I take the long way home, riding the metro in the dead emptiness after the morning commute. Yes, morning. I didn’t go home. A skull-deep ache pounds behind my eyes, as it has since I hit up a highlayer gym after last night’s fight and spent the next hours venting my frustrations into iron weights. I left somewhere in the darkest hours of the morning, bouncing from a caf bar, to a depressing empty park with a single rusted swing set, to the undercity metro, where I’ve been aimlessly riding to pass the time.

I cup my JOY in one hand and cradle my gym bag in my lap, scrolling through the latest deposit of credits into my blank-named bank account. The numbers glide past in a bleary haze. It’s just more zeroes. Money can’t give me the answers I need, though Cal certainly gets a draconic gleam in her eyes whenever she sees me dump a fresh slush of credits on the kitchen table.

My nails scratch a groan-inducing line along my scalp. I run them through again while the metro rattles on to its next stop and I search for my next mark. The one I have a fight lined up at in just over twelve hours, give or take. Darkened blocks of the undercity flash past outside. Rusted dirt-lot parks. Venomous green-tainted fires burning in steel trash bins. Trash piled and scattered. Pale streetlamps flickering and dying. And that’s just on one side. On the other, through a haze of lighter smoke made by the metro’s other occupants, shadows crawl and eat through the crumbling concrete foundations of entire blocks and towers that have been abandoned in years past. The Shocks, the Venters call those places. Entire sectors that have been condemned to disrepair and left to the things that lurk in the dark. From what I’ve heard, the Shocks is larger than the Vents itself these days. Darkness growing as the lights shrink and die off, power shunted to more overcity corporations, none of those credits trickling down to help restore what’s crumbled. Forcing the people stuck down here into smaller and smaller spaces.

It's unimaginable that in a world like mine, with technology like JOYs, a place like this could be let to exist. The desperate aura of this urban hell eats unendingly at my sixth sense. Coming from a home like mine makes the contrast even worse. The Vents is so wrong on such a fundamental level. There’s no sun. No wind. No life. Nothing green but the oil and the neon. And the people who live down here just accept it. They can’t change it. They’re beaten down, and they’ve forgotten that this isn’t the way things should be, because they’ve never been given a chance to know better.

I know Dad must have felt the same when he saw first this place. His heart bled for these people. You can see it in the graffiti that rages from the sides of the upside-down towers. Can hear it in the grumbles at the bars. Venters have been forgotten by the overcity, but they have not forgotten the man who gave them a reason to believe things could be better- and more than that, that they should be better. He’s beloved down here, far more than even in the villages. It makes me feel a little more at home when I brush against the coals of fires he stirred.

Those coals still exist in the Vents, waiting for a breath of hope. But I’m not the kind of person who could reignite them. Dad did. He knew what to say to this dismal, lifeless underworld so direly in need of a light. But I am not my father. I can’t smile like him. Or laugh, or talk like him. I had to watch that answer take him from me time and time again. And then it took what little I had without him.

Still. Seeing the sadness flashing past, even I feel the call.

I snap off the projector screens and shove my JOY into my pocket. Thinking about fighting again already leaves a sour taste in my mouth. This makes a week straight of pushing my limits on four hours of sleep. The toll’s coming; I just haven’t paid it yet.

Glumly anticipating the smog and grime waiting when the metro doors open, I fish one of dad’s tank tops out of my bag and tug it on. It’s two sizes too big, like everything of his that I wear. I pull the fabric higher and take in a long breath through my nose, trying to remember how he smelled. I always remember apples. The shirt just smells like sweat.

Working downlayer from the metro stop, I wind my way down criss-crossing concrete paths that descend towards the blocks closest to the reach of the Abyss. Without a sun to go by, there’s no way to tell that it’s even supposed to be midmorning down here. Just my body’s seesawing circadian rhythm. The towers holding each layer at the core grow thinner the further I descend; undercity blocks separated by wider and wider gaps. The Abyss looms wider, growing from a sliver of darkness between the bridges to a looming expanse of black that waits no matter where you look. Stifling cold leeches humidity and heat from the air. One layer above the dimly-lit block where Cal and the shooting range are waiting, I detour towards a very specific set of coordinates that end in a mom-n-pop takeout restaurant that’s up and running in the early morning.

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A slow trickle of patrons enter and leave the shop with brown paper packages of food in hand, perfectly timed so there’s never enough people around to make trouble. Wary of the hooded and smoking Venters who linger on the towerside, I shoulder open the front door, ignore the little bell that rings to announce my entrance, then slip through the plastic tarp blocking the kitchen from the empty front lobby. The cooks and clerk don’t even look up from their work. First door on the right takes me to a small dining room with yellowed wallpaper and a silenced stream screen playing high in the corner.

My exhaust hits rock bottom when I see Nabuna sitting at the table, already digging into a manhole-sized plate of mixed rice and meat. The hairy, middle-aged loan shark has lost a little weight in the past month. Not enough that most people would notice, but I can see it. He eyes me from under the brim of a square-shaped cap, then goes back to watching highlights from my less-than-legal showstopper earlier in the night. The clips play on repeat while he eats.

“You don’t look happy, Blanco.”

I sling my bag over the chair next to him and drop into it with a grunt. “I’m not.”

“Shame.”

“The real shame is your ability to find a good fight,” I growl, resting my cheek on a curled fist. “These Venters you keep digging up aren’t worth the seconds it takes to beat them.”

“Excuse me for not being able to convince the cream of the crop to visit the dumps you decide to fight at, princess.” Still watching the streams, he pretends not to notice when I hurl a quick glare at him. “You don’t need Venters, anyways. I ain’t dim enough to miss that. You’ve been trained. Got that E-Town blood.”

“So what? If Venters aren’t good enough, then get me something better.”

“I’m working on better.”

“Work a little faster.”

“Not all of us are living life like we got a gun to our head, Blanco. What’s got you so crazy? You beat three of the top ten Venters in a single week, and you’re still sulking around like it wasn’t good enough.” He sighs when I don’t respond, dipping his spoon again into the mound of food. “You said you wanted good. Good takes grease and a hot second for gravity to get the ball rolling. Might as well get off my ass and take it easy. If you gotta burn off steam, go do it at the Orange. Go find yourself a boy and get it fucked out of your system.”

He’s going to eat all my goddamned food before I can even get a spoonful in. Fuming, I go grab a plate from the kitchen and come back to siphon off a fighter’s portion from the mountain of chicken and rice. Stab my spoon into it like it’s the source of my frustration.

I watch Nabuna’s eyes while he watches my replay. How he follows the action, what he pays attention to. Where he rewinds, and more importantly, where he freezes. He knows what to look for. I wouldn’t have taken him on as a partner in crime if he didn’t. And in a way, he reminds me of Aunt Jolie. There’s more to this greaser than he lets on.

“Good food,” Nabuna says, resuming the replay. He saw me staring.

“I come here a lot.”

“This where we’re meeting now?”

“As long as it stays quiet.”

He nods and slows his eating, studying the brief conclusion of the fight. “You go home last night, chica?”

“No. I was lifting.”

The ice in my tone shuts him up until the replay ends. His JOY buzzes a few moments later. Making his excuses to leave, the shark drops a metal credit chit on the table as a tip for the house, tugging his cap a little lower.

“Still on for the fight tonight?”

“Mah. Yeah.”

I don’t even know if I want to. The idea of sleeping in for an entire day sounds more and more appealing the longer I stay out. I know it’s just my body’s way of grumbling. Staying at the range helps no one. It gives Thane or Gami’s agents more time to track me down. And it stalls me more than I already have. Nabuna waits, browsing something of his own.

“Hey. Greaser.”

His eyebrows lift. “I’ll pretend you said that with some decency. What?”

I sink back in my chair, side-eye watching the wall. “Say you had a gun to your head. And if you didn’t figure your shit out and get way better at fighting in a very short amount of time, something really bad was going to happen. But you’ve got no idea how to untangle it at all.” My nose wrinkles. “What would you do?”

He stays there in the doorway, striking up a lighter.

“You remind me of this girl I used to know,” he eventually says. “She was a lot like you, Blanco. Had a chip on her shoulder you could see coming a mile away.” Puff of smoke. “She had this gun. Beautiful piece, masterwork. It got cracked the day her old lady’s luck ran out on a job. She kept shooting the damn thing anyways. Growing the cracks. Didn’t have time to fix it, yeah? Streets were bad. Fire on her mind. So she shot and shot and shot that thing right up until she found the bastard who killed her ma. She pulled the trigger one last time. And it shattered in her hand.”

“…What happened to her?” I ask.

Nabuna shrugs. “She got lucky. Got a new gun. Got a new life. New dream. New things to fight for. Moved up and out.” Tired brown eyes find me through the haze. “Some of us don’t have that luck, chica. I don’t recommend pushing yours.”