Page 198

Kato held his breath, tuning out the sound of his heartbeat, of Skye’s… There—the sound came faintly through the wall. The distant, hollow drip of water.

The door was reinforced steel and rusted into place. It groaned like a dying beast when they tried to move it, their combined weight and strength jolting the ancient thing until it screeched open.

A narrow hallway stretched away from them. At the end of it, an airlift shaft loomed, its dark opening like the throat of some great beast. Its edges were jagged where the frame had buckled under years of neglect. The platform had long since crashed to the bottom.

But the ladder remained.

Its rungs were coated in grime, pocked with rust, and creaked ominously under their weight as they began their descent.

“Be careful,” Skye said, his voice echoing softly in the enclosed space. “Structurally speaking, this place is solid. Mostly. There weren’t any Gates that exploded in the area. But the infrastructure’s been neglected for two and half centuries.”

“Great,” Kato muttered, glancing at a chunk of stone missing from the wall as he slipped past.

The air grew colder, the sound of water dripping somewhere below growing louder with each rung.

The climb felt endless. Kato wasn’t sure how far down they’d gone—100 feet? 200? The steady echo of dripping water grew ever louder, but it did nothing to mark progress.

“Are we close?”

“Keep going,” Skye said from above.

“What am I even looking for?”

“Taly said we’d know it when we saw it.”

“How?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Held between Skye’s teeth, the lantern’s glow swayed faintly as they climbed, catching on jagged patches of metal and cracks in the stone. It gave Kato something to focus on. That, and not slipping. Or looking down. He glanced down anyway and immediately regretted it.

The shaft plunged into endless black. It was impossible to know how far. Just a few feet down, though, there was the faintest suggestion of something—light, movement, or maybe just his imagination.

“Seriously, this better be it,” Kato muttered as his boots scraped over another rung. “Because if we’re about to find another ladder, I’m—”

The rungs ended abruptly.

He froze, blinking at the sudden emptiness below his feet. The last rung hung twisted and useless over the void, the shaft continuing downward into what looked like endless darkness.

But he was close enough now to see an opening in the shaft wall and a section of floor just beyond.

“I’m guessing this is our stop,” Kato said, shifting his grip. Without waiting for Skye’s input, he grabbed a bent piece of piping sticking out of the wall and swung forward. His boots hit the broken edge with a solid thud, and he straightened easily, brushing red dust off his hands.

“See?” he called back. “Simple.”

Skye followed. He didn’t even bother with the pipe, just pushed off from the ladder and landed beside Kato like it was nothing.

“Show-off,” Kato muttered, but Skye ignored him, already moving into the corridor. The lantern’s light flickered over the walls, the cracked stone, and dangling wires.

The drip of water pulled them onward, out of what Kato could only assume had been some kind of utility station into the labyrinth of the underground city.

The sheer magnitude of it was the first thing to strike him. He hadn’t expected so much…space.

The walls of the cavern were perfectly smooth, carved out by earth magic. Jagged towers of stone and rusted metal rose from the shadows below, their broken tips disappearing into the darkness above. Faint beams of light filtered through cracks in the ceiling far overhead, catching on drifting motes of dust and glinting off shattered glass.

“Wow,” Kato said, his voice low as he took it all in. “It’s like a whole world under here. I mean, I knew the Underground was big, but… wow.”

“Come on,” Skye said, already moving toward the sound of water. The faint drip echoed through the ruins, pulling them deeper into the maze of broken buildings and toppled monuments. The Time crest appeared occasionally, carved into stone or stamped on rusted plaques, a reminder of the authority that had once ruled here.