The year was 2489, or at least that's what the grid called it. Calendars stopped meaning much after the last Continental Collapse, and some outposts didn't even use Earth time anymore. They went by orbital cycles, red dusk markers, or just... nothing. But for the rest of the world—what was left of it, anyway—the Unified Territories kept track. Order, they claimed. Structure.
Truth was, no one remembered how the old world ended—only that it did. Not with a war, not with a bang, just a slow, grinding erosion of borders, ethics, systems. The oceans had risen, swallowed cities. Corporations had replaced governments, then collapsed under their own weight. And then came the great Shift: when the satellites went black and the skies went red for nearly a year. No one knew what happened exactly, but when the grid came back online, over two billion people were just... gone.
And in the wake of all that, came the High Council.
It wasn't built in a day. No empire ever is. But the Council offered food when crops failed, shelter when the air turned acidic, and order when the streets were blood. So people listened. They followed. Until they didn't anymore.
Ashar stood at the window of his newly assigned unit, thirty-four stories above what used to be called Sector Lyonis. Now it was Zone 7–East, Block H. A repurposed building from the pre-Shift era, reinforced with blastglass and smart-stone, retrofitted to look functional—but not comfortable. They didn't want him too comfortable. Even now, the walls buzzed faintly with surveillance.
He hadn't taken off his coat.
There was an old book spread open on the desk behind him. Structures of Power: Collapse and Rebirth. Printed edition, rare. The Council had given it to him, as if it might teach him something they thought he didn't already know. He'd skimmed it earlier, fingers tracing the worn edges of the paper. It talked about governance like it was a science. Charts, graphs, predictive models.
Bullshit.
He remembered when governance had a face. A voice. It didn't anymore.
He looked out the window again, eyes scanning the jagged skyline—shards of dark metal, all reaching like broken fingers toward the sky. Fog rolled low across the lower zones, thick with the chemical stink of recycled oxygen and mag-tram grease. The lights down below blinked slowly, mechanically—like a dying pulse.
Somewhere down there, his daughter would've been twenty-seven now. If she'd lived.
He didn't let himself picture her too often. Not her face, anyway. Just the idea of her. The sound of her running across steel floors when she was little. The way her voice used to catch when she got excited. Then came the day when the med-clinic told him there was nothing more they could do. "Unregistered DNA markers," they'd said. "Treatment inaccessible." Meaning: you don't belong to the right class, not in the right database, go die quietly.
His wife had left soon after. Or maybe she just disappeared. That was the thing—loss, in this world, was never clean. People didn't die in one place. They faded across several systems. One registry would call them missing. Another would list them as tagged. Another... nothing at all.
Ashar stepped away from the window.
The room was sterile, like everything the Council touched. But he noticed the details. No cooking unit. Just a nutrient dispenser on the wall. No soft fabrics—synthetics only. And no lock on the door from the inside. A message, loud and clear.
You are not home. You are watched.
A knock came. Soft, mechanical.
Ashar turned as the door slid open. His aide—Zhen, a young man with a permanent expression of anxious apology—entered with a small tablet.
"Sir, your schedule for tomorrow has been updated. Briefing at Central Forum. Then a media statement. The press's already lining up. Also…" He hesitated. "There's been movement in Zone 9. Unrest. We might need to draft a response."
Ashar nodded slowly. "Put it on my desk."
Zhen paused, tapping the screen nervously. "Sir, if I may... do you trust the Council to let you work?"
Ashar looked at him. "I don't need them to let me. I just need them to think they are."
Across the city, under a different kind of light—one flickering, tinted green from the broken signage of a derelict trade block—another story was unfolding.
She crouched behind a vent shaft, fingers gliding over a small pulse-scanner as the Council escort team passed below. Four soldiers, moving in tight formation, checking ID tags of the local market drones. Idiots. The real contraband was three floors above them, right where she was sitting.
Her name was Selis Arra, at least according to the data she'd given the Council when she'd enlisted in their junior political corps six years ago. What they didn't know—what no one officially knew—was that she was born in the Burn Wards. One of the deep-skin colonies where acid rain fell nine months a year and children learned to filter their own water by the age of five.
She didn't look like it. Her records were clean, her accent wiped, her DNA markers rerouted through three generations of code masks. To the Council, she was Officer Arra, political liaison for Urban Planning Subdivision Theta.
And that was exactly how she liked it.
She stood and slipped through the shadows, entering a long-forgotten corridor half-lit by flickering bulbs. A metal door opened for her when she blinked twice—retina-keyed—and inside was her sanctuary.
Four others waited.
"Late," said Thom Yarek, arms folded, neck full of subdermal data lines. He was a former surveillance tech, now her unofficial second-in-command.
"I was watching our new Chancellor," Selis replied, throwing off her outer jacket and revealing the inner mesh-layered vest packed with black-market tech. "He's not what I expected."
"Is he dangerous?" asked Mara Vint, former weapons engineer, now demolitions expert. Her arms were visibly augmented, council-mil grade.
Selis hesitated.
"Yes," she said finally. "But not like Varin was. This one actually believes something."
"Then we kill him early," said Thom, without emotion. "Before people start to follow."
"No," Selis said quickly. "We don't assassinate a symbol. We expose the Council. Burn them from the inside. Ashar's just the next mask. They'll throw him away like the others when he doesn't perform. We let him rot where everyone can watch."
A fifth figure stepped forward. Older, eyes dull from years of exile. Eli Renn, strategist. He rarely spoke.
"But what if he doesn't rot?" he asked softly.
Selis met his gaze. "Then I'll tear him down myself."
Later that night, as the lights of the city dimmed for curfew mode, Ashar stood alone on his balcony. The air was cold, but he didn't feel it.
In his hands, he held an old photograph. One of the few physical items he'd smuggled with him through three zones. It was cracked down the middle, water-stained in the corner. His wife. His daughter. Smiling.
He closed his eyes and let the silence settle around him.
But in that silence, he felt something else.
A change.
Something coming.
Far below, in the underlayers of the city, rebellion was brewing. Quietly. Relentlessly. Like a pressure valve that had been ignored too long.
And somewhere, a woman was sharpening her knives—not for blood, but for truth.
Ashar didn't know her name yet.
But he would.
Very soon.