The vendor's shattered door creaked on its hinges as Carl stepped over the threshold, glass crunching under his boots. Night City's chaos had metastasized in the minutes since the robbery.
The street was a symphony of screaming civilians and ricocheting bullets, the staccato roar of a Militech MK.31 HMG shredding the night. A hulking man with a neon-yellow mohawk and mirrored shades stood in the center of the road, his arms vibrating from the recoil as he hosed down an armored truck.
Two of the would-be robbers lay nearby, their ski-masked faces turned to pulp by high-caliber rounds. Eurodollar bills fluttered around their corpses like confetti at a funeral.
"My ride!" Oliver hissed, spotting the fresh dent in the Quartz's door—a stray round had kissed the steel, leaving a puckered scar. "Sis's gonna kill me…"
Jackie peered past Carl's shoulder, whistling. "Guy's packing a fuckin' beast." He nodded at Maine. "Militech MK.31. Eats armor like churros."
Carl's left hand drifted to the grenade on his belt—salvaged from the Maelstrom op. "Want me to return the favor?"
Oliver grabbed his wrist. "Easy, man! Dent's just cosmetic. Not worth starting a war over."
"War's already here," Carl muttered, but lowered his hand.
The firefight ended abruptly. From the truck's flank, two figures emerged—a lanky man with a chrome arm wielding a Copperhead, and a petite girl with neon-green twin-tails and a bubblegum-pink Omaha pistol. They moved with the synchronized lethality of veteran mercs, dropping the truck's guards in seconds.
"Maine! Clear!" the girl—Rebecca—shouted, holstering her weapon with a flourish.
The mohawked giant gave a curt nod. "Pilar! Find the payload!"
Jackie watched them loot the truck, his Saints necklace glinting under a flickering streetlight. "Mercs. Like us, but louder."
Carl turned away, collecting their braindance gear from the trembling vendor. "Car's drivable?"
"Yeah," Oliver said, eyeing the Quartz like a worried parent. "But I'll need to hammer out that dent later."
The vendor scurried past them to pluck eddies from the dead robbers' pockets, his hands shaking.
Carl tucked the slim braindance chips into his jacket's inner pocket - each no larger than a credit card, their holographic labels glinting under the store's flickering lights. The headset case was bulkier, but still compact enough to slip under his arm like a hardcover book.
Oliver slid into the driver's seat, wincing at the scarred metal. "Gonna need a paint job after this."
Jackie tossed his own BD purchases onto the backseat, the plastic cases clattering against the worn upholstery. "Priorities, hermano. First, we get roofs over our heads. Then we fix your metal baby."
The Super megabuilding loomed over Watson like a rusted nail driven into the city's skull. Its lobby reeked of mildew and despair, the flickering fluorescents revealing water stains shaped like continents on the ceiling. The building manager—a gaunt man with a Biotechnica logo tattooed on his neck—leered as he handed over the keys.
"Fourth and fifth floor. Standard corpo coffin," he said, sucking synth-cig smoke through yellowed teeth. "Rules are simple: no gunfights, no Scavs, no joytoys after midnight. Violations incur fines. Substantial fines."
Oliver scowled. "What's the rent?"
"Nine hundred eddies a month. Utilities extra." The manager tapped a holoscreen listing add-ons: "Private comms—10 eddies activation fee, 0.75 per minute. Holo-TV—50 eddie deposit, 1 eddie per hour. Vending machine in-unit—no deposit, but prices are non-negotiable."
"A Vending machine in the room?" Carl raised an eyebrow. "That's new."
"Corporate partnership," the manager sneered. "All Food's 'X-Cola' only. No substitutions. Unless you wanna piss off the sales reps."
Jackie snorted. "Monopoly in a shoebox. Classic Night City."
Carl's apartment was a six-by-eight-meter cube with all the charm of a prison cell. The "furnished" unit included:
- A fold-out cot with a mattress thinner than a corpo's conscience, its hinges squealing like a tortured cat.
- A wall-mounted holo-TV plastered with warnings about deposit fees, its screen cracked like a spiderweb.
- A vending machine humming ominously in the corner, its neon X-Cola logo flickering like a faulty stimulant implant.
"Home sweet hellhole," Jackie said, flopping onto the couch. Its springs screamed in protest, releasing a cloud of dust that smelled like decade-old synth-cig ash.
Carl fed eddies into the vending machine, retrieving three lukewarm X-Colas. The first sip tasted like battery acid cut with aspartame. "They're out of real Coke."
"Real Coke?" Oliver snorted, cracking his can open. "You do know they stopped making that in the '40s, right? Rationing. All the sugar went to CHOOH2."
Jackie raised his drink in a toast. "To new beginnings. May they suck slightly less than the old ones."
Carl leaned against the window, watching Trauma Team AVs streak across the smog-choked sky. Below, a pack of scavengers picked through the day's casualties, their silhouettes hunched like vultures under the amber glow of malfunctioning streetlights. The Quartz sat in the parking lot, its dent gleaming under a flickering security light.
"So?" Oliver asked, tossing his empty can into a corner. "What's the verdict?"
"Liveable," Carl said, staring at the cracked ceiling. "Barely."
"Barely?" Oliver blinked. "You kidding? After six years bouncing between closets, this is a palace."
"Six years?" Carl raised an eyebrow.
"Since I turned eighteen. Old man kicked me out, said it build character or something. Lived in worse." Oliver shrugged. "You?"
"First time in a place like this," Carl said, avoiding specifics.
Jackie chuckled, kicking his feet up on the coffee table. "Don't get comfy, hermanos. Tomorrow we hit the streets. Find gigs that don't involve getting shot at by chromed-up psychos."
Carl didn't answer. He stared at the vending machine's flickering menu—X-Cola, X-Cola Zero, X-Cola Ultra Violence—and wondered if the real thing had ever existed.
Somewhere in the building, a neighbor's braindance player thumped through paper-thin walls—a bassline syncopated with moans.
"Guy's either having the best night of his life or the worst," Jackie said, grinning.
Oliver flopped onto the cot, his voice muffled by the pillow. "Just keep the volume down. I need sleep that doesn't involve getting woken up by gunfire."
Carl cracked another X-Cola. The sweetness clung to his teeth like cheap synth-honey.
"Too sweet," he muttered, crushing the can.
Outside, the city hummed—a ceaseless drone of neon, gunfire, and desperation. Carl's reflection glowed faintly in the grimy window, his unmodified face a relic in this chrome-plated hellscape. For a moment, he thought of his grandmother's apartment—sunlight streaming through real curtains, the smell of jasmine rice steaming on the stove.
But Night City had no room for ghosts.
He turned away from the window, the X-Cola's aftertaste still burning his throat.
His story in 2075 had just begun.