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We advance forty meters, and the systems begin to notice us.
Nothing hostile. Nothing unfolds from the walls. What happens is that a wall panel on my left brightens as I pass and dims behind me, and then one on Claire's right does the same, and then the pattern starts running ahead of us — two lines of brightening panels, one tracking her and one tracking me, converging somewhere near the vanishing point.
Two. Always two.
"It's counting us separately," Claire says.
"It's counting us as a pair."
One of the Alzohn specialists starts to follow and the panels ignore him entirely. Tomas steps up on Claire's other side and nothing lights for him either. Twenty people move around that corridor for six minutes, and the facility acknowledges none of them.
"Well," Rhyss says quietly. "That will complicate the paperwork."
At 11:20, ninety meters along the spine, we find the thing I will still be turning over years from now.
A junction, and in its floor a shallow basin of the slate material, and set into the basin a lens about as wide as a dinner plate. As we come level with it the lens brightens and a glyph column stands up out of it to chest height.
Claire has the concordance open before I finish reading.
"That's a status board," she says. "It's a live status board. Darius, that block is atmospheric and it's running. That's water. Running. That's a load figure, and it's inside tolerance."
"And the last column?"
She stops talking. Then she scrolls the concordance back and checks it twice more.
"It's a duty roster," she says.
I read the glyphs. The returning-crew mark, and beside it a count.
"What's the count?"
"Two." Her voice is very careful. "It was zero for six centuries. There's a change entry. It went to two on day twelve at fourteen-oh-eight, which is the minute we woke the relay." She looks up. "Something has been running this place with an empty roster since before the armistice, and eleven days ago it wrote the two of us onto it."
Nobody in the junction says anything.
Then, thirty meters behind us, the gate comes down.
Not a slam. The same soundless controlled travel in reverse, thirty meters settling back into the rock, the nearest light bands going down with it until the section we came through is sealed and dark.
Six people reach for weapons. Tomas gets everyone still with two words. Helena doesn't move at all, which I will remember.
Claire is watching the lens.
"It didn't lock us in," she says.
"It closed a door."
"It shut a door behind the crew that clocked on." She straightens, and I feel what she feels half a second before she says it, and it isn't fear. "Darius. It thinks we came to work."
Ahead of us the light bands run away under Paragon as far as the corridor goes, and every band of it already burning.
CHAPTER 11
CLAIRE
Nobody panics, and I credit Tomas.
Inside four minutes he has the sealed section measured, sounded, and downgraded to a secondary objective, counts eleven side branches within two hundred meters and therefore eleven unexplored ways out, and says, loud enough for the party, "Right. We're not trapped, we're inside. Different word, different mood. Move."
