The immense Hive City lay like the carcass of a beast, swallowed by a "night" that remained murky even after passing through the artificial Atmosphere's filters.
This night was no mere astronomical phenomenon. It was a heavy curtain woven from the stingy glimmers escaping billions of windows, sparse yellow streetlights, industrial fumes, and the pall of poverty.
Light was an expensive commodity here, while darkness was cheap and everywhere, enough to bury any horrifying detail.
Yet at the summit of the hive's spiraling structure, among the spires piercing the polluted clouds, light was squandered with an altogether different, nauseating extravagance.
This was the Upper Hive, the domain of nobles and guildmasters. At its heart stood the grandest Palace of all, adorned with twisted reliefs and pale marble. Now ablaze with light, it made the surrounding filth and poverty seem even more abject.
Beyond its glittering windows, figures mingled in fragrant finery, while strains of graceful but hollow music drifted faintly into the air.
Yet a psyker, or someone with exceptionally keen senses, might have pierced that splendid music and caught the faintest trace of stifled sobbing, along with another sound: oily, greedy murmurs of conversation and bids.
An auction.
What was being auctioned was not jewelry or antiques, not property or futures, but people.
Children "collected" like refuse from the lowest depths of the Hive City, or "purchased" on distant worlds and transported here.
They had been washed and dressed up like exquisite merchandise awaiting a buyer, displayed on cold platforms beneath gazes that assessed them as goods.
The sums changing hands were staggering, and the fate of the "merchandise" was often more prolonged and cruel than death.
Beneath glittering crystal chandeliers, this deepest evil proceeded calmly and efficiently.
Several hundred meters from that Palace of sin lay the fringes