We leave the hollow. The passage west is not a tunnel in the way I know tunnels. City tunnels have purpose. Corridor to cistern. Vent to cooling shaft. Lower path to abandoned storerooms. Dead ends sealed because someone died there, or almost did, or lied well enough after not dying.
This is different. This passage feels as if it was made by several minds that never agreed on what stone should be.
Zemlja passage has smoothed the lower wall in long, flowing curves. Heat fused the ceiling into rippled glass-dark patches. Cut lines run through both, too straight, too calm, like old hands insisting order can survive anything.
The wrong rhythm comes again and the cut lines hum. Not all of them. Only some of them. A thread of white-gray light flickers through the grooves, then dies when it touches a blackened seam.
I stop. Kavor stops beside me, which is still worse.
“See that?” I whisper.
“Yes.”
“Not all channels answer.”
“No.”
“Broken ones?”
“Some.”
“Dormant ones?”
“Some.”
“And the rest?”
His gaze tracks the line until it disappears beneath mineral crust. “Listening.”
That is not a comforting word. Especially underground.
The passage narrows, then opens into a slanted stretch where the floor drops by uneven shelves. Old dust lies thick in corners. My boots leave marks. Kavor’s claws leave deeper ones, deliberate and silent. He is too large for silence, but somehow he has it anyway.
Cavern-born. Stone-shaped. I thought that meant he knew underground routes. I’m beginning to understand it means more. His people did not simply live beneath Tajss. They became fluent in what the surface forgot to fear.
The sample pulses faintly, and my blood answers. Not really. Well. Probably not really. Something in my arm tightens, a little blue ache beneath bandage and skin.
I don’t look at Kavor. Obviously.
“You feel it,” he says.
I hate him.
“I feel many things,” I say, after a split-second hesitation. Too much of one.
“Sera.”
“My arm hurts. The tunnel is haunted by ancient bad decisions. A zemlja is being herded under my home. Be specific.”
“The sample.”
“No.” Silence. Too much of it. “Maybe,” I snap.
He says nothing. Which is worse than saying something because now I have to imagine all the things he is carefully not saying.
“Don’t make that face,” I say.
“What face?”
