The sky above Lower Skylight was like a dirty bandage: gray, heavy, with no trace of dawn. Even so, the sirens coming from ground zero—the place where the mobile lab had exploded hours earlier—still cut the air like razor blades. Raiko Vernier walked through puddles of acid rain and broken glass, feeling like he was carrying a lit spotlight in the middle of his forehead. Every step reminded him that the night before, he had stolen pure light and that, if the Watchtower Alliance found him, he would end up on a steel table colder than the morgue.
Beside him, Gearlock ambled forward, a giant with a metallic beard and a robotic arm that sizzled every time it touched the damp floor.
"If it's any consolation," he grunted, "half the district just thinks a transformer exploded. The other half thinks it was a terrorist attack. Few imagine a Dust-Tier got in there."
"Great," Raiko murmured. "I used to be invisible; Now I'm an urban legend.
"Enjoy it while it lasts, kid. Legends attract bullets."
He'd barely slept. The metallic dust had stuck to his tongue, and Aureos's buzzing—like a hummingbird inside his sternum—kept reminding him that he carried a hungry Luxophage beneath his skin.
More light, the symbiote whispered, its tone crooning. More future to devour.
Raiko gritted his teeth. His head ached, and worse, his heart ached: the memory of his mother speaking of blue skies had vanished the night before, given over to Aureos so he could pass the invisibility test. Now that memory was a hole in the wall of his mind, and the hole chilled everything it touched.
At ten o'clock sharp, the neoclassical facade of the Aeterna Expedition Guild opened its synthetic marble floodgates. The holographic slogan floated overhead: "Devour to be whole!" A line of applicants—skeletal children with plastic elbow pads, miners still wearing dust on their eyelashes, mercenaries with the look of old dogs—waited their turn to register as Dust-Tier.
Raiko gulped. He barely felt like part of that queue, but there he was, a threadbare sack on his back, his photonic plates barely hidden beneath an oversized jacket.
"Full name," asked the receptionist, a woman whose silver implants made her look like a living statue.
"Raiko… Raiko Vernier."
"Symbiote."
"Luxophage. It's called… Aureos."
The receptionist raised an eyebrow, typed something, and slid a sensor over Raiko's chest. The scanner hummed and lit up azure blue.
Luxophage signature confirmed. Provisional Dust-Tier. Proceed to the testing cubicle.
The cubicle was a square room with smooth walls and a rubber floor. Three examiners were waiting for him behind a smoked glass window: a woman with botanical eyes (her irises grew like petals), a man wrapped in elemental vapor, and an android with his face divided into luminous segments.
"I'm Dr. Liss," the woman said, her tone gentle but firm. "Demonstrate control over your primary ability: absorb this light and release it steadily. If you lose control, the containment drones will act."
A plasma cylinder—a tiny sun—floated in the middle of the room. And Raiko felt Aureos's appetite whet.
"Give me something shiny," the Luxophage purred. "A fresh memory. Give me flavor and I'll make it for you."
There were no more shiny memories left, Raiko thought. She remembered her sister Jade, huddled against a broken stove, gasping for air. No. She needed that. Her mother under the clear sky… neither. But something remained: the hope—the crazy idea—of seeing Jade running one day, healthy, down a smog-free street. She clenched her fists. Would she give that up too?
"All in good time, Raiko," she told herself. She closed her eyes, captured just a sliver of that future, just enough for Aureos to savor, and let the symbiote drink it in.
The cylinder extinguished like a candle in the wind; the light ran through Raiko's fingers and became an opalescent sphere that pulsed with her pulse. Dr. Liss lifted her chin, impressed.
"Check satisfactory."
The android punched the tablet. The vapor examiner nodded, as if this were a carnival trick. Raiko allowed the light to dissipate in a sigh and noticed the cold emptiness where the shard of hope had once been. But it was still there.
"Immediate recommendation for preliminary Grain-Tier," the android announced.
Raiko exhaled a sigh of relief that gripped her knees. But the peace lasted until a guttural roar was heard beyond the glass.
A robust challenger, bony spines protruding from his skin, had lost control of his Beastophage. His eyes burned with red fever; his jaw, replete with newly grown fangs, snapped at anyone who moved.
"Contain!" someone shouted.
Too late. The boy rammed a window, shattering it in a shower of metaglass and overturning a row of benches. Panic spilled out like a bucket of paint. Challengers, examiners, robots: everyone was running for cover.
Raiko felt the pull—the hunger—of Aureos in that animal light.
"Don't even think about it," he muttered through gritted teeth.
Just one bite... the creature whispered.
The Beastophage twisted its neck, sniffed, and found him. With a roar that scraped his vertebrae, it launched itself at Raiko. Instinctively, he fired a cyan flash that blinded half the corridor, but it barely stopped the beast. Gearlock emerged from the shadows: his mechanical arm collided with the bony claw and deflected it with a metallic clang.
"Turn off the glow or you'll drive it crazy!" he roared.
Raiko shut down the plates as much as he could. The Beastophage staggered, confused, and Gearlock took the opportunity to surround it with a restraining cable. It wasn't enough. The beast yanked at him like a raging bull, and Gearlock nearly slammed into the wall.
Raiko had only one option. Without thinking, he let Aureos swallow the residual light in the corridor: lamps, panels, even the welcome hologram. The shadows merged, and with that energy, he created a second flash, this time inverted: a lightning bolt that drained the red ferocity of the rival symbiote. The Beastophage screamed, fell to its knees, and finally collapsed.
Silence.
Dr. Liss ran, applied a neutralizing serum. The drones squealed with their red lights. The hallway stank of burnt wiring and animal sweat.
Raiko gasped as if drowning. Then the alarms changed pitch, becoming higher-pitched, and a hologram emerged on each wall:
CODE IRIS: Luxophage Anomaly Detected
Deploy Solar-Eye Drones
"Wonderful," Gearlock murmured. "You just yelled 'Here I am' at them in all caps."
Raiko opened and closed his hands: the photonic plates crackled. Each flash was a beacon.
"Plan?"
Gearlock pointed to a maintenance hatch.
"We're going down to the old Photonics Central network. Gray area. The Watchtower never goes down; The Umbras do. There we can erase your signature again.
Raiko thought of Jade, alone in that leaky little room.
"My sister..."
"Relax. I'll get her later. I have people. But if we don't move now, we'll all end up lighting up test tubes."
Raiko hesitated for only a second. Jade would jump for him without hesitation, he knew it. So he swallowed his fear, swallowed his guilt, and followed Gearlock down the stairs, while the panels above his head burst to let the Sun-Eye drones through.
Every step into the darkness brings us closer to hunger, Aureos hissed.
"Then eat," Raiko whispered. "But remember: the light belongs to both of us."
He wasn't sure he believed his own words, but in the gloom of that tunnel, the pact sounded louder than any siren.