Destiny

The heartbeat of the city was a low, mechanical hum. When it died, I stopped.

One second the market stalls of Sector Four were loud with the haggling of merchants and the scrape of heavy wooden crates; the next, the sound vanished.

The overhead lanterns flickered once, twice, and then snapped shut.

A collective, indrawn breath rippled through the crowded bazaar, followed instantly by absolute, suffocating silence.

In the Underground, darkness wasn’t just the absence of light; it was a countdown. Every outage began the same way. I waited. I counted. I listened for the generators. A minute was routine. Three usually meant another district had beaten us to reserve power.

And five...I hated five.

The darkness had become greedy, stealing a little more time with every outage, and every repair seemed to buy us less time.

I stood frozen in the middle of the crowded market plaza, instinctively counting beneath my breath while everyone around me followed their own emergency routine.

Parents searched frantically for children. Merchants abandoned their stalls without hesitation. Security whistles echoed somewhere across the square as officers began directing civilians toward the nearest emergency lanterns. Everyone had their own emergency procedure.

Mine began beneath the streets.

The generators finally shuddered somewhere beneath the city, sending a familiar vibration through the cobblestones beneath my boots before sickly orange lanterns flickered back to life. The crowd exhaled almost as one, but relief was becoming a dangerous habit.

I didn’t wait for the announcements. While the rest of the district gathered frightened children and relit lanterns, I turned toward the maintenance hatch embedded beside the market fountain. The heavy iron cover groaned beneath my grip before swinging open, releasing a wave of humid air that smelled of sulfur, damp stone, and overheated machinery.

It was colder by only a few degrees, but the humidity nearly doubled, clinging to my skin before my boots even reached the bottom rung. Massive metal ducts stretched into the darkness overhead while bundles of insulated cables and relay boxes lined the walls, all crammed into the same maintenance corridor.

Ventilation Shaft Twelve hadn’t cycled properly in almost six years. The Bureau insisted reduced airflow wasn’t a critical failure.

Looking at the liquefied copper inside the junction box, I was beginning to disagree.

Now at least three meters below the streets, I wedged myself inside the narrow maintenance shaft with my tool bag pressed against my chest. Thick conductive grease coated my forearms as I crawled toward the open junction box, my headlamp carving a narrow beam through the dust hanging motionless in the air.

The relay housing had ruptured completely, exposing twisted copper conductors that should never have been visible outside a fabrication workshop.

Looking at the damage, I was beginning to disagree.

According to the Infrastructure Bureau’s maintenance manual, relay replacement was supposed to be one of the simplest repairs in the system. Isolate the breaker. Wait ten minutes for thermal cooling. Replace the relay. Restore the circuit. Every apprentice memorized the procedure during their first year.

I looked from the manual on my datapad to the relay hanging open in front of me.

The manual was wrong.

I checked the serial stamp first.

Genuine.

Installation date.

Twenty-eight days ago.

I scanned the upstream regulators.

Operational.

Thermal sensors.

Functional.

I ran the diagnostics again anyway. Nothing explained what I was looking at.

A thermal relay didn’t liquefy after twenty-eight days of service unless every safeguard upstream had somehow failed. That should have been impossible. I frowned at the melted relay, my mind instinctively reaching for an explanation that refused to come.

Before I could dig any deeper, the junction box shuddered beneath my hands. The familiar hum steadied, the warning lights blinked green, and somewhere above me, the city roared back to life.

I glanced once more at the warped copper before shutting my datapad. Something about this repair wasn’t right.

I slid my datapad back into my tool bag, but my eyes lingered on the relay a moment longer. Something about it bothered me in a way I couldn’t explain. Maybe Lena would see what I didn’t.

I sealed the junction box, switched off my headlamp, and started back toward the surface.

The orange emergency lanterns had settled into their steady glow, but the market hadn’t recovered quite as quickly. Vendors knelt beside overturned baskets, scooping lentils and dried beans back into cracked wooden crates one handful at a time. Someone argued over whether the outage had spoiled a shipment of preserved mushrooms, while a butcher cursed beneath his breath as he tried to relight the heating stones beneath his display.

Nobody went home. They never did.

Within minutes, the shouting softened into bargaining again, and the scrape of crates returned beneath the hum of the emergency grid. That was how the Underground survived. We absorbed each failure, rearranged whatever it had knocked loose, and carried on as though endurance and recovery were the same thing.

I wasn’t sure when we had stopped expecting better.

A little boy knelt beside his mother’s stall, carefully stacking apples into a narrow pyramid. One rolled free and struck my boot. I picked it up, but when I looked at the display, I knew returning it to the top would only send the entire thing tumbling again.

“You need to make the bottom wider,” I told him.

He glanced at his mother before shifting two apples apart. The next row settled more securely between them.

“Like that?”

“Exactly.”

He placed the apple in my hand near the top and watched the structure hold. His face brightened with the quiet satisfaction of having understood something new.

It was such a small thing. The kind of lesson most people would forget before the end of the day. But education was scarce in the Underground, and I had never learned how to hoard what little of it I possessed.

His mother thanked me. I nodded and continued walking before she could say anything more.

The deeper I moved into Sector Four, the more familiar the city’s scars became. Emergency lanterns burned dimmer than I remembered, as if even the light was giving up. Hairline fractures webbed across the metal ceiling, disappearing into darkness where fresh welds should have been. Moisture dripped from exposed pipes overhead—slow, uneven, patient—each drop making the corridor feel longer than it was.

Most people walked past without looking.

I couldn’t, and if I was being honest with myself, I never could. Dad never had either.

I still see him ahead of me, pausing without warning as if the city itself had spoken. He’d tap a cracked support brace twice, listening more than touching, like it might answer if he gave it the chance.

When I was younger, I didn’t understand it. Why he stopped. Why he looked so serious at things everyone else ignored.

When a circulation pump would whine, he’d tilt his head and narrow his eyes. Not because he was annoyed, but because he’d heard something change. His hand would already be typing away on his datapad before I could ask what was wrong.

Better airflow. Smarter load distribution. Fewer failures. He always had an idea. Always another way the city could work a little better than it did. When I was younger, I thought he loved solving problems. Now I think he simply couldn’t walk past one without trying.

My steps slowed.

A rust-stained support panel came into view, its edges wrapped in a fresh strip of sealant already sagging beneath the damp. The Bureau had patched over the original weld instead of replacing it.

Dad had installed that support.

I stopped.

He used to joke that I’d be able to find his work long after he was gone because he refused to leave behind anything he wasn’t proud of.

I stared at the sloppy repair covering his weld. Waiting for that old pull—the instinct to measure, to calculate, to fix. The certainty that if I looked closely enough, I could make it right. Nothing came.

Only the steady drip of water echoing through the corridor, each drop striking metal with a hollow, patient tick that never changed. Dad would’ve hated this.

The thought arrived with the smell of rust and damp insulation, so vivid I could almost feel the weight of his hand on my shoulder.

“Temporary fixes become permanent the moment people stop expecting better.” I almost smiled.

A year ago, I would’ve rolled my eyes. Told him he couldn’t save an entire city with stubbornness and a datapad. He would’ve laughed through his nose, the way he did when he thought I was being dramatic, then crouched beside a leaking conduit just to show me how a bad seal spreads like rot if you ignore it long enough.

I can still hear the scrape of his tools against metal. Still see the way he wiped his hands on his sleeve even though it never made them clean.

Back then, I used to walk a half-step behind him through corridors like this, counting the rhythm of his boots against the grating, pretending I wasn’t listening when he explained things I thought I already understood.

There would be another walk, I always thought. Another corridor. Another repair I didn’t care about yet. Instead, the corridor just keeps dripping.

I stood there a moment longer, staring at the patch covering his weld. The metal around it was slightly uneven, like someone had rushed the job. My fingers hovered near it without touching, as if the surface might still remember his hands.

“Nyra!”

I didn’t hear her footsteps. I flinched anyway, my thoughts tearing away from the patch as I looked up just in time for something cold and wet to smack against my cheek.

“What the—”

Lena stood in front of me grinning, a damp cloth dangling from one hand. “You had grease on your face.”

My hand rose instinctively to my cheek. Black streaks smeared across my fingertips. I glanced back toward the patch one last time. I’d been standing there long enough to forget where I was. Long enough to forget someone else might come looking for me.

A knot tightened in my chest. I swallowed it down, wiped my hand on my work pants, and forced my attention back to Lena. “Yeah? Well. Maybe I liked it.”

She snorted. “You looked ridiculous.”

“I usually do.” That earned the smile I’d been expecting.

It spread across Lena’s face, bright and immediate, her expression softening the usual stillness of the Underground around us. Stray white curls had worked loose from her thick braid, but she didn’t seem to notice—or care. There was an energy about her that never quite belonged down here, all quick smiles, quicker jokes, and just enough mischief to make even the longest workdays bearable.

Lena had always been good at dragging me back into the present, whether I wanted her to or not.

She grinned. “True.”

I took the cloth from her and scrubbed the last of the grease from my forehead. “When did you become my mother?”

“Someone has to.”

I snorted despite myself.

Lena watched me for a beat longer than the joke deserved. The smile she’d worn since sneaking up behind me softened. “You were down there during the outage.”

It wasn’t a question. “When am I not?”

“You’ve been down there every day this week.”

“I work there.”

“You hide there.” I opened my mouth to argue, then closed it again. She wasn’t entirely wrong.

With a sigh, Lena looped her arm through mine and steered me toward the market. The street tightened around us as we joined the flow—carts rattling over uneven stone, vendors calling out half-hearted deals, the smell of fried grain and hot metal drifting from a repair stall where someone was already hammering a broken shutter back into place.

“So,” Lena said, bumping my shoulder. “What’s living in that head of yours now?”

I hesitated. “The relay.”

She groaned dramatically. “I knew it.”

“It shouldn’t have failed.”

“It did.”

“That’s exactly the problem.” She looked at me for a long moment before shaking her head with a small smile.

“You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“Getting stuck in your head about it.”

I frowned. “I don’t—”

“You do,” she said gently. A beat passed between us as we walked.

“Look,” she added, softer now, “I’m not trying to lecture you. You’ve been down there all week. You need a break.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not,” she said, nudging my shoulder lightly. “Come with me later. We’ll grab food, maybe walk the river district. No relays, no work talk.”

I didn’t answer right away.

The market noise rolled around us—voices, footsteps, the clatter of metal and wood—like the city refusing to pause for anything at all.

Lena didn’t push. She just stayed beside me, steady and patient, waiting for me to decide. For a while we walked like that, shoulder to shoulder, moving with the crowd. I wasn’t ready to step away from it yet.

“Yeah, whatever,” I said finally.

A grin spread across Lena’s face. “Great. See you at eight.” She wrinkled her nose. “And take a shower first.”

Leaving Lena behind, I found myself walking in the opposite direction of my apartment. By the time I realized where my feet had carried me, the towering stone façade of the Infrastructure Bureau loomed overhead, its weathered bronze insignia barely visible beneath decades of soot and dust. I slowed at the foot of the broad staircase, staring up at the familiar building for a long moment before climbing the worn stone steps and pulling open one of the heavy steel doors.

Warm air wrapped around me the instant I stepped inside, carrying with it the familiar scent of drafting ink, machine oil, damp stone, and hot metal. Even this late in the evening, the building hummed quietly with activity. Somewhere beyond the maze of offices and workshops, tools clinked against steel, a printer rattled to life, and someone cursed at a machine that was probably older than both of us.

I should have gone home.

The thought lingered as I stood just inside the entrance, my hand still resting against the cold steel door.

But home meant walking into the apartment my parents left behind, surrounded by shelves full of books they would never finish reading and tools they would never use again. And frankly, after the day I’d had, I couldn’t bear another evening pretending those things didn’t bother me.

The Bureau was easier... Machines just made sense.

I followed the familiar corridor toward the Sector Four Engineering Office. Most of the drafting tables had been abandoned for the evening, blueprints left weighted beneath wrenches and mugs stained dark with cold coffee.

The maintenance crews had long since returned to the city, leaving only a handful of senior engineers behind to finish paperwork no one wanted to do. But of course, Alden Thorne was exactly where I knew he’d be.

His white hair was cropped short, the color unremarkable. It was the deep lines around his eyes and the permanent crease between his brows that made him look older than everyone else.

He stood at the inventory bench with a clipboard tucked beneath one arm, methodically sorting burnt relays into wooden crates. Every relay that passed through his hands received the same brief inspection before he decided whether it was worth salvaging.

I watched him reach for another blackened relay without so much as glancing at it.

“We’re running out of parts, you know... better get on that,” I murmured, pointing to the overflowing repair crate.

Alden let out a humorless laugh, turning it over beneath the lamp one last time before dropping it into the repair crate with a dull metallic clank. “We ran out months ago.” The sound lingered in the quiet office.

“Our district lost three maintenance crews this year,” Alden said quietly.

My grip tightened around the reports. “How are we supposed to keep the grid running?”

“By consolidating resources.”

I stared at him. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning District Four gets by with fewer crews than it used to.”

So we just let parts of the city fall apart?”

He didn’t answer.

“That’s what ‘consolidating resources’ means, isn’t it?”

A muscle worked in his jaw before he finally spoke. “It’s the phrase they use.” Silence settled between us.

My eyes drifted back to the datapad lying open on the workbench, where the impossible numbers hadn’t changed. They were still there, waiting.

I slid it across the bench toward him. “Look at the diagnostics.”

Alden adjusted his spectacles and leaned over the screen. For a long moment, the only sound in the office was the faint hum of the overhead lights as his eyes moved across the readings.

He frowned. Then he checked them again. Without a word, he pulled a scrap sheet from the drafting table and worked through the calculations himself. His pencil stopped.

“Well?”

He set the paper beside the datapad and sat quietly for another moment. “I’ve never seen diagnostics like these.”

Relief hit me so quickly I almost laughed. He tapped the missing section of the load curve with the tip of his pencil.

“The relay failed exactly the way the report says it did. But this...” His brow furrowed. “This shouldn’t be possible.”

“Then where is it going?” His eyes met mine. For just a moment, I thought he might actually answer.

He slid the datapad back across the workbench without another glance. “It doesn’t matter.”

I stared at him. “It matters to me.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I do.” His voice remained calm but firm. “And understanding where the power goes won’t keep them from sacrificing our district.”

My jaw tightened. “Then maybe they don’t get to steal power from another district. Our district.”

His fingers tightened around the edge of the workbench. “You still think this is something people get to choose.”

“So you just accepted it?” I shook my head. “This is how we have to live? At the mercy of District One while they drain what’s left of ours?”

His expression softened, though the exhaustion never left his eyes. “I asked myself those same questions a long time ago.”

Something about the way he said it made the room suddenly feel smaller. “And yet, you stopped asking.”

A faint smile crossed his face, but there wasn’t an ounce of humor in it. “I learned there are questions that cost more than they’re worth.”

I leaned forward. “Worth it to who? Because it sure doesn’t seem like us.”

“You’re looking for answers. You think if you find the right one, you can save us all.”

“So what if I am? Aren’t you?”

“No.” His voice remained calm. “I’m looking for enough working relays to keep another neighborhood from sitting in the dark tonight.”

Neither of us spoke. For the first time since I’d started working under him, I realized we weren’t arguing about engineering. We were arguing about survival.

I still believed the city could be saved. Alden just wanted it to survive another day.

He pushed himself to his feet with a quiet groan and shrugged into his coat. He paused at the doorway, glancing back toward the office only once. “Don’t stay too late.”

Before I could answer, he disappeared into the corridor, leaving only the fading echo of his footsteps behind as the office fell silent.