"One for the first, when stars were born.
Two for the time the moon was torn.
Three for the flame that did not die.
Four for the child who learned to lie."
The rhyme slipped from the lips of a boy perched on the edge of a dead sky-rail platform.
Below, the city groaned beneath its own rust. Wind turbines spun in fits, coughing through choked air like old lungs past saving. The bones of Karnox—steel, soot, and sorrow—clung to life only because no one had told it how to die.
And still—his voice carried.
It always did.
Two figures sat there, above Tier 17, where the old sectors warped and rotted from the core outward. One swung mismatched boots over the ledge, spine coiled like a spring; the other leaned back on rusted plating, eyes half-lidded as if trying to dream beneath the red bruises of a dying sun.
The city stretched beneath them like a gutted machine—spire towers jutting like ribcages, rails looping endlessly over ravines that hadn't seen life in decades. Karnox hadn't been made for beauty.
It had been made to survive.
It hadn't.
"Everyone always hums that same thing," said the reclining one, his voice dry and edged with sleep.
"It's tradition," the other answered, brushing soot from a sleeve already threadbare.
"It's a nursery rhyme."
"Exactly."
The boy smiled—Casamir, though the name wasn't spoken aloud. Not here. Not where names still meant something.
He smiled like someone who knew too much, and wasn't sure if that was a blessing or a wound.
"We were all someone's child before we were anyone's soldier."
The other scoffed. "I'm no one's anything."
Silence lapped between them. The wind cut like a razor down the broken corridors of metal and dust. A flock of ashwings wheeled overhead—bleached scavenger birds that fed on powerline rot and never blinked. One circled twice before landing on a broken relay spire, its wings twitching like dying fans.
Casamir turned, studying the boy beside him. "You're mine. You're Karnox's. You're still here, aren't you?"
"Barely." A gesture toward the bleeding skyline. "Everything's dying. This city's on its last breath. Metal bones, no blood. What's left to love?"
"Hope isn't love. It's defiance," Casamir said softly. Then smirked. "And anyway—we've got dreams."
That was always Casamir's way: half-joke, half-honest. A boy born in a broken world still trying to name its shape. To give meaning to the rust so it wouldn't rot through him.
"Dreams," the other boy muttered. "Cruelest things they let us keep."
"Not if you dream smart."
Casamir looked down at the jagged drop—a hundred meters of ruin and steel debris. His eyes, ringed by sleeplessness and too many nights on the run, barely blinked. A shimmer in the haze below reminded him of glass once used in windows, now slagged and blackened into ugly mirrors.
"What do you dream about?" he asked.
The other was quiet for a long moment. Then: "An apple."
Casamir blinked. "That's it?"
"Bright green. Sweet. You bite it and it snaps. My mother gave me one before she vanished into the Pits. I remember the taste better than her face."
Casamir said nothing.
He didn't mock it. He never did.
Because a boy who mocked memory was a boy already half-dead. He'd seen it too often—wide eyes dulled behind metal visors, hope filed off like serial numbers.
He wanted so much—not for himself, but from the world. Taste, memory, understanding. Things that couldn't be scavenged from rust or ration packs. Things no one could ration away.
"And you?" the boy prompted. "What's in your dreams?"
Casamir's voice dropped. "Silence."
A beat.
"Not this kind," he added. "Not wind and metal groaning. I mean real silence. A place with no turbines. No sirens. Just… blue sky. A field that smells like rain."
He shut his eyes, just briefly.
Always the same image. Grass rippling like a sea. A crooked tree at the crest of a hill. A sky not stained with ash, but clear—clean. A place where the world didn't scream. Where it didn't bleed.
"I want to know what the world was like before we broke it."
His friend shifted. "Maybe it was always broken."
"Then I'll lie to myself," Casamir muttered. "Brick by brick. Until I build it in my head."
It wasn't delusion. It was survival. A restraint learned over years. A boy with fire in his blood learning not to burn anything unless he had to.
Below them, a rail line creaked, warped by strain. A new sound rose with it—low and constant, like something charging or breathing beneath the metal.
Casamir tilted his head. "You hear that?"
His friend frowned. "That's not the turbines."
"No."
The sirens started.
Not drills. Not practice.
A deep, rhythmic tone that trembled up from the bones of the city itself. Not a scream, but a pulse. Slow. Measured. A heartbeat rising from Karnox's metal lungs.
Casamir stood slowly.
The lights in the lower tiers flickered. Ozone choked the wind. Across the smog-choked skyline, faint glyphs shimmered—a dying satellite's war-script bleeding into the clouds.
The mark of the Empire.
"Emergency meet?" his friend asked, voice tight now.
Casamir didn't answer. He was watching the horizon. "I think this time it's real."
His friend stood, dusting off his coat, and extended a hand.
Casamir stared at it.
Then took it.
He always took the hand. That was the problem. And the hope.
Together, they turned toward the stairwell, the boy beside him already humming again:
"One for the first, when stars were—"
His friend groaned. "You're going to die singing that."
Casamir's grin returned. "Better that than forgetting."
The platform trembled.
Not from the wind. Not from cityshift.
This was deeper.
A breath passed through the bones of Karnox.
They turned.
High above the clouds, something moved.
Not falling. Not flying.
Rising.
A silhouette against ash and red glow—broad, slow, unshapable. A wound in the sky, dragging heat in its wake. The clouds boiled away from it, giving no name, no shape—only presence.
It wasn't one of theirs.
"It's not Karnoxian," Casamir whispered.
His friend was already running.
But Casamir lingered.
He watched it. That thing. That motion. That moment.
It was more than a machine.
More than a weapon.
It felt like being… seen.
As if the world had suddenly stopped tolerating him and, instead, taken notice.
Not with love. Not with hate.
Just a single, inescapable truth.
---
Casamir's vision lingered as they walked — the dream never fully faded. That imagined field, that crooked tree.
He could feel the texture of the soil under his knees, still damp from a rain that hadn't fallen in years. In the dream, there was no rust. No turbines. Only wind through grass. The kind of silence that wrapped around you like warmth, not absence. A silence that listened.
And under that tree — a shape. Not a person. Not quite. Just... kindness. Watching.
He didn't know what it meant.
But he kept it.
---
"You said your mother gave you the apple," Casamir said, voice low.
"Yeah."
"Was she… in the underground?"
A pause. The boy beside him shook his head. "Don't know. Don't wanna guess. She was just there, then she wasn't."
Casamir waited.
"She wrapped it in this ragged bit of silk. Said I could trade it. I didn't. I bit it. It was warm from her hand. I remember that."
Another silence. Then he added, "I remember the crunch more than her voice. That feel. Like... clarity. Like the world didn't lie for a second."
Casamir said nothing. But he memorized the words.
---
They passed a cracked panel on the stairwell wall. Casamir glanced at it, and for a moment the light hit just right—revealing old glyphs, scorched nearly invisible by acid rain.
A symbol of the Free Flame — a rebellion long dissolved. He used to see them scrawled everywhere. Now the Empire erased them with cleaner bots, one tier at a time.
Tier 5 had burned in his eighth year. He remembered the smoke more than the screams. Remembered the iron beams curling like paper. Someone had painted a face across the steel gates there. Bright eyes, outstretched arms.
He remembered watching it blister and blacken from behind reinforced glass.
That day had smelled like burnt copper and cheap incense.
---
The sirens still pulsed — a slow thud, like a city trying to warn its own bones.
Casamir pressed a hand to the wall. Felt the thrum through it.
His friend kept glancing behind them. "We should move."
But Casamir didn't. Something in his gut had gone still.
The air was wrong. Thicker. Heavy with the taste of static and something older — like dust soaked in lightning.
Then he heard it.
Not loud. Not close.
A single metallic cry. Not mechanical. Not animal.
Something in between.
A memory stirred — not his. Someone else's voice, buried deep:
"If the sky opens from the wrong side, don't look. Don't listen. Run."
Casamir raised his eyes anyway.
---
Above the clouds, the silhouette was growing. Not flying. Not falling.
Rising.
Its edges were blurred, as if the sky itself refused to shape it. Its presence pushed against thought — like trying to describe a shadow before the light.
Casamir's jaw clenched. Heat pulsed in his palms.
The wind didn't just rush — it bent. Around him. Threads of warmth prickled under his skin. His breath fogged, then didn't.
The boy beside him had started running.
Casamir stood rooted.
That thing wasn't just noticed. It was noticing.
It was seeing.
And somewhere beneath his ribs, something old and buried began to stir. Not fear.
Recognition.
---
The moment stretched.
It felt like the city had paused. Like Karnox itself was waiting for him to choose.
A gust of wind surged. Sparks fluttered in his vision, though there were no fires nearby.
Then—
The rail platform groaned. Steel shrieked. A bolt snapped somewhere below.
The boy shouted his name.
Casamir turned.
Ran.
The stairs screamed beneath their boots. Each step carried the weight of not just metal, but memory. A city that had broken too many promises.
But still — they ran.
Together.
He took the hand again.
And for the first time since the dreams began, the silence inside Casamir cracked.
Not broken.
Cracked.
Like a shell just before the fire pours out.
And above them, the shape continued to rise.
Watching.
Waiting.
And Casamir knew, with a certainty that burned all the way through him:
You do not belong here anymore.