The House of the Reaper welcomes Novice Justin Pontanal to our ranks. Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
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I let out an exhausted sigh, allowing the tension in my muscles to bleed off, and turned my head back to my mother, seeking a distraction from the heavy atmosphere of the clinic.
"That song you were singing," I rasped, offering her a weak, tired smile. "It was beautiful. I didn't know you could sing like that. Where did you learn?"
Mom's tense posture softened slightly as a distant look entered her bloodshot eyes, and she reached out to stroke my hair again.
"It feels like a lifetime ago," she murmured as a sad smile touched the corners of her lips. "Before I ever set foot in Night City. When I was a little girl growing up in Mexico. My father, your grandfather, was a priest in a small, beautiful parish. Our lives revolved around the church, and I spent almost every day of my youth in the pews, and naturally, I became a part of the choir."
She paused, her eyes glazing over with a nostalgic sheen, lost in memories of a world that felt entirely alien to the one we lived in now. "I loved it. It was the one thing that brought me absolute peace. But when I was nineteen, my parents decided to leave Mexico. They believed they had a calling, a mission to spread the gospel in a place that truly needed it. So, they packed up our lives and brought us here. To Night City."
Vik let out a warm and affectionate chuckle that broke the tension in the room. "She's being modest, kid. Your mother had the voice of an absolute angel. It could probably stop a cyberpsycho dead in their tracks."
Mom rolled her eyes, but the bitter smile on her face deepened as she offered Vik a brief and appreciative nod before turning back to me.
"It's true," Vik continued, his dark eyes softening as he focused on a memory of his own. "It's one of the main reasons Alejandro fell so hard for her. He walked into a rundown little chapel in Heywood, heard her singing from the balcony, and that was it. The man was done for. Hook, line, and sinker. May his soul rest in peace."
"Night City broke my parents," Mom said quietly, bringing the narrative back to the grim reality. "About two years after we arrived, a year after they bought our house, the city had chewed them up and spit them out. Their faith wasn't enough to shield them from the rot here, so they moved back to Mexico when I was twenty-one. But I... I stayed. I had met your father, and I thought we could carve out a life here."
She sighed, her thumb gently tracing the line of my cheekbone. "For a long time, I kept singing, since it was my way of coping with the grind of the city. A way to remember who I was before the neon and the smog. But as work started demanding more of me, I stopped living and was simply alive... until you came into our lives... but then I slowly started to lose your father, and, well, you know the rest..."
"And the song?" I asked softly, wanting to pull her away from the darkness of my father's death. "The one you were just singing. Was that a church hymn?"
Julia shook her head, a genuine, albeit small, smile finally breaking through the sorrow. "No. No, that wasn't a hymn. It was a song from an old, old holovision show. A pre-Krash animated series from when my own mother was just a young woman. It was called Arcane, I think. My mother used to sing it to me as a lullaby when I was terrified of the thunderstorms in Mexico. I haven't sung it in years... but when Vik called, and I saw you lying here, so still and broken... it was the only thing I could think of to try and bring you back to me."
"Well, it worked," I whispered, closing my eyes for a second and leaning into the warmth of her palm. "It was perfect, Ma."
Vik cleared his throat, pushing himself off the medical tray and stepping up to the side of the surgical chair, seamlessly transitioning back into his professional, clinical persona.
"Alright, enough of the sentimental history lesson," Vik grumbled, though his tone lacked any real bite. He pulled up a medical chart from a nearby console, the glowing green lines highlighting a complex skeletal overlay of my torso.
"You're a very, very lucky kid, Santi," Vik stated, his eyes narrowing as he analyzed the data. "Whatever hit you, hit you with the force of a wrecking ball. You've got two cleanly broken ribs on your left side that fractured inward. If they had displaced even half an inch further, they would have punctured your lung, and you would have drowned in your own blood on the floor of that place before I even got the call."
I winced, the dull ache in my chest suddenly hurting a whole lot more with that context.
"Your sternum also took a massive hit," Vik continued, highlighting a glowing red line down the center of the holographic ribcage. "It's a hairline fracture, but it's a deep one. The good news is, your youthful bone density and the rapid healing factors in your system saved you from a complete collapse. The bad news is, this isn't something I can just slap a bandage on and fix with a quick dose of stims."
He tapped a few commands into the console, dismissing the hologram as he looked down at me with a serious expression.
"Three months, Santi. I'm putting you on a strict mandate of mandatory rest. No running, no heavy lifting, no fighting, and absolutely no strenuous physical activities. If you push that sternum before the bone completely knits, it will snap, and it will take your heart and lungs with it. Do you understand me?"
I nodded slowly, the motion sending a twinge of discomfort through my neck. "I get it, Vik."
"You can keep doing your gigs through the Net," Vik conceded, waving a heavy hand. "Lying flat on your back and burning through ICE won't put physical strain on your chest. Let your brain do the heavy lifting for a while. But you take it slow in the real world, and rest. You let your mother take care of you. Am I clear?"
"Crystal," I agreed.
Vik spent the next twenty minutes carefully wrapping my torso in a tight, restrictive compression bandage designed to keep the ribs aligned and the sternum immobilized. He injected a long-lasting, slow-release painkiller directly into my shoulder, sending a cool feeling of the synthetic chemical rushing through my veins and numbing the pain.
With Mom's help, I managed to swing my legs over the side of the chair, though standing up was a slow and grueling process. The room spun wildly for a moment, and my balance was completely thrown off by the heavy compression wrap and the lingering shock of the night. Mom wrapped one of my arms over her shoulders, bearing a significant portion of my weight, and we slowly made our way out of the clinic and into the neon-lit alleyway.
Mom wrapped one of my arms over her shoulders, bearing a significant portion of my weight, and we slowly made our way out of the clinic and into the neon-lit alleyway. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, and since the Galena was our only ride, Mom had been forced to hail a late-night combat cab just to get to Little China. That meant we had to walk in silence a block down the street to where I had parked the rustbucket before passing out. Every step was a fresh wave of torture, but we eventually made it, and I gingerly lowered myself into the passenger seat, suppressing a groan as my chest protested the movement.
As she walked around the front of the car to get into the driver's seat, my eyes fell on the dark grey fabric of my jacket, which I had tossed onto the floorboard earlier that night. Protruding from the deep pocket was the matte-black grip of the Malorian Overture I had clepped from the dead merc.
Mom opened the driver's side door and slid in, her eyes immediately drawn to the floorboard, landing squarely on the exposed grip of the heavy revolver. I expected her to say something as the silence stretched out. To give me a lecture about the dangers of keeping a weapon, to tell me to throw it in the nearest trash incinerator, to remind me that I was only fifteen.
But she didn't. She stared at the gun for a bit, her jaw setting in a tight line as she understood the necessity of the iron. She reached forward, put the key in the ignition, and we pulled out into the wet street without saying a single word about it.
I had stayed true to Vik's warning over the course of the next three months. My physical world had shrunk to the dimensions of my bedroom and the living room sofa, and the simple act of coughing or laughing sent spikes of pain radiating through my chest, forcing me to move with the slowness of an old man.
But if my physical world had shrunk, my digital world kept on expanding. With nothing but time on my hands, I spent twelve, sometimes sixteen hours a day, jacked into the Net. I chatted with Kotka almost daily, and I used a portion of the forty thousand eddies from the Arroyo gig to purchase the highest-tier, deep-dive educational braindances I could find on the runner boards and devoured them. I thought about buying a runner chair, but decided against it.
Lying flat on my bed, the BD wreath pulled securely over my eyes, I scrolled through the recorded sessions of veteran netrunners and Black-ICE engineers. My unique neuroplasticity gave me an edge, letting me process the complex coding languages and polymorphic viral structures faster than any normal baseline teenager had a right to.
But I still had to grind in isolated digital sandboxes that Kotka and I had built, testing the advanced subversion tactics I saw in the BDs, watching my code fail, crash, and burn time and time again. But like always, the grueling process of trial and error, reverse-engineering my mistakes for weeks until I understood what I was doing, learning how to exploit the Net a little better each day.
But, according to Kotka, if I just continued learning code every day without giving my brain a break, I'd end up gonked. And she was right, since the intense, hyper-focused coding sessions had been leaving me mentally exhausted, craving a distraction that didn't involve code.
So I, as any guy, naturally found myself being dragged into the rabbit hole of engines. Out of sheer boredom during my second month of recovery, I had stumbled onto an encrypted subnet dedicated entirely to Night City's underground street racing scene. Since the ICE for them was garbage, I started downloading the raw and unedited sensory BDs recorded by the drivers themselves.
This wasn't the first time I had slotted in a racing BD, but holy hell did the sensory immersion hit me like a drug this time around. I felt the bone-rattling vibration of a heavily modified, twin-turbo engine roaring beneath me and smelled the intoxicating toxic fumes of burning rubber and high-octane fuel. I experienced the exact adrenaline spike of drifting a customized Quadra Type-66 around a hairpin turn in the Badlands at a hundred and forty miles an hour as the suspension screamed in protest.
It was a completely different kind of rush than netrunning. It was beautifully mechanical. That, combined with my initial, passing interest in cars, the curiosity that had led me to buy the rusted Thorton Galena G240 and fix her up, quickly blossomed into a full-blown obsession. I stopped just watching the races and started downloading deep-dive BDs recorded by nomad gearheads and bought some made by corporate automotive engineers.
Lying in my bed, unable to physically lift a wrench, I watched them work as my motor cortex tried to map the torque required to calibrate advanced fuel-injection systems, and I did my best to memorize the complex schematics and custom ECU tuning. I would close my eyes and mentally try to strip the Galena's engine block down to its individual bolts, theorizing ways to bypass the factory limiters or optimize the air intake. I knew damn well that theoretical knowledge wouldn't perfectly translate to the meatspace, and I was bound to strip some real bolts, bust my knuckles, and completely screw up a calibration once I got under the hood again, but I had a solid foundation.
By the time the calendar flipped to July, marking the end of my three-month medical mandate, I was in a completely different headspace.
Physically, the bones in my chest had knitted back together, thicker and stronger than before, and the pain finally faded away to a memory. My body itself had continued to stretch, filling out my broad shoulders, and mentally, I had leveled up.
And after realizing that I couldn't really leave mom stranded without a ride, I had set myself on the path of wanting to get my hands dirty with a new ride, and I already knew what car I wanted. A car from a manufacturer that went under in the early some oil crisis in the 80s, but had made a wicked ride before that.
"But where in the hell am I supposed to find a 1970 Ford Mustang Boss 429?"
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The children yearn for the mines... and I for the stones.
The infamous P@treon exists for those of you who want to read ahead.
patreon .com/Crimson_Reapr (Don't be a gonk, remove the space)
They get around 3 long-form weekly chapters (4.5-6k words each).