It arrived as promised, Karyl thought.
Standing atop a spire, he looked down at the city below.
Quintus after rain always gave off an unbearable stench. The rotten reek of acid rain was far from the worst of it.
After lingering briefly, the puddles on the streets produced even more complex chemical odors, and every detail within Quintus drove that smell to its peak.
In a sense, the rain represented one facet of Nostramo—whenever you thought it had shown you the worst it could offer, it always gave you something worse.
It was as though this world possessed a consciousness, deliberately mocking you in this way.
But for Karyl, what he truly found unbearable at this moment was not the foul, complicated smell, but a kind of chaos that ordinary people could not perceive.
Compared to the former, the latter was far more intolerable.
Silently, he looked toward another district three hundred meters away, where gunfire had already erupted.
The Great Purge had arrived as promised. The families that had once promised admission to the Upper Hive had vanished, but the gangs clearly had no intention of abandoning this glorious tradition. Tonight's gunfire was fiercer than on any previous night, and the entire city had descended into madness.
A thought rose in Karyl's heart.
They needed it.
Shaking his head slightly, he leapt from the spire and landed in a dark alley.
He did not need to look to know what lay on the street beyond the alley entrance—patrolling gang members carried guns as they paced back and forth through their territory. Few of them remained sane; the scent of hallucinogens filled the air.
Karyl slowly approached the mouth of the alley. He stepped over a sewage pit and pressed himself against the wall, utterly silent. His breathing was nearly