Chapter 7 Seven

Chapter Seven

The outer districts of Eldridge City were where the city's optimism ran out.

Past the rebuilt commercial centers and the Association's gleaming administrative towers, past the regulated hunting zones where mid-level Gifted farmed Vileborns for experience and loot drops, the infrastructure thinned and the damage from the Awakening showed through like old bone beneath torn skin. Buildings stood half-repaired or not repaired at all. Streets that had cracked during the tremors had been patched rather than replaced, leaving uneven seams across the pavement that caught the light at certain angles and made the whole district look stitched together.

Lucas had grown up in places like this. He moved through them without thinking.

He needed three things in a specific order. Food first, because his body was burning through whatever reserves remained and clear thinking required fuel regardless of how extraordinary his circumstances had become overnight. Information second, the practical kind that databases couldn't provide. And third, somewhere to sleep that wasn't a park bench, which meant finding someone willing to exchange a roof for something Lucas could offer.

The food problem resolved itself outside a street kitchen two blocks from the outer district's main transit hub. A heavyset woman ran the operation from a converted cargo container, distributing flat bread and lentil soup to anyone who queued without causing trouble. Lucas queued. The bread was dense and the soup was aggressively salted and he ate both without complaint, standing at the counter while the morning crowd shifted around him.

The woman watched him eat with the evaluating look of someone accustomed to reading the specific hunger that went beyond missing breakfast.

"You're the one who triggered the alarm last night," she said. Not a question.

Lucas looked up.

"Word moves fast out here," she added, answering the unasked part. "Low-level Gifted standing his ground at a red Gate. People noticed."

"I didn't stand my ground," Lucas said. "I got hit and couldn't move."

"You hit the alarm first."

"That's just a button."

She refilled his soup without being asked. "There's a man who comes through here most mornings. Calls himself Brent. Used to be level twenty-three before he lost his talent ability in a Tower accident three years ago. Runs a salvage operation in the eastern quarter now, always looking for reliable people who don't ask too many questions."

Lucas considered that. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you look like someone who needs work and doesn't have the luxury of being particular about it." She wiped down the counter with a cloth that had seen better decades. "And because anyone the Association left bleeding in the road while they handled their priority monster is probably not planning to walk through their front door asking for help."

Lucas finished the soup.

"When does he come through?" he asked.

Brent arrived forty minutes later, which Lucas spent sitting on an overturned crate outside the kitchen watching the transit hub and thinking about the paper he had read that morning. The researcher who wrote it had been named Dr. Yuen Sora. The Association had listed her current position as inactive, which in their bureaucratic language meant either retired, deceased, or quietly removed, and Lucas had no way of determining which from a public terminal.

Brent was shorter than the name suggested, compact and efficient in his movements, with the particular economy of someone who had recalibrated his entire physical approach to the world after losing an ability that had defined it. His left hand was scarred from the wrist to the middle knuckle. He ordered soup and bread and ate standing up, the same as Lucas had.

Lucas approached him directly. Indirection cost time he couldn't afford.

"I need work," Lucas said. "I'm level eleven, no talent, two cracked ribs. I'm good with information, organization, and I can move through the outer districts without attracting attention. The woman inside said you run salvage."

Brent looked him over with the same evaluating efficiency he'd applied to his food. "Level eleven doesn't get you far in salvage territory."

"I'm not applying to fight anything. I'm applying to be useful in the ways I'm actually capable of."

Something shifted slightly in the other man's expression. "You're the one from last night."

Lucas was beginning to understand that Eldridge City's outer districts functioned as a single continuous conversation that he had simply not been part of until now.

"Yes," he said.

Brent was quiet for a moment, finishing his bread. "I've got a storage warehouse in the eastern quarter. Salvaged materials from three partially collapsed Tower-adjacent structures that the Association cleared for civilian access last month. Everything needs cataloguing before I can move it to buyers. My last cataloguer quit when he found a level seven Vileborn living in the east wing."

"Is it still there?"

"No. I handled it." He paused. "The cataloguing isn't dangerous. It's tedious and the warehouse is cold and I pay in supply credits rather than currency because the outer district exchange makes currency complicated."

"Supply credits cover medicine?"

"At the district pharmacy, yes."

Lucas nodded once. "When do I start?"

The warehouse occupied the ground floor of a building that had lost its upper two stories during the Awakening tremors and never had them rebuilt. The remaining structure was solid enough, reinforced with the salvaged metal framing that characterized most outer district repairs, and large enough that Lucas's footsteps produced a faint echo when he walked the perimeter on the first pass.

The salvaged materials were extensive and entirely disorganized.

Brent left him with a system-linked tablet, a cataloguing template, and a lantern for the sections where the lighting had failed. The work was exactly as described, tedious and cold and requiring no abilities Lucas didn't possess.

He started at the northern end and worked methodically south, logging materials and cross-referencing them against the tablet's pricing index.

Two hours in, in a cluster of salvaged items pushed against the eastern wall beneath a canvas sheet, he found a sealed metal case approximately the size of a document box. No label. No Association inventory mark. The locking mechanism had been manually overridden and resealed from the inside, which wasn't possible with standard Association locks unless the person sealing it had known exactly what they were doing.

Lucas stood over it for a long moment.

He catalogued everything around it first, methodically and completely, before he reached down and opened it.

Inside, arranged in careful order, were thirty-one research documents.

The name on every cover page was the same.

Dr. Yuen Sora.