Dark Waters

Chapter 1

One

The bass was rattling the plastic casing of my headphones, vibrating straight into my jawbone. It was the only way to drown out the city. I pressed my forehead against the rain slicked glass of the train window, watching the neon pink billboards of the upper sector blur into a hazy, messy smudge. Down below, the lower sectors looked exactly like what they were, a crumbling, neglected concrete grid waiting for a spark to burn it down.

Everyone on this train was pretending. Pretending the infrastructure was not rotting, pretending the daily blackouts were just minor glitches, pretending that the suits running the central grid actually cared if we lived or died.

Negative? Sure. But in a world this broken, an optimist is just a corpse that has not stopped breathing yet.

The train hissed as it picked up speed, the car packed so tight with morning commuters that the air felt thick, smelling of cheap coffee and damp coats. A sudden movement in my peripheral vision made me look up.

A girl was pushing through the crowd in the aisle. Blonde, clean cut, wearing a jacket that looked far too expensive to be wandering down into the lower sectors. She scanned the row, her eyes locking onto the empty seat right across from me. With a quiet sigh, she sat down. Because of how cramped the back room of the car was, her knees were inches from mine.

I did not move an inch. I just looked down.

In her hands was a thick, clean book. I caught the title printed in bold, state approved font, The Architecture of Order, How Systemic Governance Breeds Prosperity.

I could not help it. A dry, quiet laugh caught in my throat, completely buried by the heavy metal music blasting in my ears. She is one of those, I thought. One of the sheltered elites from the high society blocks who honestly believed that if you wrote enough laws and filed enough paperwork, the world would magically fix itself. She probably thought the food scarcity down here was just a logistics issue.

I rolled my eyes, deliberately drawing a hard line between us, and closed them. I leaned my head back against the seat, turning the volume dial on my phone up until the music was a deafening wall of sound.

I did not care that the sound was bleeding out. I did not care that in a quiet car, my headphones sounded like a buzzing hornet nest. I just wanted to go deep into my own thoughts and stay there.

But she cared.

Even with my eyes closed, I could feel the sudden shift in the air. I opened them a c***k. The blonde girl was staring right at me, her face twisted in deep irritation. The bass was clearly disrupting her precious reading time. She waited for me to apologize or turn it down.

I just stared back, my expression entirely blank, and did not move a finger.

Realizing I was not going to bend, her jaw tightened. With a sharp, angry snap, she hoisted the book higher, burying her face right into the pages. She used it like a physical shield, a deliberate statement to let me know exactly how annoying she thought I was.

I almost smiled. Let her be annoyed. Out here, annoyance was a luxury.

Then, the music vanished.

It was not because I turned it off. The phone in my pocket vibrated violently as the entire train wireless network went dead in a single heartbeat. A second later, the overhead lights flickered, died, and were instantly replaced by the harsh, pulsing neon red glow of the emergency backup strips.

The track beneath us groaned. The automated braking system did not just slow us down, it locked the wheels.

The violent stop slammed everyone forward. I braced my boots against the floorboards, my hand instantly gripping the metal rail beside me. Across from me, the blonde girl gasped, her book flying from her hands and sliding across the floor as she pitched forward.

Outside the window, we were not at a station. We were stuck on the elevated coastal bypass, a concrete track suspended high above the lower grid docks, surrounded by nothing but the gray, churning expanse of the ocean on one side and the industrial skyline on the other.

Then came the sound. It was not a siren, though the city wide alarms were starting to wail in the distance. It was a low, deep rumble that vibrated in the soles of my feet. A metallic, hollow roar.

The automated intercom system crackled to life, a flat electronic voice echoing in the panicked silence of the car, Warning, severe seismic anomaly detected, tsunami wave imminent, all passengers must evacuate to higher sector structures immediately.

Instantly, the back room of the train turned into total chaos.

The automated doors at the front of the car slid open, revealing the narrow emergency staircase attached to the elevated track. It was a metal catwalk designed for maintenance workers, maybe wide enough for two people to squeeze past each other if they were calm.

But nobody was calm.

Move! Get out of the way!

Let me through!

The crowd exploded into a frantic stampede. It was a bottleneck of pure, desperate human survival. People were shoving, trampling over dropped bags, throwing shoulders into ribs just to get a foot onto that staircase.

I stood up, stepping over the girl abandoned book, my eyes tracking the chaos. I looked past the screaming crowd, out the front glass of the train.

My stomach dropped.

The ocean was not just rising, it was pulling back. The shoreline was completely dry, exposing the black mud of the sea floor, and miles out, the horizon was a solid, towering wall of white foam and black water. It was moving faster than anything that massive had a right to move.

I looked at the staircase outside. The line was barely moving. People were fighting each other on the steps, slowing the exit down to a crawl.

The math did not add up. Not even close. If I joined that line, I would be halfway down the ladder when that wall of water tore the elevated track off its foundations.

I turned around to find another way out, and that is when I saw her.

The blonde girl was still on the floor, on her hands and knees. She was not running. She was frantically reaching under a row of seats, her fingers desperately trying to hook the strap of her expensive leather bag.

Leave it! I yelled over the deafening roar of the crowd and the approaching sea. Get up!

My documents, the sector passes are in here! she screamed back, her voice cracking with a terrifying mixture of stubbornness and panic. The safety protocol says we have to maintain identification for emergency housing!

She still believed it. Even with the world ending outside the window, she was trying to follow the rules of a system that was currently leaving her behind to drown.

The protocol is dead! I roared.

I did not think so. My survival instinct told me to run, to push past the crowd, to find a higher piece of framework to climb. But my hands acted before my brain could stop them. I lunged forward, grabbed her by the collar of her expensive jacket, and hauled her to her feet with a single, violent tug.

Let go of me! she shrieked, striking out at my chest.

I did not answer. I looked toward the front of the train, away from the stampede. At the very end of the car was a heavy, reinforced steel door. The driver cabin. In these newer automated models, the front cabin was not occupied by a human driver, but it housed the central grid computer. It was heavily pressurized, heavily reinforced, and built like a tactical bunker to protect the city tech infrastructure from external damage.

It was our only shot.

We are not going to make the stairs, I muttered, locking my fingers tightly around her wrist.

What? No! The exit is that way! she protested, pointing toward the screaming mass of people at the staircase.

I ignored her. I threw my weight forward, dragging her behind me like an anchor. She stumbled, cursing at me, her heels clicking uselessly against the floorboards as I yanked her toward the front cabin. The air outside the train was turning into a physical pressure wave, a deep, deafening howl that drowned out the sirens, the screaming, and the wind.

I reached the steel door. Beside it was a manual emergency override lever sealed behind a pane of glass.

I did not hesitate. I slammed my elbow into the glass, shattering it. Shards of sharp pain sliced into my sleeve, but I did not care. I grabbed the yellow metal lever and threw my entire weight downward.

With a heavy hiss, the reinforced door slid open.

Get in! I yelled, shoving her through the narrow opening into the cramped, metallic space of the computer pod.

I turned back to look through the train car one last time. The back windows shattered. A spray of white, violent foam burst into the far end of the train, swallowing the tail end of the stampede in a fraction of a second.

I lunged backward into the cabin, grabbed the interior handle, and slammed the steel door shut.

The lock engaged with a heavy, definitive thud.

A split second later, the wave hit us.

It did not feel like water. It felt like we had been struck by a high speed freight train. The sound was an absolute, blinding explosion of tearing metal and groaning steel. The entire world tilted on a violent axis.

The floor beneath my feet vanished. The cabin was ripped from its track assembly, spinning violently into the dark.

Hold onto something! I tried to scream, but the sheer force of the impact ripped the air straight out of my lungs.

I was hurled sideways, my shoulder smashing violently against a bank of server racks. The pain was immediate and blinding, a white hot flash that blurred my vision. Through the chaos, I saw the blonde girl. She had not found a handhold. The violent spin of the cabin launched her across the small room like a ragdoll.

Her head struck the sharp, metallic corner of the main control console with a sickening c***k.

She went entirely limp before she even hit the floor.

The cabin slammed into something massive underwater, a bridge pillar or a submerged building, and stopped with a bone shattering jolt. The violent spinning ceased, settling into a heavy, ominous sway.

Then came the darkness.

The remaining electronics shorted out in a shower of blue sparks. The deafening roar of the ocean outside suddenly became muffled, transforming into a deep, crushing pressure that pushed against the thick steel walls of our tomb.

I lay on the floor, gasping for air, my breath coming in ragged, painful wheezes. My left shoulder felt like it was on fire. I rolled onto my knees, my boots sloshing through an inch of freezing water that had already pooled on the floorboards.

Hey, I croaked, my voice sounding incredibly small in the dark. Hey. Get up.

No answer.

A low, rhythmic hum kicked in. The cabin isolated backup battery had survived. Along the ceiling, a single, narrow strip of emergency light pulsed to life. It did not illuminate the room, it just cast a dim, bleeding neon red glow over the metal walls.

I crawled forward, my knees dripping with wetness, until I reached her.

She was lying face down in the shallow pool of water. I carefully turned her over, my fingers brushing against her pale neck. Her pulse was there, thudding weak and rapid against my fingertips, but a dark, thick stream of blood was already trailing from her hairline down her cheek, turning the neon red light on her skin into something deeply sinister.

I looked up, looking through the thick, reinforced glass portal of the cabin front nose.

There was no sky. There were no buildings. There was only a vast, murky, suffocating expanse of deep, dark ocean water. A piece of floating debris drifted past the window, illuminated by the faint glow of the train dying exterior lights.

We were completely submerged. Trapped in a sealed metal box at the bottom of the world.

I leaned back against the console, a heavy, bitter sigh escaping my lips as I looked down at the unconscious elite girl.

Well, I whispered to the empty, bleeding dark. Hope you like the system now.