Chapter 25: Zero-Nine Identifies the Architect's Infrastructure

The corridor smelled of ash and old paper, which meant the Athenaeum terrain had not yet fully released them.

Zero-Nine walked three paces behind Elian and Cass, which put her at the optimal position to observe both their body language and the passage walls simultaneously. The walls were doing something she had been tracking for four minutes: a faint, rhythmic vibration, subsurface, not quite tactile—more the suggestion of vibration, the way Karrath Prime's lower-tier transit lines announced themselves through three floors of concrete before you heard them. The Arena's walls did not have transit lines. The Arena's walls had the data-shadow, and right now the data-shadow was running faster.

She filed this under: significant.