“Is it active?”
The rhythm answers for him. Once. Pause. Again. The metal spike warms with white-gray light. Not heat-warm. Signal warm. The air around it tightens. My teeth ache. The sample flares against Kavor’s chest. My bandage pulses blue.
I swear and clap my good hand over the wound before thinking. Kavor’s head snaps toward me.
“I’m fine,” I say.
“You are not.”
“It reacted.”
“Yes?”
“Then glare at it, not me,” I say.
“I am capable of both.”
“Talented.”
The spike hums again.
Kavor moves between me and the wall before I can tell him not to. I don’t argue. There are moments when a wall is useful, even one with opinions and wings.
The hum fades. The zemlja pressure beneath us shifts farther west. Still deep. Still moving toward the City. I stare at the spike.
“Who put that there?”
Kavor doesn’t answer, so I look at him. His face is not a locked door now. It is older than that. More like a sealed cavern or a carved warning. A story repeated so often it became stone.
“Kavor.”
He looks at the off-world metal as if it has insulted the dead.
“My people would say this is how it begins,” he says.
The words are quiet. Not an explanation. A confession.
“How what begins?”
His claws hover over the spike, but do not touch it. “Chains.”
I wait.
Waiting is one of the many terrible skills Tajss teaches. Hunger waits. Heat waits. Bad news waits behind polite doors. I can wait too.
Kavor keeps his gaze on the metal.
“The surface Zmaj called it trade.”
The shift in his voice makes the hair on the back of my neck rise. Not because it’s cold. Because he has gone somewhere I cannot follow, except through what he chooses to give me.
“Epis?” I ask.
“Yes.”
The sample gives a faint blue pulse between us.
“The old surface cities grew around it,” he says. “Harvest routes. Storage vaults. Signal towers. Agreements with those who came from beyond the sky. Protection for supply. Supply for weapons. Weapons for power. Power for more supply.”
