The moment Pasco's head turned, Caleb stopped being in the turntable pit.
He was somewhere cold instead, a flat gray nowhere with no walls and no floor. He understood it without being told, because his father had described it, and Owen had described it, and now he was inside it.
This was the asking, the cold place the thing in the statues put a person, where it sat with them and asked its slow questions until the answers wore down to yes. Owen had survived it for eight months. Pasco had been in it for seven.
Rina's hum was there with him. He could not see her, but he could feel the low junk-frequency note she made, threaded under everything, steady, a sound too quiet to be a threat.
He understood now why the door had never opened for strength and opened a crack for her. Strength was another voice in the cold telling Pasco what to do. Rina's hum told him nothing. It just sat with him, as she had, twice, across two years.
