I woke up to the sound of heavy boots on gravel, a barked order, and the clatter of chains.
We had prepared—at least, we thought we had. Torn clothes, smeared faces, hollow eyes. The girls—Naina and Aanchal—had gone even further. Baggy, shapeless clothes to hide their bodies, and in an act that still twists my gut when I think about it, both of them had chopped off their hair. Long, beautiful strands that once made them glow were now reduced to jagged tufts, hidden beneath dirt-streaked caps.
They did it without a second thought, sitting under the collapsed flyover with a cracked mirror between them. Not because they wanted to. Because they had to. So, they wouldn't become targets. So, they wouldn't become burdens.
But even after all that, the city didn't let us slip through its cracks. We were spotted. It was a fat, brutish guard with a number scorched into his chest plate: C-168. His face was a mess of sweat, scars, and a permanent scowl. "Hey! You five—stop right there!" he barked, his voice thick with authority. We froze. For a heartbeat, we considered running. Then Aman muttered, low under his breath, "Don't." We knew better.
The guard lumbered toward us, swinging his baton lazily like he already owned us. Before I could react, he slammed it hard into my ribs, knocking the breath out of me. Aman moved instinctively to shield me, but caught a blow across his face for his trouble.
"Skulking around here like rats," C-168 growled, grabbing Aman by the collar and yanking him forward. "You think you can sneak into the Bypass, huh? You little shits are property now." We were rounded up. Shackled. Dragged through the dirt like animals.
It was supposed to be part of the plan—to get captured, to infiltrate—but it wasn't supposed to hurt this much.
Not like this. Three months later. Time blurred into one long stretch of grime and exhaustion.
We worked at the GT Karnal Bypass garbage disposal—a place where the sky itself seemed to vomit trash down on us. It wasn't just trash. It was mountains. Towering piles of broken plastics, rusted metals, chemical barrels, rotting food, discarded memories of a world that once was. Above us, just 300 meters up, the floating cities gleamed like a second, cruel sky. Polished, perfect. Mocking.
Every day, like clockwork, the teleportation gates flickered open at 8 AM and 4 PM. White beams of light. Guards descending. Orders barked. Lives broken. Our job was simple—haul the dumped waste into the massive processing machines. Sleek, silver monsters that vaporized trash into thin air. Technology so far ahead of us it felt alien. Whatever couldn't be vaporized got crushed into a thick, black dust and dumped into deeper pits. It wasn't just the garbage we were grinding down. It was ourselves. And I... I hated it. Not the work. Not the filth. But the way it changed them.
Naina and Aanchal had learned to move like boys, talk rough, hide their every softness. I caught them sometimes—after the shifts, sitting silently, heads low, skin scraped raw, pretending like it didn't hurt. And every time, something inside me cracked. I hated seeing them like this. I hated seeing all of us like this. But we had no choice. We weren't stupid though. We had hidden our satellite phones far away from the workers' quarters—buried inside a crumbled pillar we marked with a twisted wire. Risky, but necessary.
Late at night, when the guards changed shifts or passed out drunk, Aman or I would sneak out. A few whispered calls, a few broken messages. We stayed in contact with Rathod's group. Rathod—the sharp, no-nonsense girl who led Group 2 from the train. Her group had made it to Mayapuri, the so-called gambling town. Things weren't easy for them either.
They were stuck doing odd jobs—cleaning, scavenging, sometimes worse—anything to survive while trying to find a way to climb up into the floating cities from the ground. They were running out of money, out of options. Each time we spoke, her voice got a little harder, a little more desperate.
"We'll find a way," she said once. "I know," I told her. I wasn't sure if I believed it. But I had to sound like I did. During these three months, we learned more about the world we were trapped in.
The fall of the old world hadn't been an accident or a disaster. It was designed. Fifty years ago, the New Regime decided that the only way to rule was to erase everything before them. Monuments. Histories. Cultures. Gone.
The Metro stations, the libraries, the great towers—they were wiped off the map by the Knights. Those hollow-eyed metallic enforcers. All to destroy hope. To crush memory. To make sure no one could rebel by dreaming of what once was. It worked. Mostly. But not completely. Because as we bent our backs and crushed the old world into dust, we remembered.
And memories... memories are dangerous things. Especially in a place like this.