Kavor stops at the edge. I stop too, because our rhythm has learned itself, and apparently my body is accepting bad habits from large alien men. He listens. I watch the floor.
The grooves are thin, too straight, and full of dust. I search for movement. Gray thread. Tendril. Anything pretending to be dead. Nothing. That isn’t comforting.
“What do you hear?” I ask.
“Too little.”
“Again with the bad answers.”
“The old channels carry sound away from us.”
“So this place steals sound too.”
“Yes.”
“The quiet place.”
“Part of it.”
The name crawls along my skin.
The quiet place was a surface warning. Don’t go there. Sound lies there. Children vanish there. Penr heard something and then pretended he hadn’t.
We thought it was a place. Maybe it is a system. Maybe the City has been living beside old hunger with its eyes closed, because hunger in the belly is easier to see than hunger in stone.
I swallow. Kavor looks at me.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I did not speak.”
“You were about to ask if I’m all right.”
“No.”
“You were about to ask if my arm hurts.”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“I was going to ask what you saw.”
That shuts my mouth. At least temporarily. Kavor’s eyes hold mine in the faint blue spill from the sample pouch. “You recognized something.”
I glance back at the chamber. At the cut channels. At the way sound falls into them and does not come back right.
“The quiet place wasn’t just a surface hazard,” I say. “The records treat it like a strange patch. Sound distortion. Cooling drafts. Old collapses. Missing child. People avoid it because people died there.”
“Yes.”
“But it may be part of whatever this is.” I gesture toward the grooves. “The channels. The dead epis beds. The old structure under the basin. If this runs under the City…”
I stop. The thought is too large. Too hungry. Kavor doesn’t finish it for me.
“Can you map it?” he asks.
I blink. “What?”
