A city where the only honest work is the dirty work, and Nic and Worick are the only two people willing to do it without pretending to be better than they are. The show treats its criminals like actual people with codes, history, and reasons, not villains waiting for a hero to judge them. It builds something real in the margins of Ergastulum, then stops before it can ruin what it made. The ending doesn't close. That's the point.

Ergastulum operates in the margins of society, a city where criminals run blocks and cops collect bribes like wages. Nic and Worick are fixers known as the Handymen, the kind of guys you call when a job is too dirty for anyone else to touch. Mob syndicates and police alike hire them. After a contract to kill a local pimp, they take in Alex Benedetto, a prostitute who was also marked for death, to shield her from those who want her gone. When a cop they know asks them to take down a new gang pushing into a major Mafia family's turf, it looks like another payday, but the job proves far bigger than they expected. The city was once a refuge for Twilights, superhuman people born from a special drug, and an underground group is now hunting them, threatening a war the Handymen cannot avoid.