Morning arrives like a bill you forgot you signed.
The suite's smart-glass runs its dawn protocol—gradual brightening, circadian manipulation, the lie that waking is natural when everything in Night City runs on chemicals and schedules. Kaito disables it with a thought and lets the dark sit a moment longer. His wrist itches where the stamp faded. The hash in his cortex pulses quietly, a file that should not exist nested against his hippocampus like a splinter he's too careful to pull.
His agent chimes. Calendar block, red text, immovable: BREAKFAST 07:00 / IMPERIAL SUITE / ATTENDANCE MANDATORY.
No name. Just the kind of empty that means full.
He showers in water that costs more than mercy. The temperature auto-adjusts to cardiovascular recommendations he ignores on principle. Steam clouds the mirror long enough for him to pretend he's someone else, then clears to remind him the pretending is the point. The scar that isn't a scar catches light—micro-mesh, surgical, his father's voice on a call saying upgrade him while you're in there while a child bled on marble.
He dresses in the uniform of a boy who has never needed to run: black slacks with a crease you could cut with, white shirt that breathes better than he does, jacket tailored to suggest violence could happen but won't need to. The sakura pin goes above his heart. He looks at it in his palm before attaching it—small, enamel, the kind of symbol that makes cameras smile.
David Martinez never wore one of these.
David wore a jacket that cost nothing and meant everything until the city taught him the exchange rate.
Kaito pins the sakura. His reflection approves.
The Imperial Suite is three floors above his father's usual domain, which means this is not his father's meeting. The lift knows the route. The brass panel reflecting back at him shows a boy composed, calculated, calm. The boy behind the reflection counts the seconds it will take to delete the David Martinez hash if someone scans his neural load. Twelve seconds. Maybe ten if he's willing to burn some short-term memory as camouflage.
The doors open onto carpet so thick it apologizes for being walked on.
Two guards exist by the entrance—Arasaka close-protection, the kind who have killed people in rooms nicer than this and filed it under housekeeping. They do not check him. His face is clearance. His name is already inside, seated, waiting for him to catch up.
The suite is less room than statement. Floor-to-ceiling windows hold the city like a plaintiff holds evidence. A table, low and long, set with porcelain that has never been dropped. Calligraphy on the wall—something about impermanence and discipline, the characters done by a master or a machine too expensive to admit the difference.
His father sits at one end. Not the head. There is no head to this table.
Hanako Arasaka sits where gravity wants her.
Kaito stops in the doorway long enough to be noticed, short enough to not be rude. His pulse does something his face does not allow. She is dressed in a dove-gray suit that would be modest on anyone who was not her. Hair pinned with a single jade ornament. No jewelry. No proof. She does not need endorsements.
"Kuroda," she says, and the room adjusts its air pressure.
"Hanako-sama." He bows—the precise angle that says I understand hierarchy without performing subservience. When he straightens, his father is watching him the way architects watch foundations.
"Sit," his father says, gesturing to the place across from him, diagonal to Hanako. The geometry is intentional. Nothing in this room is accident.
Kaito sits. The chair is comfortable, which makes it dangerous.
A server appears—no, a ghost pretending to be a server, the kind of silence you pay for when you want witnesses who won't remember. Tea arrives. The cups steam like small confessions. Hanako lifts hers but does not drink. His father mirrors her. Kaito understands the choreography: no one eats until she decides the meal is not a weapon.
"You were out late," his father says. Not an accusation. An observation filed for later.
"I was networking."
"With whom?"
"People who prefer introductions stay informal."
His father's jaw shifts. Hanako's does not. She sets her cup down with a sound so soft it erases itself. "Your instructor tells me you apologized to Ms. Nomura," she says. "He also tells me it felt like a gift she didn't ask for."
"Apologies should feel like something," Kaito says. "Otherwise they're just noise."
"Noise," she repeats, tasting the word. "In my experience, noise is what people make when they want to be heard but have nothing to say."
"Then I said nothing loudly."
Her mouth does something that could be amusement if it wanted to be. His father's does something that is not. The server returns, places small plates—seasonal fish, rice the color of fog, vegetables arranged like a theorem. Hanako lifts her chopsticks. Permission granted. The meal begins.
They eat in a silence that is not empty. Kaito watches her from the edge of his vision—the way she moves through the ritual without hurry or hesitation, each gesture economical, perfect, the product of a lifetime where mistakes were edited before they could breathe. She is beautiful the way a blade is beautiful: purpose given form, function dressed as art.
He thinks about the text last night. Adequate work. Do not let it become consistent.
He thinks about the way she stood by the window during orientation, hands folded, offering him a test disguised as permission.
He thinks about how gravity works—the larger mass pulls, the smaller orbits, and neither asks if the arrangement is fair.
"You accessed the Academy subnet last night," Hanako says, and the fish on his plate becomes heavy.
His father's chopsticks pause. The pause is louder than a shout.
Kaito does not look at either of them. He sets his chopsticks down, aligned, the way you admit something without bleeding. "Yes."
"From an unsecured location," she continues, voice level, factual, a scalpel describing an incision. "Using a third-party deck with no authentication trail. You retrieved structural data from a restricted partition and left no signature beyond the statistical likelihood that someone was there."
"Yes."
"Why?"
The question sits on the table like a grenade with good posture. His father's face is stone. Hanako's is glass. Kaito could lie—say it was curiosity, say it was a dare, say it was a test of his own skills. All true. All irrelevant.
"I wanted to see if the corporation I am supposed to inherit treats its ghosts with more care than it treated the living."
Silence. The city beyond the window hums its indifferent frequency.
"And?" Hanako asks.
"It archives them. Files them under incident. Checks the file when it wants to remember that ambition without structure is just suicide with marketing."
His father speaks, finally, voice cold and calibrated. "You risked your position. Your future. Your name."
"I risked nothing," Kaito says, meeting his father's eyes now. "I demonstrated that the thing they call security is a suggestion. That the walls they build keep people in more than they keep people out. That the only thing stopping me from taking that file was the fact that taking it would be louder than leaving it."
"Theft is not loud if done correctly," his father says.
"I was not trying to be correct. I was trying to be seen."
Hanako sets her cup down again. This time the sound carries. "You wanted my attention."
It is not a question. Kaito lets it hang.
"You wanted," she continues, "to demonstrate that the leash you wear is decorative. That you can slip it whenever you choose. That the only thing keeping you in the kennel is your decision to stay."
"Yes."
"Arrogance," his father says.
"Honesty," Kaito corrects, still holding Hanako's gaze. "Arrogance would be claiming I'm the only one who could do it. Honesty is admitting I did it because I wanted to know if you would care."
Hanako leans back, minimal, a star deciding not to collapse. "I care," she says, "when talent forgets that demonstration and discretion are not enemies. You showed me you can open a door. Congratulations. A child with a hammer can open a door. The question is whether you can walk through it without announcing to everyone in the building that the lock was a fiction."
Kaito's wrist itches. The stamp that is not there anymore burns softly in his memory.
"The file," Hanako says. "David Martinez. You did not take it."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because taking it would have told you I wanted it. Leaving it told you I could have it whenever the cost became acceptable."
She almost smiles. Almost. "You think like an economist. That will serve you until it kills you."
"Better than thinking like a martyr."
"Martyrs," she says, "at least die for something. Economists die for numbers that only mean what someone else decides they mean."
The breakfast continues. The fish is excellent. The rice is a platonic ideal. The silence between bites is the most expensive thing on the table.
His father speaks, recovering ground. "You will attend a shareholder briefing this afternoon. Gallery seating. You will observe. You will not speak unless addressed. You will learn what power looks like when it is bored."
"Understood."
"You will also," Hanako adds, setting her chopsticks down with the finality of a closed file, "attend a private function tomorrow evening. My brother is hosting. Selected guests. You will be selected."
Kaito's pulse does the thing again. "Yorinobu-sama."
"He has taken an interest in Academy high-performers. You demonstrated performance. He will want to see if it was practice or instinct." She stands, and the room remembers it is hers. "Do not embarrass me by being interesting. Be useful instead."
She leaves the way weather leaves—noticed only in absence. The server-ghost vanishes behind her. His father and Kaito remain.
"You played a hand I did not deal you," his father says, voice flat, stripped of performance now that the audience is gone.
"You taught me to count cards. You never said I couldn't reshuffle the deck."
"Reshuffling is a tell. It says you don't like your draw."
"I liked it fine," Kaito says. "I just wanted to see if the dealer noticed."
His father stands, adjusts his cuffs—an old habit from before the implants made precision automatic. "She noticed. She is deciding what that costs. In the meantime, you will be measured." He pauses at the door. "The shareholder meeting is at fourteen hundred. Wear the gray suit. The one that apologizes."
He leaves.
Kaito sits alone in the Imperial Suite with the remains of breakfast and the city watching through glass. He lifts his cup, finally drinks the tea. It is cold. It tastes like policy.
His agent buzzes.
A message, no sender, just a protocol string that resolves into a location and a time: VICE TOWER / FLOOR 87 / 20:00 / BRING NOTHING.
He stares at it. Vice Tower. Yorinobu's pet project, the place where he entertains the people Arasaka corporate won't acknowledge exist until they need something loud done quietly.
Tomorrow evening.
He deletes the message. It deletes itself faster, as if embarrassed to have been read.
Kaito stands, walks to the window, watches the city do its arithmetic. Down there, people are choosing between paying rent or eating. Down there, netrunners are burning out chasing bounties that won't cover the hospital bill. Down there, a girl in a knockoff uniform stares at a building she'll never enter and calls it ambition.
Up here, he just had breakfast with a woman who could erase him with a word and chose not to.
He thinks about David Martinez—the boy who thought speed could buy him altitude, who wore borrowed chrome like a saint wears a halo, who died so loudly the city had to pretend it was a lesson instead of a murder.
He thinks about the hash in his cortex, the data-seed growing quietly in the dark.
He thinks about Hanako's eyes watching him admit he wanted her attention.
He thinks about gravity—how it pulls, how it crushes, how it makes falling and flying look the same until you meet the ground.
His wrist itches.
The city waits.
Kaito turns from the window and goes to prepare for a meeting where power will be bored and he will be invisible.
But invisibility, he has learned, is just another kind of performance.
And he is very, very good at performing.