashes; clinics in the lower blocks noticed a shift too, fewer dehydration cases, fewer fainting spells on hot days, a slow drop in kids showing up underweight, and even though the doctors still warned people to boil anything they weren't sure about, the truth was obvious to anyone keeping charts: hunger was no longer a constant choke collar; meanwhile, folks without homes started disappearing from their usual corners not because they died or got swept by security but because they moved, heading for the green where a body could build a lean-to and not get shoved off it five minutes later, lashing together branches and tarps into shelters that held through the wind, stringing up simple snares, fishing in the deeper pools with line and hooks bent out of scrap, and when night came those little camps cooked together, pooled what they caught, and traded extra meat or fruit to passersby in exchange for batteries, matches, and old pots, a micro economy sprouting at the edge of a city that never made room for them; none of it was organized and yet it was all perfectly natural, because if there was free food and clean water within walking distance people were going to use it, and soon the green fringe around Night City became a living corridor of activity, quiet in a way that didn't feel dangerous, the kind of quiet that came from grass instead of dead concrete, and you could stand there at noon and hear laughter, a whetstone on a knife, and a kid shrieking when a frog splashed too close, all at once; Maine and his crew went out more than once just to see the flow for themselves, Dorio shaking her head at the makeshift traps because they were smart and simple, Pilar testing a cheap vending-machine pistol on a log and snorting when it handled well enough for small game, Kiwi advising nobody to eat anything until it had been cooked through, and Rebecca—who had never pretended to be hard when something cute crossed her path—coming back one afternoon with the same rabbit that had curled up next to her in the field, a loop of cloth tied like a harness and a pocketful of greens, announcing, "He's mine now, he likes me," while the others groaned and David laughed because no one had the heart to tell her no when the rabbit clearly had already chosen; it wasn't just small game either, fish showed up in the streams and rivers in numbers big enough for nets and lines to matter, shiny bodies thrashing in handmade buckets, and a few of the braver takoyaki stalls started keeping tanks with small freshwater octopus—pets by day, delicacy by night—letting customers watch them drift like floating hands while the cook flipped batter and called out orders, and people swore the taste was better than anything printed, the kind of flavor that made you close your eyes and remember that food used to be something you caught and cooked, not loaded off a truck; markets adapted faster than any city office ever would, adding tables with salt, ice, knives, and bulk rice so a hunter could trade for what made a meal complete, fixers started paying for hides and bones because materials had a dozen uses in a city that repurposed everything, and suddenly the alleys behind three different blocks smelled like smokehouses again as folks dried strips of meat over low flames to stretch their haul through the week; the ripple effects touched everything: water vendors grumbled about fewer customers and tried to sell "stream filters" as an upsell to those who filled jugs on the edge, cheap-meat sellers had to lower prices to compete with rabbit and fish, and even a few ripperdocs admitted that muscle cramps and headaches from malnutrition were down among their regulars, an unglamorous statistic that meant more than any press release; you could feel a shift in how people moved, too, a kind of loosened posture in the shoulders that said the next meal didn't have to be begged for or stolen, it could be found, and when that's true it changes how fast a person says yes to the wrong job; of course there were stumbles—some folks overhunted a patch and learned to walk a little farther the next day, a vendor tried to sell meat that had turned and got chased out by his own customers, one gang tried to tax a stretch of stream and discovered you can't hold water still when too many hands need it—but in general the green taught its own rules, the way any living thing teaches you how to treat it, and people listened because the benefit was obvious the minute you swallowed; for the first time in years, even the poorest talked about cooking rather than opening, collecting rather than scraping, and the talk in stairwells and break rooms switched from "what did you print" to "what did you catch," with tips traded like cash—where the berries ripened, how to set a snare trail without scaring everything off, the best time to see fish jumping—and nobody bothered to keep the knowledge secret because it wasn't a gold rush, it was a shared pantry that only worked if you didn't act like a hog; some of the city rules butted heads with reality—the old fear of birds meant some people still threw rocks at flocks overhead out of reflex and a couple of security patrols wrote warnings they couldn't enforce the second the birds fluttered past the city line—but as days became weeks the sight of wings stopped making people flinch, and kids started pointing instead of hiding, because repetition erases old habits, and once you've seen a robin pecking at a piece of bread on your windowsill without anyone collapsing, your brain rewrites the fear; the corpos tried to figure out how to monetize or stop it, because a city that learns to feed itself is a city that buys less, and memos pinged around between departments with phrases like "unregulated harvesting," "health liability," and "security perimeter integrity," but none of those landed, because even enforcers have families and no one wanted to be the face of saying "don't drink the free water," "don't eat the rabbit," or "don't pick the fruit," not when wages hadn't matched prices for years; in that space of hesitation, Night City did what it always does when the suits drag their feet—it solved things in the alleys and parking lots, with knives, buckets, rules of thumb, and a dozen unspoken agreements, and the result was that the bottom rung climbed one inch without anyone at the top permitting it; David noticed it in the delivery routes too, fewer emergency calls for nutrient bags, more orders for bandages, salts, and old-school cooking gear, a different kind of need he was happy to fill because it meant the people receiving the packages were doing something other than surviving by luck, and on more than one run he took his lunch break by a stream, sitting on a smooth rock while Lucy texted him a picture of Rebecca's rabbit asleep in a shoe box and Maine sent a five-word message—"Don't get soft out there"—that he answered with a single photo of his boots in the grass; by the end of a month the change had a rhythm: early hunters heading out when the light was blue, foragers following later with baskets and knives, mid-day cooking smoke rising from the edge camps, afternoon lines at stands selling skewers and bowls made from what came back, and evening trips to the stream where the water reflected a sky that wasn't stained brown anymore, and if you listened you could hear the city singing a different song—still tough, still hard in all the same ways, but with a chorus underneath that said maybe there was another way to get through the day; none of it looked like a revolution, nobody marched, nobody issued a manifesto, but the small math of life improved—fewer hungry bellies, more full plates, a rabbit napping in a merc's lap, fish tanks bubbling at takoyaki shops where kids pressed hands to glass, and people with nothing walking home with something, enough times in a row that they started to believe the green wasn't going to vanish overnight; even the ones who didn't trust anything smiled when they chewed, and though gangs still ran rackets, fixers still fixed, and the city still burned neon at dusk like it always had, you could mark the change by counting how many people in line at a clinic asked for painkillers versus how many asked for antiseptic for a cut they got cleaning a fish, or by watching a group of squatters carry lumber toward the trees with the casual certainty of people who weren't going to be chased away; the system didn't soften, not really, but the ground under it did, and for once the ground gave back; Maine's crew kept an eye on it all because they were professionals and because curiosity has its own pull, and they never agreed on how they felt—Dorio wary of what she called "the angle we can't see," Pilar half-joking that they should open a stand and retire, Kiwi reminding everyone that nothing stays free, Lucy standing quiet at the waterline like it reminded her of something better, and David thinking about how his mother would smile if she could taste a real peach again and deciding to bring one to her room even if the nurses frowned, because hope feeds people too; Rebecca's rabbit chewed everything it could reach, which meant she bought it better food and a harness with spikes painted on it as a joke, and every time someone laughed she laughed too but never let anyone forget the first rule she'd made up for herself—"We feed the small ones first"—which, in a city built on stepping over small things, was about as radical as a rule could get; by the time the second month rolled around the patterns hardened into habits, and when you walked through the markets at night you saw smokers chuffing out ribbons of meat-scented fog, kids licking salt from fingers, old men teaching knots to teens who didn't have grandparents to show them otherwise, and stalls with fish on ice next to crates of wild greens, vendors shouting prices that didn't make you cry, and though the lights of Night City still blazed like always, their reflections in the clean water looked softer, almost gentle, as if the place had borrowed a little of the countryside's calm and decided to keep it; nobody knew who to thank and nobody really asked, because when your belly's full you don't interrogate the miracle, you pass a bowl to the next person and you make plans for tomorrow, and that was the real change: for once, tomorrow felt like something you could plan for.