The silence of the apartment pressed down on Angella, heavy and suffocating. The initial shock of Jackson's disappearance had begun to give way to a torrent of desperate thoughts, each one more terrifying than the last. Where could he be? Was he hurt? Was he scared?

Her mind raced through a series of scenarios, each more outlandish and improbable than the last. Had he finally managed to stabilize his energy flow and been whisked away by some shadowy corporation? Had he stumbled upon a hidden portal to another dimension? But beneath the surface of these desperate fantasies, a colder, more rational fear began to take hold: kidnapping. It was the only explanation that made any sense, however terrible it was to contemplate.

Driven by a surge of adrenaline, Angella rushed to the police station, her heart pounding with a mixture of terror and a desperate hope for help. The precinct for the Mid-Wards was a fortress of grey concrete, its windows reinforced with blast-shutters. Inside, the air was stale, smelling of coffee and bureaucratic apathy.

"My son is missing!" she exclaimed, her hands slamming onto the front desk. "He's gone, I came home and he wasn't there!"

The officer behind the desk, a weary-looking man named Sgt. Vance with tired eyes and a stained uniform, barely glanced up from his data-slate. "Name and age?" he droned, his tone devoid of any urgency.

"Jackson, he's fifteen," Angella replied, her voice rising in desperation. "You have to help me, you have to find him!"

"We'll file a report, ma'am," Vance said, his fingers lazily tapping away at the screen. "But missing persons cases are rarely... a priority, unless there's evidence of foul play."

"Foul play? He's fifteen years old and he vanished! Isn't that enough?" Angella cried, her voice cracking with emotion.

Vance finally looked up, his expression a mixture of annoyance and suspicion. "We have to follow procedure, ma'am. We'll need to conduct a search of your residence, just to rule out any... domestic issues."

"Domestic issues? What are you implying?" Angella recoiled, as if she'd been struck. The implication was clear: they suspected her. Or worse, they simply didn't care enough to suspect anyone else.

The subsequent search of her apartment wasn't the violent raid she had feared; in some ways, it was worse. It was routine.

Two officers drifted through the small rooms with the casual indifference of men checking meters. They didn't tear the place apart; they simply nudged things with the toes of their boots. One of them, a younger man with a bored expression, picked up one of Jackson’s delicate energy capacitors—the blue-tipped ones Angella had just bought. He tossed it in his hand like a toy.

"Kid’s got a lot of tech," the officer muttered, squinting at a complex circuit board on the table. "Expensive stuff for a fifteen-year-old. You sure he didn't sell this off and hop a transport to the Upper Wards? That's what they all want, right? To get above the smog line."

"He didn't sell anything," Angella snapped, snatching the capacitor from his hand before he could drop it. "He’s an inventor. He’s brilliant. He wouldn't leave his work."

The older officer, Vance, sighed. He tapped a few holographic keys, the light reflecting in his weary eyes. "Look, Ms. Angella. We see this ten times a week. Smart kid, single parent, cramped apartment. He gets bored, he meets a girl, or he thinks he’s too smart for this sector. They pack a bag and they go. It’s their choice."

"He didn't pack a bag!" Angella pointed to the hooks by the door. "His coat is here. His toolkit is here. He took nothing."

Vance didn't look up. "Runaway," he said, the word landing like a gavel. "We'll put his image on the local net, but don't hold your breath for a manhunt. Unless a body turns up or he commits a crime, he’s just another kid who walked away."

They left ten minutes later. The door hissed shut, leaving Angella standing in the center of the living room, clutching the blue-tipped capacitor so hard the edges cut into her palm. They hadn't even dusted for prints.

The insensitivity of the police, their callous disregard for her pain, solidified Angella's distrust. She left the station feeling utterly alone, abandoned by the very institution that was supposed to protect her. The system, she realized, was designed to protect the Order of the city, not the people living in it.

The first week was a blur of manic energy. Angella didn’t sleep. She spent her credits printing physical flyers—a rarity in a digital world—and plastered them over every synth-concrete wall within a five-mile radius. HAVE YOU SEEN HIM? Jackson’s smiling face, distorted by the grain of the cheap paper, stared back at her from every street corner.

She harassed the local precinct daily. She stopped strangers in the market who had the same long hair or the same slump in their shoulders. She kept the apartment lights on 24/7, terrified that he might come home to a dark house.

By the second month, the rain had turned the flyers into grey pulp. The precinct blocked her ID on their incoming comms.

By the sixth month, the silence began to change. It wasn't just the absence of noise; it was a physical weight. Jackson’s room began to gather dust. The half-finished energy algorithm on his desk sat frozen in time, the wires still exposed, waiting for hands that weren't coming back. Angella found herself standing in the doorway for hours, staring at his unmade bed, afraid to touch anything, afraid that if she moved a single pillow, she would be admitting he wasn't coming back to fix it.

But grief in the Mid-Wards was a luxury Angella couldn't afford. In a city built on efficiency, a broken heart was a liability. She started missing shifts at the data-entry firm where she worked. Then she missed whole days, unable to drag herself out of Jackson's room.

When the termination notice finally blinked on her wrist-comp, impersonal red text against a grey background, she didn't even cry. She just stared at it, numb. No job meant no credits. No credits meant no rent.

The eviction notice came two weeks later.

Moving day was a second death. She had to pack Jackson’s life into crates. The half-finished energy algorithm, the blue-tipped capacitors, the unwashed pillowcase she still smelled when the nights got too lonely—she packed it all. She sold the furniture to a pawn drone for pennies on the credit, but she kept his trash.

She couldn't afford the Mid-Wards anymore. She was forced to sell the lease on the apartment—the one with the window Jackson loved, the one with the good light for his workbench.

She moved three sectors down. The Lower Mid-Wards, bordering the industrial smog belt. Here, the air filters rattled constantly, and the grime coated the windows in a permanent grey film. Her new room was a box, barely large enough for a cot and Jackson’s crates. But it was cheap, and it was hers.

The descent was complete. She wasn't just a mother without a son anymore; she was a citizen without a status. She had fallen through the cracks of the city’s perfect Order.

Three Years Later

The vibrant energy of the retro-future city, once a source of comfort and familiarity, now seemed to mock Angella with its indifference. The neon lights that had once blurred into streaks of wonder on the hover-bus ride home now seemed garish and accusing. The familiar hum of the automated vendor stalls, the chatter of a thousand voices, the towering Holian temple that dominated the skyline – all served as a constant reminder of the life that had been so abruptly stolen from her.

Three years had passed since Jackson's disappearance. Three years of relentless searching, of dead ends and unanswered questions. The initial hope that had flickered in her heart had long since been extinguished, replaced by a gnawing emptiness that threatened to consume her entirely.

Angella was a shadow of her former self. Her once-neatly patched jacket was now frayed and worn, her light brown hair, once pulled back with a touch of elegance, hung limply around her gaunt face. Her eyes, once bright with curiosity, were now dull and haunted, reflecting the years of sleepless nights and endless grief.

She stood on the rusted balcony of her cramped unit, looking up at the Upper Wards. The great, floating platforms of the elite were bathed in perpetual golden light, far above the smog that choked her level. Up there, people had private security. Up there, if a child went missing, the whole city would stop.

Down here, in the shadow of their freedom, she had nothing.

"Free will," she whispered bitterly to the wind. It was the Holian promise. We are free to rise. But all she saw was the freedom to fall.

She rarely left her apartment anymore, the vibrant world outside holding no solace, only a constant reminder of her loss. The days bled into weeks, the weeks into months, each one marked by the same soul-crushing routine: waking up to the crushing weight of his absence, aimlessly wandering the city, and returning home to the suffocating silence of their empty apartment.

One day, however, something shifted. As she shuffled through the familiar marketplace, her gaze fixed on the cracked cobblestones beneath her feet, she passed "Pages of Yore," the quaint bookstore she used to visit with Jackson.

Elias, the wizened shopkeeper, stood in the doorway, his kind face etched with concern. "Angella?" he called out, his voice hesitant.

Angella stopped, her eyes slowly focusing on him. "Elias," she croaked, her voice barely a whisper.

"It's been so long," Elias said, his brow furrowed. "We haven't seen you in... years. What happened?"

Angella hesitated, then, in a raw, broken voice, she told him the story. Jackson's disappearance, the police's indifference, the endless, fruitless search.

Elias listened in stunned silence, his spectacles slipping down his nose. When she finished, he was silent for a long moment, his expression a mixture of shock and profound sadness.

"I... I had no idea," he finally said, his voice thick with emotion. "Angella, I am so sorry."

Then, a flicker of something sparked in his eyes, a memory surfacing from the depths of his mind. 'There was a man,' he said slowly, 'a detective. He came in here a few times, a while back. Looking for books... on strange things. Rituals, the occult, that sort of thing. He was very... persistent.'

Elias paused, his gaze fixed on Angella's face. 'He was looking for answers, I think. Like you. He might be able to help.'

'A detective?' Angella asked, a spark of something that felt like hope flickering in her chest for the first time in years. 'Do you know where I can find him?'

Elias adjusted his spectacles, a thoughtful expression on his face. 'I believe he mentioned working in the lower wards, something about a precinct there. But... he wasn't an official officer. He had a private investigator's license, I recall.'

He rummaged through a stack of old data-slates behind the counter, muttering to himself. 'Ah, here it is!' He pulled out a worn slate, its screen flickering with static. 'Lytis. That was his name. Lytis, Private Investigator.'

Elias copied the detective's contact information onto Angella's wrist-comp. The device, a ubiquitous piece of technology in this retro-future world, was far more than just a timepiece. It was a personal computer, a communication device, a digital assistant, and a window to the vast network of information that permeated their society. For Angella, it was a lifeline, her primary means of navigating the city and staying connected - or, in the past three years, disconnected - to what little life she had left.

Later that day, back in her dimly lit apartment, Angella stared at the name on her wrist-comp screen: Lytis, Private Investigator. A wave of trepidation washed over her, mixed with a desperate surge of hope. It was a long shot, but it was the first lead she'd had in three years.

With trembling fingers, she activated the communication function and initiated a call. The screen flickered, and after a few moments of static, a face appeared - a tall, gaunt man with light orange-red hair and a calm, serious demeanor. It was Lytis.