Strong Enough 5.1

Super 5.1

About an hour after clearing the scav den in the basement, David tells Taylor a story.

His mother chimes in at points, growing visibly more upset as she comes to terms with how much danger David was in as part of Taylor’s crew. That comes second though, to the part Gloria played in another story.

“David.” Taylor leans back on one of the horrendously uncomfortable staged couches. “Why is your family so intimately involved with Maine’s death?”

David shrugs. “Hey, I didn’t shoot him.”

“David!” His mom smacks his shoulder with the back of her wrist. “Have some…not that.”

“It’s fine.” Taylor sighs. “And…thanks, Gloria, for trying to keep my old boss alive.”

At that point, Emma returns to the sitting room with a glass of something strong. Taylor wishes they could trade places, after hearing exactly what Maine did right before his rampage.

“Don’t mention it.” Gloria pulls a face. She looks a lot like her son, with expressive brown eyes set above razor-sharp cheekbones. She pulled her auburn hair up into a messy bun at the back of her head for this meeting, and has thrown her yellow high-viz jacket on over far more casual clothes. “I probably wouldn’t have worked with him…if I knew he was hiring kids.”

She folds her arms at that, fixing Taylor with a harsh glare.

Taylor sighs again, rubbing her face. “Fine, we should have this talk.”

“Yeah, we should,” Gloria replies.

“Ma…”

“Quiet, Davey.” Gloria’s eyes flick sharply towards her son, and he shuts his mouth. “I don’t know how you got wrapped up in some merc crew, but you have a future. If you think, for one second, I’m just going to let you go off…galivanting around Night City—”

“I didn’t have a future, you know,” Taylor says. David’s mom blinks at the interruption. For her part, Taylor stands, brushing herself off. “My mom also got me into the Academy. Then she died.”

“All the more reason—”

“She died driving home from corpo plaza. Gang violence. The police didn’t even show up until she stopped breathing.” Taylor folds her own arms. “Night City isn’t a safe place to live; it takes and takes and—” She shakes her head. “It’s clear you don’t want to City to take your son, you want to keep him safe, you want to see him successful. That’s more than fair.”

Taylor takes a deep breath, sharing a glance with Emma, then she continues, “Both of us still wish we had a mother who could do that.”

“Personal, much?” Emma asks. She slugs back her drink. “Anyway, Mrs. Martinez, it’s clear you think David will be better off without us. Perhaps especially after he’s already squeezed you two into a nice, under-market apartment, yeah?”

Gloria stiffens, glare deepening.

Emma waves it off. “Relax, we’re not going to get you kicked out with the owners if David quits the crew. He’s earned his spot, and unlike Arasaka, that actually means something to us. If he wants to quit he can quit.”

“I ain’t gonna quit,” David says.

“That’s a discussion we’re going to have later,” Gloria replies.

David pulls a face. “Ma, you said.”

“I said I’d listen, and right now these two aren’t saying anything I like the sound of.”

Taylor laughs. “What happened to such nice girls, looking out for my David.”

“Maybe that was before I realized you were looking out for him in shootouts!”

“You can get shot almost anywhere in Night City,” Taylor says. “And that includes the boardrooms and executive suites. I’m not going to lie and tell you that it’s harder being a stuffed suit for the company. It’s much easier than living down here in the mud…if you make it to manager. Sure, someone might slip cyanide into your coffee, but at least you have Trauma Team.”

“Exactly!” Gloria says. “I’m not your mother, and clearly you two know how to look out for yourselves, but wouldn’t it be safer to put all of this edgerunning business behind?”

“Right.” Taylor shares a glance with Emma. It’s laden with a new tension that both of them stubbornly ignore. Or at least, Taylor pretends it didn’t happen, and Emma follows her lead.

Maybe that’s the problem, Taylor’s grown too used to leading. She won’t follow even for her safety, and subservience wouldn’t lead her there. Her spine thrums with electric impulse, a will bound to a cruel piece of metal that Arasaka would happily rip out of her back. She cannot stay with the company. More than that, if she worked for Arasaka after graduating, Taylor would kill herself.

“It’s safer to be in those boardrooms, if you make it,” Taylor tells Gloria. “David probably won’t.”

“Hmph.” Gloria shakes her head. “My son can do it.”

Behind her, David scratches his neck, cheeks coloring. Taylor hides a wistful smile. She wishes…

But she cannot breathe the thought into being, not even in the safety of her own mind.

“He can,” Emma says. “But he won’t be allowed to. Do you think just anyone is allowed to rise in Arasaka? If mere talent could threaten corporate Oligarchs, then the tower would have toppled decades ago. No one will promote him past assistant scapegoat, even if he’s the second coming of Bartmoss. And if that’s not enough and he starts making noise, starts thinking that he’s more important than the company…”

“Someone will slip something into his coffee,” Taylor finishes.

Gloria glances at David.

He shrugs. “It’s like I told you. The other kids at the Academy, they know I ain’t like them. They make sure I don’t forget it.”

“It’s actually been a huge pain, keeping him safe.” Emma pinches her nose. “Chairman Tanaka’s son has a particular hatred for David, and it took me far too much time and attention getting little Katsuo to play nice.”

Taylor smothers a half smile. Emma had to cozy back up to Akihito Nishigawa, the same boy who gave Taylor a concussion on the day her mother died. Chairman Tanaka, while just as senior as Nishigawa’s father, led a less prestigious division. Very few people in Arasaka took the Academy seriously, and Katsuo knew it. Convincing Akihito to help had cost Emma more time and influence in the tower than she could easily afford. Even now, she owed a favor as the price to stay off of her knees.

Taylor felt some small, wicked glee in Emma spending connections for Taylor’s sake, but she never shows it, and she doesn’t spell out that saga to David’s mother either.

“Even with our help, people like David—people like me—can only rise so high,” Taylor says. “I’m dubiously first generation, but the kids who go to the Academy? They have lineages. They have connections going back to when Arasaka first founded its offices in Night City. They go to the same parties; their parents deal in the same conferences. You can work for them, but unless you have those connections, you will never work with them.”

It clicks immediately, Taylor can see it in Gloria’s eyes. “…He’ll still be Arasaka,” she counters.

“Sure.” Taylor shrugs a shoulder. “And so are the janitors. Little cogs in the machine just like us, spinning, spinning, spinning—until we wear down enough to be replaced.”

“And that’s why you’re out running jobs?” Gloria asks.

“I’m out running jobs because I don’t have a source of income,” Taylor replies. “Emma has her own considerations. She’s better off than either me or David. We could follow in her wake, good little gophers latched onto her ankles. But…”

“I’d have to sacrifice at least one of you, probably.” Emma gives a dry laugh. “And, no offense, Mrs. Martinez, I wouldn’t be keeping your son.”

“Sacrifice?” Gloria shakes her head. “For what? It’s a company, not some dark age cult.”

“There are factions,” Emma says. “And I’m not strong enough to make my own. Anyone I work for will wonder if I have dedication, or if I have a weakness their enemies can exploit. No one would come to me and say ‘choose one of your little gutter rats and sacrifice the other,’ but they’d all know. I’d have to…make a little show to prove that my team wasn’t one to be trifled with.”

And perhaps Emma exaggerates here, for the class, but it’s a story that Taylor has seen play out. In their first year, Emma drove another girl to suicide in order to earn her place in the Academy hierarchy. She went that far in part due to her own weakness.

Taylor was that weakness, until she had her own weakness carved out and replaced shaper, more brutal metal. A steel spine that doesn’t waiver.

Only now can Taylor appreciate what Emma did for her, and the way Emma twisted and sutured herself to become something that could keep Taylor within the walls of Arasaka. The company starts young with its chosen few, sliding its scalpels into their souls and taking out the parts that do not service Arasaka.

Taylor had her heart cut out the old-fashioned way, but Emma? Emma peeled her heart open layer by layer, replacing it with company branded chrome one ventricle at a time. The marks remain, but Taylor rescued her before it was too late.

Or perhaps it was always too late. Just…this new Taylor and this new Emma fit together even better than the old ones. So well, that they can both think they’re unchanged, that Night City didn’t take parts essential to each, and the gaping wounds aren’t the reason why they fit.

“You might think that’s worth it,” Taylor picks up where Emma left off. “David can become a toady; his kid can become a toady’s kid—raised from birth to suck dick and kiss ass with the son of David’s boss. And maybe, if David and his son and the son of his son don’t get purged, or fired, or used up and wrung out and thrown away. Maybe in three or four generations, one of them will finally climb into some cushy middle manager’s position, and from there life will be easy. After that, they can only die from stress.”

Gloria looks almost disturbed at the image Taylor and Emma paint.

“Then…then what?” she asks. “You’re telling me I busted my ass for nothing? That David didn’t work hard to get a scholarship, and that we should just go back to our gutter where we belong?”

“No.” Taylor smiles. “It’s only because you worked so hard that we met David. We realized how smart he is, how hard working. He should stay with the Academy, because nowhere else in the world will he get half the education.”

“Ah, man,” David mutters. “Really?”

“But if you want him to climb out of the gutters and into the stars, then it’s better at our side,” Taylor says. “Because we’re making the same climb. We know what traps are in the way, and how to remove them.”

Emma shoots Taylor a glance, asking ‘we are?’

Taylor taps her temple. ‘We know.’

Emma rolls her eyes. ‘Sure, but we’re not going.’

Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. Taylor might just climb the tower so she can pull it down around her ears, a task made easier with more loyal hands, all willing to stand before the behemoth and say, ‘even if you trample me, I will make you fall.’

But she can’t yet share that thought with Emma over a stray gesture. Instead, Taylor says, “The best option is to have options, both inside the tower and out of it.”

“Unless you get my son shot,” Gloria replies.

“You can get shot driving home from work.” Taylor’s smile turns ghastly. “You work around corpo center a lot, don’t you? You might have even been the wagon that picked up the rest of my mother.”

David winces at that, but Gloria meets Taylor’s eyes, uncowed. EMTs must have a stronger stomach.

“Okay,” she says. “I can…understand that idea. But you haven’t convinced me that you’ll keep my David safe.”

Taylor nods. “We run a lot of jobs,” she says. “I can’t tell you details, but check with him. We’ve done over two or three dozen since he joined the crew.”

Gloria’s eyes snap to David, even as she gapes. He shrugs, avoiding her gaze as one foot taps against the floor.

“You can ask how many times we’ve gotten into shoot outs, or how many times someone with a gun has even looked at David, but there are better questions you can answer for yourself,” Taylor says. “Have we ever sent him home with even bruises? Has your son missed a single day of school?”

He hasn’t, because Taylor and Emma haven’t. Some days just take much more coffee.

Taylor watches as Gloria reaches that conclusion for herself, eyes sweeping up and down her son. She looks at how he holds himself, more confident despite the situation, standing taller and more filled out than he’d been a year ago. Spare money and better food, plus a boss that works around his class schedule.

Half the gonks off the street would kill to be in David’s spot, but none of them can get a scholarship to Arasaka Academy. Taylor would very happily keep David, but she doesn’t have it in her to split him from his family.

She won’t have to.

“Fine.” Gloria sighs, looking back towards Taylor. “You can keep taking my son on some jobs. No gun fights, no drug deals, nothing that involves the gangs! That’s my line.”

“Mom, that’s like—”

“A surprisingly small amount of our work,” Taylor replies. “We normally stray to the side of white collar gigs, and I handle most of the gun fights.”

Gloria looks at her, eyebrow raised.

Taylor smiles. “Sorry if I don’t prove it to you.”

Gloria looks at David. “Well?”

“Oh, yeah, uh.” He shrugs. “Boss is clean. Honestly, scariest person I’ve met in NC.”

Taylor blinks. “Scary?”

Emma bursts out laughing, and David won’t meet her gaze.

Taylor waves it off. “Anyway. We won’t be giving you job details, because most of them have confidentiality clauses, but we can keep David in a less confrontational role. That’s how our crew is laid out, anyway.”

“Ah, yeah, that’s the other thing I wanted to talk about,” David says.

“Right.” Taylor looks back at Gloria. Relatively light on chrome, just some cosmetic vents emphasizing her cheeks. ‘Ganic hands, but clearly used to work. “You want to chip in a bunch of salvaged camoplates that might not even work, and you want us to sponsor your mom for a ripper’s apprenticeship.”

“Apprenticeship?” Gloria asks.

“How do you think they make new rippers.”

She grunts. “Sure, but I don’t see how giving David a bunch of chrome will keep him safer.”

“Well, that’s your choice,” Taylor shrugged. “A dedicated scout and infiltration specialist would fit well with how we work, and David’s already got some experience with BnE.”

“Bn—” Her head snaps around towards David. “What have you been doing, Mijo?”

“Ah, stuff?” His foot taps against the ground. “Nothing dangerous.”

“There’s more than one type of danger!” She snaps back.

“And David would probably be safer from that danger if he could turn invisible whenever he wanted,” Taylors says. “Even if he’s doing lower risk jobs, you never know in this town.”

Gloria gives Taylor a suspicious glare. “And you wouldn’t use that as an excuse to put him on more dangerous jobs?”

“Never.”

“Well if it’s just that easy.” Gloria throws up her hands. “Fine, I don’t like it, but I know my boy well enough that he’d be out there on the street with or without my say so. Instead, I’m going to be making sure he comes home safe, and if he doesn’t you better zero me as well—”

“Ma!” David bolts upright.

“Because if not you better believe I’ll bring this whole fucking city down on your heads!”

Taylor can’t help but smile at that, in a sad and distant way. “Don’t worry,” she says. “We don’t operate like that anymore.”

Not since the first time Taylor made a call, one that killed a new friend and brought an old one back to life. Not since Maine kicked her off of his crew. They run surgical jobs, with margins for error they’ll never need to use, not just because Taylor was burned once before, but also because, “We don’t have the crew to take direct combat gigs. Having a ninja won’t change that, it’ll just mean we can take things slower, safer.”

“All by putting David on the front line,” Gloria mutters. “I’m not sold on the chrome, sure I checked if it’s functional, but I ain’t a ripper yet.”

“Ah, c’mon, I can fix it.” David’s voice takes on a wheedling quality.

“Well maybe that will keep you busy while your Mom is learning how to be a ripper.” Gloria looks away from David. “Instead of running around doing who knows what!”

Emma titters politely. “Oh, I’m sorry, we may have skipped a step here.”

Gloria and David look to Emma. Taylor just leans back on the horridly uncomfortable couch. Someone has to be the bad cop, and Emma excels at the role. Did she always enjoy pulling other people apart, or did Arasaka give her that? Taylor doesn’t know.

Taylor doesn’t know if she always loved the feeling of a revolver settled deep in her palm. Did the city damage her too, did the company pull out something essential, or did Taylor just find a pistol that feels like fire in her palm, that sings when she presses its barrel up against the faces of her mother’s killers?

The darkness within Taylor and Emma come from loss, and Night City, well…

You know.

“We like David,” Emma continues, all pretty smiles and flouncing curls. “We want to keep working with him, but, simply, we don’t know you, Mrs. Martinez. It’s a big commitment to sponsor someone we don’t know to our ripper. It puts our reputation on the line; it could damage our ability to access services that keep us and your own son safe.”

“We’ve convinced you.” Emma spreads her hands. “Now it’s your turn to convince us.”

There, twenty-seven stories above the pitted concrete, Taylor Hebert and Emma Barnes lay a new foundation for their crew, built on top of a scav den that came with one (1) really nice ripper chair.