“Tell me who taught you to move like that,” Kavrin scraped out, his boots grinding glass into the threshold, “or you bleed out where you sit.” Lishka met his gaze, no flicker of fear, only a practiced blankness. The pain in her thigh was a dull roar, but she pushed it down, focusing on the white strain in his knuckles, the slight twitch along his trigger finger. He wanted answers, not a corpse. That was her leverage. “My brother,” she said, her voice steady, surprisingly calm. “He ran with Ravash’s cells, before the purging. He taught me.” Kavrin’s brow furrowed, a flicker of something unreadable passing through his eyes. “A cell sympathizer. And you, his kin, enlisted here?” He scoffed, a dry rasp. “A convenient fable.” “The state offered two rations a day and a regulator canister that sealed,” Lishka countered, her voice hardening with a carefully calibrated resentment. “He hated the regime. I just wanted to eat. He saw the fighting as a way out. I saw it as a way to survive *him*. He taught me to defend myself, those dirty street moves. He called it the ‘Khorlan Sweep’.” She paused, letting the implication hang. “If I’d let them catch me with him, I’d be in the incinerators right now.” Kavrin studied her, the blood on her trousers a stark contrast to her composed face. He weighed her words, searching for a tell, a falter. The ruthlessness in her eyes, the sheer survival instinct, resonated with a part of him he rarely acknowledged. It was a familiar hunger. “Ravash’s cells are fragmented, but not gone. If your brother knew these ‘Khorlan Sweeps’, he knew things.” “He knew people,” Lishka corrected. “He knew an operative from the Rusk district, an explosives handler who was supposed to plant a charge near the Archon-General’s memorial last week. The man bragged about it, said the Archon-General was going to pay for ‘everything’.” Kavrin’s grip on the ‘Gravemaker’ loosened fractionally. His mentor. The explosion. This was the first concrete lead that wasn't a puddle reflection. He hated the thought of owing a street-rat, a potential sympathizer, but the information… it was too vital to dismiss. “Where is this contact?” “Basement interrogation cells,” Lishka said, lowering her chin against the reek of burning conduit. “He was supposed to be a diversion, but he got caught. Name’s Joren. If you want to know who killed your mentor, Kavrin, he might tell you.” Kavrin’s eyes were still fixed on her, calculating. The name, Joren, was a thread. He could follow it. He could break her later, after she proved her worth. He lowered the ‘Gravemaker’, the click echoing in the confined space. “Fine. But one wrong move, one lie, and you’ll wish the Cleaners had finished you.” Sub-level four smelled of carbolic wash and corroded drainpipes, housing a single wire cot bolted to rusted plate. Joren, the captured Rusk saboteur, showed none of the defiance Kavrin anticipated. He lay curled on the cot, a skeletal figure wracked by a persistent, wet cough that rattled his entire frame. His breaths were shallow, punctuated by gasps of pain. His skin was the color of old ash, and his eyes, when he opened them, were a startling, sickly blue, rimmed with a faint, crystalline sheen. “Joren,” Kavrin stated, his voice flat, devoid of sympathy. He stood over the man, Lishka a silent, watchful shadow behind him. “You were involved in the bombing of Archon-General Vorlag’s memorial.” Joren only managed another cough, a rattling sound that seemed to tear at his throat. He clutched his chest, knuckles white. “Yes,” he wheezed, the word a struggle. “A diversion. Just… a diversion.” “Who ordered it?” Kavrin pressed, leaning closer. “Ravash? Or someone else?” The prisoner's gaze, milky and glass-tinted, rolled toward Kavrin. A dry, rasping laugh escaped his lips. “Ravash… Ravash fights back. But he didn’t start it. They started it.” His gaze drifted to Lishka, then back to Kavrin, a strange, knowing glint in his sickly eyes. “The smog… it’s not natural, you know. Not anymore. Not since the high offices ordered shafts driven through the old veins.” Kavrin frowned. “What are you talking about? The Resonance-Smog is a geological byproduct, exacerbated by industrial expansion.” Joren shook his head slowly, a grimace twisting his face. “Lies. All lies. They pumped it into the lower districts. The toxic gas. For the veins. To harvest… the lungs.” He coughed again, a harsh, tearing sound. A small, translucent shard, like a sliver of polished quartz, emerged from his lips, stained with a fleck of blood. Behind Kavrin, Lishka drew in a sharp intake of air. He stared at the shard, then at Joren’s chest, the faint, unnatural rigidity he could now perceive beneath the thin tunic. “Crystallized lungs,” Joren whispered, his voice barely audible. “A new energy source. Rare, potent. That’s what the apparatus uncovered. That’s what they’re mining. Us. They killed Vorlag because he found out. He tried to stop them. He was going to expose them.” He took another shallow, painful breath. “They’re harvesting us, Kavrin. Converting our bodies into power. And the Shadow Council… they control it all.” Kavrin did not move, watching the shard catch the blue arc of the monitor light. His mentor, murdered not for political power, but for a resource so monstrous it defied belief. The engineered collapse, the constant smog, the perpetual need for breathers – it was all a macabre harvesting operation. The very air they breathed was a weapon. The arithmetic of three decades—canister quotas, cordoned sectors, Vorlag's charred desk—aligned into cold butchery. “Director, you really shouldn’t have dug up the dead.”

The Bomber's Truth