Night City, 2065

  The elevator climbed in silence, all glass and steel, a coffin rising through the sky. Night City’s neon lights blurred across its rain-slick glass walls, every color refracted into a chaotic rainbow. Tyler Monterro stood alone inside, revolver heavy in his coat pocket.

  He hated the air here. It was cold, filtered, lifeless—not like the Badlands dust that scoured the skin raw, not like the acrid wind that howled through the ruins of Lemoore after Militech razed it. Out there, survival had meant scavenging and smuggling, the clan scraping by as Reclaimers, taking whatever jobs came their way. Out there, they had bled to live.

  And Jeremiah Monterro had abandoned them. Not just abandoned—defected. While his family was broken and scattered, he had taken a corporate badge and risen high, climbing over their bones into an office in the sky.

  The elevator stopped with a chime. The doors whispered open onto a carpeted corridor, soundless beneath his boots. Security cameras tracked him, but no alarms sounded, no guards appeared. He had made an appointment. As far as the Herrera Motors corporation was concerned, he was expected—his father had agreed to see him.

  Militech had purchased the land under Lemoore, declared the Monterro claim void, and authorized lethal force to clear it. The clan hadn’t stood a chance. His mother, Lana, was among the bodies left behind. Jeremiah Monterro had buried her, then walked away from the ruins and directly into the arms of yet another corporation. He took a contract with Herrera Motors, and in the ten years since, he had climbed the corporate ladder floor by floor, boardroom by boardroom, until his name was carved into a plaque outside this office.

  That was the record. The facts.

  Tyler’s truth was sharper, uglier. Jeremiah hadn’t just buried his wife—he had buried the clan itself, sealed its coffin with a signature and a corporate badge. Every rung Jeremiah climbed was another step on their bones. Every boardroom, another betrayal. Lana’s death, the scattering of the clan, every deal made in the aftermath—they all wore Jeremiah’s face.

  And that face was waiting for him now, behind the door at the end of the hall.

  Tyler pushed the door open without knocking.

  The office was a cavern of glass, suspended over the city. Rain streaked down the windows in long silver lines, blurring the midnight glow of of the city into veins of neon. At the far end, Jeremiah Monterro sat behind a desk of polished black stone, his reflection swimming beneath him like a second self.

  “Tyler,” There was no surprise in Jeremiah’s voice. No shame. Just a cool recognition, like the man he was greeting was nothing more than a colleague come to go over the quarterly report.

  The sound of his name in that voice twisted Tyler’s gut.

  He stepped inside, rain dripping from his jacket onto the immaculate floor. Jeremiah didn’t rise. He only steepled his fingers and watched as his son crossed the room, coming to a stop just behind the chair opposite his father, jaw clenched and grinding his teeth.

  “Did you come all this way just to glare at me?” Jeremiah asked. His tone was mild, practiced. A corporate veneer. “Say what you came to say, son.”

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  Tyler didn’t sit. He could feel the chair waiting there, an invitation, but it was just another trick of civility, another corporate gesture meant to make everything neat and polite.

  “You left us,” Tyler said. His voice came out low and gravelly. “You left her.”

  Jeremiah exhaled through his nose. “We’ve had this conversation before, Tyler. Your mother is dead. Nothing is going to change that.”

  The words hit like a slap. Tyler’s fingers twitched against the grip of the revolver in his pocket.

  “She died fighting for the clan. Fighting for us. And you—you buried her and signed your soul over to the same system that killed her!”

  Jeremiah’s gaze sharpened. The veneer cracked, just for a second. “And what would you have had me do?” His voice was steel now, hard as the desk between them. “Lead the survivors into the desert to starve? Watch the clan waste away on scraps and contraband until there was nothing left but bones in the sand? That isn’t survival, Tyler. That’s suicide.”

  Tyler’s jaw ached from clenching. The words slithered like poison in his ears. Survival. That was the justification? Sell your name, your blood, your dead wife, and call it survival? He saw the pin on his father’s lapel, the crisp suit, the warm lights humming above them—all of it his by way of abandoning his clan to that “suicide.”

  Tyler’s hand tightened around the revolver. It was heavy, solid, the only honest thing in this lie-filled tower. “And you left them to it!” His voice was shaking now. “You were their leader and you left them to die scattered in the desert! You were supposed to lead them!”

  “Lead them where?” Jeremiah’s voice rose now, “Into the desert to die beside your mother? To bring you to the grave alongside her? Would that have made you love me, Tyler?”

  The room went silent except for the patter of rain against the glass. Jeremiah’s word hung like a blade. Tyler felt them twist in his chest, but the pain only sharpened his fury.

  Love?

  What did this bastard know of love? Love didn’t abandon. Love didn’t trade blood for a suit and fancy desk.

  Tyler drew the revolver. Jeremiah’s head snapped back, a spray of red painting the glass as a spiderweb halo formed behind him.

  He fired again. And again. The roar of the revolver filled the room, thunder cracking in time with his heartbeat. Shards of glass rained from the window behind the desk, but he couldn’t hear the rain anymore—only music, some vast, metallic chorus that rose and rose with every shot.

  He emptied the cylinder into his father, hammering the trigger until the gun clicked hollow. Jeremiah was no longer a man, just a slumped shape leaking onto the desk, blood bright against the black stone.

  And Tyler was no longer himself.

  The office bent around him, walls bowing like they’d been stretched by invisible hands. The streaks of neon outside pulsed like arteries. His reflection in the fractured glass swelled until it filled his vision—towering, armored, monstrous. The smoke curling from the revolver wasn’t smoke at all but fire, twisting into shapes that spoke, laughed, exalted him.

  It was beautiful. It was holy.

  Every nerve lit up with impossible clarity. He could feel the weight of every raindrop on the glass, the hum of every circuit in the tower. His blood roared like an engine, drowning out thought. For a few infinite seconds, he wasn’t a man at all. He was something greater.

  A god.

  The high burned through him, incandescent and perfect. This—this was what it meant to be alive. This was what his father could never understand.

  Then the world ripped.

  A jagged pain slammed into the back of his skull, white light cracking through his vision. His legs buckled, revolver slipping from numb fingers. The music shattered into static, the godlike reflection collapsing into a stranger’s face smeared across the broken glass.

  Tyler hit the floor, clawing at the burning chip slots behind his ears, nails raking the ports like an addict scratching for another hit. The euphoria was gone, torn out of him, leaving only sweat and shuddering emptiness.

  But he knew.

  It had come from there. From the chrome. From the neuroport singing at the back of his skull. That was the key. That was the doorway.

  And he would walk through it again.