The Vents isn’t the sort of place I would normally take Jolie on a Tuesday weeknight. Usually we’d be holed up on the couch finishing homework and binging livestreams from the arena until midnight. At least, I’d be binging.
I’m not proud of the number of economics papers my sister has ghostwritten while I trained for upcoming tournaments. I’m also not proud of how many Tuesday weeknights have started with us descending to the undercity full of dreams, and summarily ended with those dreams being puked out in unmarked alleys.
In our defense, the clubs are great. The parties rival anything I’ve thrown at the gym, even that one tournament with the blacklights and neon paint. It’s everything else that makes me swear off coming down to the Vents if I can help it. The smog. The gambling. The drugs. The brothels, murders, syndicated crime, and deregulated arenas where fighters desperate to escape poverty redefine the meaning of no holds barred just for underground moguls to profit. It’s rare to see genuine talent rise from the Vents and enter any league, university or professional- but when they do, they’re always a special breed of tenacious. It’s far more common to see uni warriors dipping down to the undercity to sharpen their knuckles against unprepared Venters.
Some coaches preach the benefits of sending their kids to train in the undercity. It teaches them to dominate, they say. Teaches them the valuable confidence that only comes with flatlining far inferior opponents, a mindset useful even in the highest echelons of fighting. I can’t say I share the opinion.
Then again, I got my confidence all-naturally.
Gleaming, late afternoon cityscape slides into the sky like slow-moving glaciers outside the massive lift Jolie and I ride. Cargo lifts like this, built into the sun-starved scars separating the overcity districts, are the most popular descension points to the Vents. Each can hold a hundred bodies at a time. Their oiled gears and ancient machinery have ferried tourists to and from the undercity since before the capital was built, back when it was a superstructure latticework suspended over the largest hole in the world. We call that hole the Abyss now. An infinite, inky void the capital was built to cover, if you believe the tales.
I’ve never put much weight in those ghost stories. But I can’t deny that it’s an entirely different world beneath the surface of the capital, either. Spotless metal and sunshine bleed down into an inverted, concrete jungle where the trees are towers and they’re pointing at hell, not heaven. Shadows crawl up the walls of the district gap like ghostly vines. Pipework and ducting bulge out of smooth metal. A thick layer of smog begins clogging the air. And by the time the cargo lift spills Jolie and I out onto a wide concrete landing at the beginning of the undercity, the last light of the sun has entirely evaporated, replaced by acidic runoff and neon-smeared miasma.
We wait on the towerside while the rest of the lift floods out, heading across the Vents’ main thoroughfares for the unflying. Wide bridges of rotting concrete span huge gaps between blocks of inverted towers, making a maze of interconnected walkways that light up the void beneath the city. The entirety of the undercity is towers and landings, concrete and bridges, a layered lattice of underworld cake. Automatic transports float between the tower gaps on paths to docks deeper in the undercity. It’s colder down there, the closer you get to that yawning darkness.
Sickly muted color saps the life from everything around me. Even my aura feels tainted by the smog polluting the air. I push the ki out at a constant, simmering level, dissuading any undercity locals from drawing too close. They’re easy to pick out by their acidproof hoods and bowed heads. Jolie and I wore matching cloaks to disguise ourselves. Most of the people dispersing from the lift are tourists from the overcity who came down for entertainment or a taste of the danger. Those who have to live in it every day tend to keep further from the lights.
“I hate it every time we come down here,” Jolie mutters beside me. “Nothing good ever came from the Vents.”
“You get lunch delivered from that takeout place at least twice a week. I count the receipts.”
She hunkers down behind her scarf, glasses fogging. “Fine. One good thing comes from the Vents.”
“Twice a week.”
“…Twice a week.”
“So, wouldn’t that be…?”
“No.”
Acidic runoff from overcity industries drizzles over dark alleys and hooded features. Tangled webs of power lines and data transfer cables make an electric canopy above the smog. I stifle a cough as we pass corner stores with boarded up windows and clubs spilling drunken music across the towersides. Jolie’s JOY illuminates our faces with thin sheets of blue light while she pulls up a map to our destination. My taped hands rest on her shoulders, keeping her from veering while she guides the way. The Vents is almost impossible to navigate freehand if you’re not a native.
“How far down are we going?” I ask, glancing to the side when the clang of a thirty-second bell hammers out of some underground arena in the next block over. My head cranes up and over the crowd until Jolie grabs my hair and tugs down, dragging my vision back to what’s in front of us.
“Look at the map, dunce.”
I shift her hand away. “Watching the map is your job, Jojo. I’m on lookout duty.”
“Since when?”
“Since that night at the Rock Bottom.”
Her shoulders stiffen under my hands. I let go immediately.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” I say, trying to pry the memory away with humor. “I’m just… keeping an eye out. For crime.”
She doesn’t look at me while she fiddles with her JOY. “Yeah.”
“It’s just the Vents. Nothing bad will happen.”
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“I know.”
“Did you see the new fashion line from Id? I saw some suits in E-Town I wanted to show you on the weekend-”
“-Stop it, Mars,” Jolie snaps, shoving her JOY into her pocket. “It was one bad night. I’m over it.”
I leave her be and adjust to her shorter stride. Can’t keep my eyes from straying over in her direction. Making sure her steps are straight. Jolie’s all composed professionalism, always clamping down on anything and everything that isn’t bolted down. Sometimes I wonder just how many problems she keeps to herself. We’re twins. We share everything. But there are some things even she won’t share with me.
“According to civic records, Akis Prazen lives in an abandoned industrial warehouse five layers down and a few blocks over,” she finally says, answering my earlier question. “Nothing suspicious at all about that, if he’s secretly three forklifts in a trench coat. Let’s find a metro and check it out. Discretely.”
I put a gentle hand on her shoulder, stopping her in the shady light of a brick-walled corner mart. A shiver of intensifying ki begins spooling out from beneath my clothes. Flapping my cloak as I open the floodgates of my aura and start escalating it into combat readiness.
“Or,” I cock my head to the side, crimson hair fluttering. “We could fly.”
-
“We are not doing that again,” Jolie groans, shoving me away. Her vomiting splashes in the darkness behind my back. More retching follows fast on its heels. Closing my ears to the sounds of nausea, I turn a quick circle and sweep my kinetic sense through the abandoned, decrepit loading dock we set down in. No sparks of life energy shine back in my awareness. Rather than pushing my aura beyond the docks to scout further, I taper it back until it rests right at surface level.
We’re in a deep industrial sector. Ghostly shadows of derelict towers creak in the yawning darkness. Rare fliers flit between them in brief bursts of colors and technology. The nearest lights glow from the Orange district; an entertainment sector managed by the inter-Sectional crime syndicate, Dynasty. Uneasy territory, in other words. The Vents is the only place in the Section that the champion’s laws don’t reach. That goes doubly so for places as deep as these. The closest wardens are an hour away in the overcity. Down here, trouble is solved alone, or not at all.
I keep my feet moving while I fix my hood, double-checking with simple visuals that the docks are empty. If there’s another fighter with my class hiding further in, using any ki here will broadcast my presence like a sunrise telegraphs day. Any attention is unwanted when dealing with the unknown.
The tower bristles when a gust of frigid, abyssal wind saps the heat from the air. Shipping containers groan in the grips of leering cranes. Every step I take kicks up handfuls of dust. Subdued, moody pulses of aura blasts it away before the particles can reach my nose. Haloed by the white light pooling from my skin, I lead the way between piles of tipped-over crates and rusted, ancient tech separating us from the massive bay doors at the end of the dock. There’s a thin split down the center of the doors that looks out into the rest of the block. As we move closer, the gap grows until Jolie and I stand side-by-side in the gap with comfortable separation between us.
We pause just inside the threshold, looking out on the derelict alleys beyond. I’ve never been this deep in the Vents. We’ve long since left the sounds of the entertainment sectors behind. There’s no way to tell why this block was abandoned. Disease, mechanical disrepair, forced evacuation by gangs. Anything is plausible. All that remains of the previous occupants is an eerily silent grid of buildings long abandoned; asphalt streets devoid of life and light. All of it silent as a graveyard.
I lead the way into the necropolis. Empty apartments loom beside the road like the desiccated husks of old giants. Blown-out windows shine like slavering fangs in the wavering light of my aura. Scars of old fires and explosions darken the brick storefronts. Snowdrifts of concrete pour into the roads. Liquid drips out in the darkness. I stick closer to Jolie as we wander over an empty four-lane highway that was shattered by an Earth elemental. Feeling the hair prickling across the back of my neck as I sweep the streets for any sign of activity.
The quiet is almost physically cloying. Every noise is dampened, like we’re moving underwater. In the distance, metal creaks; a tattered seat flaps from a rusty swingset. Jolie shivers as she pulls her JOY back out, navigating to the central menu of her classes. A folding scanner that wraps from her left ear to the left side of her glasses appears first, Innovator tech. Then a swarm of cyan nanolines knits together into the physical shape of an extendable blade in her right hand. She holds it awkwardly, unused to the weight. More at home with the tools of her office than the ones her JOY provides.
Her scanner’s lens shifts from grey to green as she waves me to a stop, inspecting the faded remnants of a spray-painted mural. Years old, it’s impossible to tell what it once depicted.
“No heat signatures, but that isn’t saying much,” Jolie murmurs, glancing back over the streets. She stands again and swishes her blade once to test the cold air. “The Abyss drains heat quickly this far from the lights. If anyone is down here, we’re going to need a physical trail. But I’m starting to doubt that’s the case. This place is…”
“...Yeah,” I mutter. “Ghost town.”
My senses take on a sharper edge as I follow Jolie’s gaze, examining the empty streets around us. “We need to check out that warehouse address before we leave. Which way is it?”
“I can’t tell from the address. It dead-ends somewhere on this half of the block. There’s nothing more specific.” She raises a sardonic eyebrow at me. “You’re the one always saying to listen to your instincts. Are they wizarding up anything useful today?”
It’s not even worth the time to explain that that’s not at all how instincts work. Closing my eyes, I let the hollow wind of the Abyss whisper against my aura, stretching my kinetic sense to its furthest reaches. There’s a couple of tiny sparks of animal life to the west, probably vermin. The east is as barren as I expected. And I’m not one for delays.
“Straight ahead,” I guess, with all the confidence of a lying politician.
We proceed in silence. I fully pull my aura within myself as we cross another city block and approach a more open industrial park, blinding myself to even Jolie’s presence behind my back. Her faint breaths prickle my ears as we skirt piles of trash and half-opened doors in an alley. I pull one of the doors open on a whim. A ramshackle apartment, more a prison cell, stares back. Rotted carpet on the floor. One empty plastic chair beside a soot-smeared hearth. An empty bottle in the corner. Nothing more. No belongings. No signs of life.
I check another. Same story. It twists my heart to see it. Venters aren’t forced to live in the undercity, but no one would choose a home like this of their own accord. Whoever lived this close to the grasp of the Abyss must truly have had no other options. And they aren’t the only ones who live like this.
Tens of thousands survive in this concrete underworld every single day. Most who are born here never leave. They find work as gang muscle, indentured servants in the Orange, or blackmarket techsmiths. Even in a world like mine, even with all our supernatural power, there are still places like these. I want to do something to change it. But I haven’t the first idea where to start. I’m just a uni fighter with dreams bigger than his hands.
Jolie tugs on my cloak as we come to the intersection of another broken highway, minutes later. The end of the block looms ahead in a pitch-black dropoff. I follow her finger ahead to where the street is flanked by a number of huge towerside warehouses. Closest to us is a hangar just like the one we set down in. Only, this one’s front doors are split down the center by the telltale light of distant, industrial halogens. And silhouetted in the runoff light, fencing blade in hand, kneels a young man with golden, braided hair I’d recognize anywhere in the Section.