They froze, muscles tight, eyes locked on the fragile fractures spreading wider with agonizing slowness.
Adrian's heart pounded. "What do we..."
The ground gave a final shudder and collapsed.
The floor vanished beneath their feet.
They plunged, swallowed by darkness.
Pain slammed into Adrian's ribs as he hit the earth. The air ripped from his lungs. Metallic tang on his tongue. The world swam.
"Alex?" His voice cracked.
A groan answered. Relief surged.
He pushed himself up, fingers sinking into damp soil. The ground had broken their fall.
Faint light bled from clusters of glowing mushrooms clinging to the walls, pale blue and green, painting shadows that twisted like ghosts.
Adrian muttered under his breath. Perfect. Glowing mushrooms. What could go wrong?
At the chamber's center, a casket waited. Resting on top of it was a cyan glow, pulsing like a heartbeat.
His gaze locked onto it. Hypnotic. Calling.
One step. Then another. The ache in his side faded beneath that pull. The glow grew stronger, shadows bending as if to watch him.
"Adrian… stop." Alex's voice was weak, strained.
He hesitated. Just for a breath. Then reached out.
His fingers brushed the light.
Darkness.
A week earlier…
The bench creaked beneath him, its rusted bolts barely holding together the splintered wood. Weeds pushed through the cracked concrete paths. Stubborn little things. They'd last longer than most people here. And some people didn't last at all.
Above him, the moon hung like a pale eye, distant and watchful. Its light spilled over the ruins of what was once a city park, bathing broken lampposts and vandalized statues in cold silver.
He sipped from a small plastic cup, the bitter black coffee doing little to keep the chill off from the night air.
Seventeen and already tired of life.
He leaned back and exhaled slowly, watching the fog of his breath dissolve into the night.
Tonight, he was celebrating a small victory, or what should have felt like a victory. His name hadn't been on the draft list. No mandatory service, no deployment to some distant conflict in a land he'd never even heard of.
The list was announced this morning, nailed to a withered tree. He had read it once. Then a third time, his heart was pounding like it was trying to escape his chest. His name was not on the list.
Hundreds of names from his city. Cassian. The last name. That left him alone. Truly alone. The promise.
It meant little now, not if he came back in a bag... if he came back at all.
The coffee was getting cold. Another sip, just before the last of its warmth faded. Bitter. He liked it that way. The bitterness grounded him. Made everything else feel honest.
A month ago, the world had crossed a line it hadn't dared touch in nearly a century. A nuclear bomb wiped out a northern city. Fire, silence, and a controlled statement. Protests didn't last. Masked police flooded the streets, chemical gas. People vanished.
He drank the last of the coffee, the final sip gone lukewarm and sour on his tongue. With a quiet sigh, he stood, stretching the stiffness from his legs. The plastic cup crumpled in his hand as he walked over to the nearest bin, overflowing with filth no one had bothered to clean. He dropped the cup on top of the heap and turned away without watching it fall.
Hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched against the wind, he started walking.
Overhead, a soft mechanical hum broke the silence.
A surveillance drone drifted slowly across the sky, its blinking red light scanning the dark streets below. Just one of many that buzzed endlessly above the city like metal vultures.
Astervian machines. "Our greatest ally," his father used to say. Adrian muttered the words bitterly. Twenty years of sanctions had strangled Dalvaria's economy, and his father's warnings felt like memories of a world that no longer existed.
He smiled bitterly, remembering the day the news came of the bombing. The bombing of the building where his father worked. He kicked a battered can, watching it roll away.
The walk back to his apartment was the same as always. Walls with peeling paint, rusted metal, and windows lit by candles or not at all.
He lived in what people now call "the slums," a term that didn't even exist a few years ago. Back then, it was just another district; worn down, sure, but not separated by barbed labels or class lines. It was just a place where people lived.
Now it was a warning label, a shadowed zone most people avoided unless they had to. A few working streetlights, no police unless someone high up wanted someone low down to disappear. It was not the prettiest place.
He pushed open the worn door to his building, the hinges squealing in protest, and stepped inside. The elevators hadn't worked in years. The stairwell reeked of piss and mold.
The door of his apartment was a breath away from falling apart, but it still held. It was where his father lived before finishing college. The only thing he was left with after everything happened.
A mattress on the floor, a table missing one leg propped up with bricks, and a secondhand radio that only picked up static and government broadcasts.
He dropped his keys on the table, kicked off his boots, and sank onto the mattress with a long sigh. His stomach growled, protesting.
He pulled the blanket over himself, more out of habit than warmth. The fabric smelled faintly of dust and old sweat, like the apartment. He closed his eyes, letting the exhaustion pull him down.
Outside, a siren screamed, faint and far away.
The air raid warning was meaningless now. There were no shelters in the slums, and the alarms hadn't worked in years.
He shivered, the blanket doing nothing against the chill that had settled into his bones. He wasn't afraid of dying. He was afraid of not knowing what it felt like to live anymore.
The next morning, he woke up with a grumbling stomach. He got up slowly and dragged himself to the bathroom, splashing cold water on his face before brushing his teeth with the last bit of toothpaste.
The mirror in front of him had a crack going down the center, but he barely noticed it anymore. He stared at his reflection. He looked like he hadn't slept for days, with dark circles under his silver eyes. His hair was a mess, jet black and uncut for months. His face looked thinner than he remembered.
He looked tired of life. Or maybe he was.
He was pulled from his reverie by a sharp growl in his stomach, a familiar hollow ache. "Four days," he whispered, a small smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "New record."
It had been four days since he had eaten last. He ran out of money even before then, but he was fortunate to have lunch with Uncle Ben.
Ben was barely scraping by, but he never turned him away. Maybe it was because of his father. Or maybe Ben still believed in something real.
After he lost his job, he spent all his time searching for work for two weeks without results. There was little work in the slums, and he wasn't even presentable enough to make it past the checkpoint into the city.
He could ask Uncle Ben for a little help, maybe a small loan to get back on his feet. But he hated the thought of being even more of a burden. "Forget it," he muttered, shaking the thought away.
He walked back into the room and pulled on a black shirt, the one that was still in the best condition.
He still had a few options left to check out. They weren't exactly legal, or even safe, but at this point, they were the only ones he could think of. If everything goes well, he might even be able to have a meal today. Or tomorrow. That was good enough.
"If I don't get stabbed," he said under his breath, forcing a half-smile.
He grabbed his coat from the chair and headed out.
The hallway smelled of damp concrete and old mold, a scent that clung to the walls. He barely noticed it anymore. One of the neighbors' kids was crying behind a thin door, and somewhere upstairs, a couple argued in hushed, exhausted tones.
The air stung faintly at the back of his throat. Laws existed, but inspectors took bribes. Politicians didn't care.
The streets were quieter than usual, probably still shaken from the air raid siren the night before. The few buses that still came to the slums had already come and gone, taking with them the few people who still had permits to work beyond the slums.
He walked along the cracked pavement, stepping over a man curled up near a broken streetlamp. The man didn't move. Maybe asleep. Maybe not.
Adrian didn't check. You learn not to, after a while.
He felt sorry for the man. He'd tried helping people like him before, but it never ended well. Once, he'd even been beaten for it. So now, he kept his distance. Sometimes, survival meant shutting off what the heart wanted to feel.
"Hope you're at least still alive," he murmured under his breath.
He was headed to an old acquaintance from the days when life was better. He had helped quite a few kids when he was visiting the apartment with his mother. They always brought food and clothing for the kids in the slums. That thought brought him a painful memory, a memory of a burning hospital. Where his mother worked.
Just as quickly the memory surfaced, he shook it away.
His destination was an old building located just a few blocks away. That was where he could find Alex. Or so he thought.
Four days without food made his legs shake. Every step toward Alex felt heavier than the last, like the pavement itself was trying to stop him.
It had been a while since he last saw Alex. He was one of the kids his mother had helped, offering a roof when Alex was kicked out, and finding him jobs to give him a shot at a better life. He was a good kid, a year younger than Adrian.
The last time he heard about Alex was from Cassian. "He's running with one of the smuggling gangs," Cassian had said. "They use the Crypts… more people get lost there than ever come back." That was why Adrian was looking for him now.
He needed a job.