District Twelve-Lower smelled like rust and river rot.
Aiden had forgotten that.
Orion's simulation environments cleaned the air by default, neutralized it to a gray background so analysts could think without distraction. He had run tactical models of this district three separate times in the past two years and never once registered that it smelled like the drainage canal that ran along its eastern edge, like old metal and slow water and the particular organic decay of a neighborhood that had been receiving the city's overflow for decades.
He stood on a narrow balcony that sagged toward the canal and let it settle into him.
*Let the footage show this too.*
