Sera was from the Middle District, which meant her life was incomprehensibly different from Kael's. She lived in a residential complex with her mother and younger brother. She had access to better food, clean water, healthcare. She'd attended school in the Middle District, which meant she'd been educated, taught history, taught philosophy.
Kael had attended school in the Lower District, which meant learning just enough literacy and mathematics to do maintenance work, and nothing else. The idea that there were other ways of thinking, other ways of understanding the world, had been deliberately kept from him.
Sera brought books to the tunnels. Actual paper books, stored in the Council archives but accessible to her because her mother worked in administration. She read to him—passages about the old world, about philosophy and psychology, about ideas that seemed impossible in the station but also undeniably real.
"People used to believe in progress," she read, her voice soft in the darkness of the tunnels. "They thought that with enough effort and determination, society could become more just, more equitable, more humane."
"What happened to them?" Kael asked.
"They stopped believing," Sera said. "Fear took over. They built walls—literal walls and metaphorical ones—to separate themselves from people they didn't understand. And eventually, those walls collapsed, and everyone fell."
"The collapse," Kael said. It was a word used often in the station, but nobody talked about what it actually meant. "What was it?"
Sera closed the book. "My grandmother was alive before the collapse. She told me stories before she died. She said people had become so separated, so afraid of each other, that they'd forgotten they were all human. They built fortresses to protect themselves from the imagined threat of the other. And in the end, the threat came from something nobody had expected. A pandemic. A disease that didn't care about borders or walls or hierarchies."
"Like what happened to my father?" Kael asked. "A disease?"
"Exactly like that," Sera said. "Except it was much worse. Millions died. Billions, some people said. The old world couldn't survive it. The systems fell apart. And in the chaos, survivors built new societies. Some of them, like this station, tried to recreate the same hierarchies that had failed before."
Kael thought about this for a long time. "So we're trapped in a cycle. A cycle that's already failed once."
"Unless we break it," Sera said. "Unless we learn from what happened before and choose something different."
"And how do we do that?" Kael asked. "In a station where the Council has absolute power? Where questioning the system is treason? Where speaking out gets you killed?"
Sera didn't have an answer. But her silence was thoughtful, not hopeless.
Over the following months, their relationship deepened in ways Kael hadn't anticipated. It wasn't romantic—at least, not in any simple way. It was something more complex. A meeting of two people from different worlds who'd found something real in the tunnels beneath the station. A shared belief, tentative and fragile, that things could be better.
But it was also dangerous. If the Council discovered that Sera was spending time in the Lower District with someone like Kael, they'd both be in trouble. Sera would lose her status, her access, her freedom. Kael would likely be executed for corrupting a Middle District citizen.
"My mother suspects something," Sera told him one night. "She asked me why I've been so interested in the maintenance systems. I told her it was for a school project."
"You need to stop coming," Kael said, though it hurt to say. "It's too risky."
"I'm not stopping," Sera replied. "I'm past the point of stopping, Kael. I understand now what's wrong with this place. And I can't un-understand it. I can't go back to my comfortable quarters and pretend everything is fine when I know that people are dying in these tunnels."
"Then what do you want to do?" Kael asked.
Sera was quiet for a long moment. "I don't know yet. But I'm going to find out. And I want you to help me."