"Shut your trap, man," Karan grunted under his breath, the words barely a vibration against the rhythmic shuck-shuck of his brush. He didn't look up. He couldn't. If one of those 'Saints' saw a low-level rat like him staring at a high-value heretic, he’d be getting a one-way ticket to the "Cleansing Vats." "You look like absolute dog water, Elian. Deadass. Keep your head low before you get us both packed up."Elian’s fingers, trembling and stained with a faint, oily sheen, gripped the edge of the eye-slit. The skin around his knuckles was already beginning to tighten, turning that sickly, metallic grey. "You... you’re a sight for sore eyes, you crazy bastard," Elian rasped. His breath smelled of copper and stale bile, a scent that made Karan’s stomach do a slow, nauseous roll. "Thought you’d have bounced from this dump the second the heat turned up.""And miss out on this five-star hospitality? No cap, the decor is trash, but

 The slide felt like it would never end. Karan’s boots found no purchase on the shifting mountain of debris, sending him tumbling through a jagged avalanche of pulverized concrete and rusted rebar. Every impact was a jolt of pure, white-hot agony that radiated through his spine, but he kept his jaw clamped shut. He couldn't scream. Not here. Screaming in the Lower Sector was basically a dinner bell for things that hadn't seen fresh meat in a decade.He finally hit the bottom with a bone-jarring thud, his body splashing into a shallow, stagnant pool of runoff that tasted like battery acid and old pennies. He lay there for a heartbeat, gasping, as the "soup"—the thick, bioluminescent green fog of the ruins—swirled around him, obscuring everything beyond arm's reach."Deadass almost broke my neck," he wheezed, the slang a desperate attempt to ground himself in his own identity. He rolled onto his stomach, his lungs already beginning to hitch

 Karan didn't just feel the clock ticking; he felt the vibration of it in his very marrow, a rhythmic, heavy thrumming that matched the pounding of the cultists’ drums outside. The green vial was a cold weight in his palm, the only thing keeping his world from straight-up imploding. He looked at the heavy steel door where Elian was caged, the muffled sounds of the Ward’s misery acting as a background track to his own rising panic."No shot," Karan whispered, his voice a jagged rasp. "No shot I’m letting this go down like this."He shoved the vial deep into the folds of his grease-stained rags, the glass biting into his hip. His skin was already acting up, those black, metallic patches of the Rust flaking and itching like a thousand needle-pricks. It was a highkey nightmare, but he didn't have time to be a victim. He had to be the ghost in the machine. The door to the Sick Ward groaned open, and two "Saints"—Jibran&rsquo

 Siti’s scream didn’t just hang in the air; it shattered the last remnants of the "Prophet’s" divinity like cheap glass on a concrete floor. Jibran’s mouth hung open, his tongue darting out to lick lips that had suddenly gone bone-dry. He looked less like a god and more like a rat cornered in a dead-end alley. The crowd, a sea of thousands who had been ready to kill and die for a smile from this man, went deathly silent. It was that heavy, suffocating kind of quiet—the kind that comes right before the sky falls.Arif felt the shift in his gut before he saw it in their eyes. He was still lashed to the metallic pillar, the rusted iron biting into his wrists, but he could feel the structural integrity of the post groaning. The "Black Rust" that had been poisoning the district’s pipes had done a number on the execution stage, too. The metal was brittle, porous, and crying out for a reason to snap. "Yo, look at this clo

 The mob was a sea of raw, jagged edges, and Jibran was the piece of trash caught in the tide. His pristine white silks, once the symbol of his supposed divinity, were now nothing more than a soiled shroud, streaked with the greasy mud of the District 9 drainage tunnels and the black, metallic bile of the very people he had claimed to heal. His screams were thin, metallic things that scraped against the ears of the crowd, but nobody was listening anymore. The "Saint" was dead; only the con-man remained.Karan stood on the landing, his lungs still burning from the root-extract purge, watching the chaotic surge of the crowd. Beside him, Siti’s breath came in ragged, wet hitches. The air between them was thick—not just with the smell of ozone and damp earth, but with a sudden, violent heat that had nothing to do with the fever. Her hand found his, her skin slick with sweat and grime, her fingers digging into his palm with a desperation that felt like a b