Page 158

"Keep sweeping as we go," I said. "Both of you. I want a warning if that changes."

Nykos rubbed two fingers against his temple a moment later, small enough that most people wouldn't have caught it, but two sweeps in close succession always cost him something and everyone in this squad had learned to watch for the sign.

Jade noticed before I'd finished the thought. She held two fingers up toward him.

"Yes," Nykos said, before she'd even asked the question aloud. "Please."

She pressed her fingers to his temple, and the tight line around his eyes eased inside a minute. Small things. I'd watched her do it a hundred times since she joined this squad, and I'd only recently started noticing how carefully she still asked every single time, no matter how many times the answer had already been yes.

Jade found the blood an hour into the sealed passage, low against the tunnel wall where the worked stone gave way to natural rock again, a dark stain gone dry and old enough to have lost most of its color.

She crouched beside it without touching, the same careful, cataloguing stillness she gave any wound she hadn't yet decided how to treat.

"Human," she said. "Not Skitter, not anything else native to this rock. I'd know the difference the moment I got close enough to actually reach for it, and I don't need to reach for this to already know."

"How old?"

"Days, not weeks. Hard to say more without touching it, and I'm not touching anything in a scene like this until we've properly documented it." She leaned closer without shifting her weight forward. "There's no pool. No spray pattern, nothing consistent with someone dying here or being badly wounded on the spot. Just this, low and smeared, like someone leaned against the wall while hurt, or was moved past it while already bleeding."

"Moved. Not buried."

"Not buried," she agreed. "Whoever this was, somebody cared enough to get them out of here rather than leave them."

That detail sat wrong in the pit of my stomach in a way the boot prints and the ruts hadn't managed. Everything else we'd found painted a picture of concealment, evidence hidden, routes staged, a story built to survive a Warden's cursory glance. This was different. This looked like the trace of an actual person, hurt and carried somewhere by someone who hadn't wanted them to die in a sealed tunnel nobody was supposed to be walking through.

The missing miner. It had to be. Or it didn't, and that possibility was worse.

Alex found the equipment forty minutes further in, in a side alcove carved deep enough into the rock that a careless search would have walked straight past it.

"Corian. You need to see this."

Three crates sat stacked against the alcove's back wall, stamped with a shipping mark I didn't recognize, a stylized mountain wrapped in something that might have been chain or might have been rope, rendered too crudely to tell which. Not Citadel issue. Not Garrison issue. Not, as far as I could tell, anything belonging to a guild I'd ever seen represented on a manifest.

Beside the crates, a scatter of broken tools lay half buried in settled dust, and Alex crouched over them with the particular frown he wore when something practical didn't add up.

"These aren't normal mining tools," his voice held certainty

"Not ours, not Terra Garrison's, not anything standard-issue I've ever seen a Battalion crew carry. Look at the housing on this drill bit. That's industrial machining, not smith work. Somebody brought equipment down here that didn't come from any Crown supplier I recognize."

I picked up the broken length of one tool, turning it over in the lantern light. Alex was right. The metal alone told part of the story, too uniform, too precisely finished for anything hand-forged in a settlement this size.

"Could it be salvage," I asked. "Something scavenged from an older operation, repurposed for whatever they were doing down here?"

Alex shook his head before I'd finished the sentence.

"Salvage looks used. Mismatched, patched, cannibalized from three different sets because that's what was available. This looks bought. New enough that half of it never got the chance to wear properly before it broke."

"Bought from where."

"That's the part I can't answer standing in a hole in the ground with two lanterns and no reference catalogue. I'd need to get a rubbing of that mark back to someone who actually tracks shipping seals for a living."

"Illegal operation," Nykos said, Halver's low body already circling the base of the nearest crate, nose working along the seam where the lid met the frame.

"Somebody's been running something through this passage that has nothing to do with Terra Garrison's supply contracts."

"Or someone's covering for something that has everything to do with them," I said, "and doesn't want the Crown looking closely enough to find out."

Nobody argued with that. Nobody had a better answer to offer instead.