Harsh acid rain poured down onto the slums of Beskon, trapped within its eternal night as the city streets boomed the sounds of workers going to and from wherever they were needed, second class citizens out of their work stumbling in and out of bars after long shifts of mining or electric work.
The Three Coils pub was full to the brim of patrons, each downing shots of Skög to deal with whatever misery had claimed them to bring them to such a location. The kind of place that was kept underground for fear of government intervention, not that they could ever shut down the entire night scene.
At the bar sat a man nearing the end of his life, roughly 14 years old - old for Beskon standards, with a broken arm and a couple scars dotted around his eyes. His skin was naturally white but dirty with mud, spread across by the rain over his buzzed head. One of the younger patrons, around half the age, stood up to talk.
“Hey Silk, you came back only two days ago and yet ya still give us noth’n? Noth’n to tell of wh’ever you been and wh’aver happ’end?”
“No my boy, nothing to tell, I nearly fell into an industrial shredder and took some time off…”
“Two garbin’ weeks? And I ain’t never seen no industrial shredder that can do something like that, they got protectors right?”
“Perhaps in your sector… the older models are unprotected, we didn’t have the same regulations…”
“I ain't even gonna pretend I know what that means Silk, but we gonna drink to ya health either way eh?”
The whole bar stood up to raise a toast to the old man's return, some clapping or even dancing. But he just sat, looking upset and contemplating something.
After a couple hours, “Silk” eventually got up and stumbled out of the bar, anxiously looking all around him to check for anyone that could be hiding in the darkness, but he was unable to see what was right in front of him. As he walked into his usual alleyway exit, the end was blocked by a dumpster flung across the side, and footsteps were heard behind.
A large man with a mask on his face faded in, going from literally invisible to fully opaque in just a few seconds, by the aid of a metallic device strapped to his wrist. He cornered “Silk”, a P-1Q2 revolver strapped to the underside of his exposed wrist.
“Are you returnee code number ASQ-2013?”
“I beg your p-”
“Are you returnee code number ASQ-2013?”
The man ran, straight to the dumpster, only to be stopped in his tracks by the boom of a bullet from the revolver slamming into his back, firing a chunk of flesh out the other end. The P-1Q2 was standard for VPA soldiers, designed not to arrest, but to kill.
After falling to the ground, ASQ-2013 attempted to grab a brick, holding it above his face, about to throw it with the strength he had left into the VPA’s face, but the soldier simply stepped onto it, forcing it down, cracking through the bones and tissue that made up his skull, until both eyeballs had fallen onto the floor.
...
The next morning, the entire street had been woken up at 4:14 am, woken by the sound of a man yelling and two women screaming, rushing out of the slums and climbing down the stacks of houses to see in the square adjacent to The Three Coils, a message board post with two new additions:
For one, a piece of paper, an official piece from the Board of the Vilha Protection Agency, read clearly that the mine worker ASQ-2013 had been discovered to be a returnee from an escape trip to Vilha.
And for the second, his body strung up by its intestines onto the phone lines.