Chapter 19 · The Maintenance Well

The smell hit Nora first. Burnt ozone and something sweet that made her teeth ache.

She was already ten feet down the access shaft when the emergency lights cut out. The city's transit grid hummed above her, a living thing that used to make sense. Now it just sounded hungry.

"Mom," she said into the dark. "I know you're down here."

Nothing answered.

Nora's headlamp flickered. The walls of the shaft were slick with something that wasn't water. She'd been working transit maintenance since she was sixteen. She knew what every fluid in the system looked like, smelled like, tasted like if you were stupid enough. This wasn't any of them.

Her radio crackled. Dead air. She was below the threshold now. Below where signals could reach. She'd told Elara she'd be back in twenty minutes.

That was thirty minutes ago.

The shaft opened into the old network. The lines nobody used anymore. The city kept saying they were sealed off after the collapse in '19, but Nora had found the access codes in her mother's workshop three days before the first reset. Before her mother disappeared.