Cayos led me through the Gutter.
We weaved between food stalls and glowing signs, through crowds of people just… living. Talking, laughing, arguing. Not hiding. Not surviving.
Thriving.
Everywhere I looked, life clung to the walls, homes were carved into the concrete veins of the old sewer system, multi-storey and mismatched, built straight into the stone like they'd always been there. Metal balconies jutted out above us, stacked with planters, tarps, and windchimes made from old rail links.
We kept to the covered walkways, beneath overhangs and low roofs, because the ceiling above never stopped dripping. Rain, or something close to it, still bled through the cracks in the dome far overhead, casting soft plinks across metal and skin. You could almost mistake it for weather. Like this place had grown its own sky.
There were even plants, ferns and moss and wildflowers rooted in rust, nurtured by the constant damp. The Gutter wasn't just alive. It had made peace with the storm.
But the air was thick.
Heavy with steam and smoke and something older, like mildew and old metal and the ghost of fires long extinguished. Breathing felt like work. I found myself lagging behind, chest tightening, trying not to cough.
Cayos moved ahead without slowing.
Effortless. Like the weight of the air didn't touch him. Like the alleys opened for him alone.
We turned a corner onto a narrow catwalk.
Rusted, wet, creaking underfoot, and suddenly the floor dropped away.
I stopped.
Below us stretched another level of the Gutter. Maybe more.
A whole vertical maze of walkways and rooms carved into stone and steel. Skiffs moved between shadowed canals, their poles pushing through sluggish water. Fire barrels flickered along the lower paths, casting uneven light on cracked concrete and twisted pipes.
And then, off to the left, tucked beneath a stone archway, something that didn't belong.
A neon sign buzzed above a gated tunnel: Indigo Smoke.
The letters were elegant. Too elegant for this deep down. Someone had paid to be seen.
A man stepped out.
Not Gutter-born.
His coat hung too perfectly. His shoes were dry. He lit a thin glass pipe, blue flame licking at something expensive, and exhaled like the city owed him.
Two girls followed, laughing too loudly in translucent jackets that weren't made for warmth. A hover-drone bobbed behind them, capturing everything.
He wasn't hiding.
He didn't need to.
The gate hissed closed behind them.
Cayos kept walking.
But I didn't.
My hand went to my pocket before I could think.
The ring. Edges bent. Still warm from the press of my hand. I'd fidgeted with it the whole way down here, unbending and twisting again. My nervous habit. My anchor.
I stared at it for a second.
Just long enough to remember what I was doing here.
Why this mattered.
Then I looked back at the gate.
I'd thought the Gutter was all hardship. Dust and desperation.
But this?
Not survival.
Indulgence.
The kind built on knowing no one would stop you.
The man hadn't even looked back.
The girls didn't seem old enough to be down here alone.
And that drone… it wasn't recording for safety.
It was part of the show.
He wasn't afraid.
Because nothing in this place could touch him.
And that...
That was power
Cayos finally glanced back. "You coming?"
I nodded, legs heavy.
As I caught up, he said, just loud enough for me to hear, "The Gutter doesn't judge. That's what makes it so beautiful."
He let that hang in the air for a moment.
Then added, quieter still.
"But beautiful things rot too… especially when they're left to fester."
He slipped through the press of bodies, past curtain-flanked doorways and dripping chain-walks, never checking to see if I kept up.
"How do you know where to go?" I managed, struggling to catch my breath.
He pushed aside a curtain of copper chains, and light spilled through.
"We're nearly there."
We ducked under the curtain and stepped into a quieter corridor, narrower, dimmer, the noise of the crowd muffled behind layers of woven fabric and hanging wires. Here, the water dripped less like rain and more like a leak, irregular, unpredictable, echoing down the metal with eerie rhythm.
My breath still felt shallow. My hoodie clung damp to my back.
Then I saw it.
An old subway car, long rusted and buried into the concrete like a fossil, repurposed into something else entirely.
It jutted halfway out of the Gutter's stone wall, embedded into a carved-out recess like someone had forced it into place decades ago and then decided to build a life around it. From the outside, it looked narrow, cramped. But the moment I stepped through the threshold, I realized how wrong I was.
It was bigger than it looked.
Much bigger.
One end had been gutted into a kitchen, steam hissing from hacked vents. The other held barstools and mismatched tables beneath colourful lanterns, their glow softening the scuffed metal walls.
The sliding doors were stuck permanently open, revealing graffiti-covered siding and a hand-painted menu written directly on the rusted shell.
A staircase had been carved into the stone wall leading to a hidden higher floor.
This was someone's home.
Most of the people inside were silent. Pale. Not sickly, just… starved of sunlight. Their skin held that washed-out grey, like paper left to soak too long. The kind of colour that didn't come from illness, but from years of never looking up.
Near the back, a young boy sat hunched over a low table, working quietly through a stack of homework. His skin was the palest I'd ever seen. Bone-white, almost translucent in the lantern light.
Just kept writing, steady and precise, like this wasn't strange at all.
And for him, it wasn't.
This was normal.
A few others stood out. Not like him. Travelers, maybe. Surface-born. Their skin held more colour. Their eyes darted toward the newcomers, alert in a way that didn't match the calm. Like they knew something could go wrong at any moment.
But everyone was eating.
And for a moment, they all looked like they belonged.
"Karu's," Cayos said simply, stepping through the threshold behind me, like it was a sacred rite. "No fights. No questions. No exceptions."
Behind the bar, a cute girl, somehow even paler then the boy, looked up.
She didn't flinch at the sight of Cayos. Didn't smile either.
Just gave him a long, steady look, then shifted her gaze to me.
Sizing me up.
Judging whether I belonged.
Or if I was going to break something.
Then, with the barest shrug, she dismissed me.
Her eyes returned to Cayos, sharp now. Focused.
"It's you. Again."