[Day-1 (15:23)]
(Outer District, Sector 9 - Aeron's Apartment)
The four tins clanked against the counter. Two beans, one dried meat, one mystery protein that might kill him tomorrow. Worth the risk. His hands shook as he sorted them - not from hunger but from memory. The alley. The thread. The way his hand had moved before he'd told it to.
"Focus," he whispered to the empty room. "Just... focus."
He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to recreate it. The dying man, the thread stretching from his wrist, the impossible feeling that he could reach out and *pull*. Nothing. Just darkness and the usual hunger gnawing at his stomach. He tried again, concentrating harder, remembering the exact way the light had caught the filament, how it had pulsed with each beat of the man's failing heart.
Still nothing.
"Figures," he muttered, grabbing a tin and heading for the door. "Probably hallucinated the whole thing."
[Day-1 (15:31)]
(Outer District, Sector 9 - IDS Checkpoint Post 7)
Getting back to the market meant crossing Post 7, the Iron Debt Syndicate's toll gate at the sector boundary. No wall - just an orange-black striped booth and two enforcers with arm-mounted devices that read rune signatures.
"Commons pass," one said when Aeron approached. Flat. Like he'd said it a thousand times today, and probably had.
Aeron handed over his sector card - a battered laminate: COMMONS / NO CONTRACT / TIER 0. The enforcer scanned it. Checked his device. Whatever it said satisfied him. He handed it back without looking at Aeron's face.
"Three reduction tokens or service equivalent for non-residential market access. Cross-sector surcharge applies post-breach events, Iron Debt Directive 44."
"I don't have three reduction tokens."
"Then work it off." He pointed toward the breach repair site where debris still choked the eastern wall. "Post-breach cleanup. Two hours gets you waived passage for the day."
This was the system operating normally. In Silver Chain territory to the north, Aeron had heard they let commons through for labor vouchers, redeemable in food. In Golden Flame territory to the west they made you pray at a syndicate shrine and counted it as social capital - their version of tribute was stranger but cheaper. He didn't know enough about the City Defense Force's southern territory to compare. He'd never had papers to cross that far.
Here you gave your time or you didn't cross.
He spent ninety minutes hauling collapsed masonry before they let him through. He was covered in grey dust by the time he reached the commons market. Nobody looked twice.
[Day-1 (15:42)]
(Outer District, Sector 9 - Commons Market)
The market ran on Reduction Tokens because the syndicates had made sure nothing else would stick. The logic was simple and suffocating: Defaults died, their fractured runes were absorbed by syndicate devices, the energy converted into tokens, the tokens distributed to licensed contractors, the tokens spent on food and housing and debt interest reduction. The whole economy was Default remains flowing upward.
The enforcers from the morning's breach would be at the paymaster post on Syndicate Row right now, claiming their tokens. Forty to eighty per F-Class Default absorbed, depending on Realm classification. The vendor who'd burned himself to nothing while the breach was happening had died owing his fire god more than he'd ever earned. The system had converted the thing he became into currency.
Aeron moved through the stalls watching the whole mechanism turn.
At a tool merchant's table, a Strength contractor was working as a porter. Brown-gold rune covering his entire forearm in angular geometric patterns. He was carrying four stacked supply crates that should have taken three men, stepping carefully around foot traffic, setting them down with controlled ease. The merchant held a device to his rune. Tokens transferred - twelve reduction tokens, Aeron guessed, maybe fifteen. The contractor pocketed them and reached for the next load without checking the amount.
His hands were the tell. Both knuckles swollen at the joints, the cartilage wearing faster than it should in a man his age. Every carry borrowed from his body's structural future. He'd need a week without the power before the inflammation went down. The tokens wouldn't cover the debt reduction he'd need to stay under default threshold. He was working faster than he was earning, and probably knew it, and probably needed to eat tomorrow regardless.
Near the food stalls, a woman with a blue-white spiral rune at her left temple stood on a crate, watching the crowd. Sensory contractor. Hired - by the exchange merchant beneath her, Aeron guessed, or the lending post beside him - to read the market. Her eyes moved in patterns that weren't quite human, cataloguing faces, rune readings, weight estimations, the small tells of people deciding whether to steal.
Each token she earned cost her in sound. A crowded market at post-breach noise levels, filtered through enhanced hearing, was slow damage accumulating in tissue that wouldn't heal without time off. She wiped her left ear with her sleeve without looking at it. The motion was automatic.
The healer from the alley was set up at a folding table near the eastern wall. Green spiral rune, still pulsing. A queue of six people with raid injuries - a man's forearm bent wrong, a woman pressing her side where something had cracked, a child with contact burns from the breach response.
The healer worked methodically, both hands moving, bruises blooming across her own skin in mirror patterns as she transferred each injury to her future self. A jar on the table caught tokens as people dropped them in. She didn't count while working. There wasn't time, and counting would have been something else she couldn't afford.
A purple-rune contractor passed through once, didn't stop at any stall. Temporal class - circular patterns at the wrist with faint hourglass motifs. He'd been paid to verify a merchant's goods: touch a bolt of imported cloth, read its recent history, confirm it was what the label claimed. He held it for three seconds. Nodded. Took his tokens. Left. His eyes were two different colours as he walked away - one slightly darker than it had been before, the colour-differentiation his memory of that particular moment now cost him. He kept them down when he walked. Probably habit by now.
"Exchange rate's up to three-to-one today," the nearest stall-keeper called. "Iron Syndicate's collecting early. Sell quick if you're selling."
Aeron laid his mystery protein tin on the counter. The merchant scanned it with and made a face.
"Two reduction tokens."
"Three." said Aeron.
"Post-raid glut. Everyone's selling what they grabbed. Protein's cheap until the walls are properly sealed again." He tapped his device on the tin. "Two reduction tokens. Comes back up next week. Blame the market kid - not me"
"Two tokens," he said. And took them.
"Not enough. Never enough." he uttered as he walked.
A wave of dizziness suddenly hit him, the market tilting. He caught himself on a post and turned for home before he got worse.
[Day-1 (15:47)]
(Outer District, Sector 9 - Aeron's Apartment)
The apartment dissolved around him as soon as he closed his door. He was eight years old again, hiding under the kitchen table as his mother's rune cracked down the center. She'd been a healer, always transferring others' pain to her future self, until there was no future left to borrow against.
The Collector arrived without warning. Reality didn't tear open gradually – it split apart like lightning, revealing wings like bandages stretched tight, veins glowing faintly with each beat. Its eyes shone cold and white, like the lamps in a hospital, scanning everything without care. His father, a big man with no contract and no powers, grabbed a kitchen knife like it mattered.
"Run," his father had screamed, standing between his family and the impossible being. "Get the hell out of here - Run!!!"
The Collector didn't speak. It simply moved, and his father came apart. Not burned, not cut - simply ceased to exist in pieces that fell separately to the floor.
His mother was already folding, the Collector reaching into her chest to withdraw something colorless. Young Aeron had frozen, tears streaming down his face, rage building until it burned hotter than any fire contract.
*I'll kill them,* he'd thought, over and over. *I'll kill every last one of them.*
But he'd run. Just like his father said.
[Day-1 (16:03)]
(Outer District, Sector 9 - Aeron's Apartment)
He woke on the floor, cold sweat drying against the boards. No idea how long he'd been out.
Late afternoon light pressed grey through the window. He pulled himself to the sill and looked down at the street.
Three floors below, a contractor was walking fast, head down. Orange-red rune, jagged flame patterns, sharp-edged the way new contracts looked before wear smoothed them. He was a fire type. Couldn't have been contracted more than a few weeks - there was still something expectant in the way he moved, like the power was still a surprise he was waiting to need.
To his shock, he saw the same thread he had seen in the alley - thin, bright, and stretching from the contractor's wrist into the air above him.
"What in the world is that?"