The maintenance corridor ended without ceremony.
No door. No threshold. Just a place where the walls stopped being walls and became something else — open air, high ceilings, the faint smell of mineral dust that clung to everything this deep in the Source. Kai stepped through and stood at the edge of a wide transit junction, one of the old ones, where three survey routes had once converged before the reclassification reduced them all to restricted access.
Empty.
He'd expected bodies. Not dead ones — he wasn't naive enough to think the intercept team had simply dissolved — but people. Positions. The geometry of a standoff.
There was nothing.
Roan came through behind him, then Orin, then the others, each of them pausing at the threshold with the same instinct — wait, assess, wait — and finding nothing to assess.
"Where are they?" Finn said.
No one answered.
