The first thing Nico Chen noticed when he woke was the smell. Recycled air thick with the tang of industrial lubricant, the sweet rot of the algae farms three sections over, and underneath it all, the particular stench of two million people crammed into a space meant for half that. Level 8 smelled like failure, and after ten years, he'd stopped noticing most days.
Today wasn't most days. Today his hands were shaking.
He lay in his sleeping pod—two meters long, one meter wide, stacked four high in a block of two hundred identical coffins—and counted the rivets on the ceiling panel six inches from his nose. Forty-three. Same as yesterday. Same as every goddamn day for the past three years since he'd downgraded from a "real" apartment. That's what they called it when you fell: downgrading. Like it was a fucking software update instead of your life circling the drain.
The shakes got worse. His stomach clenched, a familiar twist that started in his gut and radiated out until his teeth ached. Withdrawal. Not the bad kind yet—he wasn't puking or hallucinating—but bad enough that his skull felt too tight and every sound scraped against the inside of his brain like steel wool.
"Yeah, okay," he muttered to the rivets. "Point taken."
He fumbled in the narrow gap between his mattress and the pod wall, fingers searching until they found the small metal tin. Inside: three vials of Veil, each one a slender tube of pale blue liquid that caught the dim emergency lighting and seemed to glow. Beautiful, really. That's what they never told you about addiction—how pretty it was, how it promised to make everything soft and bearable.
Nico pressed the vial to the port on his wrist, the one the street medic had installed five years ago for "easier administration." The auto-injector hissed. The liquid went in cold, but within seconds warmth flooded his bloodstream, and the world softened right on schedule.
His hands stopped shaking. His stomach unknotted. The smell of Level 8 receded to something almost ignorable.
"Better living through chemistry," he said to no one, and laughed because what else was there to do?
He had two vials left. At current market rates, that was maybe three days if he was careful, two if he wasn't. He'd need to move product today, which meant getting out of this coffin and pretending to be a functional human being for a few hours.
Nico triggered the release, and his pod door hissed open. The dormitory stretched before him: a maze of pods stacked to the ceiling, connected by narrow catwalks and ladders, lit by failing fluorescent strips that flickered like dying insects. Somewhere three levels up, someone was screaming. Domestic dispute, probably. Nobody moved to intervene. On Level 8, you learned to mind your own goddamn business.
He climbed down the ladder—his pod was third from the bottom, a small mercy—and made his way to the communal bathroom. Fifteen showerheads for two hundred people. The water was brown for the first thirty seconds, but it was water. He scrubbed his face, avoided looking at himself in the mirror's cracked surface, and tried to remember when he'd last eaten something that wasn't a protein bar.
Twenty minutes later, he was on the street. Well, "street." Level 8 didn't have streets so much as corridors—vast industrial passages that had been repurposed into living spaces when the station's population exploded and nobody in the upper tiers gave a shit where the poor people slept. The ceiling here was thirty meters up, criss-crossed with pipes and ductwork, condensation dripping down to form permanent puddles on the rubberized floor. Market stalls lined the walls, selling counterfeit everything: food that was mostly filler, tech that would break in a week, drugs that would kill you if you weren't careful.
Nico knew his route. First stop: old Mrs. Huang, who bought a vial every three days and paid on time. She was waiting outside her partition—not even a pod, just a plastic curtain defining her space—when he arrived.
"Nico," she said, her voice thin and papery. She was maybe sixty, maybe eighty. Level 8 aged you fast. "You're late."
"Sorry, Mrs. Huang. Long night." He palmed her the vial with the ease of long practice, accepted her credit chip in return. Thirty-five credits. Barely above cost, but she was old and alone, and he wasn't completely a piece of shit. "How's your hip?"
"Hurts. How do you think?" But she was already loading the vial into her wrist port, and her face softened as the Veil hit. "Thank you, child."
He moved on. Two more stops: the Patel brothers, who bought in bulk and never haggled, then Jess, who paid in food stamps because she'd lost her job at the recycling plant. He took the food stamps. They were worth less than credits, but again—not completely a piece of shit.
The commerce district of Level 8 was waking up properly now. Vendors hawking their wares, children dodging between stalls, workers in stained uniforms trudging toward the industrial lifts that would take them to their shifts maintaining the paradise the upper-tier folks enjoyed. Nico watched them go and tried not to think about the fact that he'd once been on track to live up there. Engineering scholarship, bright future, the whole fucking delusion.
Then he'd discovered Veil in his third semester, and the rest was gravity.
"Nico Chen."
He knew that voice. He closed his eyes briefly, composing his face into something like a smile, and turned. "Maya."
Maya Torres stood five feet from him, looking like she'd stepped out of a different world—which, technically, she had. Level 6 professional attire: clean slacks, a jacket that hadn't been patched, shoes that weren't held together with sealant tape. Her hair was pulled back severely, and she carried a tablet under one arm like a weapon.
"Don't run," she said.
"Wasn't going to."
"You ran last time."
"That was different. You were with that cop."
"That was a social services liaison officer, and you know it." She stepped closer, and he caught the smell of her—clean soap, real coffee, the faint scent of something floral. Level 6 smells. "I want to talk."
"Yeah? I'm kinda busy, Maya."
"Busy dealing." Not a question. Her eyes flicked to the tin he'd reflexively shoved in his pocket. "That's new. You're selling again."
"Gotta eat, yeah?"
"There are programs—"
"Jesus Christ, not this again." He ran a hand through his hair, felt the grease, tried not to care. "Look, I appreciate the concern, really. But I've done the programs. They don't work."
"They work if you commit to them."
"Listen to me," he said, and there it was—the crack in her professional facade, the frustration bleeding through. He hated that he could still read her after all these years. "I'm not interested in another ninety-day stint in some clinic where they pretend to give a shit while warehousing addicts for the state stipend. I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You're dying."
"We're all dying." He tried for a grin, something to deflect. "I'm just doing it more efficiently."
She didn't laugh. She never laughed at his jokes anymore. "I can get you into a good program. Level 5 facility, actual medical care, therapy that isn't just watching videos. You could get clean. You could apply for tier advancement, get a real job—"
"With my record? Maya, come on. You know how this works."
"Then we seal your record. I know people—"
"You don't know people. You know functionaries who'll pretend to help until I'm not useful anymore." He softened his voice, because despite everything, he didn't want to hurt her. They'd been friends once. Maybe more. "I appreciate what you're trying to do. But I'm not one of your success stories."
"You could be."
"Yeah? What am I right now?"
She looked at him for a long moment, and he saw it: the calculation, the weighing of effort versus outcome, the decision that he wasn't worth the energy. He'd seen it in a dozen faces over the years. Social workers, clinic staff, his own fucking family.
"A waste," she said quietly, and walked away.
He stood there for a while, watching her disappear into the crowd, and tried to remember why he'd ever thought he deserved someone like her. Then he remembered: he didn't. That was the whole point.
The rest of the morning passed in a blur of transactions. He sold his last four vials—making enough to buy six more from Kade later, the math of addiction never quite adding up to profit—and was contemplating whether to spend his remaining credits on food or another vial when Mr. Chen found him.
Not Mrs. Huang's Mr. Chen. This was Chen Wei, the landlord who owned half the pod blocks in Section 7. Chen was maybe fifty, compact and hard, with the look of a man who'd clawed his way to Level 8's particular version of success: owning property in hell.
"Nico Chen," he said. Different tone than Maya. This was business. "I have a job for you."
Nico leaned against a support pillar, trying to look casual. "Yeah? What kind of job?"
"Cleanup work. I have a tenant who died, and the apartment needs to be cleared out. Family wants nothing to do with it—no surprise there—so I'm hiring out. Three hundred credits for a day's work."
Three hundred credits. That was a month of meals, or two weeks of Veil if he was careful. "What's the catch?"
"No catch. Just cleaning. You throw out the trash, pack up anything valuable for donation, leave it ready for the next tenant." Chen's eyes narrowed. "But I hear you're honest, for a junkie. So I'm telling you straight: don't take nothing that ain't yours. I'll know if you do, and we'll have problems."
"Who told you I'm honest?"
"Mrs. Huang. Says you undercharge her."
"Mrs. Huang talks too much."
"She likes you. And her opinion matters on this block." Chen pulled a key card from his pocket, old-fashioned physical security. "Apartment 7-G-2847. Used to belong to a guy named Park. Lived alone, kept to himself, died three days ago. Medical examiner took the body, but they didn't clean. That's your job."
Nico took the key card. The plastic was warm from Chen's pocket. "What'd he die of?"
"Does it matter?"
"If it's something contagious, yeah."
"Heart failure, they said. Happens." Chen turned to go, then paused. "One more thing. He was old-school. Kept everything physical—papers, photographs, the works. You find anything that looks personal, set it aside. I'll see it gets to the right people."
"Sure."
"Three hundred credits. Don't make me regret this, Nico."
After Chen left, Nico stood in the corridor, turning the key card over in his hands. Three hundred credits for a day's work cleaning a dead man's apartment. It was good money, suspiciously good money, but Chen's reputation was solid. The man was hard but fair, as much as anyone on Level 8 could be.
Besides, it wasn't like Nico had better options. His next dose of Veil was looking increasingly theoretical, and Mrs. Huang's endorsement might mean the difference between making rent this month or going back to sleeping in maintenance tunnels.
He looked up at the ceiling, at the tangle of pipes and wires that kept this section habitable, at the water stains and rust and all the accumulated evidence of decades of neglect.
"Another day in hell," he said to nobody, and pocketed the key card.
The apartment could wait until this afternoon. First, he needed to eat something. And maybe, if he was lucky and Kade was holding, he could score one more vial to take the edge off before he spent the day sorting through a dead man's life.
Small mercies. That's what you learned on Level 8. Take the small mercies where you could find them, because the big ones weren't coming.
Not for people like him.
Not ever.