The chute didn't end in a soft pile of trash. It ended in a soup.
Jax and Ryla splashed down into the "Sump"—a vast, subterranean reservoir where the city's liquid waste collected before being filtered. It was warm, viscous, and smelled like battery acid mixed with the sweet, cloying scent of rot.
Jax went under. The sludge filled his ears, a muffled roar of industrial drainage. He kicked hard, his heavy left boot acting like an anchor, dragging him down toward the sediment. He thrashed, his hand finding a rusted rebar ladder on the wall. He hauled himself up, gasping, wiping the oily film from his mask's visor.
"Ryla!" he choked out, his voice distorted by the wet intake.
"Here," came a voice from the darkness. "Gross. Gross. Gross."
Ryla was scrambling up the slick metal bank, shaking slime off her hands. The neon-pink strips on her suit were now a dull, muddy brown, and her hair hung in heavy, dripping clumps. She looked like a drowned rat painted in day-glo.
Jax waded out behind her, his boots sucking loudly in the muck. Schluck. Schluck. The air here was heavy, thick with green fog that clung to the ground.
"You okay?" Jax asked, scanning the shadows. The Sump wasn't just a sewer; it was an ecosystem. There were things down here—"Muck-Eaters" gone rogue, mutated fauna that fed on the chemical runoff.
"I smell like a battery died in my mouth," Ryla spat, wiping her tongue on her sleeve. "But I'm alive. And I still have it."
She held up the canister. The blue light of the BATCH 404 cylinder pulsed rhythmically, cutting through the darkness of the Sump like a beacon. It hummed against her chest, a low vibration that seemed to sync with the thrumming of the massive filtration pumps overhead.
"Turn it off," Jax hissed, grabbing her wrist. "That light is going to get us zeroed."
"I can't!" Ryla snapped, her voice trembling with adrenaline. "There's no switch. It's... it's warm, Jax. It feels like it's waking up."
Jax looked at the cylinder. The digital readout was scrolling faster now, streams of encrypted data cascading like a waterfall. It wasn't just storage; it was processing something.
"Silas," Jax said, making a decision. "We need a Faraday cage and a firewall. We need to get to the workshop."
They moved fast, sticking to the shadows of the massive intake pipes. The trek to the "Weeping Wall" usually took twenty minutes, but they did it in ten. They scrambled over piles of discarded tech—broken drone chassis, shattered solar panels, the skeletal remains of a mag-lev carriage that had fallen years ago.
The Weeping Wall was a section of the crater's bedrock where the toxic runoff from the Hanging Gardens cascaded down like a glowing green waterfall. The acid in the water burned the skin and ate through standard hazard suits, so nobody went near it. It was the perfect camouflage.
Jax led Ryla along a narrow ledge behind the toxic flow. The roar of the falling acid was deafening. The air was misty and stinging.
He stopped at a seemingly solid slab of rock. He punched a code into a keypad hidden behind a patch of moss: 1-1-2-3-5.
Hydraulics hissed. The heavy lead-lined steel door groaned open, revealing a blast of dry, filtered air and the comforting smell of ozone and soldering iron.
Jax stumbled inside, pulling Ryla with him. The door sealed shut, cutting off the roar of the waterfall instantly.
"You're late," a gravelly voice called out from the gloom. "And you're tracking muck on my floor."
Silas was hunched over a workbench, illuminated by the violet sparks of a laser-welder. He didn't look up. His massive, snout-like industrial respirator hissed with every breath—Hiss-click, Hiss-click—and the servos in his robotic left eye whirred as it focused on a micro-chip.
The workshop was a cathedral of junk. Floor-to-ceiling shelves were packed with scavenged wonders: half-built drones, jars of rare screws, coils of copper wire worth more than life. In the center, a massive generator hummed, powering the bank of monitors that was Silas's pride and joy.
"Silas," Jax gasped, ripping off his own mask. The air in here was the only clean thing in the Basin. "We have a problem."
"You always have a problem, Rat," Silas grumbled, adjusting the focal length on his eye. "Usually, it involves a broken boot or a burnt-out filter. If you're here to ask for a loan, the answer is—"
Silas turned around. His robotic eye zoomed in, the lens rotating with a soft click. It locked onto the glowing blue cylinder in Ryla's hands.
The old engineer froze. He dropped his welding torch. It clattered onto the concrete.
"Where," Silas said, his voice suddenly deadly quiet, "did you get a Class-A Bio-Core?"
"We... we stole it," Ryla stammered, shivering from the cold muck on her skin. "From Sector 7. Vorg's processing plant. We thought it was fuel."
"Fuel?" Silas let out a harsh, rattling laugh that turned into a cough. He walked over, snatching the canister from her with a speed that belied his age. He handled it with terrifying reverence, his gloved fingers dancing over the casing.
"This isn't fuel, girl. It's a coffin."
He carried it to his main console. He swept a pile of schematics onto the floor and jacked a universal cable into the canister's port.
Screens flickered to life. Lines of code cascaded down like green rain, faster than Jax could read. Warning lights blinked on the console.
"Look at the timestamp," Silas pointed a grease-stained finger at the screen. "This data is fresh. And it's massive. Terabytes of genetic sequencing."
"We saw bodies," Jax said quietly, stepping closer to the warmth of the monitors. "Nulls. On a conveyor belt. I saw a Runner... Gaz. He was in a bag."
Silas went still. He typed a command, bypassing the encryption with a series of rapid keystrokes that reminded Jax why this old man used to be a Silver—a Rim-class engineer.
A 3D helix appeared on the main screen. It was fragmented, jagged, and horrifying. Sections of it were highlighted in red.
"It's a gene-slurry," Silas muttered, reading the data stream, his good eye widening. "Vorg isn't just making meat. He's extracting genetic markers. Look here—resistance to sulfur toxins. Here—enhanced night vision. Hyper-dense muscle fiber."
"I don't understand," Ryla whispered.
"He's harvesting the mutations of the Basin population," Silas said, turning to face them. "The Top-Siders... they are weak. They live in sterile air. Their DNA is stagnant. But us? We survive the muck. We adapt. Vorg is distilling our survival traits into a serum."
"To sell to them," Jax realized.
"Exactly. The ultimate hypocrisy. They call us trash, but they want our DNA." Silas looked at the canister. "This Core... it's proof of illegal harvesting on a massive scale. Even the Overseer has laws against 'Unsanctioned Biomass Theft.' If this gets out, Vorg loses his Sector."
"So we can use it?" Ryla asked, hope creeping into her voice. "We can blackmail him?"
"Blackmail?" Silas slammed his hand on the table, making Ryla jump. "You stupid girl. You don't blackmail a Warlord! You just painted a target on your back the size of the sun!"
BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.
A red proximity alert flashed on Silas's perimeter monitor.
"Isotopes," Silas swore, turning back to the screen. "They didn't need a camera. They tracked the radiation leak from the Core."
A heavy, rhythmic thudding echoed from the tunnel outside, audible even over the waterfall. Thud. Thud. Thud.
Someone was knocking on the lead-lined door with a hydraulic fist.
"Open up, Old Man!" Krix's voice boomed through the intercom, distorted and ugly. "We know you have guests. And they have something that belongs to Lord Vorg."
Silas didn't grab a weapon. He didn't panic. He just remained calm and thought through his options.
He grabbed a heavy rucksack from under his desk and shoved it into Jax's chest.
"Out the back," Silas ordered, keeping his voice low. He pointed toward a small maintenance hatch hidden behind a stack of old servers. "Go. Now."
"What! w-we're not leaving you," Jax said, stepping forward, his Spark-Gap in hand. "We can fight him. There's only one entry. We can bottle-neck them."
"And destroy my shop?" Silas scoffed. He walked to the door control panel, his hand hovering over the release. "Use your head, Jax. If we fight, they bring a plasma cutter and burn this place to the ground. I lose fifty years of work. You die. Ryla dies."
"Silas—"
"If I open the door... Krix is a greedy bastard. He won't wreck a workshop full of Class-B chrome. He'll want to keep it. He'll want me to run it for him."
"You're surrendering?" Ryla asked, horrified.
"I'm buying you a head start," Silas snapped. "Don't waste it. Go!"
Another blow struck the door. The hinges groaned. Dust rained from the ceiling.
"I'm counting to three," Silas said, his hand on the lever. "One."
Ryla grabbed Jax's hand. "Jax, come on. He's right."
"Two."
Jax looked at Silas one last time. The old man wasn't looking at him. He was looking at the door, straightening his greasy jumpsuit, wiping the soot from his face. He was preparing to face the monster with dignity.
"Three."
Jax gritted his teeth, turned, and dove into the hatch. Ryla followed, clutching the Core.
As Jax slid into the darkness, he looked back just in time to see Silas pull the lever. The main door slid open with a hiss. The massive, hulking silhouette of Krix filled the light, his hydraulic arm dripping oil onto Silas's clean floor.
"Welcome to my humble abode," Silas said, his voice calm.
Then the hatch sealed shut, plunging Jax into the dark.