Part II
The echo of the impact still resonated in the tunnel.
The man lay on the ground, his hands outstretched toward the broken Gray Lung, as if he could crawl back to the lost air.
The cylinder sputtered, releasing one last metallic sigh that faded into the tunnel's dampness.
That hiss blended with my own mechanical breathing.
Cold.
Constant.
Detached.
I didn't move for long seconds.
My fingers still trembled inside the reinforced glove, even though the Exoskeleton kept my posture rigid.
That tremor wasn't physical.
It was memory.
The image of my father, with red eyes, hitting the module door, was still lodged in me like a splinter.
I finalized the protocol with an automatic movement.
Eviction completed. Act of Silence registered.
The system beeped, indifferent to the tremor that still ran through my bones.
In the official record, this was nothing more than a statistic:
—An illegal module neutralized.
—A Gray Lung destroyed.
—A user eliminated.
But I had seen more than that.
I had seen a man cling to a piece of metal as if it were his last child.
I had seen someone look me in the eye and call me an air thief.
And I had felt the shadow of my father behind that gaze.
The tunnel continued to stretch beyond the module.
Dark, damp, full of mist that coiled around my steps.
It wasn't in the protocol, but my feet advanced anyway.
District 20 was unlike anything I knew.
The corridors no longer had the ordered structure of the Rings.
Here, everything seemed improvised, patched with metal scraps, as if the arc-city itself had begun to fall apart and someone was trying to hold it together with garbage.
The air smelled different.
Not just of dampness and rust.
It smelled of smoke.
Human smoke.
I stopped.
The system vibrated in my ear.
Environmental anomaly detected: Combustion particles. Possible source unregistered.
A campfire.
Here, on the border of the Shells.
I advanced slowly, the echo of my footsteps muffled by the humidity.
The hallway opened into a wider cavity.
There, in the center, was a weak fire fed by scrap and damp cloths.
And around that fire… shadows.
Five people, huddled together, sharing the warmth.
Children who were too thin, a woman cradling a bundle that might have been a baby.
They were all breathing around an improvised cylinder connected to the fire—a mechanism that seemed to distill air from some hidden system.
Another Gray Lung.
More rudimentary, but functional.
They saw me immediately.
The fire illuminated my mask as if I were a demon emerging from the darkness.
Their eyes widened, not in surprise, but in dread.
One of the women abruptly stood up, placing herself between me and the others.
"No… no more," her voice trembled, yet remained firm.
The children started coughing, frightened.
I remained motionless, watching.
The protocol dictated that I should destroy that Lung, cut off the access, sign another Act of Silence.
It was my duty.
But my hands didn't move.
The fire crackled.
The flames illuminated the tunnel mist, projecting long shadows onto the rusted walls.
The shadows seemed like living figures, like ghosts crawling through the Shells.
The children looked at me as if I were one of those ghosts.
A specter who arrived in the shape of a man, but faceless, soulless.
A Respirator.
And then I heard it again.
Not from them, not out loud.
I heard it inside my mind, like an echo repeating since yesterday.
"You don't breathe like us!"
The tremor ran through my hands again.
That voice wasn't the girl's.
It was mine, as a child, screaming silently as I watched my mother die on her knees.
The system vibrated, demanding action.
Pending procedure: Disconnection of anomaly.
I didn't move.
I only listened.
The whisper of the fire, the children's coughs, the irregular breathing of the woman who challenged me.
That set of sounds mingled with the hiss that still resonated in my ears, the eternal hiss of the empty coffins.
I inhaled deeply, the cold air from my mask filling my mechanical lungs.
The contrast was unbearable.
They were gasping, sharing a rusted cylinder.
I was breathing steadily, thanks to state-of-the-art filters.
The difference between us was so brutal it seemed obscene.
I took a step forward.
The woman backed away, hugging the baby tightly.
The children cried, trying to hide in the shadow of the wall.
I raised my arm.
The protocol demanded that I press the command, that I disconnect the Gray Lung, that I let that fire go out along with the bodies surrounding it.
My finger approached the authorization panel.
The system emitted a soft beep, ready to seal the fate of strangers once again.
But my hand kept trembling.
For an instant, I saw my mother standing in place of that woman.
I saw my father behind her, hitting the module, begging for one more chance.
I saw myself, a huddled child, eyes fixed on a red counter.
That memory superimposed itself on what was before me.
I could no longer distinguish the past from the present.
I could no longer distinguish those children from myself.
The line between duty and memory blurred.
The system's beep insisted.
Disconnection pending. Act immediately.
My breathing sounded loud inside the mask, a metallic echo that almost hurt my ears.
I did not press the command.
Not yet.
I stood there, trapped in an endless instant, with my hand suspended over the panel and my mind divided between two worlds:
The Respirator who had to obey.
And the child who had never stopped suffocating in that sealed module.
The fire crackled again.
One of the children coughed harder, doubling over.
The woman stared at me, her eyes filled with fury and fear.
She said nothing.
She didn't plead.
She only waited.
She waited for me to decide if that fire would keep burning for a little longer, or if it would be extinguished forever.
In that unbearable silence, the tremor in my hand grew stronger.
And I understood something terrifying:
It wasn't my body that was shaking.
It was my will.
I, Kaelen-7, the efficient and cold Respirator, the executioner of air… was hesitating.
And in this world, hesitation was a crime worse than stealing oxygen.