Prologue

In the static neon hum of the Bazaar skyline, a spray can rattled.

Quill crouched on the edge of the power duct overpass, boots balanced on rusted metal piping, his gloves damp with pre-dawn condensation. Far below, the Market Tier rolled on—glowing signage on floating sky barges, hissing jets of steam from cracked pipes, clockwork ‘mechs dragging carts, all of it heaving like some vast mechanical beast gasping for air.

He looked at the blank wall in front of him. Thirty meters tall, weather-stained synthcrete, tucked between two ventilation towers of Grid 19’s sprawling CSTAE Reactor complex.

Perfect.

Quill tugged the scarf up over his nose and clicked the nozzle on the spraycan. The cap hissed. Black pigment misted into the dark.

One stroke, then another. He moved fast. Purposeful. Furious. His hands had memorized the design over the past weeks. This time, however, there would be no outlines, no sketches, no test runs. Just motion and message.

Two black-clad figures in white porcelain masks, featureless and clean. One on each side of the wall—towering and sinister. Between them, a small girl with a smiling face reaching upward, the light surrounding her seeming to drive the masked figures away.

Above her in curling gold hung the words:
“WE WON’T BE SILENCED”

Quill stepped back and exhaled heavily. His hands were shaking.

He didn’t feel better. This close to the heart of the Bazaar, “better” was pulled from your body before your heart even registered its presence. But he felt alive. He looked up at the mural, thin lines of dripping paint still running down the synthcrete and dropping with faint plats on the rusted metal of the gangway. It wasn’t his best work, but it didn’t have to be. It would be seen by those who needed to hear what it had to say, and that was what mattered.

Something shifted quietly behind him, subtle but unmistakable. His shoulders tensed. Something metallic clicked.

“Step away from the wall.”

Quill turned slowly. Two enforcers in matte grey armor stood a half dozen steps away. One of them held a stun wand at arm’s length, its end crackling with orange static energy. Local-level security. Not the Choir—but close enough.

“Easy, fellas. I’m just here enjoying the view,” He said.

He slowly backed up until his back was against the metal handrailing of the gangway, his mind racing. What were his options? He wasn’t going to make it over the railing to run for it before that stun wand froze his limbs. There wasn’t a chance he could fight a single enforcer, much less two.

He still held the last rattlecan in his left hand. But how would…

His fingers brushed one of the pouches on his belt.

Oh, yeah. That’d work.

Keeping the two guards to his left, he gently pulled one of the thin metal climbing spikes he carried from its pouch with his free hand, careful to hide the movement behind the rest of his body.

The guard with the wand stepped forward, his hand tightening around it.

“Drop the can and put your hands up!”

Quill shrugged.

“If you insist.”

Before the guard could react, Quill jerked his right hand around and drove the metal spike into the side of the spray can. Golden spray paint blasted out of the rupture, covering the glass visor of the enforcer’s helmet. Quill dropped the still-erupting can and vaulted over the gangway railing behind him.

He dropped down three meters onto a drainage vent cover, which screeched in protest from the impact. Landing in a crouch, he sprang forward, his boots smacked against steel as he ran along the metal walkway. The hollow thwacks of pursuing boots echoed faintly behind.

“Stop! By order of the Vaulted Senate—!” a voice called. A gold-orange bolt of energy crackled past, scorching the metal a few feet away in a spray of sparks.

Ahead, a scaffolding beam bisected the walkway, rising up to support another gangway leading toward the shielding structure of the reactor’s core. He scaled it in seconds, well-practiced fingers finding hidden holds on the rusted metal. In the twenty years of his life, the sprawling maze of walkways, pipelines, conduits, and platforms that made up this part of the city had been a playground he’d learned to navigate like a spider in a web, one bruise at a time.

He could hear them cursing behind him, fainter than before. He was gaining ground. Good.

Ahead, the walkway dead-ended into a T-split. A dozen feet beyond the split’s handrail, one of the abandoned Tidal refinery centers rose to the cloud-covered sky. Neon glinted off one of the broken windows a short gap from the gangway intersection. Thinking fast, Quill dove over the gangway’s handrail, sailing through the open air until he burst through the window sideways, glass clattering behind him as he tumbled onto the tiled floor of a long-vacant processing chamber.

Around him rose a rat’s nest of cobweb-covered conduit and clockwork, much of it covered with arcane symbols he couldn’t read. The perfect place to hide. He ducked into a shadowed alcove among the sprawling weave of cables, catching his breath and listening for any sign of approach.

The sound of boots on metal thumped closer on the walkway. Voices called out to one another, and a radio crackled back. There was a moment’s pause, and then boots thumped off down either direction. fading away until all Quill could hear was the ever-present faint hum of power in the air. He waited in the dark for several minutes. Once he was satisfied that he’d shaken the enforcers, he rose out of hiding and crossed to the fire escape visible out the windows on the other side of the chamber.

The side street he dropped into emptied into one of the main arteries of the city’s center. In this part of town, there was no downtime. Traffic that rolled and hovered and flew beat a steady rhythm on and above the street, and man and machine both filled the sidewalks and loitered outside of endlessly-open clubs. Few of them seemed to notice the sirens blaring all around them.

Outside of one, a handful of bodies in brightly-patterned clothes spilled out onto the walkway, laughing loudly. The glowing yellow fluid in their cups sloshed over the rims onto the concrete as they jostled one another. In this part of town, no one could afford to buy pure Joy, or even Happiness. But Pleasure and Euphoria were always cheap. For most, they were good enough. Many places would just pass off the inferior product as the real thing. Do some manipulation to tweak the color and add the glow, and nobody who hadn’t felt the real thing before could tell a difference.

Up ahead, a quartet of enforcers pushed through the crowd, scanning the biometrics of everyone they passed. One of them held a projector pad in his hand that displayed a picture of his face. Thinking fast, Quill ducked into the nearest alley. It’d been a long time since he’d seen the Grid on this high alert. Evidently his piece had made quite the impression. In the far back of the alleyway, another fire escape gave him access back to the sprawling network of catwalks, gangways, and conduit that overhung the streets below.

As he navigated back to the hideout, he had to duck out of sight several times as patrol drones whizzed past, spotlights dancing over where he’d stood only moments before. Down below, sirens continued to roar, echoing off the metal superstructure of the Grid’s power center. Finding a high vantage point shielded from prying eyes, Quill looked back in the direction of his handiwork. Finally catching sight of it, his heart dropped.

A pair of enforcer hover-cars hung in the air on either side of his piece. An impromptu scaffold hung between them. On it, grey-suited bodies stood spray-blasting the paint off the synthcrete. As he watched, the girl’s smiling face melted away into a colored slurry that ran down the wall. Within a minute, the whole thing was an indecipherable smear of color.

Quill’s face grew red. He cursed under his breath. It hadn’t even been up for fifteen minutes. In another minute, the synthcrete was clean, the scaffold retracted. The two patrol cars roared off, sirens still blaring. The only evidence that anything had been there at all was a rapidly drying stain of water.

Unable to stop himself, tears sprang to his eyes. Hot and angry. Weeks of preparation and planning, scouting, scoring the paint without drawing unwanted attention, all wasted. With as quickly as it was down, it was likely no one seeing it would have even managed to snap a picture. He pounded his fist on the catwalk beside him. What was the point of trying to resist all of this if every effort to push back was destroyed as soon as it was created?

He dropped down back onto the gangway, still out of sight, and leaned back against one of the metal supports. The tears still came, burning bitterly down his face.

I can’t do this anymore.

The thought came unbidden to his mind. Not for the first time. He tried to push it away, but it persisted.

What’s the point?

He tried to push that one away too, but it wouldn’t budge either.

Nothing we do is going to be enough to change things.

That one was new, but sat the deepest inside him. And why wouldn’t it? The Ministry took everything good from the hearts of its people and sold it back to them for prices almost no one could afford. Everyone else was so busy struggling to survive that they didn't have time to rise up even if they wanted to.

And why would they want to, anyways? The Hope they need to even try costs three thousand credits a dose.

He lowered his head, his breath coming deep and ragged. He’d joined the resistance because he knew, deep down, what was right. This wasn’t how people were meant to live. He’d never had any hope. Neither had anyone else. But they’d fought anyway. And for what? Rem was gunned down by enforcers. Pollux had been taken by the Choir. Daz had given up and thrown himself off the top of a building. There were few of them left now. Everyone who remained, well, they had even less faith left than he did.

He would find a way out, whatever it cost. Maybe, just maybe, he could find someplace else out there where people wore their happiness like a second skin instead of buying it from a bottle. Or had the hope that they can actually change things for the better without having to pay someone else for the privilege. Or could cry from joy rather than pain.

Quill wiped the moisture from his eyes, and began to climb down as the sirens continued to echo throughout the Grid.