The copied footprints dried before Jiang's breathing settled.
One by one, the dark webbed marks faded from Nerea's cloth until only the outward turn of the left foot remained. That last stain pointed back toward the sealed floor.
"It wants us to follow your weakness," Aylin said.
Jiang rested on his belly with both feet under the towel. Pressure Heart's recovery had left them warm enough to ache and too heavy to trust. He tapped once for agreement.
"Then it can wait until you stop shaking," Devika said.
Nobody argued with her. Aylin held the shaft edge. Nerea drew the landing from the cloth-line slack and her memory of the old rungs. Lucia prepared a broad lamp rather than two competing beams. Matthews tied the return line around the stone bench and tested a release he could manage with one hand.
Jiang ate another strip of fish and hated needing the time.
By the time his breaths stopped crowding, the copied left print had vanished. His shoulder still burned. Devika kept the damaged flipper against his side, then let him stand and judge his own feet.
He managed three careful steps across the towel.
"Landing only," she said. "No second use of your new adaptation."
Jiang gave her one clear tap.
Nerea removed the stone weights. Cold air returned through the seam, carrying damp mineral odor and the faint sweetness of old resin. Nothing in that smell belonged to a festival or a city.
The tile rose on her padded fork.
Below it, iron rungs descended past rough stone to a landing broad enough for two people. The white cloth hung from its edge. No footprints marked the actual floor.
"The marks climbed on the witness we gave it," Nerea said. "The stone stayed honest."
Under Lucia's descending hooded lamp, Nerea took the rungs. Matthews paid out its line while Aylin followed with her green boundary held close to her boots.
Devika folded Jiang's towel into a chest-clear sling. She took the front and looked across him. "Rear support?"
Aylin waited for Jiang's answer.
He touched Devika's wrist, then tapped once toward Aylin. Permission covered the landing and nothing deeper.
They lowered him between them. Jiang kept both feet against the stone, taking part of his weight whenever a rung passed beneath his toes. His rigid body fit the shaft better than a human torso would, but the injured shoulder protested every turn.
The landing received all six of them and the single hooded lamp.
Lucia remained nearest the rungs. Matthews kept the return line free. Nerea recovered her cloth with the fork while Devika opened Jiang's sling enough for him to stand.
Aylin looked down the short corridor ahead.
"That wall should be there," she said.
Black stone rose where the shaft ended.
Its upper edge opened onto an impossible blue evening beneath Rome. Lamps burned along a broad avenue. Their glass cups shed gold over market awnings, canal rails, and hundreds of people dressed in winter red.
Jiang smelled damp shaft stone and old resin.
The crowd carried no sweat, smoke, wet wool, cooked grain, or river water.
At the far end, a royal balcony hung above the street. A silver-haired man stood beneath a black-and-gold banner with both hands on the rail.
Aylin stopped breathing for one beat.
"Father, is that you?" she asked.
King Edric raised his head.
"Aylin Seran," the image called. "You came home for River-Open Night."
Her shadow lengthened toward the balcony.
Jiang struck one webbed foot against the stone. The sound reached Aylin, but her gaze stayed on the man's face.
Edric smiled. "The east wall is whole. The canal is open. Come up where you belong."
Aylin's mouth trembled until anger steadied it.
"You never stood there on River-Open Night."
Across the distance, his smile remained fixed.
Aylin wanted the image. Jiang saw it in the way her body leaned before her boot moved, ready to cross an entire ruined world for the ordinary chance to accuse her father of worrying her. The trace beneath her collar darkened as if Gredudande tasted the want with her.
Devika saw the spreading branches. "The picture is feeding from your response."
"Then I give it one response with a purpose," Aylin said.
Aylin walked one step into the false avenue. Her boot passed through a dropped red ribbon without moving it.
"The royal balcony stayed empty," she said. "That was the point."
Copper cups appeared in the crowd's hands.
"Every correction teaches it more," Matthews warned.
"If I leave this vague, it keeps my father."
"And the next copy improves."
Aylin touched the bruise under her collar, then removed her hand. "So do we. It gave me a clean wall and a king above the work. That tells us what it cannot understand yet."
Aylin faced the counterfeit king. "He worked the lower floodgate beside the canal crews. He wore an old leather apron because opening water is dirty work. The first year he took me, a rusted lever tore both his gloves."
Under her words, Edric's black coat became an apron while the crowd turned toward the canal. Rust appeared across hands that had been clean.
Gredudande was learning in front of them.
Aylin saw it too. She continued anyway.
"The wall smelled of wet lime and hot seed cakes. Children struck copper cups along the parapet when the first water passed beneath them. Half the adults joined late because everyone wanted a cup in one hand and food in the other. The crews cursed whenever the cups drowned out a shouted warning."
Warmth entered her voice for a breath.
"Father dropped his cake into the gear pit. He blamed the baker until I reminded him that he had been the one waving it at a councilor."
Lucia gave the false king a severe look. "A plausible royal defense."
Aylin almost laughed. Grief reached the sound first, but the attempt belonged to her rather than the apparition.
Jiang lowered his breast closer to the landing.
Cold air moved beneath the false street from right to left. The projected crowd ignored it. He pressed his beak to the seam where black wall met Roman stone and tasted grit, damp, and the bitter trace of Nerea's old sealing resin.
His right foot found a shallow channel beneath the light.
Jiang called once into it.
The living two-voice beat ran below the festival. No citizen turned. No copper cup answered. From deeper stone came one delayed copy.
He pecked twice at the channel.
Nerea knelt beside him. Her padded fork entered the same seam and struck open space behind the projection.
"The corridor continues here," she said.
Aylin looked from the counterfeit Edric to the dark slit beside Jiang's beak.
The image offered everything she had named: working floodgate, stained apron, copper cups, wet lime, seed cakes. Her father stepped down from the balcony and held out a gloved hand.
"Come home to us," he said.
Aylin pulled her shadow back one heel at a time.
"Home would have interrupted me by now."
Green light followed the true cold draft along the floor. Where it touched Nerea's fork, the black wall split down the middle.
The false avenue folded like painted cloth.
Market awnings flattened. People lost their faces. King Edric's hand stretched across the closing image until only his fingers remained around Aylin's shadow.
She cut them away herself, and darkness returned to the landing. Rough stone replaced the clean east wall. Beyond Nerea's fork, a narrow stair descended with the true draft and the black core thread.
Aylin leaned against the rungs. The branches beneath her collar had deepened, and her hands shook from holding the boundary.
Jiang pressed his warm side against her boot after she looked down and nodded. The contact steadied neither world, but it gave both of them one honest body in the room.
"It knows the festival now," she said.
Matthews watched the lower stair. "It knew enough to hurt you before."
"Now it knows enough to improve."
From below came the thin strike of metal on metal.
One copper cup answered another, then another, rolling along an invisible wall in the exact rhythm Aylin had remembered. Gredudande added the late clatter of workers missing a warning, a detail it had owned for less than a minute.
Hot seed cake rose in the cold air.