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I crouched beside it, angling my lantern low across the print to catch the tread in relief. Greymantle's registered miners wore standard Garrison-issue boots. This tread ran differently, narrower channels, a distinct diamond pattern across the heel that matched nothing in that catalogue.

Jade crouched down on the print's other side without waiting to be told what we'd found.

"Voss's people don't wear this."

"No."

"Terra Garrison B?"

"Different pattern again. I checked before we left." Halver's nose dropped lower along the print, and Nykos's voice followed a beat behind, translating rather than speaking.

"Heavier on the left. Whoever left this was carrying something, or favoring an injury."

Alex whistled low from further down the passage, crouched beside a set of shallow ruts pressed into the stone floor.

"Cart wheels," he said, when we reached him. "Recent enough that the dust hasn't properly settled back into the grooves."

I checked the map. The passage we stood in bore no number, no designation, nothing beyond a single faded line marking it sealed off two years prior, back when a partial ceiling failure had made the Warden's office judge it unsafe for continued work.

"That doesn't match," I said, mostly to myself, and caught the habit before it went any further.

We slept in shifts that first night in a shallow chamber near the entrance, close enough to the surface to still feel a trace of moving air, and went back in at first light with the sealed passage as our only remaining target.

The worked stone waited for us that second day, behind a fall of rubble in the same sealed passage, and it was Jade who found the seam that gave it away.

"This wasn't a collapse," she said, running her palm along a section of wall where the rock face changed character entirely, smoother, more deliberate, edges too even for anything nature had a hand in shaping.

"Someone cut through here. Recently, and carefully enough to know what they were doing."

I studied the rubble piled in front of it, and the longer I looked, the less it resembled the collapse it was meant to resemble. Real cave-ins scattered debris the way water scattered when it fell, chaotic, following whatever gravity demanded. This pile sat too even, too deliberately mounded, rock stacked to block a passage rather than dropped by a ceiling that had genuinely failed.

"Staged," I said.

"Staged," Jade agreed.

Halver's low shape worked along the base of the pile, claws scraping at a stone that sat slightly proud of the others, and Nykos's voice carried the rest a moment later.

"Somebody built this to survive a glance and nothing closer," Nykos said. "Look how the smaller rubble sits on top of the larger pieces instead of underneath. A real collapse buries the small stuff first."

"Whoever did it wasn't stupid," Alex said. "Just rushed, or didn't expect anyone to look at this carefully."

"Voss looked," I said. "Voss looked hard enough to write directly to the High General over her own Warden's head. Whoever built this either didn't count on that, or didn't think it would matter."

Nykos had gone quiet several minutes earlier, eyes distant in the particular way that meant he'd reached past the physical space around him into something only he could sense. When he finally spoke, his voice carried an edge I didn't like.

"Nothing," he said.

"Define nothing."

"No minds. Not close, not distant, not shielded in any way I recognize as shielded. I swept this whole section twice." His jaw tightened.

"Whoever did this isn't here."

Jade closed her eyes a moment, her own version of the same search running through whatever sense let her feel a heartbeat through solid rock.

"I'm not sensing anything that registers as human either," she said. "Nothing alive that shouldn't be here, nothing hiding that I can find. Whoever did this either left a long time before we arrived, or they're shielded from me too, and I don't know what that would even mean, since I've never met anything that could hide from this."

That unsettled me more than an actual threat would have. A hidden enemy was still an enemy, still something with a location and a body and a weakness to find. An absence explained nothing. It only meant the danger had already happened and moved on, leaving us to piece it together from what it left behind.