They entered the conduit at twenty-two hundred.
The access point was exactly where Kael had mapped it, a maintenance panel in the southeast wall flush with the surrounding surface, distinguishable only by the faint wear pattern around its edges that came from years of use by people who knew it was there and by no one else.
Kael opened it with the tool he'd made specifically for this lock from a memory of the mechanism six years old and still accurate.
He went in first.
Aiden followed.
The panel closed behind them.
* * *
The conduit was narrow and dark and smelled of circulated air and metal and the particular staleness of an enclosed space that had been sealed between maintenance visits.
Aiden had been in tighter spaces.
He had never been in a tighter space where the wrong movement meant a frequency log that would reach his father's desk before morning.
