The rain in the Dregs didn't fall clean.
It came down orange, filtered through the particulate haze that hung permanent over District Nine like a second sky, and it tasted like rust if you were stupid enough to open your mouth. Kai learned that lesson at six years old. He was nineteen now, and the only thing that had changed about the rain was that he'd stopped being surprised by it.
He cut his electric bike through the narrow throat of Shen's Alley, both hands tight on the bars, the insulated delivery box strapped to his back running hot against his spine. Three stops left. It was past midnight. He was already behind because the checkpoint boys at the Fang Street crossing had made him wait forty minutes while they searched the box, knowing full well it was just pharmaceutical drops and contraband cigarettes, the kind of low-stakes cargo that kept District Nine alive and that nobody powerful enough to matter would ever bother to intercept.
That was the trick of the Dregs. Nothing that came through here mattered enough to protect. Not the people. Not the packages. Not the rain.
Kai took the corner onto Meridian Row and saw the fire.
He squeezed the brakes without thinking. The bike fishtailed on the slick pavement, caught itself, and he set his foot down fifty meters from the roadblock. Two cars burned sideways across the road, orange flame eating at their chassis in the wet air. Between them, maybe thirty people. Half carried blades. Half carried worse.
Kai recognized the colors. Red stitching on black — the Hollows, from the eastern blocks. And on the opposite side, the pale green of the Substrate Boys, who ran the underbelly of the Dregs proper. He'd made deliveries for both sets. He knew better than to know anyone's name.
He started backing the bike up slowly, keeping his hands visible.
"Hey."
The voice came from his left. A kid, maybe seventeen, materializing from a doorway with a short pipe in his hand. He had Substrate green on his collar. His eyes were the kind of empty that came from too much stim or too little sleep, and Kai couldn't tell which.
"You ride for Yao?" the kid asked.
"I ride for whoever's paying tonight," Kai said, because that was always the safest answer.
"You got a box."
"Medical drops for a grandmother on Sutter Passage. I'm already late. She needs them."
The kid looked at the box the way people in the Dregs looked at anything that might be worth taking. Then someone shouted from the roadblock, something in rapid Hak dialect that Kai didn't catch, and the kid's attention snapped left.
Kai turned the bike.
"I said hey."
A hand grabbed his collar and yanked him backward off the seat. The bike toppled, the front wheel spinning. Kai hit the ground shoulder-first on wet asphalt and came up already calculating — not escape routes, because there weren't any now, but damage. What was broken. How fast he could move.
His shoulder ached. Nothing structural. He got his feet under him.
Three of them now, all Substrate, the kid plus two older ones who'd peeled away from the roadblock. Behind them the Hollows were shouting. The whole gathering was winding up toward something, a pressure in the air like the moment before a speaker blows.
"The box," one of the older ones said. He had a vibro-blade, cheap model, the hilt duct-taped. "Open it or we open you."
Kai unclipped the box. He set it on the ground. He stepped back and kept his hands at his sides and watched the man crouch and pop the latch.
Pharmaceutical drops. Cigarette bundles in brown paper. Nothing.
The man looked up at him. In his face Kai read the specific frustration of someone who'd committed to a violence and now needed to justify it.
That was when the shooting started.
It came from a rooftop on the east side — not corporate security hardware, nothing accurate, just a rain of fragmentary rounds pouring down into the roadblock. Both sides scattered. Kai hit the ground for the second time in two minutes, pressing himself flat against the alley wall as the Substrate men ran, abandoning the box, abandoning him entirely.
He should have run too.
Instead, he grabbed the delivery box, because the grandmother on Sutter Passage genuinely needed those drops, and he started moving low along the wall toward the far end of the alley.
He didn't see the one who caught him. He felt it — a body blindsiding him from a doorframe, an arm around his throat, the ground tilting. They went through a plywood-covered window together and crashed into the ruin of an abandoned unit, dust and plaster, the delivery box skittering into the dark.
Kai fought. He'd grown up in District Nine; he knew the fundamentals. He got an elbow into something soft, felt the grip loosen, rolled. The other person was Hollow by the colors — a woman, mid-twenties, blood already on her face from somewhere. She had a look of pure adrenaline, the look of someone who'd already stopped thinking and was running on the older, quieter machinery underneath thought.
She hit him with something he didn't see. His head snapped back against the floor.
The room went sideways. He felt his body try to get up and fail. The shooting outside continued in bursts, and the woman was gone, and Kai lay on the rotted floor of a unit that hadn't been occupied in years and looked up at a ceiling with a hole in it through which the orange rain came in at a shallow angle, slow drops falling in the firelight from the roadblock outside.
He thought about the grandmother on Sutter Passage.
He thought about his mother, who'd raised him two blocks from here before her lungs gave out from the particulate air, who used to tell him that the Dregs had a heartbeat if you knew how to listen for it. Not a metaphor. She'd meant it literally — she'd press her hand to the walls of their unit sometimes, eyes closed, like she was checking a pulse.
He'd thought she was losing it toward the end. The air did things to people.
Now, with something leaking warm from his hairline and the sounds of the street war dimming at the edges, he thought he could feel it. Something below the floor. Below the building's foundation. A deep, structural rhythm that was not his own heartbeat, was nothing like his heartbeat, was slower and older and vast in the way that dark water is vast — you can't see the bottom but you know it's there.
Not yet, something said. Not in his ear. Deeper than that. In the place behind his sternum where breath lives.
You don't get to die in the mud. Not you. Not the last one.
Kai decided he was concussed.
He pressed his hand to the floor to push himself upright. His palm hit the bare concrete beneath the rotted carpet, and the moment it did something cracked open in his chest — not physically, though it felt physical, felt like a rib flexing — and a heat unlike anything he'd experienced poured from his palm into the floor and back again, a current completing a circuit.
He gasped.
The room was the same room. Rotted plywood, orange rain through the ceiling, muffled violence outside. Nothing had changed.
Except that he could see in the dark now. Not like a light had come on — more like the dark had become transparent, like he was reading the building the way an X-ray reads a body. He could see the structural bones of the walls. He could see, three floors down through layered concrete and rebar, the old channel of a river that had been buried when the city was built — buried the way you bury something you want to keep but can't display, the way District Nine buried its dead under the foundation slabs because the cemetery plots were priced for a different tax bracket.
He could see that the river was not dead.
It moved. Slow and black and patient, and when it moved it moved with purpose, with the specific directionality of something that knows where it is going regardless of what has been built on top of it.
Kai's hand was still on the floor. He watched, detached and wondering and not quite afraid, as a thin luminescence climbed from the point of contact, not quite light, not quite heat — something that had no name in any language he'd been taught — and traced up his arm to his shoulder, to his chest, and stopped.
Then it was gone.
He sat alone in the room. The shooting outside had stopped. He could hear the distant wail of corporate security drones vectoring in, which meant the territory war had gotten loud enough to trigger an automated response, which meant he had maybe four minutes before the whole block got cordoned and processed.
He found the delivery box in the corner. He checked inside. The pharmaceutical drops were unbroken.
He picked up the box. He went to the window.
His hands, when he looked at them under the orange glow of the neon from the sign across the street — some noodle shop that had been closed for a year but whose sign still cycled through its cheerful sequence of characters, too expensive to remove — his hands looked the same. Calloused. Scarred across the knuckles. Delivery-boy hands.
But under the skin, in the web of bones and tendons, he could see a faint trace of that not-quite-light, wound through him like a fault line wound through rock. Dormant. Present.
He climbed out the window and retrieved his bike, which was still there, still running, a minor miracle in its own right.
He made the delivery to the grandmother on Sutter Passage. She was awake, sitting in her chair by the window in the particular way of people who have long since made their peace with the fact that the world will not deliver things on time. She took the box without comment. She looked at his bloody temple and went to her kitchen and came back with a cloth.
"You look like you fell through a window," she said.
"Yes," he said.
She studied him in the sharp, unsentimental way of old women who had outlived their District's expectations by decades. Then she said, in a tone that was not a question: "You felt something tonight."
He looked at her.
"The old bones," she said. She turned back to her window and the view of rain on neon. "The city has them. The builders buried everything underneath and then forgot. But the bones don't forget." She paused. "My mother used to say — when a street god remembers you, it's because it's running out of options."
He didn't ask her how she knew. In District Nine, you learned not to ask elders how they knew things. Either they'd tell you in their own time or they wouldn't, and both outcomes were equally likely and had to be accepted.
He got back on his bike.
He had two credits to his name, a rented room above a machine laundry that smelled permanently of industrial solvent, and a hairline fracture of something divine sealed inside his blood that he didn't have a name for yet.
The city lit up around him in orange and green and the cold blue of corporate surveillance grids hovering over the mid-tier districts, visible even from down here in the Dregs — the Spire, distant and brilliant at the city's center, a needle of light that punched through the particulate sky into something cleaner.
Kai looked at it the same way he'd been looking at it his whole life.
Then he looked away, back at the street ahead of him, at the alley mouths and the burn-barrel warmth and the corrugated walls tagged in ten years of compounded history, District Nine declaring itself present to anyone who bothered to read it.
He felt the pulse below the pavement.
He didn't run from it this time.
End of Chapter One