The seam shut behind him with a reluctant groan. Dust rained onto Kael's head, whispering in his ear about lung disease. He coughed once into his sleeve, then froze, listening.
Nothing answered. No echo of boots, no hound-clatter, no thief trying to remember how to breathe quietly. Just the heaps muttering to themselves, which was their normal setting.
Good, he thought. Still mine.
He crept forward on elbows and knees, careful as a thief in his own house. He had scattered alarms like breadcrumbs on purpose: a strip of tin lids strung with wire, a copper hairline tuned to sing when plucked, a pressure pipe that whined if touched the wrong way. As he passed each, he checked them with a pluck or a twist.
By the time he reached the vestibule, his muscles had switched from tense to sour. The place was barely taller than he was, four sheets of plating leaning together like they'd agreed to keep him alive a little longer. He pressed the hidden switch made from a refrigerator hinge and a broken lamp, and the inspection light buzzed awake, sputtering white like it was angry about the overtime.
The glow spilled across his kingdom.
The bed was a nest of stitched rags pressed into the a slant in the wall. A heating coil crouched beside it like a pet snake, wired to a battery that kept threatening retirement. His water can sat beside the filter tower he'd cobbled from cloth, charcoal, and ceramic beads he'd nearly died bargaining for. Above the bed, chalk marks marched in tidy rows of five. Each cross-out meant the heaps had failed another day to file him under "missing." He picked up the nailhead from its cup and carved another slash, slow and deliberate.
Another day the mountain miscounted. Another day its accountant should be fired.
The bench dominated the far wall — four legs of mixed parentage, a fifth stolen from a dream, the top scarred by every argument Kael had ever had with stubborn metal. His tools lined up obediently, though none of them matched. The pliers grinned crooked, the file had been worked down to almost nothing, the soldering iron had been reborn from a spoon. His little museum of treasures sat on the shelf above: a broken drone eye polished into a toy starfield, a holo-projector that coughed fog like a dying lung, a wedge of alien glass etched with unreadable hieroglyphs, and the wrist-comm that refused to admit it was dead.
Kael placed his bundle on the bench and unwrapped it. The cracked power cell glared at him like a patient judging the surgeon.
"Don't worry," he said. "I'm equally unqualified for all procedures."
He washed his hands in gritty sand and rationed water, scrubbing until the stink of market filth surrendered. Fresh rags wrapped his palms. He whispered threats to the heating coil, which whined awake. The soldering iron lounged across it, resin sweating in a tin nearby. The stink filled the burrow like an old secret.
He drank half a mug of boiled water, salted it, and let his stomach pretend it was soup. Then he sat, hunched, and went to work.
The crack had widened since morning. A seam of hissing gel mocked him. He clamped the casing into his crooked brace and, with a bent brush bristle, coaxed the ooze into a rag. The hiss softened. He traced resin into the wound with hands that pretended to be steady. The resin smoked like it disapproved, but it hardened obediently.
The indicator blinked, sulked, then held steady at a jaundiced glow.
"There you go," Kael murmured. "Still ugly, but aren't we all?"
He set it aside, wrapped safe.
Next came the wrist-comm. The screen was cracked worse than Kael's humor. He re-soldered a lead, scraped corrosion with a razor chip, bridged a gap with solder thin as patience. The comm spat static, then grudgingly coughed symbols onto the spiderwebbed screen.
"…—MANDATORY JUVENILE INDUCTION—…—DISTRICT THETA—…"
The voice was flat, official, oblivious to the irony of reaching a boy who had never owned a chair.
Kael leaned closer, whispering, "Say it again. Lie to me."
The line died, polite as a thief leaving the door closed behind him.
Kael sat still, staring. The words carved themselves into his skull: Mandatory. Juvenile. District Theta.
Not insults. Not orders from a black-jaw. Words that sounded like a system bigger than the heaps, where chairs might actually have names and walls didn't collapse because gravity was drunk.
Longing, if that's what it was, tried to form. He crushed it into something uglier. Plan. Not dream. Plans pay better.
He picked up the chalk and drew another box on the map above his bench — a city wall, a gate, a line pointing toward it. He didn't label the line. Writing things down made them less cooperative.
He crawled back through the burrow's side tunnels, checking each trap. The bell-string rattled right when plucked. The copper hairline twanged its tune. The stink-bomb's seam burped chemical breath. The pressure pipe groaned like a ghost. A rusted bolt balanced precariously on a hinge, ready to announce intruders with a clatter.
Satisfied — or at least equally paranoid as before — he returned to the bench, lit the coil again, and warmed his hands over it. The cracked cell's steady glow painted his knuckles yellow.
He let his eyes climb to the treasure shelf. The drone eye reflected the inspection light, scattering it into mock stars. For a moment, he lifted it, held it to his own, and let the chalk map behind it blur into constellations. Fake stars are still stars if you squint.
The alien glass waited, etched with channels he had traced until his fingers knew the grooves better than his own scars. He named the unreadable letters himself — the loop was enough, the ladder was why not. Naming things made them real enough to argue with.
He returned them to their places, because vanity was dangerous but not owning anything was worse.
Suddenly, glass rattled.
Kael froze. His alarms were singing the wrong verse.
Not wind. Not heap-song. Human.
The bell-string clinked in a pattern too clumsy for rats. Boots scuffed metal. Two of them, breathing hard, trying to be small.
Kael moved with a slowness that felt like treason against his rising panic. Mug down, iron off the coil, knife slipped into his palm. He snuffed the inspection light.
The burrow was plunged into darkness.
One set of lungs coughed as the stink-bomb vented a warning. The other stayed taut, waiting. Smart enough to wait.
Kael slid sideways through a vent seam, toes grazing the groaning plate that whined if you tread wrong. He let the first intruder stumble past in a fit of hacking, metal scraping. That one barreled back up the tunnel, the heap laughing at him with every rattle.
Kael waited. The second lingered, tight as a bowstring.
Always two, Kael thought. One's bait, one's brains. Spoiler: brains are never that bright.
He picked a nut off the floor, lobbed it into the left tunnel. It pinged convincingly. The breath shifted that way.
Kael slid the knife spine against a throat. "Don't," he whispered.
The body stiffened. A sour whisper answered, "Easy. Easy."
Kael recognized the voice. Star Cheek. Market thief. The inked star on his cheek probably glowing faint even in the dark.
"You followed me," Kael murmured.
"Walked your shadow. Thought maybe you had more worth hiding than a half strip."
"I do," Kael said. "It's called traps. Congratulations, you found them."
The boy's breath hitched. Kael leaned in, voice almost friendly. "Word of advice: next time, let your friend take all the coughing. You'll live longer."
He pulled the knife back. Star Cheek staggered, coughed once, then shuffled backward until the bell-string rattled again. He ducked under, retreating with the sound of a bolt clattering down a shaft.
Silence returned.
Kael relit the inspection lamp, reset every trap, and sat down before his legs remembered they were tired. His laugh cracked once in the small room, bouncing around like it was too sharp for the walls.
"Good job," he told himself. "You defended your pile of garbage from other people who wanted garbage. Truly, you're a baron in the making."
He checked his inventory again. Soldering iron. Mug. Nails. Resin, dwindling. Wire. Chalk. A power cell that might explode if stared at rudely. A comm whispering about cities he'd never see.
This won't cut it, he thought. Salt-paper and scraps won't get me past a wall. Need something bigger. Something red zone big.
His gaze lingered on the red triangle he'd scratched on the map days ago. A patch of the heaps whispered about in rumors — toxic fogs, mutant nests, machines that never learned to stay dead. The kind of place even black-jaws avoided because bullets had better things to do.
It was suicide. Which, statistically, made it his best option.
He packed in his head: cloth for his face, pliers, screwdriver, file, chalk, knife, crowbar. The comm for hope. The cell if it behaved. Water. Wire. A shard of mirror. Oil-soaked rag.
He imagined the walk. The fumes. The things with too many legs. The silence when he didn't come back. Then he imagined something else: the city's towers up close, not smeared on the horizon. A chair with his name notched into it. A voice calling him student instead of rat.
That second imagining was heavier. It tipped the scale.
He scrawled two words under the map, small, almost shy: Not forever. Then rubbed them out immediately, because the heaps loved to punish optimism left lying around.
Kael stretched out on his bedroll. The coil ticked as it cooled, the resin stink clung, and water dripped down a tunnel seam like it had nothing better to do. He tucked the knife close, let his stomach gnaw politely, and drifted into sleep that felt more like holding his breath.
He dreamed of desks with carved names. He dreamed of chalk dust that wasn't counting days but writing lessons. He dreamed of a word he'd never tasted properly: school.
When he woke, dawn outside had gone gray again. The wind blew from the north, which meant the red zone's fumes would travel toward the market instead of him. Which meant today was, technically, lucky.
Kael rolled from the rags, strapped the knife, tied his bundle, and whispered to the burrow as he left, "Try not to collapse without me."
The seam groaned shut.
He angled his path away from the market. Toward the air that shimmered the wrong color. Toward the red triangle on his map. Toward a risk stupid enough to feel like progress.
Behind him, the burrow held its breath. Ahead, the heaps hissed like a stage preparing for its next scene.
Kael adjusted the rag over his mouth and muttered, "Here's hoping I die interesting."
And he left.