The ash had filled the keyholes.
Harsk pressed one claw into the black crust around the bunker door and felt the metal beneath it. Still warm. Someone below had banked a stove recently. He turned his head once, listening through stone, then drove the heel of his hand into the seam.
The door gave on the third blow.
It had once belonged to a grain office. The painted sign lay face-down in the street, its iron letters swallowed by soot. A row of apartment fronts looked toward the square with every window knocked out. The cull had not left much to search. It had taken the workers first, then the clerks, then the old people who had stayed because their hands shook too badly to run. Four years had made the ruins orderly. Ash in the gutters. Ash in the empty carts. Ash packed into the joints of the paving stones.
There were six heartbeats under the floor.
Harsk stepped through the splintered door without lowering his shoulders.
