Disregarding what he'd just let his base desire coax him into, Luke snapped back to reality. It was time to move forward—somehow—after losing his job at the Delights Superstore, the one place that had kept him afloat for longer than he liked to admit.
Granted, it wasn't an ideal job, nor something anyone dreamed of doing for a lifetime, but in Slum City, options were luxuries, and Delights had been one of the few doors that ever opened for him. Now it had slammed shut. Hard.
He sank onto the edge of his thin mattress, elbows on knees, fingers interlaced behind his head as though he could manually switch on the part of his brain that solved problems. The room felt too small for thinking—four walls stained by time, one flickering neon sign bleeding cracked light through the blinds, humming like an insect that refused to die.
Okay. Breathe. Think.
Bills didn't care about his panic. Rent didn't pause for heartbreak. And hunger—hunger was a punctual creditor.
Luke closed his eyes, trying to pinpoint the exact moment things had slipped beyond his control. Maybe it didn't matter. What mattered was what came next. The question that clawed at the inside of his skull:
What now?
Something had to give. And if the city wasn't going to hand him another chance, he'd have to carve one out himself—however reckless, desperate, or strange it might have to be.
Luke stayed like that—hands pressing into his skull—until the ache in his arms forced him to drop them. The silence of the room wasn't peaceful; it was accusatory.
Every crack in the wall, every stain on the floor seemed to whisper the same thing:
You should've seen this coming.
He exhaled sharply and pushed himself to his feet. Sitting wouldn't save him. Thinking wouldn't either, not unless he paired it with action. The problem was… he didn't have many actions left to take.
The city outside his window growled with its usual nighttime discontent. Slum City never slept; it only shifted moods—daytime desperation turning into nocturnal hunger. Somewhere down the street, someone shouted. Glass broke. A siren wailed but didn't hurry.
Luke grabbed his threadbare jacket from the back of a chair. If he stayed inside, he'd drown in his own thoughts. If he went out, maybe he'd drown in something else—but at least it wouldn't be boredom.
He descended the rusted stairwell of his building, each step creaking like it wanted to collapse but wasn't brave enough to.
The lobby smelled like mildew and old regrets. Mr. Halver, the landlord, sat behind the counter pretending to read a newspaper, though Luke knew he was tracking late payers more diligently than current events.
Halver's eyes flicked up.
"You're two weeks behind."
Luke didn't slow his pace. "Yeah. I know."
"You planning to fix that?"
"I'm planning to… try."
Halver snorted. "Try harder."
Outside, the cold slapped him awake.
Streetlights buzzed overhead, casting sickly halos across the sidewalk. Luke shoved his hands into his pockets and started walking with no destination in mind—only the need to be anywhere but where he was.
As he passed the alley behind the shuttered pawnshop, something caught his eye.
A flicker of movement. A glow, faint but unnatural, pooling beneath a dumpster like spilled light.
Luke paused.
That glow… it wasn't the broken neon sign around the corner. It wasn't a reflection. It was something else—like a pulse, slow and steady, breathing against the darkness.
He glanced up and down the street. No one around.
Curiosity, the same trait that had saved him and ruined him in equal measure, nudged him forward.
He stepped into the alley.
The air shifted—colder, quieter, expectant.
Behind the dumpster, half-buried in the grime and debris of Slum City, was a small metallic object shaped like a flattened sphere, no bigger than his palm.
Its surface shimmered with patterns that moved like they were alive, rearranging themselves every few seconds.
Luke crouched and hesitated, his breath visible in the dim light.
"What… are you?"
The object pulsed again, as if answering.
Luke reached out.
And the moment his fingers brushed the metal, the world exploded into white.
The blinding light knocked Luke out cold. He lay in the alley for several minutes before consciousness even threatened to return. The place wasn't exactly bustling, but a few people passed through now and then. None of them stopped. None of them even slowed down.
They barely spared him a glance.
It was just another ordinary sight in Slum City—someone on the ground, hurt, unconscious, or worse. Here, people only cared if you had status, money, or something they could use. Everyone else blended into the background noise of survival.
As Luke's breathing steadied, a faint chill crept up his spine from the cold concrete beneath him. The metallic smell of rust and runoff filled the air.
Somewhere deeper in the alley, a pipe dripped steadily, each splash echoing like a reminder that time hadn't stopped just because he had. A stray cat darted past his legs, pausing only long enough to sniff him before deciding he wasn't worth the trouble.
If anyone had bothered to look closely, they would have seen the faint scorch mark on the wall beside him and the thin trail of smoke still curling upward—the only evidence that the light had been real, not some hallucination from exhaustion or hunger. But no one looked.
No one ever did.
Slowly, Luke's fingers twitched. A dull ache spread through his skull as awareness returned in uneven waves. He didn't remember falling.
He didn't remember the light. He only knew that something had happened—something that didn't belong in the forgotten corners of a city that had long since stopped believing in miracles.
Or in warnings.
The glowing metallic object that initially drew his attention had now transformed in a gold coin, but not in their currency, it had markings luke had never seen before.
Luke did not know what to make of this, but one thing was certain, this was not a normal occurrence.