The sun hung straight overhead when the team started packing up. The Spire—once this cold, looming symbol of everything wrong—stood now like a beacon. Carter paused, glancing back at the hood in the distance. That was where it all started. He remembered being just a kid, struggling to scrape together enough for rent. Weirdly, he felt proud. That desperate kid built the man he was now, a man ready to take on the world.
The mag-lev train tore through the Deadlands at 300 miles an hour, a silver needle threading its way through a blanket of pitch black. Outside the thick viewports, the world passed in a smear of gray dust and bones of dead buildings—what was left after the old world got gutted to feed the city’s bright towers. Out here, there was nothing. No grid, no neon, no System to keep
