The evening finds Kaito in the Archives.
It's a room most students avoid—three floors below the main Academy structure, accessible by a lift that requires clearance most don't have. But Kaito has his father's credentials, borrowed through methods the security logs won't show, and the Archives are the only place in the building where the silence isn't performative.
He sits at a terminal, alone, the glow painting his face blue-white while he searches.
Black chrome. Military grade. Old spec.
The results are extensive but useless—procurement records, maintenance logs, spec sheets for augments that stopped being manufactured in 2045. He narrows the search.
Black chrome. Combat solo. Fourth Corporate War.
The results shift. Articles. Obituaries. Conspiracy threads from net forums that got shut down when they got too close to truth. And then, buried under corporate scrubbing and deliberate obscurity:
Morgan Blackhand. Status: Unknown. Last confirmed sighting: 2023, Arasaka Tower, Night City.
Kaito's pulse does its thing.
He pulls the file. Photographs—grainy, decades old, most corrupted by data degradation or deliberate editing. A man in tactical gear, face obscured. Another shot: the chrome arm, unmistakable, matte-black and heat-scored, catching light in a way that says this isn't decoration, it's weaponry. A third: Morgan standing beside someone Kaito recognizes from history texts—Johnny Silverhand, the rockerboy terrorist, the one who nuked Arasaka Tower and died screaming about corporate slavery.
Kaito's cortex connects points like a netrunner finding patterns in data streams:
The hand on his arm. Black chrome. Combat grade.
The voice. Old. Weathered. Military.
The warning about David. About Yorinobu. About making mistakes everyone makes.
"I'm the only one in this city old enough to remember when corporations used to pretend they weren't eating their young."
"Fuck," Kaito whispers to the empty Archive.
His agent buzzes.
Unknown contact. Again. No identifier. Just coordinates and a timestamp: INDUSTRIAL ACCESS TUNNEL 7 / SUBSECTOR K / 22:00 / COME ALONE OR DON'T COME AT ALL.
And beneath it, a single line that makes his blood ice:
So kid, you wanna live?
Industrial Access Tunnel 7 is where the city keeps its infrastructure honest.
Pipes the diameter of cars. Electrical conduits humming with enough voltage to turn a person into a statistic. Maintenance drones on their endless patrols, blind and deaf by design. The air tastes like ozone and old concrete. Water drips from somewhere it shouldn't, counting seconds in a language only the damned understand.
Kaito descends at 21:47. No driver. No backup. No clever plan beyond showing up and hoping the question wasn't rhetorical.
The tunnel is lit in intervals—pools of sodium-yellow between gulfs of dark. His footsteps echo. His cortex runs threat assessments and finds everything wanting. Every shadow could be an ambush. Every sound could be a weapon charging. Every breath could be his last.
At 21:59 he reaches Subsector K.
The figure is already there.
Leaning against a support pillar like he's been waiting hours or minutes and neither matters. The scrambler field is off now. Kaito can see him clearly.
Morgan Blackhand looks exactly like the photographs and nothing like them.
Late sixties, maybe older—it's hard to tell with the chrome. The face is weathered, scarred, the kind of face that's been in rooms where violence wasn't discussed, it was applied. Gray hair cropped military-short. Eyes that have seen too much and refuse to stop looking. The chrome arm is fully visible now—ascending from fingertips to shoulder, black as a void, articulated with the precision of something designed to kill in seventeen different ways. The other arm is meat, scarred, tattooed with unit insignia Kaito doesn't recognize.
He's wearing tactical gear that predates most of the students at the Academy—old-spec, functional, the kind of equipment that works because it's simple and simple doesn't fail. A pistol on his thigh. A blade on his belt. Probably six other weapons Kaito can't see.
"You figured it out," Morgan says. Not a question.
"Yes."
"How long it take?"
"Three hours. The Archives helped."
"The Archives lie." Morgan pushes off the pillar, walks closer. His gait is careful, controlled, the movement of someone whose body is part machine and part scar tissue and both parts remember pain. "But they lie consistently, so if you know what they're hiding you can work backwards to truth. Smart kid."
"You're supposed to be dead," Kaito says.
"I'm supposed to be a lot of things. Dead. Missing. A legend. A warning." Morgan stops three meters away—conversation distance, execution distance, the gap is context-dependent. "Instead I'm here, in a maintenance tunnel, talking to a corpo brat who just sold his biometrics to Hanako Arasaka and doesn't realize he signed his own death warrant."
Kaito's face stays composed but his pulse spikes. "Explain."
"This morning. Reconciliation Park. You met Michiko Sanderson. You received data. You memorized it. You left." Morgan's chrome hand flexes—hydraulics whisper, actuators purr. "Thirty seconds after you exited the park's north gate, a six-person kill team activated. Tyger Claws. Professional. Contracted through a cutout that leads back to internal Arasaka security. Their target package included your biometrics, your route, and a twelve-minute window to make you disappear."
The tunnel's ambient hum becomes very loud.
"I walked you through their kill zone," Morgan continues. "Held your arm so you'd keep pace. Kept you moving at exactly the right speed so their timing collapsed. By the time they adjusted, you were at the Academy perimeter, cameras everywhere, too public to touch. They aborted. Went home. Filed a report that says the target deviated from expected patterns and the job became unviable."
Kaito's mind replays the walk. The hand on his arm. The grip that guided. The voice that told him to keep his eyes forward, keep walking. The crowd that flowed around them. The vendor who didn't look up.
"You saved me."
"I delayed your death," Morgan corrects. "There's a difference. Saving implies you're safe now. You're not. You're a sensor in a war between a daughter and her father, both of whom have killed more people than you've met. You're carrying data that three factions want—Saburo's people, Hanako's people, and now other interested parties who think you're a vulnerability they can exploit or an asset they can turn."
"Who ordered the kill team?"
"Saburo's inner circle. Someone who attended that Vice Tower meeting and decided you were too curious. Someone who doesn't want a teenage netrunner with a conscience poking around the Relic project." Morgan's eyes don't leave Kaito's face. "The order came fast. Professional. No hesitation. Which means they've done this before. Which means David Martinez probably wasn't the first Academy student who saw something he shouldn't and ended up archived."
The name hits like a fist.
"David wasn't murdered by the city," Kaito says slowly. "He was murdered by the corporation."
"The city is the corporation. The corporation is the city. You keep trying to draw lines between them like lines mean something." Morgan's voice is tired, factual, the tone of someone explaining gravity to someone who insists they can fly. "David got chromed up, thought speed would save him, ran jobs for people who used him until he became a liability. Then they activated MaxTac, called it a cyberpsycho incident, and filed him under PR problem solved. Clean. Efficient. Everyone got paid except David."
Kaito thinks about the yellow jacket. The basement. The candle guttered flat.
"Why save me?" he asks. "You don't know me. You don't owe me. I'm just another corpo kid making mistakes."
"Because someone should have saved him," Morgan says quietly. "Because I'm tired of watching this city eat kids who could have been something. Because forty years ago I stood in a tower with a rockerboy terrorist and we tried to burn Arasaka to the fucking ground, and all we did was give them an excuse to build it taller." He steps closer. "And because when I look at you, I see every kid who thought they were smart enough to navigate the game. And I'm tired of going to their funerals."
The silence stretches. Water drips. Drones patrol their eternal routes.
"So kid," Morgan says, and the chrome hand extends—not threatening, offering. "You wanna live?"
Kaito stares at the hand. The black chrome. The weapon that's saved people and killed people and probably can't remember which outnumbers which anymore.
"What does living cost?"
"Everything you thought you'd become. Everyone you thought you'd impress. Every future the corporation promised you in exchange for your name and your spine and your willingness to not ask questions." Morgan's hand stays extended. "I'm offering you a chance to stop being what they're building you into. To learn how to survive in a city that's designed to consume you. To maybe—maybe—become someone who chooses what they are instead of having it chosen for them."
"And if I say no?"
"Then I walk away. The next kill team will be better. Faster. They'll take you in a window you won't see coming. Could be tomorrow. Could be next week. Could be the moment after Hanako extracts everything useful from your cortex and decides you're a liability she can't afford." Morgan's eyes are gray and old and have seen this exact conversation play out with different kids in different tunnels. "You'll die. Night City will file you under incident. Your father will attend a memorial. Hanako will send flowers. And someone else will take your place in the machine."
Kaito thinks about the breakfast with Hanako. The way she said useful. The way his father adjusted his collar and warned him about angles.
He thinks about Emi crying in his suite, poisoned by drugs sold by someone who knows exactly what they do.
He thinks about Saburo wearing Yorinobu's corpse like a suit and calling it efficiency.
He thinks about David Martinez—fast, chromed, doomed—filed under case study.
He thinks about the funeral he's attending.
His own.
"What do I have to do?" Kaito asks.
"Learn. Listen. Survive." Morgan's hand doesn't waver. "I'll teach you what the Academy won't—how to see the angles before they close on you. How to walk through kill zones without dying. How to carry secrets without getting consumed by them. How to be dangerous enough that elimination becomes expensive enough to reconsider."
"You want to turn me into a solo."
"I want to keep you alive long enough to decide what you want to be." Morgan's chrome fingers flex slightly. "The rest is up to you. But you make the choice now. Right now. In this tunnel. Because once you walk out of here, the next team won't be Tyger Claws with a twelve-minute window. It'll be professionals who don't miss."
Kaito's hand rises. Hesitates. His entire future is contained in whether his fingers close on that black chrome or turn away from it.
Everything he was supposed to be: executive, strategist, inheritor of his father's name and Arasaka's machinery.
Everything he could be: alive, awake, dangerous, his own.
His hand closes on Morgan's.
The chrome is cold and warm simultaneously—heat from hydraulics, cold from the absence of flesh. The grip is firm, controlled, the handshake of someone sealing a contract that both parties know is written in probabilities and blood.
"Good," Morgan says. "First lesson starts now. You're going to keep attending classes. Keep smiling at cameras. Keep being Hanako's useful little sensor. But you're also going to start learning how not to die."
"How?"
"By making your death expensive enough that everyone decides it's cheaper to let you live." Morgan releases his hand. "By learning to move through the city the way I do—visible when useful, invisible when not. By understanding that loyalty is a transaction and every transaction has a price."
He turns, starts walking deeper into the tunnel. Pauses. Looks back.
"You coming, kid? Or you need more time to decide?"
Kaito looks at the path behind him—back to the Academy, back to his suite, back to a future that involves being useful until he's not and then being archived like David, like Yorinobu, like everyone who thought they mattered.
He looks at Morgan—legend, ghost, the man who tried to burn Arasaka and survived when it should have killed him.
He follows.
The tunnel swallows them both.
Behind them, maintenance drones continue their patrols, blind to everything except malfunction.
Above them, Night City performs its evening ritual—deals made, lives traded, futures sold to people who'll never deliver them.
And in an office three floors above ground, Hanako Arasaka stares at a data stream showing biometric logs from Reconciliation Park and notices something interesting: for forty-three seconds during Kaito Kuroda's walk back to the Academy, his threat response dropped to zero despite being in a crowd.
Zero threat response in Night City doesn't happen naturally.
It happens when someone very dangerous is making sure nothing dangerous can reach you.
She makes a note. Files it. Adds Kaito's name to a list that gets shorter every quarter as people on it either prove useful or prove mortal.
Then she returns to her work.
The city continues.
The machine continues.
And in a tunnel beneath it all, a boy just chose to stop being processed.
Whether that makes him smart or suicidal, Morgan Blackhand will teach him over the next six months.
If he lives that long.