The air in the Pit was a solid thing, a stew of recycled oxygen, stale sweat, and the ozone tang of cheap Pneuma-crystals. It clung to the back of Kai's throat as he danced back from a wild swing, his boots slipping on the spray-damp metal plating. Around the chain-link cage, a hundred faces pressed in, distorted by the flickering neon signs bleeding from the stacked hab-units of Ash-Heap—adverts for synth-protein and engine grease that painted the crowd in garish shades of cyan and arterial red.
They weren't here for artistry. They were here for the thud of flesh, the spray of blood, the quick transfer of ration credits. Kai, seventeen and wiry as a frayed cable, gave them what they wanted. He moved with a desperate, instinctual grace, slipping a jab, returning with a sharp cross that cracked against his opponent's jaw. The man, a grunt from the lower docks, staggered. The crowd roared, a wordless animal sound that vibrated in Kai's chest.
He didn't hear the individual taunts or bets anymore; they'd blurred into a constant, hungry static. His world had narrowed to the next breath, the next opening. His muscles burned, a familiar and unwelcome ache. This was his third fight tonight. He needed two more wins to hit the credit mark. The thought was a cold stone in his gut, heavier than any punch. Two more wins, and he could afford the week's dose of stabilizer for his mother, Zara. Without it, the cough that rattled her frame would sink deeper, turning into the fluid-filled drowning that had taken half of Ash-Heap's aging population.
He saw an opening and lunged, driving a knee into the grunt's solar plexus. The man folded with a whoosh of escaping air, hitting the plating hard. The ref, a scarred hulk with one milky eye, dragged Kai back and raised his grimy hand.
"Winner! Credit chit to the scrapper in the grey wraps!"
The announcement was swallowed by the noise. A digital chit, glowing a transient blue, was slapped into Kai's palm. He clutched it, the phantom value of medicine making his fingers tremble. Two more. Just two more.
The crowd parted for a moment, and through the press of bodies, Kai saw his next opponent climbing over the chain links. The static in his head sharpened into a spike of cold dread.
Grawl wasn't a dock grunt. He was an enforcer for the local recycler guild, a mountain of scar tissue and augmented muscle stuffed into reinforced leathers. He didn't smile. He just stared at Kai with the flat, dispassionate eyes of a man about to perform a mundane task. As Grawl dropped into a stance, the air around him shimmered. From his back, a projection of crackling, copper-light energy erupted—a jagged, geometric form that resolved into the shape of a massive, feral canine wrought from gleaming, interlocking plates. A sanctioned Rust-Hound Constellation. It was clean, sharp, and terrifyingly official. The crowd's roar took on a new, reverent tone. This was a real Constellation, one of the Seventy-Two Forms. This was civilized power.
Kai had nothing but his wraps, his speed, and a reservoir of something raw and unformed that churned in his core like a storm. He'd never manifested a Constellation. On Ash-Heap, they called his kind "Starless"—those with enough Pneuma sensitivity to feel the cosmic energy but without the lineage, training, or credit for the Sigil inscriptions needed to shape it into something respectable.
The gong sounded.
Grawl moved. He wasn't fast, but he was inexorable. The Rust-Hound projection mirrored his movements, a phantom limb of devastating potential. A swipe of Grawl's fist was accompanied by a ghostly set of metallic jaws snapping at Kai's head. Kai ducked, the energy whispering through his hair, smelling of hot iron and static. He darted in, landing two quick jabs against Grawl's ribcage. It was like punching a bulkhead.
A backhand caught Kai on the shoulder. It wasn't just the physical impact; a wave of concussive, rust-colored energy bloomed from the contact, throwing him sideways. He skidded across the plating, pain flaring in his joint. The crowd bayed. Grawl advanced, the Rust-Hound's form flickering with eager, predatory light.
Kai scrambled up, his mind racing. He couldn't trade blows. He couldn't block the Constellation-enhanced strikes. His eyes darted to the credit chit, discarded at the edge of the cage. The image of his mother's face, pale and drawn against a thin pillow, flashed behind his eyes. The cold fear crystallized into a white-hot wire of panic.
Grawl cornered him against the chain links. The enforcer raised a fist, the Rust-Hound's maw opening wide above it, ready to deliver a finishing, bone-shattering strike. The crowd's noise reached a fever pitch. This was it. The medicine, the credits, Zara's chance—all evaporating in the face of sanctioned, superior power.
The panic didn't freeze him. It detonated.
A pressure Kai had spent a lifetime ignoring, a wild, howling static in his blood, ripped free from its restraints. It wasn't a controlled channeling. It was a rupture.
A nova of color exploded from him.
It wasn't copper-clean like the Rust-Hound. It was neon-bright, chaotic, and violently alive. Electric blue, savage pink, and acid green erupted in a torrent of spray-paint-like energy. It didn't form a shape. It was a shriek of light—jagged, lightning-bolt lines; cartoonish, winking stars; drips and tags and splatters that sizzled where they hit the metal, burning temporary, glowing scars. The air filled with the smell of ozone and something sweetly synthetic, like burnt candy.
Grawl's finishing strike faltered. The pristine Rust-Hound Constellation flickered violently as the chaotic neon spray splashed across its form. Where the clean lines met the wild color, the Constellation sputtered, its coherence breaking like a corrupted signal. The metallic plates of the phantom hound seemed to warp, bubble, and flake away into discordant sparks. Grawl roared in confusion and pain, clutching his head as his manifested power short-circuited back into him.
Kai, driven by pure instinct and the raging torrent of energy, didn't throw a punch. He shoved forward, a wave of disorganized, blazing color erupting from his palms. It hit Grawl like a physical tsunami of light, lifting the massive enforcer off his feet and hurling him into the chain links with a deafening clang. He slumped, unconscious, his sanctioned Constellation guttering out like a snuffed candle.
Silence.
A thick, stunned silence pressed down on the Pit, broken only by the sputter and fizzle of Kai's fading energy, which dripped from the cage walls like luminous paint. The crowd stared, mouths agape. There was no cheer. Only confusion, then a rising wave of murmurs that sounded like fear. This wasn't a victory. It was an anomaly.
From a shadowed alcove above the pit, two figures observed. They wore robes of stark, antiseptic white, unblemished by the grime of Ash-Heap. Their faces were impassive masks. One held a sleek data-slate, his finger tapping rapidly. The other simply watched Kai, who stood panting in the center of the cage, his hands still crackling with dying embers of impossible color. The man's expression was one of cold, clinical disapproval. He murmured a single word to his companion, a word that carried the weight of law and dogma.
"Unsanctioned."
The climb back to his hab-unit was a blur. The credit chit felt like a lead weight in his palm. The whispers followed him up the rusted gantries and across the shuddering suspension bridges that connected Ash-Heap's stacked sectors. He kept his head down, pulling his thin jacket tighter around himself, trying to hide the occasional, uncontrollable flicker of pink or blue that sparked from his fingertips.
Home was a single pressurized room in a cluster of modules bolted to the side of a derelict ore-processor. The air inside was marginally cleaner, filtered by a wheezing unit in the corner, and warm with the glow of a single lumen-strip. The smell of cheap antiseptic and slow-cooking broth hung in the air.
Zara was propped on their sleeping pallet, a data-slate with a cracked screen resting in her lap. She was in her late forties but looked twenty years older, her face etched with the fatigue of constant gravity and thin air. Her eyes, however, were the same sharp, warm brown as his own.
"You're late," she said, her voice a raspy thread. Then she saw his face, the new bruise blossoming on his jaw, the wild, unsettled look in his eyes. The rebuke died. "Kai."
"Got the credits," he said, his voice rough. He crossed the room and fed the chit into the medical dispenser unit mounted on the wall. It whirred, lights cycling, and ejected a single injector vial of cerulean fluid. He handed it to her.
She took it, her thin fingers brushing his. A tiny arc of green static jumped from his skin to hers. She flinched, not from pain, but from surprise. She looked from the spark to his eyes.
"What happened?"
"I won." He turned away, walking to the small sink to splash water on his face. In the polished scrap-metal serving as a mirror, he saw his reflection—pale, eyes wide with a fear he couldn't name. He held up his hands. Beneath the skin, a faint, rainbow aurora swam, like oil on water caught in light. He clenched his fists, but the colors pulsed stronger, threatening to break free. "Something's… wrong with me."
"It's not wrong," Zara said firmly, though worry lined her voice. She administered the injection with practiced ease. "It's yours. It's just… loud. Your father's was like that. Before they…" She trailed off, a familiar, old grief closing her expression.
"Before the Overseers made him get the Sigils to 'correct' it," Kai finished, the bitterness acidic in his mouth. His father had left for a "standardization assessment" when Kai was five. He'd never returned. Official notice: "Pneuma instability. Unfortunate accident." The white robes had delivered the notice.
A heavy knock sounded at the hab-unit's door, not the rapid fist of a debt collector, but three slow, deliberate thuds that shook the thin metal.
Kai and Zara froze. The paranoid silence stretched. The knock came again, authoritative, inevitable.
Kai moved first, gesturing for Zara to stay back. He peered through the door's cheap security peephole. The distorted fisheye view showed a man. He was older, maybe late forties, with a grizzled, weathered face and short-cropped, greying hair. He wore practical, stained traveller's gear, a heavy coat over a worn bodyglove. One leg was strapped into a mechanical brace that whirred softly. He didn't look like an enforcer. He looked like trouble.
"I know you're in there, kid," the man's voice came through the door, gravelly and tired. "I saw your light show in the Pit. We need to talk. Unless you want the White-Cloaks to talk to you first."
Kai's blood ran cold. He glanced back at his mother. Her face was a mask of terror. The White-Cloaks. The Orthodoxy of the Fixed Star. They were the enforcers of celestial law, the arbiters of the Seventy-Two Forms. They didn't come to Ash-Heap unless something had broken the approved patterns.
Slowly, heart hammering against his ribs, Kai unbolted and opened the door a crack. The man, Jaxxon, didn't try to force his way in. He just stood there, his eyes—one a sharp grey, the other clouded with a faint scar—sweeping over Kai with an unnerving intensity.
"You've got a Scribble-Soul," Jaxxon stated, no preamble. "A Graffiti Constellation. A mess of beautiful, illegal potential. And in about ten minutes, the Orthodoxy is going to knock that door down to bag and tag you for 'assessment.' Which is a polite word for erasure."
"Who are you?" Kai snarled, bracing himself in the doorway.
"Someone who's seen what they do to things they don't understand," Jaxxon said, his gaze flicking past Kai to Zara. There was a hint of old pain there. "My name's Jaxxon. I can get you off this floating scrap-heap. I can get you to a place where you can learn to use that… art… instead of having it scrubbed from your soul. The Celestial Gauntlet."
The words meant little to Kai. The Gauntlet was a galaxy-wide spectacle, a thing of shimmering broadcasts seen on public screens, involving champions from glittering core-worlds. It wasn't for Starless scrap-rats from Ash-Heap.
"Why?" Kai asked, suspicion a hard knot in his chest. "What do you get?"
"A chance to spit in the eye of the system that crippled me," Jaxxon said, his voice dropping. He lifted his left arm. With a soft, grinding sound of metal on metal, the flesh and fabric from his forearm to his fingertips transformed. It became a construct of pitted, corroded iron plates, pistons, and grinding gears—a limb of breathtaking, brutal engineering, but one that looked ancient, damaged, and painful. A ghostly, larger projection of a crumbling, rusted iron giant flickered behind him for a split second—a wounded, decaying Golem. "They enforce compliance, kid. They punish originality. You're a question they can't answer. I find that… useful."
Before Kai could process this, a new sound cut through the constant hum of Ash-Heap: the clean, high-pitched whine of repulsor lifts. Two sleek, white aerial skiffs, devoid of markings except for a single stark emblem—a circle encompassed by seventy-two points—descended silently onto the gantry outside. The white robes. They'd found him.
The door was wrenched from Kai's grip from the outside, not by Jaxxon, but by a force of compressed air. Two Orthodoxy enforcers stood there, their white robes pristine, their faces obscured by smooth, expressionless visors. The lead one spoke, his voice synthesized and hollow.
"Kai of Ash-Heap Sector 7. You are charged with Unsanctioned Pneuma Manifestation, Category: Anomalous. You will submit for immediate assessment and Sigil-correction under Ordinance 72."
They stepped forward, extending gauntleted hands that glowed with a soft, white null-field. Kai stumbled back. Zara cried out.
Jaxxon moved. He didn't attack the enforcers. He slammed his corroded metal fist into the wall next to the doorframe. A shockwave of orange-red rust particles exploded outwards in a cloud, swirling with a dry, metallic scent. The enforcers recoiled, their sensors and visors momentarily fouled by the corrosive dust.
"Time's up, kid! Now or never!" Jaxxon barked, his organic hand shooting out to grip Kai's arm.
Kai's eyes met his mother's. Hers were wide with fear, but she gave a sharp, desperate nod. Go.
With a final, wrenching look, Kai let Jaxxon pull him towards the room's only other opening—a small, circular viewport meant for emergency egress. Jaxxon's metal fist punched through the safety latch. He kicked the viewport out into the void.
Cold, thin air whipped into the hab. Below was a kilometers-long drop through the tangled superstructure of Ash-Heap into the nebulous void below.
"Trust the landing!" Jaxxon yelled, and shoved Kai out into the open air.
Kai's scream was stolen by the wind. He plummeted, the neon-soaked labyrinth of his home rushing past in a dizzying blur. A split second later, Jaxxon leapt after him. As they fell, a beat-up, wedge-shaped Pneuma-skiff, paint scarred and engines coughing, rose on a column of blue flame to meet them. It was piloted by a blurry figure in the cockpit.
Kai hit the sloping hull hard, his ribs screaming. He scrambled, fingers finding a grip on a cargo strap as the skiff banked violently. Jaxxon landed beside him with a heavy thud.
Looking up, Kai saw the two white skiffs emerge from the cloud of rust, accelerating after them. Bolts of focused white energy—Erasure-lances—streaked past, sizzling the air where they flew.
The beat-up skiff's engines roared in protest, then surged. It shot forward, diving into a narrow canyon of towering scrap and derelict ship hulls. Kai clung on, the g-force pressing him into the hull. He looked back.
Ash-Heap, the only home he'd ever known—a grimy, vibrant, struggling cluster of light and life—receded rapidly, shrinking into just another piece of celestial junk against the infinite dark. Ahead was only unknown black, speckled with the distant, cold pinpricks of stars. The white robes of the Orthodoxy, and the last glimpse of his mother's face, were swallowed by the distance.
He was Starless no longer. He was something else. And he was flying blind into a galaxy that had already deemed him a mistake.