“Yeah,” she snorts in frustration.
I reach the hall floor, and the heat hits like a hand. Bodies press too close. Sweat, dust, fear, old food stores, and cracked stone. The wrong rhythm pulses up through my boots. My bandage glows beneath the wrap, and people see.
The nearest man backs away. A woman whispers, “She found it.”
Someone else says, “Epis.”
No. Not like this. Not me as the key. Not me as proof. Not me as a cup they can hold under hope and drink from.
I climb onto the first ration platform. Pain tears through my ribs. I let it. Pain is loud. I need loud.
“Stop moving!” I shout.
No one stops. The crowd noise swallows me. Fine. I grab a metal ration tray from the platform and slam it against the stone counter.
The sound cracks through the hall. I pause, then do it again, a mimic of the wrong rhythm, and the floor answers.
So does the crowd. They freeze. Kavor’s head snaps toward me. Oops. No. Good. Useful.
I slam the tray again, then throw it hard across the floor toward the center crack. It skids, shrieking metal over stone, and disappears into a glowing seam.
The floor flashes. Everyone stares.
“Move like that,” I shout, pointing to the tray, “and the floor eats you.”
Silence. Not complete, but enough of it. I point to the north wall.
“The north chute gates are opening. You will leave in lines. Children first. Elders next. Injured after. Anyone who runs goes last.”
A man shouts, “You’re hiding epis!”
“I’m hiding you from a machine that wants enough bodies on this floor to crack it open.”
That shuts him up. Briefly.
Adran steps toward me. “Sera?—”
“No.”
His eyes narrow.
Not now, polished man. Not today.
“I know you’re hungry,” I shout to the crowd. “I know you’re tired. I know you’ve been told all your lives that waiting is survival. I know that if someone says there’s enough below us, every part of you wants to tear the floor open with your hands.”
The hall stills by degrees. Even Adran. Truth is a hook if you put it where the wound already is.
“I felt it too,” I say.
My voice shakes, damn it. Let it.
“I saw the source. It’s real.”
The sound that moves through them is almost a prayer. I cut it before it grows teeth.
“And it’s being drained by something that will use your panic to break this hall under your feet. If you want to live long enough tosee what we found, move slowly. Quietly. Sideways. Not up. Not down. Sideways.”
The floor pulses once. Pause. Again.
