The sun-melon was a dead weight. Not of gravity, but of pure, crushing cost.
It was small, barely nestling into the curve of her twelve-year-old palms. Its golden skin radiated heat, trapping the energy from the merchant's blood-glass display lights. It smelled of heavy summer honey, a sweet, rich scent that didn't belong in the choking dust of the Sump. But the true weight—the gravity of what it meant for her father's failing lungs, and the twenty blood-glass coins now dangling over her head—settled onto her narrow shoulders like the perpetual fall of Ash-Snow.
She clamped the fruit against the hollow of her chest, feeling the frantic thunder of her heart right through the stolen treasure.
Three breaths.
That was the window. All the time she could spare before the vendor, a man of grime and bad temper, noticed the damning gap in his arrangement. Three breaths before the hole in the precise pyramid of glowing fruit became a scream. Three breaths until she committed to motion or faced public execution.
The Mid-Tier market pressed in close, a churning sea of flesh and noise. The air was thick with the sharp, coppery stench that signaled the blood-tax collectors were at work two stalls down, obsidian needles glinting. Morning during Bloodfall Season was always chaotic, but this year the desperation felt sharper. Weaponized. Everyone weighed the calculation: was petty theft worth a drawn-out death?
Luna had done her own morbid accounting. The numbers were simple.
Father was fading fast, his breath a wet, tearing sound. Mother was throwing up a fragile wall of denial. And Luna? She was just small enough to melt into the misery of the crowd and fast enough to outrun the Guard.
The sun-melon could buy her father a week of strength. Perhaps two.
It was worth it.
She slipped away, a seamless shadow.
The cardinal rule: Fuse chaos with confidence. Walk as though you'd already paid. Look like you belonged. Never run until you felt the hot breath of necessity on your neck.
Luna tucked the golden fruit tight inside her threadbare tunic, loving the solid, foreign warmth it projected onto her ribs. Her heart beat a panicked tattoo against the melon's skin: One-two-three, one-two-three. The rhythm she counted when fear tried to seize her diaphragm. The rhythm Mother hummed over the loom. Keep moving. You are almost safe.
She wasn't a novice. Stale bread. Siphoned water. Small things.
This was different.
Sun-melons were outrageous. Nurtured in High-Tier glasshouses where Guardian-Vines warded off pests and blood-glass lamps provided artificial light, filtered through the copper lie of the Solar Mask. Pure luxury. Carrying one through this market was akin to walking with a target painted on her back in fresh blood.
But her father adored them.
He'd told her about the taste once, years ago, back when he was hale enough to hoist her onto his shoulders. Before the Ashen Rot began to devour his lungs. Before that awful, wet cough began to wrack his body. Before the grey film crept across his skin like killing hoarfrost.
"Tasted exactly how the sun must taste," he'd confessed, giving her that careful, brittle smile. "If the sun ever decided to be kind to you."
Kind. The sun was a colossal lie. The memory made her tighten her hold on the melon until her knuckles went bone-white.
She dropped low, ducking beneath a hanging display of dried Aether-Ray spines. Her bare feet, tough from the volcanic stone, made no noise on the slick pavement. The Sump had taught her to move like air. To be a shadow that could slip through the cracks.
But the sun-melon glowed beneath her dirty tunic. Golden. Impossibly out of place.
Someone would notice.
Someone always—
"HEY! STOP! THIEF!"
The air snapped.
Luna didn't look back. Eye contact meant a description of her eyes. Better to be a blur. A suggestion of movement.
She bolted.
The market detonated around her. Stall-keepers shrieked. Bodies slammed in close. The hot chaos of discovery rippled outwards. Luna was small, but small translated to fast and flexible. She squeezed through gaps no adult could register.
She dove under the massive, low-slung belly of a Sun-Strider. The huge, six-legged beast snorted, breath hot and musky, shifting its weight. The creature provided a perfect, three-second blockage of the merchant's line of sight.
"THIEF! SOMEONE PIN HER DOWN!"
Nobody did.
The Sump didn't turn in its thieves. The Sump was the thieves. You never sold out your own kind.
Luna ran, feet pounding the stone. The crowd fractured and pulled back. The heavy boots of the Guard hammered behind her, a steady, sickening rhythm drawing closer.
Stupid. I should have waited for the dusk shift.
But Father was dying now.
Luna slammed into the market's periphery at top speed.
The warrens swallowed her whole.
The Sump's residential maze. A vertical nightmare of scavenged mud-brick and warped metal. Structures piled precariously high. Passages so narrow you had to suck the ribs tight just to pass. Clammy walls. Floors that dropped away into pitch darkness.
An instant death trap for anyone unfamiliar.
Luna knew every turn. The topography of the Sump was written on the soles of her feet. She'd mapped them out with Kayo—memorizing connections, dead ends, and loose stones that could be kicked free to block pursuit.
But she heard boots behind her anyway.
Twenty blood-glass coins. The bounty flashed in her memory. Enough money that anyone might risk the warrens to collect it.
She pushed her legs harder, forcing air into burning lungs.
Left turn. Right turn. Squeeze through the sliver where the wall had given way, grit scraping her hipbone. Drop three feet using the frayed rope. Keep moving. Do not stop. Do not think about the fire in her chest or the sun-melon bruising against her ribs.
Think about Father's smile. Think about one more week.
Behind her, the boots faltered. Lost the trail.
Luna didn't let up until she burst into the open space near the Black-Quarry.
The quarry's lip was a gaping, infected wound. Veins of raw obsidian exposed. The air here was dense, metallic, tasting of ash. The cursed Ash-Snow fell thicker here. It seeped into your lungs.
Father had spent twenty years working right here. Luna's chest seized with a physical gasp of grief.
"Luna! Behind you!"
She spun.
Nia stood panting at the warren's entrance, her six-fingered hand signing a blur of desperate movement: Guards coming. Different route. Follow me. Now.
Luna's stomach plummeted. Someone was serious.
She followed Nia's directions. They took the scenic route home, which meant the worst way possible. Through the overflow channels where the city's fetid waste sluggishly drained. The stench felt like a physical hand choking her. Through the abandoned sections where buildings had collapsed entirely.
By the time they reached their safe-house—a crumbling old watchtower—Luna's legs shook uncontrollably. The sun-melon was gripped against her chest like a prayer.
Kayo was waiting. So was little Kip.
"You got it! You actually did it!" Kip's eight-year-old eyes went saucer-wide. Painfully thin. The grey film already settling around his lips. "That's a real sun-melon!"
"That was flat-out suicide, Little Lark," Kayo grumbled, though a worried smile pulled at his mouth. "What in the hell were you thinking?"
"Father," Luna stated. The rock-solid truth.
Kayo's smile vanished. He understood. When someone you loved was wasting away, and the medicine was priced in coins you could never earn—you committed stupid, terrifying acts. You tried anyway.
"Guards are hunting hard," Kayo murmured. "They put out the bounty. Twenty full coins."
The number hit her in the gut. "Twenty. Why so much?"
Nia signed rapidly: Merchant saw your eyes. Told them magic-touched.
Luna's hand flew to cover her face. Her eyes. The Sight. The bizarre ability to perceive auras. Magic draws their hungry attention, girl.
Too late now.
"I'll be careful," Luna promised, hating how small her voice sounded.
Kayo pressed something into her free hand. A piece of carved obsidian. A tiny bird, edges worn smooth. "Thought your father might like it. For when he's better."
When he's better. Not if. Luna blinked away the hot tears.
"Thank you, Kayo."
The sun-melon, perfectly golden. Twenty coins on her head. Guards hunting. Magic-touched and marked.
But Father would smile.
Worth it. It absolutely had to be.
Home was three pathetic rooms carved directly into the crater wall, reachable only by a rickety rope ladder. It smelled of ash, weaving chemicals, and the sickly copper-scent of creeping sickness.
Luna climbed with agonizing slowness, the melon and the obsidian bird secured inside her tunic.
Mother was hunched over her loom when Luna ducked through the door-curtain. Her hands slowed their rhythm.
"You stole something valuable." Not a question.
"For Father," Luna said.
"Luna—"
"He is dying, Mother."
The words hung in the oppressive stillness like smoke. The truth they refused to speak aloud.
Mother's hands stilled on the loom. Slowly, painfully, she turned.
"Show me what was worth your life."
Luna pulled out the perfect, glowing sun-melon.
Mother's breath hitched. Her weary mask fractured, revealing the raw grief underneath. The sheer terror.
"Oh, Luna," she whispered. "What did you do?"
"What I had to do."
From the other room, Father gave that rattling, wet cough. The sound of lungs filling with something that shouldn't be there.
Mother closed her eyes. When she opened them again, they were dry. And determined.
"Hide it well until tonight," she said, voice low. "We'll make it a celebration. We'll make him something he'll remember."
Luna nodded.
She slipped into her tiny room and tucked the sun-melon under the worn sleeping mat. Her fingers grazed the smooth obsidian bird.
She held both treasures and made a silent vow to the damp walls: I will keep you alive. Whatever the price. I will find a way, even if I have to steal the light from the sky itself.
The Sump's cursed Ash-Snow continued to drift past her window like endless grey rain.
And Luna—twelve years old, with frightening magic in her eyes and a father dying—began to let her imagination wander toward impossible, desperate things.
Because the impossible was all she had left.