The shareholder meeting is exactly what his father promised: power, bored.
Men in suits that cost more than surgeries. Women with implants so subtle you only see them when they want you to. A presentation about quarterly projections that uses the word "synergy" seventeen times like an incantation that might summon profit if repeated with enough conviction. Kaito sits in the gallery, invisible, taking notes he will never read, watching people who have forgotten how to want anything they cannot invoice.
He thinks about Hanako. The way she dismissed him with a sentence. The way his pulse betrayed him when she said useful instead of interesting.
He thinks about tomorrow night. Vice Tower. Yorinobu. The kind of room where people decide what Night City will pretend to be next quarter.
His agent vibrates. A message from Emi: Are you at the tower? I need to talk.
He types back: Gallery 12. Until 16:00.
Three dots. Then: I'll wait at your suite.
Something in the phrasing—wait, not meet, not stop by—makes him watch the dots longer than he should. They disappear without adding anything.
The meeting drones on. Someone proposes an acquisition. Someone else proposes patience. Everyone agrees to disagree until the numbers prove someone right and everyone claims they predicted it. At 15:47, Kaito stands, exits through the gallery's private door, and no one notices because noticing is not billable.
Emi is sitting on the floor outside his suite when he arrives.
Not standing, waiting with her spine like a contract the way she usually holds herself. Sitting, knees pulled up, head tipped back against the wall, eyes somewhere else. She's still in uniform—sakura pin crooked, tie loosened, the kind of dishevelment that on her looks like structural damage.
"Emi." He keys the door. "Inside."
She stands, wavers, catches herself on nothing visible. When she passes him, he smells it: something synthetic and floral, the kind of scent that comes from inhalers sold in Kabuki clinics under names that sound medical until you read the fine print. Blue Glass. Maybe Bounce Back. Something that makes the world softer and the user smaller.
The door seals behind them. She walks to the window, leans her forehead against it, breathes fog onto the glass.
"When did you start?" he asks.
"Does it matter?"
"It matters if you're standing in my suite at sixteen hundred on a Tuesday looking like you lost an argument with your neurotransmitters."
She laughs—small, broken, a sound like dropping something expensive and pretending it was cheap. "After midterms. Everyone does it. You know that. The ones who say they don't just found better dealers."
He knows. Academy students microdose their way through hell week with the precision of accountants. Stimulants for focus, depressants for sleep, empathogenics for the networking events where you have to pretend the person across from you is human. It's pharmacological optimization. It's survival.
This is not that.
"What did you take?" he asks.
"Something Kenji gave me. Said it was clean." She turns from the window. Her pupils are wrong—too wide, too eager, drowning the iris. "Said it would make everything easier."
"Kenji sells unregulated product to people who can't afford a tox screen."
"I can afford it."
"That's not the point."
She crosses the room—not walking, drifting, the drug piloting her like a rented body. "You don't get to lecture me, Kaito. You were out until midnight doing whatever it is you do when you take off the pin. You came back smelling like incense and revolution. Don't pretend you're clean."
"I don't use," he says.
"You use something. Power, maybe. Hanako-sama's attention." She stops close enough that he can see the way her jaw clenches and releases, the drug telling her muscles they have opinions. "You think I don't notice? Everyone notices. The way she looks at you. The way you look back."
His pulse does the thing it shouldn't do. "Emi—"
"I'm tired," she says, and the sentence arrives pre-broken. "I'm tired of being perfect. Tired of every conversation being an audition. Tired of sleeping three hours because if I sleep four someone will beat my score and take my placement and I'll end up in some regional office filing reports for a manager who thinks my first name is 'intern.'"
She reaches for him. Her hand finds his chest, fingers spreading over the place where his heart is still deciding what to do.
"I don't want to think tonight," she says. "I don't want to be Emi Sato, class representative, stakeholder's daughter, future executive. I just want to be—" She stops. The drug makes her eyes shine. "I want to be someone who gets touched without it being networking."
Kaito's hands stay at his sides. "You're high."
"I'm aware." She leans in, close enough that her breath is warm and chemical. "Does that matter?"
Yes, he almost says. No, something else suggests. She's here. She's asking. The city has taught him that people take what they want or they die wanting. That hesitation is just suicide with better PR.
Her mouth finds his—clumsy, desperate, tasting like synthetic flowers and the kind of sadness that can't be prescribed away. For a moment he lets it happen, feels her hands pull at his jacket, feels the weight of her trying to climb inside someone else's life and call it escape.
Then he sees it.
In the reflection of the window behind her, her face: eyes open, watching herself kiss him, and in those eyes—not desire, not relief, not even the drug's false promise of ease. Just sadness. Deep, vast, the kind that makes you wonder if the bottom is even there or if it's just sadness all the way down.
He pulls back. Gently. Catches her wrists before she can pull him back.
"Stop," he says.
"Why?" Her voice cracks. "Why does everyone stop? You stopped. Hanako stopped looking at anyone except you. My father stopped pretending I'm what he wanted. The drugs are supposed to make it stop mattering but they just make it louder—"
"Emi." He holds her wrists like they're fragile, because right now they are. "Do you think this will help you?"
She stares at him, pupils blown, tears forming in the corners where the drug hasn't erased everything yet. "I don't know what helps anymore."
He guides her to the couch, sits her down, keeps space between them. She folds into herself—knees up again, face hidden, breathing like someone learning how.
"What happened?" he asks quietly.
"Nothing happened. That's the problem. Nothing ever happens. Every day is the same test with different questions. Every night is the same dream about falling out of buildings I climbed to impress people I don't like." She lifts her head. The tears have made tracks through the careful makeup. "You get to be dangerous. You get to break into systems and attend underground meetings and have Hanako-sama notice you exist. I get to be perfect and polite and I can feel myself disappearing into the resume they're building for me."
Kaito sits on the edge of the coffee table, close enough to be present, far enough to not be pressure. "You think I'm not disappearing?"
"You're choosing it. That's different."
"Is it?" He thinks about his father adjusting his collar. About Hanako telling him not to be interesting. About the hash burning in his cortex like a seed he didn't ask to carry. "The only difference between your disappearing and mine is I'm pretending it's on purpose."
She laughs, wet and broken. "That's very philosophical for someone who just rejected me."
"I didn't reject you. I stopped you from using me as a coping mechanism that would make you hate both of us tomorrow."
"Tomorrow I'll hate myself anyway." She wipes her face with her sleeve, smearing the makeup into war paint. "At least tonight I would have felt something other than the gap between who I'm supposed to be and who I actually am."
He wants to tell her the gap never closes. That the city runs on that gap, sells dreams inside it, builds empires on the rent. He wants to tell her David Martinez tried to close the gap with chrome and speed and righteous noise and the city ate him anyway.
Instead he says: "When did Kenji give you the inhaler?"
"This morning. After you didn't apologize the way they wanted you to apologize. After Hanako-sama came to campus and everyone remembered they're ants pretending to be architects." She pulls the inhaler from her pocket—sleek, medical-looking, lying. "He said it would make me care less."
"It makes you care louder in a frequency you can't hear."
She looks at the inhaler like it's betrayed her. Maybe it has. Maybe that's the business model.
Kaito takes it from her hand. She doesn't resist. He turns it over—no branding, no dosage information, just a serial number filed off and a warning label someone peeled away. Underground fab. The kind of product that kills you slowly enough to call it living.
"You're going to tell me to stop," she says.
"I'm going to tell you that this specific product is probably cut with something Kenji's supplier uses to stretch profit margins, and that if you're going to poison yourself you should at least know what's in the poison."
"That's very pragmatic."
"I'm a pragmatist."
"No you're not." She meets his eyes. Hers are starting to clear, the drug cresting, reality bleeding back in. "You're a romantic pretending to be a pragmatist. That's worse."
He doesn't argue. She might be right. The breakfast with Hanako plays again in his memory—the way he admitted he wanted her attention, the way she almost smiled, the way gravity bent the room toward her.
"What's wrong with you?" Emi asks, and the question is gentle, curious, the voice of the girl who became class rep because she genuinely wanted to help before the job taught her help was just another transaction.
"What do you mean?"
"You have everything. Your father's name. Hanako's attention. Talent they can't teach. But you walk around like you're at a funeral for someone who hasn't died yet."
He looks at the inhaler in his hand. "Maybe I am."
"Whose?"
He thinks about the boy he sees in the mirror every morning—the upgraded face, the calculated smile, the performance so perfect he's forgotten which parts are him. He thinks about David's yellow jacket shivering in AC. He thinks about the meeting tomorrow night with Yorinobu, the kind of room where futures are decided by people who already know how the story ends.
"Haven't decided yet," he says finally.
Emi leans back, exhausted, the drug leaving her system like a guest who overstayed. "You know what the worst part is? I came here thinking if we—if you and I—" She stops. Starts again. "I thought maybe if someone touched me like I mattered instead of like I'm networking infrastructure, I'd remember I'm a person. But you stopped. And you were right to stop. And now I just feel worse because even the drugs couldn't make me into someone you'd want."
"Emi." He sets the inhaler on the table between them like evidence in a case neither of them can win. "This has nothing to do with wanting. If I touched you right now, I'd be the drug. Another thing you use to not feel what you need to feel."
"And what do I need to feel?"
"That you're disappearing. That the person they're building you into isn't the person you are. That if you don't find a way to matter to yourself, you'll spend the rest of your life mattering to people who only love the parts of you they can invoice."
She stares at him for a long moment. Then: "You really are a romantic."
"I'm a realist who read too much philosophy before they could teach me better."
She almost smiles. Almost. "What are you going to do with that?" She nods at the inhaler.
"Dispose of it properly. Send Kenji a message that if he sells you unregulated product again, I will ensure his supplier's next shipment gets flagged by NCPD with enough evidence to make the arrest billable."
"You'd do that for me?"
"I'd do that because Kenji is a mediocre dealer with delusions of empire, and you deserve better quality self-destruction."
This time she does smile, small and sad and real. "Thank you for stopping."
"Thank you for not hating me for it."
She stands, wobbly, recovering. "I should go. My father has a dinner. I'm supposed to perform competence for someone who might offer me an internship I don't want."
"Will you?"
"Perform? Always." She adjusts her tie, tries to resurrect her posture. "Will I take the inhaler to a clinic and have them tell me what I already know it's doing to my neurotransmitters? Probably not. But I won't take it tonight. That's something."
"That's everything."
She walks to the door, pauses with her hand on the panel. "Kaito? When you figure out whose funeral you're attending? Don't send me an invitation. I don't think I could watch you bury yourself and keep pretending I'm fine."
She leaves.
The suite is quiet except for the city's hum and the inhaler on the table, evidence of a night that almost became a different kind of mistake.
Kaito picks it up, takes it to the bathroom, watches the chemical dissolve in the sink, thinks about all the ways people try to disappear in Night City and how few of them ever come back.
His agent buzzes. A reminder: VICE TOWER / FLOOR 87 / 20:00 TOMORROW / BRING NOTHING.
He thinks about Hanako. Gravity. The way she said useful instead of interesting.
He thinks about Emi's question: What's wrong with you?
He thinks about the breakfast, the way Hanako confronted him, the way he admitted he wanted her attention and she almost smiled.
He thinks about Yorinobu—exile returned, rebel prince, the brother who left and came back different, the kind of different that makes boardrooms nervous.
He thinks about the hash in his cortex. David's ghost. The file someone keeps checking.
He thinks about being useful versus being interesting, and wonders if there's a difference when you're already halfway to being a weapon.
The city watches through the window.
Kaito stares back.
Tomorrow he'll walk into Vice Tower and pretend he belongs there.
Tonight he'll stand in his suite and pretend he belongs anywhere.
The window reflects a boy who looks like he's already decided which performance to give.
The boy behind the reflection isn't sure if he's lying.
End of Chapter Six: Weight