Morning, or what the Grund pretended was morning, seeped in along the seams. The green of the glow-fungi thinned from bruise to breath; damp walls wore a faint sheen, as if the night had exhaled and the room had kept the sigh. Breuk sat on the pallet and stared at the vacancy at his shoulder the way a man studies a locked door—knowing what's behind it and hating the knowing.
His breath came in small, disciplined parcels. Each shift of weight lit a little fuse along his ribs. The bandage bit at the stump—clean work, smart knots—and the phantom of a hand curled itself in an absent pocket.
He stood anyway.
The floor wobbled like a bad promise. His jaw set. Teeth found teeth. He reached for his jacket with the right hand and dragged it over himself like weather. The fabric snagged on bandage and bone; he swore once, softly, and made it through the sleeve. The seams they'd sewn into him held. He felt every stitch consider defection and decide against it.
I have to go back.
Lig's name anchored a corner of his mind. The crew filled in around it—Tev's steady knuckles on a wheel; Tara's hands, quick as arguments and twice as right; Limar chewing the world into smaller, more survivable pieces. A weight under his breast pocket reminded him it existed: the disc, the necklace's cold roundness—quiet now, but not absent.
The door-lintel found the top of his head. He found the door with the rest of him.
The opening cloth stirred and admitted Jakk, carrying a metal can that sweated clean condensation down its battered side. Barefoot, balanced, he stopped when he saw the jacket half-on, the stance that hoped the room would learn to stop moving.
"You can barely stand," Jakk said.
"I've got work," Breuk answered, not looking up, not slowing the one-handed fight with fabric.
"Up there?"
A thin nod. "I have a crew. I need to get back." He swallowed, then added the fact that would sound like fiction. "We've got someone who can build me a new arm."
Jakk blinked as if the light had shifted. "Build… an arm?"
"Yeah." Breuk's breath hit a seam and tripped. "She's a mechanic. Better than any doctor at making nerves listen to orders."
Jakk's laugh was small and unbelieving rather than unkind. "You make bodies out of metal?"
"Sometimes," Breuk said. "If you can afford the hours."
Jakk looked at him the way people look at a story they want to keep, even if it won't be true in the morning. "Up top sounds… like a fairy tale."
"Then I'm going back to my fairy tale," Breuk said, and limped past him into the day the Grund had cobbled together.
The village opened like a machine that had learned to grow. Bridges of root and cable stitched huts to platforms, platforms to tunnels, tunnels to nothing and then to something else. Water found edges and re-wrote them. Everywhere, the grammar of salvage: a child wearing a crown cut from a ventilation ring; an old man coaxing a thread of warmth through a pipe that had forgotten its job; a woman stooping with a bucket to steal a slow leak from a tank whose manufacturer's name had long ago turned into a prayer.
Jakk stepped in front of him and became a wall without leaning. His gold eyes were steady, not hard. "It isn't that simple," he said. "There are ways up, yes. We've walked them. They end in nowhere."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Jakk lifted the can and sipped water like an oath. "Between up and down there's something you don't see. A wall made of air." He gestured at the ceiling—the color of closed eyes, the reactor's far coin buried in dark. "No one knows what it is. Those who try to go through it—" His jaw moved once, a small, tired muscle. "They go missing."
"Maybe they made it," Breuk said. His voice had iron filings in it, resisting a magnet.
"Or they never arrived," Jakk said, and did not sharpen it.
Breuk looked past him. A tangle of wire lay on a plank like a nest of dead snakes. Children worried a copper length into a game, counting, pretending to sell. A woman poured a ladle of water into the mouth of a cracked porcelain filter and waited for the small miracle of a drip. An old man used a wrench on a valve that had become part tree and part history, the metal polished to a dull memory by years of hands that refused to learn futility.
Everything that fell ended here. Plastics that remembered parties. Tools that remembered being held by men who didn't bleed on them. Shirts whose collars still kept their shape against a neck that had found other cloth. The tribe of things the upper world had dismissed and the lower world had adopted.
Breuk reached out with the right hand and skimmed his fingertips along a strip of alloy bolted into a brace. Smooth, factory-honest. It had a weight to it that didn't belong in a place made of patience. His skin remembered what it felt like to be a man who walked under neon and called that daylight.
Our world ends down here. And no one above is told it happens.
He looked up into the hollowness. Far above, farther than anger could throw a word, the reactor's light thinned to suggestion. The dark in between felt like distance and decision both.
"It must be possible," he said. "I fell. I can climb."
"You can try," Jakk says. "Some do. They hit it harder."
Breuk swallows something that feels like glass. "And you all just… accept this?"
Jakk's mouth does a small, crooked thing. "We accept the ground. We argue with the rules." He nods toward a line of older huts, each one with a different kind of ladder leaning inside. "We build. We test. We lose people. We grieve. Then we eat. And then we build again."
The necklace against Breuk's chest is colder now, or he imagines it is. He presses his palm over it through the jacket—the shape as exact as an accusation. During the fall, it had chosen him over speed. He had felt the world thicken, noticed his body remember itself for one pulse. If it could do that, what else could it do?
"Come on," Jakk says, gentle and implacable. "You need to sit before you fall again."
"I'm not staying," Breuk says, gentler than he meant. "I'll work. I'll pay back your thread and your herbs and your careful hands. But I'm not staying."
"No one stays," Jakk says. "Not really." A beat. "We live."
They return by a different path because the Grund hates predictability; it's how it survives. Breuk's legs shake the way a man's hands shake the first day he doesn't drink. Children stare for exactly as long as politeness allows and then less. A woman offers him a strip of something that remembers being fruit. He takes it, because refusing would feel like theft.
At the hut, the little fire has remembered how to be a friend. Jakk sets down the basin, pours some water into a tin cup, and hands it over. Breuk drinks and tastes root and rock and something like time. It steadies him. Nothing changes. Everything does.
"You could help with the pump line," Jakk says, not looking at him. "Your one arm knows more than most men's two."
"Tara would laugh to hear you say that," Breuk answers, and Jakk doesn't ask who Tara is because down here names matter only when they return.
Silence comes and sits between them again. It is not comfortable. It is honest.
Breuk stands. He looks up at the ceiling that refused a stone and will refuse him. He hates it so much he almost loves it.
"I'm going back," he says, as if the wall of air understands language and can be insulted into weakness. "Even if I have to teach the sky a new rule."
Jakk lifts one shoulder. "Bring a good joke," he says. "Sky likes those."