Halfway down, a side platform opened out of the wall. He saw it first as a break in the red glow, then as a grated ledge with bundled cables snaking into a service tunnel. He stopped, one hand locked on the ladder rail. Something moved on the far side of the platform.

A face. Pale in the red light, narrow, gone at once.

“Hello?” His voice came back to him chopped and thin. “I’m not armed. I only want to talk.”

No reply.

He turned his head, trying to catch another angle past the ladder. A second figure slipped across the opening lower than the first, fast and bent, then disappeared into the side tunnel with a soft scrape of shoe on metal. Thin bodies, quick in the half-dark, watching from cover with the alert stillness of people who expected trouble first and explanation later.

“Wait.” He heard how useless it sounded the moment he said it.

A small sound answered from somewhere below and left of him. Not speech. A click, then another, spaced like a signal. After that, nothing but the hum of the shaft and the faint wet run of condensation down the pipes.

He went on.