Movement flickered at the far end of the bay. Three figures worked in the half-cover between filter columns, lean and pale in close-fitted scavenged layers, heads turning toward him and away again without breaking pace. One pulled a crate free, checked a seal, shoved it onto the lift plate. Another bent over a console made from parts much older than the glassy systems above. Their motions were fast, practiced, and stripped of waste. None of them called out. None came near.

“Who are you?” Elias said, louder this time. “Why are you hiding? The people above don’t even know this is here.”

One of the figures looked up. He could not make out age at this distance, only a white face and dark eyes under the red wash of emergency strips. The person lifted two fingers, flicked them sharply to the left.

A signal. The same kind he had seen the night before.

Then they were gone, slipping through a side opening in a wall of ducts with a speed he could not have matched on his best day, let alone this one.

He moved after them and stopped at the edge of another corridor. Fresh hand marks stained the wall where bodies had turned close. The passage beyond branched three ways. On one side, stripped copper hung in sorted loops. On another, bundles of salvaged plastic had been stacked behind a mesh gate. A little farther in, under a bank of dead monitors, someone had painted a row of short marks in black, grouped carefully, as if counting days or shifts or losses. He did not touch them.