The abyss smelled of ozone and wet iron.
Kaelen crouched on a rusted girder, his fingers curled into the pitted metal. Below him, the shantytown of District 9 hung suspended in the dark like a tangled net of fairy lights caught in the throat of a dead god.
The air here was thick, a soup of recycled breath and industrial exhaust that tasted of copper and old grease. He checked the seals on his respirator. Three green lights. Adequate.
A scream echoed off the metal ribs of the ship. It was a raw, jagged sound that tore through the ambient thrum of the ventilation fans. Kaelen didn't flinch. Screams were currency in the Ribs. If you weren't screaming, you were buying silence, and silence was a luxury he had never been able to afford.
"Target identified," he whispered. The words were lost in the mask, a ghost of sound against the glass.
Twenty meters below, on a precarious platform of scavenged scrap, a man in a velvet robe stood over a kneeling shopkeeper. The robe was an obscenity in the Gut—clean, deep crimson, the color of fresh arterial blood. The man was a Projector, a minor functionary of the Church, a thug with a magical badge and a mind full of holy lies.
"The Tithe is unpaid," the Projector announced. His voice was unnaturally loud, amplified by the ambient belief of the terrified crowd gathering in the shadows. It carried a resonance that made the iron girder beneath Kaelen's boots vibrate. "Therefore, gravity is heavy here. The ground hungers for the unfaithful."
The shopkeeper gasped. His arms buckled, and his face slammed into the metal grating with a wet, sickening crunch. Blood pooled around his nose, dark and thick in the flickering sodium light. The Projector wasn't touching him. He didn't need to. He was simply asserting a lie—that the shopkeeper weighed a ton, that the very air was pushing him down. Because the crowd believed the Projector had the power to command the world, the universe agreed.
Kaelen watched the shopkeeper's bones. He could hear them creaking from the girder. It was a dry, snapping sound, like kindling under a boot.
"Classic," Kaelen muttered. "Mass-induced localized hyper-gravity. Sloppy execution."
He stood up. He wasn't a hero. The shopkeeper was a stranger, and in the Ribs, strangers were just obstacles you hadn't moved yet. But the Projector had a pouch on his belt, and inside that pouch were pure Ether shards. Kaelen had rent to pay, and the radiation blockers were getting expensive.
He dropped.
The fall was a blur of rushing wind and the smell of hot oil. He landed silently on a corrugated roof behind the Projector, his knees absorbing the impact with the practiced grace of a machine. The crowd didn't see him. Their eyes were fixed on the glowing figure in velvet, their fear feeding the magic, reinforcing the gravity that was currently crushing a man to death.
Kaelen pulled a small glass vial from his coat. Sulfuric acid. He didn't believe in the Dictum. He believed in chemistry.
He stepped out of the shadows. "Hey, Wizard."
The Projector turned. His eyes were wide, glowing with a faint, sickly violet light. He sneered, a look of practiced disdain. "Another rat? Kneel. The air around you is lead. The world wants you down."
Kaelen felt nothing.
The crowd gasped. They expected Kaelen to collapse. They believed he would collapse. The pressure in the air spiked, a physical weight that should have crushed a tank. The metal roof beneath Kaelen's boots groaned, bending under a phantom mass.
But Kaelen was a Null. His brain lacked the receptor for the Consensus. To him, the Projector was just a fat man in a dress yelling at physics.
Kaelen walked forward. His boots clattered on the metal, a steady, rhythmic sound that broke the Projector's concentration.
"I said kneel!" the Projector screamed. Sweat broke on his forehead, carving pale tracks through the grime on his face. The Dissonance was starting. When reality refuses to bend to the mage's will, the mage begins to break. "You are heavy! You are stone! You are a mountain of lead!"
"I am one hundred and sixty pounds of flesh and bad decisions," Kaelen said. His voice was flat, stripped of all resonance.
He closed the distance. The Projector panicked. He raised a hand, his fingers trembling, and conjured a blade of shimmering, violet light. It hissed in the air, a beautiful, deadly thing made of focused faith. "This sword cuts steel! It severs the soul!"
"That's a flashlight," Kaelen corrected.
He sidestepped the thrust. The "blade" passed through his shoulder, singing the fabric of his coat but doing no damage to the skin beneath. It was an illusion made solid by the fear of the observer. Kaelen had no fear.
He uncorked the vial and splashed the acid into the Projector's face.
The magic didn't matter. Chemistry always worked.
The Projector shrieked—a raw, human sound that lacked any divine authority. The glowing sword vanished instantly. The crushing gravity lifted as the crowd's focus shattered, their collective belief broken by the sight of a god bleeding like a pig. The shopkeeper gasped, inhaling greedily, his chest heaving as his ribs tried to knit back together.
Kaelen kicked the screaming man in the knee. There was a sharp pop as the joint shattered. He snatched the Ether pouch from the man's belt and tucked it into his coat.
"Lesson one," Kaelen addressed the stunned crowd. He didn't look at them. He looked at the acid smoking on the floor. "Fire burns because it's hot, not because he tells you it is."
He looked at the shopkeeper. The man was staring at him with a mixture of awe and terror.
"You owe me ten percent of your earnings for the next month," Kaelen said. "Don't make me come collect."
He turned and vanished into the steam vents before the Enforcers could arrive. He didn't run. He walked with the heavy, efficient stride of a man who knew exactly how much air he had left.
In his pocket, the Ether shards hummed against his thigh. It was a low, vibrating warmth. Enough for food. Enough for filters. Enough to stay alive for another week in the gut of a dead god.
Above him, the gargantuan, fossilized heart of the world beat once—a tremor that shook the entire city, rattling the chains that held the shantytowns in place.
Thump.
"Go back to sleep," Kaelen whispered to the ceiling, to the miles of iron and bone above him. "I'm not done robbing you yet."