The iron service wicket clicked shut behind Daro Kesh’s heel. Then, cutting off the orange animal fat light and the clatter of horn scrapers from the unloading bay, the air changed fully. They stood in the inner service hall. A curving passage of dressed black dark rock where the twelve monthly registration lamps hung dark and unlit in their iron wall-brackets. That left only the dim red glow of ember-grates set into the floor. Ahead of them at the end of the hall stood the heavy bronze door of the inner tester vault, and running straight out from beneath its stone threshold—bedded onto thick green slabs of White Heron insulating jade—lay a nonstop, six-inch-wide main bronze floor-guide-rod that connected to a master junction block and twelve numbered brass monitoring plates bolted into the outer granite inner wall.
Seyun took three steps down the dark rock walkway beside the green jade curbing and stopped dead in his tracks just short of the closed bronze vault door.
He didn’t need to kneel and press his ear to the stone. Through the soles of his boots, through the dressed granite partition wall ahead of him, and straight into the open ringing receiver of his Answering Spirit vein, a vast, clashing chorus of human breath struck his chest all at once.
