The morning sun didn't rise in the normal way anymore. It drifted — slow and pale — slanting over the skeletal towers and rust-glass domes until the mist caught it and turned the city to amber dust. The sky was gray, but the streets below pretended otherwise.
Cralin woke with the sound of a siren — short bursts, two notes, distant enough to ignore. The wall beside his cot trembled as the train above passed on its half-broken rails. He reached for the kettle balanced on a makeshift stove of brick and wiring. The flame sputtered green before yielding to a steady orange. Across the narrow room, a girl sat cross-legged on the floor, stringing copper charms into a belt.
"Your shift today, or mine?" she asked without looking up. Her name was Iven, his cousin, the kind who'd start an argument just because she was bored watching the fog.
"Yours," he said. "You still owe me for yesterday."
She snorted, teeth flashing silver in the dim. "I owe you nothing. You just like sleeping through the air drills."
Outside, through a warped sheet of glass, the city of Ashlight Market was unfolding. Vendors hauled tarps aside, revealing tables cluttered with machine parts, bread in cloth wraps, a few rare bulbs that still glowed. The smell of hot oil mixed with the faint tinge of ozone. Someone was hammering two pipes together, making more noise than progress.
Cralin stepped out first, coat collar up, the old insignia stitched on his sleeve faded beyond recognition. The streets crouched low between slanted buildings — remnants of some old order, patched with scrap panels and neon. Every corner displayed a sign in multiple hands, none official.
At a stall near the gate, an older man was arguing with a child over the price of wire. The child's hair had the static shine of someone who worked too close to charge nodes. The man spat on the ground and declared, "Then go strip it yourself, and may the current fry your boots if it feels kind today."
No one paused to watch. Arguments like that were air.
Iven leaned against the gatepost, eyes scanning the columns of smoke in the distance. One plume was leaning too far east — a refinery glitch, maybe. Or worse.
"Think it's another breach?" she murmured.
"Not our sector," Cralin said, but his gaze lingered. Somewhere beyond the fog, the barricades shimmered faintly — what was left of the city's outer defense. He shook his head, turning back toward the market.
Two mechanics from the under-lift district were stringing wires along the rail trench. One of them, a woman with grease-stained goggles, waved them over. "Cralin! Tell your cousin to stop selling those fake amp coins. The charge in one of them fried my radio."
Iven laughed, all teeth again. "Only fried because it had taste. You should thank me for the upgrade."
The mechanic made a half-hearted throw of her wrench, missing on purpose. Behind her, a scavenger trudged past with a wheelbarrow of scrap, humming out-of-tune, a voice roughened by ash and years.
Farther down, a group of children were drawing circles on the ground with crushed ore dust, whispering hymns they likely didn't understand. One of them caught Cralin's stare and grinned — not shy, not innocent either — before darting away when a patrol drone buzzed by overhead, scanning lines twitching across the street's face.
No one looked up. Drones were as common as flies, less curious.
A vendor at the corner began roasting grain over a plasma exhaust, and soon the air filled with the smell of burnt sweetness. A preacher — one of those who still wore melted metal jewelry as "blessings" — was complaining to his followers about the rising price of steam. Across the street, someone tuned a rusted radio until a half-stable melody flickered to life.
For a while, the market drifted into its rhythm — slow, dense, alive. Cralin leaned against the stall's edge, eyes on the horizon where the refinery plume had already thinned. "It's burning off," he muttered.
"Or hiding," Iven said softly, threading another copper charm into her belt.
A silence hung between them, filled only by the hum of faraway engines and the muttering of people who had long since learned that nothing broke for free.
When the first bell rang from the central tower, it wasn't loud enough to matter. Most didn't even notice. Only Cralin did — because it was one tone lower than usual, and because it meant someone, somewhere, had turned off the wrong generator. But he said nothing yet.
There was always another day for things to go wrong.