Mauna Kea
In the vertical megacity of Nadir, life is ruled by water. Twice a day, at noon and eighteen hundred, rain thunders from the pipes and people lift bowls like worshippers. High above, the wealthy live behind dry glass near the reactor “sun.” Far below, the undercity rusts under pipes and legends of an Angel who “saved the world” by dividing it.
Breuk is a scarred courier who rides the city’s arteries on his motorcycle. With his crew – strategist Lig, mechanic-medic Tara, tech Limar and driver Tev – he works in the grey zone between politics and crime, sabotaging projects that threaten the lower districts while still serving the system that exploits them.
A quiet fixer named Kane offers them a final, life-changing job: infiltrate the upper-tier Valeris villa and steal the “Necklace of Ascent,” a relic said to belong to the man who became the Angel and to respond only to the “fallen.” During the heist, a dying servant presses a different pendant into Breuk’s hand and begs, “Not her. Don’t let her wear it.” Realizing the display piece is a fake, Breuk keeps the true necklace and leaves the decoy behind.
Soon after, the crew is ambushed. Breuk falls into the Schlund, a colossal shaft that swallows whatever the city wants to forget. The real necklace slows his fall. He wakes maimed but alive in the Grund, a hidden settlement at the bottom of the world, where people have survived for generations on fungus, runoff and scrap, feeding the Schlund with offerings so it will “forget” them.
As Breuk heals and works beside villagers like pragmatic Jakk, he finds an old book: the Angel was an engineer who built an invisible barrier, the Circle of Peace, powered by the Schlund. It ended a devastating war by locking upper and lower worlds apart. “The world was saved,” the book claims. Breuk keeps asking: whose world?
Lig eventually discovers a way through the Circle and descends. In the Grund, he and Breuk clash: Lig wants to use the villagers’ anger and the necklace to break the order; Breuk fears any grand gesture will destroy the people he’s come to protect. After a protest over the offering ritual ends in death and the village refuses to keep feeding the Schlund, they choose a third path: a dangerous migration.
They weaken the Circle just enough for the villagers to climb through forgotten shafts into Nadir’s underlevels. The ascent costs lives but not all. They don’t topple the Heights; the rich still drink clean water. Yet the Grund is no longer a sealed grave. With forged papers, its people become “maintenance workers,” folded into the city instead of sacrificed to it.
In the end, Breuk stands with Lig above the undercity. The rope from their climb hangs slack between them, unbroken. The necklace warms on Breuk’s chest; he refuses to see it as a command. He will not be a new Angel drawing lines between saved and buried. Instead, he returns to the machinery with his people, choosing slow, imperfect bridges over righteous walls.