The air of Lower Skylight smelled of hot scrap metal and acid rain. Under the purple light of dying billboards, Raiko Vernier ran, his lungs burning and his throat thick with rust. Behind him, a swarm of UV drones buzzed like metallic midges, threading ultraviolet beams between the rooftops. Each sweep tore a sliver of shadow from the night, and Raiko felt like any one of those flashes could shatter what little life he had left.
"Don't lose your stride, Raiko." Aureos's voice sounded in his head like a whisper made of bell jars. "Your light is flickering; hunters smell fear."
"It's not fear," he thought as he vaulted a corroded railing. "It's... tiredness." But the Luxophage sensed the tremor in his chest and responded with a mocking click.
A siren howled; violet headlights ripped through the low clouds. Raiko took a quick look: three drones, no more. He knew their pattern. He had—maybe—20 seconds.
He remembered the trick that had saved his life in Élan Chamber-0. He took a deep breath. The air smelled of ozone and burnt grease. He focused the burning heat on his photonic plates and, with a painful throb, let Aureos drink from him. The world lost color; shadows and light merged. For a brief moment, Raiko was a ghost.
Four seconds of invisibility. Three. Two.
He dropped down a rubble chute and through a swinging door into an old mecha workshop, as silent as a sleeping animal. The hinges creaked and closed behind him just as the invisibility died with a blue flash. Outside, the drones passed by.
The silence that remained seemed to pulse. Between the shadows, Raiko realized he was not alone. Forgotten tools glowed with a faint orange hue, and behind a table piled high with unpolished prosthetics stood a human mountain with a steel beard.
"Too much light for a Dust-Tier," the man grunted, sizing Raiko up with a cybernetic eye. His voice was deep, tired, almost paternal. "Those spotlights will cook you if you keep sparking like that."
"I didn't get a degree in stealth," Raiko joked breathlessly. "I need a hiding place. I can... pay."
The giant—Gearlock, a retired ex-adventurer, famous in the back alleys for fixing things no one else could—shrugged.
"Pay? Dust usually come with empty pockets. Show what you're carrying."
Raiko raised his right arm. Aureos's translucent plates lit cyan and gold, as if forged by the light of an aurora. Gearlock whistled.
"Luxophage. That explains the drones. And explains why you're still alive." He frowned. "But it also explains why you're a couple of bad decisions away from ending up on a Watchtower dissection table."
Raiko swallowed. He thought of his sister, Jade, gasping for air on her slashed cot. The image made him shiver.
"I can give you anything you want if you erase my signature from the tracker."
Gearlock patted his cybernetic arm; the prosthetic responded with an electric click.
"90-strength Catalyst Wax, kid. Everything else is junk."
Raiko opened her mouth to protest, but Aureos spoke first, flooding her mind with a satisfied murmur.
"Accept." The symbiote dropped a note of thirst into each syllable. "The Wax will feed my light. Yours."
Raiko, with no other option, nodded. Gearlock smiled with the sad satisfaction of someone watching a pup sign a pact with wolves.
The Watchtower Alliance's mobile lab glided along an underground track like a train of white bone. Raiko, crouching behind a ventilation shaft, felt his heart squeezing. He'd been running for hours, yet his legs trembled with little adrenaline. Gearlock, leaning beside him, typed commands into his Nexus wrist.
"Shield doors active. I'm going to blink them for eighty milliseconds." She glanced at him. "Blink and you're out."
"Understood," Raiko whispered, though his hands were sweating like ice.
"Give me some more light," Aureos demanded. "I need something cool." A spark of what you desire.
Raiko closed his eyes. He saw the impossible image: he and Jade looking at a clear sunrise, a real sun, not the radioactive lamp that illuminated the district. It was a dream so bright it hurt to let it go. He surrendered it, and the Luxophage purred.
The plates glowed, and Raiko dissolved into thin air.
"Zero... now," Gearlock murmured.
The shields went down with a click that sounded like a giant heartbeat. Raiko slipped through the opening, a liquid shadow. Inside, Car 03A was alive with light: glass cylinders guarded by static sentries. The hum was almost a sacred chant.
Bodiless, weightless, Raiko brushed past a guard, and the sensors faltered as if something twisted their logic. He picked up a cylinder, so hot it burned even through his glove. The Wax pulsed with a rhythm that synchronized with his own, threatening to tear his sternum.
The shields squealed. Instability. Too long.
A particle beam grazed his leg, slicing through the invisibility like taut fabric. Raiko darted between shelves, sensing the second shot. Over the intercom, Gearlock yelled for him to jump onto the roof. Raiko obeyed on impulse: he pulled himself up with the handle of a grappling hook, crashed through a skylight, and rolled onto the hot sheet metal.
At his feet, a flower of photons erupted: a sentry had fired at the spilled Wax on the floor. The car exploded into an inner sun. For an instant, Raiko saw silhouettes of impossible colors.
"Flashfield!" Aureos shouted. "Now."
Raiko let the stolen light escape. The world went white and silent, as if no reality existed except the explosion in his chest. When he regained his sight, he was on his knees, breathing in fragments of incandescent air. The drones burned, turned into floating embers.
Gearlock opened a hole in the roof, yanked it out. They ran, blinded by trails of light, to an evacuation tube. They slid across the slippery metal, falling into the blackness of a storm drain where the water was black and warm as oil.
There, in the silent darkness, Raiko realized his body was still trembling. The Luxophage hummed contentedly; he, however, felt an unbearable emptiness. He had paid with a luminous promise, a dream he no longer clearly remembered.
Gearlock removed the cylinder—half intact—connected it to his node arm, and let the Wax imbue the runes. The lights on his prosthesis danced.
"Signature erased," he said finally. "I'll never say cheap, but it was worth it."
Raiko leaned his head against the damp wall. Tiredness returned with the weight of a rampart. Still, a stubborn spark burned in his chest.
"I'm not finished," he said hoarsely. "I'm climbing Grain-Tier tomorrow."
Gearlock let out a laugh that echoed in the tunnel.
"Dream big, Dust-Tier."
Raiko closed his eyes. The murmur of the dirty water reminded him of the beating of a giant heart beneath the city. In that darkness, he thought of Jade, of the light he still needed to steal for herself, and of the new scar that seared his soul: the promise of a dawn he might never imagine again.