He widened his search beyond the clean paths and into the decorative growth no one had reason to enter. The planting was meant to look loose, but the soil gave itself away. In three places he found narrow tracks where stems had been bent low again and again, not by weather but by regular passage. The marks were too straight, too purposeful, and they angled not toward the commons but behind the landscaped ridges that screened the tower from open view.

He crouched, touched one flattened runnel, and found grit pressed into the leaves from shoes or wheels. Not surface slippers, not bare feet. Something harder. He followed it until the trail vanished under a spread of hanging root mesh woven to look decorative.

Ten steps farther on, a pulse of warmth touched his ankle.

He stopped and backed up. There, hidden under a lip of stone dressed with moss and trailing green, a slit vent breathed air in slow bursts. Warm, dry, and carrying a faint metal smell under the sweet garden damp. He held his hand over it. The flow strengthened, faded, returned. Cycled. When he moved away and listened, he heard another vent farther down the line, then another, the breaths staggered like linked lungs.

He stood very still and let the place speak in pieces.