Dawn hadn't broken yet when Kael's eyes snapped open. No alarm needed—his body had learned to wake at the precise moment when Lyra's breathing grew most labored.
He lay still for a heartbeat, listening. The rattling wheeze from the corner cot confirmed what he already knew. Another night survived, barely.
Kael pushed himself up from the thin mattress, bare feet finding the cold concrete floor. The apartment's single room felt smaller in the pre-dawn darkness, walls pressing inward like a fist slowly closing. He moved with practiced silence toward their makeshift kitchen—a hot plate balanced on a crate, a few dented pots, and precious little else.
The porridge stretched further when watered down. Kael had become an expert at making nothing look like something, stirring the thin gruel while mentally calculating dosages. The cough suppressant bottle sat on the windowsill, amber liquid catching the first gray hints of morning light filtering through grimy glass.
'Three drops. No more. Make it last.'
"Morning, Kael." Lyra's voice emerged as a whisper, rough as sandpaper.
"Morning." He turned, forcing a smile that felt more natural than it should have. "Hungry?"
She struggled to sit up, pale fingers clutching a worn sketchbook against her chest. "Look what I found last night."
The drawings were old, pages yellowed and corners soft from handling. Gardens exploded across the paper in careful pencil strokes—impossibly lush trees, flowers that existed only in Lyra's imagination, pathways that curved between beds of impossible beauty.
"Remember when I drew these?" She coughed, a wet sound that made Kael's jaw tighten. "I was thinking... maybe the Inner City really has places like this."
Kael measured out the medicine with surgical precision. Three drops into the porridge, stirred until invisible. "I'm sure it does."
"Real flowers. Not just the scrub grass that grows through the pavement cracks." Her eyes brightened with fever or hope—sometimes the difference was academic. "Do you think we'll ever see them?"
The spoon felt heavy in his hand. "We'll find a way. I promise."
'Another promise. How many does that make now?'
Lyra smiled and accepted the bowl, eating slowly while studying her sketches. Within minutes, the suppressant did its work. Her breathing eased, eyelids growing heavy.
As she drifted back to sleep, Kael noticed something that made him pause. The red threads he'd grown accustomed to seeing around her seemed... fainter today. Less vibrant.
He wasn't sure if that was good or very, very bad.
The marketplace sprawled across what had once been a proper square, back when the Outer Ring pretended to be civilized. Now vendors hawked their wares from makeshift stalls cobbled together from scrap metal and rotting wood, voices rising in a cacophony of desperation disguised as commerce.
Kael moved through the crowd with practiced efficiency, scanning for anything that might serve as a substitute for Lyra's medicine. Herbs, maybe. Folk remedies. Anything cheaper than the extortionate prices the licensed dealers charged.
'Because hope is apparently all I have left to trade.'
A raised voice cut through the marketplace chatter—familiar, sharp with frustration. He turned to see Mira facing down a bread vendor, her slight frame rigid with barely contained anger.
"Three copper for a half-loaf?" Mira's voice carried the edge of someone who'd been pushed too far. "Yesterday it was two."
The merchant, a bloated man with grease stains mapping his apron, shrugged with theatrical indifference. "Supply and demand, girl. Don't like it? Go hungry."
"People are starving while you—"
"While I what? Run a business?" His laugh was ugly, dismissive. "You Outer Ring trash should be grateful for scraps. Most of you don't deserve even that."
Kael felt something cold settle in his chest. He approached slowly, fishing the last of his coins from his pocket—barely enough for anything substantial.
"How much for the whole loaf?" he asked quietly.
Both Mira and the merchant turned. Recognition flickered in her eyes, followed by something that might have been relief.
"Five copper," the vendor said, eyeing Kael with the same disdain he'd shown Mira.
Kael counted his coins. Three copper, two brass bits. Mira wordlessly added her meager handful to his palm—together, they had exactly enough.
The bread was dense, probably a day old, but it was food. Real food. They found space on the cracked rim of an old fountain, its basin filled with debris and broken dreams.
"Your sister?" Mira asked, tearing off a piece of bread.
"Worse." The word came out harder than he'd intended. "Yours?"
"The same." She chewed slowly, making it last. "Naia's got the wasting sickness too. Started three weeks ago."
They ate in companionable silence, two people united by the particular helplessness of watching someone they loved fade away.
"I heard something yesterday," Mira said finally, voice dropping to barely above a whisper. "About a healer. Black market. Supposed to work miracles."
Kael's pulse quickened. "And?"
"And it's probably suicide to even look for them."
But her eyes said she was already considering it anyway.
The park—if it could be called that—occupied a small patch of cracked concrete between two crumbling tenements. Someone had dragged in chunks of scrap metal, old tires, and pieces of broken machinery to create a makeshift playground. Children's laughter echoed off the walls, bright and incongruous in the gray wasteland of the Outer Ring.
Kael and Mira settled on a bench made from a rusted beam and watched a group of kids navigate their improvised jungle gym with the fearless grace of youth.
"Look at them," Mira said, and there was something wistful in her voice. "They don't see the rust or the sharp edges. Just possibilities."
A little girl, maybe seven years old, scrambled up a tower of stacked metal drums with the confidence of a born climber. Golden threads shimmered around her—connections to her friends below, bonds of shared adventure and innocent trust.
'Beautiful,' Kael thought, then froze.
The girl was climbing higher now, reaching for a twisted piece of rebar that jutted from the top drum. Red threads began forming around her small hands, spreading like a web of potential disaster. The metal groaned under her weight.
Kael's hand moved instinctively, reaching out as if he could somehow—
'Stop.'
Lyra's voice echoed in his memory. *Promise me you won't use it unless you absolutely have to.*
His fingers clenched into a fist, and he forced his arm back to his side. The red threads pulsed brighter. The girl's foot slipped.
But she caught herself, laughing as she swung from the rebar like it was all part of the game. Carefully, deliberately, she climbed back down. The red threads faded to nothing.
"You okay?" Mira was watching him with those sharp eyes that missed nothing. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
"Just... worried about the kid," he managed.
She studied his face for a long moment, then seemed to decide not to push. "Sometimes I wonder if we're doing them a disservice," she said instead, nodding toward the children. "Letting them hope like this. Pretending there's a future worth building."
Kael watched a boy help his friend up after a tumble, their golden threads brightening with shared kindness. "Maybe hope is all we have left to give them."
"And maybe that's the cruelest gift of all."
Her words hung in the air like smoke, bitter and true. But watching these children play in their broken paradise, Kael couldn't bring himself to agree.
Not yet.
The maintenance ladder was slick with evening moisture, its metal rungs cold against their palms as they climbed higher into the dying light. Kael's muscles protested each step—another reminder of yesterday's failed run—but the view from the Middle Wall's observation deck was worth the burn.
"Look at that," Mira breathed, settling beside him on the narrow platform.
The Inner City sprawled before them like a constellation fallen to earth. Towers of glass and steel pierced the twilight, their windows beginning to glow with warm electric light. Gardens cascaded down terraced levels, green and lush even from this distance. Clean streets. Working fountains. *Life.*
Behind them lay the Outer Ring—their world of rust and ruin, where children played in rubble and hope came rationed.
"Sometimes I can't decide which view makes me angrier," Mira said, her voice carrying an edge that hadn't been there with the children. "The wasteland that wants to kill us, or the paradise that won't let us in."
Kael's fingers found the railing, gripping until his knuckles went white. 'Tell her.' The thought hammered against his skull like a migraine. 'Tell her about the power. About what you can do.'
But Lyra's face floated in his memory, pale and blood-flecked. *Promise me.*
"You ever wonder what it would take?" Mira continued, unaware of his internal war. "To tear down those walls. To make them see that we're human too."
A distant howl drifted across the wasteland, long and mournful. Something out there in the dark, hunting or dying or both. The sound made Kael's spine crawl, reminded him that the monsters beyond weren't the only threat they faced.
"Power," he said quietly. "It always comes down to power."
"Yeah." Her laugh was bitter as ash. "Sometimes I dream about having that kind of strength. The kind that could change everything." She glanced at him sideways. "What about you, Kael? What would you be willing to sacrifice to save someone you love?"
The question hit like a physical blow. Red threads flickered at the edge of his vision, responding to the spike of emotion before he could suppress them.
'Everything,' he thought. 'I'd sacrifice everything.'
"I don't know," he lied.
The Inner City's lights blazed brighter as full darkness fell, each window a reminder of the life they'd never touch. Beside him, Mira fell silent, lost in dreams of impossible revolution.
Kael closed his eyes and tried not to think about the price of power.
The apartment door creaked open to silence that felt wrong. Too heavy. Too still.
Kael's stomach dropped as he spotted the crumpled cloth beside Lyra's makeshift bed, dark stains telling a story he didn't want to read. His sister sat hunched against the wall, pale as bone, one hand pressed to her mouth.
"Lyra?"
She startled, quickly shoving the bloodied rag behind her back. "You're home early."
'Not early enough.' The red threads around her pulsed brighter now, a crimson web that made his chest tighten. He crossed to her in three quick strides, kneeling beside the bed.
"Let me see."
"It's nothing, just—"
"Let me see the cloth, Lyra."
Her shoulders sagged in defeat. The rag came away from her lips dark and wet, more blood than he'd seen before. Much more. His hands trembled as he took it from her, the fabric warm and sticky between his fingers.
"When did this start?"
"About an hour after you left." Her voice was barely a whisper. "I'm sorry, Kael. I know we can't afford the medicine, and I'm just... I'm such a burden."
The words hit him like a physical blow. 'A burden?' He wanted to laugh, wanted to scream. She was the only thing keeping him human in this cesspit of a world, and she thought she was a *burden*?
"Don't." His voice came out rougher than intended. "Don't ever say that."
He helped her clean up, fetched fresh water, arranged the thin blanket around her shoulders. All the while, those crimson threads writhed and pulsed, growing stronger with each labored breath she took.
"Promise me something," she said suddenly, catching his wrist as he turned to leave. Her grip was weak but desperate. "Whatever you're thinking of doing... whatever crazy plan is brewing in that head of yours... promise me you won't risk yourself. Not for me."
'She knows.' Somehow, she always knew when he was planning something stupid.
"Lyra—"
"Promise me, Kael. I couldn't live with myself if something happened to you because of me."
The red threads flared, responding to his surge of emotion. Soon. Very soon, they'd claim her completely.
"I promise," he lied.
Hours later, after her breathing had finally evened into sleep, Kael sat beside her bed. His finger traced the air where the crimson strands danced, not quite touching, not quite pulling.
"Some promises," he whispered to the darkness, "might be impossible to keep."