Chapter 13 — Neighbors
The city had a way of rearranging people into smaller, sharper constellations. Tonight those constellations clustered around cheap light and cheaper food: a Santo Domingo diner with a flickering holo-menu, a corner booth that smelled of grease and old smoke, and a round table crowded with hands that could break you — or save you.
Maine toyed with a battered lighter while Rebecca demolished a composite burger like a small comet devouring a planet. He watched her with the fond exasperation of a man who'd spent too long keeping other people alive to be surprised by anything they did. When she chewed and shrugged between mouthfuls, crumbs spattered the table like confetti. She wiped her hands on her coat and grinned as if the world were a joke only she fully heard.
"Are you sure she'll come?" Maine asked, not because he doubted Rebecca but because he had been keeping the ledger of risk and risk had teeth.
"Don't doubt me, Maine." Rebecca chewed, then swallowed. "I am not Pyrrha. I don't flake."
Her voice swallowed space and left a smug little silence that belonged entirely to her. Rebecca's hands were small and quick; she drank deep from a plastic cup, the liquid making her cheeks glow as if she'd swallowed a small neon light. When she spoke again she did so with the kind of insolence that charmed and annoyed in equal measures. "I met her. That's it. End of mystery."
Maine rose with the posture of someone who had to put on gravity. He reached across and ruffled Rebecca's green hair the way an older brother might play with a stubborn child's crown.
"Why shouldn't I ask?" he said, amusement lifting his face. "I was your guardian, weren't I? When Pyrrha was off fixing engines or putting out fires, who looked after you?"
"Fuck your guardian," Rebecca snapped, then immediately flipped her middle finger at him and laughed because the worst things in this city had to be laughed at sometimes. Her laughter was loud enough to startle a waitress and small enough not to draw the wrong attention. She was a child grown hard, a grin that hid old bruises.
Maine wiped oil from his hand and breathed in the diner's steam as if choosing to believe ordinary comforts were enough. That belief was an act of defiance. He'd lost enough friends to the street to know better, but hope was cheap and hope kept you moving.
Rebecca's eyes went glassy for a second when she turned her head. She pointed behind Maine without taking her gaze off him. For a sliver of time the room shifted—an arrival, a small arrow of presence.
A woman approached, coat-tail cutting the neon. She was taller than most, moving like an elegant machine made of bone and practiced detachment. Her hair was blonde, cut into a utilitarian trench-coat silhouette, and a thin piece of red steel masked her lower face, hiding whatever expression might otherwise have betrayed her. Smoke feathered from a cigarette between two fingers that had clearly handled wires and blades in equal proportion.
"Am I late?" she asked, tone clipped and inherently dangerous.
"No," Rebecca said without hesitation, patting the empty seat between them. "You're just in time."
Maine blinked, then stood and offered a courteous hand. "Qiwei," he said, like an introduction to a ledger that had just added a new line. "This is the captain. He's annoying, loud, and usually right when it matters."
Qiwei took his hand with the air of someone who measured truth by the weight of a handshake. She removed the cigarette from her mouth and pinned him with eyes that looked like they could download a lie. There was something about her that suggested she had been carved from ice and dressed in red on purpose.
"Tell me the terms," she said without fanfare, the sort of line that meant: show me the math, and make it quick.
Maine straightened, inhaled, and said the things that merc captains said when they were trying to buy loyalty: honesty, a cut, and a family. "We split it evenly. You do the work, you get paid. I can't promise riches every day—only that if you bleed with us, you won't die alone."
Qiwei's eyes hardened. She had the kind of stare that suggested she'd been betrayed enough times to be late to hope. "If I earn less than when I solo, why join you?"
Maine closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and offered something that had the whiff of a bargain and the sheen of ambition. "Because we're on the rise. We've got momentum. This crew doesn't ask you to be family unless you want to be. Two days ago we pulled a big job. The payout — 250,000 euros. Split four ways, that's not a joke."
That number landed like a meteor in the hush. For people who lived by scraps, a quarter of that could anchor months of risk in a warm bed.
Qiwei's deadpan expression softened just a fraction. Money could be persuasive. So could the promise that someone else'd cover the knife edge when it got too thin.
Rebecca, watching the exchange, rolled her eyes theatrically. "Maine says everything like a salesman," she said under her breath. "He says it like the world will believe anything if you hand him a grin."
Maine pretended not to hear, and gave Qiwei a grin that tried to be less predatory and more brotherly. "You won't regret it."
Qiwei's cigarette went out in the ashtray. She extended her hand with the immovable certainty of a contract. Maine took it, and for a beat the table felt like a summit.
Trust in this city was a currency as volatile as any other — but sometimes you had to place a stake. Qiwei's chin lifted and for the first time, the red mask suggested something like amusement. Her smile, if you could call it that, didn't brave the whole face. In Santo Domingo, trust was rationed and expensive; she had learned the math early.
Outside, the world cracked on. The afternoon heat struck like an accusation. Down by the subway entrance a different story walked out from under the metro shadow: a boy in a school uniform, breath fogging slightly in the warm air, pockets empty of spare eddies. He ran because he could. He ran because running saved him from the thought of rent and yesterday's unpaid light bill. He ran because sixteen wore like a bruise and running smoothed it into motion.
Birth certificates don't come with armor. The boy pushed through the plaza, straightened when suspicious glances tried to shape him into someone's easy prey. He was used to the gasping looks — Santo Domingo's cheap patchwork had a habit of judging those who moved too much or too little. He rode that judgment like a tide.
He arrived at his building, punched the elevator number, and the doors slid open with a groan that smelled of rust and old promises. The corridor had the usual nothings: peeling paint, a neighbor's laundry line, and the distant echo of someone else's argument. It was home by the optimistic standards of a place that had once been something else.
Inside, the plaster smelled like boiled cabbage and the kind of domestic discipline that had been around since before the corporations. A woman stood with her back to the stove, red hair in a bun, sleeves rolled as if she'd been training her whole life to heat food and hold a nervous household together. When she turned, she had a face that had been worked over by worry and grit, large eyes that softened when they found the boy.
"You back?" she asked. Her voice was a warm, brittle thing — a lullaby with too many edges. "Take these to the neighbors. We've got someone moving in next door. You know how it is."
The boy's mouth twisted into the universal teenager's snarl. "Why? We hardly got enough for ourselves. Who asked for this?"
The woman gave him the small discipline of a practiced parent. "We need neighbors who know us. People who watch the doors when we can't. Find the good in the city — sometimes you have to plant it." She smiled the kind of smile that smelled like late nights and overtime; her eyes asked for a truce.
"An old man called David Martinez," she said casually, then turned back to the stove like she'd spoken a weather report — a name, a fact to tuck away. "He's the stoop man. Don't make him mad."
The boy's jaw tightened. David Martinez was a name that rolled with the weight of the city's myth — not the famous merc of legend in some timeline, but a local fixer known for favors and bad luck. The woman's comment should have been casual, but in a town that haggled for chances like currency, mentioning such a neighbor was a cautious nudge toward safety.
Back in the diner, Maine watched the boy's name like a line in a ledger. He kept his gaze long enough to measure risk in a glance. People were never just people for long in Night City; they were liabilities, potential allies, and sometimes both.
The team's conversation shifted from recruitment to other necessities — the mundane engineering of survival. Fuel, safe routes, someone to fence new tech, a driver who would not betray them for the right wallet. Maine outlined the next moves with the battered lighter between his fingers, planning like a man who'd learned that plans were both a weapon and a lullaby.
"Driver," he said simply. "We need one who knows when to get the hell out and when to be a bump on a board. Not some kid with a clean conscience."
Rebecca's grin was a flash of teeth. "We'll find one. We always do."
Maine nodded. "We expand. Carefully. No more lone hackers. We're getting Qiwei for the crew. Pilar's patchwork will cover our tracks. Rebecca, you keep recruiting on the sly. And—" his voice softened, "—we take care of each other. That's the part most people sell for a little more cash."
The diner hummed with small plans and the low static of a city that never left its ears. Outside, a siren wailed in the distance, the city's uneven metronome. The day rolled forward. Rivers of people flowed in their tiny circuits. Hope passed as rumor.
Later, the boy from the apartment — their neighbor to be — would learn the kind of lessons Night City taught fast and without pity. He'd be forced to decide: keep running or learn to run for someone else. The woman's mention of David Martinez would later be an invitation or a warning, depending on who pressed the right buttons.
At the container cluster, Maine's team prepared like people who stitched their nerves into armor. Plans were made and folded into pockets. Qiwei watched the roster like a surgeon appraising the instruments on a table. There was a rhythm here: the quiet, clean kind that comes from competence. They were a team of margins, and margins made for easier disappearances.
Rebecca, crouched on the curb after she left the diner, lit a flimsy cigarette and stared at the sky where the neon tried to outshout daylight. "You think he'll last?" she asked, voice almost private.
Maine's answer was the kind guys like him gave: blunt truth wrapped in a soft lie. "If he learns to listen, maybe. If he keeps running on his own, he'll be a cautionary tale. Either way, we'll make sure we remember his name."
It was a mercenary's promise — half threat, half blessing. In their world the line between both blurred until you couldn't tell which side you were on.
Farther down the river valley, a different kind of movement took shape. The city had layers, and this one thrummed with electricity: people made small deals, people washed away debts into the hands of others, and old names like David Martinez made small arrangements happen in apartments and alleys. People traded favors for favor, no one keeping a ledger but everyone remembering who owed what.
Maine's team would sleep for a while on the words they'd laid out — recruit, widen, prepare. They'd wake into a day where dead names and living plans mingled and where a new neighbor would be either a trouble or a treasure. The diner's light sputtered and steadied. Rebecca's laughter faded into the general ambiance the city made when it thought it had survived the problem. Outside the window, the river valley moved, and somewhere, a child's elevator dinged closed on yet another small home that would have to learn how to live in a city that forgot too much.
Night City would roll on, indifferent and hungry. But inside the hum of that moment, Maine and his crew felt something like a claim: the small, fierce declaration that you could still choose companions who'd catch you when you fell. It was a fragile thing, and that fragility made it sacred.
They ate another meal, made more plans, and left their promise like a footprint in the wet cement of an ordinary afternoon. The rest of the world could wait. For now, they had neighbors — people to trade smiles with and to watch doors for. That was enough to start.