Steel Pulse

Rain tastes like copper on the roof of 7C, and Aria Vale liked it that way—an honest, biting tang that woke her lungs faster than any espresso. She kept to the edge, toes over the gutter, palms rough from leather and filament, and watched the city unspool beneath her: a vertical river of lights, sky-bridges slick with runoff, the great glass ribs of the spires throwing fragments of neon like fish scales. From up here the smells sorted themselves into lanes—ozone and fried street food, diesel and wet concrete, a faint, persistent sweetness that came from the greenhouses in the lower wards. The wind pushed against her hoodie and took the loose hair you could never quite tame.

Her morning routine was muscle memory. A quick stretch, two checks of the harness—one at the wrist, one at the ankle—another for the carrier pouch that sat like a second skin across her ribs. She ran her thumb over the faded stitch on the pouch; someone had once embroidered the Blue Line emblem into the seam with a hurry of bright thread. The courier network had become her family by default: no questions, fast routes, pay for the day. It was honest in the only ways cities like Novus Axis offered honesty—danger, speed, and a little bit of glory when you landed a job clean.

“Aria!” Rahul’s voice crackled from the wrist comm before she could slide down the ladder. It sounded both tired and thrilled, the voice of the person who loved deadlines more than sleep.

“Two minutes,” she answered, though it was never two in the real sense. The city rewarded false promises and punished hesitation.

She caught the first rail to the east face, palms finding grooves in memory, boots whispering over wet metal. Her breath came as a rhythm—two in, three out—and she felt the old burn in her calves, the same ache she’d had since she was seventeen and too eager. Parkour wasn’t a show of grace in Novus Axis so much as a ledger of willingness; every scar on her shins was a debt paid to gravity.

Her building gave her a view into the way people tried to live with each other stacked like decks of a ship. Across a courtyard, an old man fed pigeons that were themselves city-bred hybrids, feathers iridescent with residual LED. Down three levels, a barber sang off-key as someone argued politics into a cup of bitter coffee. In the room she shared with Liam, a lamp burned low. He always kept a lamp burning when he worked nights, because light made fewer mistakes than sleep.

Liam—his name was a soft thing that still caught in her throat sometimes—was nineteen and had a head full of schematics and a habit of fixing radios for everybody on their block. He’d put his jaw into the lid of a cabinet and called it art when the scrapped servos shifted like bones. When he laughed, the apartment filled with the sound of small, bright things falling into place. He left the kettle on for her every morning, and that kettle had a stubborn whistle like an animal insisting on attention.