By the time the sun cleared the haze, the pair was already walking among bones.

  Not real ones—those lay in mass trenches outside the city—but relics of a dead civilization. Highway pillars jutted from the earth like snapped ribs, their rebar visible and rusted. Vines crawled over faded green signs, their names meaningless now. Cars fused to buckled asphalt, tires melted into black puddles fifteen years ago, frozen there ever since.

  Calen Ward picked his way along the cracked shoulder of the overpass. He kept his eyes on his feet, more than on the horizon. Concrete here tended to crumble out from under you; the drop to the ground-level road was three stories. The wind tugged at his jacket. It brought the faint smell of wet mold and distant smoke.

  Ahead of him, Jordan hopped from a collapsed section of guardrail onto the hood of a half-swallowed sedan.

  "You ever notice how this place actually gets prettier?" Jordan called, arms out for balance as he walked the car's length. "Every time, somehow."

  He spun once on his heel at the edge, grinning like a performer at the end of some act. Behind him, the skeleton of downtown Atlanta rose in the distance. Blackened towers. Shattered glass. A few half-standing cranes frozen mid-gesture over projects that would never finish.

  "That why it’s so popular?" Cal called back, voice dry. "Too beautiful to resist?"

  "Obviously," Jordan said. "We’ve got taste. Let the climbers keep their Towers. This—" he gestured wide—"this is real art."

  Cal huffed—almost a laugh, which annoyed him more than Jordan’s joke. He kept his eyes on the crumbling shoulder anyway, but the tightness in his chest eased by a notch.

  The hood under his boot squealed, metal flexing. Cal flinched.

  "Jordan," he said warningly.

  Jordan hopped down to the safer, vine-cracked pavement with a thud. "Relax. The car’s been sitting here since before I was born. If it was going to collapse, it would’ve done it already."

  "That’s not how fatigue works," Cal muttered, but he let it go.

  He adjusted the strap of his pack and kept walking.

  They left the highway where a gap yawned in the concrete barrier, the overpass sheared off in some long-ago collapse. A sloping spill of broken chunks and dirt formed a ramp down to surface level. Cal tested the first few pieces with his weight before committing, feeling for the subtle give that meant a stone could slip loose.

  Jordan just slid down in a running shuffle, pebbles spraying out from under his boots.

  "You’re going to eat it one day," Cal said as he followed, more slowly.

  "Gravity and I have an understanding," Jordan said. "She knows not to show me up."

  “Tell gravity I’m not paying your hospital bill,” Cal said. It was the closest thing to a joke he’d offered all morning.

  On the ground, the city pressed closer.

  Trees burst through cracked sidewalks, roots swallowing curbstones. Kudzu had turned blocks into soft green mounds, its broad leaves hiding whatever lay beneath. Gray towers loomed behind veils of creeping ivy. Here and there, a building had slumped in on itself. Its interior lay bare like a cross-section: exposed stairwells, dangling cables, rooms where desks and chairs still sat in frozen disarray.

  Cal remembered this city when it had still been in the news.

  Not with his own eyes—he’d been a kid when the Corona hit. He remembered from footage: Atlanta’s brief attempt to rebuild on the back of early Tower exports. New aether-tech companies were rising. Old ones clawed for relevance. For a few years, people said this place would be the first great Tower-era city.

  Then someone misjudged a storm.

  Aether had rolled through like a second wave. It warped half-built infrastructure, turning neighborhoods into hazard zones. The corporations left. The government declared the region economically unviable and rerouted what little reconstruction funding remained.

  The news stopped coming after that.

  But the scrap remained.

  "Tech quarter should be this way," Cal said.

  Jordan was already angling toward a cluster of taller buildings, their glass fronts shattered and scorched. Overhead, a flock of blackbirds rose from one jagged window line, circling once before settling again.

  "You’re sure the last crew didn’t strip it?" Jordan asked.

  "They said they didn’t go past the ground floor," Cal said. "Too many stress cracks in the upper levels."

  Jordan glanced back, eyes bright. "Our favorite kind of opportunity."

  Cal didn’t bother replying. Cal had known Jordan long enough that the banter was less conversation than pulse-check. If Jordan was joking, it meant he was still breathing.

  The closer they came to the old mall complex, the more the city stopped looking like an accident and began to look like a wound.

  A burned-out skyscraper leaned against its neighbor, one side a melted curtain of black glass. Another tower had lost its top fifteen floors, leaving rebar jutting up like a ragged crown. Elevated rail lines sagged between support pylons—a snapped section now hung at an angle over the street, like a dead limb.

  Aether storms altered the city in stranger ways, too. On one sidewalk, pebbles of aggregate had fused into a single glassy sheet, with ripples frozen in place as if water had solidified. A streetlight curved sharply to the side halfway up the pole, its metal bent as if softened and then left to harden mid-flow.

  The silence was wrong.

  Cal had seen old clips of cities when they were alive. Cars and buses. Crowds. Music. Sirens. The constant background roar of too many people on top of each other. Here, there was only wind and the occasional clatter of loose debris.

  Even the birds seemed to keep their distance from the worst-hit blocks.

  They reached the mall’s main entrance: a yawning gap where glass doors had once been. The name—some bland corporate nonsense—was half-melted, letters drooping. Inside, the atrium gaped dark, sunlight from the broken roof slanting down in sharp beams and catching motes of dust.

  Cal stopped at the threshold and scanned the interior.

  "Front support columns look intact," he said. "Roof’s gone over the center section, but the outer ring should still be holding. We stay off anything that hangs over open air."

  Jordan leaned past him, peering into the gloom. "So, no parkour across the decorative sculpture thing in the middle. Tragic."

  "We’re not dying for a nameplate and a handful of dead tablets," Cal said. "We’re here for Tower scrap. Early stuff. Anything with an aether signature."

  "Relax," Jordan said. "You’re the one who always says, ‘Routine keeps us alive.’"

  "I also say, ‘Don’t quote me at me.’"

  Jordan grinned and ducked inside.

  Cal followed, the temperature dropping a few degrees as the mall swallowed them.

  Shops yawned open on either side of the main corridor, their glass long since shattered, their contents picked over by a decade of scavengers. Clothing stores were mostly empty, with racks and shelves collapsed. A bookshop still had a few mummified paperbacks scattered across the floor, pages fused from old moisture and dust.

  They passed a food court where tables lay on their sides, chair legs poking up like broken bones. The smell of old grease had faded years ago, but Cal’s nose picked up mildew and something metallic beneath it.

  "We hitting the usual?" Jordan asked.

  "Electronics first," Cal said. "Then we see if the loading dock storage has anything on the higher shelves."

  The tech store sat where he remembered it, a rectangle of darkness with its logo burned away by some long-ago fire. The air inside smelled stale. Their boots crunched on broken plastic.

  "After you," Jordan said grandly.

  Cal stepped in and let his eyes adjust.

  Once, this place would have been bright walls and curated displays: phones, tablets, home assistants, the whole catalogue of pre-Corona dreams. Now the shelves sagged under the weight of half-melted housings and tangled cords. A few cracked display screens still clung to their mounts, spiderwebbed and black.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  He moved slowly, scanning for any glint of white metallic stone, the kind brought out of the Tower.

  "You picture what it was like? Walking in flush and grabbing the best toys off the wall?" Jordan called.

  "Sure. About as often as I dream of a private Tower gate," Cal said.

  Jordan snorted. "Dream smaller, Ward. You’ll live longer."

  Something crumbled under his hand.

  "Careful," Cal said automatically.

  "Relax. Just an old console," Jordan replied. He lifted the casing, and it fell apart between his fingers, the circuit board beneath flaking into green-black dust. "See? Worthless."

  Cal picked up a different device from a lower shelf and turned it over. The smashed screen was obvious, but the casing was still intact. He pried it open with his knife. The guts inside were the same as Jordan’s—traces of something, but mostly nothing. The Corona wave had fried the brains of anything on this hemisphere that wasn’t shielded or turned off, and this place had been very much on.

  "Old chips, dead chips," Jordan said. "You’d think folks would get that by now."

  "Some of them weren’t here for the first round," Cal said, setting the useless scrap aside.

  "You’re the one dragging us back into the corpse," Jordan said.

  Cal didn’t bother arguing.

  He moved deeper into the store, toward the back wall where the more expensive items had once been locked behind glass. The cases were long shattered, but sometimes merchandise had fallen behind counters or wedged under fixtures in ways early scavengers had missed.

  He crouched, running his hand along the underside of a shelf. Dust coated his fingers. Something hard and smooth bumped his knuckles.

  "Got anything?" Jordan asked.

  "Maybe," Cal said.

  He dug it out and set it in the light.

  Not Tower-tech. Just a sleek, old-world portable battery, the kind that used to charge phones on the go. When he shook it, something rattled inside.

  "If we ever find a museum that pays in chips, we’re rich," Jordan said.

  Cal dropped it into his pack anyway. Even worthless things sometimes bought them a few dollars from collectors, and dollars still bought food.

  They worked the shop in a practiced pattern: Cal methodical, Jordan faster and looser, sometimes climbing over fallen displays that Cal circled around. They’d done this enough times that their bodies knew the rhythm—check high shelves, then low; trust your weight to the spine of a shelf, not the crumbling edge; never step on anything that sounds hollow.

  Jordan broke that last rule first.

  It happened on the upper level.

  A set of escalators led up from the main corridor to the second floor. The rusted steps flaked at the lightest touch, their rubber railings drooping like old skin. Someone had spray-painted STAY OUT in faded red letters on the metal years ago.

  Cal rested his hand on the railing and leaned his weight into it.

  The metal squealed but held.

  "We could skip it," he said.

  "Ground floor’s been picked clean ten times over," Jordan replied. "You saw how much scrap was left down here. Best stuff’s always where people are too scared to go."

  Cal couldn’t argue with that. Their last valuable score—a cracked casing from a first-generation aether battery—lay wedged behind a fallen server rack on a third-story office level.

  It had also been the day he’d watched a chunk of floor give way under a different scavenger’s feet.

  They’d never found the body.

  Cal’s palm tightened on the railing.

  "Two rules," he said. "We test every step before we put weight on it—and if I say we back off, we back off. No arguing."

  "You wound me," Jordan said, hand over his heart. Then he started up the escalator, boots landing lightly on each step as he went.

  Cal followed more slowly, letting his weight settle, listening for the telltale groan of failing bolts. Dust puffed up around them.

  The second floor opened in a ring around the central atrium. Daylight fell in hard shafts from the broken skylights above, catching floating dust in a slow snowfall of gray. Cal could see straight across to other storefronts, their interiors dark.

  "Left first," he said. "We clear the outer loop and see what’s not about to fall into the food court."

  Jordan stepped onto the upper walkway.

  The floor flexed under his weight with a soft creak.

  Cal’s heart stuttered.

  "Back," he snapped. "Now."

  Jordan shifted his weight automatically and hopped backward onto the top of the escalator stairs. A second later, the section of walkway where he’d been standing sagged another inch. Hairline cracks in the concrete webbed outward with a faint, dry pop.

  They both froze.

  Cal swallowed, tongue dry.

  "That," Jordan said after a beat, "is why I always bring you on dates."

  "This isn’t a joke," Cal said. "We skirt the outer edge. Hug the wall. No shortcuts."

  Jordan’s grin was a little tighter this time. "Copy that."

  They tested each new section with the ball of a foot, then a little more weight, ready to pull back if the concrete felt wrong. The mall survived the Corona and the aether storms, but not time. Water had seeped into cracks in the walls. Support beams that were never meant to hold the weight of fifteen years of neglect.

  At one point, Jordan brushed by Cal a little too close, and the walkway groaned under the sudden combined load. Cal grabbed a fistful of his jacket and yanked him away from the inner edge, his stomach doing a slow roll as he imagined both of them tumbling down into the food court tables below.

  "Hey," Jordan protested.

  "One misstep and we fall three floors," Cal said through his teeth. "There’s nothing down there but broken plastic and old fry oil."

  "Pretty sure fry oil’s all fossilized by now," Jordan said. But he moved more carefully after that.

  They reached a store whose front had partially collapsed, leaving its ceiling warped but its interior mostly intact. The old sign read something-tech in faded blue.

  "This is the one?" Jordan asked.

  "This is the one," Cal said.

  Inside, the air was thicker, dust undisturbed for years. Their bootprints broke the gray film on the floor.

  Shelves along the back wall still held boxes, some collapsed under their own weight, others intact but sagging. The failed rebuild entombed this part of the mall, and the city's final death consigned it to the junk heap.

  "Jackpot," Jordan whispered.

  Cal’s chest tightened for a different reason.

  Boxes meant weight. Weight meant stress on old supports.

  "We stay near the door," he said. "If you see cracks, you call it out."

  Jordan was already moving toward the nearest shelves.

  There was no point in arguing. Cal followed, watching the floor more than the potential loot.

  They opened boxes carefully, cutting tape that had long since dried and cracked. Most held pre-Corona tech: routers, home assistant hubs, display units no one would ever power on again.

  "Worthless," Jordan muttered.

  "Check the labels," Cal said. "Anything marked Tower-adapted or aether-compatible, we keep."

  "You ever notice they never use the word ‘Tower’ on the boxes?" Jordan asked. "Always ‘external integration’ or ‘off-world compatible.’ Like if they don’t say it, people won’t notice where it came from."

  "Marketing," Cal said. "You put ‘from the alien murder-spire in Appalachia’ on the label, some people get nervous."

  Jordan snorted.

  They were halfway down the aisle when Cal’s hand brushed a box that felt wrong under his fingers—denser, the carton reinforced.

  He pulled it out.

  The label was mostly peeled from the metal, but he could still make out the faded print: GEN-1 EXTERNAL AETHER PACK — CERTIFIED FOR REMOTE APPLICATION.

  His pulse ticked up.

  "Jordan," he called.

  Jordan popped his head up over a nearby stack. "Tell me you just found a pizza oven."

  Cal held up the box.

  Jordan’s grin flashed. "Oh, hello, beautiful."

  They set the box on the floor between them. Cal cut the tape. Inside, nestled in foam that had yellowed with age, lay a metal shell the size of a small backpack. The metal was pitted with corrosion, one corner bent, and the connectors along the side charred black.

  "Storm must have got it," Jordan said, deflating a little.

  "Yeah," Cal said. He ran a fingertip along the cracked seam. "But the shell’s intact. The alloys alone are worth something. And a Gen-1 Tower battery case? The buyers love that story."

  "So, not the big score," Jordan said. "But a medium score."

  "Small to medium," Cal corrected.

  Jordan tilted his head. "Gotta let me dream, Ward."

  They eased the dead pack into Cal’s bag, distributing the weight so it wouldn’t pull him sideways on the way back. Every kilogram mattered when you were walking over questionable floors.

  They kept searching until the light started to shift, the high beams from the broken skylights slanting at a different angle. That meant it was later than Cal liked.

  "We head back," he said.

  Jordan glanced at the remaining closed boxes. "We could hit one more aisle."

  "We head back," Cal repeated, turning toward the door. "You want to navigate that walkway in the dark?"

  "You always know how to kill a mood," Jordan said. But he followed.

  On the way out, the floor creaked again. This time, neither of them joked.

  The walk home always felt longer.

  They retraced their path through the mall, down the escalator, out past the yawning entrance, and into the open air. The city watched them leave, with their windows hollow.

  By the time they reached the broken overpass, the sky had shifted toward evening, the sun a dull smear behind high clouds. Shadows filled the gaps between buildings. Somewhere far off, a siren wailed in the inhabited districts outside the dead zone.

  From the top of the overpass ramp, Cal turned one last time to look back.

  Old Atlanta sprawled to the horizon, a patchwork of ruin and regrowth. In the far distance, barely visible through the haze, something else rose from the line of hills like a misplaced tooth.

  The Tower.

  From here, it was just a silhouette: a smooth, tapering column of stone and something that was not stone, too straight and too tall to be anything human-built. In the right light, it caught the sun, turning it into a vertical line of white fire.

  Even from this far away, Cal felt his chest tighten when he looked at it.

  He had seen footage, of course. Official feeds of climbers emerging from its base, faces hard and eyes distant, ready to sign corporate contracts or government service oaths. Grainy underground clips of people on the lower floors, fighting things no one had words for yet.

  The Tower was the world's true core, the place where power flowed. Securing a place there meant his small life would finally expand, trading scraped-together chips for fortunes he could actually earn.

  "You’re staring again," Jordan murmured.

  Cal blinked and tore his gaze away.

  "Just thinking," he said.

  "Uh-huh," Jordan said. "About how we just hauled thirty kilos of dead metal for the privilege of maybe paying rent this month, and how if you walked into that thing and made it to, what, Floor Ten, you could earn more in a week than we do in six months?"

  He said it lightly, but there was an edge there.

  "You’re the one who keeps saying climbing kills," Cal said. "Salvage is safer."

  "Safer," Jordan said. "Not safe." He kicked a loose rock off the edge of the overpass. They both listened to it clatter down through the girders. "The difference is, I know how to dodge falling rebar. I don’t know how to dodge whatever they’ve got on Floor Twenty."

  Cal imagined it—the Tower from the inside. White stone like in the government videos, air humming with unseen power. Doors opening onto forests or deserts or things that weren’t any recognizable biome at all. Monsters that were sometimes animal, sometimes machine, always something otherworldly.

  He imagined himself there, shield in hand, pushing forward while some faceless teammate shouted warnings and an AI murmured numbers into his ear.

  For a moment, the picture burned so bright it hurt.

  Then it collapsed under the weight of reality.

  Rent was due in four days. His mother’s last treatment had bought them a handful of weeks. Sammy’s shoes were too tight, and their landlord started looking at them the way someone looked at a weak shelf—calculating when it might give way.

  You don’t get to run off and play hero, he told himself. Not while they’re still depending on you to keep the roof over their heads.

  The Tower stayed where it was, indifferent.

  Cal shifted his pack on his shoulder, feeling the drag of the dead aether pack’s weight.

  "Come on," he said. "If we’re late, Mr. Hsu will run out of soup."

  Jordan rolled his eyes but fell into step beside him.

  They left Old Atlanta behind them as the light faded, walking toward the patchwork shanties and stacked concrete blocks of the refugee district. Away from the Tower’s distant silhouette and back toward the cramped apartment that waited for them.

  He just walked, counting the steps without meaning to, as if distance alone could keep everything from falling apart.