The shaft swallowed the garden fast. Within ten rungs the morning smell of wet leaves was gone. The air turned thick and old. Rust roughened under his palms. A pipe bundle ran down the wall beside him, sweating beads of warm water that touched his wrist and slid cold under his sleeve. He kept three points of contact on the ladder and tried not to look down for too long, because the red strips below seemed to float in empty space and made the depth hard to judge.

Above him the opening shrank to a ragged gray shape. Once, when he glanced up, Lina’s face crossed it and vanished.

The shaft was not quiet. That was the first thing that changed his sense of it from tomb to system. Low fans came on somewhere beneath him with a heavy turning rush, then cut off. A few seconds later another set answered farther away. Metal knocked inside a duct. Water ticked through a drain channel close enough to hear each drop break. The walls held the sound and passed it along in odd false directions. Twice he paused because he thought someone was climbing below him, only to realize it was machinery taking load somewhere in the dark.

His shoulder began to burn. He shifted his grip, favoring one side, and pain answered from his ribs. The rung under his right foot flexed enough to make his mouth go dry. He tested the next one before trusting weight to it. Old ladder rails, old shaft, active use. That should have calmed him. Instead it made every weakness more dangerous. If this route still mattered, someone would also care who used it.