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NOW.
FORTUNE CITY
IN THE RUIN AND RUBBLE where a monumental research facility once stood four years ago, Cain Castello sits under the eternally overcast sky, letting a cigarette burn down to the filter. If he closes his eyes and inhales the smoke, he can still picture how it all came crashing down.
A long time ago, Velocity Labs could've been considered the pinnacle of scientific research, and now it is in unsalvageable pieces left idle like a scrap yard. A long time ago, Velocity Labs was his home. He felt along the scars encircling his neck, along the burn marks left behind by electric shock collars, a necklace of his own missteps. They weren't pleasant, but they allowed him a shelter. Before that, he had nothing. Was nothing. And though he'd grown up in the sky citadel, soaked in sunlight and the privilege that followed his father's name, it was Warner, his own brother, who continually pointed out that he never belonged, that just because they shared a father didn't mean that they shared blood—Cain's had been tainted, his mother a ghost from the ground. But Velocity Labs had given him something tangible. Something worth holding onto.
Now, though, as he casts his gaze toward the ever-grey sky, Cain can't help but feel that the thread has been severed, the doors slammed shut on him. From the ground, one couldn't see Elysium, only the bottom of it, a screen projecting the illusion of a sky, dark clouds passing by on a loop. The only way to the city was by air shuttle, and only a few people had access. The city blocked all sunlight at noon, and since its construction, the ground had been saturated in its shadow. Under this shadow, Cain felt like a bug under a boot. When the lab went down, they'd been cast out into the dark, locked out of Elysium, his access revoked.
It's merely an incentive, Warner had told him. You earn your way back to Elysium once you've found the girl.
But it's much more than that.
At the base of his neck, Cain traces the unnatural rise and slope of his skin. The bump, just a finger's width, slotted between the discs of his spine feels foreign, unsettling. Though it's inert at the moment, each time he's reminded of it, he can't help but feel the burn of its presence, a smoking gun. Without the protective measures—the power suppressors, the shock collars—Cain understands that his existence is a threat to the fragile armistice humankind and Noumena have written in the past few decades. Vigilare had seen to that. Warner wanted his Horsemen to be lethal, to be weapons, and cleaved them into such. Their original power suppressors had a limited range of activation, and so, they needed something far more feasible to control from headquarters in Elysium. As such, the chips planted in their spines doubled as both a tracker and a kill-switch, rigged to blow his head clean off his shoulders if he so much as put a toe out of line.
It was Warner's idea.
The surgery was painless, but the ridged scar sears with resentment, a bitter sting even though the physical collar is no longer there. Somehow, this feels much worse.
