My injured arm throbs hard enough to spot my vision at the edges. I ignore it. Kavor notices, obviously.
“Sera,” he says.
“No.”
“I did not speak.”
“You breathed like you were about to.”
“I was going to ask if you can climb.”
“I can climb.”
His gaze drops to my arm.
“I can climb badly,” I amend. “Efficiently enough to be annoying.”
“That is likely.”
“See? Agreement. We’re evolving.”
The emergency signal strikes again.
The tunnel ahead angles upward through old stone split by zemlja pressure. Dry heat seeps down from above, carrying dust, smoke, sweat, and the sour bite of too many frightened bodies in an enclosed space.
City air. My lungs know it before my mind does. Home, if a person is generous with the word. Trap, if a person is honest.
Kavor moves beside me, not ahead, though every line of his body wants to. I can feel it in the way he keeps one claw near the walland one near me, as if the tunnel might make a legal argument he intends to answer with violence.
He doesn’t touch me. Good. Bad. Useful. Pain takes a bite out of my next step. I keep moving.
The tunnel narrows, then cuts sharply right. The stone changes from natural pressure break to old City repair work. I know the difference even before I see the patch marks. Human hands make ugly fixes. Zmaj hands make strong ones. City hands make whatever will hold until everyone forgets to be afraid.
This one did not hold.
A fracture runs across the ceiling, black dust falling from it in thin streams. Someone has wedged old metal braces beneath the worst section, but two have buckled. Fresh scrape marks scar the floor where people fled or dragged something heavy.
The alarm is above us now. Three strikes. Pause. Three.
Then voices. Muffled. Human. I stop. Kavor stops too. My heart slams once, hard enough to hurt.
A woman shouts somewhere beyond the stone. A child cries. Another voice answers, distorted by the passage.
“Lower cistern access,” I say.
Kavor’s head tilts, listening.
“No water in it anymore,” I add. “Not for years. We use the outer chamber for storage when the heat’s bad. Sometimes shelter. Sometimes ration overflow. It connects to the east service hall.”
His eyes shift toward the ceiling fracture. “The zemlja pressure reaches near it.”
The frozen fingers of fear trail down my spine. I clench my fists and nod.
“Of course it does.”
The tunnel opens into a low access crawl, half-blocked by a fallen slab. Beyond it, no red emergency light glows because there is no electricity, no miracle lamps, no powered warning system. Only torchlight. Fire in wall cups. Shaking shadows.
People. Too many. The air carries panic like rot.
