Falling wasn't the part that hurt. The landing was.
I didn't hit concrete. I hit something that gave way—a mountain of crushing, tearing, shifting metal. My shoulder slammed into a hard ridge. The air left my lungs in a violent wheeze. I tumbled, rolling down a slope of slick industrial waste before finally coming to a stop in a pool of stagnant, oily water.
For a long time, there was only darkness. And the ringing in my ears.
Am I dead? I tried to move my fingers. Pain shot up my left arm, sharp and hot. Not dead. Dead things don't feel pain.
I groaned, rolling onto my back. The smell hit me instantly—sulfur, rotting plastic, and ancient rust. It was the smell of a machine that had died a long time ago.
"Stay down," a voice hissed from the dark.
I froze. My eyes struggled to adjust. Above me, miles up, I could see a faint, jagged line of light—the sky-bridge we had jumped from. It looked like a distant crack in a black ceiling. We hadn't just fallen. We had descended into the earth's gut.
"Lyra?" I croaked, my throat raw.
A small light flickered to life nearby. It wasn't an Echo. It was a chemical glow-stick, casting a sickly green hue over the debris. Lyra was sitting on a rusted engine block, clutching her side. Her face was smeared with grease, and her flight jacket was torn at the shoulder. She looked exhausted.
"We're alive," she whispered, staring at the glow-stick. "Statistically, we shouldn't be. But we are."
I sat up slowly, clutching my throbbing shoulder. "Where are we?"
Lyra held up the light, revealing the cavernous space around us. We were in a graveyard. Not for people. For the city. Twisted skyscrapers that had been demolished decades ago lay in heaps. Mountains of discarded server racks, broken drones, and miles of tangled cables filled the landscape. There were no clean streets here. No neon signs. No countdown clocks.
"The Underside," Lyra said grimly. "Sector Zero. This is where the System dumps everything it deletes."
She looked at me, her grey eyes searching my face. "Including us."
I looked down at my hands. They were trembling. "My Echo," I whispered. "The black one. Is it..."
I tried to call it. I tried to summon that feeling of cold power I had felt on the bridge. I squeezed my eyes shut, willing the darkness to rise. Nothing. Just the cold dampness of the underground. The power was gone. Or dormant.
"It saved us," Lyra said softly. "I saw it. Before we hit the trash piles, that black shadow wrapped around us. It took the impact." She stood up, wincing, and walked over to me. She grabbed my wrist and checked my pulse, then looked at my retinal display.
"Offline," she noted. "Your connection to the Grid is severed down here. No GPS. No updates."
"So we're safe?" I asked, hope rising slightly. "If the Grid is down, the Admin can't see us."
Lyra laughed. It was a dry, humorless sound. "Safe? Kairo, look around you."
She kicked a piece of metal into the dark water. Ripples spread. But something else moved in the water, too. Far out in the shadows, beyond the reach of the glow-stick, two small red lights blinked open. Then two more. Then a dozen.
Low, mechanical growls echoed off the walls. Not the clean hum of government drones. These sounded jagged, grinding, like gears grinding against bone.
"The Admin isn't the only thing that lives in the dark," Lyra whispered, extinguishing the glow-stick instantly, plunging us into total blackness.
She grabbed my good arm, pulling me close. "This is the Scavenger Zone. The machines down here... they don't get software updates. They get hungry."
A heavy metal footstep crunched on the debris nearby. Then another. Closer.
"Don't breathe," Lyra breathed into my ear. "If we want to survive the night, we need to find high ground. Now."
I realized then that jumping off the bridge wasn't the end of the story. It was just the end of the tutorial. The real game—the game of survival—had just begun.