The air on the high-altitude rooftop where Hide currently stood... didn't carry the sweet air from below.
Up here, perched on the cold, weathered concrete edge of an abandoned factory the atmosphere was thick with the slow-moving, grease-tinted smog that continuously bled from the factories of the lower quadrants.
Hide sat silently, his long legs dangling casually over the multi-hundred-meter vertical drop. His fingers were loosely hooked into the pockets of his jacket, his face an unreadable mask of chilling indifference.
He tilted his head back, his gaze narrowing as he scanned the overcast sky. The moon was nothing more than a muffled, bruised smudge behind the blanket of grey industrial haze. The stars were entirely invisible, snuffed out by the pollution of Area 17. The only light capable of breaking through the dense twilight was the rhythmic, clinical blinking of the crimson beacons mounted to the tips of neighboring corporate skyscrapers.
