Souls Below - Rebellion

Chapter Two.

Nine hours later, I collapsed onto my narrow bed, boots kicked off haphazardly, limbs too sore to bother with anything else. Every muscle in my body screamed. My hands were blistered, shoulders tight from hauling tools through crawlspaces barely big enough to breathe in. Eighteen-hour shifts. Eight days straight. And now—one glorious day off before it all started again.

'Oh, such a blessed life,' I thought dryly, contorting my face into a mock-joyful grimace. 'What a f*****g joke.'

I stared at the cracked gray ceiling above me, my chest rising and falling in shallow, exhausted breaths. The steady hum of the Lower City droned on outside my walls—the rattle of machinery, the occasional hiss of steam vents, and the muffled thrum of electricity pulsing through lines above our heads, and the ever steady thump thump underneath us all. Always buzzing. Always alive.

It was strangely comforting. The hum meant the city was working. And if the city was working, the Uppers were comfortable. Power running, water flowing, food delivered on time to their precious towers. Because if anything stopped, if we didn’t break our backs day and night to keep things running… well, let's just say it wasn’t an option.

The Uppers couldn’t go without their luxuries. Their air filtration. Their wine. Their golden halls and sunlit windows. If a single fuse blew which affected up there, a dozen of us bled down here to fix it. Fast.

I turned onto my side, curling my legs close beneath the blanket. It was scratchy, patches sown together in places, but warm. Better than the streets, anyway.

I’d heard stories—whispers, really—about a rebellion that broke out a few years back. Some brave, or stupid, group of Lowers decided enough was enough. They tried to rise up, demand better, fight back. It ended in fire, in blood, and too many bodies to remember names.

The Uppers didn’t waste time with warnings or negotiations. They sent in their soldiers—black-armored shadows with rifles and flamers. Whole sectors burned. Families disappeared. Just like that. Poof.

No surprise, really. We never stood a f*****g chance. And that’s where I come in.

Found wandering through the ash-covered alleys, clothes torn, blood crusted in my hair, face swollen from some long-forgotten blow. Just another broken kid in a broken city. No name, no memory, not even a trace of where I’d come from. I couldn't have been more than fifteen, maybe younger.

Jerard always said I was lucky. That I’d survived something I shouldn’t have. The injuries, the amnesia—it all fit. Easy to say I’d been caught in the fighting, that my home had been wiped out. My family gone.

But the missing ID? That part never made sense. Everyone in the Lower City was tagged at birth. Your number was everything—access to work, to food, to housing. No number meant no life. Simple as that. Unless…

Unless you were born an Upper, or hidden away at birth, and no one ever came looking for me. So, yeah, like Jerard said, lucky me. Or maybe… just the wrong girl in the wrong place, alive when I shouldn’t have been.

Either way, I was here now. Still breathing. Still waiting for answers.

Still living the dream.

I sat up, pulling my knees to my chest, and rested my chin on them, gazing out the window beside my bed. It looked out onto the guts of the Lower City—rusted scaffolding, flickering lights, steam pipes stitched across steel like scar tissue. A world stitched together by the desperate, decaying under the weight of the perfect city above.

I used to think there were answers out there. That if I just kept digging, kept asking, I’d uncover something—anything—on who I was, where I came from, why I didn’t belong to anyone or anything. All I found were beatings, close calls, a few broken ribs and busted nose.

Eventually, Jerard begged me to stop. And when Jerard begged, you listened. He’d seen what happened to girls like me—ones with no papers, no protection, no place. Easy to sell. Easier to erase. Disappear into the cracks and never come back out.

Makers, this place sucked.

I stopped looking. I didn't want to but... Jerard was right. With no leads to follow, and not security for my identity, I was a walking target. Jerard gave me a place instead. His home... in his dead daughter’s room.

That part always sat weird in my chest. The blanket still smelled faintly like lavender soap and iron, the walls were bare, but the corners felt full of ghosts. I tried not to think too hard about it—about the girl who used to sleep here. About the fact that I’d taken her place like some stray animal wandering into the wrong den.

Instead, I focused on the one thing I knew for sure: Jerard didn’t have to help me. He could’ve turned me in, sold me off like a dozen others did when the food ran dry. But he didn’t. He hid me. Faked enough paperwork to pass me off as a pipe worker—grunt labor, low clearance, no questions asked. It kept me out of sight, out of scans. More importantly, it kept me alive.

I heard boots outside—slow, heavy, and familiar. The door creaked open, hinges whining like they hated the effort. I turned my head, eyes taking in Jerard’s rough-lined face that appeared in the doorway, framed by shadows and flickering hallway light. He looked surprised to find me awake.

“Rough day?” he asked. I didn’t answer. Just turned back to stare out the window, toward the distant lights pulsing through the metal veins of the Lower City. Jerard stepped inside and sat at the edge of my bed with a slow grunt. His joints popped as he moved. Too many years spent working these tunnels. Too many sacrifices. He was like the city—built tough, full of cracks.

“I heard what happened at meal time,” he said. Of course he had. Jerard had eyes everywhere—people who owed him, who listened to him. Especially when it came to me. He had this way of knowing things before they even happened. And somehow, in a place where information was currency, Jerard never seemed short on funds.

He had power. Not official, not on paper. But real. The kind you earned with sweat and blood, not signatures. The kind the Mayor didn’t have.

The Mayor was the Uppers piss poor idea of a joke. Everyone knew it. A coward fattened on Upper bribes, carted around by armored guards, living in a corner of the Lower City scrubbed clean for show. He didn’t lead us. He didn’t even pretend to try, he just carried out the orders sent from above, and made sure everyone complied.

But Jerard? People followed him. He’d grown up here. Knew every sector, every shortcut, every soul worth saving. When the sickness hit, he dug graves by hand until his fingers bled. Then he kept digging, never asked for thanks. Never needed it. But it was the one for his daughter which turned his help into a different shade of dark.

After that, they started calling him the Grave Digger. It wasn’t just respect, It was warning. Because if you crossed him… well. You’d best start digging your own grave.

“She was just hungry,” I murmured, “That’s all.” The words came out quieter than I meant them to. I hated how small my voice sounded sometimes—like it didn’t belong to me.

Two years ago, I might’ve handed over my meal ticket. Let her eat. Go hungry myself. But the city teaches you fast—kindness gets you killed, and sharing makes you weak. I’d learned the hard way: if you couldn’t feed yourself, no one else would. It didn’t make the guilt any easier to swallow, sitting like a stone in my gut, cold and heavy.

“It’s getting worse,” I added quietly, eyes still fixed on the window. I didn’t need to explain. Jerard knew. Everyone did. Rations were thinner every cycle, fewer boxes, more mold. The good stuff simply became a myth they were ever included. The Uppers claimed it was a supply issue—“technical disruptions” from the rebels. We knew better. They were bleeding us dry, keeping just enough food flowing to stop a riot.

“There’s not much we can do, Pea,” Jerard said gently, using my nickname like it might soften the truth. I hated when he called me that. Not because I didn’t like the name—but because of what it meant. That he still saw me as someone to protect. Someone fragile.

“As strong as you are, Jerard,” I said, “you’re still just one man.” He didn’t argue. Neither of us needed to say it. As respected as he was down here, Jerard was powerless where it really counted. No one in the Upper City knew his name. And if they did, they’d make sure it disappeared.

“We could make them listen,” I muttered, almost to myself. “If we stopped working. If we all just stopped—refused to show up. They’d lose everything. The lights would go out, the towers would shut down, the water would stop flowing. Without us, they have nothing.” The moment the words left my mouth, I felt the tension snap tight between us, Jerard's posture stiffening.

“Don’t talk like that, Mira.” His voice dropped an octave. “You know what happens to people who think that way.” I did. So did he.

His wife—Klare—had once said the same thing, back before I came to live with him. She’d worked the medical ward, the kind of woman who didn’t flinch from blood or bureaucracy. Quiet, sharp-eyed, and tired of pretending everything was fine. She’d talked about revolution. Whispered it late at night when she thought no one could hear. Blamed the Uppers for the sickness that killed families. Said it wasn’t a natural spread, that they were testing something.

Then one day, she didn’t come home from her shift. No warning. No body. Not even a rumour. The system erased her like she never existed.

“So we’re just supposed to live like this until we die?” I asked bitterly. “Scraping metal. Eating their shitty trash. Waiting for some machine to fail and cook us alive?” Jerard remained silent. “That’s the same as giving up. If we do nothing, we die. If we fight back, we die. Either way, we lose. Might as well die for something.” Anger surged in my chest, bright and hollow and sharp. Not at Jerard—at everything.

At the way the Uppers sat above us, clean and golden and untouchable, while we coughed up black smog and scraped sludge from the pipes just to survive. The injustice of it burned hotter than the hunger ever could.

“You've got to pick your battles, Mira,” Jerard said slowly. “Sometimes... doing nothing is better than doing something.” I scoffed.

“That sounds like something someone afraid would say.” The room went still. The kind of still that comes just before a storm hits. I hadn’t meant it to cut like that, but it did. Jerard didn’t flinch, didn’t raise his voice. Sometimes I wish he did, just a little. s**t, even just to tell me to stop acting childish. Instead, he just sat there, eyes shadowed, jaw set.

“I am afraid,” he answered finally. His voice low and rough. “Every damn day.” I believed him. Not because he looked afraid. He never did, lucky prick, with his large frame, square shoulders and towering figure. But because I’d lived in this house long enough to see the signs. The way he double-checked the locks each night. The way he shut off the lights early, didn’t draw attention. The way he kept old ID bands in a locked drawer, ones that didn’t match any known citizen, but would buy enough time for me to get away before the system flagged it as fake.

The way his eyes lingered on the metal roof, like he was waiting for something to fall from it. There were things he wasn’t telling me, things he didn’t want to tell me. But I felt them. In the walls, in the air. In my bones.

Like a warning.

“Your birthday’s coming up,” Jerard said after a long silence, his voice softer now, hoping I would continue the changed subject. He leaned back slightly, the mattress creaking under his weight. “Anything you want?”

I blinked. It always caught me off guard when he brought it up—like the day meant something more than just another rotation in this rusted-out cavern. I didn’t know my real birthday, so Jerard gave me the day he found me instead. More of an anniversary, really. A beginning of something new, not a celebration of something old.

“A memory bank?” I muttered without thinking, the words heavy with bitterness. Jerard sighed. I could feel the weight of it, the guilt he never voiced.

“I haven’t stopped looking, Mira. But still—nothing. No missing children reported. Not even in the Lowers. And without an ID code...” He trailed off.

“I wouldn’t show up in any system.” I finished for him, voice flat. It wasn’t new. Same s**t, different day. The same quiet apologies wrapped in soft reassurance. But no matter how gently Jerard said it, the meaning never changed—I was a blank slate. A glitch in the system. A name without a past.

I didn’t respond. I couldn’t. My chest ached with the kind of exhaustion that sleep wouldn’t fix. I hated how ungrateful I felt. Jerard had risked everything for me, took me in, hid me. Protected me when he had every reason not to. I shouldn’t take my disappointment out on him—but I did, in the silence, in the sharp edge of my tone.

I let out a slow sigh, pressing my forehead to my knees. I never really fit in down here. Not with the other kids, not with the adults either. Too quiet. Too strange. Always asking the wrong questions, always looking up when everyone else kept their heads down.

The Lower City was all I knew… but it still felt foreign. Not because I didn’t remember where I came from, but because somewhere deep in my bones, my body knew—this place wasn’t home. Not really. Like I was a misplaced piece of something bigger. Something long gone.

“A new crystal?” I asked after a long pause, glancing up at him. It was an olive branch. A quiet way of saying 'I’m sorry' without the words. A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth, it softened his face, eased the worry lines that never quite disappeared.

“You and your glowing rocks,” he said, shaking his head fondly. I smiled faintly. Crystals weren't overtly rare down here, but most were mined long ago or hoarded by collectors. Some still turned up in old, forgotten tunnels though, tucked in the bends of dead wiring, or fossilized in collapsed metal. It was the ones that glowed, which were the rarest—luminescent fragments of something older than the city itself. Dangerous to own. Priceless to find.

They reminded me of something I couldn’t name. Something just out of reach.

“I can do that,” Jerard said gently, standing. His knees cracked as he moved, reminding me of just how long he’d been running this life. At the doorway, he paused, turning slightly to look back.

There was something in his eyes I couldn’t place. Pride, maybe? Or maybe relief? I knew my presence gave him purpose. I’d heard his friends say it when they thought I wasn’t listening—that I pulled him back from the edge. That he’d been colder, harder, after his daughter died… until I came along.

He never talked about it, never talked about her. I had never even heard him utter her name either. Selene. The ghost which seemed to echo in the quiet parts of the house.

But, I think he loved me just the same. In his way. I wouldn't be here if he didn't.