Chapter 11 — Are You… a 2D Character?
The night air tasted of metal and fried oil, the kind of flavor Night City wears like makeup. Santo Domingo coughed neon down at the edge of the container cluster; laundry lines and buzzing holo-ads fought for attention with the low thrum of distant traffic. After adrenaline, the city feels enormous and small at once — enormous because the skyline keeps swallowing you, small because a single human decision could still tilt the whole thing.
Adrian let the wind braid itself through his bun while Sasha stood on the guardrail, knees tucked, eyes narrowed against the cold. The wound in her shoulder had been patched; Korna's hands smelled of antiseptic and incense and something else that felt like home. Susan had fussed like a mother and then gone silent the moment the med-field hummed steady. For now, they were warm inside their thin armor — the train running on borrowed time.
Sasha's bodysuit had been sliced and scored by shrapnel; black fabric rolled against exposed skin that looked almost unaugmented. Under the streetlight, it caught the pale blue like someone had painted veins with moonlight instead of metal. The cat ports at her temples still steamy, she flexed her fingers as if testing the world.
"Ask me anything," she said suddenly, curling her hands behind her back. Her voice was softer than he'd heard it in the chaos, an odd civilian thing Adrian hadn't earned yet.
"You told me to mind my own business," he said, half-joking. The night made jokes feel brave.
"You're petty," she shot back, but the smile behind it was real enough.
They fell into a kind of companionable quiet. A dozen containers away, the team laughed too loudly over a bottle and a ruined joke; Rebecca's bark of a laugh bounced down the alley. Night City moved on—contractors, corpo PR, and the little economies that turned life into numbers and names into ledger entries. But for a fragile hour, the two of them had the city to themselves.
"Safety Spirit," Sasha murmured eventually, like a card she'd been carrying in her palm for years. "You know what it is?"
Adrian shook his head. "Never heard of it."
Her eyes went cold for a moment, not cruel but sharp as a scalpel. "Pain reliever and neuro-modulator. They marketed it like salvation for surgical patients and war wounds—'Safe Spirit,' clinical and blessed and expensive. You have to know somebody to get it. It cost my sister and me everything when Mom was sick."
Adrian watched her profile, the night outlining the small cut on her lip. He'd heard rumors—a dozen murmurs about corpo drugs, bad trials, quiet cremations at odd hours—but hearing it plain in Sasha's voice made it a person-shaped wound.
"I gave it to her," she said. The words were precise, each one dropped like a coin on cold metal. "I thought I was buying time. I thought I was saving her."
"And she…?" Adrian felt the question on his tongue like a shard.
"They cremated her without telling us." Sasha's throat tightened. "No notice. A form filed by someone who wasn't us. They blamed a sudden complication. But today…I found the internal thread. 'Recall recommended' — and a single line: Norman: Deny. Proceed."
Her fingers patted the leather of the guardrail, a nervous cat ritual. "That file answered a question I'd been carrying for years. Why the rush? Why the silence? Why my mother's urn waiting when I came in shaking? The answer was a corporate ledger." She laughed, low and bitter. "I realized that I'd handed the thing that was going to kill her directly into the hands of the people who would bury the mistake."
Adrian wanted to reach out and take the whole weight of it, but he'd learned something the hard way: you can't carry other people's history for them. You can make space, though. He raised the wine bottle he'd snuck out from the loot bag and tossed it to her. She caught it like a goal she'd won.
"Why risk it?" he asked softly. "Why not bring us in—Maine, Pilar—any of us?"
Sasha's expression folded. "Because I thought I could control it. It was selfish. It was also lonely. I knew how the machine moved. I knew what it would hide. But I never expected the upload to go as far as it did, or that I'd get tagged while I was still inside the system. For a second, I thought… I thought being the leak might be the end of me and of them. I wanted people to know."
He waited while the night shifted. In the distance a holofish blinked past, a corporate advertisement sliding like a smile that never reached the eyes.
"You did it," he said finally. "You got the data out."
"Yeah," she said. "And then I nearly bought us both a funeral." She glanced over at him, and for once she sounded almost embarrassed. "I flipped the line. I started the upload. I wanted it to be impossible to bury."
"You did more than that," Adrian said. "You titled the corpse. You made them sweat."
Sasha breathed out, and for the first time since he'd met her, she looked relieved. "I couldn't carry it anymore. The not-knowing burned. But somehow—" Her smile was small and crooked, the kind you give someone you trust enough to let see the mess. "When you hauled me out of that window, I realized something else: I'm tired of dying."
Adrian's chest tightened. It wasn't the heroic drama of a movie—no slow-motion heroics, no soundtrack. It was two people in a cold city, both reluctant to trade their next heartbeat away. He let the silence hang, letting it mean what it wanted to.
"You think politics will change after 54News runs it?" Adrian asked, angled to sound cynical and not hopeful.
Sasha snorted. "Tomorrow they'll open the plant like nothing happened. Bad PR is an expense. But someone will ask questions. Maybe the right person will care. Maybe somebody who has more teeth than money will sniff around." She dipped the bottle for another sip, and it warmed her. "For now, I feel lighter. The secret's out."
Adrian's system chimed in the corner of his vision — the HUD a dull companion to the night's small triumph.
> [Mission — Rescue Sasha Yakovleva: COMPLETE]
Rewards: +0.10 Physical (Adrian)
Skill Unlocked: Potential Overdraft — 30s stat boost (Physical +60%, Reflex +50%), Cooldown 30 min; Aftereffect: Overheat.
He blinked. The numbers felt petty and cosmic at once. A new skill blinked into being on his slate, a badge for an audacity he hadn't planned on. He tucked the glow away like a secret.
"So," Sasha said, sobering like someone replacing a mask, "what now? You've got no place to sleep, right?"
That question had been waiting, the one that nudged at his pockets and his bones. He'd slept in the container, in a crate, under a leaking roof. The idea of a real bed felt obscene and tender all at once. Sasha's voice had the practical edge of someone who could code through a power outage and solder a broken heart back together.
"I don't have anywhere," he admitted.
"Haywood's too far. Pacifica's a dead end and the cops love it there. Santo Domingo or Watson — my vote's Santo Domingo. We're here. We're loud. Riverdale's got a building Maine wants to convert. That could work."
Adrian pictured a tiny room with a window that didn't face a billboard. He let himself like the idea aloud. "Riverdale sounds good."
"Two days," Sasha said. "Two days in the warehouse, then I'll pull strings. You'll get a room. I know a guy who knows a guy with an empty studio. By then we'll have to be quieter than we feel. They'll be hunting vectors."
They drank in silence for a while — not the loud, laughing kind that makes the city think you're fine; the quiet that says you survived and maybe that's enough for the night. The bottle shrank and their shoulders loosened.
Sasha hopped down from the railing and shuffled closer, nudging him with her shoulder like an embarrassed cat. "Ask me something," she said, mischievous now, deflecting the heavy with a cudgel of normalcy.
Adrian cracked a grin he didn't feel entirely but fished for warmth anyway. Memories of simpler indulgences surfaced — late-night illegal streams, old anime reels, laughable merch. What popped out was dumb and honest and somehow exactly the kind of thing drunken city nights required.
"Are you… a 2D character?" he asked, and the question landed between them like a soft grenade.
Sasha blinked, not offended but amused, then laughed the kind of laugh that leaks honesty. "A Danger Girl fan? You're adorable."
He felt a flush of something that wasn't shame, maybe relief. "I like old films. They make the city feel less sharp."
She reached into a small bag and produced a pair of gaudy, collectible Danger Girl stickers — plastic shine, a licensed pistol, and an absurd grin from some corporate artist. "Look," she said proudly. "Renata's signed one of these. I spent 24,000 eddies on this whole set back when I thought it was a good investment!"
Adrian leaned in. He was suddenly fascinated; those consumer relics felt like constellations for people who had less than the switch on a console. "You… you like this stuff?"
"It's fashion," she said, but her cheeks warmed. "And it reminds me I can be playful. We're all professional monsters a lot of the time. It's a way to smile back."
They sat like that for a long time, food smells drifting from a nearby stall and the container lights painting shadows that looked like planet maps. For a moment, the merc and the hacker and the ex-Mox kid were just two people with a clumsy affinity for collectables and a shared willingness to keep the other alive.
Back in the container, the team muttered and planned. Pilar fussed with the jammer's logs, running cleanups and fake traces, his hands working the way his mind stitched problems together. Maine mapped out safe houses and old debts they could call in. Dorio and Rebecca bickered about the music in the truck and the best way to get a drink that hurt less than the last.
"Get some sleep," Sasha murmured, nudging him. "Riverdale's a project. I'll make the calls. You should think about using that new skill we unlocked."
Adrian looked at the HUD's little icon for Potential Overdraft, feeling its hum pull at him like a promise and a warning. "I'll think about it."
Sasha's face softened in the way that made her dangerous and human all at once. "Promise me one thing."
"What?"
"Don't go dying on principle. Not for now." Her tone was coaxing and not an order; it was a small bargain between two people who'd just seen the city try to consume them.
He smiled, because the worst promises were the honest ones. "No promises."
She punched him lightly in the arm. "Then at least try."
They walked back to the container together — two silhouettes in neon haze. Above them, a distant server farm blinked to life. Somewhere in a cool, corporate room, analysts called lines of code and alerted security. The trace would inch closer. That was a certainty like gravity.
Inside, Korna fussed over the med-kit, rinsing out cloth and humming a wordless tune. Susan's jaw was a set line; tonight she'd loaned Adrian a gun and not asked why. The Mox were the kind of family that roughly hugged and then rewired your life. Adrian felt both thanked and indebted.
Before sleep, Sasha leaned close and whispered, "Adrian — you're a good listener. But you can also talk. Use it."
He wanted to say he would. He wanted to lie and be noble. Instead he tucked the words into himself like a battery.
Outside, the neon kept chewing the dark. The city's appetite was patient. It would raise its head again with the sunrise, and the corp's trace would be sharper. But for now, there was breath and a stupid sticker and a shared bottle to anchor the night.
---
System Log — Quiet Aftermath
Mission Complete: Rescue Sasha Yakovleva (Primary + Bonus)
Rewards: Physical +0.10 (Adrian) — New Skill: Potential Overdraft unlocked.
Bond: Adrian ↔ Sasha increased.
Immediate Threat: Biotech trace active. Recommended: lay low, launder funds, use Pilar's counter-trace.
Notes: Sasha's upload delivered a public leak to 54News — short-term PR impact expected; long-term corp retaliation probable.