Chapter 1
The silence was the most terrifying thing. And that was because district 13 was never silent.
It's default soundtrack was chaos. Either the clang of metal -on-metal, or the sound of people fighting, the sound of thieves being pursued because there was a lot of thieves in the district. The sound of a woman screaming in ecstasy…the point was, district 13 was never quiet but this announcement had made it's residents mute that even those who talked a lot had nothing to say.
In the cramped confines of Hab-Unit 734, the only sound was the frantic, shallow rasp of Finn's breathing. He stood frozen in the middle of the room, his face the color of spoiled milk. The synth-sausage he'd been eating lay on the floor where it had fallen from his fork, a pathetic brown stain on the grimy floor. His eyes were wide, fixed on the dead comms panel on the wall as if he could force it to speak again, to take back the words it had spoken.
Cypher sat at his workbench, his own body rigid. The tools of his trade which included a hydro-spanner, a coil of copper wire, a delicate micro-soldering iron, lay before him, suddenly feeling like children's toys. His gaze drifted past Finn, toward the unit's single window. Outside, the view was the same as it had been every day of his life, or at least, every day he could remember.
A landscape of rust and ruin. Stacked hab-blocks leaned against each other like tired drunks. Their rust colour shining in the daylight. A web of cables and makeshift walkways crisscrossed the gap between buildings.
And above it all, impassive and immense, was the Dome.
It was barely visible through the layers of smog and light pollution, a soft, almost imperceptible curve against the blackness of the poisoned sky. It was their cage and their savior.
The history was taught to every child, drilled into them before they could even read. In the early 2200s, the world had ended not with a bang, but with a whisper. The Fog. A mist of unknown origin that had swept across the planet. It didn't just kill. It remade.
Anything it touched be it plant, animal, human was twisted, its very biology rewritten into something monstrous and unrecognizable. The stories told of men whose bones bent into new shapes, whose skin grew beyond recognition, whose minds dissolved into pure, predatory instinct.
Humanity's last act of defence was the Domes. Grand, technological arks built by the Founding Families, titans of industry and science who shielded the last remnants of civilization beneath impenetrable canopies. They had saved the world by cutting it up into pieces.
Ten districts, to be exact. Ten districts with the lowest being district 13 nicknamed hell.
It wasn't like this at first but Cypher didn't know district 13 to be anything different. He only knew one thing, you were born into a district, and that was your station. Your quality of life, your access to resources, your very value as a human being was determined by that number.
District 23 was heaven. A place that houses the founding families and the leaders of this new world. A place that most people wished to live in because one thing was sure, life would be better and perfect up there. One wouldn't need to fight for food or water. You'd get it without asking.
And then there was District 13.
It wasn't just the bottom. It was the sump. When a citizen in a higher district committed a crime, they weren't imprisoned. They were exiled. Sent down. Stripped of their status and dumped into the chaos to be forgotten. Here, murderers lived next to petty thieves, political criminals shared walls with disgraced engineers. It was a chaotic ecosystem of the unwanted, a place where the only law was survival and the only authority was the brute force of the gangs that carved up territory block by block. There was no upward mobility from District 13. There was no escape. It was the end of the line.
Until now.
"Decommissioned," Finn finally choked out, the word sounding alien and obscene in the quiet room. "What does that… what does that even mean?"
"It means they're turning it off, Finn." Cypher said not only to Finn but also himself . "The power. The water. Maybe the dome also."
Finn scoffed. "You can't be serious. If they take the dome away, there's no way well survive. Hell, we are hardly breathing clean air as it is."
Cypher wanted to be on Finn's side but he couldn't. This announcement didn't sit well with him. They only had seventy two hours.
What Finn said was true. The only way the air was safe was due to the air scrubbers, the massive, unseen lungs of the district that filtered the recycled atmosphere, keeping the toxins at a survivable level. Without them, the air would turn poisonous in days. They would choke on their own exhalations.
"Seventy-two hours," Finn whispered, running a trembling hand through his greasy hair. He started pacing, two steps one way, two steps the other, a caged animal. "Three days. They're giving us three days to… to what? Die?"
"Perhaps. But who knows? This sounds like a race for survival." Cypher replied to him.
Finn stopped pacing. He stared at Cypher, his eyes begging for a different answer. "Two hundred," he said. "Cypher, the voice said two hundred people."
"I heard."
"There are three hundred thousand of us! At least! That's not a race, that's a slaughter! That's… that's nothing." The number was so small, so absurdly, cruelly small, that it defied comprehension. It wasn't a chance. It was an excuse to sanction a bloodbath. Two hundred slots for a city of criminals and low-lives.
As insane as it sounded, the authority dangled hope for the residents if district 13. The most dangerous commodity in District 13. When there is hope or even the smallest chance, these residents would take it without looking back.
"The gate," Cypher said, his gaze returning to the window. The main demarcation gate was miles away, on the district's northern edge. The only official way in or out. A slab of steel and security checkpoints that no one ever passed through. "To District 14."
District 14. A world away. A place with rules, with guards who enforced them, with a life that didn't involve checking for tripwires in your own hallway. It was so close, just on the other side of a wall, but it might as well have been the moon. The thought of it was a fantasy, and now, it was the only prize in the deadliest game imaginable.
The silence outside continued to stretch, taut and unnatural. It was the sound of three hundred thousand minds all arriving at the same horrific conclusion. Every person in every hab-unit, every workshop, every filthy alley was doing the math. They were looking at their neighbors, their friends, their family, and they were seeing obstacles. Competition.
Every single person was a rival.
The quiet was the sound of alliances being mentally broken. It was the sound of kindness being weighed against survival and found wanting. It was the sound of the thin, fragile veneer of society evaporating in an instant.
Cypher's eyes fell upon Glitch, his canine-sized automaton, who sat powered down in the corner. The dog-like machine was his only link to a past he couldn't remember, a complex piece of work he knew, instinctively, he had built, but could not recall how. His amnesia had always been a frustrating blank space in his life. Now, it felt like a handicap in a race where every advantage mattered.
Finn was mumbling now, a frantic, repetitive prayer of curses. "No, no, no, this can't be… we can't…"
The silence had become a physical presence. It pressed in on the ears, heavy and suffocating. It was the deep breath before the plunge, the held moment at the top of a roller coaster, the pause between the lightning flash and the thunder. It was the sound of a city holding its breath.
Then, from somewhere deep in the concrete canyons below, the silence broke.
It was not a roar. It was not an explosion.
It was a single, high-pitched, piercing scream. A sound of pure terror, sharp enough to cut glass.
And at that moment, everyone knew the race had just begun.
People remaining: 299,999
Accepted residents: 0