Cayos led me through the Gutter.
We weaved between food stalls and glowing signs, through crowds of people just… living. Talking, laughing, arguing. Not hiding. Not surviving.
Thriving.
We kept to the covered walkways, beneath overhangs and low roofs, because the ceiling above never stopped dripping. Rain, or something close to it, still bled through the cracks in the dome far overhead, casting soft plinks across metal and skin. You could almost mistake it for weather.
I felt as if even down here, the Gutter had made its own sky… leaking, fractured, and still alive.
There were even plants, ferns and moss and wildflowers rooted in rust, nurtured by the constant damp. The Gutter wasn't just alive. It had made peace with the storm.
But the air was thick.
Heavy with steam and smoke and something older, like mildew and old metal and the ghost of fires long extinguished. Breathing felt like work. I found myself lagging behind, chest tightening, trying not to cough, and getting a little dizzy.
Sleep clawed at the edges of my thoughts, slow and heavy. The kind that makes you forget why you're moving at all.
Cayos slowed near a wire crate stacked with cartons of spotted eggs. The stall was unmarked, run by an old woman who didn't look up. He crouched, studying the contents like they mattered.
"Below market," he said, almost to himself. "Guess she's pricing low to get people this far back. Not much foot traffic out here unless you're looking for something."
Behind us, two kids leaned against a lamppost, sharing a foil-wrapped bun and whispering.
"Did you hear? Someone in the Spill got Marked."
"No way."
"Swear on the flow. Said the Gate blinked, and boom… he was gone."
"Lucky. Wish it was me."
I turned toward the voice, but the kids scattered, one of them glancing back with a grin that didn't quite reach his eyes.
Cayos didn't look up.
"People down here pray for it," he said softly.
"They call it being chosen."
"Even if it's a death sentence?"
He shrugged.
"Better than a slow one."
Cayos moved ahead without slowing.
Effortless. Like the weight of the air didn't touch him. Like the alleys opened for him alone.
We turned a corner onto a narrow catwalk.
Rusted, wet, creaking underfoot, and suddenly the floor dropped away.
I stopped.
Below us stretched another level of the Gutter. Maybe more.
A whole vertical maze of walkways and rooms carved into stone and steel. Skiffs moved between shadowed canals, their poles pushing through sluggish water. Fire barrels flickered along the lower paths, casting uneven light on cracked concrete and twisted pipes.
And then, off to the left, tucked beneath a stone archway, something that didn't belong.
A neon sign buzzed above a gated tunnel: Indigo Smoke. Too elegant for this deep down. Someone had paid to be seen.
The gate slid open. A man stepped out, definitely not Gutter-born. His coat hung too perfectly. Shoes dry. He lit a thin glass pipe, exhaled like the city owed him.
Two girls followed, laughing too loudly in translucent jackets made for eyes, not warmth. A hover-drone drifted behind them, lens glowing. Not security. Performance.
He wasn't hiding. Didn't need to. The gate hissed shut.
Cayos didn't even glance. Like he'd seen worse. Like he expected worse.
My hand had already found my pocket. The ring. Bent edges. Still warm. I'd twisted it the whole way down here, unbending, folding again. My anchor.
I stared at it, just for a second... long enough to remember why I came. Why this mattered.
Then I looked back.
This wasn't the Gutter I had expected. No hardship, dust, desperation.
This was indulgence.
The kind that came from knowing no one would stop you.
The man hadn't even looked back.
The girls didn't look old enough to be down here alone.
And that drone? It was part of the show.
He wasn't afraid.
Because nothing down here could touch him.
And that…
That was power.
Cayos finally glanced back. "You coming?"
I nodded, legs heavy.
As I caught up, he said, just loud enough for me to hear, "The Gutter doesn't judge. That's what makes it so beautiful."
He let that hang in the air for a moment.
Then added, quieter still.
"But beautiful things rot too… especially when they're left to fester."
He slipped through the press of bodies, past curtain-flanked doorways and dripping chain-walks, never checking to see if I kept up.
"How do you always know where to go?" I asked, breath catching up with everything else.
He pushed aside a curtain of copper chains, and light spilled through.
"We're nearly there."
We ducked under the curtain and stepped into a quieter corridor, narrower, dimmer, the noise of the crowd muffled behind layers of woven fabric and hanging wires. Here, the water dripped less like rain and more like a leak, irregular, unpredictable, echoing down the metal with eerie rhythm.
My breath still felt shallow. My hoodie clung damp to my back.
Then I saw it.
An old subway car, long rusted and buried into the concrete like a fossil, repurposed into something else entirely.
It jutted halfway out of the Gutter's stone wall, embedded into a carved-out recess like someone had forced it into place decades ago and then decided to build a life around it. From the outside, it looked narrow, cramped. But the moment I stepped through the threshold, I realized how wrong I was.
It was bigger than it looked.
Much bigger.
One end had been gutted into a kitchen, steam hissing from hacked vents. The other held barstools and mismatched tables beneath colourful lanterns, their glow softening the scuffed metal walls.
The sliding doors were stuck permanently open, revealing graffiti-covered siding and a hand-painted menu written directly on the rusted shell.
A staircase had been carved into the stone wall leading to a hidden higher floor.
This was someone's home.
Most of the people inside were silent. Pale. Not sickly, just… starved of sunlight. Their skin held that washed-out grey, like paper left to soak too long. The kind of colour that didn't come from illness, but from years of never looking up.
Near the back, a young boy sat hunched over a low table, working quietly through a stack of homework. His skin was the palest I'd ever seen. Bone-white, almost translucent in the lantern light.
Just kept writing, steady and precise, like this wasn't strange at all.
And for him, it wasn't.
This was normal.
A few others stood out. Not like him. Travelers, maybe. Surface-born. Their skin held more colour. Their eyes darted toward the newcomers, alert in a way that didn't match the calm. Like they knew something could go wrong at any moment.
But everyone was eating.
And for a moment, they all looked like they belonged.
"Karu's," Cayos said simply, stepping through the threshold behind me, like it was a sacred rite. "No fights. No questions. No exceptions."
Behind the bar, a cute girl, somehow even paler then the boy, looked up.
She didn't flinch at the sight of Cayos. Didn't smile either.
Just gave him a long, steady look, then shifted her gaze to me.
Sizing me up.
Judging whether I belonged.
Or if I was going to break something.
Then, with the barest shrug, she dismissed me.
Her eyes returned to Cayos, sharp now. Focused.
"It's you. Again."