The humming didn't stop when they drew their weapons. It didn't quicken, either, or shift, or do any of the things a living thing does when it notices it's been noticed. It kept breathing, slow and enormous, somewhere ahead of them in the dark, patient in a way that felt, the longer it went on, less like a predator sizing up prey and more like something waiting for a scheduled appointment.
⠀
"...It hasn't moved," Armor said, after a long minute of nobody moving either. "Not once. Whatever it is, I don't think it's decided we're worth chasing."
⠀
"Or it's decided we're not worth the effort of moving for," Jianhuan muttered, though he didn't lower his guard.
⠀
Mori's scarf had gone taut, low and watchful, and it was that stillness, more than anything, that gave him the nerve to take a slow step forward instead of back.
⠀
"Prospero. Can you tell what it is yet?"
⠀
There was a pause, longer than Prospero's usual pauses, the kind that meant it was genuinely working rather than building suspense for its own amusement.
⠀
"I'm getting fragments of data," it said finally. "Old maintenance logs, mostly. This isn't a specimen. It doesn't have a heartbeat, or anything close to one." Another pause. "I believe what you're hearing is a standby cycle."
⠀
"A standby cycle?" Yuhuan asked.
⠀
"Waiting to be called," Prospero said. "Which is, historically, exactly what elevators do."
⠀
It took them the better part of an hour to find it, tucked behind a service door none of them would have looked at twice if the humming hadn't led them straight to it: a freight lift, wider than the one that had first carried them down from the surface, its doors seamed shut but humming with that same patient, waiting warmth. A single panel sat beside it, dark until Mori's scarf-light passed close enough to reveal it, one button glowing dull amber beneath a stenciled label worn nearly to nothing.
⠀
FLOOR 10 — AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
⠀
"Floor ten," Roby read aloud, squinting at it. "Just floor ten? Not, like, all the floors?"
⠀
"This wasn't built for people like you," Prospero said, and there was something careful in how it said it, the particular carefulness it reserved for facts it didn't especially want to sit with either. "This was built for moving something specific between two points, quickly, without anyone or anything in between getting a look at it on the way. I don't have the manifest. Whatever it moved, the record's gone the same way most of the useful things in this facility went."
⠀
"So it skips thirty-two floors," Haddler said, already grinning in a way that suggested he'd made up his mind about the whole thing before Prospero had finished the sentence. "That's thirty-two floors of almost dying we could just... not have to deal with."
⠀
"It's thirty-two floors we haven't looked at," Pallas said, quiet but firm, and just like that, the argument that had clearly been building somewhere under all of them for the better part of a day finally broke the surface.
⠀
"We don't know what's on those floors," Pallas said. "We've found things on every single level we've properly searched. Records, evidence, whatever kept the lights on down here... If we skip thirty-two floors of that, we skip thirty-two floors of understanding what this place actually did, and I am not willing to walk past that much of it just to save ourselves a few sore feet. I have to understand this place, Haddler."
⠀
"It's not about sore feet," Yuhuan said, backing him without hesitation. "It's about doing this properly. People died on every floor we've passed through. Walking past their floors without so much as a glance feels like—" he searched for the word, found it uncomfortable in his mouth, and said it anyway. "...Disrespect."
⠀
"Nobility's a lovely instinct," Jianhuan said, arms folded, "right up until it gets somebody killed for the sake of a eulogy nobody down here can hear anyway. But for once, I agree with my brother. Rushing headlong into unfamiliar territory is how careless people end up dead, and I'd rather not add any of us to that particular ledger."
⠀
Armor said nothing, but the way he'd already shifted his stance toward the stairwell rather than the freight lift said enough.
⠀
"Nobody's talking about being careless," Mori said, and something in his tone, quieter than usual, steadier, made a few heads turn. "We've been down here for days, real days, since the loops stopped protecting us from needing food and sleep. Every floor we search properly is another floor closer to running out of both. The thing pulling at all of us, the source, it isn't getting weaker while we take our time being thorough. Every hour we spend down here is an hour it gets to keep doing whatever it's doing."
⠀
"So your solution is to skip most of the evidence," Pallas said, sharper than he probably meant to.
⠀
"My solution is to split it," Mori said. "Half of us keep doing this the way you want, floor by floor, thorough and careful, finding whatever's worth finding. My half takes the fast way down, and we'll try finishing our mission from the bottom. We meet somewhere in the middle with twice as much information as either group could've gathered alone."
⠀
"But what about the failsafe?" Yuhuan asked. "Your scarf is the only thing keeping us from going back to that loop."
⠀
"I've already come up with a solution," Mori said, reached up, and tore a narrow strip free from the trailing end of his scarf.
⠀
The fabric came away easier than any of them expected, a thin ribbon of black and red still smoldering faintly along its torn edge, and for a moment the whole corridor held its breath, half expecting some catastrophic backlash that never came.
⠀
"Pallas." Mori held it out. "Take this. Walk to the far end of the floor, as far as you can get from me and still be somewhere I can see you. Check your watch when you get there."
⠀
Pallas frowned, taking the fragment carefully, as if it might bite him. "What am I checking for?"
⠀
"During the loops, watches and clocks couldn't tell time properly. They didn't stop, exactly, but... they would skip. Like as if someone scrambled them all up." Mori's jaw tightened. "I remember it happening to Haddler's, once. Early on. Before we stopped noticing things like that."
⠀
"I remember that too," Haddler admitted, quieter than usual, checking his own wrist out of pure reflex.
⠀
"If a piece of the scarf still carries enough of whatever's overwriting the failsafe to keep a watch running true, even far away from me, then it's safe enough to split up. If it doesn't—" Mori shrugged, though the gesture cost him more composure than he let show. "Then we don't split up, and we all go the slow way."
⠀
Pallas studied the fragment a moment longer, then nodded slowly, something in his expression shifting from stubbornness into something closer to respect.
⠀
"Clever," he said, and walked.
⠀
The floor was wide enough that by the time Pallas reached its far wall, he'd shrunk to little more than a silhouette against Mori's scarf-light. He checked his watch with careful, deliberate attention.
⠀
He gave them a thumbs up.
⠀
A ragged, relieved sound went through the group, Saoirse actually cheering out loud before Stuffy shushed her on reflex, and Pallas made his way back at a jog, refastening his watch as he came.
⠀
"It held," he confirmed, once he'd rejoined them. "Steady the entire walk. Not a flicker."
⠀
"A genius! So it works!" Yuhuan exclaimed, some of the fight going out of his shoulders.
⠀
"Doesn't mean I like it," Jianhuan said, though there was considerably less venom in it now than there had been five minutes earlier.
⠀
"You don't have to like it," Armor said.
⠀
It took surprisingly little time, once the argument had actually been settled, to sort out who was going where. Pallas made it plain he wasn't leaving a single floor unsearched if he could help it, and Yuhuan, still turning Jianhuan's earlier words over in his head, elected to stay with him.
⠀
"Someone should walk it properly," Yuhuan said when Roby raised an eyebrow at him. "For the ones who didn't get a choice in how they left."
⠀
"Suit yourself," Roby said, though something in how he said it carried less of its old teasing edge and more of something that had started, somewhere over the last several floors, to look a great deal like mutual respect.
⠀
Armor fell in without much discussion at all, the decision so obviously already made in his own head that nobody bothered asking him to explain it. Jianhuan took a moment longer, glancing once at Yuhuan, then at the fragment of scarf still tied loosely around Pallas's wrist, and sighed, long and put-upon, in a way that fooled absolutely no one.
⠀
"Someone competent needs to keep an eye on both of you," he said. "It certainly isn't going to be Cinder-face's replacement dogs."
⠀
"They're good dogs," Leopold said, mildly offended on their behalf.
⠀
"They're on fire, Leopold."
⠀
"That's what makes them good!"
⠀
Armor drew Jianhuan and Yuhuan a short distance apart before they set off, his voice dropping low enough that only the three of them, and Pallas a few steps behind, were meant to catch it.
⠀
"We should be honest about one thing before we split," Armor said. "Our mission isn't just a matter of thoroughness."
⠀
"The Bashnya mission," Jianhuan clarified.
⠀
"Our mission is not theirs to know," Armor said, not unkindly. "Same as yours. Everyone down here is carrying something they haven't told the whole group. I'd rather be honest about that fact, even if I can't be honest about the specifics."
⠀
Yuhuan considered that, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he couldn't argue with it. "Fair enough."
⠀
Mori's group gathered at the freight lift's doors while the others made their goodbyes, a strange, subdued little ceremony none of them expected to be performing this deep underground.
⠀
"You'll wait for us," Yuhuan said, more instruction than question, "once you've found something. Anything. You don't push ahead alone."
⠀
"We'll wait," Mori promised. "We're looking for the same things you are, just from the other end. Antollio's object, any way to shut this failsafe off for good, or a way out. If we find either, we sit tight until you catch up."
⠀
"And if you find trouble instead?"
⠀
"Then we handle it," Roby said before Mori could answer, and something in the flat certainty of it, no bravado in it at all, just plain fact, made Yuhuan actually believe him.
⠀
Saoirse hugged Yuhuan hard enough to nearly knock him over, Arnold shrieking something enthusiastic and mostly incomprehensible about missing him already, and even Stuffy, when it was his turn, managed a grudging "...Don't die. It would be... inconvenient... to explain to the others..." that everyone present understood, correctly, as the closest thing to real affection Stuffy was capable of offering.
⠀
Prospero's voice crackled through a nearby speaker, unusually solemn for once. "I'll be splitting my attention between both groups from here on. I'd ask you all to bear with any delay in my commentary. It's rather a lot of facility to keep an eye on with one voice, even for something like me."
⠀
"Do your best," Pallas said. "That's all any of us can promise down here anyway."
⠀
The freight lift doors ground open at Mori's touch, wide and dark and smelling faintly of something old and metallic that none of them could name. Leopold stepped in first, testing the floor with his boot out of pure habit, then Haddler, then Saoirse, still waving at the others.
⠀
Mori paused in the doorway a moment longer, looking back at Yuhuan, at Pallas, at Armor and Jianhuan standing together in a loose, watchful line, and felt something settle in his chest that was equal parts confidence and dread, the same strange mixture that had been building in him since one-hundred.
⠀
"Floor ten," he said, mostly to himself, and stepped back to let the doors close.
⠀
The lift began its descent, fast, faster than anything they'd ridden since the surface, the numbers Prospero fed them ticking downward in the sudden silence...
⠀
39
⠀
35
⠀
29
⠀
21
⠀
16
⠀
13
⠀
10