The march felt like a funeral for a world that refused to stay buried. We had been walking for fourteen hours through the "Industrial Slums"—the skeletal remains of the factories that once kept the Cradle’s life-support systems humming.
By dawn, the gray dust rain had stopped, replaced by a thick, yellow fog that smelled of sulfur and old grease. We reached the edge of the Lithium Run. It was once a cooling canal for the refineries; now, it was a thirty-yard-wide torrent of black, viscous sludge that hissed as it ate away at the concrete banks.
"We can't swim that," Mara said, tossing a piece of plastic into the water. It dissolved in seconds, vanishing into a swirl of toxic foam. "The pH level alone would melt the skin off an Upload in minutes."
"There was a bridge here," Kael growled,
