He sat up like a man being lifted by a rope he couldn't see. The body made its inventory known—ribs that argued, a spine that had learned new angles, skin pasted with damp. The air was thick and close, soft with rot and iron, as if the room had been breathing longer than he had.
"Where… am I?" Breuk's voice came out sanded, the word am a scrape in his throat.
"Down," a voice answered from the seam of shadow. Footsteps, bare and sure. The young man stepped into the half-light with the quiet of a person who has no need to be loud. He was lean without emptiness, skin a warm, deeper tone that caught the green glow in the room, eyes pale-gold like the flash inside a bottle when you tilt it. He wore what the place gave—stitched canvas, leather softened by hand, fibers braided from plants. No ornament. No waste.
"You're in the Grund," he said, with a small smile that didn't ask to be returned. "Further down doesn't exist."
Breuk's gaze skipped past him, through the slit that forgot to be a door. Outside, the world moved in slowed pulse. People crossed between walls furred with moss, their steps mapping paths along bridges grown from roots and rescued from scrap. Lamps weren't lamps—fungi glowed where someone had taught them to like wood. Every face he saw wore the same earthen tint, the same light in the eyes that made them look lit from somewhere other than the sun.
They don't look like the ones above, Breuk thought, without deciding if that meant better or worse.
He put his right palm to the ground to push himself higher. Habit made his left follow. Habit met absence. Pain bit like a dog that knows your scent. He rocked, almost went over. The young man was there in the space that almost took him, a hand firm at his good shoulder, the other bracketed against Breuk's back.
"Slow," he said. "You're not all the way back."
"I've survived worse," Breuk said, because that was a truth he liked to keep in the room, even when it didn't help.
"Not here," the young man said, and didn't smile this time.
They sat at a small fire made inside a ring of stone and old machine parts. The flame was modest, patient; the smoke was educated enough to find the crack in the roof and leave that way. Between them, a dented bowl steamed—a tea that smelled like leaf and mineral, like something the ground would approve of. The young man passed it over. Breuk's hand shook and steadied around the heat.
"How deep did I fall?" he asked, when the first swallow had convinced his throat they could still be allies.
"Deeper than most," the young man said, watching, not prying. "Those who fall that far rarely stay whole."
Breuk lowered his eyes out of reflex and took inventory he already knew. The bandage at the shoulder. The ache under the gauze where metal used to be. He kept his face retired from expression. Only the tremor in his fingers testified.
"I noticed," he said.
The young man tilted his head. Firelight made two coins in his eyes. "You came from the sky," he said, as if naming a fact about rain.
"What?"
"That's how we say it," he went on, leaning back on his hands so the heat touched his face evenly. "When one of you drops. Long time ago, another fell. The old ones say he was an angel. They say he was cast out of the sky because he betrayed the light."
Breuk laughed, which cost him a cough. The laugh sounded like old hinges moving without oil. "And you think I'm one of those?"
A shrug, quick and practical. "You fell and you live," the young man said. "Down here, that's enough to make a person… other." The smile returned, edged with a joke he wasn't sure would land. "Supernatural is a long word to say not dead."
Breuk looked into the fire, because it was easier to talk to something that did not talk back. The coals flexed and settled, a slow red thought. "I'm no angel," he said. "I just fell too far."
The young man pushed to his feet with the ease of someone who knows exactly where the ground is at all times. At the doorway he paused, half turned. "That's what the other said," he offered, with no ceremony, and stepped out.
Breuk stayed a while with the flame and the bowl and the tire ring that pretended to be a hearth. The tea's warmth made a small negotiation on his behalf with his bones. Outside, the place called the Grund kept choosing to live.
He levered himself up, piece by piece, and saw it properly. Huts grown the way coral grows, accepting whatever currents brought: ribs of steel reeducated into beams, root-lattices trained across gaps, planks arranged like arguments that ended in affection. Paths ran in three dimensions, stitched by bridges you'd trust only because everyone else did. A fine mist moved through, heavy with the breath of plants and old stone, collecting on lashes and cool on broken skin.
There was no sky. There was a ceiling the color of closed eyes. Far off, in the deep of deep, something flickered. Not bright, not near, just a suggestion—like a beacon that had forgotten what message it was meant to send and kept sending anyway.
People passed him without the stare that hurts. Their glances were quick, assessing and then done. A woman with a bundle of fronds nodded without smiling and kept walking. A child paused on a root-bridge and let his toes grip the bark, gold eyes curious, then went on when his mother called. There were no uniforms. There were patterns: leather hardened by water, cloth patched in ways that made maps, ornaments made from rings that were once part of something that hummed.
They moved like people who had trained themselves to be quiet so that the place that adopted them would not spit them out.
"Jakk," someone called, and the young man turned his head from a distance. So that was his name. He was carrying two lengths of pipe over one shoulder like a yoke, feet sure on the wet. He glanced at Breuk and raised his chin in a hello that did not insist on being answered.
Back at the small door, Breuk sat when his legs insisted he did. The fire had folded into coals, small eyes watching him. The bandage itched in that way that suggested healing had begun to write a rough draft. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and let the quiet have him.
An angel, huh? I'm missing the wing. He looked at the place where the machine had died and was gone. Figures.
He didn't feel sorry. He felt… incomplete in the way a sentence does when it realizes it has lost its verb.
The weight at his chest reminded him it was there. He pressed his palm flat over the pocket and felt the disciplined cold of the disc through damp cloth. In the fall, it had choose to be mercy. Down here, it chose to be a secret. He was good at keeping those. He wasn't sure why the thought made him tired.
Footsteps again. Jakk, this time, empty-handed. He crouched at the doorway instead of coming in, forearms on his knees, bare toes bunched in the dirt as if they could read. He didn't look at the bandage. He didn't pretend not to see it either.