Chapter 29: Snowballing (Patreon)

This chapter is written in honor of our newest member, Director Devon Horn!

Thanks for your immense support, and to all my readers, I wish you all continue to enjoy the things my brain comes up with.

Also, I apologize for the slow release of chapters. I simply haven't had a ton of time to sit down and write the draft for a couple of chapters to then edit and upload.

"Only the dead have seen the end of war." 

- Plato

---

Santi waited until the renovation was finished. The full project had taken just over four months from purchase to completion, and during that time, Santi made the trip from Rancho Coronado to Northside Watson almost every day, checking in on the progress, coordinating with the crews, and personally configuring the security subnet's ICE architecture.

By the time the last turret was tested and the final camera was calibrated, the building was unrecognizable from the abandoned shell he had first walked into. Of course, that was from the interior only, since Santi didn't want to attract the wrong kind of attention by beautifying his building's facade.

The ground floor was clean, open, and functional, the four bay doors operational, the concrete floor sealed and polished, the cargo lift restored, and the cavernous warehouse space fitted with modular workshop infrastructure and proper industrial lighting.

The mezzanine catwalks gleamed with fresh railings, and the remainder of the second floor had been converted into a proper operations center. The moldy rooms had been rebuilt, their walls knocked down to make a large space for a server room with climate-controlled ventilation. The second floor now also boasted a planning space, an armory, and dedicated storage. The blast-rated interior doors had been restored and fitted with biometric locks.

As for the third floor, it was a livable apartment. It had three bedrooms, a common area that had been converted into a massive living room with a functioning kitchen, 3 individual showers per room with hot water, and windows that caught the Northside skyline from every angle.

Overall, it was quite the restoration.

So, when Santi sat Julia down at the kitchen table of their home in Rancho Coronado on a Thursday evening in late June, he felt confident. Julia had just gotten home from running errands, and he had made some coffee, the real kind, not the synthetic garbage, which he had splurged on from a vendor in Little China specifically for this conversation because he knew she was going to need it, though looking back at it now, maybe coffee wasn't the best option.

"Ma, I need to talk to you about something," Santi said, sliding Julia a mug of coffee across the table.

Julia looked at the coffee, then at him, and her eyes narrowed as she read her son's face. "Is this real coffee? You know, your father did the very same thing when he did something very good or very bad. So which one is it?"

"Little bit of both," Santi admitted.

"Right. Let's get the bad news out of the way first," she said, wrapping her hands around the mug.

Santi took a deep breath and just said it bluntly. "I spent all my money."

"Huh?" Julia blinked. "All of it?"

"Every single eddie," Santi confirmed.

She set the coffee down and folded her hands on the table, her expression shifting into the calm that came before the storm. "Andrés. You made over eight hundred thousand eddies. Where did eight hundred thousand eddies go?"

"I bought a building," Santi said, swallowing hard as his mother just did something she had never done before in his life, and that was calling him only by his middle name. 

The silence that followed pressed against the walls of the small kitchen and made the ticking of the clock above the stove sound louder than it ever should have.

"A building," Julia repeated slowly.

"A three-story building in Northside Watson," Santi said, and he could hear how insane this sounded coming out of his own mouth. He was a sixteen-year-old sitting at his mother's kitchen table explaining that he had blown nearly a million eddies on commercial real estate that wouldn't even serve a purpose other than being a home, a place of storage, and a hideout. "It's near the Charter Street data term. Twenty-something thousand square feet. It's got a ground-floor workshop with four armored vehicle bays, a cargo lift, catwalks, the works. Second floor is an operations center with a server room. Third floor has three bedrooms, a kitchen, showers, and running hot water. I've had the entire thing restored, rewired, replumbed, and outfitted with a security system."

"A security system," Julia echoed.

"Yeah. Things like cameras, biometric locks, and..." He hesitated for a moment before saying the last bit. "Turrets."

Julia closed her eyes.

"Twelve turrets, to be exact," he continued, since stopping now would only make the inevitable worse. "They're concealed anywhere, from vents to window frames. They're smaller caliber and have motion tracking. They're also retractable and are tied into a central security network that I can control through my Neural Link. The building is basically a fortress, Ma."

Julia opened her eyes and looked at him with an expression he had never seen before. It wasn't anger or shock. It was a mixture of exhaustion, disbelief, and something that might have been reluctant admiration fighting for space behind the maternal concern.

"Why?" she asked simply.

"Because the war is coming, Ma." Santi leaned forward, his hands flat on the table. "The NUSA is pushing hard west. They've already taken everything east of the Rockies, and Myers isn't going to stop. If she pushes into Northern California, Night City becomes the front line. And when that happens, every gangoon, corpo, police, and military unit operating in this city is going to be fighting for territory. This house... This house won't survive if it comes down to that, and trust me, it will."

Julia was quiet for a while, sipping her coffee and staring at the mug. Santi had no idea how much time had passed since either one of them spoke a word when she finally looked up at him.

"You want us to move," she said.

"Well, yeah," Santi said. "I want us to be safe."

"This is my parents' home, Santiago," Julia said while biting her lower lip in thought. "Your abuelos left me this house. It served us as shelter when we had nowhere left to go. Where I spent a good part of my early twenties."

Santi knew this was coming, since no house was simply just a house. It was the last physical connection to a family that Night City had dismantled. Her parents had moved back to Mexico City just over thirty years ago. The house was the only piece of them that remained in Julia's daily life, aside from the chats they rarely ever had. Asking her to sell it was asking her to sever one more thread connecting her to the people she loved.

"I know, Ma," Santi said quietly. "And I'm not asking you to forget any of that. I'm asking you to let me keep you alive long enough to make new memories."

"Ay, Jesús. Santiago, tengo 39 años," Julia wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "For someone living in Night City, whose life expectancy is only 53 years, how much more time do you think I have?"

Santi stayed quiet at her remark, which made Julia sigh. "Alright, let's say I theoretically agree to moving, how much do you think we could even get for the house?"

"Honestly? Maybe seventy to eighty thousand if we sell it on the open market," Santi said. "But I'm pretty sure we can get much more if we find a private buyer who wants to stay off the deed registry. After all, the neighborhood isn't exactly appreciating in value."

"And the building," Julia said. "You said it had three bedrooms?"

"Yup," Santi nodded. "And you'd get the biggest one. Corner unit on the third floor. It has windows facing south and west, which would allow you to get morning light, real morning light, Ma. Not the filtered stuff we get through the smog down here."

Julia looked at him for a moment, and Santi could see the calculations running behind her eyes. She was measuring the weight of what she was being asked to give up against the weight of what she might gain. A son who had just spent every eddie he had to build a place that could protect her.

"If I sell this house," Julia said slowly, "your grandparents need to know. And they need to agree. This is their home, mijo. I need their blessing."

"That's fair," Santi agreed.

"And I want to see the building," Julia added. "Before I agree to anything, I want to walk through it myself."

"You bet. We could go tomorrow morning if you'd like," Santi said.

Julia picked up the coffee and took a long sip. Then she set the mug down, folded her hands again, and fixed him with a stare that carried the full weight of a mother.

"Now. Back to other pressing matters," She said. "You spent eight hundred thousand eddies... In four months."

"Give or take a few days," Santi said.

"Que El Señor tenga misericordia," Julia muttered, shaking her head.

They sat in the kitchen for another hour, drinking coffee and talking about the building, the neighborhood, the security systems, and the war that had almost marched all the way to Night City. Julia asked questions that Santi answered honestly, including the ones about the gangers in the back alley, the ones about the mold remediation, and the ones about how a sixteen-year-old had managed to purchase commercial real estate without a single government agency noticing.

By the time she went to bed, she hadn't said yes to the idea of selling the house and moving, but she hadn't said no either.

---

Julia said yes three days later, though she didn't exactly use the word "yes." She had simply walked into the kitchen at nine in the morning, set her empty mug in the sink, and told Santi to get the car.

The drive from Rancho Coronado to Northside Watson took forty-five minutes with traffic, and Julia spent every single one of them gripping the passenger-side door handle of the Galena. She wasn't nervous about the way Santi drove, since he had become an adequate, if occasionally aggressive, navigator of Night City's chaotic roads. But she was nervous about what she was agreeing to.

She hadn't said a word the entire ride, but once they crossed the municipal border into Watson, she opened her mouth.

"Your father would have done the same thing, you know," Julia said quietly, watching the industrial sprawl of the Northside roll past the window. "He would have bought a building with all of his money, filled it with guns and turrets and computers, and then sat me down with a cup of coffee and acted like it was the most rational decision in the world."

Santi glanced at her, catching the faint and bitter smile on her face. He didn't respond, choosing instead to listen and let silence serve as his acknowledgment of a comparison he wasn't sure was actually a compliment.

They arrived at the building just past eight, the morning light cutting sharp lines across the open lot surrounding the structure. The exterior looked exactly as it had when Santi had first scouted it. The faded blue and weathered grey paint had been left untouched, the windows still appeared dark and uninviting from the street level, and the surrounding lot remained a stretch of cracked earth and dead weeds.

From the road, it looked like what it was supposed to look like, which was nothing worth a second glance.

Julia stepped out of the Galena, pulling her jacket tighter against the morning chill since it was a surprisingly cold day. She stood there for a quiet moment, looking up at the building that her son had spent every single eddie he had risked his life to earn.

"It looks like it's about to collapse," she said.

"That's the whole point, Ma," Santi said, walking toward the grey-side entrance, pressing his thumb against the new biometric scanner recessed into the reinforced door frame, and inputting a sixteen-digit access code through his Neural Link. The heavy hydraulic locks disengaged with a sequential thud that was satisfying to the ears, and the door swung inward on quiet, freshly greased hinges.

Julia followed him inside, and the moment she crossed the threshold, she stopped walking.

The contrast between the exterior and the interior was like night and day. The ground floor stretched out before her in an open expanse of sealed and polished light colored concrete, bathed in warm industrial lighting that hung from the newly painted steel ceiling beams. The four armored bay doors sat closed along the front wall, each one large enough to house multiple Galena's.

The cargo lift occupied the far corner, its platform flush with the floor and its safety rails gleaming under the overhead lights. The mezzanine catwalks wrapped along three walls above them, their railings catching the light in a way that made the space feel like the interior of a moderately funded military facility.

"Dios mío," Julia whispered.

Santi led her through the ground floor, explaining the layout with a matter-of-fact efficiency as if he were giving a safety briefing. He showed her the four individual bays, pointing out the heavy-gauge steel of the roll-up doors and the electromagnetic locks that secured them. He demonstrated the cargo lift, riding the platform up to the second floor with Julia gripping the railing and looking down at the shrinking ground level with wide, disbelieving eyes.

And once they reached the second floor, her brain reset once again. The climate-controlled server room was humming faintly behind its blast-rated door, which could only be accessed through a biometric lock that Santi opened with a retinal scan, a palm print, and another sixteen-character alphanumeric code transmitted through his Neural Link. The planning space beside it was large and clean, its walls painted a neutral grey, its floor sealed, and its overhead ventilation running quietly.

"What is this for?" Julia asked, gesturing at the planning space.

"Operational planning," Santi said.

"You're sixteen," Julia reminded him.

"It'll come in handy someday," Santi replied. "Plus, planning ahead is the difference between surviving and becoming a statistic."

Julia didn't argue with that and instead opted to just look at the room in silence while processing her son's ambitions.

But when they climbed the stairwell to the third floor and Santi pushed the door open to the living quarters, the protective mask Julia had been wearing since they left Rancho fully slipped.

The living room area was spacious and flooded with natural light from the south-facing windows, and the kitchen was fully equipped with appliances that actually worked and were connected to plumbing.

The corner bedroom Santi had designated as hers was the largest of the three, its windows framing a view that had a clear line of sight of the corporate skyline beyond. The morning sun poured through the glass, painting the walls in warm light, and for the first time in nearly eight years, Julia stood in a room where she didn't have to squint through smog to see the sky.

She stood at the window for a long time, one hand pressed against the glass, her reflection staring back at her from the reinforced and tinted surface. Santi stayed in the doorway, watching her shoulders rise and fall with slow breaths, and he could see the exact moment the decision crystallized behind her eyes.

"Okay," Julia said, visibly fighting to keep herself pride contained. "I had already talked to my parents, and they were fine with this. So, call your fixer buddy and put the house on the market."

---

It had taken nine days for the house to be sold, a speed Santi hadn't expected. He had assumed the house would sit on the market for weeks, possibly months, given that the neighborhood wasn't worth the money it cost to live in and the municipal infrastructure in Santo Domingo was deteriorating faster than the city council could pretend to maintain it. A 6th Street stash house had been raided a block away from them just two nights before the listing went live, and the gunfire had rattled Julia's kitchen windows hard enough to knock the salt shaker off the counter.

But with the help of Regina Jones, they found a buyer so fast that Santi suspected she had already had one waiting before he even made the call. The buyer was a mid-level fixer from Heywood who needed a discreet, off-the-books property to use as an intermittent safehouse, somewhere forgettable and somewhere that nobody would think to check when the heat came calling. The Rancho house, with its decaying facade, its pothole-riddled street, and its absence from any corporate surveillance grid, fit the brief like a glove.

The negotiations were short. The fixer offered a hundred and twenty thousand eddies, paid through a crypto-washed escrow account that Santi verified line by line before authorizing the transfer. Regina took her standard ten percent commission of twelve thousand eddies, leaving Santi and Julia with a hundred and eight thousand in additional eddies.

The move itself took just over three weeks, spread across the final days of June and the first two weeks of July.

There wasn't much to bring with them. Eight years of living in Santo Domingo had taught them how the poor lived. You owned what you needed, and you needed what kept you alive. The furniture was cheap and largely disposable. The appliances were outdated and wouldn't survive the transit. And the memories attached to the walls, the good ones and the terrible ones, those would travel with them regardless of what they packed.

Julia insisted on bringing the small wooden dining table. It was the same table where Santi had eaten dry kibble as a ten-year-old, waiting for her to come home from the liquor store. The same table where she had slammed the cred-chip down and confronted him about the vending machine daemon. The same table where they had sat drinking real coffee three weeks ago while Santi explained how he had spent every eddie to his name.

They loaded the table onto the top of the Galena, along with three suitcases, two boxes of personal belongings, and the sealed Militech hardcase containing the Higurashi 20-13 Mantis Blades that Santi still couldn't install.

The last thing Julia carried out of the house was a small, cheap metal urn that had been sitting on the shelf above the kitchen sink for the past six years. She held it against her chest with both hands as she walked down the cracked front path for the final time, and Santi didn't say a word about it. He just opened the passenger door and waited for her to sit down before closing it gently behind her.

Julia held the urn containing Alejandro's ashes in her lap for the entire drive to Watson.

Once they arrived, they settled in quickly. Julia took the corner bedroom and spent the first three days arranging her few possessions with meticulous care. She hung a small wooden crucifix above her bed, placed the metal urn on the windowsill where it would catch the morning light, and positioned the wooden dining table in the common area, pushing it against the south-facing window so they could eat with the Northside skyline stretching out before them.

Santi took the bedroom nearest to the stairwell. He had chosen it for tactical reasons that he didn't bother explaining to Julia. If anyone breached the third floor, they would have to get through his door before reaching hers. He set up a compact workstation against the wall, synced his Paraline Mk.1 to the building's central security subnet through a hardline connection routed directly from the second-floor server room, and spent the first week fine-tuning the ICE architecture until the local network was locked down tighter than most mid-tier corporate facilities.

The third bedroom was the smallest, and it sat empty, its door closed and its purpose yet undefined. Julia had looked at it once during the first week, tilting her head at the bare walls and the sealed windows, before turning to Santi with an expression that communicated something he refused to engage with.

"Don't," Santi had said.

"I didn't say anything," Julia had replied, smiling.

"You were thinking it," Santi muttered.

"A mother is allowed to think," Julia said, walking away with a satisfaction that bordered on malicious.

By the time the last of the unpacking was finished and the building genuinely felt like a home, the situation in the former United States had escalated further.

The Unification War had been building pressure for months, but the dam finally and irreversibly broke in the first week of July.

President Rosalind Myers, operating from the heavily fortified NUSA command center in the Virginia Congressional Bunker, authorized what the official government broadcasts euphemistically called "Operation Liberty Shield."

The sanitized name was printed across every corporate news ticker and government holoscreen in the country, accompanied by patriotic imagery, stirring orchestral scores, and the cold and calculating smile of a woman who had spent years running the most powerful private military on the planet before she seized the presidency.

It was pretty much a nicer, yet more fucked up version of what had been announced at the beginning of the year. A new declaration of a total continental military offensive.

The former Free States of Southern California and Utah, both of which had been quietly negotiating reunification terms with the NUSA for months while things had begun kicking off in the East, formally declared alignment with the federal government and opened their borders to Militech ground forces.

They made an announcement that was broadcast on every major news network simultaneously, delivered by the governors of both states in matching, scripted statements.

Militech, which had officially been redesignated as the New United States Armed Forces under a classified executive order Myers had signed three months prior, began pouring through Southern California and Utah like water through a broken dam. Armored convoys stretched for miles along the I-15 and I-40 corridors, and the satellite feeds that independent journalists managed to intercept before the government scrubbed them showed column after column of matte-grey Militech Basilisks, Behemoths, Hellhounds, and other military vehicles rolling, their turrets tracking the empty desert horizon.

The initial battles of the year had been a way for the NUSA to test the waters, which meant that things were different this time around, and the Free States mounted their resistance.

Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Montana, and Arizona declared a mutual defense pact within hours of the Southern California and Utah announcements, pooling their limited military resources and militia forces into a loose, desperate coalition. Nevada and Northern California, both of which bordered the newly hostile territories, followed suit the same day, formally rejecting the NUSA's unification demands and fortifying their borders with whatever they could scrape together.

Washington, Oregon, and Idaho watched the dominoes fall from behind the Cascades and collectively decided they wanted no part of the bloodbath. The three states issued a joint declaration of armed neutrality, stating that they would defend their own borders but would neither aid the NUSA nor the Free State coalition. It was a bet that the mountains and the distance would keep them out of the crosshairs long enough for the fighting to burn itself out, though anyone with a basic understanding of geography could see that this neutrality would only last as long as it took Militech to secure the West.

And then there was Texas.

The Lone Star Republic, as it had taken to calling itself since the fracturing of the nation in the early 2000s, told both sides to go fuck themselves with as much diplomatic eloquence as it could manage. Governor Santiago Aldecaldo, the great-nephew of the legendary nomad family's matriarch, broadcast a two-minute address from the steps of the Austin Capitol building, flanked by a wall of heavily armed Texas Rangers and Aldecaldo clan veterans wearing the distinctive dust-stained leathers of the Badlands.

The address was simple. Texas wanted its freedom and opposed the NUSA's authoritarian consolidation, while also opposing the Free State coalition's willingness to accept corporate poisoned money. If either side set foot on Texan soil, they would be met with the combined firepower of six million armed citizens and the largest independent military force outside of the federal government.

The broadcast ended with the governor holstering a massive, pearl-handled Malorian Arms revolver, and every major network cut to commercial within four seconds.

What nobody outside of the intelligence community knew, but what Santi had known for months thanks to the shard he had pulled from the dead Corpo in Northside, was that the Free States' resistance was being artificially sustained by the very corporation that had nearly been the cause of the destruction of Night City half a century ago.

Arasaka's shadow operations had scaled dramatically since the start of hostilities. The conversation logs Santi had decrypted on that February night painted a picture of local proxy funding, but the truth was unfolding on the ground as something far more ambitious and coldly strategic than a few weapons and cash drops to local gangoons.

The Japanese megacorp, still officially banned from operating on North American soil under the post-Fourth Corporate War sanctions, was funneling billions of untraceable eddies into the Free State coalition through a labyrinth of shell companies, offshore banking satellites, and cryptocurrency exchanges.

The money bought them hardware, and the hardware was flowing across the borders in unmarked cargo containers and repurposed commercial transports. It included Arasaka-manufactured assault rifles, smart munitions, powered exoskeletons, combat cyberware, and anti-armor missile systems, all of it stripped of its corporate branding and repackaged under fictional manufacturer designations to maintain plausible deniability.

But Arasaka wasn't just selling weapons. They had decided to try to take full advantage of things and also sell expertise. Embedded within the Free State military commands, operating under fabricated identities and civilian cover stories, were dozens of Arasaka Corporate Security advisors. These were veteran operators with decades of combined experience in asymmetric warfare, counterinsurgency, and urban combat, and they were teaching the Free State militia commanders how to fight a conventional military force that outnumbered and outgunned them by a factor of ten.

It was a strategy that every great empire in human history had eventually fallen victim to. Arasaka didn't need to fight Militech directly to win. They just needed to keep the Free States fighting long enough to bleed the NUSA dry, exhaust their supply lines, drain their treasury, and fracture their political will. And when the dust finally settled and the federal government was too weak to enforce its own borders, Arasaka would simply walk back through the front door.

It was corporate warfare at its purest, most unfiltered, and devastatingly efficient form. And the people dying in the desert were just the cost of doing business.

But despite the advisors, the money, and the steady flow of advanced weaponry, the Free States were starting to rapidly lose.

The NUSA's Militech-backed forces were simply too large and well-supplied for the loosely organized Free State coalition to withstand in a conventional fight.

The steamrolling offensive began with Colorado, whose state militia held the mountain passes along the I-70 corridor for eleven days before Militech's air superiority turned the defensive positions into craters. Denver fell on the twelfth day, and the governor surrendered on the thirteenth after Militech armored divisions encircled the city and cut the water supply.

New Mexico lasted eight days. Wyoming lasted six. Montana, with its open terrain and minimal infrastructure, was functionally occupied in under a week by a single Militech mechanized brigade that rolled up the I-90 at will, meeting so little resistance that the operation was classified as a "peacekeeping deployment" in the official federal reports. Arizona held out for sixteen days, largely because the Sonoran desert itself was a more formidable opponent than the state's exhausted militia, and Militech logistics struggled to keep their armored columns supplied across the waterless terrain.

In the span of three weeks, the NUSA had conquered five states and absorbed their populations, their resources, and their infrastructure into the federal machine. Each conquest followed the same chilling and depressingly efficient pattern. Militech's armored spearhead would breach the border, overwhelm the defensive positions with combined-arms superiority, seize the state capital, arrest or execute the political leadership, and immediately install a federally appointed governor backed by a permanent garrison of Militech security forces.

The corporate news networks covered each "liberation" with the same script, the same patriotic graphics, and the same focus-grouped soundbites about national unity and shared prosperity. N54 News ran a twenty-four-hour victory crawl across the bottom of every broadcast, updating the real-time territorial gains of "our brave men and women in uniform" as if the systematic conquest of sovereign states were a sports scoreboard.

Santi watched the coverage from the common area of the third floor, his feet propped on the wooden dining table. Beyond the windows, the Northside skyline shone with a perpetual neon glow, as if the city was desperately trying to pretend the world wasn't ending. His Kiroshis painted data overlays across the broadcast footage, pulling metadata from the corporate news feeds and cross-referencing them against the independent journalist reports that were still leaking through the censorship nets.

The official casualty figures were a fraction of the real ones. The "peaceful transitions of authority" involved mass arrests, forced relocations, and the systematic dismantling of civilian communication networks. And the "Militech security forces" maintaining order in the occupied territories were, in many cases, the exact same private military contractors that had been running illegal black sites across the Southwest for the past decade, now wearing federal uniforms instead of corporate ones.