District 17 slept with a metallic murmur.
The walls vibrated with the constant hum of the generators, like an artificial heart keeping the entire hive alive.
From the outside, the habitation modules looked like rusted beehives, stacked upon each other without apparent order, supported by beams that groaned with every change in air pressure. Each cell was identical: a narrow rectangle, windowless, constructed from sheets that had survived for too long. The hallways were tight and damp, always saturated with the smell of stale sweat and accumulated mold.
I lived in Module 6-C, a metal box wedged between dozens of others, with nothing to distinguish it save the door, dented by the blows of neighbors and by time itself.
My home.
Or the closest thing to one.
Upon entering, the dampness hit my face like a slap.
The room was barely three meters long and two meters wide. The ceiling was low, so low that the Exoskeleton had to fold slightly so as not to strike the pipes crisscrossing it.
The first thing I did every time I returned from a round was always the same: wiping the layer of dust and sweat that accumulated on the mask.
A ritual.
A gesture so mechanical that I no longer knew if I did it out of habit, necessity… or because it was the only thing that reminded me there was still a separation between the outside and the inside.
I sat on the cot, which creaked under my weight, and carefully pulled back the breathing mask. Not completely. Never completely.
The connectors remained anchored to my jaw and the base of my skull. The mask wasn't removed, only slid back just enough to clean the filter and the visor.
The air that entered directly into my artificial lungs was harsh, loaded with metallic particles. I coughed, an old reflex that no longer belonged to me.
I cleaned the visor with a damp cloth, wiping over every scratch, every scar from the impacts I had received.
In the corner, a broken mirror returned the fragmented image of my face.
I didn't like to look at it.
But sometimes I did, as if I needed to remember that something human still remained beneath the layers of metal.
I saw my own eyes: dull, with a grayish reflection that wasn't natural.
I saw my pale skin, marked by scars where the connectors sank like nails.
I didn't see a man.
I saw a residue.
I slid the mask back over my face.
Breathing sounded in my ears again, mechanical, controlled.
The silence of the room filled with that familiar echo.
The surrounding district was moving.
I could hear them, even though my walls were thick: muffled voices, arguments, contained crying, brief laughs that sounded like echoes of an extinct time.
And, amidst it all, a characteristic hiss: air escaping from faulty valves, the constant sigh of a sick hive.
A knock came at the door.
A soft tap, almost a scratch.
"Metal boy… are you there?"
I recognized the voice.
It was my neighbor: the old woman Liora.
No one knew her exact age, but it was said she had survived three generations of cutoffs and sealings.
She stayed alive thanks to a clandestine business: selling bottled oxygen, collected in small cylinders she carried in a backpack deformed by the weight.
I got up and opened the door.
I found her standing, hunched over, her back bent as if she carried the entire weight of the Shells.
Her mask was old, patched with adhesive tape and rubber seals. Every one of her breaths sounded like an asthmatic hiss.
"I brought you one…" she said, holding up a small cylinder.
I took it silently.
It was adulterated air, mixed with whatever could be found on the black market. It didn't really help me: my filters processed better than any human lung. But she always offered me one, as if afraid that one day I, too, would fall into the same need as everyone else.
"Thank you," I mumbled, barely audible behind the mask.
The old woman smiled, her yellowed teeth gleaming under the dim hallway light.
"You don't talk much, do you, metal boy?"
"There's not much to say."
"Of course there is." Her eyes narrowed. "Every breath you take is a story. You, on the other hand, breathe like the machines: without telling anything."
I didn't answer.
She didn't expect one.
She turned slowly, dragging her feet toward her own module, leaving behind the hiss of her deteriorated breathing.
I lay back on the cot.
The silence of the room became even heavier.
The mask filtered the air in regular cycles.
Inhale. Exhale.
The sound filled my head, like a relentless metronome.
I closed my eyes.
And the memories returned.
The Shells.
The absolute darkness, broken only by the bluish glow of fungi stuck to the walls.
Me, a child, trembling from hunger, scraping the ground with my nails to find crumbs of food.
The echo of other children crying in the distance, voices that faded when the air became too scarce.
I remembered my mother's hands, cold, covering my eyes so I wouldn't see her own face suffocating.
I remembered my father's murmur, his broken voice, promising me that everything would get better, even though he himself already knew it wouldn't.
And I remembered the sound that had never left me: the hiss of lungs emptying, the sigh of those who no longer had the right to breathe.
I opened my eyes abruptly, as if the memory had suffocated me.
The mask returned cold air to me.
The room was the same: silent, cramped, dark.
But in my mind, I was still trapped in those tunnels, with glowing fungi and motionless bodies.
I got up and walked to the broken mirror.
The mask returned an incomplete reflection of my face.
I placed my hand on the glass, leaving a damp mark on the surface.
"Who are you?" I asked in a whisper I hadn't even expected.
The reflection didn't answer.
It only returned the metallic echo of my breathing.
I tightly gripped the cylinder the old woman had given me.
A piece of bottled oxygen, stolen, sold as merchandise in a black market.
A mockery of what it meant to be alive.
In this arc-city, I thought, there is no difference between air and hunger.
Both are rationed, both have a price, both are stolen, and both are sold.
And I was part of the machinery that decided who could keep breathing.
The executioner of air.
I turned off the module lights.
The cot creaked again under my weight.
Silence enveloped me completely, heavy, absolute.
A silence that was not peace.
It was condemnation.
The silence of an empty apartment in a dead hive.
The silence that resonated just like the Shells.
The Apartment of Silence.