The Ojo de Dios sign blinks like a tired miracle—an eye inside a triangle inside a promise. The front entrance is laughter and lacquer. He doesn't approach it.
When the city yawns, follow the halo's shadow.
At this hour the halo casts a bent crescent along a side alley where concrete sweats and dumpsters hum to themselves. He steps over a prayer of melted wax and bottle caps. A cook in a grease-stained apron smokes with closed eyes, timing the drag to a rhythm only the kitchen knows. The alley curves, constricts, opens onto VESTIBULE C—half-painted letters, a door with the kind of dent you get from a person who lost an argument with it.
No cameras. No pins. No prayers.
He checks his cuffs, smooths a wrinkle that doesn't exist, sets his personal agent to silent and then to something quieter than silent. The sakura pin is already sleeping in the armrest tray miles away. He touches the coaster, feels the raised rosary find his thumbprint like recognition without affection. The lacquer skull warms once—acknowledgment without warmth.
One knock is a client. Two is law enforcement. Three is family.
He raises his hand and lets it hover in the cold between choices. Three would be poetry. Two would be provocation. One is contract.
He knocks once.
The door opens the way a mouth opens when it knows exactly what it will say. A woman fills the frame—not large, but composed in the proportions of authority. Hair pinned with milagros, lips the red of old saints, forearms silvered with burn scars that tell stories the apron won't. Her eyes move down his body, up again, file him without retaining him.
"No pins," she says.
He opens his hands. "No pins."
"No prayers."
"I ran out last week."
"Clever." She takes the coaster from his fingers without touching his skin. The ink is still warm. She turns it, finds the crease he found, finds the second skin he found, and doesn't smile. "Ask."
"La Silla del Santo," he says.
"Which one?"
"The one people whisper about and then deny."
"Better." She steps aside. Inside is not yet inside—it's a tunnel of tile and steam and the smell of cumin and bleach. "Shoes on the mat. Phones in the box. Names belong to mothers—leave yours there too."
He removes leather that cost three political favors, sets it on a rubber mat painted with a cross that flinches when wet. He places his agent in a cedar box lined with copper lace. The lid closes independently and the hum of his implant drops a note, like a singer choosing a different key. He leaves his name in the air between them by not saying it.
"Hands." She mists his palms with something that tastes like peppermint and Faraday cage. "It's lace," she says when he raises an eyebrow. "For signals, not for marriage."
The kitchen is a rapid river. Knives sing. A boy with a teardrop under one eye calls orders like liturgy. A crucifix above the pass observes without judgment. They move through it on a line only staff knows, past a wall where Polaroids curl like leaves—weddings, wakes, a quinceañera for a girl trying not to smile at a cake larger than her hope.
They pass through a swinging door into a low room dressed as a chapel drowned in amber. The floor is black-and-white tile, the kind that makes you feel like a pawn if you allow it. The altar is a bar. The saints wear tattoos. Someone hung a yellow jacket near the candles, the paint catching breath from AC and shivering. The candle below it has guttered flat, a coin of wax that forgot it used to be fire.
"Sit," the woman says, indicating a chair in the back booth. It isn't special at first glance—old wood, one leg mended with brass plate—but the air around it is the air people maintain around things that broke someone once. The cushion's pattern is saints and skulls if you stare, geometry if you don't.
"La Silla," she says simply.
He sits. The chair accepts his weight like it has an opinion. The brass plate hums, barely audio, more pressure—a hand on the shoulder a second before it becomes a shove. Under the table, a structure of wire and wood like a harp touches his knee. "You'll feel a bite," the woman says. "Tell me something you didn't rehearse."
The bite is clean and small, a bee with credentials. It tastes adrenaline and sends it back to the brass. He watches his hands rest themselves, watches his breath become something someone else could count.
"Mirko offered me a line," he says, letting the name land on tile where it can't be owned by a microphone. "I caught it. But I brought my own rope."
The woman's eyes don't move. Somewhere behind the bar a glass gives up on being whole. Someone says "híjole" the way a prayer says itself when no one's listening.
"What won't you miss?" she asks.
He almost says time—inexpensive, dramatic, sufficiently correct. He almost says the person they think I am—true, hungry, obvious. He thinks of Hanako's paper: Silence outperforms loyalty over distance. He thinks of his father's half-lie straightening a collar. He thinks of the yellow jacket shaking in the AC like a plan remembering it was a person.
"The felt on the table," he says finally.
A blink. "Say it again."
"The felt. On the table. They engineer it soft so you don't hear the cards. They teach you the silence is respect. It isn't. It's so you don't hear the deal. I won't miss that."
The chair hums a different note, satisfied as a cat. The woman's mouth does something almost like approval.
"You'll keep your shoes," she says. "You'll receive a stamp, not a brand. Don't make me upgrade you."
She opens a drawer that thinks it's a reliquary. Inside: a rubber stamp, a pad that smells like sage and ozone. She takes his wrist. Her fingers are warm and not interested in ceremony. The stamp comes down on the inside of his forearm: a skull in a circle, the teeth little squares like pixels or rosary beads.
It heats once, those teeth lighting in sequence and then forgetting they ever did. He feels the lacquer skull in his pocket answer—a soft consonant tapping against the inside of the coin compartment.
"You didn't ask who I am," she says.
"You didn't ask who I work for."
"Everyone works for someone. Some of us do it with our eyes open."
"That's more difficult," he says.
"That's why we stamp," she says, and the stamp on the bar winks out like a trick performed correctly.
From the side door, the boy with the rosary wrist enters without his cologne and without his jacket, which makes him appear more dangerous and less certain. He nods once. The nod means stairs.
"Your driver?" the woman asks as if making conversation.
"Knows what not to know."
"Acceptable. People with nothing left to lose are loud." She gestures with her chin toward the back. "Go learn to whisper in a place with no walls."
The back corridor bends, tight as a secret. Stairs descend in the old way—stone and damp, the city's throat without implants. He takes them because elevators drop. The boy moves ahead, counting under his breath in a rhythm that probably keeps him alive.
It smells like extinguished matches and old bread. Halfway down, a niche holds a saint no one ordered—hands raised, gold leaf scabbed off at the fingers. A paper bracelet looped around the wrist reads H4 with a heart someone drew who never met the person they were loving. He looks at it and doesn't look away quickly enough to protect himself. The boy notices. Doesn't comment.
"Here," the boy says at a steel door painted the color of a decision you won't admit to. He raises his hand, knocks once. A pause. Twice. The boy looks at Kaito.
One is a client. Two is law enforcement.
Kaito knocks a third time.
A hinge in the dark finds itself. The door opens to a room not much larger than a confession and twice as honest. The walls are draped in acoustic velvet, black consuming black. No lenses. No reflection. The only light is a low ring set into the floor like an eclipse that exhausted itself.
There are four people already inside and one empty space in the circle. The empty space is not a chair. It is a shape in the air the color of invitation. A man in Afterlife black with a face that refuses to be average. A girl with a Valentino rose hand-poked at the throat, eyes laughing at the concept of laughter. A suit so simple it looped back to expensive. A slate kimono, tungsten eyes—the woman from the tower.
He doesn't look surprised. He looks oriented.
"Sit," the slate woman says, as if she had never stopped walking him down halls.
He steps into the circle. The floor ring warms his ankles just enough to tell his nervous system someone did their research. The city is far away and very close. If he speaks, the room will categorize it as useful or noise. He can feel the chair's hum still, low in bone, reminding him of weight.
He doesn't speak.
The man in Afterlife black produces a deck—not cards, a neural interface deck, compact as a cigarette case and twice as deadly. He sets it on the floor between them where the ring of light turns it into an artifact. The chrome catches nothing because there is nothing to catch but intention.
"You run the net," he says. It is not a question.
"I navigate," Kaito replies. "Running implies someone might catch me."
The Valentino girl laughs—a small sound that dies before it reaches the walls. The suit shifts, minimal, the kind of movement that says I'm cataloging this for later.
"Modesty or precision?" the slate woman asks.
"Both are survival tools," Kaito says. "I use whichever the firewall prefers."
The man slides the deck forward with one finger. "Arasaka Academy has a subdomain. Student records, encrypted, but not by anyone who understood that secrets depreciate faster than hardware. There is a record in there that does not exist anymore. A boy who attended for one semester before the city reminded him he was mortal."
Kaito does not blink. "David Martinez. Sandevistan burnout. The city filed him under cautionary tale and moved on."
"The city moved on," the man agrees. "The record did not. Someone archived his behavioral analysis, his neural mapping, the scan they took when they kicked him to the curb and told him he could be average somewhere cheaper. That data still lives in a partition that thinks it is invisible."
"You want me to retrieve a ghost," Kaito says.
"No." The slate woman leans forward, and her kimono does not move with her, which is how you know the fabric is smarter than it looks. "We want you to prove the ghost can be retrieved. We do not need the file. We need to know the file can be taken."
The room breathes. The floor ring dims a fraction, conserving energy, waiting.
Kaito reaches for the deck. His fingers stop a centimeter above it. "If I access Academy infrastructure from here, they will trace the intrusion to somewhere between this block and the harbor. Padre owns the parish. Wakako owns the data clinics. Rogue owns the silence. By the time they triangulate, you will all have plausible excuses written by lawyers who bill by the heartbeat."
"Yes," the man says.
"I will not have an excuse," Kaito continues. "I will have a connection. They will find the thread and pull until it leads them to a suite in their own tower where a boy who should know better just committed professional suicide."
"Also yes."
Kaito picks up the deck. The weight is beautiful and wrong—custom fab, someone sanded the serial number off with patience and a dream of anonymity. He turns it over. No branding. No fingerprints but the ones he is leaving.
"Then this is not about the file," he says. "This is about whether I will burn my inheritance to prove I never needed it."
The girl with the rose tattoo smiles wider. "He's quick."
"Quick gets you shot," the suit says, speaking for the first time. The voice is West Coast money that moved East to watch something die. "Smart gets you seated."
Kaito slots the deck into the port at his temple. The interface shivers awake—cold chrome kissing neurology, a handshake where both parties are lying. The room folds into data. He does not close his eyes. Closing your eyes in the net is what people do when they think the net is somewhere else.
The Arasaka subnet unfolds like a city inside a city. Firewalls the color of old cherry blossoms. ICE that patrols in formations copied from Mikoshi security protocols—because even the academy wants to feel like it guards souls. He slips past the first layer using credentials he lifted from a prefect's agent during a mandatory assembly where everyone was too busy performing attention to notice a localized signal bleed. The second layer is a neural lock calibrated to reject anyone whose brainwave pattern does not match archived faculty signatures.
He does not try to match. He simply waits, suspended in the space between packets, until a teaching assistant logs in remotely to grade essays that should have been graded last week. He rides the assistant's authentication like a child holding onto a turnstile and steps through while the system is still deciding if it noticed anything.
Inside, the data is organized the way a mausoleum is organized: quiet, precise, and certain that nothing here will ever leave. Student records glow in stacks. He ignores the ones that are still warm with recent access. He wants the cold files. The archived. The ones someone moved to a partition labeled HISTORICAL REFERENCE, which is how bureaucracies say we want to forget but are legally obligated to remember.
David Martinez is not filed under M.
He is filed under TERMINATION / ACADEMIC / INCIDENT.
There are forty-seven other records in that partition. Kaito opens one at random: a girl who stole test keys and resold them to Tyger Claws until Arasaka legal made her sign an NDA that could be tasted. Another: a boy whose borged reflexes glitched during a sparring drill and put two instructors in a med-center for a week. All of them alive. All of them gone.
David's file is third from the bottom.
The timestamp says it was accessed eight months ago. No name on the accessor. Just a string of authorization codes that dead-end at a clearance level Kaito has seen exactly twice: once during a presentation on Mikoshi architecture, once in his father's briefing shard the morning Yorinobu Arasaka came back from his long exile and stood in a boardroom that wanted to be a throne room.
He does not take the file.
He takes a hash—a fingerprint of its structure, the neural map compressed into a seed you could carry in your cortex like a bookmark. The file itself is a trap. The structure is a key.
He backs out, retraces his steps, erases his signature from the assistant's login token, and lets the subnet fold itself closed behind him like a lotus that thinks it's still a bud.
When he opens his eyes—though he never truly closed them—the room has aged a minute and aged a year. His temple port is warm. The deck is warmer. He sets it back on the floor.
"Six minutes," the man says. "Adequate."
Kaito hears the word and does not let his face admit he heard it before in a different room. "The file exists. It can be taken. It should not be. There is a clearance signature on the access log that belongs to someone who does not make casual queries."
"Who?" the slate woman asks, though her tone says she already knows.
"Someone who wants to remember what happens when a poor boy tries on a rich boy's corpse and calls it a life."
The room considers this. The floor ring pulses once, softly, as if approving of a thesis. The Valentino girl taps her throat where the rose grows. The suit does something with his jaw that could be a smile if smiles needed a permit.
"You passed," the slate woman says.
"I demonstrated competence," Kaito corrects. "Passing implies a standard. You wanted proof I could bleed without screaming."
"Poetry," the man in black says, bored and pleased in equal measure. "Rogue will appreciate that. She collects boys who speak in obituaries."
"I am not seeking collection."
"No one ever is," the man says. "But you came to a restaurant's basement, sat in a chair that bites, and pulled data from the corporation that owns your name. Either you are seeking something or you are running from it. Both look the same from the right angle."
Kaito stands. The floor ring stays dim, unimpressed by departures. His legs remember they were sitting and forgive him slowly. "I came because three separate fixers left me invitations they pretended were accidents. I came because Hanako Arasaka told me to be curious instead of cruel. I came because my father told me not to pose in front of murals, which means he knows I have been measuring them."
"And?" the slate woman asks.
"And I wanted to see what a room without cameras costs."
"Freedom," the suit says, standing as well. He is taller than Kaito expected, which means shorter than his clothes suggest. "Freedom costs privacy. Privacy costs silence. Silence costs breath."
"I have all three," Kaito says.
"For now."
The boy with the rosary wrist reappears at the door as if he had been listening but the room had not allowed him sound. He gestures: stairs, surface, back to the world that has names.
Kaito follows. Behind him, the slate woman says something too soft to carry, and the man in black laughs once, sharp, like a period at the end of a sentence someone was afraid to finish.
The kitchen is still a river. The saints still watch. The yellow jacket still shivers in the AC that never stops, never cares. The woman who took his name and did not return it is at the pass, plating a dish that smells like memory and lies about being comfort food.
"You have a question," she says without looking.
He does not ask about the chair. He does not ask about the circle. He asks the only question that matters. "Why did you keep his jacket?"
She plates the second dish. "I did not keep it. Someone brought it here after the tower. Someone who knew him before the chrome made him stupid. Someone who wanted a place where he could still be something other than a warning."
"Who?"
"Does it matter?" She slides the plates toward the pass. The boy with the teardrop under his eye collects them like they are relics. "The city eats saints. The city shits sermons. Somewhere in between, someone loved him."
Kaito touches the stamp on his wrist. It does not answer. "I never met him."
"But you know the story."
"Everyone knows the story."
"No," she says, finally turning to look at him. Her eyes are tired in a way that has nothing to do with the hour. "Everyone knows the anecdote. Story has a beginning. David had a mother. He had a dream. He had a teacher who told him he could not afford gravity and he tried to steal flight instead. That's a story. The rest of you just watched him burn and called it entertainment."
Kaito does not apologize because apologies are what losers do with time. He nods once—the angle that says I understand the lesson, not I accept it—and she seems to accept that as currency.
His agent vibrates in the copper-laced box. Time leaking back in, the world remembering he exists. He retrieves it. The phone flinches awake. Twelve messages, escalating in urgency, all from the driver. One from Emi: Where are you? Two from his father's office shard: reminders that tomorrow's breakfast will include someone important enough to be nameless in a calendar slot.
One from a number that is not a number, that is a protocol handshake wrapped in a social veneer: Adequate work. Do not let it become consistent. —H.A.
He stares at the initials. Hanako does not text. Hanako does not acknowledge. Hanako exists in the space between orders and inevitability.
But she is watching.
He pockets the agent, collects his shoes, and steps back into the alley where the halo has shifted and the grease-smoking cook has been replaced by a dishwasher who stares at nothing with the intensity of someone pretending prayers still reach.
The car is three blocks away, the driver leaning against the hood in a posture that says I'm not worried but I've counted every second. When he sees Kaito, he straightens, opens the door, says nothing.
"Home," Kaito says.
"Traffic suggests the long route."
"I'm not avoiding traffic."
The driver nods once and the car slides into the current. Night City does its oldest trick: it watches him leave and forgets him instantly. Billboards sell salvation. Pedestrians cross against lights that have given up enforcing order. A netrunner in a corpo coat stands at a corner, eyes milked, fingers twitching through someone else's banking credentials. An NCPD cruiser drifts by, sirens off, the cops inside laughing at a joke the city wrote for them.
Kaito watches his reflection in the window. The boy he sees is tired and not tired enough. The stamp on his wrist has faded to almost nothing, which means it has sunk deep enough to matter.
Somewhere in the city, David Martinez is a mural.
Somewhere else, he is a file that someone important keeps checking.
Somewhere else, he is a jacket shivering in AC, waiting for someone to stop pretending history is fixed.
Kaito thinks about Hanako standing by the window, her hands folded, her voice offering a test disguised as permission. He thinks about his father adjusting his collar and warning him about angles. He thinks about the slate woman in the circle, the skull on his wrist, the hash of a file burning quietly in his cortex like a seed he did not ask to carry.
He thinks about silence outperforming loyalty over distance.
He thinks about stairs and elevators and which one is really the trap.
The car pulls into the tower garage. Security nods them through. The lift hums its insured frequency. The suite is dark because it is always dark when his father wants him to wonder if he is home.
Kaito sheds his jacket, his shoes, the pretense that today was simple. He stands at the window and watches the city perform.
Down there, someone is climbing.
Down there, someone is falling.
Down there, Night City is deciding which one gets the spotlight and which one gets the pavement.
He presses his wrist to the glass. The stamp warms once, briefly, as if recognizing its reflection.
Then it goes cold, and he lets it.