The smog in the Undercity didn't just hang in the air; it had teeth. It chewed at the edges of Kaelen's lungs with every desperate breath as he vaulted over a crumbling, soot-stained roof.
Behind him, the heavy thud of Syndicate enforcers' boots echoed through the haze. He had shorted them on his last tribute, and the local crime boss wasn't known for his forgiving nature. Kaelen hit the next roof rolling, his momentum carrying him toward the edge. He needed to make the jump across Blackwater Alley—a four-story drop into a canal of toxic industrial runoff.
He focused on the rusted iron fire escape on the opposite building. Three strides. Two. One.
He launched himself into the abyss.
Mid-air, the world screamed.
It wasn't a sound, but a violent tearing sensation right behind his eyes. The suffocating gray smog vanished instantly. In its place, the rusted fire escape ahead of him shimmered and snapped into pristine, gleaming gold. The decaying brickwork of the tenement building transformed into flawless, polished white marble, bathed in an artificial, sunlit warmth that absolutely did not belong in the lower tiers.
The sudden, jarring shift in reality threw Kaelen's equilibrium into a complete tailspin. He blinked violently, a sharp spike of pain driving through his temples like a nail.
A glitch. He hadn't had one this severe in months.
By the time his vision violently snapped back to the grim, rusted reality of the Undercity, his trajectory was terribly off. Instead of landing cleanly on the iron grating, his boots slammed hard into the rusted railing. The ancient metal groaned and gave way.Kaelen scrambled, his calloused fingers desperately finding purchase on a jagged drainage pipe just as his legs swung out over the dizzying drop. He slammed against the brick wall, the breath leaving his lungs in a sharp hiss.
Above him, on the roof he had just left, the Syndicate enforcers skidded to a halt, peering down into the thick, swirling smog.
"Lost the little rat," one of them grunted, spitting into the alley.
Kaelen held his breath, the iron pipe biting into his palms, his heart hammering against his ribs. Only when the heavy footsteps finally receded did he pull himself up over the railing, his head still throbbing with the phantom warmth of a golden city that didn't exist.
Or shouldn't exist.
He rubbed his temples, squeezing his eyes shut to push the impossible image away. He had a crippling debt to pay by midnight, and hallucinating about the Architect's gilded spires wasn't going to save his life. He needed a job. A big one.