The next morning, the air in the Hold tasted stale.

Skadi stepped out into the corridor, shoulders hunched against a silence that felt too heavy to be natural.

There was no bustle, no scattered voices or echo of footsteps down the hall. Just the soft hum of the heating systems and the low crackle of ancient piping. Every sound she made, boots against metal, breath fogging in the cold, sounded too loud.

No one had told them to stay quiet. But they were.

She passed closed doors, some sealed with biometric locks, others with crude barricades, a storage crate shoved against one, a piece of stripped conduit wedged across another like a deadbolt. No one watched her pass. Or if they did, it was from behind narrow slits of shuttered windows.

A fresh patrol drone hovered at the corridor's bend, lens blinking silently as it scanned her and moved on.

Skadi had grown up wtih drones buzzing over her shoulder, so she didn't slow, didn't flinch, but today their presence felt different. More than surveillance. A warning that things were escalating.

She reached the lift, descended alone.

Even the airlocks to the infrastructure levels sounded subdued. No barking foreman, no clatter of tools. Just her and the soft click of her ID chip against the lockpad. The door sighed open.

Inside, the maintenance level was nearly deserted. A few techs moved through their routines, eyes down, words kept short. No jokes. No music. Just the hush of a city trying not to breathe too loud.

Skadi stepped up to scarred counter, tapping at the handheld diagnostic device on it. It stubbornly refused to cooperate.

The hum of the water processing systems buzzed in the background, broken now and then by the sharp hiss of a struggling valve somewhere deep in the pipes.

"Skadi. Good, you're here. You're up," came Halvar's voice as he stepped into the room, holding a datapad.

Just like always, his tone carried the clipped edge of someone who'd spent too many years patching the same systems over and over, with no illusion it was getting better.

"Distribution Hub 7's reporting flow inconsistencies. Get over there and check it out."

She barely looked up. "Inconsistencies? You mean Haven's bargain-bin filters are clogging again?"

"Could be. Could be air in the lines. Could be a frozen feed valve." He didn't bother correcting her tone. "Whatever it is, we need it sorted."

Skadi sighed and pushed off the counter. "Sure. I'll just wave my wrench and make it all better."

Halvar gave her a sharp look. "Just fix it. And watch yourself out there. This place is held together by hope and duct tape."

As he walked away, Skadi muttered, "If I get hurt, at least it'll be Haven's fault."

No one in the room disagreed. Most didn't even look up. The grind was familiar. Constant triage for a system that never truly held.

Grabbing her toolkit and helmet, Skadi made her way down into the outer maintenance levels.

The corridors grew colder and quieter as she descended, insulation thinning, air turning sharp and dry. Pipes ran along every surface, patched and repatched with sealant and prayer. Flickering lights cast uneven shadows across the grating beneath her boots.

She reached the hatch for Distribution Hub 7 and crouched to punch in her access code. The panel stuttered before accepting, and the hatch hissed open with a reluctant groan. A rush of frigid air hit her face.

The inside of the hub felt more like a crawlspace than a proper facility. Tight metal walkways, bundles of pipes arcing overhead, the distant sound of flowing water echoing through the chamber. A faint mist clung to the floor, just enough to catch the light from her helmet lamp.

She lifted her handheld scanner. Blessedly, it decided to work. Swept it across the nearest pipe junction.

The numbers came back wrong.

Pressure spikes alternating with dead zones. Flow rates that made no sense. No signs of a blockage, no temperature anomalies. Just chaos.

"Great," she muttered. "Because fixing one problem at a time would be too easy."

Her radio crackled. "You at Hub 7 yet?"

"Yeah," she replied. "And it's weird. Flow rates are all over the place. I'm not seeing any obvious damage, but something's definitely off."

"Keep at it," Halvar said. "We can't afford another delay."

She clicked the radio off and kept moving, deeper into the hub. Her breath fogged in the cold. Every so often, she paused to listen. The water should've been a steady rush. But here, it pulsed strangely. Intermittent. Like breath catching in a throat.

And underneath it, something else. A faint splash, like something moved where it shouldn't.

Skadi froze.

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"Halvar," she said, thumbing the radio back on, "I think I heard something in the pipes."

A pause. Then his voice crackled through. "You sure it wasn't your boot?"

"Yeah, I'm sure." Her voice stayed dry, but the tension crept in. "I'm heading down to check."

"Careful," he warned. "If it's structural, one pressure dump and you'll be on the wrong side of the valve."

She descended slowly, bootsteps echoing on the narrow metal stairs as she made her way toward the lower valves. The cold was sharper here, biting through her gloves, through her jacket. Her scanner flickered in protest but held its signal.

The readings only got worse. Pressure variations so severe they bordered on system failure. Water flow twisting through the pipes like it didn't want to follow its designed path.

She swept her light along a lower conduit, and for half a second, she could've sworn the mist shifted, as if something moved beneath it.

A chill slipped down her spine.

She tightened her grip on the rail and kept moving.

Whatever this was, it wasn't just another Haven patch job gone bad. Something was wrong.

Skadi clipped the radio to her belt and glanced around, breath curling in the frigid air. A maintenance ladder dropped into the dark below. The main intake level, where the massive water channels converged.

She hesitated only a moment before starting down. The metal rungs bit through her gloves, cold and rough.

The lower chamber was worse. Dim maintenance lights flickered overhead, throwing sickly light across metal bulkheads slick with condensation. The sound of water was louder here. A constant rush and gurgle that echoed in the pipes above and below like a heartbeat with no rhythm.

She crouched by an inspection port and flicked on her scanner.

The readings were erratic. Pressure spikes. Temperature fluctuations. No reason for either.

She frowned and adjusted the scanner's sensitivity.

That's when she heard it. A splash, followed by a faint scrape of metal.

Her head snapped up. Too close.

She swept her flashlight through the gloom. The beam caught only metal, slick walls, pipe junctions, condensation pooling along the floor grating. Nothing moved.

The splash came again. Louder this time. She flinched and turned toward one of the main intake pipes. Her boots thudded quietly on the grating as she stepped closer. The scanner beeped again, the sound sharp and discordant against the rush and flow surrounding her.

Whatever was inside that pipe, it was interfering with the flow.

She crouched by the inspection port, thumb hovering over the screen control.

"What the hell's in there?" she whispered.

With a breath, she tapped the panel. The viewing screen flickered to life, blurry with condensation. Water surged past the camera, broken by strange turbulence, as if something were half-blocking the pipe.

Then a shape darted through the frame, long, fast, and unnatural.

Skadi flinched back.

That wasn't debris. It moved too cleanly, too deliberately. Couldn't be a machine, it was too fluid. Something else. Something alive.

She keyed her radio with a shaking hand. "Halvar," she said, voice tight. "We've got a problem. There's... something in the pipes."

There was a pause. "Something? Like what?"

"I don't know," she said. Her eyes didn't leave the screen. "But it's moving."

Halvar's voice dropped. "Skadi, the pressure readings are off the charts. Get out of there. Now."

The radio crackled and went silent.

The water roared louder now, building to a pressure scream. Her heart pounded in her chest. She turned toward the ladder.

A metallic snap echoed through the chamber.

Her flashlight swung toward the sound, just in time to see a valve rupture. Water sprayed out in a high-pressure arc, slamming into the walls and drenching the floor. The roar became deafening.

Skadi staggered back, boots slipping on the grating. Her scanner skittered from her hand and vanished into the flood.

Another sound joined the chaos. Low, wet, and wrong.

She didn't wait. Just lunged for the ladder, scrambling up, legs burning as cold water lapped at her boots. At the top, she slammed the hatch shut and locked it, her fingers shaking against the controls.

She slumped back against the wall, gasping, soaked to the bone.

Whatever that thing was, it didn't belong in Zephara's water system, and it wasn't going to stay hidden forever.

Skadi wiped her face with the back of her glove and forced herself upright. Her soaked boots squelched with every step as she made her way through the corridor's gloom, the noise of the maintenance pipes a steady, pulsing drum in her ears.

As she turned a corner, she nearly collided with an older woman hauling a battered toolkit. Marra, one of the night shift pipe-hands who lived in the same block as her mother.

"Don't go near the lower junction," Skadi said quietly, not breaking stride. "Something's in the lines."

Marra blinked after her, mouth parting to ask, but Skadi was already moving, pace unrelenting.

By the time she pushed through the last access hatch into the hub, her shoulders were tight and jaw clenched. She was done with corridors.

She stormed into the hub, her boots leaving wet tracks across the metal floor. Stripped off her gloves with more force than necessary. Tossed them onto the nearest counter.

The room buzzed with activity, techs hunched over consoles, voices barking across the intercom as damage reports flooded in.

At the center of it all stood Halvar, arms crossed, scowling at a junior tech. He looked up as she entered, worry and irritation battling across his face.

"You made it out. Good." His eyes scanned her. "Talk to me. What the hell did you see down there?"

"I told you," Skadi said, shaking out her damp sleeves. "There's something in the pipes."

"Yeah, you said that," Halvar muttered. "But now I need details. The flow's spiking worse than before. One of the intakes is spraying like it's trying to drown sublevel three."

She exhaled. "It's alive."

The room quieted. A few nearby techs looked up, their conversations faltering.

Halvar blinked. "Alive?"

She pushed forward. "I saw it on the inspection screen. Big. Fast. It wasn't debris. It moved like an animal."

Halvar looked like she'd just told him the ice was haunted. "Skadi, there's nothing alive down there. If something organic had gotten into the system, it would've triggered every alert we have."

"Well, maybe your systems missed something," she snapped. "Or maybe it's new. I don't know. But it's in there, and it's making everything worse."

Halvar rubbed his temples. "I've seen my share of busted pipes. Clogged filters. Cold fractures. But this? You're reaching."

"I know what I saw," she said, stepping closer. "And if we ignore it, something worse is going to happen."

He dropped his hands. "Even if I believed you, what am I supposed to do? Send a sweep team with a net? You want me to pull techs off active repairs because something spooky went bump in the pipe?"

"Haven's not going to help," she said. "Not unless the whole hub explodes and takes our quotas with it. So yeah, maybe we should be the ones looking."

Halvar exhaled, frustration fading just slightly. "Skadi... you're one of the sharpest techs we've got. But you've been running too hot lately. Between the riots and your brother's mess... maybe you saw something, maybe you didn't. But we don't have the bandwidth to go hunting ghost fish."

"It's not a ghost," she said quietly. "It's real."

He didn't argue. Just turned back to the monitors.

"Fine. File a report. But unless you can show me proof, not just weird flow patterns and your word, I can't justify the manpower."

Skadi's shoulders sagged. She picked up her helmet and gloves in silence.

As she turned to leave, Halvar called after her. "Skadi."

She paused.

"Be careful, yeah? I don't want to lose you to a plumbing myth."

She gave a nod, but didn't answer.

As the door shut behind her, her mind was already racing.

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