The lower service corridor smelled of stagnant brine, damp lime, and cold copper conduit.
Mara kept her shoulder against the masonry wall as Dorian worked the tertiary service hatch. Gideon shifted his Remington against his sound left side; his right shoulder had been struck at the gate and now stayed strapped across his chest.
“Keep it slow,” Gideon murmured under his breath. “The hinges will carry all the way up the ventilation run.”
“It hasn’t had grease in four years,” Dorian whispered back. He didn’t look up. His knuckles were raw from the gate lever above, dark grime packed under his nails from the compound yard. “This intake bypasses the secondary watch desk. But the pressure seals are pneumatic. When the dog drops, the line will hiss.”
The dog dropped. A sharp, wet cough of compressed air vented into the passage, smelling faintly of engine oil and scorched rubber. Dorian held the heavy hatch with his hip, panting softly, and gestured with two fingers into the darkness beyond.
Mara stepped through first, her field ledger pressed flat against her ribs inside her coat.
The space opened not into a hall, but into an arterial sorting gallery forty paces long. Overhead, industrial fluorescent fixtures hung from unpainted steel trusses, half of them dead, the rest pulsing with a low, sixty-cycle hum that vibrated in Mara’s dental fillings. But it was not the machinery that stopped her breath.
