The young girl pulled the frayed, threadbare hood of her ragged cardigan further over her face, trying to hide from the world's cold and merciless glare. The fabric had worn so thin that the biting wind slipped right through the seams, raking against her skin and leaving her shivering violently. The weather didn't exactly herald a storm, yet Caduta's signature, bone-chilling frost stalked the streets in silence. Denied the salvation of a proper winter coat, her body clung desperately to the meager warmth of this cardigan; despite its inadequacy, this pathetic rag was her only refuge, her sole armor.
She pressed her back against the damp corner of a dilapidated building that had long surrendered to time and neglect, its walls scarred with cracks. As her shoulders met the rough, freezing surface, she tried to dissolve into a shadow, willing herself to become just another piece of the street's bleak and grimy scenery. She even regulated her breathing, terrified that the vapor pluming from her lungs would betray her. Her gaze darted across the guards in the distance like poisoned arrows. She never tore her eyes away from those armored silhouettes; she lay in wait with the meticulous patience of a professional predator, hunting for a human lapse, a momentary distraction, or that single second when their iron discipline slipped.
Dead in the middle of the street squatted three massive transports—metal beasts acting as the shadow of Sarcos's iron fist. The vast, pitch-black, windowless compartments dragging behind them resembled silent tombs waiting to swallow the rounded-up mutants. The profound emptiness gnawing inside each vehicle only dug Serevia’s eternal heartbreak a little deeper, because she knew down to her marrow exactly why those metal cages were there, and exactly which souls they ripped away from their families. The sheer bulk of the transports mirrored Sarcos's arrogance, while the heavy stench of diesel they spewed made the air even more unbearable.
The guards clustered in front of the transports, radiating a soulless, mechanical authority as they kept watch. Though their helmets obscured their faces, the rigid impatience in their stance bled out for miles. It was painfully obvious why they stood there, why they lingered in that smog-choked air: their mission was to round up every mutant harboring that forbidden power in their veins and haul them to the central towers. Today, however, Caduta's dusty, treacherous streets hadn't offered them the bounty they expected. From the looks of it, things weren't going so well for Sarcos's masked hounds; the ramps of those colossal machines hadn't yet dropped for a single "diseased" or "dangerous" mutant.
As the vile guards of Sarcos choked on the suffocating, restless air of failure, Serevia watched their uneasy vigil with pure hatred. The fact that they hadn't snagged a single mutant was like a drop of water sizzling against the roaring fire in her chest. Yet she knew this quiet standoff could detonate at any moment, that their mounting frustration would only make them more vicious. Masking her presence like a guarded secret, feeling the icy bite of the concrete against her spine, she kept waiting.
While her mind hunted for a tiny fracture in the guards' steel discipline, she buried her fingers into her cardigan pockets, trying to thaw her palms. Her plan was simple, but every passing second felt like waltzing with death. A momentary lapse, a quick smoke break, or just wandering a few feet away... The second it happened, she would snatch those cold, gleaming metal weapons forged by Sarcos's flawless tech. If she could fence just one of those rifles in the shady, godforsaken back alleys of Caduta, she could scrape together enough cash to extinguish the endless burning in her gut. Maybe, for a few weeks, she would actually eat enough to breathe like a human being, rather than merely survive.
Yet she knew that if her plan went sideways, a guard's boot would crush her or a rotting cell would claim her. Fear, however, could no longer find a foothold in Serevia's soul. The Center had already stolen her brother without blinking—a piece of her own flesh, her most precious being. So, bleeding a single weapon from Sarcos's armory wasn't a sin in her eyes; it was merely a microscopic crumb of long-overdue justice.
Sarcos's greed had twisted the people of Caduta into the walking dead. Starvation and the rusty dust that clawed into their lungs with every breath withered them away before they even reached middle age. But Serevia refused to be just another tired soul surrendering to fate. Rather than slave away for the cruel masters pulling the strings of Sarcos, she chose to carve out her own laws in the heart of this misery, surviving by stealing and staying on edge every ticking second. She refused to be a pawn in anyone's game, a puppet on anyone's strings.
When the deep, agonizing rumble from her stomach scraped against her ears in the silence of the street, a sudden tremor seized her body. The temperature seemed to plummet several degrees in an instant, rolling out a blanket of ice beneath the sky's gray shroud. She pressed her quivering shoulders harder against the building's freezing wall. All she truly wanted right now was to abandon this frozen vigil and walk away, but she had no real home to run back to.
If she failed to pry something from those guards today, by the end of the sixth day, she would have to bid farewell even to the damp ruin where she hid from Sarcos; her body would completely collapse among those crumbling walls. Her system hovered on the brink of total failure. A fantasy looped in the back of her mind: if only she had a warm, safe roof over her head, she could stumble inside, black out instantly, and plunge into a sweet, unbroken sleep for days.
But the only reality life offered her was an endless flight. She ran from everything. From the Center's soulless guards, from the orphanage corridors that reeked of screams, and, most agonizing of all, from the final dream where she last saw her brother—a dream seared into her mind like a brand. That dream materialized in every shadow like a relentless ghost, forcing her not to stop, but to run even further.
The young girl wrapped her stiff, freezing arms tightly around her torso. As her fingertips dug into her ribs through the thin fabric of her cardigan, her trembling lips murmured the silent, desperate prayers she kept buried in the deepest corners of her mind. She never tore her eyes away from the guards, tracking them from the shadows with the patience of an ancient predator.
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For days, she had lingered in this exact spot, caked in the street's dust and rust, memorizing the guards' shift changes, their moments of lax discipline, and their reaction times. She knew the fatal flaw in their seemingly flawless system was their insatiable bloodlust for mutant hunting. If even the slightest trace of a mutant surfaced in some corner of the streets, that disciplined mass would shatter instantly. Most of them would scatter in every direction with savage appetite, desperate to secure their sacred "harvest" and win Sarcos's favor.
That was the exact moment fewer guards would remain to stand watch over those colossal armored transports. This razor-thin window of time was what Serevia had been waiting for, the precise moment she staked her entire life upon. If she could catch that opening, she would rip those gleaming weapons from their posts in a matter of heartbeats. She trusted her own speed, the raw agility she had forged by swallowing the dust of these streets. She had long ago learned how to vanish like a phantom into Caduta's labyrinthine back alleys, to sprint so fast that the guards, weighed down by their clunky boots, could never catch her. Everything hinged on that minuscule, split-second opening fate might grant her.
The months she had spent thieving in Caduta's makeshift, soot-choked marketplaces flickered through her memory like a worn film strip. Life down there amounted to a pathetic exhibition of misery, entirely reliant on Sarcos's mercy. Some of the market merchants knew that the harder they groveled to the guards, the more they turned informant and sold out their own people, the more crumbs would fall onto their tables. They had become nothing more than parasites orbiting their colonizers, scrambling for a cut of their own people's blood and tears.
Serevia had stolen bread or shriveled fruit from those stalls countless times just to fill her belly for a single evening; back then, thievery was merely a primal instinct keeping her alive. But as time bled on, the unquenchable fire of starvation in her gut and the relentless fury of vengeance in her heart forced her to elevate her prey. She no longer hunted for a mere crust of bread; she hunted for the fragments of that cold, lethal tech belonging to the greedy bastards who had condemned her and her brother to this darkness.
Ripping off one of Sarcos's high-tech weapons wasn't just an act of petty theft to her; it was a brutal backhand to the entire system. A single rifle or an advanced sidearm translated to weeks of a full stomach and a safe haven on Caduta's black market. She snapped her gaze back to the helmeted figures guarding the transports; the days of scraping by on petty market thefts just to silence her stomach were long dead. Now, she stood ready to tear a chunk out of Sarcos's arrogant armor, ready to jam a wrench into the gears of this unjust machine with her own two hands.
As much as Serevia wanted to reject the truth in the deepest pits of her soul, to tear it entirely from her mind, she knew that even in Caduta's squalor-choked streets, certain lives shimmered in gold. These were the loyal servants Sarcos had planted within this filthy regime, the rusty yet razor-sharp daggers plunged right into the people's flesh. They were Sarcos's eyes on the outside, the winds whispering directly into the empire's ear. Because they bore Caduta's genetic legacy, they never needed to cower behind heavy hazmat suits, respirators, or radiation shields like those masked guards; the immune blood coursing through their veins armored them naturally against this toxic atmosphere.
And they weaponized this very privilege to sell out their own kin. They whispered every scrap of intel to Sarcos with the devotion of a zealot, snitched on every stifled cry of rebellion, and in return, they formed Caduta's vile little aristocracy. Every time the young girl witnessed these parasites looking down on the rest with their crisp clothes, swollen bellies, and counterfeit arrogance, she felt the hatred within her bury its roots a little deeper. They were phantom people dreaming of wealth on the crumbs tumbling from their masters' tables, building palaces upon the starvation of their own brothers and sisters.
Serevia had claimed this damp, pitch-black corner long before the raw, pale light of dawn ever struck the dirt. Her vigil had stretched on so agonizingly that time stopped slipping through the hourglass; instead, it crushed her like collapsing rubble. Now, the sky had darkened its gray mourning attire, and the night slowly began to swallow Caduta's rusted rooftops.
The storm raging inside the girl refused to die down; she muttered her fractured prayers to God on one hand, while raining curses upon Sarcos's gleaming spires with every exhalation. Her body finally began to buckle under the crushing weight of this relentless ambush and the sickness eating at her. The jagged swelling in her throat punished her with every swallow, as if she were gulping down thousands of glass shards. The beads of sweat pooling on her fever-scorched forehead turned to sheer ice every time the wind howled. Her feet throbbed, no longer feeling like a part of her own body, but rather like alien deadweights pumped full of acid. She gritted her teeth against the blinding agony that spiked into her skull every time her blistered toes scraped against the stiff leather of her boots.
Had it not been for that singular, burning purpose—that faint glimmer of salvation—flashing in her mind, she would have collapsed into the dirt right then and there. But that purpose stood as her final fortress against the exhaustion severing the tendons in her knees.
Feeling the freezing breath of despair ghosting across her neck, she forced her gaze back toward the transports, yet the sight only carved her exhausted expression deeper into her features. The guards still stood there; it was as if someone had welded them like iron statues to the front of those colossal, armored machines. Not a single one of them had any intention of budging or breaking their ironclad discipline.
Serevia slumped her shoulders, dropping her gaze to the slick, wet cobblestones. In this mammoth city, this capital of sin and suffering, why wasn't a single street rat sparking a riot right now? Why didn't some mutant vomit out their silent rage and drag this armored horde on a wild chase? She only needed a two-minute window, a fleeting burst of chaos. She begged from the absolute bottom of her soul for this world, a world that had long forgotten she even existed, to grant her one tiny opening. Yet the guards' soulless vigil was dangerously close to burying the very last shreds of Serevia's hope in the mud of those pitch-black streets.
As she swept her desperate eyes across the gray, lifeless scenery around her, she locked onto a heap of metal just a short distance away—an old telephone booth, its paint flaking off and its glass clouded with grime.
In that split second, the dense fog clouding her thoughts evaporated one by one, giving way to a razor-sharp, insidious plan. She stared hard, refusing to tear her eyes away from the booth. This rusted box could be the key to shattering the guards' impenetrable discipline, the bait to drag them away from their armored transports. As the realization fully hijacked her mind, a wicked smirk—one perfectly fitting the darkness of Caduta—crept onto the corner of her lips. She finally knew exactly what to do, exactly how to throw those guards into absolute chaos.
