"Is anyone there?" a voice crackled. It sounded like it was coming from a thousand miles away—or perhaps from thirty years in the past. "We’ve been trying to reach the surface. They told us the sky was gone. They told us the calls were being blocked."

The rain didn’t just fall in Sector 4; it dissolved. It was a chemical mist that ate at the neon signs and turned the cobblestones into mirrors of oil and light. Elias sat in the back of The Rusty Signal , a dive bar where the Wi-Fi was as thick as the air and just as toxic.

Elias realized then that "keepcalling" wasn't a command for him. It was a distress signal from a forgotten colony beneath the crust, trapped by an encrypted firewall they couldn't break from the inside. The Connection