Imagine the breadth of the Vents. The incoherent chaos of its layers and grime, the messy sluices and rivers of downtrodden humanity, the neon and the smog and the people who profit from it, all stitched for layers upon endless layers into a lawless basketweave. Then unravel it one strand at a time. First the hope. Then the homes. Then the people, and the ground they walk on. And only then, once the last stragglers have been forced from the layers by gang wars, unrepaired corrosion, and fires that consumed whole sectors of the undercity, one by one, the lights wink out. The air cleaners stop working. The water quits running. No more trash scatters across the streets, because there’s no one left to make it and nowhere left to sell it. There is nothing but the darkness.

The Shocks is a graveyard of what was. City blocks crumble around me in the shadows, cloaked in lightlessness so complete that I can only see small glimpses of them with my palm light and the faint illumination that comes from my JOY. I peer through my tiny cone and wonder at the loss. How many people once existed here, to leave behind this sprawling necropolis? I walk in one layer of one block of the Shocks. There are countless others around me in every cardinal direction, each cut by streets that once had names, lined by buildings that once had purpose.

Liminal silence fills every empty space I pass. Windows are blown out. Metal doors hang ajar, locked open by failsafes when the power cut. Scars of ancient fires and explosions darken the bricks. Snowdrifts of concrete pour into the roads. A child’s desiccated stuffed animal lies in a pool of its own stuffing, fallen from a fifth-story apartment with a bombed-out wall.

I understand now why the Venters don’t leave their lights.

This place is not a place for the living.

It unsettles me at the most basic, human level.

My legs start moving faster of their own accord, spooked by primal instinct. My animal mind thinking against reason that there will be some light ahead where I can take shelter. The gravity of the Abyss sucks me forward into its embrace. I reign in the adrenaline, slowing the beating of my heart as I lope slowly through the cryptic emptiness. I spring across gaps in the bridges and push deeper into the Shocks on a straight-line drive to my destination.

Like a cosmonaut crossing an asteroid in deep space, it’s just me and the sound of my breath. Shattered glass twinkles like distant stars. Everything sounds underwater, deep-sea muffled.

I pass through several city blocks that way. My route takes me through the widest boulevards, under sagging archways of fallen towers and through snowfields of ash, heedless of the state of collapse or the number of craters that litter the roads. I soon shut off my palm light and navigate only by a small map that cascades from my JOY’s projector. Try to separate myself from the uneasy feeling low down in my spine; that old instinct that I am being watched. It’s just the dark. The tinkles of falling glass are just that. The odd clicks and clacks of rubble just the wind.

The further I go, the worse the collapse and devastation become. As I draw within a few blocks of Cal’s coordinates, the streets turn black and flaky beneath my feet; covered in heavy layers of char and soot that I kick up like fall leaves. I can still smell the smoke. Don’t need a light to know what my other senses tell me. This place was burned. A fire, an old one, compressed like a pressure cooker by the crust of the overcity, turning this block and the ones around it into a crematory furnace. Melted electrical cables and data wires worm between the bricks in alloyed veins.

When my path takes me to a fully collapsed bridge that would normally span the chasm between me and the block I’m looking for, I mutter a curse and follow those veins back towards the husk of a metro station that they originally came from. I flick my light on while I walk, trying to see across the chasm, but only see the shattered teeth of the bridge’s other side. Too far. In the past, I could have crossed a thirty meter gap like that with ease using my ki. But even though I can barely stomach the pain of my black aura now, I can only direct it into a loosely-controlled eruption; not nearly well enough to fly.

So I head into the train station. Past the tatters of grimed-over posters for Metro Blockhouse fights from back when Rex Fang was still Champion, then shoving aside a collapsed Shimano Industries vending machine that blocks the tunnel. I vault the depowered turnstile in the lobby and head to the tracks. Toss a chunk of metal on the rails to see if they spark. All clear.

Before I hop down onto the rails and start tightrope-walking my way across the chasm to the next block, I dare to stretch my sixth sense of ki in a brief search of the nearby area. The sense is painful even to touch, tenuous and wavering, but I can reach out enough to know I’m in a void in more ways than one. There aren’t even the tiny sparks of animal life my mind expects to feel. No sparkrats, no vermin.

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I strike out across the warped metro rails, arms outstretched for acrobatic balance. The Abyss yawns beneath me like a black hole maw, clutching at the underside of the layer ahead. The city beneath it must have crumbled and fell into the void some time ago. There’s only small, spindly remnants of jagged towers and broken bridges stabbing downward. I can’t see much. Nor can I spare the brainpower on it. Away from the undercity infrastructure, freezing wind tries its best to batter me off-balance, though I’m nothing if not a match for its strength. I was running on the estate’s walls when I was five.

Creaks erupt in the metal underfoot as I near the other side of the chasm. I burst into a sprint, legs eating up the last meters. Shoes slamming lightly against the metal as I hurl myself forward. Metal warbles. The collapse reaching its tipping point. At the last instant, I jump off the rails and hit the towerside in a roll, tumbling through the snowy ash that coats the concrete walkways.

Alloyed metal creaks, groans, and snaps behind me. The noise is titanic in the silence. I spring back to my feet and watch the rails plummet into the dark below, panting for breath, stamping down on the fear. One path doesn’t matter. All that matters is where I’m going. Once I get there, I’ll figure out another way back.

Easy to say in my head. Hard to believe when I can watch the exact moment my way back disappears into the void.

The Abyss. The end. To the Venters, the void is a permanence in their lives. Things that fall in do not come out- not even people. And plenty have tried. I shiver as I force myself to look away, returning my gaze on the rest of the darkened block.

Frigid wind moans through the hollow cityscape. Snowflakes of ash tickle my nose as they drift past. Shielding my eyes from the blizzard, I pull out my JOY and open the map once more. Cal’s coordinates dead-end at this block. The Relic I’m looking for, if it’s here at all, is somewhere within these four corners.

Toggling the sphere to a scouting mode, I cup it and sweep it in a slow arc, having it run penetrant tests in search of materials with a composition like Cal’s bangle. The JOY picks up the trail fast. Gives off a two-note tone, then repeats the notes every so often, and it’ll increase the speed of the repetition as I close in. Right on cue, a small dot of light appears on the map. The Relic’s signal is coming from somewhere behind the scorched apartment complexes that front against the towerside. Deep in the heart of the block.

I close the sphere’s projector and slap it back against my hip. The bwah-bwah ringtone pulses at near-silent volume as I cross a silent highway littered with husks of autobikes punctured by bullet wounds. The ash I kick up joins the eerie blizzard swirling around me, barely visible even without a running light. Faint, silvery illumination filters down from somewhere far above. I crane my head back and spot the tiny seam in the city’s crust nearly a mile up. A narrow, circular chasm. Just a large tube for air and runoff water, really. Maybe a rain drain for the Electric Town. The diffused moonlight coming through it suspends this entire block in an oceanlike twilight layer. Neither enough light to see by, nor enough darkness to blind.

My JOY guides me towards the southern face of the block where I find a warehouse with the bay doors rolled open, stripped barren by its old occupants. That’s about when the little sphere decides to finally give up on me. Too much interference coming from ahead. Concrete, mazed hallways; could be anything frizzing the trail. Could be nothing. Could be something. My kinetic sense says it’s the first. That I’m the only spark of life for miles around. My gut isn’t quite so certain.

Swallowing, I take one last look behind me before heading deeper inside. Huge ceiling, pillars evenly spaced, concrete once polished to reflect spotlights now smeared in black and debris. Two chains holding the last splinters of an advertisement board drift soundlessly outside. A small arrangement of chairs and countertop, mostly slagged by heat, lurk in a faroff corner of the warehouse. There’s another machine by the doors that survived a bit more of the fire. Some kind of ancient data-access device surrounded by a litter of melted metal discs.

My eyes catch on a lifeless shape in the middle of the warehouse floor. A body- a very dead one, at that. An evaporated bloodstain pools around the flaking tatters of the robes it must have worn. Not much is left of the skeleton itself. I kneel and rifle through the robes just in case it has a clue of the Relic I’m looking for. There’s only a few plates of armor, each of a different make and style. Hand-forged. Expensive stuff. If they’d been made by a JOY, they would have disappeared when it shut off. No weapons though. Strange.

I rise, dust off my hands, and head further inside.

The rubble in the back of the warehouse blocks a series of passages heading deeper into the buildings at the heart of the block. My JOY thinks the Relic is down one of them, though it’s not sure which. I close my eyes and clutch my left hand tight, holding back the instinctive impulse to draw on the black aura to carve a path forward. I don’t need to use it. Some of that rubble looks passable if I really squeeze.

Stale, lifeless breaths echo as I inhale deeply. Tenuously bottling up the malevolent power that lurks just beneath the surface of my skin. It waits patiently. Knowing one drop of lethal emotion is all the fuel it needs to ignite. I refuse to give it that. Pure stubbornness, maybe; or just knowing exactly how Cal would look at me if I fully gave in. If I went back to the way I was when I saw Thane.

These days, I almost can’t see a path forward without that black aura, even though it crucifies me to draw upon it. I’ve spent so long searching for a way back to my old strength, to no avail. Maybe the answer’s been with me the whole time.

Maybe that’s why I can only think of her as I push forward into the dark.