The city's noise was background radiation now — the low, buzzing hum of lives burning themselves out one deal, one scream, one needle at a time.
Kai moved slow, not because he was tired — though he was — but because every corner was a coin flip between another alley of nothing or something that wanted him in pieces.
He'd already counted his possessions three times since leaving the clinic. Bone knife. Smokes. Concrete shard. That was it. No hidden pouch of credits, no magic tricks, no Sovereign prompts blinking in the corner of his vision. The clothes the doctor gave him hung loose over his bandages, the fabric smelling faintly of bleach and old sweat.
It was laughable, really. Weeks in the pit, and this was the "upgrade."
He'd heard about the machine more than once now — whispered over dice games in corners, muttered between traders. Never a full description, just "that machine" and a face that said you didn't ask again. A tool for the people above to do things to the people below. God knows he didn't want to know the details.
He stepped in something wet without looking, the chill seeping through the thin sole of his shoe. Red spread across the concrete under him, its edges feathering into black where it had begun to dry.
Blood.
He kept walking. Didn't look back, didn't follow the trail. That was someone else's story, and he'd learned a long time ago that in this place, stories had teeth.
Somewhere above, a balcony door slammed, and voices flared in argument. A woman's laugh cut through — sharp, broken in the middle, like it had been dragged out of her throat with pliers.
Kai adjusted the satchel strap that wasn't there — the phantom habit of someone who used to carry more. His free hand brushed the bone knife in his pocket, the cool ridges of its handle grounding him.
The streets here were narrow enough to force you into shadow, hemmed in by rusted fire escapes and hanging laundry stiff with grime. The air stank of cooked fat, hot metal, and the kind of chemical sting that made your eyes water.
He turned down another block and passed a wall scrawled with symbols — half graffiti, half warding marks. The kind of thing you painted when you wanted to warn people but couldn't afford to say it out loud.
A figure moved in the periphery, just far enough away that chasing it would've been a choice, not a reaction. Kai didn't make choices like that anymore.
Not without something worth losing.
A shout cracked the air ahead of him — too sharp to be drunken laughter, too short to be an argument.
Kai slowed, keeping to the wall. A broken awning dripped onto his shoulder as he angled himself into shadow.
The street bent in a lazy curve, and when he leaned just far enough to see, the cause was obvious: three men had a fourth pinned against a chain-link fence. The pinned man's coat was inside-out, pockets hanging like pulled tongues.
They weren't robbing him. They were cutting him.
Not deep — not yet — but deliberate. One knife to the stomach, slow, then a rag pressed to catch the blood. Another man tipped the rag into a metal pail and stirred it with something that looked like a syringe barrel without the needle.
Kai didn't need to get closer to understand. They were collecting.
The pinned man groaned, but no one told him to shut up. The one with the knife smiled at him, said something low, and made another cut.
A pair of women passed on the far side of the street, one with a grocery sack, the other pushing a wheeled crate. Neither looked.
Kai's fingers brushed the bone knife in his pocket, then stopped. This wasn't his fight, and in the Lawless City, trying to make it yours was a good way to vanish into one of those whispered "machine" stories.
One of the collectors looked up mid-stirring, eyes flicking toward Kai's corner. He smiled, small and knowing, before turning back to his work. The message was clear: we see you, and we don't care. That was worse than being chased.
The pail sloshed, the rag came out cleaner than it went in, and the man on the fence was shoved to the ground. Not dead. Not free, either. They left him curled there, clutching his stomach, the pail carried away with the same casual grip you'd use for a bag of groceries.
Kai waited until the alley swallowed them before moving.
When he passed the man on the ground, he didn't stop. Just stepped over him, the way the women had, the way you did when there was nothing you could offer but another name for the city's long list of missing.
Behind him, the man coughed, wet and desperate.
Ahead, the city roared on.