Chapter 4: Drift, Below the Waterline

The entrance to the water-reclamation levels was not marked on any city map that SEREN had access to. That was the point.

I left the car four blocks north of the arcology district's secondary service road, in a lot that charged by the hour in untraceable scrip and kept its cameras pointed at the ceiling as a matter of longstanding informal arrangement. From there I walked, collar up against the autumn damp, following a route I had memorized rather than recorded — southwest along the maintenance wall, left at the junction where the old substrate piping ran above ground for forty meters before descending again, then down the access ladder behind the decommissioned water-relay station that the city's infrastructure division had been meaning to demolish for eleven years and hadn't gotten around to yet.

The ladder was cold. My hands registered the condensation on the rungs as I descended, and the smell of the lower levels came up to meet me before I was halfway down: wet concrete and mineral sediment and a faint metallic trace from the reclamation membranes that still ran passive filtration cycles down here despite being officially inactive, because no one had bothered to disconnect them and the water still moved through Nexus Prime's bones with the indifferent persistence of water.