Luka sat on a paint-chipped bench at the edge of Fallen Park and let the city breathe over him. The neon halo from the Aetherline towers turned the puddles into small, electric moons. He folded the crumpled application form in his hand until the paper ached. Another rejection stamp. Another polite email that said he wasn't quite the right "resonance profile."
"Failed again," he muttered. "Isn't this ridiculous? You'd think a degree and two years of hands-on in maintenance would count for something. But nope — no special heart, no prospects."
He stared at his reflection in a discarded can of coffee. In a world obsessed with Birth, with those rare people born with the ability to channel Aetherion, the rest of them were measured in spare parts and second chances. Luka had learned the scales: resume on one side, a blank spot where a heart should hum on the other. The balance never tilted in his favor.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He looked automatically, then frowned. Another advert. Another scam. Until he read the header.
Bright Laboratory — Your employment confirmed. Report to Night Maintenance, shift B.
Luka blinked. He hadn't expected anything from Bright, not ever. Bright was one of those labs everyone mentioned in the same breath as privilege and sealed doors — the places the city's Resonants trusted with the holy work: jigs, implants, protocols that made certain people gods. Still, a job was a job.
"Maintenance," he said aloud, with a half-smile that tried to be optimism and landed closer to desperation. "Small step up from street tech, I guess."
Seven days later he was pushing a cart through a back corridor of Bright. The lab was less cathedral and more well-oiled machine: metal, glass, clipped voices filtered through a humidity controlled to stop organic decay. His badge barely granted him access; it let him past the janitorial airlock and into the belly where recycling units hummed and old centrifuges blinked their tired lives away.
They assigned him the usual — clean, catalog, keep the experimental waste separate from the salvage. They told him not to touch anything marked Confidential. They told him the lab was happy to have him.
And when he applied for a technician role in a research wing — anything beyond broom duty — they told him he lacked the profile. "We need active resonance for that position," his supervisor said, with that flat, practiced sympathy reserved for people whose fate made employers tidy.
It stung. Not because he wanted power — not at first — but because he wanted to be recognized as useful for more than keeping machines tidy. A man who cleans can only ever clean. A man who builds can lead the build. Luka wanted to build.
That evening, he stayed late under the pretext of consolidating salvage. The floor lights were dimmed to cinders and the glass corridors outside his area reflected the lab's heartbeat: precise, clinical, indifferent. He wheeled a battered crate into the outer storage where rust and memory stacked like bad choices.
He worked slowly, cataloging battered servos and cracked sensors, separating anything that still pulsed faintly. At the bottom of a pile, behind a coil of ruined coax, his gloved fingers brushed something cold and dense. It was a module — not like the usual scrap. Silver, with fine grooves that drank light. A dim fluorescence pulsed inside, like a breathing core.
He froze. The crate had no records. No tag. No place on any demolition manifest. Whoever had tossed it here did so quietly.
His training told him to log it and call the supervisor. His hunger told him otherwise.
While he examined the module, he noticed a folder wedged beside the box — its corner singed, the title almost rubbed away. He slid it free and his breath pooled cold in his chest.
PROJECT HELIOS — ADAPTIVE CORE TRANSPLANTATION: CONFIDENTIAL LEVEL Ω.
The pages smelled of ozone and late-night ink. Diagrams ribboned across them: heart schematics meshed with latticework and energy conduits, notes on immuno-binding curves, a side note in cramped handwriting: "virtually indistinguishable from natural core under standard metrics." There were names stamped along the margins — names he had heard only in rumor, names that sat at the top of funding trees.
Luka's rational mind tried to file this as impossible, as a misplaced file, as a deliberate test. Everything in him, the part that scraped by on scavenged parts and half-paid rent, started clicking into dangerous patterns.
If Bright could design a heart that mimicked a natural Resonant core so well it passed ethical panels and market tests, why sell transplants at astronomical risk and price? Why not make and distribute for control?
The folder answered nothing directly, but detail by detail it painted a picture Luka could not unsee: an engineered organ; protocols for surgical integration far more advanced than the public surgeries; a hidden pipeline for elites. The more he read, the colder the lab air felt. He forced the folder shut and stuffed it into his jacket, careful of the light and the weight. The module he tucked under his arm, close to his ribs like contraband.
He could have walked away. Logged the find through proper channels. Gone home and pretended not to tremble.
Instead, he wheeled the crate back to a disused janitor's closet, sealed the lock, and forced his face into the practiced blank of someone who belonged in the margins. He passed the night finishing his assigned rounds as if nothing in him had shifted. He washed grease from his hands in the same sink he'd used for months.
Outside, Fallen City dripped neon and rain. Inside, Bright breathed its even, secret breath. Luka kept walking.
When he stepped out into the wet air, the folder pressed like a promise against his chest and the module hummed a shallow, private pulse. He felt the city's eyes like questions and answered with a feeling he had not given voice to before: not vengeance, not just curiosity — a plan.
"They sell a god's heart and then charge to keep it secret," he murmured into the rain. "Fine. I'll learn how they do it. I'll make one that doesn't need them."
He slipped through the streets with the practiced silence of someone who knew how to move invisible. He had a roof and a bench and a toolbox of parts he'd been collecting for months — scrap that would finally mean something.
Tonight, a low-level maintenance hire had walked home with the beginnings of a revolution tucked into his jacket. He didn't know yet how far it would reach, only that he could no longer afford to wait for permission.