Cyberpunk: Whispers of the Blackwall

AN: Only this chapter for this week. I'm swamped with midterms and job interviews, so I won't be able to keep writing.

The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:

Director Jackson Reiners!

It's been ages since a Donation Tier member joined this house! In their honor, I typically release an extra chapter, which is one of the reasons why I'm uploading this chapter, since I was not planning to upload at all this week. I bore witness to their rise through the ranks myself. Entering as a Novice and quickly becoming an Operative, and just look at them now: a director. You all should take inspiration from Director Jackson Reiners (and hand over your moolah). Their contributions and dedication to our cause are exemplary, and their name shall be honored and known throughout the Net and the Stars.

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"I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night."

- Sarah Williams, The Old Astronomer to His Pupil

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The Hozuki launched out of the valet line in a wide arc, its tires screaming as the rear end stepped out just enough to swing the nose around toward the street. He caught it with a flick of the wheel and fed the throttle, and the car shot out onto the boulevard and toward the giant roundabout at the heart of Corpo Plaza.

Sasha let out a shriek of pure joy, a sound Santi had never heard come out of her mouth before, and it filled his chest with joy and pride.

He hit the roundabout doing 90 mph, running a red light as he yanked the shifter back and downshifted. He let the nose dip and came off the brake, turning in before pulling the handbrake, throwing the rear end out in a wide swing, and the Hozuki slid sideways around the curve of the huge roundabout, past other cars.

The glittering towers of Corpo Plaza spinning past the windshield, the tires howling, the smell of burning rubber pouring in through the open windows as a white cloud formed in their wake. Cars swerved, and people honked, but Santi could not bring himself to give a single fuck. Sasha threw both arms up over her head, and then she leaned one out of her open window and waved it out into the night as the wind whipped her short hair across her face.

As he reached the exit, Santi swung the car the other way and took the exit in a drift before straightening out and banging through the gears without bothering to look back.

They made a pit stop in Heywood twenty minutes later, at a little all-night clothing store wedged between a noodle shop and a pawn shop, with a hand-painted sign in the window that read "ROPA Y MÁS" (Clothes and More). The woman behind the counter took one look at Sasha's dress and Santi's coat and raised an eyebrow so high it almost disappeared into her hairline, but she didn't ask any questions.

They split up and dug through the racks, and ten minutes later, they met back at the counter.

Santi came out of the changing room in black combat boots, black cargo pants, a black tank top, and a dark red flannel shirt hanging open over it with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His silver cross sat against his chest. He had a dark gray hoodie slung over one arm in case it got cold out in the desert, and his dress clothes in his other arm.

IMAGE OF SANTI

Sasha came out in a pair of white sneakers, black sweatpants, and a wine-red crop top that stopped just above her navel while her clothes were slung over her arm. Her choker was still on, but around her neck, on a thin silver chain, was a small silver cross, and Santi stared at it.

IMAGE OF SASHA

"What?" she asked.

"You have a cross," Santi pointed out the obvious.

She looked down at it, then at his. "So do you."

"I got pressured into buying mine," Santi said.

"Well, I always carry mine on me. Hold this," she said, passing him her dress clothes without waiting for an answer, and pulled a gray hoodie on over her shoulders without zipping it, letting it hang down off her arms. "My babcia (grandmother) gave it to my mother, and she gave it to me before..."

She didn't need to finish the sentence for him to understand what she meant. Santi carried both their clothes, and they each grabbed snacks off the shelf by the register. Chips, candy, some carbonated drinks, gum, and some synthetic jerky. Santi paid for everything, and the woman behind the counter folded the dress and the coat into shopping bags for them, still shaking her head.

When they got back in the car, Sasha buckled herself in. Then she reached over, scrolled through the playlist, and picked a song from the playlist: Highway to Hell.

Santi laughed out loud and put his foot down, tires screeching as they blew out of Heywood and onto the highway heading east, slowly leaving the city behind.

The neon thinned, the towers shrank in the rearview mirror, the megablocks gave way to warehouses, and the warehouses gave way to scrapyards and abandoned gas stations and long stretches of chain-link fence with nothing behind it. They flew past Trey Orsen's junkyard field doing a hundred and forty, past the rusted husks of cars and the towering stacks of scrap that Santi had once walked through looking for parts.

As the car ate up the asphalt beneath them, the sun started to set. Rocky Ridge rose out of the desert, brown scrub and the occasional Joshua tree twisted up toward the sky. Santi took the curves fast but without any issues, letting the rear end slide just enough to make Sasha squeal, but keeping things under control. In the rearview mirror, the last red band of the sunset was dying along the western horizon, sinking behind the distant shape of the city.

And once it was gone, night came down over the Badlands all at once. The headlights cut through the darkness as the Hotel California played. They ate their snacks with one hand and talked with the other, about everything and nothing all the same. They remembered the time Judy nearly set the scrap-fab on fire and talked about whether the Widowmaker would actually be able to drift with that much armor on it, which, of course, Santi was confident in.

"Trust me, it'll drift," Santi said.

"But it's going to weigh like eight thousand pounds," Sasha countered.

"Seventy-five hundred," Santi said in an attempt to make an argument in his favor.

"Yeah, that's still a hunk of metal, Santi," Sasha said. "It's gonna be like a tank, and to my knowledge, tanks don't drift."

"Come on, we've both seen that Fast and Furious movie," Santi argued.

"That was a movie, you lunatic," Sasha said, laughing heartily. "You're insane."

"Yeah, you said that already," Santi said with a laugh of his own.

Twenty minutes later, Sasha stopped mid-sentence and leaned forward as she looked through the windshield. "Santi."

He had already noticed what she was looking at. There was a cluster of white floodlights on the desert floor maybe eight miles out. They were prefab barracks with a huge radar dish turning slowly. The squat shapes of armored vehicles parked in rows, and above it all, a pair of AVs hanging in the air with their running lights blinking red.

It had to be the NUSA.

Santi slowed his speed, killed the headlights, and the road went black in front of them. Sasha grabbed the handle above her door and he dropped the speed while activating his cyberdeck, which allowed the world around him to be washed in a night-vision green, though it wasn't the best quality. Because of this, he hit a few potholes, forcing him to drop his speed even more and shift into seventh gear to keep the revs low.

"Can you see?" Sasha whispered, like the soldiers might hear her through miles of desert.

"Yeah," Santi said.

"Are you sure?" Sasha asked again as he swerved to miss a big pothole.

"I can see," he said. "For the most part."

She didn't let go of the handle and lowered the music until they could barely hear it, which had shifted to the soft piano and guitar from November Rain by Guns N' Roses.

The camp slid past on their right, and one of the AVs swung its nose a little in their direction. Santi felt his chest go tight, but his hands remained steady on the wheel, ready to do a J-turn at any moment, bring the lights up and delta the back to the city.

The AV held there for a long second, then it turned away and drifted back toward the camp. It was clear that it was looking for something more interesting than one car on an empty highway.

Santi waited a while longer before flicking the headlights back on. Sasha let out a deep breath, and then she started laughing again, a little shaky this time.

"Okay," she said. "That was scary. That was scary as fuck."

"You want to turn back?" Santi asked.

She looked at him like he had just asked her to eat a rock. Then she reached over and turned the music back up.

They stopped at a gas station and got a full tank, which would sustain them for another 500 miles, and drove for another hour, past the point where the road signs stopped bothering to tell them where they were going, until the windmills came up out of the dark.

They stood in a long scattered field on both sides of the road, old-style wind pumps with spoked wheels on top of tall metal frames, dozens of them, silhouettes against the night sky. Some of them were still turning slowly in the breeze, but most had been rusted in place for so long they would never turn again. Between them, the desert floor was covered in low, scrubby brush.

Santi slowed down and scanned the side of the road until he spotted a narrow dirt service road, branching off the highway and winding up toward a ridge on the left.

He turned onto it, and the Hozuki bounced and rattled over the uneven ground, its low splitter scraping every once in a while, making Santi wince. But he took it slow, and the road climbed for another few minutes, and then it leveled out onto a wide, flat plateau at the top of the ridge.

He pulled up near the edge of it and killed the engine, drowning them in silence. For almost a minute, neither of them moved, simply taking in the silence as the engine ticked from cooling. Then Santi unbuckled his harness, popped his door, and climbed out. He walked around the front of the car, opened Sasha's door, and crouched down beside her to unclip her harness, the five buckles coming loose with a series of soft clicks.

He held out his hand to help her out, and she took it. Sasha stood up on the plateau and turned around, looking out over the edge, and almost stopped breathing at the sight.

The whole sky was on fire with stars. There were more stars than Santi had ever imagined existed, scattered across the black. And running through the middle of them, from one horizon to the other, was a long glowing river of light. It was the Milky Way. He had seen pictures and BDs. But he had never seen it with his own eyes.

Off to the right, low over the mountains, hung a thin silver crescent of moon, and far away on the horizon was Night City.

From out here, it was almost beautiful. A tiny cluster of light at the edge of the world. Three tall towers stood out against the dark, their holo-ads flickering in blue and pink and white, and above them, a glowing disc-shaped tower hovered in the sky like a spinning top. Santi knew that it was the advertisement tower for the Crystal Palace. The rest of the city was a low golden glow along the horizon, with the windmills standing in front of it in silhouette, their wheels turning slowly in the breeze.

IMAGE FROM LOCATION

"Oh my God," Sasha whispered while Santi didn't say anything. He just stood next to her and looked on in awe.

"I've never been this far out of the city," she said after a while, her voice barely above a whisper. "I didn't know it looked like this. I didn't know the sky could look like this."

"Me neither," Santi said.

"It's beautiful," Sasha said in amazement.

"Yeah." He looked down at the ground beneath their feet, at the scrubby little bushes and the trees scattered across the ridge, their spiky branches black against the stars. "There's even some green out here. Kind of."

Sasha laughed. "That's what you notice? The plants?"

"I mean, it's not like we get to see any of the natural shit in the city," Santi said with a shrug. "So I guess I like plants."

"You liking plants was something I would have never seen coming," she said, shaking her head.

He looked at the Hozuki, and then he looked up at the sky.

"Come on," he said.

He climbed up onto the car's hood, then onto the roof. The armored panels didn't even flex under his weight. He turned around and offered her his hand, and she grabbed it, and he pulled her up beside him as easily as lifting a bag of groceries.

They lay down side by side on the Hozuki's roof, and they looked up at the stars without saying anything because there was nothing to say. The wind moved through the scrub, and the windmills creaked off in the distance. The engine below them ticked and crackled as it cooled. And above them, the whole universe spread out in every direction, so big and so quiet that Night City, the NUSA, fixers, and the Blackwall all felt very far away and very small.

Santi lay there and listened to Sasha breathe, and slowly, without looking, he reached out his hand. His fingers found hers on the roof between them, and he felt her go still. Then she turned her hand over, and laced her fingers through his.

Her hand was warm and soft and small inside his. His hand was chrome and cold metal under synthetic skin, fingers that had cut a man into pieces in a warehouse in Arroyo two nights ago, fingers that had pressed a revolver against Padre's forehead and hooked into a knife fighter's ribs and broken teeth out of a solo's mouth. The hand of a killer, holding the hand of a girl who had never seen the stars before.

But she didn't let go.

They lay there together in a quiet neither of them had ever known. The traffic, sirens, ads, and gunfire had been replaced by the wind, the windmills, the soft crackle of the cooling engine, and the sound of each other breathing.

"I wish this could last forever," Sasha said softly.

"Yeah," Santi said. "Me too."

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, almost too low to hear, "The moon is beautiful tonight, isn't it?"

Santi turned his head and looked at her.

She was still looking up at the sky, but her cheeks had gone pink in the starlight, and her fingers had tightened around his.

He knew what she meant. He had read it once, a line from a Japanese writer from a time before anybody had ever heard of chrome. A way of saying the thing without saying it.

"I'm not a complete gonk, you know," he said.

Sasha's eyes flicked over to him, then back to the sky. "That's very debatable."

"I know what that means," Santi said and watched as her blush got deeper. He smiled and looked up at the thin silver crescent hanging over the mountains, and then he looked back at her. "The moon is more than just beautiful tonight... It's been beautiful for a long time. It just took me a long time to realize it."

Sasha turned her head, and her pale eyes met his, lit by a million stars, and for a second, neither of them breathed. Then she leaned in, and he leaned in, and on the roof of a car on a ridge at the edge of the world, under a sky full of stars that Night City had been hiding from them their whole lives, they kissed.

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Long live Love! Stones are much appreciated, but I know they're not free. So as payment, here is an original poem I wrote for someone titled "To Think I Knew My Own Heart":

I found myself thinking

throughout the day,

throughout the night,

of your face,

of your eyes.

I can't even begin

to explain what I feel within.

How or why my heart skips a beat,

when you're standing before me.

Before you crossed my path,

I was sure I knew

what I wanted in life.

Blonde or red hair

paired with blue or green eyes.

But how foolish was I

to think I knew my own heart?

Because one look at you

was all it took to tear those notions apart.

Those beautiful dark curls,

those gorgeous brown eyes.

A woman so beautiful,

one who brings me dread.

I want to conquer your heart,

but what if I push you away instead?

The moon is beautiful tonight,

isn't it?

Shining so bright,

glistening as it dances

in those golden-brown eyes.

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There you can find everything I've ever written, as I'm writing it.