Sirens pierced the dawn.
Their shrill, jagged wails carved through the silence, ricocheting off the weathered brick and grimy glass of Eldridge's tenements.
The sound was too loud, too raw, like a blade scraping bone. Elias Thorne's eyes snapped open, tracing the familiar cracks in his ceiling, their flickering shadows dancing in the dim light.
His breath hitched, caught in the stale rhythm of a city he despised but couldn't escape.
For a moment, he lay still.
Half-sunk into the sagging mattress, arms folded beneath his head, his pulse stayed defiantly steady.
The sirens didn't unnerve him.
They weren't meant to. They were just… there.
A constant hum beneath the city's pulse.
"Same old noise," he muttered, voice rough, unsure if the words stayed in his head or slipped into the air. It didn't matter.
A scream tore through the paper-thin walls—male, slurred, laced with liquor or rage, maybe both.
A woman's voice followed, sharper, venomous, punctuated by the dull thud of something heavy striking drywall.
Elias didn't flinch.
The sirens faded, their wail curling toward some distant corner of Eldridge where blood still glistened wet.
But the shouting next door persisted—a crash, another yell, the clatter of something metal tumbling to a stop.
He could parse every word if he chose to.
He didn't.
His gaze drifted to the corner of the room, where mold bloomed like a festering wound across the wall. Green and fuzzy, it crept over peeling paint, thriving in neglect.
It had no purpose, no ambition. It just existed.
Like him.
He blinked, slow and deliberate. The shouting stopped, leaving only the hum of silence.
Elias exhaled, no relief in the act—just air escaping. The city never apologized for its chaos. It churned on, relentless.
He sat up, the mattress springs creaking in protest. His studio apartment—barely worthy of the name—felt like a relic of someone else's life.
Faded posters clung to the walls: old comics, gritty vigilante films long forgotten. A broken fan rattled in the window, useless.
A kettle, dead for weeks, sat on the counter.
His phone buzzed, a single sharp vibration.
He reached for it, muscle memory overriding thought.
"Body Found in Alley Behind 14th Street—No Suspects."
The headline glared through the fractured web of cracks on Elias Thorne's phone screen.
Below it, a grainy image: yellow caution tape sagging in the dawn light, a body bag half-shrouded under a tarp.
No name. No details.
Just another corpse in Eldridge's endless tally.
Elias lingered on the screen longer than he intended. Not out of shock or curiosity—just a heavy, wordless weight. His thumb hovered, then swiped down.
Another headline.
"City Council Vows Crackdown on Gang Violence—Again."
A dry scoff escaped him.
Empty promises.
The city's veins pulsed with violence, and no one was fooling anyone.
The sirens from dawn clicked into place. Another life snuffed out.
He tossed the phone onto the bed, its muted thud drowned by the city's waking clamor—garbage trucks grinding through narrow alleys, a man shouting about a lost lighter, distant dogs barking into the haze.
Elias rose, joints stiff from restless sleep, and grabbed yesterday's clothes from the chair: faded jeans, a diner-branded tee, a hoodie with frayed cuffs, all steeped in the scent of grease and urban grit.
No time for a shower. No water either.
He laced up worn sneakers, the left sole splitting at the seam, and zipped his hoodie halfway. No breakfast—nothing to eat anyway.
Just the quiet and a full ashtray on the windowsill, left by someone who wasn't him.
He stepped into the hall.
The air hit him first: a sour mix of urine and mildew.
A flickering bulb overhead buzzed, clinging to life. By the time he reached the street, the sun barely pierced the city's smog, casting a dull glow over Eldridge's familiar decay.
A homeless man, swaddled in three mismatched coats, muttered to himself by a trash fire beneath the overpass.
A woman pushed a shopping cart overflowing with blankets and dented cans past a toppled mailbox. Two kids bickered over a broken scooter, their voices sharp against a wall scrawled with red graffiti.
Elias kept his head low and moved.
Thoughts reined tight.
Hands buried in pockets.
Presence small, unnoticeable.
His gaze snagged on a crumbling wall past the corner liquor store.
Fresh graffiti: jagged black letters rimmed in blood-red.
Big Rico's crew.
He froze mid-step.
Just for a heartbeat.
Then walked on.