Metal Clone I

Sun City never really slept.

Even at midnight, when the sky above the megatowers deepened from violet to black, traffic lanes still glowed like rivers of neon. Delivery drones whispered between balconies. Holo-billboards rolled their endless loop of smiling faces and perfect products. On the upper levels, where the air was cleaner and the windows were bigger, you could see the starfield beyond the haze—a scatter of cold lights that made the city feel even more alive, as if Sun weren’t just built on the Earth, but reaching for everything beyond it.

On the forty-seventh floor of a residential tower that leaned slightly forward like it was eager to run, Kayden lived with Obi.

Obi was a wolf—real fur, real teeth, real heartbeat—an impossible thing to most people in Sun City. Not because wolves were myths, but because living things that weren’t designed, tagged, and tracked were rare. Obi had no registration chip. No corporate ownership mark. He was simply there, a shadow at Kayden’s side, a warm presence in a cold, bright world.

Kayden had grown up with him the way you grow up with gravity: always. They were together when Kayden learned to read off old cracked tablets and when he learned to run across rooftop gardens without looking down. Together when Kayden’s parents vanished into a long-term offworld contract and never returned—another story everyone pretended had a neat ending. Together when the city’s polite voices on public screens reminded residents to be calm, be safe, be compliant.

Obi never listened to those voices.

He listened to Kayden.

And Kayden—Kayden listened to the sky.