They followed the curve for a few seconds before the corridor straightened again.
The layout didn't open back up the way Eli expected. It stayed tight, the walls close enough that two people walking side by side would have to angle their shoulders. The ceiling hadn't changed height but it felt lower somehow, the way enclosed spaces sometimes did when you had been moving through them long enough that the dimensions stopped being abstract and started being something your body registered. Storefronts still lined both sides, but these were different from the first section. Smaller entrances. Some with partial shutters pulled down at uneven heights, not fully closed, not fully open. Some with narrow glass doors instead of wide openings, the kind that suggested the stores themselves were smaller, more enclosed, the interior geometry tighter and harder to read from the outside.
The crow ring was still warm. Eli hadn't reached for it again, but he was aware of it the way you were aware of a sound you couldn't quite place, a low persistent presence sitting underneath everything else. He didn't say anything about it. Not yet.
Caspian slowed at the first storefront on the right, already angling toward it before he said anything.
"Same as before," he said. "Quick check, keep moving."
Naomi didn't answer, but she shifted her angle slightly as they approached, watching the reflections in the glass instead of the doorway itself, picking up what she could before they committed to going in. It was the same thing she had done at the last store, methodical, the habit already established over the past few weeks of working together on the field.
Eli stepped in behind Caspian.
This one was different immediately.
Shelves instead of racks. Low counters along the walls with mirrors mounted behind them at different heights, some angled slightly downward, some tilted to catch the light from above. Small stools tucked under the counters. Makeup displays running the length of the room, most of them cleared out, a few items still left scattered across the surfaces like they had been sorted through and the rest taken in a hurry, someone making decisions about what mattered and what didn't.
Too many reflective surfaces. Every angle showed something, but none of them showed the same thing twice. The whole store was a hall of fractured views, partial images, depth that wasn't there, distances that looked different depending on which mirror you were reading. It made the space feel larger than it was and smaller than it was at the same time, and standing in the middle of it meant accepting that what you were seeing wasn't the full picture.
Naomi stepped in just behind the entrance and raised her hand slightly. The small displays nearest the doorway stilled completely, anything loose settling in place as she held the space around them.
"Give me a second," she said.
Caspian moved through it anyway, quick, checking corners and behind the counters with the same efficient pace he brought to everything. His focus wasn't on the mirrors. He was moving through the actual physical space, trusting his own eyes over the reflections.
"Front's clear," he said.
Naomi released the space behind him as he passed, letting the store shift again once he was already through it.
She didn't follow him all the way in. Instead she stayed near the entrance again, but her focus moved slower here than it had in the clothing store, her eyes working through the mirrors one at a time, methodically, taking the geometry of the room apart in pieces. "Don't move too fast in here," she said. "You can miss something just off reflection."
"I'm not blind," Caspian replied.
"That's not what I said."
He didn't argue it further. He knew she was right and he knew she knew he knew, and neither of them needed to spend time on it.
Eli stepped farther in, stopping near one of the counters. He caught his own reflection for a second, the image fractured slightly by the angle of the mirror, displaced just enough from where he expected it to be that it read wrong for a half second before his brain caught up. He shifted his position deliberately, using the mirror to check what was behind him instead of looking at himself. The angle was usable. He tracked it, moved to another, built a rough composite of the parts of the room he couldn't see directly.
Nothing moved in any of them. The store held still in every direction it showed.
He glanced toward the back.
There wasn't a full room this time. Just a narrow section with a divider and a short hallway leading to what looked like a storage area, the opening partially blocked by a rack that had been pushed out of its original position and not pushed back, leaving the entrance to it narrower than it had probably been designed to be.
As Caspian passed, one of the loose compacts started sliding off the counter. Eli stepped in and flicked his hand toward it. The compact jerked sideways mid-slide and skidded flat against the mirror instead of falling.
"Nice one, it looks like the back's still there," Caspian said, already heading toward it.
Eli nodded. "Let's check it."
Naomi stepped forward and pressed her hand briefly against the edge of the divider, holding it steady.
"Go."
Caspian pushed past the divider and disappeared for a second. Eli listened. Footsteps. A quick shift of weight. Then silence for a beat that ran just long enough to be noticeable before it resolved.
"Clear," Caspian called.
Eli stepped back out of the store first, giving Naomi room to do a quick check of the back section herself. She came out after him without saying anything for a moment, taking a final look over her shoulder as she stepped through the entrance, the habit of double-checking running through her the same way it ran through all of them by now.
"Nothing," she said.
Two spaces cleared. Nothing found in either of them. Eli tried not to read too much into that, but the absence was starting to feel like its own kind of information. A space this size, with this many places to put people, and they had gone through two stores without finding anything. Either the placement was deliberate and the civilians were further in, or they were somewhere in the sections they hadn't reached yet, or they were somewhere overhead on the upper level, and none of those options told him where to go faster.
He filed it and moved on.
They moved on.
The next storefront sat partially closed. The metal shutter was pulled down just below waist height, leaving a narrow gap low to the ground, the space beneath it dark enough that you couldn't see the full interior without crouching.
Caspian stopped in front of it. "You serious?"
Naomi crouched slightly, checking under the gap before committing, scanning what she could see of the floor inside, reading the depth of the shadows, looking for the specific kind of stillness that meant empty versus the kind that meant occupied. "We still check it."
"Or we skip it and don't waste time crawling into every half-closed room," Caspian said.
Eli looked at the gap, then past it into what he could see of the interior. From what was visible, it was a sports store. Equipment racks, shelves running along the walls, a few lockers along the back wall, their doors in varying states of open and closed. More places to hide something than the stores they had already cleared. The kind of space that rewarded thorough checking in a way the simpler stores hadn't.
"We check it," Eli said.
Naomi reached up and held the edge of the shutter as she went under, keeping it from shifting or dropping further while the others moved through.
As Eli slid under last, the shutter dropped suddenly. He drove his shoulder up into it. The impact didn't bounce or recoil, it just stopped, the weight hanging there instead of continuing down.
"That looked like it hurt," Caspian said.
"Not too bad," Eli said sliding out from under the shutter. "I'm getting more used to it now,"
The space felt tighter than the others. Equipment racks created narrow lanes through the store, some of them slightly shifted out of their original positions, pushed out of alignment just enough to be noticeable. Not chaotic. Not ransacked. Just moved, deliberately, by someone who needed more room to move through a space that hadn't been designed for it.
Someone had already been here.
Not recently. Or maybe recently. He couldn't tell from the racks alone. But the displacement was there, the small evidence of prior presence, and it sat with him differently than the open door had, because this one was subtle. This one you would miss if you weren't looking.
"Watch the corners," Naomi said quietly.
Caspian moved through the first row, pushing one of the racks slightly to widen the lane without asking. "Yeah."
Eli stayed near the center, scanning between the shelves, trying to hold the whole layout in his head at once. His eyes moved over the equipment without registering most of it individually, looking past the surface of things for whatever was underneath, for the shape of the space rather than its contents.
The back wall came into view.
Lockers. A full row of them running the width of the store, some closed tight, some sitting slightly ajar, the doors not fully seated in their frames. Not left open casually. The specific not-fully-closed of something that had been checked and then partially pushed back, the way you did when you were moving fast and didn't want to make noise by letting the door swing all the way.
Eli looked at them for a second before saying anything.
Caspian glanced back at him. "You want to check every single one?"
Eli nodded once. "Quick."
Caspian muttered something under his breath but walked over anyway, pulling one open. The metal door swung out with a hollow sound that carried in the enclosed space.
Empty.
Naomi moved to the opposite side, checking a second one.
Also empty.
Eli took the middle row, opening one, then another, moving down the line with his hand already reaching for the next before the last one was fully confirmed. The rhythm of it became automatic after the first few, the mechanics of checking taking over, creating the space for his attention to sit somewhere else while his hands kept moving.
Nothing.
They worked through the rest of the row like that, each taking a section, the sound of locker doors opening and closing stacking up in the enclosed space. Metal against metal, short and sharp, repeating down the line until they reached the end of it.
"Clear," Caspian said after the last one. His voice had a particular flatness to it, the sound of someone who had been thorough and found nothing and wasn't sure how to feel about that.
Naomi closed the locker she was on and stepped back. "Yeah."
Eli paused for a second, looking over the row again. He stood there with his hand still resting on the last door he had checked, not ready to move yet. Something about the row didn't feel finished, even though they had been through all of it. He could account for every door. Every door had been empty. The logic was clean and the result was clear and something was still sitting wrong about it.
He reached out and pulled one of the lockers back open.
Empty. Same as before.
"Eli," Caspian said. "We just checked those."
"I know."
Eli looked at the inside of it for a moment. The bare metal back, the empty hook, the scuffed floor of the locker where something had sat for long enough to leave a faint mark on the surface. He stared at the mark for a second. It was old, probably, the kind of impression left over months or years by something heavy sitting in the same spot. But it was there.
He closed the locker.
He couldn't explain what had made him open it a second time. It wasn't a thought exactly, just the feeling that something had been passed over, and the feeling didn't go away even after the locker proved it wrong. The crow ring under his shirt wasn't telling him anything new. It was still warm at the same level it had been since they entered the corridor, consistent, directional, present without spiking.
He let it go.
"Let's move," Naomi said.
They ducked back out under the shutter and into the hallway, the cooler air of the corridor meeting them as they straightened up, the temperature difference between inside and outside more noticeable than it had been at the last store. Eli registered that without stopping on it. The stores weren't all the same temperature. That was worth holding onto.
He stepped out first this time and stopped. Just for a second, standing still while the other two came out behind him and straightened up beside him.
He turned slightly, looking back at the storefront they had just come out of.
The shutter looked lower than it had before. Not dramatically, not in a way that would be obvious at a glance. Just enough that when he compared it to the image he had of it from when they first approached, something didn't match. The gap at the bottom was narrower. Measurably narrower, or close enough to measurable that he couldn't dismiss it as a trick of the light or a different viewing angle.
"You see that?" he asked.
Caspian glanced back. "See what?"
"The shutter," Eli said. "Was it that low before?"
Naomi looked at it, taking a moment with it rather than dismissing it outright, giving it the same careful attention she gave everything. Then she shook her head slightly. "I didn't track it."
Caspian shrugged. "It's probably just set like that."
Eli didn't answer. He stood there another second, looking at the gap between the bottom of the shutter and the floor, trying to decide if he trusted his own memory of it. The gap had been wide enough to crawl through with room to spare. It was still wide enough to crawl through. But it was narrower. He was almost sure of it.
He turned forward again. There was nothing to do with it either way. You couldn't act on an almost.
They kept moving.
A few doors down, they reached another storefront.
This one was already open.
Not all the way. The door hung slightly off its hinge, just enough that it didn't sit straight in the frame, the gap between the door and the wall slightly wider than it should have been at the point where the hinge began to take the weight. Naomi slowed immediately.
"Wait."
Caspian stopped, but didn't step back.
Eli looked at the door. It wasn't just open. It had been opened, recently, by someone moving through it without slowing down enough to let it settle back into place. The angle it hung at wasn't from normal use, wasn't from age or wear on the hinge. Someone had pushed through it with forward momentum, without thinking about what they were leaving behind, the way you moved through a door when your attention was already on what was on the other side of it.
Someone in a hurry. Or someone who had already been moving that way for a while and had stopped bothering to cover their trail.
Naomi stepped closer, careful with her footing, reading the same thing he was. "This wasn't like the others."
"No," Eli said.
He looked past the doorway into the interior of the store. No one visible. No sign of a civilian placement from this angle. Just the space beyond the door, and the fact of what the door itself was telling them.
Caspian's expression shifted slightly, something sharpening in it, the loose ease of his usual posture tightening into something more focused. "So someone's already been through here."
Eli nodded. He looked from the door to the floor in front of it, checking for anything else the approach might have left behind. Nothing obvious. No marks he could be certain about. But the door told him enough.
They didn't say anything for a moment, each of them holding the same thought from a slightly different angle. The other groups had been inside longer. They had already covered ground Eli's team hadn't reached yet. The door wasn't evidence of failure. It was evidence of how far behind they actually were.
Then Caspian exhaled, the sound carrying more weight than he probably intended. "Alright. So we're behind."
Naomi didn't correct him this time. She just looked at the door for another second, then at the corridor stretching ahead of them, then forward again. Which was its own kind of answer.
Eli looked past the open doorway one more time, then back down the hallway ahead. More storefronts. More doors. The corridor extending into the same tight, reflected sameness they had been moving through since they turned off the main floor, the far end of it still not visible, still just more of what they had already seen.
"They're ahead," he said. "We just don't know how far."
Caspian adjusted his stance, already leaning forward, his body committing to the next move before his feet had caught up. "Then we stop wasting time."
Naomi hesitated for half a second, running something through quietly, then nodded.
Eli did the same.
They moved again. Faster this time, the pace shifting from cautious to urgent without anyone calling it, the decision made collectively in the space of a breath. The uncertainty hadn't gone anywhere. The ring was still warm at the same steady level, the spatial wrongness was still sitting in the back of his awareness, the shutter that had maybe moved was still maybe moved. None of it had resolved.
But there were civilians in this building that hadn't been found yet, and somewhere ahead of them were groups who were already further along, and standing still while someone else moved wasn't something any of them were willing to do. So they chose to move through the uncertainty instead of waiting for it to resolve, because waiting was also a choice, and it was the worse one.
The corridor kept going.
Eli moved through it with his hand occasionally brushing the ring without meaning to, his awareness split between what was in front of him and what the ring was telling him about what wasn't visible yet, the low steady warmth of it building in a way that had direction now, that had specificity, that was pointing somewhere ahead of them in the tight, familiar, slightly wrong space of the corridor.
He followed it.