The train station was all that remained of the old world. Not a station in the traditional sense—this was a city built into the mountain, carved out over decades by people desperate to survive the collapse. Forty thousand humans, divided into three districts, separated by massive steel barriers that hadn't opened in twenty years.
Kael had never seen the sky. He was seventeen years old, born in the station, and his entire world was measured in kilometers of tunnel and the hum of air recyclers that never stopped. His skin was pale from the lack of sunlight, his eyes dark and observant, always watching the machinery that kept everyone alive.
He worked in the Lower Maintenance District, a title that sounded important until you realized it meant cleaning filters, repairing pipes, and making sure the people above didn't have to think about where their water came from. His father had done the same job until his lungs gave out from breathing recycled air contaminated with mineral dust. He'd died six years ago, coughing blood into a cloth, his final words something about "the system being broken."
Kael had been eleven. He'd cried for three days, then joined the maintenance crew. It was what happened to people like them—people without connections, without family status, without anything the Council valued.
The station was organized by districts, a hierarchy that nobody questioned because nobody remembered anything else. The Upper District housed the Council, the administrators, the families who'd been important before the collapse. They had clean water, fresh food grown in the hydroponic gardens, comfortable quarters with actual bedrooms. Kael had only seen the Upper District once, on a school trip when he was younger. It looked like a different world—bright lights, wide corridors, people who didn't look exhausted.
The Middle District was where most people lived. Workers, technicians, soldiers, traders. They had decent food, clean water, and relative comfort. It was enough to keep people from rebelling, but not enough to make them complacent. There was always resentment simmering beneath the surface—resentment at the hierarchy, at the unequal distribution of resources, at the way the Council made decisions that affected everyone's lives but consulted nobody.
The Lower District was where Kael lived. The forgotten place, where the air was thick with humidity from the water recyclers, where the temperatures fluctuated wildly, where the strongest worked until they broke and the weak died quietly without anyone noticing. There were maybe three thousand people down here, in quarters that were barely more than caves carved into rock. The Council kept the food supply just barely adequate, the water clean enough that disease wasn't rampant, but not comfortable.
The Lower District was meant to be a deterrent. A reminder to people in the Middle District of what happened when you didn't follow the rules.
Kael didn't think about this often. Thinking about it was dangerous. It made you angry, and angry people made mistakes, and mistakes got you reassigned to the mines or the deep recyclers where the air was poisonous.
So he kept his head down, did his job, and tried not to notice how unfair everything was.
That was before Sera.