Kane's words rang in Max's skull all day: Two canisters. By sundown. Or you're done breathing.
It wasn't an empty threat. Everyone in the Red Quarter had heard stories of what Kane did to debtors. Throats slit, masks cracked open while they slept, bodies left in the alleys as warnings. Kane didn't just kill. He made examples.
Max couldn't afford to be one.
So he scavenged.
He crawled through the Quarter like a rat, ears tuned to the faintest hiss of a leak. Broken pipes, corroded tanks, anything that bled oxygen into the air. Most weren't worth the trouble. Some had already been tapped by other scavengers. A few spat gas so foul it burned his throat raw — but he still caught it in his battered canisters. Kane wouldn't care about purity. Kane only cared about tribute.
By midday, Max had barely filled one canister. His lungs ached, his head spun, and every shadow looked like it held one of Kane's dogs.
At one point, near the Serpent gang's border, he almost lost everything. A masked lookout spotted him fiddling with a rusted valve. Max's heart froze. One wrong move, and they'd strip him bare and leave him coughing blood in the dirt.
So he lied. He held up the cracked canister, forced a grin, and said, "Already bled this pipe dry. Nothing left for you." The lookout spat at his feet and waved him off. Max didn't breathe until he was three alleys away.
By dusk, he had two canisters clinking weakly in his satchel. Both together weren't worth half of Kane's demand, but it was all he had.
He was limping back through a collapsed underpass when his boot struck something solid under the ash. At first, he thought it was just more scrap. He bent down, fingers brushing aside soot and rubble.
Then he felt it.
Not rust. Not bone. Metal. Smooth, heavy, humming faintly like a heartbeat.
He pulled it free: a device no bigger than his forearm, etched with strange vents and markings that pulsed with a dim, unnatural glow. Symbols that weren't gang tags, weren't Authority seals, weren't anything he recognized.
Max's breath hitched. Scrap was common. Scrap was life in the Quarter. But this… this wasn't scrap. This was something else.
The canisters clattered as he shifted their weight, suddenly meaningless compared to the warmth thrumming in his hand. For the first time that day, Kane's shadow didn't feel so heavy.
For the first time, Max wondered if the Quarter itself had just given him a weapon.
To be continued…