The inner residential quarter lay beneath a descending network of narrower corridors. The ceilings lowered gradually, the stone giving way to simpler surfaces, worn not by time, but by former presence. Alcoves lined the walls. Doorways opened into small chambers with shallow recesses, low platforms, the faint outlines of spaces once meant for living.
The city felt different here.
Closer.
Less monumental.
The air carried a faint dustiness, the smell of stone that had been closed too long. When Ira brushed her fingers along one wall, a fine residue clung to her skin. She rubbed it against her jeans without thinking.
"These were occupied before the preservation was completed," Devansh said quietly. "Before emotion was fully externalized into structure."
Meera stepped into one of the chambers, peering inside. "They look like dorm rooms."
Rehaan snorted softly. "Immortal dorm rooms."
Ira walked into the same chamber. It was small. The ceiling sloped. The stone platform that likely once held bedding was chipped at the corners. She sat down on it, testing its solidity.
It was cold.
But it held.
"This feels…" Meera searched for the word. "Less watched."
Ira nodded. She felt it too. The city's awareness still moved here, but without the same coherence. As though the old residential layers carried impressions that resisted easy classification.
"These places were designed for unpredictability," Devansh said. "For unregulated existence. The city learned later how to remove that."
Ira looked around the small room. "Then these are the parts of it that never learned to be a system."
Rehaan leaned against the doorway. "Which makes them excellent places to hide a problem."
Ira smiled faintly at that.
They spread out, choosing nearby chambers. Nothing elaborate. Just spaces where they could sit, leave things, exist. Rehaan disappeared down one passage and returned with a bundle of cloths and a few objects he'd scavenged over time: a dented metal cup, a strip of dark leather, a cracked tile he'd once said looked like a map.
He set them down without ceremony.
Meera sat cross-legged on the stone floor of the adjacent room, pulling her knees close. "I didn't realize how tired I was until we stopped."
Ira felt it then, too. The fatigue that came not from exertion, but from constant internal attention. She lowered herself back onto the platform and let her shoulders slump.
Devansh stood in the doorway, watching the corridor rather than them.
"Sit," Ira said.
He hesitated.
Then he did.
The movement looked almost strange, as though his body had to remember how.
He sat on the edge of the platform opposite her, forearms resting on his thighs, hands loose rather than ready.
Silence settled.
Not the vast, resonant silence of the upper city.
A smaller one.
The kind that forms around people.
Ira became aware of small things. The faint sound of Meera shifting next door. The way dust clung to the skin at her wrists. The way Devansh's presence no longer dominated the room but shared it.
"This is what changes look like," she said quietly. "They don't start with battles. They start with rearranging how people sit."
Rehaan's voice came faintly from the corridor. "You always narrate like this, or is it new?"
She huffed a small breath. "It's new."
Devansh glanced at her. "It is accurate."
She leaned back against the wall, letting the coolness settle between her shoulder blades.
For the first time since the Scribes' pressure had begun, the tightness in the air eased slightly.
And somewhere beyond the hidden city, instruments designed to read structural anomalies began returning data that made less and less sense.