Ash Water & Memory
There is no need to search for the devil in this universe. If you are unlucky, he will find you.
It always begins with the fog.
Not the kind that rolls in gently and gray. This fog chokes. It burns. It forces you to wrap a cloth around your face just to survive the morning. We grew up hearing stories about it. Warnings whispered like superstition. No one believes the stories. Not until the sky turns the wrong color. Not until the air tastes like blood and metal.
There are thousands of theories about how they poison the atmosphere. I don’t care which one is true. Those aren’t the kinds of questions I’m after.
When I was a child, the sky was blue. The air filled your lungs and gave something back.
Now, a deep breath is a gamble. My lungs beg for clean air. My organs answer with rot.
Three years ago, they came.
They took everything.
Our crops. Our livestock. Our air.
Then they took our people.
They took Natalia.
She was in the kitchen when they came. Grease on her hands from tearing apart the stabilizer core she’d promised to fix for our neighbor. She always fixed things for free. Said broken machines were easier to deal with than broken systems. I remember the look she gave me when the sirens started. Calm. Focused. Like this was just another problem to solve.
I’ve replayed that look every night since.
There is no corner of this galaxy far enough from THEM to hide.
I will find THEM.
Even if the universe has to burn.
Ash Water burned slowly. Smoky and bitter. A hint of sweetness that never quite made it to the tongue. It tasted like charred oak and refinery smoke.
Cheap bourbon cut with whatever passed for clean water in Sancheon. It wasn’t good, but it was enough.
Ventra tipped the glass back, watching dark flakes cling to the sides. Natalia’s face surfaced again. Grease on her hands. Sirens wailing. Then the door tore inward, and everything after that was screaming.
He swirled the glass. Sediment crawled along the walls.
He shouldn’t be buying this poison. He should be saving for a shuttle ticket out. He’d already stripped his apartment bare. Sold every scrap of metal and every piece of furniture that was worth a credit.
Even Natalia’s tools.
He kept them for months. Her precision driver set. The custom calibrator she modified herself. He lasted one week after selling them before he went back to the pawn shop and stared at the empty shelf where they’d been.
Ventra tapped the stem in his forearm. The screen flickered to life. The numbers stared back. Not enough.
Sancheon survived on one thing.
Cadmium-18.
Ships needed it. Fleets needed it. So the mines never stopped. The pay was enough to eat and live modestly.
If you lived.
Thirty percent didn’t, each year. Lost to collapses, gas pockets, and equipment that should have been replaced but never was.
The plan was always the same. Work the shafts. Save enough. Leave.
If you survived long enough to buy that dream.
Three years he had drifted. Burned through his savings, then through everything Natalia had left behind, then through whatever scraps were still worth a credit. Now there was nothing left to pawn and no time left to grind. He was one hundred thousand credits short of passage. Three years in the mines, if he was lucky.
He couldn’t risk it.
He couldn’t die down there in the dark.
Not before he made THEM bleed.
He needed to live long enough to see fear in their eyes. If they had eyes. If fear meant anything to them at all. Death would have to be enough.
Ventra drained the last of the ash water and stepped into the street.
The fog hit him immediately. Thick. Acrid. It clawed at the scarf wrapped around his mouth. The fabric rasped as it strained.
He stood in the center of the financial district.
Not that real money moved here anymore.
Skyscrapers rose like blackened bones into the smog, their upper floors swallowed whole. Once, every apartment had been lit. Every balcony was alive with music. Now the towers stood hollow, their windows black as the fog that ate them. Which made it perfect.
Perfect for the kind of deal that ended with a body in the fog.
Ventra adjusted his scarf and kept walking.
The kind of job he was about to take would earn more than three years in the mines.
One job. He’d be gone by this time next week.
Or dead in a back alley before the fog lifted.
