The coordinates led them to Sub-level 11.
Nobody went to Sub-level 11 voluntarily. It was the kind of level that existed because something had to be at the bottom, and whatever was at the bottom had to go somewhere. The transit lines didn't reach it. The Authority's patrol routes skipped it entirely, not because they'd cleared it, but because whatever lived down here had apparently reached a mutual understanding with the system that neither would bother the other.
Wrench led. Riko navigated. The rest followed in the particular silence of people who had agreed to do something and were now in the process of questioning that agreement but had gone too far to say so out loud.
The address on the chip resolved to a corridor on the eastern edge of the level, behind a water reclamation unit that hadn't reclaimed anything in what looked like several decades. The door at the end of it was unremarkable. No lock, no panel, no biometric scanner. Just a handle. Old fashioned, physical, the kind you turned with your hand.
Dokja turned it.
The room beyond was large. Larger than it had any right to be given the corridor that led to it. The ceiling was high enough that the light from Wrench's portable emitter didn't fully reach it, just suggested it was up there somewhere, existing in good faith.
They filed in one by one and stood there.
'Someone planned this very carefully,' Dokja thought, for what felt like the hundredth time since the plaza.
The room was almost entirely empty.
Almost.
In the center, a single bed. Not a cot, not a slab. A proper bed, made up with clean sheets, pillow, the kind of deliberate domestic detail that was somehow more unsettling than anything else in the room. Like whoever had left it had wanted to communicate something specific about the person they expected to sleep in it.
And in the far corner, occupying maybe a tenth of the total floor space, a collection of surgical equipment. Neatly arranged. Covered in a thin layer of dust that suggested it had been here a while, but organized with a precision that suggested whoever arranged it had cared very much about the arrangement. Trays of instruments. A monitoring unit, offline. IV stands. A light rig on an articulated arm, folded down.
That was it. That was everything.
Jax walked to the center of the room, turned a slow circle, and looked at the bed. "Someone was expecting a patient."
"Someone was expecting one specific patient," Wrench said. She was already scanning, her wrist display running its quiet analysis of the room. "The equipment in the corner is specialized. This isn't general surgery." She moved closer, not touching anything. "Half of this I don't recognize. The other half I recognize and shouldn't be here. Some of this is Authority grade. Above Authority grade."
Koshva stood in the doorway, looking at the bed. "How long has this been here."
"Dust pattern on the equipment suggests eight to fourteen months," Wrench said. "The bed is newer. Sheets were changed recently. Within the last two weeks."
The room absorbed that information quietly.
'Eight to fourteen months,' Dokja thought. 'Before I arrived. Before the tutorial failure. Before any of it.'
Riko hadn't moved from just inside the door. He was doing what he did, reading the room the way he read streets, looking for the thing that didn't fit. His eyes moved from the bed to the equipment to the ceiling to the floor and back to the bed.
"There's no dust on the floor," he said.
Everyone looked at him.
"There's dust on the equipment," Riko said. "There's dust on the walls. There's no dust on the floor. Someone's been walking around in here. Recently and regularly." He looked at the bed. "Someone's been coming here to check on it."
Dokja walked to the bed. He stood over it for a moment, looking at the pillow, the clean sheets, the careful making of it. Then he crouched down and looked under it.
Nothing under the bed. Of course not.
He stood back up and looked at the surgical corner. Walked to it slowly. The instruments on the nearest tray were laid out in a specific sequence that he didn't recognize but felt like it should mean something, the way a sentence in a language you almost speak sits just outside comprehension.
He reached out and picked up the closest instrument. Small. Precise. Not a scalpel, not quite. Something designed for something more specific than cutting.
[Unregistered Medical Instrument Detected.] [Classification: Divine Essence Extraction Tool. Prototype.] [Status: Unused.]
Dokja set it back down very carefully.
'Extraction,' he thought.
"We need to leave," he said.
"We just got here," Jax said.
"I know." Dokja turned from the equipment, his face arranged into the particular calm of a man whose mind was moving extremely fast behind it. "Someone built a room to extract whatever is inside me. They put a bed in it so I'd be comfortable first." He looked at the door. "And someone has been coming here regularly to check that everything is ready."
The silence in the room changed quality.
"Which means," Koshva said slowly, "they knew you'd find this place."
"They gave me the coordinates," Dokja said.
"Vance gave you the coordinates," Riko said from the door. His voice was flat. That certain, street-kid flatness.
Everyone looked at him.
Riko looked back at all of them with the expression of someone who had said their piece in the plaza and had been waiting, without particular impatience, for the rest of the room to catch up.
"We need to leave," Dokja said again. "Now."
This time nobody argued.