The air in the Cinder-Reach hub was thick enough to chew. It wasn't the clean, thin air of the Sol peaks or the damp, salt-heavy mist of Zenith. It was a stagnant soup of coal smoke, ozone, and the metallic tang of a thousand cooling furnaces. Vane led the way through a narrow alleyway where the soot had settled into drifts like black snow, his boots making a soft, rhythmic crunch that Valerica struggled to match.
They had been moving through the industrial outskirts for three days. The process was exhausting in a way that had nothing to do with combat. It was the constant, low-level stress of being surrounded by people who looked at a clean pair of boots as a week's wages. Vane didn't use the carriage after the first day. A carriage in the hubs was a lighthouse for trouble, and he wasn't interested in wasting energy on low-level thugs who thought they were predators.
