Tomorrow, I will be sensible.
But tonight, as I climb the narrow stairs to my apartment above the bakery, I carry the memory of his startled eyes with me, and I cannot shake the feeling that some people are not strangers because they want to be.
Some people are strangers because the world taught them it was safer that way.
CHAPTER 2
KAUSS
Halo breathes differently after midnight.
Aboveground, Vedder City wears its decay in neon, rust, rainwater, and bravado. Down here, beneath the cracked streets and collapsing civic pride, the city has no vanity left. The old flood drainage system smells of brine, wet concrete, mold, overheated wiring, stale smoke, and the sour human desperation that sinks into places where sunlight does not reach. Water runs in thin silver threads along the curved tunnel walls, clicking through rusted grates and pooling in shallow depressions where rats drink beside discarded injector caps. Somewhere far overhead, a freight hauler grinds through the harbor district, and the vibration travels down through the old support columns until the tunnel ceiling hums against the ridges of my skull.
I move through the dark without a light.
Vakutan eyes do not require much. The tunnel is a map of gray shapes, heat traces, and familiar hazards. A broken pipe hangs low near the third bend. Someone left a crate of spoiled protein packs too close to the west drain. The old service ladder at the maintenance junction will collapse if a full-grown manputs weight on it, and I outweigh most full-grown men by enough to make the ladder’s opinion irrelevant.
A child coughs behind a curtain made from cargo tarp. The sound is wet, persistent, and too small.
I stop.
The mother hears me stop and goes still on the other side of the tarp. Fear has a rhythm. It changes breathing first, then heartbeat, then the tiny involuntary movements people make when they decide whether running will save them. Hers says she has no energy left to run and no weapon worth trusting.
“It is me,” I say.
The tarp shifts. A narrow face appears, pale in the dark, eyes hollow with exhaustion. Maren has been down here nine days. She says her husband will come back for her and the boy once his dock contract clears. Men who intend to come back do not usually leave their families in old drainage tunnels, but I have not said that to her. Hope is a ration people spend carefully down here. I do not steal it unless there is a reason.
“Kauss,” she whispers, pressing one hand over her chest. “Sorry. I didn’t know.”
I crouch because standing at my full height in front of frightened people helps no one. The concrete is damp beneath my boots, and the old ache in my left knee flares when I bend. Horus IV left me many gifts. The knee is among the least interesting.
“The boy is worse,” I say.
“He’s fine.” She says it too quickly.
The child coughs again, proving his mother a liar.
I reach into the inner pocket of my coat and withdraw a sealed packet of fever tabs from the clinic dispensary three districts over. They are not stolen. Not exactly. The clinic had an unsecured donation box, and I had a practical understanding of need.
Maren stares at the packet. “I can’t pay.”
“I did not ask.”
“I’ll owe you.”
“No.”
Her fingers tremble when she takes the medicine. Pride fights gratitude across her face, and gratitude wins because pride cannot lower a child’s fever.
“Thank you,” she says.
I nod once and stand before she can say more. Thanks have weight. Too much of it bends the spine if a man stands still under it.
A voice drifts from farther down the tunnel. “Big bastard’s making rounds again.”
Al Simmons sits on an overturned supply drum beside a heater coil that glows dull orange behind a cracked safety cage. The heat paints his wrinkled face in firelight and shadow. He is sixty-two, he claims. He looks eighty on bad mornings and forty when he cheats at cards. His beard is a gray tangle, his left eye is artificial and cheap enough that it clicks when he blinks, and his right hand shakes unless he has a cup of something warm wrapped around it.
Tonight, he has no cup.
