Time in the undercity moves strangely.
There is no morning.
Just brighter darkness
and dimmer darkness
and the quiet understanding that life goes on even where the world doesn't look.
They adapt.
Not gracefully.
Just… enough.
The first thing Aiden learns is that the undercity is not abandoned.
It's lived in.
Not openly.
Not proudly.
Quietly.
Quiet deals whispered in hallways that never see a sky.
Old criminals breathing beside lost saints.
Children darting between steam pipes like ghosts that gave up on haunting and just decided to survive.
No one down here asks names.
Names imply permanence.
They trade in looks, gestures, and the soft acknowledgement that everyone below the city has already been priced and found inconvenient.
Aiden tries to smile at people.
Most blink like they forgot what that expression is for.
One old woman stares too long and mutters,
"Pretty things don't come down here unless something broke."
He doesn't correct her.
She isn't wrong.
Inkaris does not pause training simply because society has declared them fugitives.
If anything, he becomes more efficient.
Lessons weave into survival.
Breathing control while they walk tunnels.
Mental discipline while filtering sounds of distant machinery.
Restraint drilled into instinct because desire echoes too loudly down here.
"Your power," Inkaris says flatly, "is magnetic to desperation. This location contains an unusually concentrated quantity of desperation."
Aiden winces.
"So I'm… dangerous."
"Yes."
He says it gently.
Which somehow makes it worse.
Liora recovers in motion.
She refuses bedrest in the quiet stubborn way only people who have nearly died can muster.
Pain remains.
She walks anyway.
There's something harsher in her now.
Not unkind.
Just less willing to pretend.
She sits sometimes in a little alcove carved into concrete, legs dangling, watching the distant glow of pipes stretching into infinity.
Once, she reads Ardent's note again.
Once, she doesn't.
Both times, she is a little braver afterward.
Inkaris watches her and says nothing.
Eventually—
"You do not process through stillness," he observes.
She blinks.
"What?"
"You process through momentum. You fall apart if forced to sit. Therefore I will not request it."
For her, that is kindness.
She almost smiles.
Seris learns how it feels to be watched with the wrong kind of curiosity.
Above, she was a badge.
A system.
An authority.
Down here… she's just another fallible animal.
She hides her posture of command when she walks now.
Or tries to.
Habits die harder than people sometimes.
She laughs, bitter and breathless, one evening beside a rusting rail that hasn't seen a cart in decades.
"No parents. No house. No official record anymore. Nothing to threaten. Nothing to ruin but me."
She leans back against the wall.
"I've never been so free and so doomed."
Aiden sits beside her.
He bumps his shoulder into hers.
No grand speeches.
No rescue promises.
Just warmth.
She exhales and lets herself lean into that.
For a moment, the world stops hurting badly enough to breathe.
Inkaris remains…
Inkaris.
Unflinching.
Unimpressed.
Unmoved.
He lies when useful.
He tells truths that feel like insults.
He praises only in terms like "acceptable efficiency increase."
And yet.
There is something quietly protective in the way he positions himself whenever tension passes through the tunnels.
Something solid in the way he stands between them and the rest of the world without ever announcing that he is doing so.
He doesn't call them "friends."
He wouldn't.
But they are becoming something like his responsibility.
Demons are terrifying when they care.
Because they never promised they would.
And yet, sometimes—
they do anyway.
The undercity breathes.
So do they.
Not healed.
Not safe.
Not certain.
But alive.
And for the moment,
that is enough.