The air in The Sink didn't just smell; it tasted. It tasted like copper wire, burnt hair, and the wet, rot-sweet scent of dying fungi.
Jax woke up the way he always did: gasping.
His hand flew to his throat, fingers scrabbling against the cold plastic of his Aero-V2 rebreather. Tap-tap-tap. Three sharp strikes against the cartridge housing. The seal held. The little LED indicator on his wrist blinked a steady, reassuring green.
He held his breath for a second longer, letting his heart hammer against his ribs, before finally exhaling. The hiss of the exhaust valve was the only sound in his "apartment"—a repurposed shipping container wedged into a crack in the bedrock, eight hundred meters below sea level.
"Forty-two," Jax whispered, his voice muffled by the mask.
He tapped his Wrist-Deck. The cracked screen flickered to life, displaying his current balance in neon-red digits: 42 kW.
Forty-two kilowatts of Charge. Enough to keep his Mag-Lock boots active for three days. Enough to buy two nutrient pastes. Nowhere near enough for a Class-C chip. Nowhere near enough for a window.
Jax sat up, swinging his legs over the edge of his cot. His boots sat waiting for him like loyal dogs. The left one was a rusted, clunky monstrosity salvaged from a dead miner—heavy, loud, and prone to jamming. The right one was his prize: a sleek, stolen military prototype with silent-step hydraulics and a grip strength that could hold him upside down on a polished steel wall.
He strapped them on. Click-clack. Whirrrrr. The mismatched servos whined in disharmony.
Outside, the city of Anarchious was waking up, which mostly meant the coughing had started.
Jax pushed open his heavy steel door and stepped out onto the catwalk. The humidity hit him instantly, a wall of hot, wet smog that slicked his spiky black hair to his forehead. Below him, the depths of The Basin churned with toxic green fog. Above him... nothing. Just a mile of darkness and the faint, mocking glow of the Hanging Gardens far overhead—Top-Side—looking like upside-down constellations he would never touch.
He started walking, keeping his head down. The metal grating of the walkway vibrated under his feet.
Cough.Cough.Hrrrr-ack.
It was the soundtrack of the bottom. "Gutter-Lung." Every third person he passed was hunched over, hacking wet, black fluid into the grates. Men with rags wrapped around their faces. Women holding dirty industrial filters to the mouths of crying babies.
Jax held his breath as he passed a group of corpse-dredgers arguing over a body. He didn't look at them. Eye contact was an invitation to get zeroed.
"Hey! Mask-boy!"
Jax didn't stop. He knew the voice. Krix. The Enforcer for the Rust-Kings.
He picked up the pace, his mismatched boots creating an uneven rhythm on the metal—Thud-hiss, Thud-hiss.
"I'm talkin' to you, Meat-Bag!"
That was how the Nulls living in the basin with no machine parts were called.
A heavy hand clamped onto Jax's shoulder.
Jax didn't fight the grab. That was rule number one of Rat-Tactics: Never fight the force; redirect it.
He spun with the momentum, dropping low. As he turned, he saw Krix looming over him—a mountain of muscle and bad hygiene. Krix was wearing a cracked construction mask that covered his mouth but left his scarred, bulbous nose exposed to the smog. His right arm was a nightmare of rusty hydraulics, leaking black oil onto the deck.
"Pretty mask," Krix grunted, his eyes narrowing. "Too much chrome for a Null. Hand it over."
Jax didn't speak. His left hand flashed out. In his palm was "The Spark-Gap"—a modified welding igniter he'd built from scrap. He jammed it into the exposed servo-joint of Krix's cyber-arm.
ZAP.
Blue electricity arced. Krix roared, not in pain, but in frustration as his massive limb seized up, locking in a fully extended position with a grinding screech.
"Glitch!" Krix screamed, clawing at his frozen limb with his organic hand. "I'm gonna peel that face off your skull!"
Jax was already gone. He vaulted over the railing, trusting his right boot to catch the magnetic strip on the wall below. Thunk. He hung there for a split second, looking down into the abyss, then scrambled sideways into the shadows of a ventilation duct.
He didn't look back. He just tapped his filter. Tap-tap-tap.
Survival wasn't about winning. It was about keeping your air.
Twenty minutes later, Jax dropped out of a rusted pipe near the "Drip-Line"—the unofficial border where the toxic runoff from Sector 7's industrial factories rained down into the Basin. It was a dangerous zone, corrosive and unstable, which meant it was the perfect place to find things Top-Siders had thrown away.
"Took you long enough, Gas-Bag."
A figure detached itself from the shadows. It was Ryla.
Even in the gloom, she was impossible to miss. Her neon-pink hair was a jagged splash of color against the grey slime of the tunnel walls. She was wearing her signature black bodysuit, covered in peeling strips of reflective tape that caught the dim light. She looked like she'd been rolling in grease—her face was smudged with black streaks—but her eyes were bright and manic.
"Run-in with Krix," Jax muttered, adjusting his hood. "He wanted the mask."
Ryla grinned, the small LED strips on her own battered sport-mask pulsing pink. "Did you Spark him?"
"Froze his chrome. He'll be stuck waving at traffic for an hour."
Ryla laughed, a sharp, echoing sound that made Jax wince. "Nice. You owe me a drink when we get rich today."
"We're not getting rich, Ryla. We're finding copper wire and we're leaving before the acid rain starts."
"Boring," she sang, hopping onto a precarious ledge over a pool of bubbling sludge. She moved with a terrifying, careless grace. "I heard a rumor from a Dredger. Said a shipment from the Silk District got knocked loose during a mag-fail last night. Fell right into the upper vents of Sector 7."
Jax froze. "Sector 7? That's Vorg's territory. We don't go up, Ryla. We stay down."
"It's technically not in the sector," she argued, balancing on one foot. "It's in the ventilation crawlspace under it. Technically, it's No-Man's-Land. Come on, Jax. Imagine what the rich folks in the Silk District throw away. Real batteries? Uncracked screens? Maybe even... chocolate?"
Jax felt the familiar tightness in his chest. Going up was dangerous. The Hanging Gardens were guarded by drones and Sector Lords who shot Nulls for sport.
But then he looked at his wrist. 42 kW.
If he didn't find something valuable today, he wouldn't have enough Charge to power his mask filters by tomorrow night. He would be breathing raw smog. He would end up like Kio.
He looked at Ryla, who was watching him with those expectant, electric eyes. She didn't care about the danger. She just wanted to see what was at the top of the ladder.
"Fine," Jax sighed, his voice distorted by the rebreather. "But if I see one drone, I'm dropping."
Ryla beamed. "That's the spirit! Follow me, Rat. I found a way in."
She dove into a narrow, upward-sloping maintenance shaft. Jax hesitated for a heartbeat, tapped his filter three times—Tap-tap-tap—and followed her into the dark.