At the last second, the technician yanked him by the jumpsuit behind the glider.

  Lex was breathing heavily. “Did they see us?” he asked.

  “Shh. Not a sound.”

  The boy held his breath. They stayed crouched behind the side of the sleek sport glider, unmoving. Nothing happened. No alarms blared. The beam of light swung away, but it seemed no one had noticed them. The guards regrouped at the exit of the airlock where they’d entered. Silent and coordinated, they marched out, moving like a hive mind. But this time, Lex knew better. It wasn’t instinct. It was telepathy.

  The night sky lit up in a flicker of white. A deafening crack of thunder followed. The storm was right above them.

  “They haven’t given up,” CR muttered. “They’re just changing tactics. They don’t have time to calmly search through thousands of gliders. It’s costing the company too many credits. That means it won’t be long before they restore power to the towers... and we need to be gone before that happens.” CR slipped out of the hiding spot, climbed into the glider, and slid over to the driver’s side. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Lex exhaled the breath he’d been holding in a noisy rush. His hands were trembling as he gripped the front of the glider for balance. With the next flash of lightning, he saw his reflection on the chrome bar. His face pale as a ghost. “This stuff really messes you up,” he muttered.

  CR clicked his tongue and focused on the glider’s control panel. “Careful what you say, grunt. That ‘stuff’ is the only reason not all our memories are just work and misery.” He hopped off the side step and opened the glider’s side panel.

  For a moment, he examined the repulsor engine, the helium tanks, and the massive electromagnets anchoring the polished disc at the heart of the anti-grav system. Then, reaching into the engine compartment, he started tinkering with a screwdriver. He seemed to have found the right cable to jump-start the HTSL disc and get the glider levitating without a key. But instead of starting, sparks flew from the engine, followed by smoke. Thick, choking smoke.

  The glider’s lights suddenly blinked to life, and an ear-splitting alarm wailed.

  “Damn it... I’ll fix it!” CR growled. He grabbed a bundle of cables and yanked them out in one chaotic motion. The lights blinked off, and the alarm died instantly.

  Silence returned. The sound of rain and the whistle of the storm through the tower walls filled the void.

  “Okay,” CR said, standing up from his crouch.

  “Okay, what?”

  “Okay, the glider’s busted.”

  “Then we’ll try another one.”

  The technician shook his head, brushing his hair out of his face. “Honestly? I have no idea how to get these things running without a key. The glider we escaped in was our one shot.”

  The boy stared at him for a moment. “Are you even an electrician?”

  “I’m a technician, yeah. But as you can see, I’m not a particularly good one. Nobody’s good at the things they only do for money. I work for Wolf Glider because I need the credits. It’s not my calling. That’s why I don’t even feel bad about being terrible at it.”

  The boy kept staring, his expression unreadable. “If I take a job, I do it right,” he said finally, turning his back on the technician.

  He walked toward a vertical split in the wall, where the view stretched across multiple levels. As if the answer to their escape lay somewhere out there, he stared into the distance. Rain. Endless rain. A gray-black sky illuminated by the countless lights of the megalopolis. But nowhere in sight was a solution. Only cold, wet poison dripping onto his face. And the thought of her—the girl. Her image kept circling back into his mind.

  “You look like an idiot standing there.”

  “It’s all new to me.” He didn’t turn around as he spoke, his words lost in the night. He wasn’t even sure if CR heard him.

  Then, suddenly, he felt two hands on his shoulders. CR leaned into him, his chest pressing against Lex’s back, his sharp chin resting on the boy’s head. Together, they gazed out at the storm.

  “This is Joy, my friend. The city of gliders. My home.”

  It took a while before CR spoke again.

  “I grew up here with three brothers. Isaias, Chet, Jonas. Only I made it out.”

  The boy’s eyes remained fixed on the distant horizon. Over the workers’ huts, a black helicopter hovered, fighting against the storm. Its searchlight cut through the rainy night.

  “What happened to them?” Lex asked quietly.

  It was only after a moment that he realized CR was slowly shaking his head, the movement pressing his sharp chin against the boy’s head. “It’s the new world order,” he said quietly, “that sealed my brothers’ fate. When the gap between rich and poor gets wide enough, the poor eventually disappear—they just stop being seen. My family and I… we were so far out, trust me, grunt. We lived where no respectable eye would ever look. Tossed aside into the filthiest slums of Joy. No medical care, no water, no food, no roof over our heads. ‘Multidimensional poverty,’ that’s what the politicians call it. They know the definition of the word, but they’ll never understand what it means. We squatted illegally between factory walls and fenced-off high-voltage transformers, hiding from the torture dens of organ traffickers. For years? No, for my whole childhood and part of my teenage years, we clung to whatever hiding spots we could find. In winter, we camped near sewer vents, crouching in the steaming heat, enduring the stench of shit so we wouldn’t freeze to death. We ate whatever we could scavenge. Broke into dumpsters behind the filthiest dives. We risked our necks just to eat trash. And why? Because even eating garbage is illegal. Politicians... those bootlickers... made sure of it. They passed a law that made using discarded food a crime because anyone eating waste isn’t buying new products. And that, grunt, would cost corporations like Snackbite a few precious credits.”

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  He wrinkled his nose, as if a phantom scent of rotting food had reached him—the smell of a stolen childhood. Lex, however, only smelled the oily, electric tang of stormy air.

  “So… your brothers starved to death?” Lex asked hesitantly.

  “No,” CR replied. “The Ghoul Plague took them.”

  “Ghouls?”

  CR nodded, his expression so serious it made the word sound plausible. “It starts as a tiny sore inside your mouth,” he said. “It gets infected. Then it spreads, eating away your face from the inside. This disease has been spreading like wildfire in Keldaraan and the poor districts for decades. But the government? They just stand by and watch. In medical textbooks, it’s called Noma, but down here in the slums, we call it the Ghoul Plague. The poor souls who survive are left with half a face. Their jaw, nose, eyes—all eaten away by bacteria. The survivors live like ghouls in the city’s sewers, spat on and cursed by the very people who should be their kin. Most of the workers here are superstitious or paranoid. Some think it’s witches or ghosts causing the disease. Others think it’s a government-made virus to keep the poor weak. But who needs conspiracy theories when the truth is simpler? No one cares about them. About us.”

  Lex swallowed hard. His throat bobbed, but the lump stayed lodged there. Keldaraan. Joy. Misery piled on misery. Nowhere else in the world was the web of human suffering woven this thick. He stared out into the night, unblinking, his eyes wet and gleaming as they wandered over the smoldering urban sprawl.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I want you to understand that whatever we did in the last hour, it was the right thing to do. Even if it means we don’t make it out of here alive. Even if it means missing a date we’ve been looking forward to.”

  Lex hesitated. A moment later, the heavy hands on his shoulders were gone. He turned to look at CR, his whole body trembling from the cold and wet. The technician was standing at the edge of the chasm, leaning forward.

  Lex wiped his face dry on his sleeve. “What if I don’t see it that way?” he asked. “What if I’d rather undo it all... whatever it is we did.”

  Right then, the power to the glider towers was restored. Neon floodlights flickered on around them, their reflections rippling across the glossy surfaces of the brand-new gliders. The entire tower lit up, a sparkling sea of lights.

  CR turned back to him. “You see it differently, huh? You’d undo it all?”

  Behind him, the automated glider elevator ascended, depositing the latest model into an empty parking bay.

  Lex didn’t know why CR was asking, but he nodded cautiously. “Yeah. I’d undo it if I could,” he admitted.

  “Well, it’s not about what you want.” CR’s voice was sharp. “Tell me, grunt... what brought you here? Why do you think you’re standing here right now?”

  The answer seemed obvious to Lex: he’d made a mistake, a bad decision. But something stopped him from saying it out loud. Instead, he stayed silent.

  “What are you even doing in Joy if you weren’t born here?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you where I’m from,” Lex replied. “And you’d believe me even less if I told you how I ended up in Vega Prime.”

  The quiet wrapped around them like a shroud, the western wind whispering through the tower’s gaping walls. Finally, Lex broke the silence.

  “Maybe the name Limbo Two means something to you?”

  It took a long moment before CR responded. “That’s… one of Kronos’ moons, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. The second one.”

  “And you’re saying... you’re from there?”

  “Exactly.”

  Silence fell between them once more.

  Suddenly, CR let out a dark laugh. “Vanta-B’s really done a number on your brain, hasn’t it? Or were you born with this kind of wild imagination?”

  “Told you you wouldn’t believe me.”

  Before CR could respond, the entire platform beneath their feet began to quake. With a sudden jolt, the fork of the glider elevator locked firmly into the undercarriage of the platform.

  “Damn it!” Lex shouted, instinctively preparing to jump to the adjacent platform. But there was no time. The platform shot toward the hydraulic mast so fast that he lost his balance. His face smacked against the edge of the left engine. Reflexively, he grabbed for the glider’s wing, slipped, spun midair, and landed flat on his stomach on the metal floor.

  His head spun. Warm blood trickled down his forehead, dripping into his right eye. His world shrank to a narrow tunnel. He spotted the small flashlight rolling back and forth across the floor, and his ears rang with the memory of a wrench clanging against the level below.

  Where was CR?

  Panic set in as he let out a startled yell, spotting five fingers clutching the edge of the platform. CR was hanging over the abyss with one hand, dangling precariously. He would’ve fallen into the chasm if Lex hadn’t grabbed his wrist at the last moment.

  “You’re heavy as hell!” Lex grunted through clenched teeth.

  “For my height, I’m pretty light. Now pull me up.”

  “It’s not like I’m not trying!”

  But CR’s weight was dragging Lex closer to the edge. Lex flattened himself against the platform, clinging desperately to the technician’s arm. “I can’t do it,” he gasped.

  They hung there in silence for a moment, the elevator steadily descending deeper into the shaft.

  “Talk about a picture-perfect dilemma,” Lex muttered. “Either I let you go, you fall into the pit, and I hate myself forever—or I don’t let you go, and we both fall.”

  “There’s a third option,” CR called out, still dangling over the abyss. “Can you reach the glider with your foot?”

  Lex glanced over his shoulder. “Think so. Why?”

  “Hook your foot onto something. Anything. Just make sure you can’t slip into the abyss.”

  “And then what? I’ll still lose strength and drop you.”

  “Just do it!”

  Lex found a spot under the chassis to hook his bent foot.

  “Now what?”

  “Got it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then stay like that.”

  CR began pulling himself up, using Lex’s arm like a rope. It felt like his shoulder was being dislocated, then ripped clean off. CR’s grip found the fabric of Lex’s jumpsuit, then a strap, before he swung his leg onto the platform. With a final heave, he pulled himself up, collapsing next to Lex. Both of them gasped for air, though Lex let out a string of curses between breaths. His pulse hammered visibly in his neck as he stared at CR for a moment.

  “Where’s this elevator even going?”

  “To Ataris,” CR said, still catching his breath. “The rich district. Where the air doesn’t kill you after a couple of years. Where life’s pretty sweet, if you can afford it.”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

  “No joke. The glider will be transported through an underground vacuum tube to the delivery center... which just so happens to be in Ataris.”

  “That’s over a thousand miles from here.”

  CR nodded. “Pretty much exactly. And at near-supersonic speed, the platform will reach the delivery center in about an hour.”

  He paused, glancing at the expensive sport glider beside them. Gleaming chrome bars, ambient lighting, massage seats wrapped in synthetic leather, and interior panels made from the rarest hardwoods of Luvanda.

  “Yeah,” he muttered, as if agreeing with his own thoughts. “Some rich bastard is going to be very surprised when his shiny new glider shows up with two corpses on the platform.”

  “Corpses?! Why corpses?”

  CR licked his lips and tilted his head toward Lex. “How long can you hold your breath?”

  “What?”

  “I asked, how long can you hold your breath? Roughly.”

  “Maybe a minute?”

  “Well,” CR said, wiping his face with one hand, “that’s not going to cut it. You’ll need at least an hour.”

  Lex’s eyes widened. “Wait... are you saying the air in there is poisonous?”

  “No,” CR replied. “It’s not poisonous, because there’s no air at all. No oxygen, no CO2, nothing. The tube we’re about to get launched into is a vacuum tunnel. Without air resistance, the platform can hit those insane speeds and make it to Ataris in an hour.”

  Lex stared at him. “So that’s it?” he asked, his voice hollow. “There’s no way out?” His disbelief was written across his face. “It was all for nothing,” he whispered. “We might as well have fallen into the chasm earlier. Or let the guards carve us up with Elvin. It was all pointless. We’re going to die here.”

  CR said nothing. He lowered his gaze, staring between his bent knees at the finely grooved surface of the platform floor.

  This was it. There was no way out.