Chapter 2: The Under-Grid
403 Words
They didn't crash. The secondary emergency tethers caught the island with a violent, bone-rattling jerk that knocked Lyra off her feet. When she sat up, rubbing her bruised elbow, the emergency luminescent strips on the floor were glowing a faint, pathetic green.
"Jax?"
"Alive," a groan came from beneath a pile of canvas tarp. "But I think I swallowed a bolt."
"Keep it as a souvenir. I need to get to the sub-level." Lyra grabbed her heavy leather tool belt and strapped a localized lantern to her chest.
"Are you insane?" Jax ask, popping his head out from under the tarp. "The sub-level is restricted. It’s just structural framework and dead space. If the Enforcers catch you down there—"
"If I don't figure out why the pressure backup failed to reroute, the Enforcers won't have a floor to stand on when they come to arrest me," Lyra said fiercely. "Stay here. If the pressure gauges hit the red zone again, bleed the auxiliary valves manually."
Without waiting for his protest, she pried open the heavy iron hatch in the corner of the bay.
The sub-level of Ironhook was a labyrinth of rusted catwalks and massive structural beams that held the floating island's soil together. Below the catwalks was nothing but a sea of endless white clouds, thousands of feet above the surface of the ruined old world.
Lyra climbed down the iron ladder, her boots clanging softly. The air down here was freezing, whipped by the high-altitude winds. She followed the main power conduits—thick, insulated cables that usually pulsed with bright blue Aetherial light. Right now, they were dead grey.
She tracked the lines past the usual junction boxes, noticing something strange. The conduits weren't just dead; they were being pulled. Someone had spliced massive, military-grade cables into the public grid, diverting the residual emergency energy downward, away from the city's stabilization thrusters.
"What are you playing at, you thieves?" she muttered, following the rogue cables.
The lines led her deep into the structural core of the island, to a section marked on no map. She stepped off the catwalk onto solid stone—an ancient foundation block from the era before the sky-cities were built.
The rogue cables disappeared beneath a massive, circular iron door adorned with runes she had only ever seen in history books. It was an Old World vault.
And the door was slightly ajar.
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