[Day-1 (14:23)]
(Outer District, Sector 9 - Scavenge Block 7, Neo-Alexandria)
The storage unit smelled like mould and someone else's old life. Dust coated every surface, and air was filled with the scent of decay. Aeron's footsteps echoed off the walls as he moved fast, his eyes scanning shelves for anything of value.
Third shelf - six tins, two dented beyond safe use. He pocketed four that weren't, metal clinking against his leg as he moved. Copper wire on a rusted nail: weight versus value, half a second, left it. He'd been inside four minutes. He gave himself two more. The silence was oppressive, followed only by creaks and groans of the old building.
Outside, Sector 9 was its usual middling disaster. Crumbling tenements stacked against each other like they were holding one another upright. Debt Runes flickered at wrists and throats - pale orange, sickly green, one steady blue on an older woman hanging laundry three floors up. Healthy blue meant current on payments. Barely anyone was current anymore. The sound of distant sirens and the hum of the city's machinery created a constant, maddening drone.
The air was filled with the promise of rain that never came, carrying metallic tang from the nearby processing plants. Each breath Aeron took tasted like rust and desperation. He could feel the weight of the city's struggles bearing down on him, the desperation of its people visible in every glance.
On a stairwell wall, a glossy 'Iron Debt Syndicate' recruitment poster. A smiling 'contractor' in clean clothes: *Your Skills. Our Contracts. Unlimited Potential.* Below it, someone had scrawled: *they take the unlimited, you keep the debt.* No one had torn the poster down. You didn't tear down syndicate materials. You just wrote under them. The words seemed to mock him, a cruel reminder of the city's true nature.
He was on the second step when the alarm hit.
[Day-1 (14:31)]
(Outer District, Sector 9 - Street Level)
One sustained note, low and continuous. The kind that meant *not a drill* in a way drills never quite managed. Sector 9's eastern wall section had given way.
The street filled in seconds. Contractors checking their runes, calculating whether they had enough debt capacity left to spend. A market vendor near the corner made a decision. Mid-thirties, Fire Contract - his rune ran jagged at his forearm, orange-red, flame-patterned. He planted his feet and breathed out.
Fire poured from his palms. The first 'Default' rounding the corner - a thing that had once been human, its proportions wrong now, its mouth too wide, its hands too many - stumbled but didn't stop. The vendor burned hotter. His rune flared white at the edges.
Aeron was already moving. Not toward the fight. Toward the fire escape northeast, three floors up - visibility in both directions, two exit routes. He didn't think about the vendor or anything else. He ran.
[Day-1 (14:34)]
(Outer District, Sector 9 - Rooftop, Building 14)
From up here he could see the vendor still fighting and the vendor's rune beginning to crack.
White-hot had become pale. Every burst of fire smaller than the last - not because he was losing will, but because the debt of his power usage was outpacing him. Each expenditure had a cost attached. The god on the other end of that contract was patient.
Across the street, a healer crouched over a collapsed civilian. Her rune pulsed soft green. The man's ribs knit together with each breath. Then the cost hit - bruises blooming across her forearm, bone‑deep purple, fading and returning as she forced more healing through. She was borrowing against her own body to pay for his survival.
Aeron watched and said nothing.
The vendor's rune cracked.
Not gradually. A single splintering sound like glass dropped on stone. The vendor dropped to his knees and looked at his forearm with the expression of a man who has finally read the fine print.
Reality opened above him.
The air split vertically - a seam appearing where there had only been space - and through it descended something that should not have fit inside a city street. Four wings, each one made of compressed fire and char and dying ember. Not burning as fire burns, but *burned*. Coals that remembered what they had been. Across its body, its wings, and the space immediately surrounding it - eyes. Dozens of them, moving independently, seeing everything, interested in nothing except the kneeling man below.
A Default stood between them. One of the larger ones that fought the vendor, still moving.
The Collector's lowest wing swept forward once. The Default came apart. Not thrown, not burned. It simply ceased to be structurally coherent. The pieces fell separately.
The Collector stepped over what remained and stood before the vendor.
The man said something. Aeron couldn't hear it from here. It wouldn't have mattered.
The Collector reached into the vendor's chest - not through it, not past it, but into the specific place where a debt to a god is stored - and withdrew something without colour. The vendor folded. Not fell. *Folded.* Like weight had been removed rather than body. What hit the ground wasn't him anymore.
The seam began to gradually seal as the collector entered it. The street smelled like ash and old smoke.
But then the empty shape on the ground began to twitch.
At first just a finger jerk. Then the arm contracted. The legs started to bend wrong directions, bones making sounds they shouldn't make. The transformation was faster than the vendor's had been - this was the Collector's method. Leave nothing but a monster behind.
Reality was still repairing itself when the first Iron Debt Syndicate enforcers rounded the corner. Three of them, armbands glinting, weapons already drawn. They'd been closest to the breach.
The lead enforcer raised a hand and the other two fanned out, weapons ready. The transforming Default on the ground was almost fully formed - limbs too long, mouth splitting vertically.
"Absorb it before it finishes transforming," the lead enforcer said.
They moved in coordinated sync. Two distracted it with weapon fire while the third placed a device on its chest. The Default screamed - a sound of metal tearing flesh - as dark energy flowed from it into the enforcer's rune. The rune flared brightly as the essence transferred, crack patterns spreading across its surface.
Once the transfer was complete, the Default's body began to disintegrate. Not falling apart, not crumbling - dissolving like smoke in wind, leaving nothing behind.
"Sector 9 Repair Team, respond to eastern wall breach," the lead enforcer said into his comm unit. "We have a containment situation neutralized."
[Day-1 (14:39)]
(Outer District, Sector 9 - Rooftop, Building 14)
Aeron stared at the space where the vendor had been.
He'd bought dried goods from that man twice a week for three years. Known his voice, the way he always short-changed the weight but threw something extra in at the end so you couldn't be angry about it.
*The debt closes on all contractors. Doesn't matter what you built while it was still open.*
Aeron climbed down.
[Day-1 (14:47)]
(Outer District, Sector 9 - Alley Behind Building 11)
He was counting tins when he heard the breathing.
The man was folded against the alley wall, arm pressed to his chest. Even from three metres Aeron could see the red in his rune. Not the usual debt-stress color. Terminal red. A Collector was already being summoned somewhere from somewhere no one knew.
"Walk away. Two minutes, maybe less. The math is simple." thought Aeron.
But he didn't move.
And then, beneath the rune - beneath the surface of the man's skin entirely - he saw something that had no business being visible. A thread. Thin as a filament pulled past its limit, running from the man's wrist upward into nothing he had a name for. Debt made physical. Interest, accumulating in real time, and he could *see* it, and somewhere in the animal part of his brain - a part of him understood that he could reach out and *pull* it.
His hand moved before he told it to.
He stopped it. Stepped back hard into the opposite wall and pressed his palm flat against brick and breathed until the wanting stopped.
He was three streets away when he heard the reality seam open behind him.
He didn't look back. But his hand wouldn't stop shaking, and he wasn't sure anymore if that was fear.
Or if something in the dark machinery of the world had just noticed him reaching...