Getting to the Tidal-Flow station was like peeling back the city’s steel skin and crawling into its trembling, rusted heart. Gone were the sleek comforts of Gravity-Lifts and neon-lit corridors—here, there was nothing but the groan of old ropes, the shriek of iron pulleys, and the slow, rattling descent through the vertical shafts of Sector 10. The air grew heavier with each meter, thickening with the brine of the Atlantic; it pressed in on the lungs, sticky with salt and the promise of drowning. Every vibration in the walls told a story—the turbines thrummed with the distant violence of the tide, their battered blades holding back the endless weight of the ocean. Down in these depths, time warped and blurred; the machinery had run unsupervised for a century, alive in the darkness, stubbor
