⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀LUKE MONTANN.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Engineer.
"Stop the bad thing, get the good money."
Bad, to worse, to way worse..
═⠀I am but a poor, wayfaring stranger.⠀═
The lower levels of Coruscant had always hummed with life, but this level- level 2187, was silent. Luke stepped carefully over the brittle ribcage of what used to be a person, the bones flaking beneath his heavy boots. His helmet HUD flickered in the stale dark, its rangefinder struggling to make sense of the corrupted terrain around him. This place hadn't seen daylight in centuries, and now it smelled like it—rotting wires, dried plasma burns, melted duracrete. The lights on his forearm scanner pulsed amber: the reactor was still running. Still running, and—he swallowed—still getting hotter. Still pulsing radiation. A failure of that reactor meant a meltdown of the entire section, putting thousands more at risk.
He moved slowly, hand gripping the hilt of his arc-cutter like it might ward off the silence.
"This job's gonna kill me," Luke muttered into the near pitch-black darkness.
His voice was loud, foreign in the tomb-like space. Somewhere behind him, metal groaned. A pipe, maybe. Maybe not. He whipped around, flashlight scanning the immediate area from either side of his helmet. Nothing. Just the hollow outline of a collapsed speeder, covered in mold and blast scoring. But he could swear—swear—he'd just seen someone duck behind it. A person. Moving. Watching.
"No one's here, Luke," he told himself, gritting his teeth.
"Just ghosts and rot."
Coruscant's 2187st level used to pulse with life. It was never clean, never safe, but it was there, it was home to many. Dense clusters of families, workers, mechanics. Lives stacked atop each other like parts in a junk bin. Then came the sickness. Then came the war. And now, Luke walked its bones like a grave-robber. The reactor core had been set up in a makeshift station back during the fighting—an emergency power grid to support evac efforts for many of the lower levels. The Alliance left in a hurry, too much to save, not enough time. And now the core was critical, chewing through itself. If it went up, the next three levels would follow, if not more from the radiation fallout. Or, even worse, a critical explosion.
He passed a shattered display screen, its holonet feed frozen on a news anchor mid-broadcast. The movement was back. Just ahead. A silhouette, half-formed, flickering behind the rusted doors of a service elevator, long dead like everything else around here.
"Who's there?" he shouted, his voice bouncing back at him like a challenge. No response. Just a child's laugh—faint, lilting—impossibly distant. He froze. Then it was gone. The silence returned like pressure, tightening against his skull.
"Stars and slag, I'm losing it…" He realized why he rarely took planet-side salvage and repair jobs. They were usually creepy and he was usually alone.
At least in space, he was alone with the stars.
Here, it was just darkness.
She ran barefoot. Alina's knees were scraped, and the smoke stung her eyes, but she didn't cry. Not anymore. The air above their block had turned red, full of screaming metal and death. Alliance and Imperial ships tangled above the clouds, close enough that their engines boiled the rain before it touched the towers. She ducked under a fallen speeder, the heat of its broken thrusters still baking the duracrete. "Go to the center," someone had told her. A soldier with a cracked visor, blood coming out from beneath the crack as he barely held himself together. "They'll protect you at the center." She believed him. She had to.
Around her, the level was falling apart. Civilians ran in all directions—toward gunfire, away from it. Some made it past the barricades. Most didn't.
Alina kept moving. Her fingers clutched a piece of cloth from her mother's sleeve. It was all she had left. Distantly, she heard the bark of orders, the thump of boots. Marines. Galactic Alliance. They were close. She turned a corner—and screamed. A man lay there, eyes open, but not seeing. He was holding something. A detonator? No. A datapad. It beeped softly, searching for a signal that would never come. She ran again.
Luke exhaled and slumped against a cracked durasteel column, his head swimming. The reactor's signal was closer now, a steady ping from his scanner. Three hundred meters, maybe more. Maybe less. With all the signal interference, it was a toss-up. Not to mention, the reactor could've been either in that area... or below or above. He tapped into the maintenance network—static. Fried relays, long dead. He'd have to shut it down manually. He hated that. Not just the danger. The noise. The silence. He looked up. For a second—just a second—he thought he saw a girl standing at the far end of the corridor. Eyes wide. Face smudged with ash. She looked at him like she knew him. Then she vanished with a blink. But she was there.
Right?
"You're not real," he whispered.
He was sure of it. The girl. The voices. The movement. Just residual fear, recycled through air filters older than he was Protection, she'd said. Luke squared his shoulders, forced his boots forward, and walked into the heart of a dead city, searching for a core that might already be past saving—and praying he wouldn't meet whatever still called this place home.
