The air in the Guts tasted of rust, recycled oxygen, and a faint, cloying sweetness that never left the back of the throat—the smell of the protein vats. Elara kept her head down as she hurried along the grated catwalk, the rhythmic, heavy clang-clang-clang of the main air recyclers a constant, oppressive heartbeat. This was her world: a vertical slum of metal and shadows, crammed into the spaces between the refinery's colossal, dying organs.
Her dwelling was a small, wedge-shaped space behind a bank of coolant pipes, the metal walls perpetually slick with condensation. Inside, her younger sister, Lyra, lay on a thin pallet, her small body shaking with a familiar, low-grade fever. Her skin had the same pale, unhealthy sheen as the blighted leaves in Voss's hydroponics bay.
"Did you get it?" Lyra's voice was a dry whisper.
Elara knelt, pulling a small, grimy packet from inside her tunic. It was a nutrient bar, the real kind, with actual fruit and grains, not the grey sludge they were given. She had traded a mended blanket and two weeks' worth of her own rations for it on the black market.
"Eat slowly," Elara said, breaking off a small piece.
As Lyra ate, Elara's mind drifted to the world outside the refinery. Her parents had told her stories of the Before-Time, of green fields and open sky. Here, the only sky was a ceiling of rusted iron, and the only green was the artificial, sterile glow of the hydroponics bay—a place she was forbidden to enter, a sanctuary for plants deemed more valuable than people.
Later, on her work shift clearing sludge from a secondary filter, the casual brutality of their world was on full display. Rhys, Voss's hulking enforcer, strode down the catwalk, his black armor a symbol of his untouchable status. An old man, his movements slow with exhaustion, fumbled a tool. It clattered to the floor.
Rhys didn't break stride. He backhanded the old man with a heavy, gauntleted fist, sending him sprawling. "Useless," Rhys grunted, stepping over the man's crumpled form. No one moved. No one spoke. To intervene was to invite the same punishment. Fear was the currency of the Guts, and Rhys was its master.
But Elara saw something else. She saw the flicker of shared hatred in the eyes of the other workers. She saw the way their hands tightened on their tools. It was a silent, simmering rage, a pressure building behind the dam of Voss's control.
That night, huddled with Lyra, she heard the distant, high-pitched shriek of the alarm—the sonic diversion. It was a sound of chaos, of something breaking the monotonous, oppressive rhythm of their lives. A short while later, Rupa's voice boomed from a speaker somewhere outside, a voice of impossible hope, speaking of a future, of clean food, of another way.
Lyra's eyes, dull with sickness, widened. "Is it… is it real?"
Elara pulled the thin blanket tighter around her sister's shoulders, a fierce, protective resolve hardening inside her. "I don't know," she whispered. "But for the first time in a long time, I think it might be." The voice was a spark, and the Guts were a tinderbox of quiet desperation, waiting for a reason to burn.