Chapter 7: Four Thieves and a Floor Plan That Breaks Its Own Rules

The station's countdown reached thirty-five hours forty-three minutes and then, with the precise inconvenience of a universe that had never once consulted its occupants, the floor stopped being a floor.

Not dramatically. Not all at once. The central tiles — if they were tiles, if that word applied to the composite material that had been cycling between Varenthal limestone and galactic alloy composite and Casket City concrete and something else, something that did not have a name in any of the four present languages — began to bleed their edges together, the demarcations dissolving the way dye dissolves in water, irreversibly and with a kind of elegance that had no business being here.

Lira felt it through her boots before she saw it. A vibration that was not a sound, a frequency below hearing and above endurance.