Arcane, Voice of Zaun

[Paul's POV]

From my perch among the shadowed rafters, I watched the confrontation unfold. The warehouse air hung thick with smog that I had so grown used to along with the weighted tension of imminent violence. Jay crouched beside me, his breathing steady yet alert. I could sense his muscles tensing, preparing for what was to come.

"Of course you fucking did," Lloyd said, his words falling like stones into the stillness.

The chemtech knife in his hand pulsed with green luminescence, activating with a sound that reminded me of the ancient machinery in the depths of Old Hungry—a whirling, metallic screech, like nails on a chalkboard.

Prescience tugged at the edges of my consciousness. I had seen this moment before, or one like it—the crests of possibility rolling through my dreams like waves against a forgotten shore. But which crest was this? Which future? The immediacy of the moment pulled me back to the present.

"Do we jump?" I whispered to Jay, my fingers finding the hilt of my own knife secured against my thigh. The metal felt cold, unactivated. Unlike Lloyd's weapon, mine remained dormant—a snake not yet roused to strike.

"No, not yet," Jay replied, his eyes never leaving the tableau below.

Silco stood before Lloyd with the casual confidence of a man who had already calculated every variable. His men were positioned strategically throughout the warehouse floor—thirty against our eighteen. The odds manifested themselves in my mind with mathematical precision: 1.67 to 1. Unfavorable, but not impossible. Yet something told me these were not the final numbers.

"Now, now," Silco began, his voice carrying the peculiar quality of shattered glass being ground underfoot. "No need to start a fight, we aren't animals."

"Then what do you want?" Lloyd's voice remained level, but I observed the subtle tightening of his grip on the knife—a unconscious gesture of preparation.

"Haven't you wondered why, if I have manpower, I sent you to the mines?" Silco posed the question as if he was trying to lead Lloyd to a conclusion. "That amount of money doesn't come easy, even for me."

He paused, allowing the weight of his next words to gather strength before release.

"I want you to join me. You, your members, follow me."

The simplicity of the statement belied its gravity. Alliances in the Undercity were as rare as they were dangerous—marriages of convenience that lasted only until betrayal became more profitable than cooperation.

"And why would I ever do that?" Lloyd asked, though I sensed he already knew the answer. This, too, was part of a ritual of negotiation as old as human conflict.

Silco's hand moved through his slick hair with practiced elegance, the gesture betraying a history spent among those who valued appearances. "Because you should know it best, Lloyd—the enforcers and their cruelty, how we all live under the topsider's boot."

His voice dropped an octave, as his world came with a gravitas that belied his skinny frame. "I want something greater for us, for the entire Undercity, for our great nation of Zaun."

Zaun. The word sounded familiar, or at least looked? familiar I didn't know much myself. It tasted of possibility, of identity.

Lloyd's response cut through my momentary reverie. "Good story, but you know as well as I that in a war against topside, we'll lose. You did once before, didn't you? How did it turn out exactly?"

The accuracy of Lloyd's statement registered in Silco's physical response—a clenched fist, nails digging into flesh, something I could see even from up high in the rafters.

"I prefer to live as I do now, than none at all," Lloyd added, the words falling like a final judgment.

Silco's reply came measured, each word selected with precision. "Sacrifices must be made in the vision of something great."

The warehouse fell silent. Even the ambient sounds of the Undercity—the distant hum of machinery, the drip of condensation from pipes—seemed to quiet down.

Lloyd's rejection came without hesitation. "Still not on board. If you want to do a suicide attempt, go for it, but you're not bringing me or my people into it."

I watched Silco's face carefully, but on the surface it looked as if nothing had changed.

When he finally spoke, his sigh carried the weight of decisions already made. "If you're not with us, you're against us, and I can't have rats running around while dealing with a hound."

The snap of his fingers echoed through the warehouse with uncanny clarity. It was a simple gesture—the friction of skin against skin producing a momentary sound—yet it carried the weight of command, of lives about to be altered or ended.

His thirty men surged forward as one entity, weapons drawn. Silco himself retreated toward the entrance with unhurried steps, a director departing his stage once the performance had begun.

"Jump, dude!" Jay's voice carried urgency, but I had already made my decision.

I shook my head, reaching for a nearby support pillar. The metal was slick beneath my palms as I slid downward I felt my palms protest, burning, my descent faster than intended. Impact jarred through my legs upon landing, momentarily disorienting me. The sounds of the brewing conflict receded behind the ringing in my ears.

When my vision stabilized, I looked toward the exit. Silco had pushed through the doors, but in their momentary opening, I glimpsed what lay beyond—a sea of bodies stretching into darkness, each figure armed, each a potential killer. Not thirty men, but hundreds. We were fucked.

Of course, we had also come with backup if necessary but we hadn't expected Silco to come with so many.

Below me, the Atreides gang rushed or landed on the thirty men, weapons digging at their flesh. Lloyd stood at the center, his chemtech knife leaving trails of green light or smoke as he moved quickly through the crowd. 

I felt a peculiar detachment, as though I were observing the scene from multiple perspectives simultaneously

I—Paul of the Atreides gang, formerly Paul of the nameless mother, now caught in a battle I should have had no business in.

A revelation struck me, in the middle of it all, this moment had been inevitable from the first encounter between Silco and Lloyd. Their philosophies—survival versus revolution—were fundamentally incompatible. One would necessarily consume the other.

Time seemed to slow as the second of Silco's men burst through the giant entrance doors of the warehouse. Metal flashed. Blood sprayed in an arc that seemed to hang suspended in the warehouse's dim light. A scream—whose, I couldn't tell—pierced the air.

I unsheathed my own knife, I concentrated on my vocal chords, a blue string forming in my mind which came along with a voice. My mother's? My own? I didn't know but it urged caution.

Wait. Observe. Choose your moment.

The reinforcements kept coming in with no end in sight. They poured in like a toxic tide, yelling at their top of the lungs, to quell their own fears or incite our own, I had no clue.

In that moment, I understood what we faced: insurmountable odds against a gang from the Sump. The scale of the conflict transcended mere territorial dispute or economic competition. This was Silco's opening move in a larger game—the elimination of potential opposition before his true campaign began, a pawn being thrown to the waste side.

I gripped my knife tighter, my mind cataloging potential paths through the melee. If we could break through to the eastern wall, there might be drainage access. If we could hold our position long enough to form a more orderly retreat...

But these were the calculations of hope against probability. The mathematics of our situation remained stark, we were outnumbered, surrounded, and caught by surprise.

Silco's voice, though he was no longer present, seemed to echo in my mind.

Sacrifices must be made in the vision of something great.

The question that remained, as I prepared to enter the fray, was whose sacrifice this would be—and for whose vision of greatness.