I was lying on the side of the conveyor line, feeling the ultraviolet rays of the emitters burning my skin, it was unpleasant, but necessary, if not for them, I would soon turn into the slime that came from the bunker to the conveyor line, it was all that was left after the work of active bacteria for processing organic matter.

I had wounds all over my body that were caused by bacteria from the organic waste bunker. The feeling of hopelessness was so strong that I could not find the words to describe it fully. I could not believe that Leah and I had escaped from that trap. It was a pure miracle. I could not believe that all this had happened to us.

I looked at Leah, who was lying next to me. Her condition was much worse than mine, maybe even critical, and I didn't know what to do next, I was only the third day in this world and once again I was on the verge of life and death, now I was on the verge of despair, I didn't know where to go, what to do, I could have left Leah here to die, but... but she didn't leave me when I was in a similar state. Every second, the despair in my soul only grew. But, on the other hand, I was glad that we escaped from that terrible place, Leah's house was a terrible place, and I didn't want to go back there again.

Remembering the last ten hours of my life, I did not understand how we managed to survive, I do not know where we got so much luck, according to all the laws of life we should have died more than once, but we were alive, I do not even know what we will have to pay for it.

Ten hours ago, when we found ourselves on the same assembly line only in Xarlex Leah's home sector, we immediately ran through the technical tunnels. We had to buy time and get to a safe place as soon as possible. I offered to go straight to the transition to another sector of the station, but Leah assured me that it would be safer to stay at Akas's place. That was our first mistake, as I remember it now.

" Here's the back entrance to the hotel, you see, no one is waiting for us here," Leah smiled at me, proving that she was right, "Now we'll get some rest and after collecting information, we'll decide what to do next. In general, it turned out well," she tossed a card with fifty thousand credits in her hand. "I wish it was two hundred, but I didn't expect two hundred thousand."

"How much does an energy cell really cost in that condition?" I asked Leah, as we sat near the back door of the Akasa Hotel and watched him. We had to make sure that it was safe there now.

"You can't buy it officially, you can buy a new one with packaging on the black market for five hundred thousand, but this one..." Leah thought, "Well, one hundred and fifty thousand would probably be enough.

" So why two hundred?" I asked Leah, watching as a man approached the back door and, looking around, dialed the password on the combination lock, and as soon as the door moved aside, he jumped into the airlock, and the door immediately closed behind him.

"Halimon, about three years older than me, unlike me, studied to be an electronic thief. Once I came to him with a request to remove a lock from a game console that my great-grandfather had put in place. What a bastard, for two minutes of work he asked for ten minutes of groping my tits," Leah grimaced.

"And you agreed?" I asked in surprise.

"The station's championship was starting in half an hour, and I was young, stupid, and I didn't want to miss it," Leah answered, it was clear that she was uncomfortable with the memory, "As for the price, I set a fair price, considering that the energy cell was already here and now, so two hundred grand is a fair price. Let's go, as if everything is calm," Leah replied and jumped down from the container on top of which we were hiding.

I jumped down after Leah and headed for the back door. While she was entering the code, I looked around and it seemed like there was really nothing around. Maybe I was worried for nothing. After going through the procedure of decontamination and cleaning from bacteria under ultraviolet light, we went to the next room where we found ourselves in the crosshairs of a droid, Leah warned about it, this droid Akas bought from Leah's grandfather, he used to be a police officer, but her grandfather remade him, not forgetting to leave a backdoor for his family, which Leah took advantage of. Akas knew about it and didn't mind. But as soon as we walked out the door, a nervous Akas met us.

"Why did you come here," he hissed and grabbed her arm, dragging her into the nearest room, "that's all I needed."

"Teacher, what happened?" Leah asked Akasa, who was surprised by this behavior, but I seemed to be beginning to understand.

"You and your partner are no longer members of the guild, you have been declared outside the guild's laws," Akas began to speak quickly, barely audible.

"We were acting honestly," Leah was indignant, "We even have a recording."

"Your record is all over the place. You killed four Brailo fighters, stole a speeder that the guild leadership had plans for, almost blew up Sharj Torak, who was supposed to lead the offensive, and almost caused a sector-wide disaster. " Akas replied, "They already came to my place and searched it.

"What should I do?" Liya asked her teacher for advice.

" Run away, and Leah," he looked at her, "they want to punish you demonstratively to improve discipline. There's a bounty of one hundred thousand credits on his head, and twenty for yours. And I have to turn you in," Akas said and looked at Leah expectantly, who looked at him without understanding, but I seemed to understand what he was waiting for, "I'll go out and contact Brailo now," and he fell silent again and waited.

"Why? Teacher?" Leah said in disappointment.

"You idiot," I couldn't take it anymore and grabbed a chair and hit Akas on the head with all my strength, he instantly fell unconscious on the floor, but a moment before the blow I noticed a smile on his face, so I did the right thing, "He was standing there on purpose and waiting for us to disable him. He warned us. "

" And I thought he had betrayed me," she wiped her tears unnoticed by me. Then she leaned over Akas, checking to see if I had killed him.

"Is he alive? How much time do we have?" I asked her as I put the chair back in place.

"I think he's alive. We have for at least ten minutes, and most likely an hour or more, could you have been more careful?" Leah asked me, quickly coming to her senses and searching the teacher's pockets, "Here are ten thousand ksar, here," she began to check the cards she found on the teacher's person, "Yup, three thousand credits, we're alive," Leah smiled a little too fake.

"Where are we going to go?" I asked Leah, "I take it that we can't go the way we came?

"You're thinking right, if the teacher wasn't lying, then now all the known guild crossings, both official and illegal, are under the control of the guild, and they will be waiting for us there. Of course, we can try to break through by force, but they know that we can and I doubt very much that we will succeed."

"Should I contact your great-grandfather?" I asked her.

" No, it's not the case that if my grandfather helps us, they might find out who he really is, and then the entire Xarlex army will be here in ten minutes. And there will definitely be aliens. No, I won't do that," Leah answered categorically.

"Who is your grandfather?" I asked her as I undressed Akas, who was wearing a very nice jumpsuit with enhanced anti-blaster protection.

"If you don't understand, then you don't need to know," Leah answered, "Somewhere here I had a map of the sector, even before I was born my father was mapping the entire sector for the guild, so here," she tapped the screen of her communicator on her hand and a three-dimensional hologram of the station sector formed above her hand. Almost the entire sector was filled with red, with only the outer compartments of the sector being pink. Zooming in, Leah began to look for something and when she found it, she said, "Here," she highlighted a mine in green, "My father didn't notice this mine on the guild maps on purpose, this ventilation shaft connects our sector to the neighboring one, it leads to the same organic processing bunker in the other sector, this mine used to level the concentration of bacteria in the recyclers."

"Do you think they don't know about him?" I asked her.

" Maybe they do, but as you can see, the radiation here is three times higher than the lethal level. "I don't remember why, but the reactor protection there is many times worse than here.

"I don't like this very much," I replied, "I understand correctly that the more concentrated the red color, the more radioactive the radiation?" I asked her looking at the map.

"Yes, and as you can see, you can either go more or less safely around the sector in a circle, or directly. -"The advantages of the second route are that there is no one there, we are unlikely to meet anyone on the way, it's safe, organic matter cannot live there, and we can reach the mine in three hours versus seven or eight."

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"With all the lethal radiation levels, can the anti-radiation drug cope with this?" I asked her.

"The standard dosage most likely won't. " She answered honestly, "A double dose is calculated to get me through it.

"Explain more detail."

" We will receive very strong radiation. As long as the antiradium is working we will live, if the antiradium stops working we will die without decontaminating our body," Leah answered honestly, "But don't think so, I know a clinic in sector ten forty-two, we need to get there within a day and there is an alien medical capsule there, it will cope with it."

"I take it it's not free?" I asked her, knowing how people live here, and no one does anything for free, let alone for free.

"Here," she displayed the clinic's price list on the hologram, "the procedure for deactivating the body costs a million ksars per person. Quite a reasonable price," I estimated the exchange rate in my head and realized that it would be about ten thousand credits.

"Then let's not waste time, it's time to start our journey into hell itself," I smiled at Leah.

After taking two antiradium pills each, as the previous one was running out, we left the Akasa Hotel through the back door and quickly, trying not to attract attention, headed for the airtight doors leading to the station's interior compartments.

Previously, they were under the control of the station's official services, who were worried that bandits would try to steal valuables from the internal compartments, but time passed, the most valuable items were taken by the officials and they went to other sectors, leaving everything to be looted by those who could not allow them to leave this sector of the space station.

But as it turned out, without protective suits, people there received lethal doses in minutes, and the equipment brought from there continued to kill people here. So, over time, the gates to the inner sectors were welded shut, leaving only a few passages, and we approached one of them.

There was a conventional airtight door about three meters high and one and a half meters wide. This side of the airtight door was covered with a thick layer of live and dead bacteria that had built up over the decades since it was last opened. It took at least twenty minutes to free the mechanism of the airtight door, fortunately the metal used to make the door was not corroded, so the door mechanism opened relatively freely, with Liya alone.

Almost as soon as the door was opened, Leah's wrist communicator turned red, and the built-in dosimeter showed that we should not go in. But that's exactly what we were going to do.

Closing the door behind us, we found ourselves in complete darkness. Leah immediately turned on a red flashlight and we set off. It was clear that this compartment was intended to be inhabited, unlike the organic waste bunker where everyone was living now. It was even ironic that people, being organic organisms, were living in a bunker for processing organic waste.

Unlike the bunker, there were normal corridors, such as those I saw during the police pursuit, this corridor was not very large, only five meters wide and high. Everywhere you look you can see traces of dismantling of various equipment, for months the walls were cut through, looking into one such hole I saw a large room with racks in the distance, in some places you could see broken tables and chairs. And apparently I had already seen such tables and chairs in Akas's hotel, so that's where he got them from.

After half an hour we came out into a much wider corridor, about fifty meters wide, according to Leah it was a small main tunnel where flyers and speeders were supposed to move. Only this tunnel ran in a plane I was not used to. It seemed to go from top to bottom, and we are on the very bottom of the tunnel. Behind it was only an organic waste bunker.

These tunnels led away from the center of the sector like branches of a tree, but in the center was a large main tunnel that was almost a hundred meters wide. It turned out that the large main tunnel used to connect the sectors of the station. In a normal situation, the giant gates between the sectors were open and you could get from one sector to another without stopping. Only it was worth considering that in the center of the large tunnel there was a two-meter pipe and which contained gravity generators that created artificial gravity. Leah did not know how they worked because she did not want to study gravitational and spatial physics with her great-grandfather. But I was curious how they managed to make it so that it continued to work even now, even more than a hundred years after the last maintenance.

Since we needed to get to the other side of the sector, we just will have to climb up. It's a good thing that there were emergency stairs built along the wall, because without them I have no idea how long it would have taken to get to the center of the sector.

Gradually, during the ascent, the dosimeter on Liya's arm began to show higher and higher doses of radiation that we were receiving. At first, I wasn't even very worried, because according to Liya, the anti-radiation pills was supposed to protect us, but when we had climbed about three hundred meters, I started to feel nauseous, flies started flying in front of my eyes, and I was tired. I thought it was just me, but soon I saw Leah bend over and start vomiting.

"Are you okay?" I asked her, supporting her so she wouldn't fall down the stairs while vomiting.

- It's bad, and we're not doing very well, we need to speed up, the radiation level is several times higher than on my father's map. - Leah answered, barely able to stop herself from vomiting again. - The main thing is to get to the center and move to this part, there we will have to go down this tunnel. - She started pointing at the map, "If I faint, leave me, let at least one of us survive." Leah coughed, spitting out blood, "We have even less time than I thought.

- "Then let's not waste time," I answered and immediately continued climbing the stairs, we had no more than a hundred meters to go to the central tunnel and we had to hurry. About five minutes later, I stopped hearing Leah's footsteps behind me and turned around to see that she was sitting on the step, unable to walk any further. Her pale face and bloodstains under her skin told me that I should hurry very much. I could feel myself getting worse by the second, but for some reason I felt much better than she did. Going down two flights of stairs, I picked up her hand and threw it around my neck, "Come on, we have to go, just a little bit more.

- I can't, leave me here, I...

- "Shut your mouth," I snarled at her, "and start moving your feet.

The next five minutes we spent climbing up to the central tunnel seemed like an eternity. But we managed to do it. Here, in the central tunnel, the radiation level exceeded the level that would be fatal for a person without protection by several dozen times. As far as I understood from Leah's explanations, the reactor was located at the other end of the sector and between us there was only a damaged biological defense system and maybe a dozen or so not very thick metal walls, which themselves became good sources of radiation during this time.

Moving solely on willpower, I managed to drag Leah to another side tunnel that led down towards the neighboring sector. The strangest thing was that the tunnel we came out of was now above my head. Such are the miracles of this artificial gravity, but I didn't have time to think about it for a long time, I had to go. I don't know how, but in another ten minutes we managed to get down to the side corridor we were supposed to go to. Almost immediately, the radiation level began to drop. It didn't help me much, I still started vomiting blood, but it got a little better. The radiation shields finally started to cope with the level of radiation we were receiving now.

Leah had been unconscious for the last ten minutes and I realized that we had to hurry. We had no more than an hour, two at the most, before our condition would become irreversible.

Fatigue and nausea seemed to be frozen at the same level. This was the only thing that allowed us to move on, subjectively it took at least ten hours before we finally reached the airtight door leading to the organic waste bunker at the level we needed, but judging by Leah's communicator, only two and a half hours had passed since we entered the central compartment.

We were very lucky that the airtight door opened without any problems, and I was able to drag Liya to the middle of the bunker, where the radiation level exceeded the lethal level by only a couple of percent. Although it didn't matter to us, we had already received a lethal dose, and if the anti-radiation shielding stopped working, we would die. We could only hope that we would succeed in our plans.

After resting for a few minutes and realizing that my fatigue was just beginning to grow, I struggled to my feet and, throwing Leah on my back, walked in the direction of the ventilation shaft. Surprisingly, the surface of the metal was almost clean, with only a few piles of dead bacterial colonies in places. Apparently, the level of radiation here was such that they had died in this part of the bunker a long time ago. In about twenty minutes I managed to drag Leah to the ventilation shaft between the two sectors with interruptions, and what I saw surprised me: right in front of the entrance there was a small container, and it hadn't been there for all the hundred years, it was put there much later. And when I got closer, I was completely stunned, Leah's name was written on it. It was definitely not for nothing, the only one who could have done it was her great-grandfather, and there might be something here that could help us. So I put Leah on the floor next to the container and climbed inside.

Well, there were really useful things here. Brand new coveralls, a first aid kit, and a stack of cards. They looked very much like credit cards. And the main thing was that the sizes were ours. After looking around, I finally found what I was looking for: a small mechanical spider hanging from the ceiling, looking at us with its one eye.

- "Thank you," I sincerely thanked the spider, and the next moment it seemed to disappear into thin air and vanished. Well, my grandfather helped his great-granddaughter as best he could, and I thank him for that.

I quickly threw off my soiled overalls and changed into a new one, then opened the first aid kit and found two disposable pistols with something poisonous green in color with a short inscription "Against radiation sickness". I don't know what was in them, but I immediately injected myself and Leah, and then started changing her clothes.

Ten minutes later, I continued on my way, opened the hatch to the ventilation shaft, dragged Liya in, and then climbed in myself. The shaft was only about one and a half meters wide, so I had to drag Leah on my bent legs, but it was good that I only had to drag her a hundred meters. And then we went to the organic waste bunker in another sector of the space station.

What immediately caught my eye was that, unlike Leah's home sector, it was full of garbage and all of it was moving from the layer of bacteria that was processing it right now. The temperature was over sixty degrees, and the humidity was such that I was immediately covered in condensation. That's it, we got to another sector, but there was another problem, we had to get out of the bunker, because I could already feel tingling on the exposed skin. It is not difficult to understand what is happening, the bacteria saw organic matter that needs to be processed.

It's good that we discussed this point with Leah, there should be a valve for the recycled organic matter that flows to the conveyor line, and from there it flows to the factory that will create food from the recycled slime.

Only here it was not so easy to do, there were several tens of meters of organic waste under my feet, and when I say organic waste, I mean both human waste and any other organic matter.

For the next few minutes I tried to figure out where to go until I saw a dip in the garbage about forty meters away, and after consulting Leah's map I came to the conclusion that this was exactly what I needed. But for this I would have to literally swim to that dip. I won't describe how difficult it was, but I managed to do it and now I was lying there waiting for the strength to call the staff of that clinic right here, because I realized that I would not be able to get out on my own.