The tower lists like a struck ship. Somewhere above, glass keeps breaking with the delicate insistence of rain. The floor under our boots shivers, steadies, shivers again—as if the building is breathing against its better judgment.
“We go down,” I say.
Dominic nods once. Blood has dried in a dark wing at his temple; the cut makes his face look younger, not softer. He scans the broken mezzanine with a soldier’s eye and finds what I was already praying for: a maintenance ladder half-torn free, a throat of black below it.
“The grid core feeds through sublevel C,” he says. “If he’s inside the system, that’s where he’s densest.”
“Dense,” I echo, because I need the word to be an insult and a map.
We move. My ribs bark each time the ladder bites my palms. The well smells like copper and old
