“The movement is deep,” he says. “Not below the City. Not yet.”
Not yet. The two words crawl under my skin.
“Direction?” Virn asks, stepping away from the table.
Kavor tilts his head, eyes narrowing.
“East. Beneath the outer flats.”
“Toward the sinkline?” Adran asks.
“Yes.”
“Or from it,” Syin says, jaw tightening.
Kavor’s gaze cuts to him.
For a second, I feel the tension between them, though I don’t know its shape. City Zmaj and Cavern Zmaj. Stone watchers and underground trackers. Two kinds of knowing, each pretending the other is arrogance.
“Both may be true,” Kavor says.
That shuts everyone up. Ila grips the edge of the table. Her knuckles go pale beneath papery skin.
“Explain in words that don’t sound like a death prayer,” Ila says.
“The zemlja doesn’t travel like a straight line,” Kavor says. “It circles pressure. Follows weakness. Opens old paths. Sometimes a trail is not where it goes.”
He pauses. My stomach knots because I already know the next part will be worse.
“It’s where it has been called back,” Kavor finishes.
The chamber changes, fear shifting its weight.
“Called?” Marut says. “By what?”
Kavor’s gaze drops to the stone again.
“I don’t know.”
For some reason, that frightens me more than any answer could have. He doesn’t dress ignorance in pride. Doesn’t puff himself up with near-certainty. He says the words like a stone placed on the table.
I don’t know.
And suddenly the City feels too thin around us.
All these layers of old red walls. All these rules. All these ledgers and ration marks and sealed doors. We’ve spent a generation acting like the City is a body strong enough to hold us. Maybe it’s only a shell. Maybe something underneath has finally remembered we’re inside it.
“We need eyes on the eastern sinkline,” Virn says.
“You need fewer feet near it,” Kavor says.
“That isn’t your decision,” Syin says.
“No,” Kavor says. “It’s the zemlja’s.”
Syin’s wings twitch. Virn lifts one hand, and Syin stills. Not obedience. Control.
Another tremor whispers through the floor. I feel this one in my teeth. Tiny, but enough to rattle the slate on the table once. One of the ration tokens near the edge rolls in a slow circle, then tips over. Everyone watches it fall.
