The sound of Lucien's footfall echoed through the stone-tiled corridor like a whisper in a silent tomb. Every step felt heavier than the last—not because of fatigue, but because of the weight of everything they'd been carrying since the girl arrived.
Behind him, Crick walked with his head low and hands stuffed into the oversized sleeves of his coat. He looked smaller than usual, and Lucien noticed for the first time how the boy's shoulders never seemed to fully relax.
Back inside the hideout, Zivah stirred slightly in her sleep, curled on the narrow cot in the corner. A soft groan escaped her lips. Lucien glanced back one last time, uncertain.
Crick caught the look. "She'll be fine," he said softly, not entirely convinced himself.
Lucien turned away and nodded. "Let's go."
The city above buzzed with machinery and broken neon, leaking like oil onto the streets. C-lass was never silent. Factories belched heat into the smog-choked sky, their pipes hissing and moaning with age. Rust and metal dust clung to the air like perfume.
They crossed two alleys, ducked under a flickering traffic bridge, and arrived at the building Crick referred to simply as "The Yard."
To Lucien, it looked like an old carcass of something once great—twelve stories of metal scaffolding wrapped in layers of copper nerves and snaking wires. Sparks rained from open circuits above the entrance, where a flickering holoboard still tried to display the logo: TRIGGEN INDUSTRIALS.
As they approached, Crick pulled a tattered ID card from his coat. "Try not to talk too much," he muttered. "You've got the kind of face they'll want to remember."
"That's encouraging," Lucien replied dryly.
Inside, the air was worse. Hot. Thick. Smelled like burning plastic and unwashed steel. Every surface was coated in grime, and the walls were colored in varying shades of grey. A few workers shuffled past them, their eyes dull, breathing through plastic valves patched with duct tape.
Lucien felt a twitch at the base of his neck—nano-pulses from the machines brushing against his skin. The entire facility seemed alive, like it was watching.
"This way." Crick led him down a grated walkway suspended over a dark pit. Below, conveyor belts moved crates of cylindrical bottles—Trigger.
The bottles were thin, made of reinforced polyglass, each filled with a pulsing blue-green liquid. Lucien stared at them, remembering what Crick said about oxygen being the active compound.
So this is what passed for magic here, he thought. Life diluted and sold in bottles.
They reached a door with a corroded sign: INTAKE—TEMP WORKERS ONLY.
Inside was a small square room. A single desk. A woman sat behind it wearing a visor that covered half her face. She didn't look up.
"New recruit?" she asked, voice mechanical, almost rehearsed.
Crick nodded. "Temporary. He'll be tagging with me."
"Name?"
Lucien hesitated. He couldn't use "Tochi." Not here.
"Lucien," he said. "Lucien A..."
He stopped.
Crick shot him a glare.
"Lucien Aven," he finished.
The woman typed something. "Don't die," she said flatly. "Next."
A door hissed open behind her. Crick gestured for him to follow.
They stepped into the factory floor—an endless maze of pipes, gears, shifting steel arms, and moving belts. Sparks showered from above. Hissing machines injected nano-circuits into tiny capsules. Drone-mounted spotlights swept the ground.
"This place…" Lucien murmured, watching a mechanical arm lift a crate the size of a small car and toss it like paper.
"Runs twenty-four-seven," Crick said, already slipping on a mask. "Most of the people here aren't even citizens. They're contracted ghosts. No ID, no rights."
Lucien's mouth was dry. "And you've been working here since you were a kid?"
"Still a kid," Crick muttered. "But yeah."
A whistle blew. Several workers scurried into formation. Crick handed Lucien a mask, a pair of worn gloves, and a stamped ID tag.
"Your job's easy," Crick explained, leading him toward a conveyor line. "Just make sure the nano-injection nozzles don't clog. You'll get sprayed if they do."
"And if I do get sprayed?"
Crick laughed grimly. "You won't die. Not the first time."
Hours passed.
Lucien kept his head low and hands moving. The rhythm was mechanical—lift, wipe, turn, check. The hum of Trigger moved beneath his skin, making his nano-field tick like a second heartbeat.
At some point, he stopped seeing people. They all looked like parts of the factory now—grey clothes, grey expressions, grey routines.
Eventually, Crick nudged him. "Break."
They sat near a busted fan behind a tower of crates. Crick handed him a protein wafer, and they ate in silence.
Lucien looked up through the lattice of wires above them. The sky was still smog-choked. He felt like he hadn't truly breathed since arriving in this world.
"Do you ever think it could change?" he asked suddenly.
Crick paused. "What?"
"This world. The way it works. The Houses. The Church. The Trigger."
Crick shook his head slowly. "You're thinking too much like someone who wasn't born here."
Lucien said nothing, but the words stung.
As their break ended, Crick stood and stretched. "Come on. Next shift's rougher. You'll hate it."
Lucien followed, pocketing the wrapper. But something lingered in his mind—something about the grey, the Trigger, the bottles of diluted life.
He didn't know what it meant yet. But he could feel it. Like a code just beneath the surface of a screen. Like a secret waiting to be decrypted.
And for the first time, he wondered if this place—this factory—was just another gear in something larger.
Something much darker.
The dull thrum of machinery echoed endlessly through the vast interior of the Trigger factory. Metal arms hissed and hissed again, spraying translucent nano-serum into sleek glass containers that slid across conveyor belts like soldiers in a silent war. The floor vibrated under the rhythm of automation, and the air was thick with the scent of molten copper and synthetic oil.
Lucien stood at his post, leaning against a support beam blackened by years of grime and heat. His palms were raw, fingertips dark with the dust of engineered materials. Across from him, Crick wiped his face with a rag that used to be white. Neither spoke for a long while. The factory worked them like it worked its machines—efficiently, and without pause.
"Crick," Lucien finally said, his voice nearly swallowed by the ambient grind of gears, "how did you end up here?"
Crick didn't look at him at first. His eyes stayed fixed on a worker two levels up, narrowly dodging a burst of hot nano-spray. Only when the danger passed did he turn to Lucien.
"I wasn't supposed to be a walker," Crick replied, his voice quieter than usual. "My parents… well, whatever. I was just going to be another cog. Same as most. Work, eat, survive."
Lucien furrowed his brow. "So what changed?"
Crick's eyes darkened. "I saw what happened to people who didn't have a House. No name. No power. They're treated like dirt. Can't even walk the streets without being watched—or worse. A few friends of mine… they got taken during a House round-up. Just because they were unaligned."
Lucien didn't press further. The silence between them tightened, tense and real.
"So you chose to take the Trigger," Lucien said.
Crick nodded. "Didn't want to. But sometimes, it's not about what you want. It's what you need to do to not disappear."
Lucien looked around the factory floor. The others were blurred silhouettes under harsh lighting, indistinguishable and unspeaking.
"I still don't fully get what being a walker means," Lucien admitted. "But I know now—I'll need power to survive here too."
Crick offered a grim smile. "Then you'll need to understand more than just power. You need to understand value." He reached into his coat and pulled out a small pouch. With a flick of his wrist, he spilled a few coins onto the floor between them.
Lucien's eyes went to the strange currency—metallic discs in hues of dark silver, dull blue, and glinting gold. Each bore the sigil of a broken triangle—a symbol Lucien had come to associate with the city.
"This is Nevart," Crick said, crouching beside them. "Our currency. Three grades."
Lucien knelt beside him, interested.
"The dark silver ones," Crick pointed, "those are Quinn. You'll use them for street food, public transport, or renting dirt to sleep in. Ten Quinn makes one Sinn—those are the blue ones. Mid-range coin. Enough for some Trigger doses, cheap cyberware, basic meds."
"And the gold?"
"Kinn. Highest grade of Nevart. One Kinn is ten Sinn. And if you've got a handful of those?" Crick gave a soft whistle. "You can live above the smoke. Buy influence. Maybe even earn a House's attention."
Lucien stared at the gold coin. It was no bigger than a thumbnail, yet Crick's tone gave it the weight of a kingdom.
"I got this?" Lucien asked, blinking.
Crick stood and gestured over his shoulder. "Yeah. After you signed in at the front, I saw one of the cashiers mark your name with a red seal. You're temporary contract. They fronted you twenty Kinn."
Lucien blinked. "That's… that's a lot?"
Crick almost laughed. "It's insane. That's what they give upper-class testers when they need someone to touch unstable prototype tech. You? You're just a new guy."
Lucien's heart ticked faster, but he played it cool. "Why give me that much?"
Crick shrugged. "Maybe someone higher up flagged you. Maybe someone made a mistake."
Or maybe, Lucien thought, this world doesn't recognize that I'm not from it.
He pocketed the coins slowly. Their weight was slight, but what they represented felt immense. He felt the shape of his pocket watch as his fingers brushed past the pouch—its presence grounding him in confusion, memory, and something intangible.
"You're lucky," Crick said. "With that, you could buy shelter for months, real food, a proper mask, even a diagnostic at one of the better labs to see what kind of walker channel your body leans toward."
Lucien looked at him sideways. "How do you know so much?"
"I've been poor long enough to dream about what I'd do with money."
There was no sarcasm in Crick's voice. Just weary truth.
Lucien clutched the pouch tightly. "Then let's not waste time."
Crick looked at him, confused.
"Let's go shopping," Lucien said with a smirk.
The hallway leading to the chamber shimmered with veins of fire beneath black obsidian tiles. Each step echoed like a whisper between gods, rippling down the perfectly symmetrical corridor lined with golden sigils and ancient emblems. At the end of the corridor stood a door—not one of steel or wood, but one shaped from an obsidian monolith, carved with a single word:
"Law."
It melted open with no sound.
Inside, the chamber was more than a room—it was a declaration. A circular table hovered in the air, untethered by any visible support, polished to such clarity that it reflected the ceiling's constellation-like etchings. The air shimmered faintly from the heat of the torches embedded in crystalline sockets on each wall. It was beauty veiled in menace. Ancient. Absolute.
Four chairs, already occupied.
Four figures.
Two were elder men. Their faces were carved by time, not aged by it. The woman looked barely twenty-five, yet her silver eyes were still, as if untouched by youth. And the fourth was a man no older than twenty, lounging back with an air of careless boredom, cracking his knuckles with an audible pop.
The oldest man, dressed in golden-black robes stitched with runes in a forgotten language, broke the silence.
"It's all going according to plan," he said, voice calm, slow. "But it's too smooth. Things are always more dangerous when they go too smooth."
The second elder leaned forward, his fingers gliding across the surface of the floating table. His touch activated a glowing map—cities, military routes, names flickered to life in miniature. "Lucien Adrek," he said quietly. "That is our only anomaly."
The young man in his twenties laughed aloud.
"Heeeee?" he dragged the sound, resting his chin in his palm. "You're worried about some kid from a Mid-Class House? You even sent someone to kill him. Sounds like overkill, don't you think?"
He tapped the table twice, zooming in on a district called C-Lass.
The woman didn't speak. She only observed.
The first elder turned slowly toward the youth, his gold eyes narrowing. "It's not him I fear," he said, enunciating each word with surgical precision. "It's his bloodline. His father…"
He paused.
Even the flames seemed to bend toward his mouth, as though the fire itself awaited the name.
Then, like a stone dropped in a lake, the words fell.
"Titan Adrek."
The room dimmed. The table's glow flickered. The torches bent sideways.
A wind that had no source, no right to exist in a sealed chamber, blew across their necks.
The young man sat upright, suddenly expressionless. The woman finally blinked.
The second elder closed the map with a single wave.
No one said another word.
The room, full of powerful beings, had become still.
And far, far away in another part of the world, Lucien Adrek sneezed.