Chapter 16 — Mom, This Is What You Said
Dawn in Santo Domingo never arrived the way stories promised. It came under neon—an early, synthetic light cast from looming holo-billboards and the always-on screens that painted the lower clouds in bruised turquoise and magenta. The air tasted faintly of burnt synthetica and coolant. The H4 block breathed in that color and kept the city's heartbeats pressed close to its chest.
Inside Room 604, on a table scraped smooth by years of use, two chipped ceramic bowls sat like little islands. Gloria Martinez slid one toward the boy across from her with a practised calm. The contents were a stew the city called food: processed soy-meat lacquered with curry compounds, rice of uniform grain and rubbery texture. It smelled better than it tasted, but Gloria dished it with the same ritual care she'd taught David when he was small — the small ceremonies against the constant grind.
David Martinez tied the laces on his scuffed sneakers with methodical, almost mechanical fingers. He had sent the morning voice-text already — the standard message that both anchored and choked him: "This is David. I'm leaving for school now. I had a good breakfast. Don't worry about me. Please take care of yourself." The shard vibrated once, Gloria's curt reply curling into a line of emojis: a coffee mug, a heart, and a work-shift timer.
The ritual calmed him, until it didn't. He slapped his cheeks until the sting cleared the fog left over his mind—hangover of too little sleep and too many unasked questions. He told himself he was ready. He'd survive another day of Arasaka Academy's polished corridors and acidic whispers. He always did. He always would.
He opened the door.
The hallway hit him like an entirely different ecosystem—voices, boots, chrome and cigarettes. This part of H4 was never quiet, but it was rarely this loud at sunrise. The sound carried with confidence: things being arranged, decisions being made, plans setting like a trap.
"Which room's Adrian in? H4, right? I've been hard-pinging his comm since dawn. Could he still be asleep?" The voice sounded like wind over a factory roof—big, habitual, and used to being obeyed.
"Didn't Sasha tell you?" another voice replied, clipped and careful.
"Nah. She only said she was going for a spin. Told her not to wander off alone. That guy's shady as hell, choom—what if he's playing her—"
"Shut it, Maine." The interjection cut clean.
David stiffened. Two names — Adrian and Sasha — landed between his ribs like knives. The new arrivals in 603 and 603's neighbor. He'd seen them in the hall the day before, like ghosts dropped into his building: faces that did not belong to his world of late shifts and second-hand classes. Tonight, they were words. They were being discussed.
He leaned his shoulder against the doorframe and looked down the corridor.
They were a crew—too obvious to be only neighbors. Maine dominated the group: a mountain of a man whose forearms looked like they harbored their own biographies. White mohawk, chrome pieces glinting under the low neon, a grin too wide for something that could crush a man. Dorio, tall and taut in a crimson coat, traced the outline of a pistol with the kind of familiarity of someone who'd seen too many ends. Pilar adjusted the knuckled joints on a gorilla arm, muttering to himself. Rebecca—small, wired, green-haired—twirled a submachine gun by her hip like a child spinning a toy. And in the corner, calm as midnight, stood Kiwi: red trench, steel mask, cigarette ember like a tiny planet between her lips. Her eyes were shutters—closed, measured, unreadable.
A rational person would have retreated, closed the apartment door, locked it, and gone to school ten minutes late instead of five. Fear was polite that way—keep the heart in your chest, avoid attention.
But Maine's voice carried again, this time directed at the nearest door. "Hey, kid!"
David's lungs shortened. He might have been in any movie where the hero miscalculated. He might have been an idiot. He might have been lucky.
He took a step forward.
"You… you called me?" His voice came out thinner than he'd expected.
"Yeah, you." Maine's grin cut the dark. His shadow took up the whole hallway. "Don't look so spooked. Come here. I've got a question." The tone was overwhelmingly personal, like the kind of voice that measured the size of your bones by touch.
David moved as if the floor were a countdown. He had to tip his head up to meet Maine's glance; the man's silhouette scraped the ceiling. He felt small, like a kid fished from a sea he didn't know.
"Name?" Maine asked, all business.
"David," he said.
Dorio's laugh softened into a pat on Maine's shoulder. She crouched slightly, trying for a tone meant to be easygoing. "Don't mind him; he's loud. You headed to school?"
"Y-yeah," David said, voice wobbling. The memory of Gloria's hands on the steering wheel at odd hours, the half-truths of scraped wages, the tuition that still felt unattainable—all of it pulsed behind his ribs.
Maine's gaze traveled, curious and calculating. "New tenant moved in yesterday. Asian, dark hair. Taller than you. Room number?" Dorio asked, the way she always asked—part friendly check, part reconnaissance.
David swallowed hard. He did know—Adrian. Room 603. But the words lodged like pieces of a puzzle he wasn't certain he wanted to complete. "I… I got in late last night. I didn't meet anyone."
Maine's hand moved. The silence stretched taut, as if a wire had been pulled in the corridor. David expected the hand to close into a fist across his cheek. He braced. He had prepared all night to be punished for something he hadn't done, for truths he hadn't told. He had prepared to run.
Instead, Maine's giant hand dropped onto his head and mussed his hair. The rough affection of it made David flinch, and then a laugh rolled down from the man like thunder. "Good kid," Maine said. The word was a small thing, and for reasons David couldn't explain it felt like absolution.
The door to 603 clicked open.
Adrian stepped out as if he were the center of the world's gravity—casual, watchful. He moved like someone who had practiced stillness until stillness itself had become a blade in his hand. Dark hair, a face that had learned the economy of expression, a posture that didn't try to fill space but instead took it with quiet permission.
"David?" Adrian called, voice low enough to keep its edges from the hallway's noise.
David's throat constricted. He recognized that voice from when Adrian had left in a hurry the day before, from the impression of a man who lived with decisions already made.
Maine turned back to Adrian and raised an eyebrow. "We're rolling. Sasha said seven but—" he looked at his watch as if the numbers were an insult. "It's only six. Time waits for no one."
Adrian frowned, checking his own comm. "Give me a minute."
His gaze slid to Kiwi with a flicker of understanding. Kiwi's cool mask hid the flicker and its reasons. For a second, Adrian's face softened. The moment felt private and old and dangerous, like the space before a fight when people let their hands rest from clenches.
Adrian's eyes moved back to David.
"Morning," he said.
"Good morning, Roll… big brother." David's voice tumbled out before he could stop the ritual—those words spilled raw, a childhood habit of calling to the people who made him feel less alone.
Adrian's mouth twitched in an expression that might have been amusement, might have been the ghost of something sadder. He did not correct the address. The phrase was small, and then it landed like a warm hand.
"You heading to school?" Adrian asked.
"Yeah." David's answer came fast now, less self-conscious. "I, uh—" he swallowed. He wanted to say more, but the corridor felt like it was lined with eyes that would weigh his words and possibly auction them off.
Adrian reached into his pocket and caught a small shard of light from the panel on his wrist. He tapped a sequence and a contact floated into David's shard with the label: Adrian — 603. The contact popped into the boy's world like a silent promise.
"Here," Adrian said, voice low. "Call if you need anything. If someone gives you trouble, hit me."
David's fingers cradled his shard like something holy. "Thanks," he breathed. It wasn't just gratitude. It was the rise of something that had been dry inside of him for years—hope, and the dangerous flirtation of belonging.
The elevator's doors closed and the boy stepped away, each floor lighting up like another chance. By the time the lift reached the street, the night had bled completely into day and the city hummed in its normal, indifferent rhythm.
He kept Adrian's contact in his hand for a long time, the little name glowing in his palm. Gloria's words from last night came back in his head—not the lecture about safety or about payment schedules, but the small, urgent plea she'd wrapped in an exhausted smile. "Spend time with people who will pull you up, David. Let someone in who actually changes your life."
David had rolled that phrase around in his mouth like a foreign coin. It had felt like a dare. It felt like life.
He stepped into the street. Neon still washed over the sidewalk like paint. Holo-ads leered down—slick company men promising futures that would cost everything. He walked past gutter-slick marquees and an old vending kiosk that sold coffee to men with hard hands. He felt lighter and heavier at once: lighter because someone had given him a number, heavier because numbers meant obligations.
Arasaka Academy loomed ahead, glass and chrome and the scent of institutional certitude. Somewhere inside, there would be suits, polite smiles that measured people by the quality of their implants and the smoothness of their credits. He adjusted his backpack and thought of the tiny, hidden rig under his mattress—his guilty private joy. A braindance deck the shop had sold him second-hand, a stolen escape for long nights. Gloria would have torn it apart if she'd seen it in the wrong mood. She hadn't. Either she didn't know or she let him keep the thing out of mercy.
On the sidewalk, a group of kids from Arasaka's vocational program passed by, all crisp uniforms and corporate haircuts. They turned their faces away when they saw him—politeness that wasn't quite kind. The city's stratification was a language everyone learned to speak without much practice.
David's comm chimed—Adrian: Keep your head down. Don't do anything stupid. After school, talk. Short, blunt, efficient. Like everything Adrian did.
David's mouth formed a small smile and he typed back: Got it. Thx.
The school day stretched and folded like a practiced charm. Gloria's warning played like an undercurrent in every hallway; every sideways glance, every whisper next to vending machines, every ledger of social points assigned and deducted in glances. He endured. He remembered the number stashed in his shard as if it were a talisman.
When the final bell rang, the city outside felt different—less hostile, a shade more playable. He took the long way home, past a laundromat whose glass front showed a reflection of a sky full of drones, past a street vendor who sold bootleg media, the kind of old action scenes that made the crowd laugh in all the right places. He walked slower than usual.
The keyless door slid open and the corridor fell away into a hush again. David saw the back of Adrian's head through a sliver of gap at 603's open door. A silhouette of someone who didn't belong to the same piece of paper as him. Adrian looked up, saw him, and offered a nod that was both permission and question.
"Wanna ride?" Adrian asked, leaning against the frame. He'd left his helmet on the hook and the outline of a motorcycle, sleek and cheap in the same breath, hummed in the corner like a cat.
David stepped forward. The bike's lucky-cat charm winked under the neon as if it knew him already. Inside his chest something loosened. The day had not been a victory. Poverty and the city's rub would have their ways to remind him. But this small connection—Adrian's number, a nod, the casual offer—felt like a hinge opening.
"Mom," he had promised himself he would say more than the ritual voice-text. He had meant to ask her if she wanted him to keep trying; to ask if the dream of an ordinary job, of a salary that didn't need gouging, was still worth chasing. He had intended to tell her, with the bluntness of someone who had kept a secret too long, that he was starting to believe something could actually change.
On the street, a holo-van guttered past with a corporate logo that sang of futures he couldn't afford. He stepped up onto the bike behind Adrian and let the engine take the moment into motion. The city blurred and he felt, absurdly, like the small spark of a fuse.
This was not a promise that would keep itself. It was a small, combustible start—fragile, dangerous, valuable. He thought of Gloria folding shirts in the evening, of her worn hands, of how many mornings she had gotten to work bleeding a little. He thought of how close he'd come to becoming invisible.
And he said, silently, to the back of Adrian's jacket: "Mom was right. Let me spend time with someone who'll change my life."
Adrian didn't answer. He didn't have to.
The city hummed. The day wore its neon like armor. And somewhere above the rooftops, the future that the billboards promised was still for sale—if you had the creds, the luck, the ruthlessness to buy it.
David, pedals cold beneath him and heart louder than the motor, decided to try.