They called it a maintenance tower like that made it less alive. It was a rib in the city's middle layer, a stack of metal and concrete and old intentions, humming with power lines and the throat-song of fans the size of apartments. Somebody had carved a bar into its side and given it a name no one remembered. The door was a sheet of repurposed plating with bullet dimples hammered flat. The sign above it flickered WATER IS FAITH, skipping the last letter half the time so it read like a dare: WATER IS FAI_.
Breuk had been early enough to look late. He sat at a bolted table with a glass of something that looked like water and glowed faintly blue when the neon hit it. He didn't drink. The cigarette between his fingers did the moving for him—smoke lifting, curling, deciding.
He still had both sleeves filled.
The cuff at his left wrist lay snug over skin and tendon. When he tapped ash into a shallow tin, his knuckles were their old scraped-pink, not plates. When he brought the cigarette to his mouth, there was no servo whine, just the wet rasp of the tower and his own quiet breath. Later, people would say they remembered the night you could tell the difference. He didn't know it yet. Right then, it had just been another job.
The man across from him wore an elegant coat that didn't creak and hands that didn't work. Middle-aged, middle-smile, careful eyes. Two small silver tattoos sat under each eye, delicate as commas; they told anyone who spoke that language that he belonged up where windows didn't sweat. His voice had been smooth enough to lay on bread.
"You're late, Jeremiah. Right?" he'd asked.
"I'm Breuk," Breuk said. He didn't change the angle of his head. "Jeremiah's… tied up."
"I see."
A soft KLICK put a metal case on the table, then another click opened it. Inside lay routes printed on plastifilm, customs chits, permits that looked real enough to fool cameras, and a fan of mugshots—uniform smiles on uniform faces, cops and soldiers and civic guardians looking like they passed inspection twice a day. The paper smelled like the city's clean rooms.
"Transport," the man said. "Three Sun Cylinders. No questions, no detours. Delivery by next week."
The hum of the tower pressed in. Breuk leaned back, a slow exhale putting smoke between them like a curtain. "And if someone stops me?"
The man's gloved fingertip touched one of the faces, then another. "They're ours," he said, as if explaining gravity. "Ask for any of these names. You'll be waved through."
Breuk's eyes didn't shift for a long moment. When they did, they went to the glass. A drop landed. Plink. "Smuggling Sun Cylinders," he said at last. "Sounds like rain cult work. I don't like fanatics."
The man's smile thinned, sharpening without growing. "So-called fanatics pay well."
Breuk let that lie on the table. He reached forward with his left hand—the old hand—and closed the case, slow enough to make sure the other man could see the calluses, the steady tendons, the fact of it. "Fifty," he said.
The man's brows went up in polite disbelief. "You'll get thirty. That's more than you're worth."
Breuk stood and slid the case toward him in the same motion. Not angry. Not eager. Just done. "Find someone else to drive through the lower fog," he said, turning away.
"Thirty-five," the man called after him—reflex, not strategy.
Breuk stopped. The rain on the grating above drew a fine stitch across his shoulders. He lit a new cigarette with the lighter he could still work one-handed because the hand was still his. "Make it fifty," he said around the smoke. "No debate."
Silence decided to sit down with them. A blue drop fell into the glass and exploded into rings. The man watched the rings, then Breuk.
"...Fifty," he said.
Breuk nodded once, took the case back with the left hand—solid weight met solid grip—and tucked the cigarette into the side of his mouth. "Deal."
He left the bar with the case under his arm. The room returned to its chatter the way ponds stop noticing stones. Outside, the tower's galleries ran like ribs—narrow walkways of wet metal gapped with view. The rain from the overhead grid fell in hair-thin strands and freckled his jacket. He didn't hurry. The tip of the cigarette guttered under the rain, glowed stubbornly back to life, guttered again.
The middle tiers breathed their same old breath—ozone and oil, boiled tea and boiled rumor. Tradesmen leaned on rails and traded stories about parts that didn't fit and money that wouldn't come. Smugglers hawked the legal with illegal accents. A soldier off-duty laughed too loud at a joke he didn't like. Everyone watched the ceiling when the reactor light fluttered. No one said they'd watched.
Breuk stopped at the edge where the gallery opened onto the hollow. The rain threaded past him, straight as a thought, then bowed to the pull of the city and disappeared into the dark. Far below, a smear of light marked a lower market waking up; someone had thrown a switch and declared morning.
Everything fell.
He looked down long enough for the cold to find its way through his collar. There was a thought in there he'd been circling for years, a thin thing with too few words to catch it right. It occurred to him that water understood the city better than people did.
Everything flows down, he thought. Like us.
The grating under his boots shivered when a freight elevator somewhere changed its mind. He stared at his reflection in a puddle that pretended to be a mirror. The face the water gave him was a rumor of his own—scar lighter than skin, eyes tired past their age, both sleeves heavy with the person they belonged to. A fleck of ash dropped from the cigarette and landed in the puddle; oily black spidered through the reflection and turned his features into a broken coin.
He had pocketed the case without thinking about the weight of the papers inside or the weight of signing up for other people's rooms on fire. He had walked away without thinking too hard about the word fanatic and how much of it was mirror. He had taken the job because you took jobs, because every job kept another problem fed, because refusing on principle paid exactly nothing.
He had still had his left hand. He had still had the habit of checking the knuckles for cuts out of reflex and finding skin instead of welds. He had still had nights where the choice felt like his.
On the first landing down, two runners slid past him on the outer path with a sack slung between them—components wrapped in rags, heavy enough to change their stride. They never made eye contact. People didn't, not when the ceiling went dim. A priest with a collar made of punched tin and wire beads tapped a pipe and whispered, "Run at twelve, run at eighteen," like he was reciting a schedule to the god of pressure. Children had their bowls out already though it was hours off; practice was part of ritual. The WATER IS FAITH sign jittered against the damp air and told the same lie as every good sign: that believing was the whole of it.
He took a service stair instead of the lift. The stairwell smelled like handprints and rust. The case beat a soft rhythm against his hip. At the second turn, the old man who sold boiled moss tea from a barrel nodded at him like news passed between nods. Breuk slid two credits and didn't wait for the change; the old man pretended not to notice the extra and watched the ceiling with everyone else. The tea tasted like clean metal and smoke. It warmed nothing and was exactly what he wanted.
Back at the bar's level, a pair of uniforms he recognized from the case-mugshots drifted through, laughing with their mouths and not their eyes. One glanced at him as if reading a name off a wall and filed it away. The other read the time and the distance to lunch off the same invisible wall and didn't see him at all. Breuk had nodded once and kept moving because acknowledging the story you were in never helped the ending.
He reached the outer catwalk that led to the freight district and stopped again out where the tower surrendered to air. The rain stitched at him, at the city, at the idea of gravity. He pulled on the cigarette and let the smoke crowd his chest until it felt like company. When he took it away, the ember drew a quick comet in the humid air and stained the rain with momentary fire.
Down below, the light smeared itself across new puddles like a painter learning to like water. He watched a droplet fall and searched for the sound it made when it landed far below. The city had always loved making men believe they could hear the bottom.
Another ash-fleck fell. The black spread out on the puddle's skin like oil finding the easiest path.
He crushed the cigarette with the left boot and moved on.
The tower thrummed, the case knocked his hip, the neon stammered its sermon, and the rain did what it had always done—choose down.