The hum of the gate finally stopped with the sun having gone down.
We were now in the outer districts of Halden.
We passed the edge of the city like crossing into a memory.
Aboveground, Halden's outer districts always looked rough around the edges, industrial scars wrapped in concrete and wire. But even then, they still had clean streets, surveillance drones, noise ordinances. No one ever called it a slum.
It was one of Halden's proudest boasts: the only post-war city without slums. A utopia, on paper.
We stopped at what looked like the ruins of an old transport hub. Overgrown, fenced off, cracked signs warning of structural collapse. Cayos slipped through a bent section of railing and descended a narrow stairwell slick with condensation and graffiti.
The stairs groaned beneath our feet. I reached for the photo in my pocket without thinking, bracing for what I might find down there.
Rot.
Shadows.
Maybe even blood.
"Lucky it stopped raining," Cayos said casually, just ahead of me. "Would've been a lot worse if it hadn't."
"Worse how?" I asked, ducking under a rusted pipe.
He didn't turn.
"Sometimes the old tunnels flood. The Gutter knows how to swallow people."
—
The air changed. Got thicker. Louder.
And then-
Light.
Colour.
People.
I stopped cold at the bottom of the stairs, blinking like an idiot.
We weren't in ruins.
We were in a city.
A real one.
The tunnel opened into a vast, sunken dome, stacked with makeshift homes and glowing signs, layers of life built into every inch of the old subterranean structure. Neon lights buzzed in every corner. Market stalls spilled into each other, selling steam-fried dumplings, bootleg implants, hand-carved music boxes. Strung lights and recycled banners crisscrossed overhead. Murals covered every flat surface: wings, hands, wolves, gods.
Music drifted through the air, two competing songs from opposite balconies, overlapping in a strangely pleasant dissonance. And the smell. Grilled meat, incense, machine oil. Everything. All at once.
And through the centre of it all ran a river.
Not a sluggish trickle, but a fast, living thing, swollen from the recent rains, its surface rippling with momentum. The water shimmered under the neon haze, catching flashes of pink, gold, and blue from the lights above. Pipes emptied into it at odd intervals, but somehow the smell was clean. Purified. Tamed.
The banks weren't natural. They were concrete, sloped and stained, with raised ledges on either side where people sat or walked like it was a boardwalk. Bridges stretched across it at irregular points, most no wider than two people side-by-side, strung together with scavenged cables and grated platforms. Skiffs floated past, ferrying crates and passengers, some rigged with lights that cast soft ripples across the ceiling above. One old man fished with a neon-threaded line, humming off-key to the river's rhythm.
And everything, everything, dripped.
Rain hadn't touched Halden in hours, but the dome ceiling still wept. Water seeped through old cracks in the stone like the storm hadn't ended. Drops fell from the beams above, caught in funnels and gutters, redirected into tiny rooftop gardens, hanging bottles, and moss-covered filtration grids.
Whole clusters of plants had grown wild across the upper levels, ferns curling out of rusted ducts, vines draped across balconies, little violet flowers blooming defiantly on broken piping. It looked like nature had claimed a corner of the underworld and no one had told it to stop.
Homes rose in layered clusters along either side of the river, multistorey and mismatched, cobbled together from subway panels, salvaged scaffolding, shipping crates. Some extended out over the water itself, balanced on stilts, with balconies wrapped in coloured cloth and laundry lines that fluttered like prayer flags.
A woman above us watered herbs from a repurposed bottle rig. A man whistled as he repaired a neon sign. Two kids chased each other barefoot across a grated bridge. A couple slow danced beside a broken vending machine. An old woman laughed so hard she had to steady herself against a walker made of pipework and bike handles.
This wasn't decay.
This was a heartbeat.
Something old and vital and stubbornly alive.
"I thought-" My voice caught in my throat. "I thought the Gutter would be…"
"Worse?" Cayos said, stepping beside me, his tone unreadable.
I didn't answer. I didn't need to.
He looked out over the lights. "Everyone thinks that. They hear Gutter and picture rot. Crime. Darkness. And sure, it's all here. But so is everything else."
I turned slowly, taking it all in again. The layers. The colour. The weight of it all pressing upward against the lie I'd grown up believing.
"I always wondered," I said quietly, "how Halden managed to stay so clean. No homelessness. No slums."
Cayos gave me a look. Calm. Sharp.
"It didn't. They just paved over the broken parts and pretended they never happened."
Maybe Halden's worst-kept secret was actually its best-kept one.
A lie so clean it looked like progress.
"And this is what's underneath."
He nodded. "This is what's left when you push everything down."
Maybe that was true for people too.
Push hard enough, and something always leaks through.
Grief. Guilt. Or worse, hope.
I looked up.
No sky. Just girders and steel beams, flickering signs that climbed so high they vanished into shadows. Somewhere up there, the clean world still hummed, blind to the truth beneath its feet.
I wasn't sure whether to feel furious… or ashamed.
That I had never questioned it.
That maybe I hadn't wanted to.
A kid zoomed past us on wheeled sneakers, laughing as he narrowly avoided a skewer cart.
I stared.
"This place is…" I didn't finish.
"Alive," Cayos said for me.
I nodded, slowly.
The weight of it all still sinking in.
My stomach growled again, louder this time.
Then he grinned.
"I told you, I know a place," he said, already walking, humming a familiar tune.
I followed.
What else was Halden hiding?
How deep did it go?
And how did Anya fit into this?