The Rusted Ladder
The guards' footsteps faded into the vast, humming darkness, leaving a silence that felt heavy with their discontent. After another long, motionless minute, Jaya gave a single, sharp nod. Kenji went first, moving toward the service ladder with a fluid, practiced silence. The ladder was a narrow, rust-eaten spine of iron ascending into the oppressive gloom.
The climb was a slow, nerve-wracking ascent through the refinery's digestive tract. With each rung, the air grew thicker, the low hum of the machinery vibrating through the metal, a constant, menacing thrum that Anja could feel in her teeth. The smell of rot and decay intensified, now mingled with the unpleasantly sweet, cloying scent of the nutrient paste the guards had mentioned. It was the smell of a slow, industrial death.
Anja climbed between the two men, the data slate secure on her back, the weight of their mission pressing down on her. Every creak of the corroded metal under her boots, every scrape of a hand on the rusted rungs, sounded like a gunshot in the immense, listening silence of the Guts.
The Warren
They emerged onto a wider catwalk on the third level, and the world changed. This wasn't just a service level for machinery; it was a city. A grim, vertical slum had been crammed into the spaces between the colossal pipes and tanks.
Makeshift dwellings, cobbled together from scavenged sheet metal, heavy plastic, and stained tarpaulin, clung to the superstructure like barnacles. They were precarious things, suspended over drops that disappeared into darkness, connected by narrow walkways of lashed-together planks and rusted grating.
Dim, jury-rigged lights cast a sick, yellowish glow over the scene, revealing a world of profound desperation. The people here were wraiths—hollow-eyed, gaunt, moving with the slow shuffle of those who had given up hope but hadn't yet been granted the mercy of death.
Anja counted at least fifty dwellings in her immediate line of sight, which meant there were probably hundreds throughout this level. Hundreds of people, living in this metal tomb, sustained by Voss's scraps and brutality.
A child—Anja couldn't tell if it was a boy or girl beneath the grime—sat on a narrow ledge, legs dangling over a twenty-meter drop, staring at nothing. The child's arms were covered in the telltale lesions of the blight, the same sickness that had ravaged the Cooperative's gardens. Here, it was eating the people themselves.
"They're starving," Kenji breathed, his voice thick with horror. "All of them."
"Not starving," Kenji corrected quietly, her own voice haunted. "That would be too quick. They're being kept almost alive. Just functional enough to work, but too weak to resist."
Anja felt bile rise in her throat. This wasn't a community. It wasn't even a prison. It was a farm, and Voss was the farmer, harvesting labor from people he'd reduced to living tools.
The Food Line
To proceed toward the hydroponics bay, they would have to cross through a wider platform that served as a kind of town square—or more accurately, a distribution center. They waited in the deep shadows of a massive coolant tank, watching the grim tableau unfold below.
A long line of residents stood in silent formation, waiting for their daily ration. At the front, a large vat of gray, unappetizing sludge was being ladled into small bowls by a bored-looking attendant. Each person received a single ladle-full—perhaps a cup's worth—and moved on without comment, without complaint, without even the energy for gratitude.
"That's it?" Anja whispered, horrified. "That's all they get?"
"That's all Voss gives them," Kenji confirmed. "The protein paste. It's made from algae grown in the lower tanks, mixed with synthetic nutrients. It tastes like rust and despair, and it provides just barely enough calories to keep you upright for another day of work."
Anja watched a woman receive her portion, her hands trembling as she carried the bowl away. The woman looked to be in her sixties, though she might have been younger—hard to tell when starvation aged you decades in months. She moved to a quiet corner and began to eat with a methodical, joyless efficiency.
But then, something caught Anja's attention. A younger woman, perhaps in her twenties, with fierce dark eyes despite her hollow cheeks, stepped out of the line. She had received her ration but hadn't started eating. Instead, she glanced around quickly, then moved toward an old man who was struggling to stand after receiving his bowl.
The old man had stumbled, and his precious ration had spilled—a gray puddle spreading across the corroded grating, irretrievable. The loss was written across his face: this wasn't just a meal lost, it was a day's survival that had literally slipped through his fingers.
The young woman knelt beside him, helped him to his feet, and then—in a gesture so quick and subtle that Anja almost missed it—pressed her own untouched bowl into his hands.
The old man's eyes widened, and he tried to refuse, but the woman whispered something urgently, gave him a gentle push toward a darkened alcove, and disappeared back into the crowd before he could argue.
She had given away her only meal.
Anja felt something crack in her chest—not breaking, but opening. In this place of absolute dehumanization, someone had chosen compassion. Someone had looked at another person's suffering and decided to bear that suffering themselves rather than ignore it.
"Did you see that?" Anja whispered to Jaya.
"I saw," Jaya replied, her voice carefully neutral, but Anja caught the slight softening in her expression. The warrior had seen it too, and it had affected her.
But the moment was shattered by a new presence. A heavy-set man in black armor strode through the crowd, shoving people aside with casual brutality. Anja recognized the profile from Jaya's descriptions and the intelligence they'd gathered. It was Rhys, Voss's chief enforcer.
He moved through the crowd like a shark through a school of fish, and the people parted before him, their heads down, their eyes averted. He paused near an older man who was moving too slowly in the line, and without warning, kicked the man's legs out from under him.
The old man fell hard, his bowl clattering away, its contents spilling across the deck.
"Move, you useless slug!" Rhys snarled, not even breaking his stride. He continued on his patrol, disappearing down a corridor.
No one moved to help the fallen man. They simply stared, their faces blank masks of learned helplessness. The cost of compassion in Voss's refinery was too high. The young woman's earlier act of kindness was now revealed as extraordinary precisely because it was so rare.
But as Rhys's footsteps faded, something happened. The same young woman who had given her meal away—the one with the fierce eyes—broke from the crowd again. She knelt beside the fallen man, helped him to his feet with quiet words Anja couldn't hear, and then did the unthinkable.
She broke her piece of hard bread—the dry, supplemental ration that came with the paste—in half, and gave one half to the old man.
It was her second act of rebellion in as many minutes. And this time, for just a brief moment, her eyes lifted and met Anja's across the distance.
There was no fear in that gaze. Only a burning, defiant spark that said, I see you. I know you don't belong here. And I'm still fighting, even if you can't see the battle.
Then she was gone, melting back into the shadows, leaving Anja shaken by the encounter.
"We have to get her out," Anja said, the words not a suggestion but a vow. "All of them. We have to."
"That's why we're here," Jaya reminded her quietly. But there was a new hardness in her voice, a cold fury that hadn't been there before. Even the warrior, who prided herself on tactical detachment, had been moved by what they'd witnessed.
The Heart's Antechamber
With the platform momentarily clear, the team darted across and into a less-trafficked service corridor, Anja once again taking the lead, her mind locked on the schematics. "This way," she whispered, her voice tight. "The primary access to the hydroponics bay should be just ahead."
They followed the corridor as it twisted, the air growing warmer and more humid. They could hear the gurgle of water moving through pipes. They rounded a final corner and stopped dead.
There, at the end of the corridor, was a heavy, reinforced steel door, stenciled with the words: "HYDROPONICS - SECTOR GAMMA - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY." The schematics had shown a simple electronic lock, easily bypassed. But the schematics were wrong. Two guards, armed with pulse rifles and clad in the same black armor as Rhys, stood sentinel before it. A portable, jury-rigged motion sensor had been bolted to the wall beside the door, its red eye sweeping the corridor in a slow, unforgiving rhythm.
Kenji let out a breath that was almost a curse. "They've upgraded their security," he whispered.
Jaya said nothing, but Anja could feel the tension radiating from her. Their scalpel had just hit a wall of reinforced steel. The path to the refinery's heart was no longer just locked. It was guarded.