Chapter 2 - The Harvesters
Madame Aris carried Sam into the basement, bypassing the flour sacks and leading Maya to a heavy steel door hidden behind a rack of baking sheets. She pressed her thumb to a biometric scanner. The door hissed open, revealing a makeshift medical bay.
She laid Sam on a cot and placed a metallic patch over his chest. A monitor flared to life, not showing a heartbeat, but a core temperature reading. It was glowing bright red.
"Your brother," Madame Aris said quietly, "has the Ignis Mutation."
"I don't know what that means," Maya said, her fists clenched. "He's just sick."
"He’s not sick. He’s a battery," the baker corrected. She pressed a button on the wall, and the floor became transparent.
Maya gasped. Beneath the bakery, vast titanium pipes pulsed with glowing blue energy, running straight from the Dregs up into the Zenith Sector. But the energy wasn't geothermal.
"The climate-controlled canopies of Zenith require massive amounts of thermal energy," Madame Aris explained, her voice heavy with disgust. "Ten years ago, the Elite realized the cheapest fuel source wasn't the earth. It was us. The Dregs. They harvest ambient bio-heat from the slums. But children with the Ignis gene... they produce ten times the normal thermal output. The Elite kidnap them. They plug them into the grid until they burn out."
Maya’s mind flashed to her father. The way he had suddenly collapsed two nights ago, shivering violently even though they had a small fire going. He hadn't frozen to death.
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"My dad..." Maya whispered, tears finally breaking through. "He was protecting Sam. They drained him."
"And they will drain the boy if they find him," Madame Aris said, loading a sleek silver pistol. "I am part of the Embers. We are a resistance network. But the Enforcers will be back for that thermal spike. We have to move."
