The walk back to the Academy is twelve minutes of trying to pretend the morning was normal.
Reconciliation Park to Corpo Plaza. Corpo Plaza through the gauntlet of morning vendors selling coffee and breakfast synth and the illusion that nutrition is anything except fuel. Past the NCPD checkpoint where cops scan faces and file threats and pretend their quotas matter. Past the memorial fountain where water cycles and nothing is reconciled.
Kaito walks with his hands in his pockets, the shard fragments like evidence he can't quite dispose of, the data burning in his cortex like a brand that can't be hidden.
He's thinking about Hanako. About fourteen hundred hours. About what it means to have your biometrics extracted directly from your neural buffer by someone who says useful instead of interesting.
He's thinking about—
The hand closes around his bicep from behind.
Not grabbing. Guiding. The kind of grip that says I could break this if I wanted, but I'm choosing conversation instead. The pressure is precise, clinical, the touch of someone who knows exactly how much force a joint can take before it becomes a medical problem.
"Keep your eyes forward, kid." The voice is male, old—not the Academy-polished old of instructors who've had their vocal cords tuned, but street-weathered old, the kind of age that comes from decades of breathing air that wants you dead. "Keep walking."
Kaito's pulse spikes. His implants catalog threat response: elevated heart rate, adrenaline dump, cortisol cascade. His training kicks in—evaluate, calculate, survive. He doesn't stop walking. He doesn't turn his head.
But he looks.
Peripherally, the edge of his vision catching what's beside him in the crowd. A man matching his stride perfectly, close enough to be a friend, positioned like an executioner. Kaito can't see the face. Can't see the body. Just the hand on his arm.
Black chrome. Not the polished corpo chrome that costs six figures and whispers in boardrooms. Combat chrome. Matte-black, heat-scored, the kind of metal that's been through fire and returned with opinions. The fingers are articulated too precisely—military-grade actuators, response time measured in milliseconds. The wrist joint shows scoring patterns. Weapon contact. Repeated.
Kaito's mind supplies the math: I was going to die. This soon. Fuck.
"Shut the hell up, kid," the voice says, somehow knowing Kaito's internal monologue is screaming. "Keep walking. We're going to have a conversation, and you're going to live through it, and then you're going to make some very careful decisions about who you talk to and what you say."
They pass a noodle cart. The vendor doesn't look up. Professional blindness, purchased or practiced.
"I don't know who you are," Kaito says, voice level, buying time.
"Good instinct. Keep it." The grip adjusts fractionally—not tighter, just reminding Kaito it's there. "You left Reconciliation Park seven minutes ago. You met with Michiko Sanderson and Kenichi Zaburo. You received a data package. You memorized it. You destroyed the physical evidence. Very clean. Very smart. Very stupid."
Kaito's cortex is running scenarios. NCPD? No—they'd have pinned him at the checkpoint. Arasaka internal security? Possible, but they prefer drones and legal threats. One of the fixers from the underground circle? The hand is wrong for that—too military, too old.
"You're wondering who I am," the voice continues. They turn a corner. The morning crowd thickens. No one notices. In Night City, two people walking close together could be lovers or killers and the algorithm is: not my problem. "You're running through your list of people who want you dead or controlled. It's a good list. Growing every day. But I'm not on it. Not yet."
"Then who—"
"Eyes. Forward." The command is absolute. "You're going to listen now. You're going to listen very carefully because I'm only saying this once, and if you make me repeat myself I'll get annoyed, and when I get annoyed people tend to need extensive reconstructive surgery."
They pass a Zetatech storefront. Advertisements promise better vision, faster reflexes, the future installed in six easy payments. The reflection in the glass shows Kaito, pale and composed. The man beside him is a blur—deliberately, Kaito realizes. Some kind of scrambler field. His face won't resolve. His body is static. Only the hand is clear.
"You attended a meeting at Vice Tower," the voice says. "Eighty-seventh floor. You saw something you weren't supposed to see. You're young, so you think that makes you important. It doesn't. It makes you a loose thread. And in this city, loose threads get pulled until they unravel or cut."
They turn again. An alley. Kaito's threat assessment spikes. Alleys are where conversations end permanently.
But they don't stop. They keep walking through it, out the other side, back into foot traffic. The hand never releases. The voice never rises.
"Saburo Arasaka is wearing his son like a suit," the voice continues, and the casual way he says it—like discussing weather, like stating a fact everyone knows—makes Kaito's spine ice. "You figured that out. Good eye. Smart kid. Hanako Arasaka knows what her father is. She's building a case. Building leverage. You're one of her pieces. Michiko just armed you with data that makes you valuable. You know what valuable means in Night City?"
"Target," Kaito says quietly.
"Exactly." The grip tightens fractionally, approval or threat. "Right now, three factions know what you know. Saburo's people, because they were in that room. Hanako's people, because Michiko briefed them. And now, someone else. Someone who's been watching this family eat itself for longer than you've been alive."
"Who?"
"Someone old. Someone tired. Someone who's seen this play before and knows how it ends." They're approaching the Academy's perimeter now. Security cameras pivot. Drones track. The hand releases Kaito's arm. "You're going to your meeting with Hanako at fourteen hundred. You're going to give her the data she wants. You're going to smile and nod and be the useful little sensor she needs."
"And then?"
"And then you're going to do exactly what I tell you to do."
Kaito stops walking. The crowd flows around them, a river around stones. He still can't see the face. The scrambler field holds. But now he can see more of the arm—the full sleeve of combat chrome, ascending into a shoulder that's probably more metal than meat. Military spec. Old military spec. The kind they stopped making forty years ago because it was too expensive to maintain and too brutal to justify.
"I don't take orders from people who won't show their face," Kaito says.
"Yes you do. You just don't know it yet." The voice drops lower, intimate, the tone of someone sharing a secret at a funeral. "You want to survive this, kid? You want to make it through the next six months without ending up archived or worn or disappeared into a corporate liability footnote? Then you listen to me. Because I'm the only person in this entire city who doesn't want something from you. I just want you to stop making the same mistakes everyone else makes."
"Which mistakes?"
"Thinking you can navigate this. Thinking you're smart enough, careful enough, useful enough to matter to people who've been playing this game since before you were code in a genetic planning suite." The voice pauses. "David Martinez thought he could navigate it. He had speed. He had chrome. He had a crew that loved him. The city ate him anyway. Yorinobu Arasaka thought he could burn it all down and walk away clean. His father ate him instead. You? You're just the latest kid who thinks being clever is the same as being safe."
Kaito's jaw tightens. "Then why warn me?"
"Because someone should have warned them." The statement lands flat, factual, heavy with something that might be regret if regret wore combat chrome. "Because I'm tired of watching this city grind up kids who could have been something if someone had just told them the game was rigged."
The Academy's entrance is twenty meters away. Students flow in and out, black uniforms and red patches and sakura pins, all of them performing their futures.
"Hanako will extract the data at fourteen hundred," the voice says. "Give it to her. All of it. Let her think you're loyal. Let Saburo think you're recruitable. Let everyone think they know which side you're on."
"And which side am I on?"
"Your own. If you're smart." The presence beside him shifts. Prepares to leave. "You'll hear from me again. When you do, you'll have a choice. You can ignore me and trust that Hanako or Saburo or whoever gets to you first will let you keep being a person. Or you can listen and maybe—maybe—survive long enough to decide who you want to be instead of having it decided for you."
"How will I know it's you?"
"You'll know." The voice carries something like amusement. "I'm the only one in this city old enough to remember when corporations used to pretend they weren't eating their young."
The hand doesn't touch him again. The presence withdraws. Kaito counts three breaths before he turns.
The crowd is just crowd. Morning commuters. Students. Vendors. NCPD drones painting their lazy orbits. No combat chrome. No scrambler field. No old voice that sounds like it's been breathing smoke for decades.
Just Night City, performing normalcy while the machines underneath it grind.
Kaito's arm tingles where the grip was. He'll have a bruise tomorrow—not from force, but from the certainty of it. From being held by something that could have crushed and chose conversation.
His agent buzzes. Emi: Where are you? You missed two classes.
He types back: Dealing with something. I'll be there for afternoon sessions.
Three dots. Then: You sure you're okay?
He stares at the question. Thinks about Michiko's warning. About Hanako waiting at fourteen hundred. About Saburo's smile in Yorinobu's face. About the data burning in his cortex that three factions now know he carries. About a voice that sounds old enough to remember when the game had different rules.
No, he types. But I'm functional.
The Academy swallows him. Cameras smile. Systems purr. He walks through corridors that smell like ambition and furniture polish, past students who are all pretending they're not being measured.
In the bathroom he checks his arm. The bruise is already forming—four dark points where fingers held, one where the thumb pressed. The pattern is precise. Professional. The grip of someone who's done this before. Many times. Successfully.
He photographs it with his optics. Files it under evidence that probably won't save him but might explain him.
At 13:47 he presents himself outside Hanako's office suite. The same woman in slate kimono materializes from the wall or the air or the gap between what's allowed and what's necessary.
"Kuroda-sama. Punctual." She gestures: enter, comply, perform.
The door opens onto a room that is less office than equation. Hanako sits at a desk that probably costs more than most people's lives, paperwork arranged in perfect geometry, a tea service waiting like a threat disguised as hospitality.
She doesn't stand. She gestures to the chair across from her. "Sit."
He sits. The leather exhales. The city watches through glass.
"You have something for me," Hanako says. Not a question.
"Yes."
"And you understand what giving it to me means."
"That I'm complicit. That I'm choosing a side. That I'm gambling my survival on your ability to use the information without revealing the source."
"Correct." She sets down her pen with the precision of a period ending a sentence. "You may still walk away. I will not pursue. I will not punish. You will simply remain what you are: a talented student with a promising future in a corporation that may or may not remember your name."
"And if I give you the data?"
"Then you become something else. An asset. A liability. A variable in an equation I'm solving. You will be useful until you're not. And when you're not, I will dispose of you with the same efficiency I dispose of anything that ceases to function."
The honesty is almost beautiful. Almost kind.
"I met with Michiko Sanderson this morning," Kaito says. "She gave me biometric data from last night. My cortical response to Saburo's... demonstration."
"And?"
"And she told me you need proof. Evidence that Saburo is recruiting for the Relic project. That he's showing people what he is because he's confident enough to stop hiding."
"That is accurate." Hanako leans forward slightly. "Will you provide this evidence?"
Kaito thinks about the hand on his arm. The old voice. The warning that he's making mistakes everyone makes.
He thinks about David Martinez in a yellow jacket.
He thinks about Yorinobu, wherever he is—ghost in a machine wearing his own corpse, screaming silently while his father pilots his meat.
He thinks about the funeral he's attending.
"Yes," he says.
Hanako's smile is minimal and absolute. "Very good. Please access your neural buffer. I'll extract the data directly."
He feels the connection establish—her deck reaching into his wetware, pulling threads of memory and biometric response. The sensation is invasive and clinical, like being read by something that doesn't care about the story, only the data points.
The extraction takes forty seconds.
When it's done, Hanako leans back. "Adequate. Better than adequate. Your cortical response when Saburo mentioned Yorinobu was... instructive. Elevated threat markers. Empathetic distress patterns. You felt horror. You controlled it. But you felt it."
"Should I apologize for having human reactions?"
"No. I needed confirmation that what Saburo showed you affected you. That his confidence is genuine. That he's moving past concealment into recruitment." She stands, walks to the window, her back to him now. The posture he knows. The one that means truth is about to be more expensive than lies.
"My father is building an empire of ghosts," she says quietly. "He believes death is a problem to be engineered around. That consciousness is transferable. That bodies are just hardware waiting for better firmware." She turns slightly. "He's not wrong. The technology works. But the cost..."
"Is children," Kaito finishes.
"Is choice," Hanako corrects. "The Relic doesn't ask. It consumes. Overwrites. My brother is gone. What wears his face is..." She stops. Regroups. "Is something else."
The silence is heavy. The city hums. Somewhere far below, people are dying and living and neither matters to the machines keeping time.
"What do you want me to do?" Kaito asks.
"Continue. Attend your classes. Maintain appearances. When Saburo calls you back—and he will—go. Listen. Be the sensor you've proven to be." She returns to her desk. "And when I need you to be more than a sensor, I will tell you. Until then, you are dismissed."
He stands. Bows. Walks toward the door.
"Kuroda."
He stops.
"The bruise on your arm," Hanako says without turning. "Who gave it to you?"
His pulse doesn't spike. His face doesn't change. But his mind races: she knows. How? The cameras? The drones? Some other surveillance he hasn't detected?
"Someone who wanted to have a conversation," he says carefully.
"And did you?"
"Yes."
"And are you going to tell me what was discussed?"
He thinks about the old voice. The warning. The choice being offered.
"No," he says.
Hanako's shoulders move fractionally. Amusement or threat. "Good. That means you're learning to have secrets that are yours. Guard them carefully. In this family, secrets are the only currency that doesn't depreciate."
She dismisses him with silence.
Kaito leaves. The hallway receives him. The Academy performs its function. He walks past students and drones and cameras that smile and sees all of them and none of them.
His arm aches where the hand held him.
His cortex burns where Hanako pulled the data.
His future fractures into paths that all look like falling.
And somewhere in the city, someone old watches and waits and decides whether he's worth saving or just the next name in a very long list of people who thought they could be clever in a game designed by cruelty.
End of Chapter Nine: Pressure