No Guardian, I

Part 1

Jas cowered beneath a pile of rubble and prayed hard he wouldn't be seen.

The searchlight passed over his hiding spot and further down the shelled-out street, towards the river. It pulled, if only for a second, jagged ruins out of the darkness - something that has once been a warehouse, then the empty husk of a factory. This part of the City has never been fully reclaimed after the Twilight Gap. Rust and decay reigned here, amidst already ancient shipyards slowly disintegrating under the flow of time.

Carefully, Jas lifted a piece of broken mirror above the rim of his foxhole and tried to gain at least a measure of his surroundings. It didn't help much - the mirror, as low-tech a device as it gets, refused to reflect anything in the gloom of a cold april night. Then again, it also meant there were no lights close enough to pick him out and signal an end to his adventures.

Still, it wasn't his first trip to the outside of the Wall. He knew how to remain unseen to the patrolling frames, and even found plans of the Wall dating back to the beginnings of the City, with drainage ducts clearly marked and numbered. He spent precious months scouting a safe-ish path outside, to where he was unlikely to ever go if he remained a simple worker of the Daito gun-enclave.

This was the night. His provisions were already smuggled outside; seventy-six almost expired packs of nutrient paste, twelve filters for a pilfered heavy-duty water purifier, seven fully stocked militia-grade medkits and one missing the oxygen mask and splint-spray. He was never to carry all of this on his own back, of course - during the last few weeks he ferried, piece by piece, a refurbished Sparrow to the wind-blown cave he found beneath the eastern-most bastion. The only things left were the aft stabilizers, which weighed down his pack along with a change of clothes, hygiene kits and seventeen clips of ammo for the thing he hoped he'd never use - a Galahad-pattern assault rifle.

He would not trust the weapons his enclave made with his life.

He got up on his palms and knees and shuffled out of cover and towards a man-hole in the middle of the road. The pack, held by its straps until there was no option but to let it drop, went down first. Jas flinched at the loud splash.

Nothing happened.

Jas hurried down after the pack. The waterproofed contents were in no danger from the freezing water, but still...

He groped around in the dark, found a strap and pulled it further down, away from the hole in the ceiling. Ten sloshing steps down, and his right hand, following the wall, hit a void. Jas pulled the pack around the corner and dared to turn on his lamp-pack. The way was still clear. He breathed easier. There was no pursuit.

Everything went smoothly, just as the eighty-nine times before. He quickly dismissed the nagging feeling that someone was watching him. Nobody was here. Nobody but him knew of this way out of the City and into the Caspian Wastes.

His light bounced around the drain in rhythm to his steps. Dancing shadows made him spring and reach to the rifle-case more than once. He realised that he'd never get it out in time if something jumped him here and decided to unwrap it at the first dry spot he'd encounter.

The drainage tube, easily half again as tall as him now, led him on towards a rusted sluice-gate. A few turns of an ancient crank lifted the gate enough for him to push the pack beneath it and crawl after it. He was sodden at this point, freshly-thawed water seeping through his boots and jacket seams. Luckily, he wasn't far from his cave hideout.

Something creaked ominously as he bent to retrieve the pack, and the sluice-gate crashed down behind him. Jas cursed. No going back now. Not that he intended to, anyway - not empty-handed. If - no, when! - he'd return, it would be through the City's gates, hailed and revered.