The bridge over the Pilt Canal was engineering the way most good engineering was: invisible until you looked at it properly, and then unavoidable.
From the air it was clear how the whole arrangement worked. Piltover on the east bank, built upward and inward in the way that cities built by people who feel entitled to the sky tend to build. The lower city on the west bank, built downward, into the natural fissures left by a geological event nobody from the east bank thought about very often. Between them: the bridge, the connection, the mechanism through which the two halves pretended to be one thing.
The bridge was lowering as they crossed over it. A trade ship below, requiring the clearance. From this height Jayce could see the whole sequence: the bridge sections rising, the ship passing, the bridge resettling. He had seen it hundreds of times from street level. From the middle of the air, held up by a column of shaped wind that moved with the stability of furniture built by someone who has never heard the phrase "load-bearing," it looked completely different.
He would have appreciated this more if the wind had been less variable.
"Is this going to be like this the whole way?" he said, to the air, since there was nobody immediately next to him.
The air did not answer.
The golden cloud set down on the surface level of the lower city: the strip of ground that was neither Piltover nor the deep rift, the layer where the district began its descent into the cracks. The alchemist barons lived up here, in the territory closest to sunlight on the wrong side of the river.
Vi, Powder, Mylo, and Claggor stepped off. When Claggor's weight left it, the cloud dispersed without drama, folding back into the natural energy field the way a candle folds into the dark when you blow it out.
Liam and Shizuku landed beside them a moment later. Then Jayce came in from slightly the wrong angle, announced by a gust of wind that had made one final emphatic statement before releasing him, and met the ground face-first.
He lay there for a moment. Then he moved his hands. Then his face. He sat up with the expression of a man running a systematic inventory.
"I'm not hurt," he said. This seemed to surprise him.
Powder was watching Liam. She had a theory about why this was, but she kept it to herself.
"Where's Ekko?" Mylo was scanning the area with the specific vigilance of someone who has watched themselves get ambushed in a light curtain and has drawn appropriate conclusions. "In what the curtain showed us, he had people waiting."
"We weren't running," Claggor said, pushing his goggles up. "In the curtain we came down in a panic after the explosion, with law enforcement behind us. There was a reason to be ready for us." He looked around at the distinctly non-panicked situation. "There isn't a reason now."
Mylo considered this. "So the curtain was a warning."
"The curtain was a possibility," Liam said. "Possibilities change."
Shizuku was looking at the elevator shaft set into the wall of the rift's edge. The mechanism was old and industrial and made the kind of sounds that suggested it had opinions about being used.
"That goes to the bottom level?"
Vi looked at Liam. She had been doing this since they landed: not confrontational, but watching. She had been watching since the apartment. She had not decided what to do with what she had noticed.
"You don't need to take us anywhere," Liam said. "We're just passing through. Traveling. Looking for somewhere to spend the night."
"Upper City's more suitable for that."
"It probably is." Liam appeared to think about this. "You know, before this city divided into two parts, it had one name. Osla Vazuan. Named after a great scientist from the lower city who built the first canal gates." He looked across the river at Piltover. "The east bank took the infrastructure. The west bank kept the name. Zaun." He shrugged pleasantly. "I just think that's worth noting."
Vi looked at him.
"I have no feelings about politics," Jayce said, quite firmly. "I have feelings about experiments. Mr. Liam, why did I have to come to the lower city for this?"
"For the experiment." Shizuku showed him what she was holding: the blue crystals, the experimental housing, his research notes. She had collected them from the bench before they left with the efficiency of someone who knew exactly which things would be needed and had simply picked them up.
Jayce stared at his own research notes in someone else's hands.
"Fine," he said. "Let's go."
Vi turned and led the way to the elevator.
The elevator descended with the clank and sway of a mechanism built for function and not for the comfort of passengers. Through the gaps in the walls, the lower city rose outside them in layers: the surface disappearing above, then the middle tier of flying bridges and suspended platforms, then finally the deep rift opening around them. The Black Alley. The bottom.
The air changed as they went down. It had the specific quality of air that had passed through several industrial processes before reaching this level. Not exactly poisonous. More the color of a warning that had been given so many times it had become wallpaper.
Jayce breathed shallowly without quite deciding to.
Vi noticed this. She looked at Liam and Shizuku, who were breathing normally, and recalibrated something in her assessment.
"How does this compare to Meteor City?" Liam asked Shizuku.
Shizuku considered. "Meteor City's air isn't as bad as you're probably imagining, if you stay away from the mountain itself. The living areas are further from the source."
"I've never been there. It's natural to assume the worst."
"It's a fair assumption." She was quiet for a moment. "My part of it had decent air. I moved around a lot. There's nothing there that really counts as a fixed address." She paused again, in the way she sometimes paused before adding something that had a different quality from the rest. "Before I was two I lived in a church somewhere. After that I moved around. The closest thing I had to a place was a valley, about ten months, when I was with my master. The air there was very clean. Far from the garbage."
"Was it good?"
"Yes," she said. "It was good."
The elevator reached the bottom and stopped with a definitive clang.
They were far enough behind the others that the conversation had been between the two of them, carrying only as far as the space between them. Liam did not ask more about it. He didn't need to. He had heard the quality of "yes, it was good" and knew what it was worth.
The elevator opened onto the main corridor of the Black Alley.
The lower city had an aesthetic that Piltover had chosen not to develop: neon in colors that had no interest in being subtle, chemistry happening in vessels and pipes and puddles at every unexpected elevation, structures that had been added to and modified and corrected and modified again until the original architecture was more of a suggestion than a foundation. It was the kind of place that had evolved rather than been designed, and it moved with the specific energy of somewhere that had never asked anyone's permission to exist.
People looked at them from both sides of the corridor.
Vi had her hood up. She was walking fast, one hand holding Powder's. The stares accumulated with the patience of people who had seen the light curtain and drawn conclusions about this particular group of visitors.
"...the Vander family's girls..." "...that's the inventor? The one from the experiment?" "...what about the other one, the one with the leg?"
Then: "JINX!"
It came from the crowd with the velocity of something that had been waiting for the right moment. The word. The one that had been said in the light curtain and said today and would apparently be said again for as long as anyone in the lower city had a memory.
The bottle followed the word.
Vi moved without looking at it. One hand caught Powder's shoulder and kept her behind. The other caught the bottle. In a single rotation she returned it to the crowd with enough force that everyone in the immediate vicinity made the correct decision about whether to remain standing where they were.
The bottle found the wall. The fire spread up the brickwork.
The bald man who had thrown it was the last one in the cleared space.
Vi looked at him with the expression of someone who has run out of patience for this particular variety of conversation.
"You want to fight, come find me," she said. She raised her voice to address the walls on both sides. "Vander's Tavern. You all know where it is. If anyone has a problem with my sister, that's where I'll be." She looked back at the bald man. "And if you call her that again, I'll introduce you to the wall directly."
Jayce, who had seen Vi's aura shift with his newly opened perception from something contained into something that had points to it, was reconsidering his prior assessment of the lower city's ambient threat level.
The crowd produced the reaction of a crowd that has been told exactly where the line is and is deciding whether to test it. Nobody crossed it.
Someone from the back called: "Vander's not there! He went after Silco! Maybe he won't be coming back!"
There were a few laughs. The cynical kind, the kind that are not enjoying anything.
Vi's expression changed.
She turned and walked toward The Last Drop at a pace that was not quite running.
"Charming neighborhood," Liam said, to nobody in particular.
He was smiling the way he sometimes smiled when the environment was doing something interesting that most people would not be paying attention to.
The airflow around them had a quality he had noticed about a minute ago. He had filed it under "worth monitoring" and continued. It was still there. The natural energy field in the lower city moved differently from Piltover: denser in some places, thinner in others, shaped by decades of alchemy and industrial activity and the particular density of human need that accumulated in places where people had very little room to move.
But underneath that, or alongside it, there was something else. Not a person's aura. Not a stray Nen construct. Something that felt like thought without a thinker, intention without a source.
He paid attention to where it was coming from.