WHEN THE TRASH HAULER breaks my fall, I think I’m dead at first.

Seven stories of negative acceleration abruptly ends with me slamming into a snowdrift of trash at lethal velocity. Half-dead, I plunge through the hauler’s open roof right as it pulls out from one of the Orange’s lower docks. The impact shatters me.

Miraculously saved from a fall into the Abyss, I don’t even have the life left to be thankful for the cushioning. Bottles and debris puncture and lacerate my exposed skin with hundreds of tiny wounds. Greasy filth oozes over me. Rot and decay overwhelm every sense. Insects scatter, then begin investigating my flesh. A shattered chunk of a whiskey bottle stabbed through my cheek halfway through my mouth. Iron blood starts pooling under my tongue. I can’t pull it out.

When the hauler rattles and begins to ascend, the trash rises in front of me like a wave and I tumble backwards with it, buried in moments. Unable to breathe, unable to comprehend, I watch through gaps in the hauler’s roof as the lights of the Orange slowly drift downwards and the fires of the street war replace them. Again the hold shifts around me. Cold, rancid liquid spills down my legs, between my thighs. Slime and grease cakes me in a second skin. Solely on instinct I feel around for my JOY, it is gone.

Twice more there are stops for more mountains of trash. Slowly I’m being crushed under the weight. My broken wrist screams at the slightest effort to move. Whole body throbbing from the hundreds of cuts. And the Armiger’s gutshot. I can feel the bullet from the Sixer burrowed deep in my stomach, killing me slowly but surely.

I am dying.

Buried alive, trapped in an endless loop of pain, my mind has nothing to do but reel and fixate on the man who put me here. Ulysses betrayed me and Sarah both. I still can’t comprehend why. Why he would compromise with the syndicate and its killers when they’re the ones poisoning our home. Why he would do that to Sarah. Her death, the shot that echoes every time I close my eyes, might as well have been his finger on the trigger; not the Armiger’s. And then to me, too. Why. Why. Why.

How much of my life was spent under his wing? Those years of stories, lessons, and cautions. If Sarah was my mother, he was the closest thing I ever had to a father. The care in his eyes when we talked over drinks was no lie. He loved me. How could he ever do such a thing? Kill Sarah, deceive me so easily because I trusted him, then give me up too?

In Sarah’s absence, I never realized how much I was relying on the surety of Ulysses. He was the wall I could always plant my back against. Now that wall is gone.

I don’t know what to do. I’m lost. Alone, dying, and scared. I have nowhere else to go. No more plans. No more heroes. Everything I thought I could do, I failed. Matthias is dead because I thought I could change something. But the game was rigged from the start. Or maybe I never had a chance at all.

The stench of the rot becomes so overwhelming my body can’t even process it in tandem with the pain. My stomach lurches as the hauler finally begins its ascent towards the overcity in earnest. Shivering in a cold sweat, I cry out and force myself to crawl up and up through the refuse until at last the top half of my body surfaces and I flop onto a pile of aluplast cans. There I lay. In the dark, atop the trash, coiled around the horrible pain that spreads from my stomach, crying while the hum of the engine drowns out my weeping.

“I’m sorry…” I croak. “I’m sorry…”

I have nothing left but tears. I sob and writhe until at last my eyes waver open and I realize I passed out at some point along the ride. The hum of the hauler’s engine is twice as loud in my ears, the pressure of the ascent now gone. Pale light leaks through the closed roof. Bumps and jostling reverberate from the landing struts as the hauler settles down. For a moment, I numbly wonder if someone looked back into the hold and saw me, forgetting that these things are entirely automated. The only place we’re headed is an incinerator in the heavy industry district.

Then the roof of the hauler groans open to reveal a wide-open sky and a robotic arm clasping a neighborhood trash bin in three massive metal fingers. The arm reaches down into the hold to deposit the bin. I throw myself at the wrist and hang on for dear life. As the arm begins retracting and my grip starts slipping, for a moment, I consider letting gravity take hold. Fall back in to be buried and incinerated. But my survival instinct is too strong. I cling on until my one unbroken hand slips and I fall ten feet off the side of the hauler, smacking down against black asphalt.

The hauler rises up on hovertech and drifts off to its next destination, and after a few more seconds, I’m alone with the songbirds in the pre-dawn overcity. Sky the color of a bruised fingernail, slowly brightening. Brick-walled alley of a two-story neighborhood right smack in the Glass district. Middle of the road, looking like something that just got vomited out of a sewer, my Iros disguise a slop of silk and slime.

Just like when I held onto the hauler’s arm, I don’t know why I push myself up off the asphalt, but I do. My vision is doing spirals and twists. Focus coming in and out in bouts of insane clarity mixed with lethal brain fog. Leaning against the low wall of a yard I’m sure these people think is just okay in size, I stagger towards the brightening horizon. I don’t know where my steps are leading me. Like a dying animal, I only want a place to fade in peace, away from the world. Somehow I get across a curved six-lane road and up the grassy hills on the other side. Before my legs finally give, I catch a glimpse of gardens and an artificial lakeshore. Then I hit the ground and my body smears a trail down the other side of the hill. My path ends facedown at the gnarled roots of a tree of silver leaves.

I spit dirt and try to sit up, managing after three tries to finally get my back against the tree. My whole body convulses and tightens up as I sit there. A wall of flowering hedges cups the garden, and straight ahead down a little wooded path, the full breadth of the lake unfolds. I almost laugh as I recognize the view; that otherworldly paradise I saw when I came topside with Sarah. A world of color so much more vibrant than the one I used to lull myself to sleep. Which one was the lie? This, or the nature programs I would turn on every night?

As I sit there, the sun breaks the horizon, beaming between the skyscrapers that fence in the other side of the lake. I watch it rise through glassy vision. My first sunrise. It feels so hollow.

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My eyes sink closed, back molding to the smooth, metallic bark of the tree. Another full-body shudder wracks me. I can feel my breathing slowing. Those hundreds of cuts fading like so many needle pricks with every lasting second. Let go, the myriad wounds whisper. Why continue to struggle? I tried, and look how it ended. What is there left to survive for? Everything I have ever known has forsaken me.

“I’m tired, Sarah.” The words mumble past my lips one at a time, barely more than a whisper. “Just so fucking tired.”

For a moment, my brain thinks it’s a ghost of the woman herself who clears her throat five feet to my left. Then the rest of me catches up and dispels the hallucination. I’m not alone in this garden. Someone else has been here the entire time.

Gunslinging instincts try to react; twist evasively and reach for the 6-Teba. On the outside, it just looks like the spasm of a dying fish. My head lifelessly falls to the side and I see the source of the noise. A university boy around my age, pale and princely thin, with a long braid of pale gold hair and the kindest, purest eyes I have ever seen. Like petrified water, they are riven with dogmatic discipline, yet inspect me from a distance with the utmost gentility. He wears the traditional summer robes of a village native. Pastel colors, open chest revealing thin and wiry muscle. Baggy martial pants in dark durocloth and a serpentine length of metal entwined around his tanned left arm fill out the rest of him, other than the watering can in his hand.

“You’re a Venter,” is all he says.

I’m in so much pain, I can’t help but laugh. “That obvious?”

He taps beside his eye.

“Ah.” I pop out the Iros contacts and flick them into the dirt. Gets an arched eyebrow, if nothing else.

“Anyone sane who was in your condition would have gone to a hospital, too. Not a public park.” He slowly bends down and sets the watering can on the ground, stifling a cough as he does. “And besides. You look too old to be how old you are.”

A violent shudder wracks me, blood drippling down the corner of my mouth. “Is that some attempt at flirting I’m too poor to understand?”

That gets a grimace. “No. Though I don’t blame you for asking; no one has ever described me as a romantic.” He has a penthouse accent, but there’s a rustic twang it’s trying to cover, like he learned the poshness as a second language. The accent might be false. But the martial grace to his poise is a hundred percent genuine. His brow furrows as he examines me more closely, though still from a distance. “You’ve been shot.”

“How…?”

The metal coil on his arm slithers in response. Elemental. Can feel the bullet inside me.

“I don’t need your help,” I say.

He holds up a perfectly recreated bullet from Sarah’s Sixer, turning it over in the dawn light. I didn’t even feel him extract it. The last slivers of the brass slither towards him through the dirt. “Type 54-Casull, hand forged. Someone really didn’t like you.”

“You don’t…” Convulsing pain cuts me off. “…you don’t look like a ‘slinger.”

“I’m not. But to understand the essence of battle, one must study all its aspects.”

The last of my strength dries up in a humorless laugh. I go back to watching the sunrise. “Great. Of all the ways to go out, getting philosophized at about the Art of War has to be one of the worst.”

“Wrong medium, wrong genre, wrong title,” he sighs.

Leaving the watering can, the boy reaches down and grabs something from his duffel combat bag. There’s a windbreaker in his left hand, red-white-blue, university issue for first year students. Concordia University. A hotshot fighter, this guy. Could never tell from the outside, he’s got the ego of a house plant. I don’t have the strength to throw his charity back at him. He drapes the pristinely ironed jacket over filthy me, then carefully places a canister of nanospray just within my reach. Letting me decide what I want to do with it. Then he goes back to watering the plants.

“Don’t help me,” I mutter, staring at the can. “I’d be better off dead.”

“You shouldn’t say that,” he patiently replies. Another little cough, stifled in his elbow. “You’ve come a long way. Even if it was the wrong way, it’s never too late to turn around.”

I wish he was right. But I already walked to the end of the line, and there’s no path left behind. Those final barriers holding everything in start to crumble. I did everything I could to numb myself to the hell I’ve endured. Pushed the hurt and pain to tomorrow, and tomorrow’s tomorrow, lying to myself that I would deal with them then, when I knew I would always be pushing them off until tomorrow. It all catches up now. Small shudders, sharp intakes of shallow breath, all the pieces of Sarah that are still left in my life, like broken glass shards that stab into me whenever they remind me of her.

I don’t break, not even in front of a stranger. I’m too much a child of the Vents for that. But I do bend. And I never thought it could hurt so much to cry.

We don’t really say much else, the stranger and I. He works on the flowers. My grief ebbs. The sun rises. The birds sing. Cicadas chirp. This is the view she wanted for me, and it might as well be paradise.

One by one, I start picking out the shards of glass. My hands, scraped raw, are ill fit for the task. I don’t know why I start doing it at first. Some unconscious force of momentum, years of training my hands to work even when the mind behind them is blank. A stubborn refusal to collapse even when I have nothing left to drive me.

When I am done, I swallow hard and pick up the spray. Numbing relief floods into my body with every hiss. Overdosed nanomeds seal the wounds and work their magic on the inside. It won’t last long, and there will be scars. But it’ll get me on my feet. One more moment, one more hour, one more day, that’s all I need. I don’t care about the future.

“Why were you even out here?” I ask when I’m near done.

The stranger’s thin shoulders lift in a shrug as he too looks out over the morning lakeside. Training fighters jog along the distant sand. The shallows writhe and roil from affinities at play. Couples share quiet moments among the artificial paddies on their way to work. Above us, the tree of silver leaves sways gently, blessed by a spring breeze. Far, far in the distance, the cheers of the Metro Blockhouse ride on the wind.

“I suppose I could say something romantic, like I came to watch the birds. But the truth is, I enjoy tending the plants. They remind me of where I came from, and why I am here.”

The next words rise unbidden from an old memory. “To fight.”

He smiles and caresses a blood-red lotus with a weathered hand. “On the worst days, I used to think it a curse. Live to fight, fight to live. But it can just as easily be a blessing. Because it means that as long as you draw breath, there will be something worth fighting for, and each of us has been given the chance to do so.” His JOY sways from a string around his wrist. “Some of those things you walk beside. Some you have left behind. And some you have yet to find. But they are out there.”

He turns one sapphire eye to look at me.

“You’re still alive. So which are you fighting for?”

“I thought I knew,” I eventually say, hugging my knees to my chest. “I thought I made a promise to someone very important to me. It was what kept me going, but it wasn’t the promise I made her. It was just something I swore after.” Unbound, my hair flutters freely along my shoulders. Caught up with the leaves, shrouding my face. “She wanted me to live for one of those things I haven’t found yet. I said I’d give it a shot.”

A shivered sigh rattles out of my chest.

“She’s gone now. All I want is to know why. What all of this was for.” My voice breaks in the shade of the silver tree. “Then I can keep that promise.”