By the time he reached the lower landing his forearms shook with effort. He stepped off the ladder too quickly, hissed through his teeth as his side caught, and had to put a hand on the wall until his balance settled. The corridor ahead was low, concrete-lined, and alive in a hundred modest ways. Green status lights blinked over old access panels. New clamps had been fixed over older pipe joints. A line of water conduits ran along one wall beside thicker insulated tubes that carried something colder; the air around them was sharp enough to fog faintly when he breathed near them. On the floor, worn paths crossed the dust where feet had passed again and again.

He followed the paths.

The undercity did not meet him face-to-face. It let him read it in scraps. A patched glove lay on a crate, fingers dark with grease. Someone had tied strips of cloth around a handrail to mark a turn where no official sign remained. Chalk arrows pointed down one branch, then stopped where the wall had been scrubbed clean. In a recess behind a heat exchanger he found a sleeping place: blankets made from old insulation wraps, folded tight, a metal cup, a child-sized shoe with the sole repaired in three places. He stood over it longer than he meant to.

Up above, breakfast would be appearing on low white tables under fruit vines no one understood how to tend. Here the same world showed its hand in knots, patches, and stripped wire.