There were no funerals in The Gut.
No graves. No names carved into stone.
When someone died, you moved the body to the chute behind Maintenance and hoped it didn't jam on the way down.
The day after the boy with the fork died, Nasir didn't eat. Didn't talk. Didn't even hide.
He just sat, alone, on the upper walkway railing, watching pipes drip black condensation onto the metal floor below. The metal was always wet, but nothing ever grew.
No one asked why. No one noticed.
But someone did sit beside him.
"You're not blinking much," Caine said, climbing up onto the ledge with the same casual grace as always. "Trying to turn to stone?"
Nasir didn't answer. His legs dangled, shoes swinging gently with the hiss of the ducts beneath.
Caine didn't push. He just sat there, kicking his heel against the rusted beam, letting the silence breathe. After a minute, he pulled out a packet and handed Nasir half a bar.
Nas didn't reach for it.
"Some things don't hurt right away," Caine said quietly. "They wait. Then they get you when you're still."
Still, no reply.
Caine finally stood. "You don't have to say anything. Just don't let it rot in you. That's how it wins."
He left the ration bar next to Nasir's hand and hopped down.
Nasir stayed there long after he was gone.
That was the first day he didn't write anything in his log.
—
Kids disappeared all the time.
Sometimes they got flagged. Sometimes they mouthed off. Sometimes they just vanished between shifts.
But the way they were disappearing now felt different.
No fights. No bodies. No chipped alerts on the bunks. Just a space that was filled the night before, and empty the next.
The girl named Emar was the first Nas noticed. She hummed at night. A little sound under the breathing and the vents. And then one morning, her bunk was stripped. Her chip console reset. The next night was quiet.
Then it was Roen.
Then Malik.
The order didn't matter. The silence did.
It wasn't loud. That was what scared him.
It was quiet. Too quiet.
Like the wind.
One second, it's whispering secrets in your ear.
The next? Gone, like a whore who got her payment.
Like the world was being edited one child at a time.
He started keeping a separate log. Not who was still there.
Who wasn't.
—
Rumors moved like dust through the walls. Most of them nonsense, but a few stuck.
"They take them to train for the upper sectors," someone whispered near the mess line.
"More like gut-labor testing. Strip you down and see if you break."
"Don't say that," a girl hissed. "You say things like that and they come for you too."
So people stopped talking.
But Nasir listened.
—
He still left food for the smaller ones when he could. Still slipped thermal patches under thin blankets. Still showed a few kids how to seal a busted air vent with scrap metal and burn wax.
But he didn't wait around afterward. Didn't ask how they were. Didn't linger.
He told himself it was because time was short. That if he slowed down, he'd lose track of what mattered.
But deep down, he knew it was more than that.
He didn't want to get used to them.
Didn't want to know their names.
Not if they were going to vanish.
—
They said this place wasn't Earth anymore. That Earth was gone. Buried in fire or dust or politics — depending on who you asked.
Now it was called the Ancient Palace. Like some distant throne in a storybook.
The old drunks whispered about it sometimes. About skies you could see without filters. Water you could swim in. Trees. Grass soft enough to lie on.
Most of the kids didn't believe in grass.
It sounded made up — like angels or hot chocolate.
But Nasir had seen pictures once. On a cracked datapad with only a few functioning frames. A field. A real one. Wild and green and untouched.
He'd stared at that image for over an hour, memorizing every curve of the hills, every fleck of sun-drenched green.
Then the screen died and never turned back on.
—
They said there were twelve sectors now.
Most kids only ever learned about a few.
Sector 12 was The Gut. That was all they needed to know. You were born here, you worked here, and you died here. The only thing above you was a pipe that leaked cold water and hope.
But sometimes, on flickering monitors in admin halls or in distorted broadcast loops, Sector 1 was shown.
White buildings. Clean faces. Skybridges. Artificial sunlight that looked… real.
The words were always the same:
"Work hard. Be obedient. Prove your value.
One child is chosen each cycle."
Then an image — a child being lifted through a glass elevator, back straight, face shining with possibility.
Nobody Nasir had ever met had seen Sector 1.
But kids still whispered about it, like a fairytale just out of reach.
Like if you smiled enough, or worked hard enough, or didn't cry when they took your bunkmate, you might be next.
Nasir used to believe it. A long time ago.
Now, it felt more like a story told to keep you still.
—
It happened again during mess. A screen blinked to life in the corner, static giving way to a video no one had ever seen before.
A teenager in a hood. Face shadowed. Voice strong.
"Sector hierarchy is a lie," they said. "Class isn't earned. It's enforced. And it's time someone cut the fences open."
Six seconds.
Then nothing.
Static again.
A few guards barked orders, trying to trace the feed. A few kids looked up. Most didn't.
Everyone went back to eating.
Nasir didn't.
He didn't say anything, but that night, he updated his slate.
"Unregistered transmission. Duration: 6.2 seconds.
Subject: Anti-structure rhetoric. Possibly Sector 8.
Action: Monitor disappearances."
That was the last night he saw Caine.
His bunk was empty the next morning. No one said anything. No one looked twice.
Nasir waited by the old pipe ladder for hours. He kept glancing over his shoulder, expecting to hear the lazy shuffle of boots, the soft rasp of Caine's voice telling him he looked too serious.
But the voice never came.
The second night, he waited less.
The third, not at all.
He told himself maybe Caine had been transferred. Maybe he'd made it out. Maybe he was one of the ones who ascended.
But the maybes didn't help. Not really.
Eventually, even those faded.
—
Another boy disappeared the next week. No struggle. No noise. Just gone.
Nasir didn't feel anything at first.
Then he realized he wasn't even surprised.
It was like he'd started bracing for loss.
Like grief was a room you had to live in long enough to stop noticing the walls.
He started writing more. Not about people. About systems.
He mapped air vent routes. Power fluctuations. Movement schedules.
He wanted to know everything that kept this place breathing, because maybe—just maybe—one day he'd stop it.
Or escape it.
Or both.
—
Elias caught him late one cycle, huddled near the generator core with a patch of wire and a stolen fuse.
"You're getting sharper," the old AI said, voice static-damaged.
Nasir didn't respond.
"You used to ask questions. Now you just watch."
"I stopped expecting answers," he muttered.
"You haven't stopped hoping, though."
That made Nasir pause.
Then, softly, almost to himself:
"Hope's a good way to get yourself killed."
Elias didn't argue.
The silence that followed felt heavier than any reply.
—
Time began folding in on itself. Days slipped past. Names faded. Faces changed.
Nasir still fixed things. Still left food.
Still pretended to believe in the stories when the younger ones asked.
But the boy who once cried quietly for a girl he barely knew was slipping away.
He wasn't cold yet. Not fully.
But the warmth was running out