“Toward the City?” she asks.
“Or into a dead pocket.”
“Comforting.”
“No.”
We run. Not fast enough.
Sera keeps close behind me at first, then beside me when the ridge widens. Her arm has worsened. I see it in the stiff angle of her shoulder, in the way she holds her breath on rough steps. I do not offer to carry her.
Yet.
If I offer too soon, she will spend her strength refusing. If I wait until refusal costs more than her pride can pay, she may let me. This is not manipulation. It feels like strategy and care have made ugly children.
The ridge slopes downward near the old structures. The pool continues draining sideways, exposing more of the white-gray machine beneath. It is larger than I thought. Ribs lead into thefloor. Arms extend under stone. A buried body of mechanisms threaded through roots and channels.
The thing below is not beneath the pool. The pool is on top of it. The realization chills my blood.
“It is bigger,” I say.
Sera follows my gaze. “How much bigger?”
“I do not know.”
“Guess.”
“Under the cavern.”
Her steps falter. I catch her elbow. She does not pull away. Good. Bad. Everything is both.
“The whole cavern?” she asks.
“Perhaps more.”
“Under the City.”
I do not answer. She does not need me to.
The old district structures ahead begin to glow along their cut lines. Not blue. White-gray. The network wakes, one line at a time. Stone that should be dead begins to remember its purpose. The purpose may kill everyone above it.
We reach the first broken pillar. A symbol flickers across its surface. I do not know the mark.
Not Cavern. Not any Zmaj script I know. Not City human marks. It might be old Tajss. It might be off-world. It might be both, tangled together by time and theft.
Sera stares only long enough to be furious. “No time to copy.”
“No.”
“I hate this.”
“Yes.”
The upward passage lies behind a curtain of epis. It is healthy at the top, blackened at the bottom where a channel cuts through the root mat. We cannot pass without touching it.
Sera sees the problem.
“We cut?”
