The Shattered Districts were not a place so much as a persistent, mechanical error in the architectural design of the world. They were the city’s armpit—a sprawling, vertical slum that clung to the dark, rusted underbelly of the hanging city like a barnacle on a hull. Here, gravity was merely a suggestion, warped by the decaying stabilization gyros of the Core. Pools of hydraulic runoff drifted in slow, iridescent globes, and the buildings were little more than shipping containers and salvaged plating, welded together in a desperate, chaotic geometry.Rovan stumbled through an alleyway that was currently oriented at a forty-five-degree angle to the horizon. His chest throbbed with the rhythmic, alien pulse of the artifact. Each time it beat, the amber light beneath his skin flared, throwing long, jagged shadows against the corrugated metal walls. It felt like his own heart was being slowly replaced, beat by agonizing beat, with the frantic ticking of an ancient clock."Keep moving, Rov

The atmosphere in the Shattered Districts was not air so much as a thick, recirculated soup of coolant mist, metallic dust, and the pungent, chemical rot of a civilization that had long ago forgotten the concept of waste disposal. Rovan leaned heavily against a bulkhead that felt cold enough to sear his skin, his breath hitching in a series of ragged, wet gasps. Every time his lungs expanded, the amber filaments beneath his chest wall stretched with them, a web of artificial nerves that seemed to be actively knitting themselves into his own nervous system. It was an invasive, terrifying intimacy. He could feel the artifact’s hunger—a dull, persistent vibration that hummed through his marrow, urging him to seek out something he could not yet identify.Selvara stood a few paces ahead, her silhouette framed by the flickering, sickly green glow of a failing halogen street lamp. She was checking the perimeter, her hand resting habitually on the hilt of the blade she’d pulled from the wreck

The spasm didn’t begin in Rovan’s muscles; it began in the rust.Ten feet away from where he leaned against an exposed support beam, a junction box hissed, spitting a plume of pressurized, white-hot steam into the freezing void of the lower strata. The moment the copper casing arched with static, Rovan felt the discharge travel down the back of his neck like a line of molten needle-points. His knees buckled without his consent. His boots scraped across the frost-slicked iron walkway, losing whatever purchase they had left in the warped, six-degree gravity field."Catch!" Selvara snapped, though she was already moving.It wasn't her hands that caught him, but Mavren’s heavy, iron-shod forearm, locking around Rovan’s chest like a crane arm. The giant pulled him backward, slamming Rovan’s back against the cold, vibrating bulkhead of a dead ballast tank."He’s leaking again," Mavren grunted, his magnetic boots clacking loud and deliberate against the floorboards as he adjusted his stance.