Sera sways, and I tighten my hand on her shoulder. She does not tell me to release her. Her absence of protest hits harder than argument.
“Sera.”
“I’m standing.”
“Yes.”
“Useful observation. Do you have another?” she asks.
“The floor is opening.”
Her eyes cut to mine. Even now, pain white around her mouth, dust in her hair, injured arm clutched against her ribs, she looks irritated. This is okay. I need her irritated. I need her alive.
“I did notice,” she says.
The wall behind the anchor cracks again. Blue glow shines beyond it. It is not faint. Not one strand. Not a sample pulse hidden in cloth. A deeper light. Old. Buried. Waiting.
Sera stares despite herself. I understand. For one breath, even I understand too much. Epis.
A source larger than the chamber we had found. Larger than the dead beds. Larger than anything that should have remained hidden beneath a starving City.
Then the signal anchor pulses again, and the glow beyond the seam flares in answer. Wrong. The light is being located. Not only revealed. Found.
“We move,” I say.
“Toward or away from the ominous opening?”
“Away.”
“No.”
Her voice is flat. I turn on her.
She shifts her gaze from the glow to the floor, the seams, the angle of the crack where stale air spills out. Her mind is not on the miracle. It is on the route.
“We cannot leave without knowing where it opens,” she says.
“The zemlja is turning beneath us.”
“Exactly.” She points toward the channel lines with her good hand. “The signal isn’t just pulling it toward the City. It’s pulling it toward this. Toward whatever is behind that wall. If we don’t understand the opening, we don’t know what path the zemlja will take.”
“We can warn the City.”
“With what? ‘Run from the ground?’ Helpful. Specific. Very reassuring.”
The passage jumps under our feet. I bare my teeth at stone. Stone does not care. Sera grabs the wall with her good hand, jaw locking as the movement pulls at her wounded arm.
“Enough,” I say.
“No.”
“Sera.”
“We need line of movement. Direction. Whether this opens upward toward the City or down into old tunnels. We need to know if the zemlja is going to break under people or under empty ruin.”
My instincts reject every word that keeps her here, but my mind hears the truth. A cruel combination.
She has called me a wall. A wall can be a prison. Devotion must have doors. I hate doors.
