The maintenance crawlspace Kai stepped into, following the flickering purple light, turned out to be a cramped utility shaft descending steeply.

  There were no emergency lights here, but the boy no longer needed human optics. The thin black capillaries of the Substrate, piercing the concrete, pulsed faintly, providing just enough light to keep him from falling into the pitch-black void.

  Kai descended, clutching the scavenger's rusted rebar shiv. His stomach churned heavily, digesting the cold synthetic paste, while his brain tried to comprehend what had just happened. His brother had become a living foundation, but his voice continued to vibrate in his bones. The Substrate had kept Kai alive, but the price of that life was now quietly wheezing, half-entombed in the collector wall behind him.

  "Touch me, Kai," Avelo's voice rustled in his head as the boy reached the wide distribution platform.

  Thick, glossy tendrils of the Substrate wove around the supporting columns here like giant deep-sea predators. The boy approached, held his breath, and pressed his small, dirty palm against the cold, pulsating stone.

  In that exact second, his mind flooded.

  The concrete walls ceased to be a barrier. Kai suddenly sensed the world the way the colossal entity sleeping beneath the City felt it. The Substrate permeated the entire Lower Sector—hiding behind the generator casings, entwining the cooling mains, and burrowing deep into the foundations of the Consortium's towers. This black web was a gigantic neural system, and now Kai had become its synapse.

  Through layers of concrete, he "saw" the thermal silhouettes of an Enforcer patrol in white armor beating a worker two levels above. He felt the heavy vibration of worn-out water purification filters in the adjacent compartment. And then his attention was captured by a pulsating red spot deep in the technical tunnels of Sector Three—a dense cluster of living bodies.

  Kai pulled his hand away from the wall, breaking contact, and sank heavily to the floor, gasping for air. The eight-year-old's brain had nearly burned itself out from the overload.

  "You see their secrets, Gardener," his brother whispered. "Use them."

  From that day on, the communications network became not a labyrinth for the boy, but a command center. Seven cycles passed. Kai survived like a ghost. He ate leftover rations found in blind spots, licked ice-cold condensation from the pipes, and sat for hours with his eyes closed, clutching the pulsing veins of the Substrate, expanding his radius of perception.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  He monitored The Rusties, a gang controlling the shadow market for parts in the third sector. Through the vibrations in the walls, Kai learned their schedule, routes, and—most importantly—the location where their leader, nicknamed Bulldog, hid military stims cut from Consortium warehouses.

  Kai realized: to truly survive, he needed resources. Thermal fabric, meds, and balanced steel instead of a piece of rebar. He needed the fear of these people.

  Intoxicated by his new, secret power, the child made a mistake. He believed in his own invulnerability.

  Tearing a piece of cardboard from an old food container, Kai mixed ingrained black soot in his palm with a drop of blood from a busted knuckle. In jagged block letters, he scrawled a message:

  "I know about the stash behind Generator #4. Leave a box with thermal clothing, a knife, and filters at hatch 12. Otherwise, Consortium Enforcers will find out who stole the stims."

  Crawling through the pipes directly above the gang's lair, he dropped the cardboard through the grate right onto the table where Bulldog's men were cleaning their optics, and silently dissolved into the darkness.

  Kai was confident in his genius. He thought he had the adults on a tight leash. Reaching hatch 12 of the main ventilation system, he lay low, listening to the vibrations in the metal, awaiting his tribute.

  But he judged predators from the perspective of an eight-year-old boy. He underestimated the fury of the Lower Sector scavengers.

  Instead of being frightened by an anonymous shadow, Bulldog alerted the entire pack. They weren't afraid of ghosts. Using black-market thermals stripped from dead Upper Tier guards, they quickly scanned the ceiling and caught the bright heat signature of a small body in the icy pipes.

  Kai realized his mistake only when the ventilation duct beneath him shuddered with a dull thud.

  Harsh, raspy voices struck from below:

  "He's here! In the central main!"

  "Drag out the cutter! We'll burn this little scum right in his hole!"

  The boy rushed backward in a panic, tearing his nails against the steel, but his escape route was cut off—the massive climate-control damper slammed shut behind him with a heavy metallic clang. One of the scavengers had manually shut off the sectors at the control panel.

  Kai found himself trapped in a metal coffin three meters long and shoulder-width wide.

  The floor of the duct beneath his belly suddenly began to heat up. The air in the confined space instantly became scorchingly dense and stifling.

  Kai screamed, crawling toward the far wall and curling into a ball, but the salvation of the cold was gone.

  Directly beneath his boots, the metal took on a cherry-red glow. With a deafening, roaring shower of white sparks, the blade of an industrial plasma cutter tore through the steel, slicing the metal just an inch from the boy's knee.