“Can you map what you know from here?”
I stare, not because it is a bad question, but because it is the right one. Because he does not say, Sit down, you’re bleeding. He does not say, Let me think. He doesn’t stare at my arm and turn my body into the only problem in the room.
He asks for what I can do.
The ache behind my ribs is worse than the wound.
“I can try,” I say.
He lowers my pack from his shoulder and sets it on a stone shelf beside me, where I will not have to bend. Beside me. Within reach. I shouldn’t notice, but I do.
“Don’t look proud of yourself,” I say.
“I am not.”
“You are doing the quiet version.”
“Yes.”
I hate him. This is becoming unconvincing.
I pull the map roll free one-handed, awkwardly. The injured arm complains when I try to hold the corner down. Kavor reaches but stops. My eyes flick to his hand, and he waits.
Damn him.
“Hold that corner,” I say.
He does, carefully. No triumph. No unbearable male satisfaction. Somehow that makes it worse.
We crouch over the map in the dead-channel chamber, my good hand marking old surface points while he tracks the tunnel directions. The sample glows faintly between us. My bandage throbs. The map smells like dust, leather, and everyone who died before they could revise it.
“Here,” I say, tapping the old basin mark. “First expected sign. Here is the collapsed cistern channel. Here is the quiet-place surface warning. Third sign should be above this general area.”
Kavor points to the chamber wall. “The channels run west.”
“Toward the old lower City edge.”
“You know that?”
“No. I know where the ground stops behaving like surface ruins and starts behaving like a buried structure. There’s a difference.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t sound pleased.”
“I will be pleased quietly.”
“That is still being pleased.”
“Yes.”
I ignore him with dignity. Mostly.
“If the channels run west, and the pulse is traveling through them…” I trace the line, past the quiet place warning, past the old lower City boundary. My finger stops over a blank section.
No records. No route marks. No death names. Blank space on a City map is never empty. It means no one came back with information.
Kavor sees where my finger stops. “What is there?”
