Chapter 14: Desta Walks the Nightmare Corridor

The stairs going down were the wrong kind of wrong.

Desta catalogued it before she could stop herself: not structurally wrong, not architecturally wrong, but wrong the way a room is wrong when something has been removed from it recently and the air has not yet filled the space. The Pell Mora Building's basement stairs were poured concrete, functional, lit by a strip of fluorescent tubing that hummed at a frequency she felt in her back teeth. Ordinary. The wrongness was underneath the ordinary, the way Colony Harrow's fields had looked perfectly ordinary for three months before the excavation, the way ordinary was sometimes the most precise instrument of concealment available.

She put her hand on the wall at the third step and felt it.