The train screeched into Ironvale Central, its brakes sighing like a weary beast. Steam curled between the silhouettes of cranes, smokestacks, and glass-paneled towers. The station glimmered—polished ferro-glass and steel humming with automation, alive with the voices of lives in motion.

  Jack Rudberg stepped onto the platform with a single duffel and a storm in his chest. So many people. Walking, talking, eating. It overwhelmed him.

  After all, this was Ironvale—the heart of the Free Industrial Zone. Home of Crystal Industrial Solutions. A place he'd never known, yet the only place his future pointed to. The city was unlike anything he’d imagined. Jack came from the humble city of Silhar, deep in Suraghar’s smog-wrapped corners.

  Above him, a massive banner stretched across the ceiling: “CRYSTAL INDUSTRIAL SOLUTIONS: 40 YEARS STRONG”

  The lettering was proud and cold, casting long shadows over the crowd. For most, it meant progress. Innovation. A dream.

  For Jack, it meant escape.

  He shoved his hand into his pocket, fingers closing around the cigarette pack. Not yet. He’d promised himself—no smoke until nightfall.

  “Welcome to ASN, Jack,” he muttered to himself.

  He looked around. People were reuniting—parents hugging children, friends shouting hellos, lovers falling into arms. But for Jack, there was no one. No family. No friends. Just a scholarship to the Vale Institute of Applied Sciences, a bag of tools, and a heart cracked by memory.

  His hands trembled as he adjusted the strap on his shoulder. They always trembled. They hadn’t stopped shaking in years.

  Not since the fights. Not since Suraghar.

  Brr. Jack’s phone vibrated. A message from the Automated Arrival Service. Welcome to Ironvale. Attached was a link to the VIAS intake office. Then another ping: a vehicle was en route to pick him up.

  Jack smirked. Efficient.

  He found a bench and waited.

  The VIAS intake office felt like a hybrid of laboratory and shrine. Steel walls laced with glowing basalt bore engraved quotes from Erwin Vale:

  “If it can’t be built, build it anyway.”

  “Sustain what you scar.”

  Jack waited in line, eyes scanning the room. Ahead, students fed biometric data into terminals. He was intrigued by all this. Jack kept looking around trying to scan everyone’s face. Trying to see if there was anyone he knew amongst the sea of people. Ahem Ahem Behind him, someone coughed.

  He turned.

  A girl, about his age. Olive-toned skin, sharp brown eyes beneath a forest-green beanie. Calm, detached, observant. She held a book in her hands, flipping pages with quiet intent. No uniform, no crest—just a heavy satchel and quiet certainty.

  Their eyes met. She gave a faint, polite smile.

  Jack looked away, fingers twitching slightly at his sides.

  As time went on, the line became smaller and smaller. Finally it was Jack’s turn. Firstly a worker asked him to put his index finger on both hands on the scanner. And then the worker told him to look into a camera. That was all. Jack was then given an ID card and then was once again welcomed to Ironvale and VIAS. One of the worker guided Jack to the community Cafeteria, meant for all the students in VIAS and also one of its neighboring university, Ravendale Commonwealth Institute (RCI).

  He stepped inside.

  The smell hit him first. Not like home. Better. Richer. Not the sterile efficiency he expected. This was indulgent.

  Steam-bathed lamb shanks rubbed in citrus herbs. Roasted root medley coated in garlic glaze. Dumplings folded into neat spirals, stuffed with kelp and scallion paste. Desserts lined up like trophies—custard tarts with black salt, fruits soaked in spiced syrup.

  Jack blinked. Hesitated.

  “First time?” a boy behind him asked, smirking.

  He nodded, eyes wide.

  “Well, go on. It won’t eat you first.”

  He filled his tray slowly, like a man in a museum. His hands trembled more with each scoop of food.

  He found a window seat and took his first bite. The lamb melted in his mouth. Bright. Tender. He chewed slow, eyes fluttering shut. The warmth spread through him like balm.

  This wasn’t survival food. This was art. This was care.

  He tried to lift the custard tart, but his hand jerked, nearly spilling it. He laughed quietly and used his fingers instead. No one stared.

  He exhaled through his nose. Let the warmth settle.

  Here, no one knew him. No one feared him. No one expected him to fight.

  He looked around, still chewing. Noticed the students huddled over project tablets. The quiet enthusiasm in the air.

  Maybe this place wasn’t heaven. But it was close enough.

  For the first time in years, Jack Rudberg felt like a person who might build something.

  Not just survive it.

  Orientation week broke most students. Jack nearly drowned in it. Theory classes hit like a brick wall—circuit analysis, thermal kinetics, mechanical code—delivered at hyperspeed. But in the lab?

  He thrived.

  His hands shook, but his mind was steady. He built faster than anyone. Understood structure by instinct. In one challenge, he revived three broken drones using only a soldering pen and a borrowed processor chip—despite the tremor.

  By week’s end, they called him Rudberg, the Quiet Fixer.

  But no one saw the Jack who smoked behind the geothermal towers at night. Who sometimes stared at his trembling hands like they weren’t his.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  The memories always came.

  Rain hammering tin. His father’s steady voice, full of ideas—sketching windmill blades on scraps, rewiring old radios, laughing.

  Then the coughing fits. The silence. The funeral with nobody—just himself….

  Jack didn’t hate his father.

  He loved him more than anything.

  And when he died, Jack’s world shattered.

  So Jack came to ASN.

  To build a new one.

  At night, he lit a cigarette. Inhaled.

  Let the burn chase the silence away.

  One gray morning, half-frozen and sleep-deprived after hydrodynamics, Jack stumbled into the cafeteria, balancing synth-tea and rehydrated noodles.

  His elbow hit someone’s drink.

  “Oh—sorry,” he muttered.

  “Twice in one lifetime?”

  The girl from the intake line. Notes soaked. Smirking.

  Jack blinked. “Wait—you were in the intake line.”

  “You looked like a freight boat was about to run you over,” she said, inspecting the damage.

  He laughed. “Felt that way.”

  “I’m Helen,” she said, offering a hand. “Law student. Ravendale Commonwealth.”

  His grip was awkward, shaky. He hoped she wouldn’t notice. “Jack. Bio-engineering.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You build stuff?”

  “Mostly. When things aren't falling apart.”

  “Do they fall apart a lot?”

  “Only when I’m awake.”

  She chuckled. “Classic engineer.” She motioned to the seat. “I’m already drenched. Mind if I sit?”

  They kept meeting. No plan. No schedule. It just... happened. A glance at the cafeteria line. A shared bench at the bridge plaza. A moment of silence during a thunderstorm beneath the freight rail underpass.

  Helen was sharp. Witty. She teased his energy law ignorance and poked holes in his logic without apology—but when he spoke, she listened. Not just politely. Attentively. She tracked his every word like it mattered. Like he mattered.

  He told her about Suraghar. The noise. The smog. The feeling of always being just a bit too late to fix things. How engineering was the only thing that ever made sense in the chaos. How he didn’t want to just build machines.

  He wanted to build a future.

  Helen told him about Ember Basin Heights. The long silences at home after her mother passed. The way her older brothers talked about legacy like it was oxygen. How power and reputation seemed to swallow people whole.

  She never mentioned her last name.

  And he never asked. Not once. It didn’t feel right to pry.

  Their talks didn’t follow arcs or bullet points. They were wandering. Comfortable. Messy in a good way. Sometimes they'd sit for hours in a half-built garden courtyard behind the Commonwealth Library, talking about nothing and everything—about systems that failed, about cities worth saving, about songs they didn’t know the names of.

  Sometimes they didn’t talk at all.

  There was a darkness Jack never voiced, but it lingered behind his eyes. She once saw him clench his fist so tightly his knuckles cracked—a moment triggered by a passing student shouting in jest. He laughed it off. But his hand didn’t stop trembling for minutes.

  He said he liked the quiet because it helped him hear himself think. What he didn’t say was that silence was the only thing that didn’t fight back.

  And Jack, for all his shaking hands and buried scars, found something quiet blooming in that space between them.

  Not safety.

  Not clarity.

  But something warm.

  Something like gravity.

  One day, in fluid mechanics class, the professor scrawled a pressure ratio on the board—unit conversion off by a decimal, enough to throw off the entire balance of the equation. Jack didn’t raise his hand. He never did. Instead, he just tapped his foot under the desk, the rhythm tight and anxious. He burned the mistake into memory, lips pressing into a thin line. His fingers twitched toward his pen, but he held back. Let the moment pass.

  During group work, his team clustered around a shared tablet, debating formulas. Jack didn’t speak much. Just leaned over the table, his hand shaking slightly as he jotted notes in the margin of the worksheet. Quietly, he corrected the unit—rewrote the conversion, adjusted the pressure curve, smoothed the math. No flourish. No announcement.

  When they checked their final answer against the professor’s sample solution, it matched—down to the decimal.

  “You fixed the professor’s math?” one of the students asked, eyebrows raised, voice laced with disbelief.

  Jack shrugged, eyes on his page. “Just made it make sense.”

  No one said anything after that. But when the next set of problems came, they passed the tablet to him first.

  She caught him smoking once.

  He was leaning behind the tower, cigarette barely lit, hands trembling around the lighter, when she rounded the corner.

  She paused. Eyes narrowed.

  “Didn’t peg you for the brooding loner type.”

  He stiffened, then looked down. “Didn’t mean for you to see.”

  She stepped closer. Folded her arms.

  “You alright?”

  He hesitated. “It started as a shield. Now it’s... more like a leash.”

  Helen didn’t say anything at first. Just nodded like she got it. Then turned and left, quiet.

  No judgment. No lecture.

  Just left him with his smoke and silence.

  He watched her go.

  That night, he didn’t crush the cigarette.

  He finished it slowly.

  Then lit another.

  The burn didn’t chase the silence.

  But it kept him company until morning.

  He didn't sleep that night. Couldn't. Helen's disappointed look lingered behind his eyelids like smoke clinging to cloth. That slight twinge in his chest wouldn’t leave. His trembling fingers found another pack of cigarettes. One more, he told himself.

  The flame sparked. The first drag burned.

  Footsteps.

  He turned.

  There she was—again. Helen. Same forest-green beanie pulled low, sharp eyes dulled by fatigue, but watching him with something gentler than before. Not anger. Not judgment.

  Something else. She didn’t say anything. Just stood under the amber light, holding two cups of synth-coffee. The steam curled between them like a hesitant question.

  Jack opened his mouth. No words came.

  Helen stepped forward, handed him one of the cups.

  “I figured you wouldn’t sleep.”

  The warmth seeped into his fingers, and something inside him eased. He managed a nod. “Thanks.”

  She leaned against the wall beside him, careful not to look directly at him, but close enough for him to feel her presence steadying his.

  “I used to think smoking was the dumbest thing in the world,” she said after a sip.

  Jack glanced down at the half-finished cigarette between his fingers. “You’re not wrong.”

  “But now,” she continued, voice low, “I think maybe it’s the world’s worst lullaby. Broken people humming themselves to sleep.”

  A breath of laughter escaped him. Thin. Cracked. Real.

  They stood there in silence—the kind that wasn't empty, just waiting to be filled. The wind murmured through the rails above. A tram clattered past in the distance. Somewhere, machinery breathed in rhythms older than memory.

  “Do you ever wonder if it gets better?” Jack asked.

  Helen stared into her cup. “No.”

  He looked over at her, startled.

  She looked up. “I believe it does. Wondering is passive. Believing… keeps you standing.”

  Their eyes locked.

  Jack nodded, slowly. As if she’d said something he didn’t know he needed.

  He took a final drag from the cigarette. It didn’t sting this time. Just faded.

  He flicked it to the ground. Ash fluttered like spent feathers.

  Helen raised an eyebrow. “One down?”

  “Maybe the last tonight,” he said.

  She smiled—not the teasing kind, not the polite one. Something quiet and rare.

  “That’s a start.”

  They didn’t touch. Didn’t say goodbye. They just stood together under a sky that blinked with pale stars and low industrial haze.

  Two hands warmed by synth-coffee.

  Two hearts gently thawing.

  And between the smoke and the silence, the wind whispered something they couldn’t name—but they both heard it.

  Something like healing.

  Something like home.