Chapter 11: Ghost on the Grid

The northern passage was a throat.

That was the word that came to Elian when they stepped into it—not a corridor, not a tunnel, but something the city had grown for its own internal purposes, narrow and humid and strung with cable bundles that ran the length of the walls like tendons under skin. The floor was submerged in four inches of standing water. It had a particular color in the neon bleed from above, somewhere between black and green, and it moved without moving, which meant there was a current beneath it flowing somewhere he couldn't see.

He walked carefully. His shoes were already ruined, which he had established as a variable in the first terrain transition and had not mentioned because there was no useful action to take about wet shoes. He had simply catalogued it. He catalogued it again now as the water reached his ankle and then receded and then reached it again.