Kota woke to the slow drip of water in the ceiling pipes and the dull ache in his right shoulder.
For a moment he lay still and just breathed, listening. Four days ago, every inhale had felt like a knife digging under his skin. Now the pain was different—heavy and throbbing instead of sharp, like someone had left a hot stone lodged beneath the bandages.
He flexed his fingers experimentally. The movement tugged at the muscles in his arm. Pain flared, then settled again.
Manageable.
He pushed himself upright, careful not to use his right arm for leverage, and glanced down at his shoulder. The bandage was still in place, wrapped snugly over skin that felt hot but not fresh-wet. No dark patches of new blood had seeped through in the night.
He unwrapped the top layer just enough to look.
The gash had pulled together into an ugly, swollen line, held shut with Yuki's small, tight stitches. The skin around it was red and tender, but the edges were closed—no gaping flesh, no raw gap. A faint smell of bitter herbs lingered from the paste she'd packed inside.
He'd seen enough untreated slum wounds to know that without that paste, this cut would be festering by now.
Inner-district medicine, he thought. Marcus must have traded half a month's work for that.
He let the bandage fall back into place and exhaled slowly.
I need to thank her.
Kota swung his legs off the bed and stood. His body moved through his morning routine by habit—wash, teeth, clothes—but with a new layer of caution. He tested the limits of his arm with each motion, learning what angles hurt and which felt safe. Raising his arm above shoulder height pulled at the stitches like hooked wire. Reaching forward too fast made his vision tighten.
He didn't push it.
By the time he headed for the stairs, the ache had settled into a steady, pulsing presence. Not gone. Just… part of him.
The narrow staircase creaked under his feet. Downstairs, the familiar scent of thin tea and nutrient paste drifted from the tiny kitchen.
Yuki stood at the stove, stirring a pot, her hair tied back in a loose knot. The light from the small window made the lines at the corners of her eyes look deeper than usual.
She turned at the sound of his steps.
"Morning, Kota," she said, and there was a quiet warmth in her voice. Her gaze dropped automatically to his shoulder. "How is it?"
"Still ugly," he said. "But better."
She came closer and studied the bandage. Satisfied that it was clean and dry, she gave a small nod.
"Good," she said. "Sit. You should eat before Marcus finds an excuse to work you to death."
Kota pulled out a chair and lowered himself into it. The movement tugged along his right side, but he hid the wince.
He glanced at the other chair—the one usually occupied by Aisha. Empty. No books scattered on the table. No half-drunk cup of tea.
"Where's Aisha?" he asked.
Yuki turned back to the stove. "Out."
He frowned. "Out where?"
Yuki's mouth twitched, like she was fighting between amusement and worry.
"She left early," she said. "Before you woke up. She told me she had to pick something up before tonight."
He blinked once. "Tonight?"
Yuki slid a bowl in front of him and placed a cup of tea by his hand.
"Your birthday, Kota," she reminded him gently. "You'll be fifteen at sundown tomorrow. She's been whispering over her plans for days. I think half the reason she volunteered to do more housework was so I wouldn't question why she was saving credits."
Kota looked down at the bowl. The paste inside was the same grayish nutrient block they'd always had—thinned with hot water, barely masked by a sprinkle of cheap flavoring. The smell was as foul as ever.
He picked up the spoon anyway.
"She doesn't need to do that," he said. "It's just another day."
"Try telling her that," Yuki said dryly. "In her head, you're not allowed to die and you're not allowed to pretend your birthday doesn't matter."
A faint image flashed in his mind—Aisha standing by the table, eyes wet, insisting he couldn't die before turning fifteen.
The corner of his mouth lifted.
"Has she been gone long?" he asked.
"Since early morning," Yuki said. "She said she'd be back by afternoon." A brief pause. "It's still morning, Kota. Don't start pacing yet."
He forced himself to nod and take a bite.
The paste coated his tongue like chalk and oil. He chewed, swallowed, and chased it with tea.
Yuki sat opposite him with her own bowl.
"After you eat, you can go to Marcus," she said. "But no heavy lifting, no climbing, and no running off to 'just take a look' at any more abandoned warehouses."
"I hear you," Kota said.
"Good." She gave him a look that said she expected him to actually listen. "I put a bit more of the paste on your wound before you went to sleep. It's not cheap. Don't waste it by tearing yourself open again."
He finished his breakfast, rinsed his bowl, and shrugged on his jacket carefully, easing it over his injured shoulder. The fabric caught once on the bandage; he grimaced, then adjusted it.
On the landing, he paused.
"Yuki?" he said.
She glanced up from where she'd started sorting laundry.
"Thank you," he said simply.
She smiled, small but real. "You can thank me by coming back in one piece today."
He nodded once and stepped out into the slum's damp morning.
—
The walk to Marcus's workshop took him past the same cracked walls and leaning structures he'd seen his whole life, but four days away from the dark boundary had made the central slum feel almost… safe. There were more people here. More noise. Kids chasing each other between stacked containers. Vendors arguing over bad produce. The distant clang of tools against metal.
He adjusted the strap of his jacket and kept his eyes moving out of habit, mapping exits, noting shadows, checking corners.
When he reached the workshop, sparks flared from the open doorway in quick bursts of orange, lighting the puddles outside.
Kota stepped inside.
Marcus stood where he always seemed to stand—broad back hunched over a worktable, welding mask down, torch in hand. The half-disassembled frame of some old transport rig lay in pieces around him, cables spilling like metal vines.
The hiss of the torch cut off as Marcus finished his seam. He flipped the mask up and glanced toward the door.
His face cracked into a grin.
"You're not late," he said. "I must be getting soft."
"You say that every time I'm on time," Kota replied.
Marcus snorted and wiped a gloved hand on his apron.
"How's the shoulder?" he asked.
"Better," Kota said. "Yuki says I still have to act like it's made of glass."
"For once, listen to her," Marcus said.
Kota's eyes flicked to the side. The copper spools he'd risked his life for were stacked neatly in a corner, now partially unwound and feeding into some complex assembly. Seeing them there, put to use, made the pain of the last days feel… not justified, but less pointless.
Marcus followed his gaze.
"Those already paid," he said. "You don't owe me anything else for them. Today, I've got something different for you."
Kota straightened instinctively.
"What kind of different?" he asked.
Marcus reached under the main table and pulled out a small, worn sack. The faint clink from inside was unmistakable.
"City work," Marcus said. "Inside the boundary. I need parts I can't salvage from trash."
He tossed the sack lightly. Kota caught it with his left hand. It was heavier than it looked.
"Credits?" Kota asked.
"Don't flash that around," Marcus said. "Inner district vendors will take your money and your shoes if you look lost."
Kota loosened the string enough to glance inside. Thin metal chits with stamped numbers glinted faintly. More than he usually saw in a week.
"What am I buying?" he asked.
Marcus used a piece of chalk to scrawl a list on a scrap of sheet metal.
"Two low-grade resonance orbs," he said. "Legit ones. Not cracked, not from some roadside scammer." Another line. "Three sheets of mid-grade steel. The kind that doesn't fold if you breathe on it."
Kota nodded, committing the list to memory.
"Which shops?" he asked.
"There's a place near the inner transit loop," Marcus said. "Sign says 'Pryt's Resonant Supply.' Old man behind the counter. Grumpy, but he won't cheat you if you look him in the eye. For the steel, the yard two blocks east of that. They'll know me."
He paused, then added, "Keep the sack inside your jacket. Hands in your pockets when you're not paying. And if anyone starts a fight—"
"Run," Kota finished.
"Good," Marcus said. "You're not paid enough to be brave today."
The inner district always felt like another world.
The path there took Kota past the semi-legal markets, then under a pair of leaning concrete arches where faded paint still tried to pretend they were security checkpoints. Beyond that, the buildings grew taller and less patched. Windows had glass instead of tarp. Doors had proper hinges instead of rope.
The air smelled different here too—less like rust and rot, more like oil, exhaust, and too many people in one space.
Domain patrols passed now and then: figures in dark uniforms with visible weapons and the sleek, stamped insignias of power on their shoulders. Kota kept his eyes down when they walked by, making himself small without looking like he was trying to disappear.
He found Pryt's shop by the flickering sign above the door, half the letters dead.
Inside, shelves sagged under rows of small glass and metal spheres—resonance orbs of varying sizes and colors. The air buzzed faintly, a low-thrum under the ambient noise. A coil-haired man with a scar along his jaw sat behind the counter, tinkering with a broken stabilizer.
Kota approached with careful confidence.
"Two low-grade orbs," he said, placing the credits on the counter. "Untuned. No cracks."
The man squinted at him, then at the money, then at his bandaged shoulder.
"You Marcus's boy?" he asked.
Kota hesitated. "I work for him."
The man grunted. "You look like something tried to eat you."
"Something tried," Kota said.
That earned him a faint snort.
The shopkeeper selected two dull-glass spheres from a lower shelf, inspected them, then set them down with a dull clink.
"Tell Marcus he still owes me a bottle," he said.
Kota nodded, tucked the orbs carefully into his inner pocket, and headed to the steel yard.
By the time he finished negotiating for mid-grade sheets—checking thickness, listening to the way they rang when tapped, making sure the seller didn't slip in cheaper scrap—the sun had shifted. The sky visible through the cracks between buildings had brightened, then dipped slightly toward afternoon.
He caught glimpses of posters nailed to walls as he walked back—Domain announcements, Sagacity Academy notices, warnings in bold red text:
UNSTABLE ZONES NEAR OUTER BOUNDARY
AVOID MARKED AREAS
DOMAIN PATROLS IN EFFECT
He didn't slow down to read the details.
It was almost half a day later when Kota pushed open the workshop door again, arms tired but manageable, shoulder throbbing in a way that felt less like injury and more like a reminder.
Marcus looked up from a pile of cables, eyed the resonance orbs in Kota's hand and the steel stacked under his arm, and nodded.
"Good," he said. "No cracks. No rust. You listen when I talk, after all."
He took the materials and set them on a clear stretch of table, his movements already shifting into the focused rhythm of work.
"Want me to stay?" Kota asked. "Help with wiring?"
Marcus shook his head.
"Not today," he said. "Go home. Rest that shoulder. Let Yuki complain that I'm overworking you. I'll take the blame."
Kota hesitated. Home meant food. It meant Yuki. It meant—
Aisha.
He glanced at the high, grimy workshop windows. The light coming through them had moved further west. Late afternoon now, edging toward evening.
"She should be back by afternoon," Yuki had said.
"Alright," Kota said. "I'll come by tomorrow if you need me."
Marcus grunted. "I always need you. That's not changing."
Kota allowed himself a small smile, then headed out.
—
The house felt too quiet the moment he stepped inside.
The faint smell of cooked grain and boiled tea lingered, but there was no hum of Aisha's voice from the main room, no rustle of pages turning.
Yuki stood at the counter, hands moving automatically as she chopped something into a bowl. Her shoulders were a little too stiff.
She looked up as he entered.
"You're back," she said. "How was the inner district?"
"Crowded," Kota said. "Marcus got what he needed." He glanced around. "Is Aisha in her room?"
Yuki's knife paused for a heartbeat before continuing.
"No," she said. "Not yet. She should have been back by now."
Something in Kota's chest went cold.
"She left this morning," he said. "It's almost evening."
"I know," Yuki said, and now the worry was no longer hiding in her voice. "She said she was just going to pick something up and come straight back. I told her to stay away from the boundary."
Kota set his jaw.
"Did she say where?" he asked. "Which direction?"
"No specifics," Yuki said. "Just 'errands.' You know how she is when she thinks she's planning a surprise."
He did know.
He also knew that the slums didn't care about anyone's plans.
"I'll go look," he said.
"Kota—" Yuki started.
"I'm just asking around," he said quickly. "I won't go far. I'll bring her back before dinner."
Yuki hesitated, then nodded once, looking as if she'd aged in the last few hours.
"Be careful," she said. "If you see Domain patrols heading somewhere, you go the other way."
He slipped back outside.
The first people he went to were the ones who always saw everything: the noodle vendor at the corner stall, the scrap dealer three doors down, the old man who spent his days on a crate watching the flow of traffic as if it were a play staged just for him.
"Seen Aisha today?" Kota asked, over and over.
"Not since yesterday."
"She bought bread in the morning, that's all."
"She was carrying a bag, looked excited," someone said. "Didn't say where she was going."
He kept moving.
The sky slipped a little lower. Shadows stretched.
He found the answer from an older woman sitting on a crate near the edge of one of the main lanes, her hair more gray than black, eyes sharp despite the wrinkles around them.
"Aisha?" the woman repeated, frowning. "Smith girl, always talking too fast?"
"Yes," Kota said. "Blond hair, always holding a book. Did you see where she went?"
The woman nodded slowly.
"Passed by a few hours ago," she said. "Had that look."
"What look?" Kota asked.
"The one young fools get when they've already decided what they're going to do, and no one's going to talk them out of it," the woman said. "She was heading toward the boundary. Near that old transit station Marcus keeps telling people to avoid."
Kota froze.
The dark area.
The same general direction as the warehouse. The same part of the slums where the air felt wrong.
"Alone?" he asked, his voice suddenly dry.
"Looked that way," the woman said. She squinted at him. "Is she in trouble?"
"She will be if she's still there," Kota said.
He ran.
His shoulder complained immediately, each jarring step sending a hot line of pain through the bandages. He ignored it. The sounds of the slums blurred into a dull background roar—shouts, clanging metal, distant laughter.
He didn't head straight for the boundary.
He veered toward Marcus's workshop.
The door slammed open under his hand.
Marcus looked up, startled, from where he was bending metal into place.
"Kota?" he said. "What—"
"Aisha's missing," Kota said, the words tumbling out fast. "She went out this morning. Yuki thought it was for my birthday. She hasn't come back."
Marcus's face drained of color.
"What do you mean, 'missing'?" he asked, voice suddenly very quiet.
Kota forced himself to slow down enough to make sense.
"Yuki said she left early to get something for my birthday," he said. "Said she'd be back by afternoon. She's not. No one's seen her since morning except—"
He swallowed.
"An old woman near Lane Six says she saw Aisha heading toward the boundary. Near the old transit station you keep telling people to avoid."
The workshop felt smaller all at once, the walls too close, the air too thin.
Marcus set his tools down very carefully. Each piece clicked against the table with controlled precision. His hands shook anyway.
"Of course she did," he muttered. "Stubborn, reckless—"
He broke off.
His gaze snapped to Kota's bandaged shoulder.
"You are not going after her," he said. "You're still half-stitched together. I'll go. I know those paths. You stay here with Yuki in case she comes back another way."
"No," Kota said immediately.
It wasn't defiance for the sake of it. The word tore out of him before he could file it down.
Marcus's eyes narrowed.
"Kota—"
"I know that area," Kota pushed on. "I was just there. I know which warehouses are collapsed, which streets dead-end, where the ground's unstable. If she went toward the old transit station, there are only a few routes she could've taken."
"And every one of them is dangerous," Marcus snapped. "Exactly why you're staying here."
"You can't search all of them alone," Kota said. "You know that. And if something's wrong with the dark zone—if it's changed—I can tell you where I felt it. You think I'll sit here and wait while you both vanish into that place?"
His voice cracked on the last word. He hated how raw it sounded.
Marcus flinched, just a little.
For a moment, the older man's face was caught between two instincts—the urge to shield and the knowledge that he couldn't be everywhere at once.
"You're still a child," he said, but without heat.
"So is she," Kota said. "And she's out there by herself."
The silence that followed was heavy.
Marcus looked away first.
He walked to the back of the workshop, to a cluttered corner Kota had always assumed was just piled scrap and old projects. He knelt, shifted aside a crate, and pulled something long and wrapped in oil-stained cloth from beneath the table.
"Was going to wait until your birthday," he said quietly. "Figure there's no point in waiting now."
He brought it over and set it on the cleared part of the table. With careful fingers, he unwrapped the cloth.
A sword lay inside.
Not the sleek, balanced kind wealthy Domain fighters carried, but a solid, ugly thing made from the best parts Marcus could salvage. The blade was a long, single-edged strip of mid-grade steel, sharpened along one side and slightly curved from careful heating and hammering. The guard was simple. The grip was wrapped in tightly wound leather, darkened by oil.
It wasn't pretty.
It looked like it wanted to cut something and survive doing it.
Kota stared.
"You made this?" he asked.
Marcus snorted. "You think I bought that for you?"
"When?" Kota asked.
"After you came back from the warehouse," Marcus said. "After I saw what that beast did to your shoulder with you unarmed. I told myself if you were going to keep being an idiot, you'd at least have steel in your hand next time."
He picked up the sword, tested the balance once, then held it out, hilt-first.
Kota hesitated only a heartbeat before reaching for it with his left hand. The weight settled into his palm, heavier than any scrap metal he'd used as a makeshift weapon before, but… right, somehow. Honest.
The bandages on his right shoulder pulled as he adjusted his stance. Pain flared, bright and immediate.
He didn't let go.
Marcus watched his face.
"You swing that with the wrong arm, you'll rip yourself open," he said. "Left-handed or not at all."
"Left-handed," Kota said.
Marcus nodded once.
He crossed to a peg on the wall and grabbed a worn, reinforced coat—patched in too many places, but with proper plating sewn under the fabric at shoulders and chest. He shrugged into it, then looped a heavy tool harness over his torso, slots filled with wrenches, cutters, and one thick metal rod ground to a blunt spike.
He looked, for a moment, less like a workshop owner and more like someone who'd once walked into bad places on purpose.
Marcus turned back to Kota.
"You listen to me when we're out there," he said. "You don't run ahead. You don't play hero. You watch the ground, the walls, the sky. If I say run, you run. If I say hide, you hide. If something goes wrong, you don't argue—you move."
Kota met his eyes.
"I will," he said. "But we bring her back."
Marcus's jaw clenched.
"We bring her back," he agreed.
He grabbed a small, dented lantern from a hook by the door, checked the charge, then nodded to himself.
"Let's go before the light dies entirely," he said.
They stepped out of the workshop together.
The slum air hit them—damp, carrying the end-of-day chill and the low murmur of voices winding down into evening. Somewhere far off, a siren wailed once, then cut out. The sky between the stacked buildings had gone from gray to bruised purple, clouds hanging low.
Marcus turned toward the boundary without needing to think about the route. Kota fell in at his side, the makeshift sword held low in his left hand, point angled toward the ground. Every jostle of his shoulder reminded him how recently he'd been cut open.
He ignored it.
They passed the last of the busy lanes and the noise thinned, replaced by longer stretches of silence between sounds. The buildings grew more broken, more skeletal. Warning signs appeared on leaning posts, their paint half-gone but their meaning clear.
UNSAFE ZONE
NO DOMAIN RESPONSE GUARANTEED
Marcus didn't slow.
Kota glanced once over his shoulder.
The workshop lights were still visible in the distance, a small, warm glow against the encroaching dark. The only safe place he'd ever lived.
He turned away from it.
Ahead, the mouth of the dark area waited—an expanse of leaning concrete, twisted rails, and shadowed gaps where whole walls had fallen away. The old transit station's broken archway rose like a jagged tooth against the dim sky.
Marcus lifted the lantern.
Its pale light barely pushed back the darkness.
"Stay close," he said.
Kota tightened his grip on the sword and stepped with him into the boundary's shadow, the slums falling away behind them as the air turned heavy and wrong.
The dark swallowed their silhouettes.
And somewhere out there, in that shifting quiet, Aisha hadn't come home.