The dim glow of their salvaged light flickered against the corrugated metal walls of their makeshift shelter, casting shadows that danced like little fireflies. The purification glyph pulsed weakly at the ceiling, its intricate patterns glowing a faint blue as it sieves pollution from the air. Every few minutes, the spell stuttered, its energy consumption sure is high but at least they got to breathe normally without the use of a gas mask.
Lucent hunched over his device, his fingers moving with practiced precision as he pried open the casing. The screen was cracked, the glyph-compiler overheating after he'd pushed it too hard during their work. Again. He wiped the sweat with the back of his hand across his forehead, smearing grease and sweat as he realigned the frayed Aether filaments.
Across from him, Kai mimicked his movements with far less grace. The kid's brow furrowed as he fumbled with a soldering tool, the tip glowing orange in the dim light. His salvaged Conduit, also patchwork of scavenged parts, whined in protest as he attempted to recompile a basic Flashburn glyph. The spell fizzled, the screen flashing red before going dark.
"You're overloading the regulator," Lucent muttered without looking up. "Ease off the power draw before the compiler fries itself."
Kai exhaled sharply through his nose, his fingers tightening around the device. "It's not responding like it should. The syntax is correct, but the output—"
"Syntax doesn't mean shit if your hardware's garbage." Lucent tossed a spare capacitor at him. It landed with a clatter, rolling to a stop against Kai's knee. "Swap this in. And stop treating it like a Spire toy. It's not gonna hold your hand."
Kai's jaw clenched, but he didn't argue. He picked up the capacitor, turning it over in his hands before slotting it into place. The Conduit sputtered back to life, the screen flickering weakly. A small victory, but in the Junkyard, those were the only kind that mattered.
Silence settled between them, broken only by the distant groan of settling metal and the occasional skitter of Glowmites across the floor. Outside, the perpetual twilight of the Junkyard deepened, the smog-choked sky bleeding from bruised purple to an oily black.
Then Kai spoke, his voice quieter than Lucent expected.
"You know this place."
It wasn't a question.
Lucent's fingers stilled. He didn't look up.
"The tunnels. The Scrapheap. Rena." Kai's gaze was fixed on him now, sharp despite the exhaustion lining his face. "You didn't just pass through here. You lived here."
The air between them thickened. Lucent could feel the weight of the kid's curiosity, the unspoken questions pressing against his ribs like a knife. He exhaled slowly, his thumb brushing the old glyph-burns scarring his knuckles.
"Everyone comes from somewhere," he said at last, his voice rough.
Kai didn't back down. "Rena knows you. Not just as a client. She knows you." His fingers tightened around his Conduit. "And you didn't flinch when Nex came for you. You knew that fight before it started."
Lucent finally lifted his head, meeting Kai's stare. The kid's eyes were bloodshot, his cheek still bruised from their last scrape, but there was a stubbornness there—a refusal to look away.
For a long moment, neither of them moved.
Then Lucent returned to his tinkering, the soldering tool hissing as it sealed a fractured connection. "Finish your glyph," he said, the words final. "We move at dawn."
Kai opened his mouth—to protest, to push—but something in Lucent's expression stopped him. The silence stretched, thin as a wire, until the kid finally looked away, his fingers resuming their work.
Outside, the Junkyard exhaled, its rusted bones creaking in the dark. Somewhere in the distance, a mag-lev train screamed on broken tracks—a sound like something wounded.
Lucent didn't speak again.
But the past lingered in the spaces between his breaths, in the way his shoulders tensed at the echo of Nex's laughter, in the ghost of a name he hadn't spoken in years.
And Kai, for all his ignorance, was starting to see the shape of it.
***
The morning light bled through the smog in weak, greasy streaks, painting the mountains of scrap metal in shades of rust and decay. Lucent sat on the rusted remains of a car, the cold metal beneath him even piercing through his worn jacket. In his hands, a protein brick—barely edible, but it was food. He tore off a chunk with his teeth, chewing mechanically, the taste like salted sawdust. Across from him, Kai picked at his own meal with far less enthusiasm, his fingers twitching every few seconds toward the salvaged Conduit resting beside him.
Three days.
That's how long they'd waited for Raker's reply. Three days of watching their backs, of jumping at every distant drone whine, of sleeping in shifts in whatever wreck they could find. Three days of wondering if Nimbrix's Black Units were already closing in.
The problem gnawing at Lucent wasn't just the wait - it was the fact he couldn't do his own digging. His Conduit, patched together from scrap and desperation, might as well have been a beacon for any corporate's scanner. Even booting up a basic search protocol would leave traces, and traces meant a death sentence.
The Conduit buzzed.
Both of them froze.
Lucent didn't react outwardly, but his muscles coiled tight as he wiped his hands on his thighs and reached for the device. The cracked screen flickered to life, displaying a single line of text in Raker's signature jagged font:
>> You're a lucky bastard.
Kai stiffened, his breath catching. Lucent ignored him, fingers tapping out a reply.
>> Explain.
The response came almost instantly.
>> Nimbrix Black Units have no tag on you. Warehouse got written off as a gas leak—no glyph traces, no manhunt. You slipped the net.
A slow exhale escaped Lucent's lips. He hadn't realized he'd been holding his breath.
Lucent's fingers tightened around the device. This didn't make sense. He'd rawcasted in that warehouse, burned through protections with enough Aether discharge to light up half the district. There should have been traces. There should have been hunters.
Kai leaned forward, his voice hushed. "What does it say?"
Lucent tossed him the Conduit. "Read it yourself."
The urge to dig deeper itched under his skin, but he knew better. Without a proper partition rig, without the layered encryption of a GhostKey terminal, any search would be suicide. He was blind, forced to rely on secondhand intel.
Kai's eyes darted across the screen, widening slightly before he looked up, disbelief etched across his face. "How is that possible? The whole warehouse is the clue. There should've been traces—"
"Maybe their scanners glitched," Lucent muttered, though the words tasted hollow even to him. Nimbrix didn't glitch. Not when it came to breaches. Not when it came to deep level information.
The Conduit buzzed again.
Kai nearly dropped it in his haste to hand it back. Lucent snatched it, his gaze locking onto the new message.
>> Don't get cocky. They might not know it was you, but they do know someone cracked their Eclipse files. And that's a problem bigger than you.
Lucent's jaw tightened. He typed one-handed, his other hand curling into a fist against his thigh.
>> Who else is looking?
The pause that followed was long enough that Lucent almost thought Raker had cut contact. Then—
>> GhostKey's whispering about a new player. Someone burning through black partitions like they're hunting ghosts. No tags, no trails. Just a lot of dead ends.
A cold weight settled in Lucent's gut. He knew that kind of work. Knew the kind of people who operated without leaving footprints.
Kai was watching him, his fingers drumming nervously against his knee. "What?"
Lucent didn't answer immediately. His gaze drifted past Kai, toward the distant spires of Neo-Tokyo, their gleaming peaks piercing the smog like needles. Someone was out there. Someone else who wasn't Nimbrix, wasn't corporate, but was digging into us all the same.
And that was worse.
The Conduit buzzed one last time.
>> You didn't hear it from me, but if I were you? I'd stay off the Undernet for a while.
The screen went dark.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The Junkyard's usual symphony of groaning metal and distant machinery filled the silence, underscored by the ever-present hum of the nodes pulse.
Then Lucent stood, his boots crunching on broken glass as he stretched the stiffness from his limbs. "We've got breathing room," he said, his voice low. "For now."
Kai scrambled to his feet, his Conduit clutched tight. "That's it? That's all you're going to say?"
Lucent shot him a look. "What do you want me to say? That we're safe? We're not. That this is over? It's not." He jerked his chin toward the maze of scrap ahead. "We move. We stay sharp. And we don't get comfortable."
Kai opened his mouth—to argue, to demand more—but Lucent was already walking, his silhouette cutting through the haze like a blade.
Breathing room never lasted long in the Junkyard.
And whatever, whoever, was hunting in the dark wouldn't stay distracted forever.
***
The narrow alley between two collapsed storage units reeked of scorched metal and something far worse—the acrid, sweet-rot stench of Hollowed remains. Kai was thankful for the new gas mask as he doesn't gag anymore as he wiped blackened gore from his boots, the viscous fluid clinging stubbornly to the leather. His hands trembled slightly, the adrenaline of the fight still coursing through him.
"Another one," he muttered, voice tight. "That's the third this week."
Lucent didn't look up from where he was prying a half-melted Aether battery from the creature's chest cavity. His knife made wet, sticky sounds as he worked. "Pay's the same whether it's tech retrieval or pest control."
Kai kicked a twisted piece of plating, sending it clattering across the broken concrete. "We're glorified exterminators. Is this what you do now? Scrape by cleaning up Junkyard filth?"
The knife stilled. Lucent's shoulders tensed beneath his frayed jacket, but when he spoke, his voice was dangerously calm. "You got a better idea, Spire brat? You want to waltz into a corpo enclave and ask for your old job back?"
"I want to do something that matters," Kai shot back, his voice cracking. He gestured at the smoldering corpse. "This isn't getting us any closer to—"
"To what?" Lucent stood abruptly, wiping his blade on his thigh. The fading light caught the fresh glyph-burns lacing his knuckles. "You still think there's some grand play here? Some way back to your gilded towers?" He barked a laugh that held no humor. "Wake the hell up. This is the work now. This keeps us fed. Keeps us alive."
Kai's jaw clenched. He looked down at his own hands—still too clean despite the grime, the nails unbroken, the skin uncalloused. Hands that had never known real labor until the Junkyard.
Lucent shoved the salvaged battery into his pack with more force than necessary. "You don't like the jobs? Fine. Next time Rena offers a retrieval gig in the old mag-lev tunnels, you can take point. See how long you last against the Dripfeeders down there."
The image rose unbidden—pale, gelatinous masses clinging to the ceiling, their translucent bodies pulsing with stolen charge. Kai had heard stories. The way they dropped onto unsuspecting scavengers, dissolving flesh as they fed.
A beat of silence. Somewhere in the distance, metal groaned as the Junkyard settled deeper into its own decay.
Kai exhaled sharply through his nose. "I didn't mean—"
"Yeah. You did." Lucent shouldered his pack, the movement pulling at the fresh claw marks across his ribs. "But here's the truth you're too scared to swallow—down here, survival is the job. Every damn day."
He turned away, boots crunching on broken glass as he headed for the alley's mouth. The setting sun painted his silhouette in shades of rust.
Kai stood amidst the wreckage, the Hollowed's corpse cooling at his feet. The weight of Lucent's words settled over him, heavy as the smog-choked sky.
In the Spires, he'd been someone. Down here?
He was just another rat in the maze.
With a last glance at the dead thing's milky, dead eyes, Kai followed Lucent into the dark.
He barely had time to take two steps before the air itself warped.
A sound like tearing metal shrieked from the alley behind them—not the usual groan of settling scrap, but something wetter, like a slop. Lucent spun, his knife already in hand, but Kai froze mid-step, his breath catching in his throat.
The Hollowed's corpse was moving.
Not the twitch of residual nerves. Not the shudder of cooling meat.
It rearranged itself.
Blackened flesh split like overripe fruit as new limbs pushed through—too many, too long, the bones beneath cracking and reforming with a sound like snapping cables. The thing's spine arched violently, vertebrae popping as it twisted onto all fours, its milky eyes now shot through with veins of luminous blue.
Kai's Conduit slipped from numb fingers, clattering to the ground. "That's—that's not possible—"
Lucent didn't hesitate. His blade flashed out, carving a deep gash across the thing's throat. Black fluid bubbled forth—and then stopped, the wound knitting itself shut before their eyes, the flesh rippling like liquid metal.
The Hollowed's head snapped up.
Its mouth unhinged, jaw splitting down the middle with a wet crack, and it screamed—a sound that wasn't sound at all but a vibration that set Kai's teeth rattling, that made the rusted walls around them shiver.
Lucent grabbed Kai's arm hard enough to bruise. "Run!"
The last thing Kai saw before they rounded the corner was the thing stretching, its limbs elongating, its eyes instantly locking onto them with terrible, knowing focus.
And then they were sprinting through the Junkyard's skeletal remains, the thing's unnatural shrieks echoing behind them, getting closer with every ragged breath.