By midday, Ashlight Market grew dense with movement, a tide of bodies pressing between tarp-shaded walkways and cables strung low like drooping veins. The heat rose from the ground in thin fumes, carrying with it the metallic scent of scorched oil and copper dust.
Cralin had wedged himself behind a half-collapsed awning, hands buried in a crate of corroded clamps. The vendor beside him, a thin woman with an eyepatch stitched from glass fiber, was repairing her own stall with scraps. Every so often, she muttered curses at the bolts that refused to tighten. "If half these things weren't made from melted spoons," she said, "this city might just hold together another month."
To their left, a street bard strummed an instrument cobbled out of pipe and wiring, its sound half hum, half ache. The melody wove unevenly through the noise — market calls, drones passing, a couple arguing over battery shares. When one child dropped a basket of dried roots, the sound was swallowed by laughter rather than scolding. Some of the laughter was genuine.
Nearby, a man wearing a patched gray vest lifted open the hood of a sputtering motor-cart. Smoke puffed from the engine, black as ink. "Still pretending that heap runs?" someone called.
"It hums just enough for belief!" he shouted back, laughing, turning his wrench as though the machine might respond to faith.
The market's rhythm rarely stopped. Above the hum, wind whistled through gaps in the rooftops, carrying fragments of distant sirens and faint voices that might've been from another district — or echoes. People here never asked which.
Cralin straightened when a small crowd gathered around the water stalls. A supplier had brought filtered canisters from Sector Three — the good kind, still sealed. The price doubled in seconds. He half-considered joining the fray, but stayed back, watching. The city had rules about how long a fight could last before the drones interfered, and it was always just under that mark.
A boy ran by, sloshing a bucket, barefoot and grinning. Behind him, an older vendor yelled, "Bring that back or bring your skin — your choice!" The boy vanished between two rusted shipping crates. Someone began clapping, half in approval, half amusement.
Across the plaza, the tea-seller who always shouted instead of speaking was sharing gossip again — something about the power conduits under the eastern vault flickering strange. She said someone had seen shapes move inside the conduits, like people made of light. "Drifters," she said. "Or survivors from another layer." No one corrected her that layers were myths. Myths were safer than truths lately.
Cralin turned away when a gust of hot wind whipped past, bringing with it the stench of rubber burn from the refinery. He could taste the ash on his tongue by now.
At the far edge of the market, beyond the rows of gear stalls, Iven was finishing a trade with one of the guild mechanics. Her posture was sharp and fluid all at once — suspicion carved into habit. The copper charms she'd been stringing earlier now gleamed faintly, hanging from her belt like a quiet warning.
"Three for the pair," she said, voice neutral.
"Two," replied the mechanic.
"Then take none," Iven countered, already turning away. The mechanic groaned and threw her the coins. "You're worse than the priest who charges for air blessings."
"I'm better," Iven said, pocketing the trade, "mine actually work."
Behind her, a group of old tech scavengers huddled near an inactive fuse box, whispering of how the outer sectors hadn't reported in since dawn. No one called it an emergency yet — people had learned not to use that word until sirens wailed twice. Still, eyes darted east more often than they used to.
Iven brushed past a child trying to sell painted bottlecaps, paused, and handed her a half-coin. "Spend it on something that won't shock you," she said. The child grinned, showing teeth filed flat — fashion of the underlift kids lately.
She made her way toward the upper balcony overlooking the plaza. From there, the market looked like it breathed — a mass inhaling sound and exhaling haze. She could see Cralin still bent over the crates, unaware of how the smoke plumes in the distance had merged into one, darker column.
She didn't tell him yet. The market wasn't ready to stop breathing.