FREE CITY, SALTMINES — The Saltmines are not a place you stumble into. They are where you end up. A post-industrial no-man’s land stretching across Free City’s northeast edge, the Saltmines are more a myth than a district: crumbling chemical plants, refineries turned squats, and ash-laced air thick enough to leave a taste in your teeth. It's where the city forgets people, and where the forgotten try not to die.
And yet, up a crooked, steel staircase lit only by pulsing red hazard lamps, you'll find something almost like hospitality.
Welcome to The Rusted Halo, a crooked inn bolted onto the top floor of a collapsed refinery. Part bar, part hostel, part trauma ward, it's held together by rust, zip ties, and the terrifying will of its owner: a one-eyed woman everyone here simply calls Mother Ula.
“If it creaks, leaks, or reeks,” Ula tells me, lighting a cigarette with a blowtorch spark, “it’s probably still better than the streets.”
A Room and a Warning
From the outside, The Rusted Halo looks like it was bombed and rebuilt by a blind welder. Inside, the smell hits first: a cloying cocktail of oil, blood, alcohol, and wet salt. Oil drums smolder as makeshift stoves. The "rooms" are welded wire cages with stained mattresses and plastic sheets for privacy. Overhead, flickering fluorescent lights buzz like dying insects. It's hellish. And yet—people come.
“Some of ‘em crawl in with holes in their guts,” says Ula. “Some just need a night of not being hunted. I don’t ask.”
She doesn't need to. Everyone here has a story, but stories are currency in the Saltmines — and Ula doesn’t give anything away for free.
The Matriarch of Metal and Grit
Before she was the innkeeper of the damned, Mother Ula was a field medic during the San Isidro Riots, where she reportedly performed open-heart surgery with a lighter and a spoon. She won’t confirm details, but nods when I mention it.
These days, she does it all: bartender, cook, triage surgeon. Her rules are clear and posted in faded ink behind the bar:
- Pay up front.
- No bleeding on the floor.
- Keep your mouth shut about who you saw.
“She stitched me up and gave me soup,” says a man calling himself Breeze, cradling a cracked rib. “Didn’t even blink when I told her what I’d done. Just muttered ‘not the worst I’ve seen’ and charged me double.”
Weapons are visible but not advertised. Ula keeps a sawed-off shotgun under the bar and a scalpel tucked behind her ear. No one doubts she'd use either.
Guard Dogs with Names
Standing sentinel near the entrance are Skid and Zorro, twin brothers with dead eyes and twitchy trigger fingers. They're drunk half the time and paranoid the rest, but their reputation for violence is near-legendary. For $5,000 they’ll escort you to the Saltmines’ edge. For another $5,000, they’ll make sure someone else doesn’t.
“We don’t kill for free,” Skid slurs, grinning with all seven of his teeth. “But we do offer package deals.”
Why Stay?
It's a question Ula answers before I ask it.
“Because the city doesn’t care. Because there’s no shelters out here. No ambulances. No cops unless someone’s setting fires near the bay. This place—ugly as it is—is the only door some people have left.”
She pauses, scrubbing a bloodstain off the bar with industrial solvent.
“Besides,” she adds, “I’ve buried enough people. Keeping a few alive? It’s the least I can do.”
Salt, Smoke, and Survival
The Saltmines remain a cautionary tale whispered by the middle class and ignored by city officials. Yet even here, there’s life. Not bright or hopeful, but dogged, bitter, and unyielding.
And at its heart sits the Rusted Halo, a sanctuary of steel and salt, run by a woman who’s seen too much to flinch and lost too much to leave.
As I leave, she tosses me a tin of mystery soup and a warning: “Don’t tell them too much. The wrong people might come looking.”
I nod. The Saltmines don’t need tourists. But they do need angels — even rusted ones.
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