Chapter 8- The Lockdown (1)

Chapter 8: 8- The Lockdown (1)

The silver blade felt heavy, and its balance was completely wrong.

Sol realized it the moment they started running across the uneven, crumbling rooftops of the tenement block.

A butcher’s cleaver carried its weight in the head, designed to fall with gravity and bite through thick bone with a single chop.

This sword was weighted at the guard. It felt flighty, almost fragile in his grip, despite the lethal cold radiating from its polished steel.

He kept his grip tight, trusting the violent, humming heat in his veins to keep the metal from freezing his palm.

Then it started, a massive iron horn, mounted somewhere high on the inner-city walls. The sound was a deep, guttural vibration that rattled the loose teeth in Sol’s skull and shook the smog clinging to the slums.

"The horn," Valera breathed, scrambling over a rusted ventilation pipe. She was still pale, her breath coming in visible, white plumes, but the lethargy of her near-death freeze was gone.

The mid-stage crystal Sol had forced into her system was burning bright and stable in his thermal vision.

"They know," Sol rasped, pushing a pulse to his eyes.

Flash.

The rooftops illuminated in a chaotic map of dull blues and freezing purples. He saw the gap between their building and the next, a terrifying, ten-foot drop over an alleyway choked with jagged debris.

Darkness.

"Of course they know," Valera said, her voice tight as she measured the jump. "You incinerated an Enforcer in the middle of a patrol route. His core stopped shining. To master cultivators it looks like a star just went out on their map."

She didn’t hesitate. She took three running steps, her ragged boots kicking up frost on the concrete, and leaped across the gap. She landed on a slanted tin roof on the other side, rolling to absorb the impact.

Sol stood at the edge, listening to the metallic clatter of her landing. He pushed another pulse to his eyes.

Flash.

He saw her thermal signature crouched on the tin, a brilliant white-blue beacon waving him over. But he saw something else, too.

Where Valera had stepped before her jump, the concrete was glowing with a faint, fading yellow heat. He looked down at his own feet.

Beneath his boots, the stone was burning bright orange, absorbing the excess radiation of his Sun’s Believer core.

He didn’t just see active heat. He could see what was left of it.

Darkness.

The horn blasted again, closer this time. From the streets below, the chaotic shouting of slum guards echoed up through the smog, accompanied by the terrified screams of scavengers being dragged from their cellars.

Sol gripped his stolen sword, backed up, and sprinted for the edge. He jumped blind, letting the momentum carry him over the drop.

He hit the tin roof hard, his boots slipping on the slick, frozen surface.

He started to slide toward the edge, but Valera’s hand shot out of the dark, her icy fingers clamping onto the collar of his coat with surprising strength. She hauled him upward, throwing his balance back to the center of the roof.

"Are you going to carry that sword over your shoulder all night?" she asked, her breathing heavy. "Or are you actually going to learn how to move with it?"

"They didn’t give me a scabbard," Sol said, getting to his feet and shaking the rust off his coat.

"Because you boiled his blood before he could draw it properly," she shot back. "You hold it like a meat hook. It’s a dueling blade. If you swing it like a cleaver and hit armor, it will snap in half, and then we are both dead."

"It cuts meat," Sol said bluntly. "That’s all it needs to do."

"Cultivators aren’t meat, Sol. Their bodies are trained from the Moon’s mist. The flesh is as rough as iron." Valera let go of his coat, shivering slightly as the cold wind of the twilight hit her face.

"Down. We need to get off the roofs. If they deploy the hounds, they’ll smell the ash on you."

Sol didn’t argue. He pulsed his vision again, establishing the Strobe rhythm.

Flash, dark, flash, dark.

He led the way this time. With his new understanding of the thermal footprints, the dark world became a painted canvas.

He found a rusted fire escape clinging to the side of a processing plant. The metal was freezing, glowing a deep, unforgiving blue, but Sol’s burning hands thawed it instantly as he climbed down.

They dropped into the narrow, winding alleys of the deep slums. The stench of rotting waste and old blood was suffocating here, completely blocking out the smell of the ozone from the slaughter-lines.

Sol stopped abruptly, throwing his arm out to catch Valera’s chest before she walked past him.

"Wait," he whispered, his voice grating like crushed stone.

"What?" Valera tensed, her hand instinctively reaching for the rusted iron pipe at her hip. "I don’t hear anything."

Flash.

Sol stared at the alley wall to their right. Pressed against the frozen brick was a clear, glowing yellow handprint. It was slowly fading into green, then blue, but it was fresh. He looked down.

A set of faint, warm footprints led down a narrow grate into the old storm drains.

"Someone was just here," Sol said quietly. "Running. They went into the drains."

"A guard?"

"Guards don’t run," Sol said. He knelt down, pressing his burning fingers against the rusted iron grate. "And guards wear boots. These footprints were barefoot. Small."

Valera was silent for a moment in the dark. "A scavenger," she realized. "Hiding from the purge."

"If a scavenger can hide down there, so can we." Sol gripped the edge of the heavy iron grate.

He pushed a fraction of his core’s heat into his arms, the muscles tightly coiling with Level 1 density, and ripped the grate out of the cobblestone with a harsh scrape of metal.

He slid into the hole, dropping into the ankle-deep muck of the storm drain.

Valera followed a second later, pulling the heavy grate back into place above them just as a squad of Vane Enforcers rounded the corner of the alley, their heavy boots shaking the dirt over their heads.