They found it by accident the way people find salvation—by running out of other directions. The seam was no holier than the thousand cracks that had lied to them all week. It was only wider. A pale sliver at first, thinner than a finger and brighter than it had any right to be, and then, as they worried crowbars into the concrete and levered with the last good anger in their wrists, it grew into a wound that let the world in.
Light bled through.
No one spoke. The things worth saying had been said too often in the dark and had frayed into threads. So the group did what all creatures do at the mouth of something new: they listened to themselves breathing. The air on the far side had a sound of work to it—distant motors, a tremor you felt in the tongue more than the ear, a thin electrical whine poured through stone.
The first rays touched faces. They glanced from cheekbone to brow, wrote their hard lines across cracked lips and deepened every shadow instead of lifting it. Light is a judge when it meets the starved. It tallied each bruise in precise handwriting. It rendered Sera's cheekbones like the edges of a broken bowl. It made Tella's burned knuckles shine with varnished honesty. It found the scars on Breuk's neck and underlined them.
He had imagined the moment like a drink—cool, easy, a forgiveness he could pour. Instead, light happened like truth: flat, without apology. It made the dust in the air visible and the fatigue visible and the tremor under his sternum visible to himself. His breath snagged on the rim of the new world.
"Finally," someone whispered, and the word sounded like metal easing.
They widened the seam enough to pass. Frehn wriggled through first with his boy's stubborn gallantry and his soldier's need to prove his weight mattered. Tella went second because work should, her jaw set against the idea that any door might prefer anyone else. Sera paused long enough to lay her palm to the threshold as if taking oath—then ducked and emerged blinking into a brightness that wasn't mercy. Haim pushed the wind chime through wrapped in cloth and came after, shoulders squared around the space where a daughter didn't tread. The line moved. It had become a thing with instincts, like an animal that had traded fear for ritual.
Breuk came to the gap and hesitated. The sensation was physical—like a hand on the chest, a palm as old as he was. He touched his pocket and felt the pendant there—a wafer of defiance he still hadn't earned. It was warmer than the air. It pressed upward against his thumb as if the light were a magnet and it some shard of kin metal. He breathed out and went through.
The space on the other side opened in a breathless, engineered gasp—wider than any room should be, tall enough to make necks ache. A maintenance gallery, but in this city "maintenance" meant cathedrals to utility: checkerplate floors spanning a void, walkways latticed like bone, trusses slung with cable fat as a man's thigh. The brightness came from above and elsewhere—refracted off mirrors, pulsed out of ducts, bleeding down through baffles in a thousand controlled leaks. Smoke lived here the way weather lives elsewhere; it lay in patient layers that remembered every footfall. And under everything, under metal clink and hum, there were engines speaking in the language of pressure: hold, release, hold.
Breuk's eyes watered with the work of seeing. He blinked hard until the world came sharp. A freight elevator cage without its car hung like a ribcage to their left; to their right a run of grated stairs bent downward into a bloom of gloom. Ahead, at the far end of the gallery, a set of doors gaped onto a balcony. Beyond them—he stepped forward without wanting to—beyond them the under-world opened.
"This is…" he said, and the word refused to be finished by any of the lies he could afford.
He reached the rail with the same dream-step that had walked him through fires and into bad rooms. The balcony jutted over emptiness. Below, the Understadt dropped away like a promise someone else had made. Levels upon levels, balconies upon balconies, a maze of catwalks that had forgotten the cats, pipes the size of avenues goring the air. It was a city built out of gravity's grudges: neon writing its hymns in patient strokes; steam painting the air with clouds that looked like thought balloons; cables like black rain frozen in the act of falling. Far across the chasm, a billboard flickered an old laugh of a woman who did not believe in men or in hunger. And up, impossibly up, the reactor's light by which generations kept time—no sun, just a machine with doctrine, a boxed star panting behind armor.
Someone behind Breuk laughed a little too long. Another sank to his knees with the untrained elegance of the fainting poor. A woman clutched the rail and sobbed once like a door closing. Tella swore softly without heat and then, because good hands need tasks, started counting exits.
"They said there would be a sky," Sera murmured behind him. Her voice was even. Even is how mothers survive. "They did not say it would be inside."
Lig had come to stand beside Breuk. He looked like a bruise in a clean shirt—composed, not yet admitted to. His eyes drank the skyline without blinking. The light found the old softness at his mouth and failed to light it again.
"At least," he said, and a corner of his mouth moved, "at least it's brighter."
Breuk looked at him. He'd run out of anger a week ago and run out of sorrow three days later and was now operating on a thin sediment of something like understanding. He heard the hum under the hum—the city's monologue. He felt the pendant burn for a heartbeat and then behave. The line of people behind him pressed forward and paused with an animal's wisdom at the edge of a drop.
"We had to," he said, and it wasn't a plea. It was a ledger entry. "Didn't we."
Lig's answer took longer than the sentence needed, which meant it was honest. He tilted his head as if listening for a figure he'd almost solved. "Yes," he said at last. And then, smaller, an admission he didn't like lending to air: "I think so."
They stood there the space of ten breaths and pretended it was a plan.
A man from the Grund fainted in a manner that involved forward motion. Frehn caught him and went down with him, thudding to the checkerplate like dropped tools. The sound broke whatever reverie had been trying to pass as worship. People remembered their inventories: water, rope, the law of edges. A couple started laughing at nothing with the brittle high of oxygen after weeks of rationed night. Someone began to sing the rain song, got as far as "twelve" and lost the number.
"Inside," Lig said, voice pitched to slip under panic like a plate under a spill. He gestured to the maintenance room they'd emerged from and then to the blind doors on the far wall. "We don't pray on balconies. We close doors. Tella—left side—find me a panel. Frehn—eyes. Sera, Haim… people who can walk help people who can't. We're not done just because a poet would end here."
They obeyed because orders that preserve dignity feel like privileges. They moved as if the gallery would punish them for clumsiness. Tella found a cabinet marked with a symbol the years had thinned but not erased; pried it open with a bolt and a promise; exhaled when the guts inside were a language she still spoke. "Power on a bus," she muttered. "Maybe a subgrid. Maybe not. We don't touch anything that hums in F."
"You and your notes," Frehn muttered, and Tella's look was the mercy of discipline.
Haim set the chime down in a corner as if this were a home and not a temporary reprieve from falling. Sera stood by the man who'd fainted, her palm on his sternum, counting. The man's eyelids fluttered with the sincerity of exhausted birds. He breathed and fell back and breathed again.
Breuk held the rail a moment longer. The world answered his grip with vibrations—going concerns, sent work, some conference between heat and distance he wasn't invited to. He looked down and saw floors like the idea of order repeated until it became superstition. He looked up and saw a cateract of ducts that must have delivered water on the hour to places that had never tasted the Grund. He saw men on a far catwalk the size of ants, in orange jackets. He saw a drone sit and lift, sit and lift along a maintenance track like a nervous thought. He pressed his thumb to the pendant through cloth and lied to himself one more time about it being only metal.
"Don't fall," he told himself, softly and late.
He left the edge and went to help Sera. The man who had dropped was fifty or something harder that had congealed into fifty from both directions: gray where hair refused to be color, lines around the mouth from a life of noticing. "Name," Breuk said, forcing his voice to be administrative and not kind, because kindness breaks men at the wrong times.
"Jorn," the man whispered, and it was a lie of convenience. Under fatigue, all names are borrowed. But it gave Sera something to call him. She nodded approval as if Jorn were a secret he had shared.
"Up," Breuk said. "Slow." He offered his left shoulder. The man got his hands under him and obeyed gravity backwards until standing. He was shaking like a badly maintained machine. He smiled once as if he had bitten something bittersweet and was polite enough not to spit it out.
Lig stood in the doorway and looked like a threshold. "We move inside," he said again. "We're a headline out here."
"What's a headline?" Frehn asked.
"A sign that says 'shoot here,'" Lig said, and the boy obeyed a definition.
They filed into the maintenance room. The doors went closed with a clean weight—the kind of weight you pay for when you manufacture morality. Inside, the sound changed. The bass of the city became a muffled doctrine. The lights struck white off paint that had once been called "safety" and was now a shade of old bone. There was a table with a map bolted under thick plastic: a schematic of ducts and access corridors, colored like a lie. There were lockers with numbers that had loved men long enough to outlive numbers.
Sera looked smaller under the white. Everyone did. The light wrote truth without shadows soft enough to hide in. For a loop of seconds, they were all exactly the size of their bodies.
"Water," Tella said briskly. "We find water or we sit down and die because it's a style." She ran fingertips under the lip of the map panel, found a latch, popped it, and slid a drawer out like a knife coming polite out of a sheath. Underneath: replacement fuses, tags, a logbook left by a man whose neatness had failed to prevent his disappearing. She flipped pages: dates, initials, a drawing of a pipe that had made him angry. "Condenser feed," she said, tapping a line in the diagram with grease-black nail. "Here. If it's still the same as when this was printed during a better century."
"Can you get to it?" Lig asked.
"I can want to," Tella said. That's all a mechanic really promises. She traced the line to a service door to the left. "Through there. Up three levels. Down two. I'd like a second person who knows the difference between 'don't touch' and 'touch and pray.'"
"Frehn," Lig said.
Frehn pulled himself taller. "I know the difference," he said.
"You know the words," Tella corrected, affection curving her mouth. "We'll teach your hands."
They went. The door ate them.
That left the room quieter. People arranged themselves along walls by the geometry of relief. Some sat with their backs together because that's how you simulate community when community has been marching for six days. Haim put his hand on the chime through the cloth and then took it away as if the metal were a child he did not have strength for. Sera counted the breathing like coins.
Lig stood near the panel map and studied the schematic with the intimacy he reserved for enemies and friends. The line descriptions spoke to him in a language that at least recognized him as a listener. He traced a finger from their room to the nearest platform with access to something like a public space. It was not far and also very far. "We need clothes," he said, to no one or to Breuk, which were the same thing at times. "We need to be a shape this place ignores. Right now we are the wrong kind of story."
Breuk leaned on a locker and felt its institutional loyalty press back: this is a place for working bodies, not thinking ones. "We need water first," he said. He didn't say: we need forgiveness last. He had begun to suspect it couldn't be acquired.
The door Tella had gone through groaned some distance away and burped back a whiff of heat. Then silence. Silence that was not empty, but full of issues.
"Think they'll manage?" Haim asked, because every group needs a man who rehearses worry as if it were a dance. His voice had the frayed dignity of someone who'd spent a life being measured by output and had never forgiven the tape.
"They always have," Lig said. It sounded like faith and like math.
The room occupied time. It's what rooms are good for. The city's cadence seeped through paint and steel. Sera closed her eyes but did not sleep, because sleep would mean letting go of her grip on a world that kept trying to drop. Jorn sat and held his head in his hands and did the unheroic thing of not making noise.
Breuk paced because pacing was the only geometry left to him. Each step traced a small defiance: I am a creature with repetition left. At the end of the fourth turn he stopped in front of the panel map and stared like a student late to a discipline. There—tiny print, a symbol he knew from his other life: a sign for emergency wash. A place that promised a spigot and a lie.
"Here," he said, tapping. "Wash station. If there's pressure, there's something like clean."
Lig glanced, then smiled like a menial winning a case. "You see the ugly things first," he said.
"They're the ones that function," Breuk said, trying on humor like a jacket he didn't own.
He and Lig went together. The wash station was down a narrow hall that ended with a door labeled in a bureaucracy's handwriting. The handle moved as if remembering how to. Inside: a row of sinks, a floor sloped toward a drain, a sign with instructions in pictures as if language had been declared optional. Breuk twisted a faucet and the handle turned and nothing came. He put his thumb under the spout like an ache and waited. After ten seconds, a cough somewhere far in the building. Then a thin line of brown that cleared to yellow that settled to clear. He caught it in his palm, tasted iron and chlorine and the assurance of machines. He closed his eyes for an indecent second.
Lig let himself smile where no one could spend it. "Make a line," he said. "We do small mercies like we do surgery."
They filled bottles, caps, guzzled a mouthful and rinsed filth off teeth, gave a palm's worth to each pair of lips and kept a tally against thirst like you keep a tally against god. Sera drank without performing gratitude. Haim washed his hands and then looked at them like they were men he might employ. Jorn splashed water over his face and wept behind it because water hides all the same things, up or down.
Tella returned with Frehn fifteen minutes later, hauling a coil of flexible line like a snake they had defanged. "Condenser feed is alive and ugly," she reported. "Won't hold a siphon without a prayer, but I found a prayer." She held up a length of clear tubing with a pinhole patched by a bandage. "We can fill by hand if no one lies to themselves about comfort."
For a brief, indecent interval, the room was a human place. Jokes remembered doors. The old ones dared to sit with both hands open. Even Lig unlatched his shoulders a notch and let his breath leave him without an invoice.
It didn't last. It never does.
A sound rose in the ducts—a shift in mood, slight but as undeniable as a friend deciding not to be. The city made a new chord. Tella's head came up like a hound's. "That's a change of load," she said. "Or someone told a story in a room with switches."
Lig moved to the map again, his attention like a blade laid against paper. "We stay quiet," he said. "We choose our first step into being seen. We do not get found like a box of contraband."
Sera looked at him with the level patience of a woman who understands both the value and the vanity of control. "And if we do?"
"Then we pay for it later," he said.
Breuk felt the pendant against him again—hot, a suggestion. He pressed his palm to it briefly, as if to quiet a child who had begun to whimper.
"We need clothes," Lig said again, as if repetition might make the city place an order. "We need names."
"We need a story," Sera said, and the flatness in her tone made it into a verdict. "You brought us to a place that runs on them."
Lig met her gaze and did not look away. "We do," he said. "We'll tell the one that doesn't get us killed."
"And which is that?" Haim asked, rubbing his forearm where hunger had written in dull pencil.
Lig looked past them all to the door, to the balcony beyond it, to the neon over the abyss writing its patient words. "The true one," he said. "Told with omissions."
They stepped back out to the balcony because the mind needs a horizon even when it threatens to teach you falling. The city had shifted shade by some algorithm meant to simulate daybreak down here; the reactor's panels had changed their angle and offered the illusion of morning. It felt obscene. The survivors—because that was the noun now—went to the rail in groups and let the sight of a functioning hell rinse something in them that grief had clotted. A laugh rose somewhere in the back of the crowd and caused an argument. Jorn stood with his hand flat on the metal and told himself not to promise anything to the view.
Breuk and Lig stood shoulder to shoulder again. The habit was old enough to be muscle.
"Look there," Lig said, nodding with his chin toward a catwalk three levels down and across. Men in orange moved with purpose—no hurry, no fear. They pushed a pallet on a rail that loved them. "Everything has lanes. If we step into the right one, we disappear. If we don't, we become the news."
"How do we find a lane?" Breuk asked.
Lig's mouth softened, not smiling. "We improvise with conviction."
A drone slid into view on their level—silent, a single blue eye. It paused as if listening, then drifted on. Breuk's fingers remembered reflexes that weren't useful here. He let them be hands.
"We can't take them all," he said, not looking back at the room where people sat counting sips.
"We never could," Lig said. He said it kindly, which is a cruelty that tells the truth in a tone that lets a man keep his hands steady.
Breuk nodded once. The pendant burned and cooled, an answer to a question no one had worded. He wished, briefly and completely, to be the kind of man who believed in omens. He let the wish go.
"Do you ever think about the other road?" he asked, his voice gone rougher by a grit he'd stopped filtering for Lig's sake. "If we would have left the ropes alone. If the old man would have died quiet in his chair. If Haim's girl would have gotten loud at boys and learned which ones to be loud at."
Lig's jaw ticked. The reactor light put a hard pencil line along his cheek. "I think about roads as a way to impress myself," he said. "To keep from admitting that they all lead to rooms with doors that want to learn us. I don't…" He paused, the sentence stalling like an engine with air in its line. "We can't give back what we took. We can only spend it correctly."
"Correctly," Breuk repeated, and let the word cut his mouth on the way out.
He became aware, suddenly, of Sera beside him. She had stepped up without noise, which is a skill acquired by those who have carried sleeping children into rooms where men die. She looked at the city the way one looks at a grown son—recognition and terror playing cards.
"Tell me," she said to both of them and to neither, "tell me that if I walk forward and keep walking, I will reach a place where the roofs are honest."
"You will reach places where the lies are well-lit," Lig said. "Honesty is in how long you stand there."
Sera accepted the insult and the truth because women who have lived under two machines can afford to. "Fine," she said. "Then show me the first lie I need."
"A uniform," Lig said. "A badge we don't deserve. A right to be here printed on plastic. Tella will make it hum. Frehn will wear it like it belongs to him."
Sera nodded. Her mouth made a line that had held back floods. "Then do it," she said. She turned her face to the wind that wasn't wind and closed her eyes once like a prayer. "And—thank you," she added, not to the men.
Breuk watched her walk back inside and counted it as a victory against whatever god kept scores of such things.
He breathed. It felt like stealing.
"Do you still think it's brighter?" he asked Lig without heat.
Lig did not answer immediately, because he liked to entertain the possibility of being wrong before declining it. "Yes," he said. "Hurt doesn't cancel light. It only proves it."
Breuk laughed once, brittle. "You should sell that line to a priest."
"I have," Lig said, and looked at the reactor. "He paid me with a plan."
The first plan of the Understadt was simple and therefore difficult: become background. They chose a lane. It began with walking away from the balcony and into the back corridors, where paint had peeled with dignity and the smell of clean burned off in the first ten meters to reveal the permanent perfume of industry: warm metal, rubber, cooked dust.
Tella hunted doors with panels; Breuk shouldered those that wanted to be argued with; Frehn learned to say "maintenance" with the bored violence of a man who owns a wrench. The survivors shed their village's silhouette and learned how to look like people paid to ignore the glorious.
They found a storage cage with coveralls. Sizes had been ordered for men with forearms that knew their forearms, not for this group of narrower and wider, taller and absent. They dressed anyway. Sera rolled the sleeves with approval. Haim cinched his waist with rope and looked like a caricature of competence. Jorn wore orange like a surrender flag and looked down at himself as if shocked to still be a body inside fabric.
Breuk found a jacket that admitted him and another for Lig. He helped Lig into it because habit taught his hands to offer use, not because tenderness had asked for the favor. Their eyes didn't meet while they wrestled cloth onto bones. That's how men apologize when language would damage the apology.
Frehn found a clipboard. It transformed him. He stood up two centimeters straighter and became a man with forms to defend. Tella handed him a pen as if giving a king his scepter. "Use it like a weapon," she said.
They moved.
The first checkpoint was an eye with a bored man behind it. He glanced at them, saw a story he liked—the one where men do work he doesn't understand for a purpose he doesn't need to—and waved them through with his knuckles. The second checkpoint had an eye with a camera and a terminal that asked for a card. Tella opened the panel below it with two screws and shorted one line to another with a wire and the terminal made a satisfied beep because sometimes belief can be engineered. The third checkpoint had a drone and a guard with a face like a decision. Lig spoke to him in the one language all empires understand: he made a problem disappear. He called it "pressure in line six" and pointed the man toward the wrong door, which is the right direction when you need to walk away.
They arrived at a service platform over the grand void. The neon roared here, closer, truer. The city showed them more of its angles without promising them any corners. People in jackets and hard hats moved on the walkways, heads full of timesheets; a woman in a suit carried a tablet like a talisman and glanced at them and didn't see them. That was the magic they'd come for: not invisibility, but compatibility.
Sera slowed at the rail and put her hand flat to a poster. It was a safety diagram of a man falling with an X through him and words that said DON'T BE HIM. She touched the man's drawn shoulder, then the X. "Too late," she said, and moved on.
Haim walked as if memorizing the taxonomy of machines. He pointed to a pipe and whispered to Breuk, "Hear it? That's E. She's kind today." Breuk listened and, because he wanted something of the Grund to remain true up here, nodded as if he could hear kindness in steel.
Lig glanced sideways at Breuk as they paused to let a pallet jack argue with a corner. "We get them to the middle levels," he said. "There's a man who sells papers out of a secondhand printer and sins out of his eyes. He'll make them legal enough to be left alone."
"And then?" Breuk asked.
Lig's mouth flickered. "And then we squander our prize wisely."
"Prize," Breuk repeated, and it felt foreign as the word love pronounced by a stranger.
They crossed to a lift that breathed when it opened. Inside, the floor vibrated with the municipal purr of a thing in charge. Lig pressed a button with the authority of a person who knows where a button's mother lives. The doors closed on the view, pinching off the abyss the way you pinch off blood to keep a limb.
The lift climbed. Breuk watched numbers admit themselves to being numbers. Sera watched her hands learn a tremor they hadn't had downstairs. Haim touched the chime and didn't ring it. Frehn looked at himself in the shine of the doors and decided to be a man who didn't imagine dying inside boxes.
"Weren't we supposed to cheer?" Jorn asked, his voice scraping the inside of the question.
"We did," Sera said. "Quietly."
The doors opened to a corridor washed in the blue of expensive light. Footsteps made a different sound here. Conversations happened in legally acceptable tones. A vending unit stood against a wall like a priest with buttons. Sera stared at it and then away, as if the machine's amphorae of sugar and salt were immodest.
Lig led. It was not a matter of choosing—he fit this architecture like a story it believed in. They passed a glass wall behind which men in sweaters moved dots on a screen with conviction. They passed a sign that said SUN FEED—ACCESS AUTHORIZED and considered the word authorized for the lie it is. They turned down a narrower hall, then into a stair, then through a door that remembered being propped open a decade ago for a smoke break.
The man Lig promised was there—he looked like every late favor Breuk had ever accepted and regretted. Hair contained by trouble, beard with a democracy of gray, eyes that never stopped calculating yield. He sat behind a counter that had once sold coffee and now sold everything else. Sheaves of paper lay near a printer that warmed the air with its small sun. A sign read DOCUMENTS, TEMPORARY, and below it another read NO GUARANTEES because honesty can be a flair.
"Lig," the man said, not surprised. "You look like work found you."
"Val," Lig said, the syllable like a coin dropped exactly from the right height to wake but not offend. "We need papers. A batch. Family status, relocation permit, medical exception for one—" he tipped his chin at Breuk—"amputation non-industrial. We need them yesterday and dated three days from now."
Val's eyes took the group in with the professional cold of triage. "And you need them to survive scrutiny from men who can read," he said.
"We need them to smile at doorways and make the mouths attached to the doorways close," Lig said. "We need them to be the kind of lie people are tired of puncturing."
"You ask for good forgery," Val said, amused in a way that offended no one. He leaned forward to inspect Breuk's sleeve. "You going to get that fixed, friend?"
"I'm going to get the rest of me fixed," Breuk said.
"Not here," Val said. "This place breaks what's already working." He put fingers to keys and the printer woke like a beast that likes its cage. "You're lucky," he said as if luck were a bill he could send. "A wave of maintenance crews came through this morning. Everyone's bored enough to let my breaking of the law be the least interesting thing they notice."
Sera stood while Lig negotiated numbers that weren't numbers and the terms that translate hunger into permission. She didn't sit. Sitting would have told a body that it could stay. Haim kept his hands in his pockets because he had been taught not to break what he couldn't afford. Frehn held the clipboard more tightly than before and made his face into an adult's.
The printer spat papers with all the sanctity of a god that ate toner. Val signed them with an implement that claimed to be official. He affixed stamps that would pass a glance and fail an audit, which is the point of most stamps.
"Don't wave them," he said, fanning one dry. "Flash them." He demonstrated a flick of wrist that turned paper into weapon and back. "Walk like you're late. People forgive late men anything that lets them avoid inheriting the lateness."
Lig paid him with a fold of credits, and with something else that seemed to go across the counter without touching it. Respect, or the absence of contempt; either spends.
"You look like men who think they just ended a story," Val added, eyes on Breuk. "You haven't. You just walked into one with better lighting."
"We noticed," Breuk said.
Val smiled without malice. "Good. Noticing buys you hours." He leaned back. "Do you want advice you won't take?"
"No," Lig said, and then, because he understood that ritual has its own lubrication, "say it."
"Don't make a scene," Val said. "Make a pattern." He pointed at the papers. "People survive here by resembling things too boring to file."
Lig nodded. "I'm trying to teach him," he said, tilting his head at Breuk.
"I was born too loud," Breuk said, and for a moment their old humor fitted exactly where it used to.
The papers distributed into hands like sacrament. Names printed in fonts conferred an authority the body hadn't owned in years. Sera held hers and did not read it—refused to let strangers tell her what she answered to. Haim folded his carefully, like clothing. Frehn slid his into the clipboard with a dignity that would have broken a lesser boy's back.
They left in a line that knew how to step uniformly now, how to blend with the traffic of men who did not confess to purpose. The city's light made their shadows official.
On a landing halfway back to the maintenance gallery, they paused, not because they needed to—because human beings hold small funerals for the versions of themselves they've just killed. Sera put her palm to the wall and closed her eyes. Haim looked over the rail at the blue below and said Lio's name silently and let it be a sigh. Tella flexed her fingers as if instructing them never to be idle again. Frehn looked at Lig the way a second son looks at an older brother and forgave him in advance.
Breuk looked up. The reactor panels had shifted again; the light crept sideways and turned a strip of ductwork into a blade that cut the air at hip height. Dust drifted through it like ash through a sermon. He felt the pendant warm. He didn't touch it this time. He let it heat. He let it cool.
"Was it worth it?" he asked himself—not accusatory, not absolving. He didn't answer. He discovered, with a small shock, that he didn't need to yet. The question itself was occupation enough.
They made their way back to the balcony because endings are the only places we remember to stand still. The room behind them held their empty; the city in front held their next injuries. The group fanned to the rail. A murmur ran through them like a voltage too low to kill and too high to ignore.
Breuk and Lig stood as they had before, but their silhouettes had changed—papers in pockets, the idea of lanes in their heads, a plan sitting between them like a third person.
"Wenigstens… ist es heller," Lig said again, softly this time, to see if the sentence could still lift its own weight.
Breuk's mouth made something that might have been a smile if mercy had been available. "We had to," he said, and he heard how weary can be a kind of faith. "Didn't we."
Lig nodded. It was a smaller yes this time, and therefore more expensive.
Below them, somewhere very far down, a vent coughed rain into air ducts that fed it into rooms that would receive it at noon and at eighteen with the punctuality of a god that had been purchased outright. The city exhaled. The neon wrote. The machines sang the simplicity of continuance.
Above them, the reactor bared a little more of its metal to their eyes. It looked, for the length of a blink, like a sun drawn by a child who had never seen one: square edges, angry brightness, not in the right place. The sight hurt. The hurt told the truth.
They stood at the threshold with papers that were excuses and hearts that were not. They had delivered a people to a horizon. It was not the one they had promised. It was the one that existed.
Breuk put his palm on the rail. The metal hummed under it, a note between E and F. He learned it. He kept his feet.
And when the group behind him pressed forward and stopped and pressed forward and stopped—like a heart that had found a new beat—he stepped into a lane that wasn't his, because it led forward, because the city respects only movement, because the only way out of a machine is through its teeth.
He didn't look back. None of them did.
At the edge of his vision, Lig did the smallest thing—a gesture no one but Breuk was paid to see. He opened his hand as if letting something go. The light took that nothing and wrote it down.
They walked. The balcony swallowed them. The room took them. The corridor counted their footfalls. The papers warmed under sweat. The city—their new sky, their other hell—made room for their pattern and then forgot them, which is what heaven does to the honest.
And somewhere, far below, the Schlund breathed, patient as a god that doesn't need worship, and exhaled into ducts that would never spell their names.