Ivan followed the kid back through the eastern corridor at the distance that experience had taught him was the correct distance — far enough that peripheral vision couldn't catch movement, close enough that a turn wouldn't create a gap he couldn't close.
The kid moved well. Better than well. He took the corridor the way someone takes a route they've walked enough times that their feet know it without instruction, which meant he was comfortable here, which meant he'd been here long enough to get comfortable, which meant this wasn't a recent arrangement.
Ivan filed that away. Kept moving.
Three junctions. Two direction changes. Neither of them random — the kid was taking a specific route, not wandering, not exploring. Going somewhere.
Ivan stayed with him.
The corridor narrowed past the second junction, the ceiling dropping two feet in a way that suggested old construction, the kind that predated whatever the Authority had built on top of it. The lighting got worse. One fixture in four was functional, the rest dark or stripped entirely, and the shadows collected in the gaps with the specific density of places that had been dark for a long time.
The kid didn't slow down.
Ivan did, fractionally. A large man in a narrow corridor with failing light needed to be more careful about sound. He adjusted his weight distribution without thinking about it, the way you adjust things that have become structural.
The kid rounded the final bend.
Ivan stopped at the corner. Counted three seconds. Then looked.
A door.
Unremarkable. No panel, no biometric scanner, no lock visible from the outside. Just a handle, old-fashioned, physical, the kind you turned with your hand. Set into the wall at the end of the corridor behind a water reclamation unit that hadn't reclaimed anything in a long time.
The kid had already pushed it open and gone through.
The door swung shut behind him.
Ivan stood at the corner for a moment. The corridor was completely still. The bad lighting hummed its one thin note. Somewhere further back, water moved through pipes that were doing better than the reclamation unit.
He walked to the door. Stood in front of it.
Voices on the other side. Muffled, indistinct, more than two. The specific acoustic texture of a room with people in it who had been in it long enough to stop being careful about volume.
He didn't listen. That wasn't the instruction. The instruction was to find the location and report.
He'd found the location.
He stepped back from the door. Turned around. Walked back down the corridor the way he'd come, the same measured pace, the same weight distribution, the same silence.
At the junction he stopped, produced a small flat communicator from his inside pocket, and pressed the single contact it contained.
Micheal picked up on the second pulse.
"Found it," Ivan said.
A pause. The specific pause of a man updating a picture he'd been building for a long time.
"Anyone see you?" Micheal said.
"No."
"The kid?"
"Led me straight there." Ivan looked back down the corridor. The door was invisible from here, the bend taking it out of sight. "Didn't know I was behind him."
Another pause. Shorter.
"How many voices."
"Didn't listen," Ivan said. "You said find the location."
The pause this time had a different quality. Not surprise exactly. More like a man recalibrating his estimate of something upward.
"Right," Micheal said. "Good. Hold the level until tonight. Don't go back to the door."
"Understood."
"Ivan."
He waited.
"When we go in," Micheal said. "Let me talk first."
Ivan looked at the junction wall. At the bad light. At the corridor that led to a door that led to a room full of people who had between them committed a list of offenses that he had been running since he'd seen the surveillance footage and hadn't stopped running since.
"How long," he said.
"As long as it takes."
Ivan put the communicator back in his pocket.
He found a position at the level's main access point, back against the wall, sight line covering both the entry corridor and the eastern branch, and settled into the stillness that had become structural a long time ago.
He waited.
He was very good at waiting.