The city didn't breathe; it mechanical-whined.
Elias stood at the edge of The Terminal, a sprawling interchange where the pristine glass skyscrapers of the inner circle met the rusted, leaking industrial sectors.
He felt small. Even the Leviathan hadn't made him feel this insignificant. There, he was prey; here, he was just... invisible.
He had exactly forty-two credits to his name—the meager sum he'd managed to scrape together by selling his mother's old silver locket and his high-grade carbon fishing rod at a dusty pawn shop on the border. It wasn't enough for a room, but it was enough for a synthetic protein bar that tasted like wet cardboard.
As he wandered the rain-slicked alleys of the Lower Sector, the "old ways" felt like a dream. Here, the air was thick with the smell of ozone and burnt plastic.
He was leaning against a flickering neon sign for a defunct noodle shop when they found him. Three of them. They didn't look like the thugs his father had warned him about; they looked like they belonged in a magazine.
Their jackets were high-tech synth-leather, their boots didn't have a speck of salt on them, and their smiles were as bright as the holographic advertisements hovering overhead.
"You look like you're waiting for a tide that isn't coming, kid," the one in the center said. He had silver hair and a jacket that shimmered with a subtle, shifting oil-slick pattern. He called himself Jax.
"I'm not waiting for anything," Elias said, his hand instinctively ghosting toward the empty space where his gutting knife used to hang.
Jax noticed the movement.
His eyes narrowed, not with threat, but with clinical interest. He looked at Elias's broad shoulders—built from years of hauling heavy nets against a resisting current—and the calloused, steady grip of his hands.
"Natural muscle," Jax whispered to his companions. "Not lab-grown. Rare." He turned back to Elias. "The city is a hungry mouth, friend. You can either be the food, or you can be the teeth. We're the teeth. Want a seat at the table?"
They called themselves The Current. It was a cruel irony that Elias couldn't escape the water, even in a desert of steel.
They took him to a sub-basement "gym" that smelled of sweat and electricity. They didn't give him a net; they gave him a weighted stun-baton and a vibrissa-blade.
"Show us how you use a harpoon," Jax commanded, pointing to a holographic combat dummy.
Elias didn't hesitate. He took the heavy baton, balanced it in his palm with the practiced ease of a man who had spent his life aiming at moving shadows beneath the waves, and launched. The weapon didn't just hit the target; it whistled through the air and buried itself into the center mass with a force that made the electronics hiss.
He was faster than the city boys. He had "sea-legs," meaning his balance was uncanny even when the floor vibrated from the passing subway trains. Within weeks, the boy who couldn't catch a fish was catching "packages" and "debts" for Jax.
He became the best. He was cold, efficient, and silent. He used his fishing experience to "hook" targets from the shadows, dragging them into the dark alleys before they even knew the "Current" had caught them.
But every night, when he closed his eyes in his cramped, neon-lit apartment, the silence of the city felt wrong. It lacked the heartbeat of the abyss.
...