Julian didn’t answer the voice.
He descended the remaining eighteen brass rungs with measured, deliberate care. His rubber soles touched the waterlogged timber of the lower deck without a sound.
Behind him came the rest of the crew. Mac dropped down with a heavy, muted thud of his work boots, his right hand resting near the fresh vanadium star-blade on his left wrist.
Elena followed with her medical satchel tucked tight under her arm, her eyes scanning the dark perimeter. Dr. Corvo, Lin Mei, Clara, and Thomas Vance stepped off the ladder behind her, fanning out into an alert defensive semicircle.
They stood inside an octagonal chamber sixty feet across.
The room was unlike anything they had encountered in the concrete corridors of the upper floors.
The walls were paneled in thick, waterlogged ship’s mahogany, salvaged from the first-class staterooms of the SS Covenant. The dark wood was swollen with a century of damp river air, weeping thin beads of salty moisture that smelled of aged varnish, pipe tobacco, and dead sea brine.
Brass-rimmed portholes were set into the timber at six-foot intervals, looking out into the pitch-black silt of the dry-dock shaft outside. Through the thick glass, Julian could see the compressed mud of New Marrow pressed right against the hull, dotted with the crushed brick and twisted rebar of thirty years of civic construction.
