The Carpark jail cell had been a brief, bizarre interlude of relative peace. Their release, secured by a grudgingly paid “public nuisance” fine that cleaned out the last of Rhaene’s saved arm-wrestling winnings from the previous year, was as unceremonious as their arrest. The head enforcer, still picking packing peanuts from his hair, upon counting the money, had just pointed at the gate and grunted, “Get out.”

  They took the advice to heart.

  Now, the badlands stretched ahead, a vast, ochre emptiness under a sky the color of brine pools. The red motorcycle ate up the miles, its growl the only sound for hours. Aren was back in his spot, wedged between Rhaene and Arbor.

  Rhaene was driving. Arbor had surrendered the controls after forty-five minutes of her complaining that his riding “had less personality than all of her exes combined” and also threatening to “throw the kid”. While Arbor knew it was statistically unlikely that would happen, he did not want to risk the 1.3% chance it would.

  “See that cloud?” Rhaene shouted over the wind, pointing to a distant, fuzzy smudge on the horizon. “Looks like a guy getting kicked in the… unmentionables.”

  “It is a cumulus formation. Its resemblance to any form of mammalian trauma is a pareidolic illusion generated by your pattern-seeking brain,” Arbor stated, his voice buzzing loud over the wind.

  “Your face is a pareidolic illusion,” she shot back. “Aren, what do you see? A bunny? A weird flower?”

  Aren, who had been quietly watching the landscape blur by, looked at the cloud. He stared intently, then held up his broken hologram projector, pointing it at the cloud as if to capture it. He made a soft, considering hum.

  “He sees cloud, surprisingly,” Arbor supplied.

  “Actually, he sees a butt,” Rhaene declared. “Kid’s got an artist’s eye.”

  Aren had no way of telling them, not that he felt particularly pressed to do so, but he had seen a pair of cherries.

  The quiet and refreshing monotony of the drive was broken by a roadblock. Not official, just the badlands being… well, bad.

  A recent rockslide had partially buried the old asphalt ribbon they were following, leaving a treacherous slope of loose scree and jagged stone.

  Rhaene brought the bike to a halt, kicking up dust. “Reckon I can drive over the rubble? Beauty can handle it, I think.”

  “The unstable slope poses a 78% chance of losing traction and a 34% chance of a full overturn if we attempt to cross here,” Arbor analyzed, scanning the debris. “We must find another path or clear a section. The next fastest route will take us an additional day.”

  “Clearing it is. I need to stretch my legs anyway.” Rhaene hopped off, throwing off her jacket, and rolling her shoulders. “C’mon, Tinman. Time for some manual labor. You can also be the brawn for once.”

  “I am always the brawn. And the brain. You are the demon I legally need in order to take requests from the Guild.”

  “Whatever you say,” Rhaene turned to Aren and stuck her tongue out, gesturing Arbor was crazy with her finger. Aren giggled.

  The two of them set to work. Arbor, using precise leverage, shifted larger boulders using his arm as the lever. Rhaene simply grabbed anything smaller than herself and threw it down the slope with gusto, occasionally yelling “BOOYAH!” when one shattered satisfyingly.

  Aren watched the back-breaking work from a safe perch on the seat. After a minute or so of watching, he scrambled down, picked up a pebble the size of his fist, and toddled it over to Rhaene. He held it up to her with a serious expression.

  “For me? Aw, you shouldn’t have.” She took it and pretended to strain with its massive weight before launching it into the abyss. “BOOYAH! Good assist, kid!”

  Emboldened by the praise, Aren became their dedicated pebble-fetcher. He’d scour the ground, select a rock with great care, and deliver it, sometimes to Rhaene’s waiting hand, sometimes depositing it solemnly at Arbor’s feet. Aren didn’t seem to understand the goal of throwing the rocks, but he liked seeing them explode at the bottom of the cliff.

  As the minutes turned to more minutes, Arbor noticed something about Aren's attempt at helping. Aren wasn’t just picking up any old rocks. He was sorting them. He’d bypass jagged ones for smoother specimens. Picking the ones that'd explode the easiest. He presented them with a kind of grave courtesy, the kind that an artisan would present their magnum opus with.

  “He quite enjoys dividing things,” Arbor observed, stacking two large stones neatly to the side. “Inefficient, but earnest.”

  “He’s a better helper than you are. You just stand there, judging every stone and then deciding to leave them to me” Rhaene wiped sweat from her brow, leaving a new streak of grime. “Pass me that wee lil wedge-shaped one, will ya?”

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  Arbor picked up the indicated rock. Instead of handing it to her, he placed it into Aren’s waiting hands. The boy’s eyes widened. He looked from the heavy rock to Arbor, then slowly, but surely tottered over to Rhaene to complete the delivery chain.

  It was, as Arbor’s logic core insisted, the least efficient method of rock relocation possible.

  But he continued to pass the occasional rock to Aren, they were at no deficit for time and this activity could even be potentially mentally enriching for a youth.

  Once a narrow, semi-stable path was carved, they mounted up onto Beauty again. The sun was beginning its slow bleed into the horizon when they saw Acedia.

  The first thing they saw was the Wall. It wasn't a clean, imperial barrier of old stone, but a cancerous, hundred-meter-high growth of fused architecture, defense, and desperate urban sprawl. Pre-fab plating welded to ancient steel buttresses, patched over with corrugated iron, concrete, and the skeletons of unfinished scaffolding. It didn't enclose Acedia so much as contain it, a pressure cooker of steel and sin. From its top, a forest of crooked spires, smokestacks, and communication arrays clawed at the bruised sky, tangled in a permanent haze of neon glow and industrial smog. One particular spire jutted far into the air, scraping the sky and illuminating the city. Light didn't shine from Acedia; it leaked, in sickly oranges, venomous greens, and the cold blue of security floodlights.

  "There she is," Rhaene said, her voice flattening. "Acedia. We’re headed to the biggest spire. A bit tacky if you ask me, but I suppose that's what selling your soul buys you."

  "Lord Vexa is not a soul-trader," Arbor stated, his optic calibrating to the thermographic bloom of the city-heat against the cooler wall. "The great Demon lord of Acedia would not stoop so low to break the 5th Sin."

  "Hop off his horns, dude." She nudged Aren gently with her elbow. "You ready, kid? It's loud, it's mean, and it's got a ceiling. Don't look up for too long though."

  Aren clutched his broken projector. He didn't look at the spires. He looked at the base of the Wall, where a dozen vehicle-sized gates glowed like festering wounds, sucking in and spewing out lines of traffic. His blue eyes tracked the flow.

  Arbor's arm tightened its secure, unyielding bar around the boy's middle. The Wall triggered a subroutine he didn't often access: Siege Protocols. Limited exits. Controlled entrances. High ground held by unknown hostiles. "Stay between us," he commanded, his vocal modulator dropping to a tactical frequency. "Maintain physical contact at all times. Do not acknowledge solicitations. Do not touch surfaces. The biofilm here is likely pathogenic."

  Rhaene snorted, but her knuckles were white on the handlebars. The playful swagger was gone, replaced by the tense readiness of a rat entering a maze. "Yeah, yeah. No lickin' the walls. Got it."

  They joined the queue for a gate marked by a flickering hologram of a key turning in a weeping eye. The noise was no longer a distant roar but a physical pressure, a solid wall of sound that vibrated through Beauty's frame: the shriek of tortured metal from unseen workshops, the layered thunder of a hundred different music genres fighting for dominance, the ceaseless bark of ad-hawkers from grimy speakers, and underneath it all, the deep, sub-auditory groan of the city itself, settling, grinding, consuming.

  Aren flinched, pressing his face into Rhaene's back, his small hands clamped over his ears. After a moment, he peeked out with one watering eye, not at the people or the vehicles, but at the gate's mechanisms, the hydraulic pistons, the scanning lasers, and the armed silhouettes in the booth above.

  "Yeah," Rhaene muttered, her voice a thread in the cacophony. She reached back and gave his knee a firm squeeze. "It's a lot. Just breathe. Stick with us. We'll be in and out."

  We.

  The word was a lifeline tossed into the sensory sewage. But Rhaene knew, the kid wasn’t coming out with them.

  The gate scanned them, charged a "municipal ingress fee" that Arbor paid with a barely audible click of disgust, and dilated open with a hydraulic hiss.

  Then they were inside, and the Wall closed behind them, sealing out the sky.

  Acedia wasn't laid out; it was packed. Streets were canyons formed by buildings that leaned drunkenly against one another, gossiping via a web of dripping pipes, buzzing cables, and shuddering ventilation ducts that breathed the city's hot, stale breath onto the crowds below. Light came in fragmented, dizzying dashes from holographic ads plastered on every vertical surface, selling everything from neural uplinks to synthetic noodles. The air was a warm, wet blanket smelling of ozone, fried food, hot metal, and the sweet-rot tang of the deep-stack recycling vats.

  Beauty moved at a crawl, navigating the press of bodies, rickshaws, and piled garbage. Aren, now surrounded on all sides by the press of the city, stopped hiding. He sat up straight in his metal-and-leather sandwich, his head on a constant swivel, drinking it all in. The frantic energy, the dense, layered chaos, it didn't seem to scare him. It seemed to make a terrible kind of sense.

  Aren pointed a finger at a flickering sign for "Dr. Zyx's Remedy-All."

  "Ad," Arbor provided automatically.

  He pointed at a grimy cascade of water from a broken pipe above.

  "Condensate leakage. A sign of failed infrastructure."

  He pointed at a hulking, four-armed demon in stained overalls welding a support beam overhead, sparks raining down like angry fireflies.

  "Skilled labor," Rhaene cut in, smirking. "See, kid? You can make an honest living here. If you've got four arms and no sense of smell."

  Aren looked at her, then back at the welder. He nodded slowly, as if filing the career path away for later.

  They were moving deeper, into the districts where the buildings pressed so close their upper floors kissed, blotting out the smoggy pseudo-sky entirely. The light was entirely artificial now, a permanent, garish electronic twilight.

  The red motorcycle, a single drop of rusty blood in the city's clogged arteries, carried its robot, its demon, and their feral kid into the gleaming, suffocating, walled heart of Acedia. And inside that central spire was the Demon Lord Vexa, a paycheck, and a decision that felt heavier with every passing, depthless level.