Chapter 3

Leo Tanner

The shift ended at 3 a.m. With the extra pay, once the system took its cut, I had enough for a partial energy payment. One thousand credits. Not enough to restore full service, but enough to keep the door functioning and basic lighting for another week.

A shuttle came to a stop at the corner platform. The doors opened in a burst of warm air. I didn't check the fare. Even the night rate costs too much.

It pulled away before I reached the crosswalk, red lights fading into the dark. One more week. That's all I needed. Cover the partial energy bill. Pass the exam. Move into repair work.

Shit plan, but still a plan.

I kept walking.

My boot scraped along the uneven concrete, the worn sole slipping a little on a loose seam in the corridor tile.

Public displays still pretended it was autumn somewhere, assuming they even worked, but seasons were another forgotten ghost from the ruined world outside. Down here, the corridors were cold. The heating always dropped this late. Exposed pipes dripped condensation onto the concrete floor. Another patchwork fix failed somewhere in the grid.

Rust-streaked panels lined the corridor where workers had rerouted power conduits a dozen times. You could tell which sectors the volunteers had patched and which ones had received official repairs from the authorities. The volunteers used scrap, but they cared. The Admin teams used new parts, but never came back when something cracked.

The buzz of electricity drew my eyes toward an arc skipping along a faulty line. Not enough current. Another bypass fed power into Sector C's filtration tower. They always prioritized filtration over lighting. Not that I blamed them, choking in the dark was worse than stumbling through it.

I used to wonder how things got so bad. I don't anymore. Now I wonder how any of it still works at all.

An illegal food vendor crouched near the corridor turnoff, burners flickering under a rusted canopy. The sharp smell of grease and charred spices punched through the cold. My stomach clenched, a deep twist that bordered on pain.

Strips of meat hissed on the grill, dark and uneven, dripping into a dented runoff pan. Real meat, or close enough to look like it. Real meat was not common in the domes for generations. People disappear all the time. Most people never returned. Others disappeared into the shadows of the black market, sold for whatever value they still had. Nobody asked questions about the protein sold by the illegal food street vendors.

The vendor caught me looking and flashed a grin. His teeth were the color of old plastic, yellowed and cracked, some missing entirely.

"Hot fresh, ten credits! No ration taste!" he called.

I ignored it. One contaminated bite meant getting sick. Sick meant missing work. Missed work meant no credits. No credits meant the door wouldn't open, and I would be doomed.

That was the chain. Break one link, and everything else follows.

By the time I reached Block D, my hands were stiff from the cold. I passed a few others along the way, trudging with their heads down, wrapped in thin coats or still wearing their work uniforms. They were people who didn't have much time left.

I was the same. I thought.

The door panel resisted when my tired weight leaned against it, scraping open reluctantly on backup power. That much, anyway, still worked. Inside the apartment, darkness greeted me.

Checking the time was necessary, but wasting the phone battery wasn't an option. Maya's charger had given me enough to use tomorrow, and with no working outlets in my apartment, I had to be careful.

I fumbled through drawers until I found an old digital wristwatch. From before. Before everything. Before the curtain, before the domes, before the portals. It was one of the only possessions returned to me after Dome City Twelve fell, salvaged from the ruins of my family's quarters by recovery teams and handed to me at the orphan housing facility when I turned fifteen.

The metal felt cool beneath my touch as I ran my fingers over the engraving. JT. My grandfather. A man I never met.

My parents said he was an engineer, too, back when that meant building bridges and communication satellites, not scraping through piles of trash, looking for the same old tech. I'm not sure if that was true. People lie to kids to keep them hopeful.

The watch survived when almost nothing else did. No network, no battery. It stored kinetic energy and a design too old to fail.

Looking at the time, I calculated what little remained before the power completely shut down. A little more than eight hours left. I set the alarm for 8 a.m. Four hours of sleep, then pay the partial energy bill, then another shift. After that, the engineering exam.

Something had to give. Eventually, something always gave.

I collapsed onto my bed, not bothering to undress. Sleep enveloped me immediately, bringing along the same dream I always had. Running through a sunlit field, butterflies spinning around me. Warmth on my skin. Laughter came easily—a child's joy in a world that never existed for me.

I'd never felt real sunlight, never seen an actual butterfly, never stood in a field of flowers. Those things were gone before I was born. My mind must have conjured them from the impossible stories my parents always told, painting pictures of a world they only knew from those fragmented stories they clung to and believed in.

When I woke, the world was silent. No hum of ventilation systems, no distant voices from neighboring units, no announcements from dome authorities. A dead quiet deeper than the usual gloom, a stillness that prickled with wrongness.

Even during energy downtimes, there was always something.

My eyes took time to adjust. The watch read 11:26 a.m.

I had overslept by hours.

Shit.

My stomach dropped. The door would lock soon. The exam had started an hour ago. Torres would mark me as a no-show and had already replaced me on the shift rotation. Three months of perfect attendance gone. All those credits I'd scraped together for tuition? Wasted. And for what? Four hours of sleep that turned into seven?

Panic finally breaking through my usual indifference, I jumped up, scrambling through the dark apartment to grab my backpack, phone, student ID card, and an extra shirt.

A vibration rumbled through the floor as I stuffed my belongings into the bag. Like a heartbeat. Thump. Thump. Thump.

I recognized that pattern immediately. I'd felt it once before, ten years ago in Dome City Twelve. The rhythmic tremors of massive footfalls, followed by that unnatural silence right before death arrived.

I knew exactly what it meant. I should have stayed back. But ignoring it wouldn't make the danger disappear.