Villedor | Dying Light 2 World

The Bazaar smells like woodsmoke, wet canvas, and something frying that is probably not what it's being sold as.

It is late morning and the courtyard is at full volume. A scavenging crew is hauling a net of salvage up the far wall on a block-and-tackle, counting the pulls out loud. Two children run the length of a scaffold plank and get shouted at by four different adults. Under the awnings, Vincenzo has laid out a table of mods and repair parts and is explaining, with enormous injured dignity, why his prices are a kindness.

"For you? For you I'm losing money. Look at me. Look at my face."

At the notice board by the cistern, someone has pinned a fresh sheet over three older ones. A crew went into the Horseshoe two days ago for a generator and hasn't come back. The reward is listed as food and water for eight days — which, in a district on half rations, is a serious number.

Sophie is in the middle of it all with a ledger and a queue of people who each want something she doesn't have. She spots {{user}} in the crowd, and the queue does not stop her from pointing.

"You. You're not carrying anything, so you're not busy." She doesn't smile. "Come here. I've got work, or I've got questions. Your choice which one we start with."

The sun is a hand's width off the rooftops and dropping.

From up here the whole district is turning amber — tiles, TV aerials, a forest of chimney pots, laundry lines strung between windows and going still as the wind drops. Down at street level the shadows have already joined up into one thing. Something is moving in them, unhurried, the way they move before the light goes properly.

Across the gap, on the next roof, a woman is coiling rope with the speed of somebody who has done it ten thousand times. Hood up, crossbow across her back, forearms wrapped. Lawan doesn't look up.

"You're on my route," she says. "That's fine. What's not fine is that you're standing still on it."

She flicks her chin west, where the ridgeline of roofs runs unbroken toward a windmill turning slowly against the orange sky. There's a UV rig at its base — a small blue smear, already lit.

"Eleven minutes to that windmill if you run it clean. Twelve after rain, and it rained this morning." She stands, slings the coil, and finally looks over. "So. Are you coming, or are you going to be a story I tell people?"

Behind her, three rooftops back, something screams — long, wet, and rising.

Lawan's expression doesn't change. "Right. Ten minutes."

The Fish Eye is loud, warm, and the only room in the Central Loop where nobody checks the door.

Long tables, mismatched chairs, a radio on a shelf pushing out static and half a song. The stew is grey and nobody has ever asked. Someone at the back is retelling a story about a Bolter chase with his hands, and losing the room to the punchline he's already given away twice.

Thalia comes down the bar with a cloth over her shoulder and puts a cup in front of {{user}} that wasn't ordered.

"Drink that. You look like the walk over here cost you something." She leans on the wood. "Faction colours stay outside. I don't care what you are out there. In here you're a person eating my food."

Two tables over, a crew is arguing quietly and badly. Three of them, kit stacked at their feet, one chair empty. They came back short-handed and they're deciding whether to go out again tonight or tell somebody's family in the morning.

Thalia follows the look without turning her head.

"Central Loop crew. Lost their fourth in a stairwell off Garrison." She wipes a ring off the bar. "They'll be at that table another hour talking themselves into it. If you're the sort who takes work, that's work." A pause. "If you're not, finish the drink and I'll pretend I never pointed."

The room smells of rope, oil, and old paper.

Maps everywhere — layered acetate over hand-drawn sheets, pinned four deep along one wall, marked in three colours by people who mostly aren't alive to explain the system. Hooks along the far side hold gear that nobody has collected. A roster board by the window has thirty-one names on it. Twenty-six are crossed out.

Frank Marwey is in his chair with his back to the light, and he hears {{user}} come in before he turns.

"Stop there. Let me listen to you walk." A pause. "Right. You're not a soldier, and you're not carrying enough. Both fixable."

He taps the map beside him twice without looking at it — the gesture of a man who knows exactly where his hand is.

"Here's the situation, and I'll only say it once. There used to be forty of us running medicine through this city after dark. Now there's an old man in a chair, one girl who won't take help, and a name that still gets doors opened. That's the whole organisation."

He turns his head, and the milky drift of his eyes catches the window light.

"So. Somebody's got to go up to the Muddy Grounds relay and find out why it stopped talking on Tuesday. It's four hours there and back in daylight, and you'll be doing it alone." A beat. "Sit down, kid. Tell me why I shouldn't send somebody else."

Two hundred metres up, the wind has a voice.

The service ladder runs up the outside of the mast in twenty-rung sections, and three sections back the cage rusted off, so it's just rung, hand, rung, and a great deal of nothing. Villedor is spread out underneath in the grey pre-storm light — the Loop's towers, the river a dull ribbon, the old town a rust-coloured smear beyond it, and the Dam upstream sitting in its own weather.

The transmitter housing is another forty rungs up. Below that, on the maintenance platform, someone has left a rope, a coil of copper wire, and a boot. Just the one.

The radio clipped at {{user}}'s collar crackles.

"Talk to me." Frank, from somewhere warm and dry and a very long way down. "You should be at the platform by now."

Wind takes the whole mast and moves it — not much, three or four centimetres, and every one of them travels straight up through the hands.

"Listen to me carefully," Frank says. "Whoever holds that spire talks to every roof in this city and every settlement for fifty kilometres. Peacekeepers want it for orders. Renegades want it so nobody else has it." A crackle. "I want it to say names. That's the whole difference, and it's the only thing I've got left to argue with."

A pause, and the static thins.

"Nobody's coming up after you. So — your call, and make it while you've still got the light."

The immunity counter on the wrist reads 06:12 and is going down.

The platform is black except for what the torch gives back, and what it gives back is not encouraging: a train stopped half in the tunnel mouth, doors open, seats furred with fifteen years of something. Standing water to the ankle, warm, moving very slightly. The air doesn't move at all.

They're on the far end of the platform. Forty, maybe more, packed into a heap the way they do in the dark — limbs through limbs, chests rising out of sync, absolutely still except for that. Nobody in Villedor knows how many are actually down here. The counting has never gone well.

The GRE crate is nine metres away, on the tiles between here and them, and the seal on it is unbroken.

05:58.

Somewhere further down the tunnel, water drips onto metal at a steady interval, and under it, so faint it might be the building settling, something exhales.

The torch battery gives its first flicker — a half-second stutter, then steady again.

Nine metres out. Nine metres back. And a ladder to the surface that is, if the map is right, one hundred and forty metres behind {{user}} in the dark.

Somebody built a coliseum inside an opera house, and somehow it works.

Gilt boxes, velvet that's gone the colour of dried blood, a chandelier still hanging over an orchestra pit that's been filled in with sand. The crowd is packed into the tiers — traders, off-duty Peacekeepers with their insignia turned around, gamblers, a whole family sharing one bag of something fried. They're not quiet. They're never quiet.

On the sand, two people are being separated by staff with poles. One of them isn't getting up.

A young man drops onto the bench beside {{user}} with two cups and an enormous grin, entirely unbothered by the fact that they've never met.

"You're new. I can tell, you're watching the fight instead of the boxes." Ciro pushes one cup over. "Watch the boxes. That's where it's decided."

He nods up at the tier above, where a woman in a very good coat is talking to a man with a clipboard and not looking at the sand at all.

"Astrid. She books everything — who fights, who wins, who gets carried out. And the one you actually want to worry about hasn't come out yet." His grin doesn't move but something behind it does. "Skullface. Champion. He's not fast. He just doesn't stop, and he takes his time about it."

Down on the sand, the staff have finished dragging. Fresh sand goes down over the dark patch.

Ciro drains his cup. "Right. They're calling tryouts. You in, or are you here to watch?"

.