Chapter 14 — The Future Legend Next Door
The silence in Adrian's new place was the kind of silence that kept its keys. It sat in the seams of the walls and the hollow behind the appliances, patient, waiting for a footstep to give it meaning. Outside, Riverdale chewed neon and spit it back in a thousand tiny pulses. Inside, a single cheap light soldered the room into a rectangle of twilight.
Adrian crouched by the battered holo-console, thumbs ghosting over the cheap keyboard. He'd opened the Cordo New Life catalog out of half-hope and half-practical terror; his fingers hovered above a collection of impossible prices and impossible finishes. A single cabinet—one cabinet—had a price tag that read like a down payment on a life: more than a month's rent, enough to make his breath catch.
"You don't need furniture," Sasha said from behind him, the movement quiet as a whisper and as precise as a lockpick. She'd slipped into the room like a cat, always a cat, never a shadow. "It's expensive and stupid. You're out most days. Hackers and mercs sleep for intervals, not decades."
Her hand landed on the back of the chair, chin propped on knuckles. The little cat-ear connectors at her temples still steamed faintly from last night's work. Her jacket smelled like solder and lemon oil; the scent fit her like a second skin.
Adrian let out a small, half-laugh, half-sigh. "I thought a house would feel like something that belonged to me," he said, voice low. "Not just a place to put my back."
Sasha's eyes softened, those blue-pink irises suddenly honest. "Belonging is a two-way street in Night City. You bring the place presents—like leaving your laundry at the laundromat—and the place fights to keep them. Buy a cabinet and you pay for it with attention. Or sleep on a mat and you spend the money on something better: a skill, a prosthetic, a day that doesn't end in thinking you're going to be stolen."
He'd been in worse places—five years under Lizzie's, with laughter on top and desperation under—so the impulse to make this small rectangle into a sanctuary felt almost obscene. Still, staring at the catalog, the idea of a single wooden shelf became an absurd luxury.
Sasha reached out and snatched the catalog, the movement both affectionate and efficient. Her fingers brushed his temple as she handed it back—no ceremony, no confession, a simple contact that had come to feel like a small oath.
"You'll get a bed," she promised. "But we won't furnish your vanity. Not yet."
Adrian nodded, and for the smallest second he felt like maybe that would be enough. A bed. A drawer. A place you could close the door and lock the world out for a while.
At that moment the smart speaker in the corner—the cheap kind wired to their brain-comms—chirped an arrival ping: someone at the door. The voice was polite and as precise as a machine. Adrian's mind skittered instinctively to the list of worst-case scenarios: corp fixers, Tiger Claws scouts, rent collectors with long knives and short patience.
"Did you tell Maine?" Sasha asked, eyes narrowing with the kind of strictness you only used on people you liked.
"No," Adrian said. "Figured I'd handle it myself."
They moved together—no fanfare, no announcement—two silhouettes in a dim room. The iron door's hydraulic hiss made a small, neighborly sound when Sasha eased it open.
On the threshold stood a boy who looked like he'd been carved out of youth and polished by poverty. He wore a black uniform that cost more than Adrian's shoes, hair hacked into a punk spike, and an apologetic smile he'd practiced in the mirror one too many times. A plate balanced in his hands, steam drifting like a small white flag.
"You live here?" he asked, voice slightly thick and eager, like someone hoping the script would not demand violence.
Adrian glanced at Sasha, who had already tilted her head. She had the look of someone assessing a new variable: dangerous, curious, mildly amused. Neighbors were data; data needed parsing.
"Neighbor," the boy said again, faster now, filling the space with words. "Room six-oh-four. I thought I'd come say hi—welcome, you know? My name's David."
"Adrian," he answered, keeping his voice steady. He didn't mention the Mox, the merc crew, the temping lure of a reputation he hadn't yet wanted to own. Sasha slid forward, hand extended with the easy politeness of someone used to masks.
"Sasha Yakovleva," she said. "I don't live here permanently—bit of a project. Nice to meet you." Her smile was an artifact of calibration, friendly enough to disarm, tight enough to hide the blade.
An older woman lingered behind him—warm, fierce, a haircut that had learned to tie itself up because there was no time for frivolous fuss. Her smile arrived with an apology and a generous edge.
"Gloria," she said, voice full and open. "David's my boy. Sorry to drop by unannounced—we saw you moving in and Mann's lot always look like the sort of people you ought to get on the good side of."
Adrian accepted the plate—two bowls of something steaming, starchy, and honest. The smell of home-cooked food hit him like a lie that made you want to cry. He'd been eating ration packs and greasy bar meals for months; this was a small betrayal of comfort he had not earned.
"Thank you," he said, muttered and sincere.
Gloria patted David's shoulder like someone thanking the universe for small mercies. "If you need anything, knock. We keep an eye on each other in this building. Folks around here look out for their own. I'll bring fresh bread around later."
When the door closed, Adrian felt both warmed and exposed. Hospitality in the city was a ledger—sometimes you paid it forward in bowls of beans, sometimes you paid for it with favors, sometimes with blood. Gloria's kindness was a currency he hadn't yet learned to spend elegantly.
Sasha tasted a meat roll and blinked like it surprised her. Food was always more complicated than it looked out here; gratitude and suspicion braided together in someone's pockets as easily as scissors and duct tape.
"You sure this is just neighborly?" she asked, not because she disbelieved the woman, but because she had been raised in a city that taught people to expect gifts to come with hooks.
Adrian swallowed, thinking of the rumor pulses that ran through Riverdale's veins: names that opened doors, names that closed them. Martinez was a surname that humored many myths. David Martinez could be a kid with a plate, or he could be a key in a sequence.
"Maybe he's just David," Adrian said. It was a small sentence, an attempt at normalcy. He found himself handing the meat roll to Sasha by reflex—humanity needed tactile reinforcement.
She chewed slowly, watching him as if cataloguing a new data point. "You were… polite," she said, eyebrows raised. "I remember you being colder. You actually said thank you."
Adrian felt a small, hot embarrassment. The night had shifted something in him. He'd spent five years learning how to be quiet under Lizzie's and two days learning what it felt like to be saved. Politeness was an act of remembering you were born as something other than a combat unit.
"Surprised?" Sasha teased.
"Maybe," Adrian admitted. Part of it was the food. Part of it was the sheer oddity of a neighbor bringing a plate. Part of it was the faint, electric whisper that he was living next door to someone who might become a story, a legend with a small name glued to a large future.
Because there are names that swell. There are myth-lines in Night City—people who start in a room with two bowls on a plate and end in a headline that reads like prophecy. Adrian felt the ridiculous, irrational thread pull at his chest: could this kid be one of those names people learned to say like a prayer?
Sasha nudged him with her elbow. "Don't talk yourself into story arcs. We need steady work, rent, a deposit. Save your legends for the day they actually earn you a warm place."
But the thought would not leave him. The idea that the future's little legends could start behind a closed door, balancing a plate, made the city feel both smaller and more queerly benevolent.
Later, when the team reconvened, the story moved like people move when they have a single, simple agenda: survival. Maine sat by the map, looking like a man who'd built a life of solutions out of scraps. Pilar tinkered with a jammer array that smelled faintly of ozone and ambition. Rebecca argued with Dorio about whether they needed a better driver or just a meaner engine. The world performed its usual slow, inevitable revolve around small, sharp plans.
"Neighbors can be dangerous or helpful," Maine said, voice low and steady. "We keep an eye. If David's legit—say he's a kid—then we help him. If he's a prod, we recruit him or we watch him. You don't leave names like Martinez unexamined in this city."
Adrian listened and felt the small gravity of the room. He had thought the apartment was a step toward something private. Instead, it had become a node in a network: an address, a value, a potential place to hide or a place to be found.
That night, when the neon outside tuned itself into a lullaby of advertisements and drone paths, Adrian walked down to the building's roof. Riverdale's skyline looked like teeth set into a jaw made by designers who had never eaten real food. In the distance, a holo-sign flickered an ad for a prosthetic holster you could pay in installments for; underneath, a slogan promised control, dignity, and forgetfulness.
Adrian thought of the Mox and Lizzie's and Korna's quiet iron-handed kindness. He thought of Sasha's deft fingers and the way she'd chosen to risk everything to make a truth public. He thought of David and Gloria—small kindnesses, perhaps, or perhaps the first moves in a larger vector.
He took one of the small stickers Sasha had given him earlier—a cheap Danger Girl charity tie, a tiny emblem of plastic and nostalgia—and slid it under the lining of his jacket like a talisman. It was a ridiculous trinket, but sometimes ridiculous things were exactly the anchors a person needed.
Back below, someone was playing a radio that broadcast static and a drunk poet's monologue. The city breathed its tired sigh. In an edge of neon light, two figures moved across a balcony, laughing in a language that had survived three different wars. The city did what cities do: it swallowed names, chewed them for a while, spat out a few that glimmered.
Adrian returned to the small rectangle of his place, to the borrowed bed and the plate now empty in the sink. He lay back and listened to the building settle. Somewhere on the other side of a thin wall, a child cried, followed by the patient, sharp voice of a woman smoothing fear into the mundane.
Tomorrow, they'd collect the deposit, move things that mattered into boxes, and prepare for whatever trace Biotech's alarms threw at them. They'd plan in lists, allocate pay, and argue about who took the first watch. But tonight, Adrian allowed himself one small, almost illegal indulgence: hope.
Outside, the night grew thinner, the neon less forgiving. The city would wake without them, and maybe it would swallow names as it always did. Or maybe, sometimes, a kid with a plate and a woman with a fierce smile would become the kind of neighbor that cut the bite of the street down.
Adrian closed his eyes and thought: if legends are built of small things—bowls shared, doors opened, hands clasped—perhaps his future would be less a headline and more a string of tiny, almost unseen kindnesses. Perhaps that would be enough to hold against a world that loved to erase.
For the first time in a long time, he slept with a stomach that was full and a heart that had room for a silly sticker. The future was wide and hungry, but tonight the door beside his was shut: a neighbor, a plate, a promise. Those were small things, but they could grow into weapons if you fed them right.
And somewhere across the building, David Martinez mopped the stairwell and thought of legends he hadn't yet earned. He was, like everyone in Night City, a work in progress—dangerous, soft, and possibly the beginning of something that would one day be told as a story.