The Patrol left.

Kael lived in the Flux, a subterranean district beneath the gleaming corporate spires. The Flux was a haven for the city’s outcasts: drag kings who welded metal into crowns, nonbinary hackers who rewrote their own code along with their identities, and elders who remembered when “transgender” was a whispered word, not a banner flown from hover-ships.

Kael’s body had begun changes they didn’t want—a voice deepening like a crack in glass, a jaw sharpening into angles that felt like a stranger’s. Above ground, the state-run “Harmony Clinics” offered free hormone blockers, but only to those who signed a loyalty oath to the dictator’s vision of “optimized humanity.” No thanks.