"We aren't running," Jax said, his voice sounding strange through the fresh filters—crisp, clear, and terrifyingly calm. "We're disappearing."
"Disappearing?" Ryla scoffed, kicking a piece of loose rebar that clattered loudly against the concrete. "Jax, look at me. I'm a walking glow-stick. You're wearing a mask worth more than this entire block. We stick out like flares in a coal mine."
"Not here," Jax said, gesturing to the looming shadows ahead. "Not in the Grave."
They stood at the rusted gateway of Sector 4-C, known to the Basin locals simply as the "Ghost Sector." Ten years ago, a catastrophic Mag-Lev failure in the Sprawl above had sheared a massive cargo freighter off its tracks. The ship, carrying tons of raw durasteel, had plummeted six hundred meters and crushed this district flat.
It hadn't been cleared; it had been condemned. The Overseer had declared it structurally unsound and cut the power. Now, the buildings were crushed skeletons, listing at impossible angles, held together by oxidized rebar and gravity.
It was a graveyard of concrete and steel. And for the first time since they left the workshop, it was silent.
"I hate it," Ryla whispered, shivering. She hugged herself, her neon-pink hair seemingly duller in the oppressive gloom. "It's too quiet. I can hear my own blood moving."
"That's the point," Jax said, checking his Sniffer. The readings were chaotic—ghost signals bouncing off the unstable metal. "The Banshees rely on acoustic precision. This place... it groans. It shifts. The interference will blind them."
"Great," Ryla muttered, stepping gingerly over a fissure in the road. "So instead of invisible assassins, we get crushed by a falling skyscraper. Keep up the optimism, Spark."
"It's temporary. Just for tonight."
They moved deeper into the ruins. The air here was colder than the rest of the Basin, stagnant and heavy with the smell of ancient dust and undisturbed mold. Shadows stretched long and thin in the flicker of Jax's wrist-light, dancing like specters against the broken walls.
Jax moved with his "Rat-Tactics" instinct—knees bent, weight low, eyes scanning the high ground. He knew the stories about the Ghost Sector. People said it was haunted. People said the "Dust-Walkers" ate anyone who trespassed.
He hoped the stories were lies. Or at least, exaggerations.
They found shelter in the hollowed-out shell of an old corporate atrium. The glass ceiling was shattered, jagged teeth of transparency framing the dark void of the upper crater. It was dry, at least.
Jax slid down against a concrete pillar, his left leg throbbing where the heavy mining boot chafed his shin. He checked his gear. His Spark-Gap was down to 15% charge. His Wrist-Deck was cracked worse than before, the screen a spiderweb of glitches.
Ryla sat a few feet away, hugging her knees. She looked small in the darkness, the bravado of the tunnel-runner stripped away by exhaustion.
"Do you think he's alive?" she asked quietly, her voice barely a whisper.
Jax didn't have to ask who. He closed his eyes, seeing the image of the workshop door closing. "Vorg wants the Core. And Silas being who he is, I don't think they'd just outright kill him. He's valuable. He's alive as long as he's useful."
"And then?"
"Then we get him back."
Ryla looked up, surprised. "You want to break into Sector 7? Jax, yesterday you freaked out about climbing a ventilation shaft."
"That was yesterday," Jax said, tightening the straps on his mismatched boots. "That was before they took my house. Before they put a price on my head. At this point, no matter what we do they'd just kill us anyway, we might as well try to do something about it"
He looked at her, his grey eyes hard behind the mask. "We aren't scavenging anymore, Ryla. We're at war."
Click.
The sound was soft, almost imperceptible. A tiny, mechanical engagement.
But Jax heard it. It wasn't a building shifting. It wasn't a rat.
It was the safety catch of a pneumatic projectile weapon disengaging.
Jax froze. He slowly looked up, keeping his hands visible.
"Ryla," he murmured, not moving his lips. "Don't draw."
"Why?"
"Look up."
From the shadows of the atrium's upper level, figures emerged. They didn't look like Banshees. They didn't look like Rust-Kings.
They were wrapped in layers of grey and brown rags, their silhouettes broken and jagged to blend perfectly with the concrete debris. "Null-Camo."
Dust-Walkers.
"Don't move," a voice whispered from the dark. It sounded wispy, artificial, filtered through a cheap vocal modulator.
Jax raised his hands slowly. Ryla, ignoring his warning, reached for the vibro-knife at her belt.
"Drop the blade, Neon," the voice commanded, sharper this time.
Three red laser dots appeared on Ryla's chest, heart, and throat.
Ryla froze. She slowly unclipped the knife and let it clatter to the floor.
A figure dropped from the ceiling, landing silently in a crouch ten feet in front of them. Around their age. Wrapped in bandages and grey cloth like a mummified spider.
The figure stood up. She was a bit shorter than Jax, but she held herself with a coiled, lethal tension. She wore a tight, cloth-wrap mask that covered her nose and mouth, Ninja-style, with a small, blocky modulator box clipped to the side.
Her eyes were visible—dark, sharp, and heavily lined with kohl to reduce glare.
Jax stared. He felt a jolt of recognition that hit him harder than the fear. He knew those eyes. He knew the way she tilted her head to the left when she was assessing a threat.
"Pria?" he breathed.
The figure paused. The laser dots on Ryla's chest wavered slightly.
The scout stepped forward, into the harsh beam of Jax's wrist-light. She pulled down the cloth mask, revealing a face that was strikingly cute—soft features, full lips, and a small scar on her chin that Jax remembered from the boiler room incident five years ago.
"Jax," she said. Her voice lost its digital edge, becoming soft, almost intimate. "You look terrible."
"You know this Ghost?" Ryla asked, looking between them, confused and instantly defensive.
Pria ignored Ryla completely. She walked right up to Jax, invading his personal space. She moved with a fluid grace that contrasted with her ragged camouflage.
She stopped inches from him. She reached out, her gloved fingers brushing the side of his high-end Aero-V2 mask. It was a possessive gesture, familiar and lingering.
"Five years, Jax," she murmured, her eyes searching his. "You leave the boiler room for the filter-station, and you never look back. Not once."
"I... I was surviving, Pria," Jax stammered, unnerved by her proximity. He could smell her scent—dust, ozone, and dried lavender. "I thought you went to the lower levels. I thought you were zeroed."
"I went where I had to," she said, her thumb tracing the scar on his cheek bone above the mask. "I survived too. But I didn't forget."
She finally pulled her hand away, her gaze hardening as she looked down at the glowing Gene-Core strapped to Ryla's chest.
"And now you bring this to my doorstep?" Pria hissed, stepping back. "The whole city is looking for that light, Jax. Banshees. Rust-Kings. Even the Corpse-Dredgers are sharpening their hooks."
"We didn't know where else to go," Jax said.
"Liar," Pria snapped, though there was no heat in it. She looked at him through her lashes. "You came here because you knew I wouldn't kill you. You knew I'd be here."
"I hoped," Jax admitted.
Pria smirked, a small, subtle thing. She turned to her squad—shadows in the rafters. "Stand down. They're... guests."
"Guests?" Ryla spat, stepping forward. "Your goons almost put a dart in my neck."
Pria finally looked at Ryla. The softness vanished instantly. Her expression went cold and flat. She looked Ryla up and down, taking in the neon hair, the reflective tape, and the curves of the bodysuit.
"You're loud," Pria stated, her voice deadpan. "You're bright. You're a walking target. If Jax wasn't standing next to you, I would have let my snipers take the shot just to stop the light pollution."
"I'm the reason he's alive," Ryla shot back, bristling. She moved closer to Jax, her shoulder bumping his. "I got him out of Sector 7."
Pria's eyes narrowed at the contact. She stepped closer again, effectively cutting off Ryla's line of sight to Jax.
"You're the reason he has a bounty," Pria countered smoothly. She turned her back on Ryla, facing Jax again. Her body language shifted, softening, leaning in. "You need a place to hide, Jax. I can give you that. My sector is a maze. Even the Banshees get lost here."
"What's the price?" Jax asked. He knew the Basin. Nothing was free. Even from an old friend.
Pria looked at him. For a second, the hardened scout vanished, and he saw the girl who used to share her nutrient paste with him when he didn't have any.
"My scrubber is broken," she said quietly.
"What?"
"The main air-scrubber for our camp. The motor seized two days ago. We're breathing raw dust. The little ones... they're starting to cough." She reached out and squeezed his arm, her fingers digging into the fabric of his hoodie. "You fix it like you fixed the fan, Jax. You fix it, and I hide you. I keep you safe."
She looked at Ryla over his shoulder, her eyes cold. "Her too. If she stays quiet."
Jax looked at the rusted machinery around them. He looked at the desperate, dusty faces of the other Walkers peering from the shadows. A trade. Rat-Tactics. But this time, it felt like paying a debt.
"Well, technically, I didn't fix the fan, but I will help now so, deal," Jax said.
Pria smiled, a genuine, relieved expression that transformed her face. She leaned in close, her lips brushing the shell of his ear.
"Follow me," she whispered. "And tell your girlfriend to turn off the night-light before she gets us all zeroed."
She turned and vanished into the shadows, expecting him to follow.
Ryla stared at Pria's retreating back, then looked at Jax with wide, incredulous eyes.
"What," Ryla hissed, "was that?"
"What was what?" Jax asked, checking his Spark-Gap.
"The touching? The whisper-talk? 'Five years, Jax'?" Ryla mimicked Pria's voice poorly. "She looked like she wanted to mount you or stab you."
"She's an old friend, Ryla. We grew up in the same boiler room. She's just... protective."
"Protective?" Ryla snorted, adjusting her gear. "She looked at me like I was a stain on the floor. Watch your back, Spark. That girl has knives in her eyes."
Jax shook his head, tapping his filter—Tap-tap-tap—and started walking. "She offered us a place to lay low. That's all that matters."
Ryla followed him, grumbling. "Yeah. Sure. Just don't be surprised if you wake up and she's watching you sleep."
They followed Pria deep into the labyrinth of the Ghost Sector, leaving the red glow of the bounty holograms far behind, trading one danger for a much more complicated one.