The entry point was a drainage access panel in the floor of the lower maintenance corridor, beneath a section of pipe housing that had not been serviced in long enough that the service hatch above it had been bolted shut and painted over. The paint was a different color from the wall, which told you when the decision to close the hatch had been made relative to the last repainting cycle. Alden had told her this, and then had shown her that the drainage access panel beneath it was not bolted and had not been painted over, because the drainage access panel was in the floor and the floor had not been repainted, because whoever had decided to close the maintenance hatch had not thought to check what was underneath it.

Things that haven’t been touched in a while stop catching the light right. And the things beneath them get forgotten.

Alden went in first. He went feet-first, lowering himself with the practiced ease of someone who had done it many times, his hands on the edge of the access until the last possible moment and then releasing cleanly without a sound. Seren followed, less cleanly but adequately.

The space below was a tunnel, roughly two meters high in the section directly below the access and lower in both directions, the floor made of the same old stone as the rest of the Hollow’s substrate. The air was cold and smelled of mineral water and old metal. There was no light source; Alden produced a small lamp from his coat, the kind with a directional shield that threw a narrow beam without scattering much in either direction.

He moved without hesitation. That was the thing she had forgotten, or perhaps not forgotten but underestimated — the complete absence of hesitation. He walked in the dark the way she walked through the Ash Annex: every element familiar, the layout existing in his body rather than in conscious recall. He ducked at the third beam support without looking at it. He stepped over a section of irregular flooring without checking it first. He knew where everything was.

“How much of this is there?” Seren asked. Her voice came back flat and close in the tunnel.

“Under Middle Ring? A significant amount. Most of it predates the current administrative district. The Hollow was built in stages, and every stage left maintenance infrastructure that the next stage built over rather than removing. Below Lower Rings it gets more extensive. Some of it goes back to the original construction.” He moved around a corner that Seren had not anticipated. “Watch the ceiling here. It drops.”

She ducked in time.

“The original construction,” she said. “How old is that?”

“No one knows exactly. The earliest Records documentation of Veyr Hollow is about two hundred and forty years back. The infrastructure below that…” He paused at an intersection, orienting for a moment by some means she could not identify, then turned left. “Older. Some of it a lot older. The stone cuts are different. Finer tools or more time or both.”

“Have you been to the oldest parts?”

“Some of them. They’re difficult to reach and not particularly useful for movement, which is mostly what I use the tunnels for.” A pause. “They’re interesting, though. The carvings in the walls change as you go deeper. Closer to the surface, it’s administrative — routing numbers, structural notations. Further down, it’s something else. I don’t know what.”

Seren filed this away.

They had been walking for about fifteen minutes when Alden stopped at a section of wall that looked identical to every other section of wall. He moved the lamp closer and she saw what he had been looking at: a door frame cut into the stone, almost flush with the surrounding surface, the outline visible only because the cut was slightly different from the natural variation of the rock.

“This connects to the Records lower north corridor,” he said. “The room on the routing card is three doors down from the inside access point. You’ll see it on the right side of the corridor when you come in — the door with the broken upper hinge. The hinge has been broken for years, no one’s repaired it because the room is officially unused, but the door opens cleanly if you lift it slightly on entry.”

“You’ve been in that room.”

“I’ve been in most of the rooms on that corridor. It was empty when I checked it last, about six months ago.” He looked at the door frame. “I haven’t been back since.”

Seren noted this.

They continued past the Records access point, moving east through the tunnel system. Alden was taking her to the transit connection point for the High Ring transition zone, which required going further into the network before doubling back upward. He had explained the route to her above ground and she had followed it in her head, but in the tunnels the sense of direction she relied on above ground was not working correctly, and she had stopped trying to track their position and was instead trusting his.

This was uncomfortable in a way she did not examine closely.

He found the camp in a section that had been used as a rest point — a wider section of tunnel near an old ventilation shaft, the floor swept clear of debris, the walls showing the marks of habitation: soot stains near the base of the ventilation shaft where a small fire had been made, a cleared area for a bedroll, several ring marks from containers set on the floor. Someone had been living here, or at least using it regularly.

“Corvin?” she said.

“Possibly. Or someone else. These rest points get used by multiple people.” He crouched and examined the floor near the soot stains. “The ash from the last fire is recent. Within the week.” He looked at the walls more carefully with the lamp. “Here.”

Seren moved closer. On the wall at a low angle, barely visible — scratched into the stone with something sharp, not ink, the marks shallow but clear. A list of names. Six of them. Next to each name, a number and what appeared to be a date notation.

She read them. Three of the names she recognized immediately from mortality records she had processed. All three were listed in the Records as deceased, causes of death varying. One had been listed as an Ashfield collapse victim. One had died of fever two years prior. One had been listed in the mass intake from a flooding incident in the Lower North district.

All three were, according to their Records, dead.

“I processed two of these,” she said. “They’re in the mortality records.”

“But someone wrote their names here recently.”

“The dates next to the names,” she said, looking more closely. “Those aren’t death dates. They’re — I think they’re disappearance dates. Or last seen dates.” She straightened up. “Someone was tracking people who appear in the mortality records but weren’t actually dead when they were recorded.”

Alden stood beside her looking at the list. She was aware of his proximity in the narrow space — not uncomfortably, just as a fact, the way she had always been aware of his proximity as a physical fact rather than an abstract one. They had grown up in small spaces. Proximity had never been remarkable.

She focused on the names.

At the bottom of the list, the sixth name was written in different ink — darker, denser, added after the others. The writing was more hurried than the others, less careful. Beside it, no number, no date. Just the name and a question mark.

The name was Corvin Ash.

“He added himself,” she said.

“He knew he was going to disappear.” Alden’s voice was even. “Or he was afraid he was.” He stepped back from the wall. “He was right.”

They did not say anything for a moment.

“The others on this list,” Seren said. “If they were recorded as dead but weren’t — or if their death records were falsified — where are they?”

“That,” Alden said, “is the question.”

Further along the tunnel, they came to the door that led upward to the High Ring transition zone. Old iron, set into the tunnel wall, with a mechanism that Alden opened with a specific sequence of pressure and release that he explained once without looking at her, matter-of-factly, the way he explained everything.

Before they went through, he paused with his hand against the wall beside the door frame. The motion was small enough that she almost did not notice it — a flat-palmed contact, brief, like checking temperature. She had seen him do it before in the tunnels, at certain points, without explanation.

The wall did not do anything. He did not react. He moved through the door.

Seren followed him through, and noted it, and said nothing.