The unmapped corridor ended at a door that shouldn't exist.
Not metaphorically. Not in the sense of unexpected or surprising. Literally — the survey records, which Kai's Null Field had been quietly cross-referencing against the Authority's standard deep-run maps since they entered this section, showed nothing here. Not a blank space. Not an uncharted region. An absence — the kind that only appears when someone has gone into the record and deliberately removed something from it.
You can't accidentally delete a door from the cartography database. It takes authorization. It takes intent.
Kai stood in front of it and thought: Vasek.
Not because he was certain. Because the shape of it fit — the same careful deliberateness, the same quality of someone who understands systems well enough to edit them from the inside without leaving fingerprints. Thirty years of classification work teaches you where the records are soft. Where you can press.
