Sera had spent twenty years looking down through service openings. On Hearth, she finally asked for the passage beneath them.
Doctor Soth did not seem surprised.
“You’ll need different boots,” he said.
He brought her a pair with thick sealed soles, a clean outer apron and a lamp she could fasten above the shoulder. He wore the same equipment. No ceremonial welcome, no argument about whose knowledge belonged in the room. He had read the released tissue findings and wanted to show her the parts his own charts did not adequately describe.
They descended below the care wards while Iven and Rian finished the second bypass assembly above.
Sera heard its bench pump through the stone for a little while. Then the passage turned, the sound faded and the warmer breathing of the host took its place.
The lower chamber smelled of iron, damp mineral and a sweet organic odor she knew too well from Mercy’s injured branches. Its far wall was not a wall. A broad sheath of living tissue curved beneath the city’s supports, crossed by veins thick as her wrist. Human fittings occupied the near edge: drains, sampling ports, a regulator’s padded contact and three housings through which regenerative fluid was collected.
