[5 YEARS AGO]
The fan wasn't spinning.
Fourteen-year-old Jax stared at the rusty turbine, his hands shaking so hard he dropped the wrench. Clang. The sound echoed in the small, hollowed-out boiler room, too loud in the suffocating silence.
The air in the shelter was getting thick. Smoke from a nearby chemical fire—a tire-burn in Sector 8—was leaking in through the intake vents. It was heavy, yellow smoke that tasted like sulfur and burning rubber.
Behind him, three other Feral kids were huddled under a tarp, coughing. One of them, a small girl around the same age as Jax named Pria, was wheezing, her chest hitching with every breath.
"Fix it, Jax," one of the boys rasped. "You said you could fix it."
"I'm trying!" Jax screamed back, his voice cracking.
He jammed his screwdriver into the motor housing again. He pushed with all his weight. "Spin. Just spin."
He twisted. The metal groaned, then snapped. The screwdriver head sheared off, leaving the shank wedged deep in the gears.
Jax dropped the handle. He backed away, his chest heaving. The smoke was curling around his ankles like a grey snake, rising higher. He couldn't breathe. The panic rose in his throat, hot and sharp. He clawed at his throat, scratching the skin, leaving red welts.
Kio died like this. Kio died gasping. Now Pria is going to die.
"Panic burns oxygen, boy."
The voice was like grinding gravel.
Jax spun around. A massive shape filled the doorway, blocking out the dim light from the corridor. An old man in a heavy, snout-like respirator, his left eye glowing with the red aperture of a complex optic lens. He looked like a monster from a bedtime story.
"I... I tried to fix it," Jax choked out, backing against the wall.
"You tried to force it," the old man corrected. He stepped into the room, ignoring the smoke that was now waist-high. He moved with a strange, clanking rhythm. He walked past Jax to the fan.
He didn't use a screwdriver. He didn't use a wrench. He reached out with a gloved hand and pulled a single, corroded wire from the bypass terminal.
Whirrrrr.
The fan shuddered, then roared to life. The blades spun, slicing through the yellow smoke, sucking it out into the ventilation shaft. Fresh, cool air rushed in to replace it.
Pria took a deep breath and stopped wheezing.
The old man looked down at Jax. "The machine wants to work. It's the rust that holds it back. You were fighting the rust, not the machine."
"Who are you?" Jax asked, wiping soot and tears from his eyes.
"I'm the guy who just saved your lungs," the man grunted. He reached into his pocket and tossed Jax a small, clean air filter. It was white, pristine. Jax had never seen one so new. "Keep it. And next time, use your head before you use your hands. A dead mechanic fixes nothing."
"Wait," Jax said, clutching the filter like it was gold. "Teach me. Please."
The old man paused at the door. His mechanical eye whirred, zooming in on Jax's desperate face.
"I don't teach rats," he growled. "But if you're still alive tomorrow... come find me behind the Weeping Wall."
[PRESENT DAY]
"Jax! Wake up!"
The shout dragged him out of the memory.
Jax gasped, his lungs burning. He sat up, splashing into freezing, ankle-deep water. He wasn't in the warm boiler room. He wasn't in the workshop.
He was in a corrugated drainage pipe, smelling of sulfur, raw sewage, and old rust.
The reality hit him. The surrender. The door opening. Krix stepping inside.
He looked at Ryla. She was shaking him, her neon-pink hair plastered to her skull with grime. But his eyes darted past her, staring down the dark tunnel behind them.
It was empty.
"He's not here" Jax whispered, the hope dying in his chest. "He didn't follow us."
Ryla shook her head, tears cutting clean tracks through the grease on her face. "He gave them the shop, Jax. I heard Krix laughing before the hatch sealed."
Jax slammed his fist into the metal wall. Thud. The sound vibrated down the pipe, hollow.
"We have to go back."
"We can't," Ryla hissed, grabbing his arm. "Krix has the high ground now. He has the turrets, the fabrication units... everything. If we go back, we're just delivering the Core to him." She clutched the glowing BATCH 404 canister to her chest like it was a lifeline. "Silas did that so we could run. Don't make it worthless."
Jax tried to argue, to scream that Silas was the only family he had, but his throat seized. He coughed, a harsh, racking spasm that bent him double. It felt like a fist squeezing his lungs.
The air inside his mask tasted stale. Sour. Metallic.
He looked down at his wrist indicator. His blood ran cold.
The LED, usually a steady green, was blinking a frantic, angry amber.
FILTER INTEGRITY: 12%
"No," Jax breathed. "Not now."
"What?" Ryla asked, seeing his panic.
"The run," Jax choked out, tapping the cartridge housing frantically. Tap-tap-tap. "I was hyperventilating in the chute. I burned through the scrubbers too fast. I have... maybe twenty minutes of clean air left."
"Do you have a spare?"
"They were in the bag," Jax said, looking at his empty shoulders. "The bag Silas gave me."
He realized with a jolt that he had dropped the rucksack when he dove into the hatch. It was back there. With Krix. Along with his tools, his water, and his extra filters.
Panic, hot and familiar, began to claw at his throat. He was in the deepest, most toxic part of the Sump—Sector Zero. The air here wasn't just smog; it was heavier than air, a sinking collection of every heavy metal and toxin in the city. Without a filter, he would be unconscious in five minutes and zeroed in ten.
"Jax," Ryla whispered, her voice dropping an octave. "Don't freak out on me but we have a bigger problem."
She pointed down the tunnel, back the way they had come.
"Listen."
Jax forced himself to hold his breath, ignoring the amber blinking on his wrist. He closed his eyes, focusing on the sounds of the pipe.
Usually, the Sump was noisy. Dripping water. Scurrying rats. The hum of distant pumps.
But now? Silence.
The rats had stopped moving. The water seemed to be holding its breath.
From the far end of the pipe echoed a sound. It wasn't the heavy clank-clank of Krix's hydraulics. It wasn't the stomp of a Rust-King boot.
It was quieter. Slush... slush...
Liquid displacement. Fast. Controlled. Something was moving through the water without splashing.
Jax squinted into the darkness. Through the green haze of the sewer fog, he saw them.
Silhouettes. Three of them. Tall, sleek, and moving with unnatural fluidity. They weren't walking; they were hunting.
"Those aren't Rust-Kings," Jax whispered, his Sniffer vibrating violently against his wrist bone. The readings were terrifying. No heat signature. No electronic noise. Just a void in the sensors. "Sound dampeners."
"Banshees," Ryla breathed, the word a curse. "Vorg didn't just send the gang. He sent the elite."
One of the shadows stopped. It tilted its sleek, eyeless head, the fins on the side of its helmet expanding. It was listening. It was listening for a heartbeat. Or a cough.
Jax felt a tickle in his throat. A cough building up.
"Run," Jax wheezed, grabbing Ryla's hand.
He pulled her deeper into the darkness of the pipe. He had twenty minutes of air, three assassins on his tail who could hear a pin drop, and a stolen secret that was worth more than his life.
It was going to be a long night.