Gellan's palms told him before his eyes did.
Three hundred meters below the garrison level, in corridors that had been Pallid living space before the war and were now archive access tunnels reinforced with Dominion stonesteel bracing, the stone changed temperature overnight. A subtle shift — surface people would dismiss it as ambient variance. But Gellan was not a surface person, and the stone spoke to Pallid hands the way sheet music spoke to trained musicians: in increments so small they were meaningless except to someone who had spent their life calibrating their skin to the language of rock.
Two degrees. Maybe three. The usual baseline in the deep corridors was consistent — stone at that depth held its temperature the way a bell held its tone, steady and absolute, changing only when the geothermal vents shifted or the seasonal water table pressed against the lower fault lines. Neither had changed. The vents were stable. The water table was where it belonged.
