Sleep is a negotiation Kaito loses.
He lies in the dark of his suite staring at the ceiling where shadows from the city's neon paint patterns that almost mean something. His cortex replays the meeting in loops: Saburo's smile using Yorinobu's mouth, the casual admission of filicide dressed as efficiency, the way the room accepted it like weather—inevitable, unmovable, already priced into the forecast.
At 03:17 his agent vibrates.
Unknown contact. No identifier. Just a location dropped into his calendar like a stone into still water: RECONCILIATION PARK / NORTH PAVILION / 05:30 / COME ALONE.
He stares at the message. His first instinct is to delete it, his second to trace it, his third to realize that anyone sophisticated enough to bypass his security protocols is sophisticated enough to make tracing suicidal.
The message adds a single line: You were seen leaving Vice Tower. We should talk before they decide what that means.
His pulse does its arithmetic. "They" could be anyone. NCPD. Arasaka internal security. The fixers from the underground circle. Hanako. Saburo wearing his son's face like a mask that breathes.
Or someone else entirely.
He gets up. Showers in water that scalds because pain is clarifying. Dresses in civilian black—no uniform, no pin, nothing that identifies him as anything except a body moving through the city at an hour when bodies shouldn't move unless they're running from something or toward it.
The driver is asleep or pretending to be. Kaito leaves through the service entrance, the one Academy students aren't supposed to know exists but everyone does. The garage spits him into an alley where the morning is still deciding whether to arrive. He walks.
Reconciliation Park is what Night City calls irony with landscaping. It's where Arasaka built a memorial after the Fourth Corporate War—tasteful stone, tasteful trees, tasteful bronze plaques commemorating the tasteful dead. What it reconciles is never specified. Probably the corporation's profit margins with the public's short memory.
At 05:23 he enters through the south gate. The park is empty except for a maintenance drone trimming hedges with the dedication of something that has never questioned its purpose. He follows the path north, past the memorial fountain where water cycles through a purification system that costs more than the lives it commemorates.
The North Pavilion is a circle of stone benches under a roof that pretends to be traditional while being entirely synthetic. Sensor-dampening, he notes—the air feels thicker here, signals struggling. Smart choice for a conversation someone doesn't want recorded.
Two figures wait.
One is a man in his late forties, Japanese features, tailored coat that says money without screaming it, posture that says violence is always an option but rarely the first one. His eyes track Kaito's approach with the precision of someone who has spent a career evaluating threats and filing them under actionable or ambient.
The other is a woman.
She sits on the bench like she owns not just the pavilion but the concept of sitting, blonde hair pulled back in a style that's professional without being corporate, suit that splits the difference between boardroom and battlefield. Her face is Eurasian, sculpted by genetics and careful augmentation into something that cameras would love if she let them. She doesn't look at Kaito when he enters. She's watching the city wake up beyond the park's perimeter, as if deciding whether it deserves another day.
Kaito stops at the pavilion's edge. "I was expecting someone else."
"Everyone expects someone else," the woman says, finally turning to look at him. Her eyes are gray—not chrome, not implants, just the natural color of winter oceans. "That's how we stay in business. I'm Michiko Sanderson. This is Kenichi Zaburo. And you're in some deep shit now, kid."
The name clicks. Michiko Sanderson—Arasaka adjacent, family lineage that traces back to when the corporation was still pretending to have a soul. Operations manager for projects that don't appear in quarterly reports. A fixer, technically, but the kind who fixes things at an altitude where most fixers need oxygen.
"I don't know what you're referring to," Kaito says, the default response, buying time.
"Vice Tower. Floor eighty-seven. Last night, twenty hundred hours." Michiko's voice is factual, clinical, a surgeon describing an incision. "You spent forty-three minutes in a room with twelve other people who all have one thing in common: they know about the Relic project, and they're either profiting from it or being positioned to profit from it."
Kaito's face remains composed. His cortex is screaming. "I attended a networking event."
"You attended an audition," Michiko corrects. "Saburo Arasaka—wearing what used to be his son—paraded you in front of people who need to believe that immortality through cannibalism is just aggressive succession planning. He wanted to see if you'd break, if you'd run, or if you'd do what you did."
"Which was?"
"Sit there. Take notes. Walk out." She stands, approaches him with the casual confidence of someone who has been in worse situations and is bored by them. "You didn't break. You didn't run. Which means you're either very smart or very stupid, and I need to know which before I decide what to do with you."
Kenichi speaks for the first time, voice like gravel sorted by hand. "The Vice Tower meeting was a trap. Not for you specifically. For whoever Hanako-sama sent to observe. She's been putting people in Saburo's path, testing them. Seeing who stays loyal to the old man or who might be loyal to her when she decides the dynasty needs editing."
"I wasn't sent by Hanako," Kaito says.
"Yes you were," Michiko replies. "You just didn't know it. That's her style. She gives you enough rope to hang yourself or weave a net, and then she watches which one you choose." She stops close enough that he can smell her perfume—something expensive and subtle that probably costs what most people make in a month. "You chose wrong."
"I chose to attend a meeting I was invited to."
"You chose to see something you weren't supposed to see and survive the seeing." Michiko's eyes hold his. "Saburo doesn't show people the Relic trick unless he's recruiting them or eliminating them. You walked out, which means he thinks you're recruitable. That makes you valuable. And in Night City, valuable means everyone wants to own you or bury you before someone else does."
Kaito's pulse is steady but his mind is racing through scenarios. "Why are you telling me this?"
"Because Hanako-sama asked me to." Michiko returns to the bench, sits, crosses her legs like she's negotiating a contract. "Not directly. She doesn't do direct. But three days ago she had me pull your Academy records, your family financials, your medical history, every piece of data that says who Kaito Kuroda is supposed to be. Then last night she sent me a location—Vice Tower—and a time window. She wanted someone watching who went in and who came out."
"You're surveilling for her."
"I'm providing context she can't get from her father's cameras," Michiko says. "There's a difference. Saburo controls the official channels. Hanako needs unofficial confirmation that what she suspects is true."
"And what does she suspect?"
"That her father is building a dynasty of ghosts. That he's not grooming successors, he's auditioning bodies. That everyone he promotes is just a future vessel he's shopping for when Yorinobu's frame wears out." Michiko leans forward. "She suspects this. She cannot prove it. And she cannot move against him without proof that would survive legal, technical, and familial scrutiny."
Kaito processes. The morning is getting lighter. The maintenance drone has moved to a different hedge. Somewhere beyond the park, the city is waking up to sell itself another day of comfortable lies.
"Why me?" he asks. "I'm a student. I have no leverage. No resources beyond my father's name and whatever talent Hanako thinks she sees."
"Exactly," Kenichi says. "You're nobody. Nobody with access. Nobody who Saburo might talk to freely because you don't matter enough to lie to yet. He wanted to see if you'd break. Hanako wanted to see what he'd show you if you didn't."
"I'm bait."
"You're a sensor," Michiko corrects. "A piece of smart infrastructure she put in the room to measure something she can't measure herself." She pulls a shard from her jacket pocket, holds it up so the nascent sunlight catches the data-etching. "This is everything I saw last night. Your biometrics during the conversation. Your cortical activity when Saburo admitted what he is. The moment your threat assessment spiked when you realized Yorinobu isn't coming back."
She sets the shard on the bench between them. "Hanako needs this. It's proof that Saburo is revealing himself. Proof that he's not hiding the Relic project anymore, he's recruiting for it. Proof that the people in that room—Militech, Biotechnica, fixers with ties to every major player in this city—are being shown the future Arasaka plans to build."
"A future where death is optional if you're willing to murder your way into new bodies."
"Yes."
Kaito stares at the shard. "If I give this to Hanako, I become complicit in whatever she plans to do with it."
"You became complicit when you sat in that chair and listened to Saburo confess patricide without flinching," Michiko says. "The question is whether you're complicit for free or whether you get something in return."
"Such as?"
"Survival," Kenichi says flatly. "Right now, you're a data point. Saburo met with you, evaluated you, filed you under 'potential asset.' If Hanako doesn't move first, he will. And when Saburo moves on a potential asset, it's either recruitment or removal. There is no third option."
"Hanako offers a third option?"
"Hanako offers uncertainty," Michiko says. "Which in Night City is the closest thing to freedom anyone gets. You work with her—quietly, carefully, in ways that look like loyalty to Saburo—and maybe you survive long enough to matter. Maybe you even get to choose who you become instead of having it chosen for you."
Kaito looks at the shard. Looks at Michiko. Looks at Kenichi, who watches him with the patience of a man who has given this speech before and knows how it usually ends.
"What does Hanako want me to do?"
"Nothing different than you're already doing," Michiko says. "Attend your classes. Smile at the right people. Perform competence for cameras that are always watching. But when Saburo calls you back—and he will—you go. You listen. You remember. And you tell us what he's building in the places Hanako can't see."
"You want me to spy on a man who's already inside his son's corpse."
"We want you to survive a man who collects useful people the way some people collect art," Michiko corrects. "Saburo will call you back because he thinks he impressed you. He thinks he showed you power and you'll want a piece of it. Let him think that. Let him invest in the idea of you. The more he invests, the longer you have before he cashes out."
Kaito thinks about Hanako at breakfast. The way she said useful instead of interesting. The way she looked at him like he was a problem she was deciding how to solve.
He thinks about his father adjusting his collar, warning him about angles.
He thinks about Emi in his suite, crying about disappearing into a resume someone else is writing.
He thinks about David Martinez—a file someone checks, a jacket in a basement, a case study in what happens when you think speed can buy altitude.
He thinks about Yorinobu Arasaka, who went into exile wearing rebellion and came back wearing his father.
"If I do this," Kaito says slowly, "if I become Hanako's sensor in Saburo's presence, eventually he will notice. Eventually his security will flag the correlation between his meetings with me and information Hanako shouldn't have."
"Yes," Michiko agrees.
"And when that happens, what's the survival plan?"
"There isn't one," Kenichi says. "That's the point. You either become valuable enough that even Saburo won't eliminate you, or you disappear into the same archive as every other ambitious kid who thought they could navigate this family without becoming part of the foundation."
"That's a terrible offer."
"It's the only offer," Michiko says. "Everything else is just choosing which direction to fall from."
The sun is rising properly now, burning off the morning's uncertainty with the same indifference it burns everything. The maintenance drone finishes its hedge and moves to the next one, content in its purpose.
Kaito picks up the shard. The data-etching is warm from the light. "When does Hanako want this?"
"Today. Privately. She's expecting you at fourteen hundred for what the calendar will call 'academic advisement.'" Michiko stands. "Don't bring the shard. Memorize what's on it. She'll extract the data directly from your neural buffer. Less evidence. Cleaner transfer."
"That requires a level of access I haven't authorized."
"You authorized it when you let Arasaka install your implants," Michiko says. "Every Academy student is hardware they own. The only question is whether they bother to check what's running on it."
She walks toward the pavilion's edge, Kenichi falling in beside her like a shadow that learned to stand. At the threshold she pauses. "Kid? You asked why you. The answer is because you're smart enough to be useful and young enough to be expendable. That's Hanako's sweet spot. Don't make her regret finding you."
They leave.
Kaito sits alone in the pavilion with a shard full of evidence that could topple a dynasty or get him filed under incident. The city continues its performance. The drone continues trimming. The sun continues not caring who it illuminates.
He slots the shard into his temple port.
The data floods in—biometric logs, cortical activity maps, threat-response timelines, a full recording of his physiological reaction to learning that Saburo Arasaka wears his son like a suit and calls it legacy. The file is comprehensive, clinical, the kind of documentation you'd need if you were building a case or building a cage.
He memorizes it. Burns it into his hippocampus alongside the David Martinez hash, alongside every secret he's collected that makes him dangerous to keep alive and too dangerous to kill cheaply.
Then he deletes the shard's contents and snaps the physical chip between his fingers.
The fragments fall like confetti for a funeral no one will attend.
He stands. Walks out of Reconciliation Park. Passes a memorial that reconciles nothing. Passes people waking up to jobs that will use them and discard them and call it employment.
His agent buzzes. A message from Hanako: Academic advisement at 14:00. Do not be late.
Another from his father: Breakfast tomorrow. There are people you should meet.
Another from Emi: Are you okay? You weren't in morning lecture.
He deletes all three. They'll regenerate. Messages always do.
Kaito walks toward the Academy thinking about sensors and bait and how you tell the difference when you're the thing being measured.
Thinking about Hanako's gravity and Saburo's hunger and which one will consume him first.
Thinking about the deep shit Michiko warned him about, and how far down deep goes in a city that's already built on graves.
The sun climbs higher.
Night City doesn't notice.
It never does.