The sun had not touched the skin of the lower sectors in over a century. What remained of its warmth was a myth passed down like an old prayer, whispered through barred grates and rust-choked ventilation shafts. On that day—one too dim to name—light breached the horizon with a solemn defiance, a soft gold tear piercing the shroud that hung over the world.
It did not reach the depths.
Beneath that fragile morning, in the choking metal womb of the city's lowest domain—called The pits by the authorities, the grounds by those who suffered there—life was birthed in pain.
A child cried.
She cried with a voice too raw for silence, as though some fragment of the forgotten sun had woven itself into her lungs. Her mother gasped when she saw her.
"She's... she's not like the others," the woman whispered, her eyes widening in disbelief. The child's skin held a warm sepia hue, untouched by the grey pallor that hung like death across every living body in the Ground. "She looks... different."
The midwife backed away in horror. "This... this will bring the rung men. You know what they do to those who stand out."
The father—calloused hands trembling, face lined with more dirt than age—stared at his daughter in silence. Then he moved.
With a sudden desperation born of doomed resolve, he wrapped the child in torn linens and bolted from the chamber. Alarms had not yet sounded. He knew their eyes—those Pale Guards—saw everything, but even the machines had blind spots.
He darted through reeking alley-vents and narrow ducts, climbing toward the lower belts of the Pits. No man rose from the Ground without a pass, but he was not seeking ascent—he sought salvation.
The housing tiers of the residential sector he jumped off as it was on lower level at least fifteen feet below, he jumped without hesitating wounded and and made a run the residential area. There, in a rust-caked hovel marked by glyphs from an older time, he found her.
An old woman, bent with years but sharp-eyed, opened the door before he knocked. She took one look at the child and knew.
"This isn't your burden anymore," she whispered.
With hands shaking, he passed the infant to her, brushing her cheek once. Then he turned without another word and vanished into the steel veins of the Pits.
He returned to the facility bloodied, wounds opened from the climb. The Pale Guards were waiting.
"Where were you! where is your infant ?" they demanded.
He said nothing.
They beat him as his wife watched, weeping but proud. She too had refused to tell. Her silence was their shared rebellion.
In the birthing chamber, flickering above the rusted cot, a light had glowed erratic since the child's first breath. Now, as both parents fell beneath the batons of the Pale Guards, it pulsed once—then steadied into a brilliant, unwavering glow.
Their deaths were recorded as routine, their bodies disposed without rites. But those who stood near swore they died with a smile.
And somewhere in the belts above, a child who should not have survived opened her eyes to the scent of ash and the breath of a forgotten world.
Marked to endure.
Marked to die.
---