It was an awkward silence between the two as they navigated the Hollow together. Cael, with his pistol back in its holster, walked a few paces behind her. He didn't want to be caught off guard again.
The girl, her swords now sheathed, moved with a predatory grace that spoke of years of practice. He couldn't help but watch the way she moved, a fluid dance of economy and purpose, a stark contrast to his own more grounded, pragmatic style.
Every so often, he'd find himself looking at the back of her neck, where her dark hair was pulled back into a tight, functional knot, a few stray strands escaping to frame the mask.
He felt a strange pull, an unwelcome flicker of... something. He dismissed it. It was probably just the adrenaline.
They reached the edge of the second sector, the place where the amber navigation lines on his device began to fade into uncertainty. The air grew heavier, thick with the scent of ozone and something else, something vaguely sweet and cloying, like decayed flowers. The light from the Ethereal matter here took on a sickly, yellowish hue.
"My Fixer told me this was the last stable geometry before the target zone," she said, her muffled voice breaking the silence. "She said the rest was... unpredictable."
"Mine too," Cael replied, his gaze fixed on the dark opening ahead.
"You know I'm taking this commission whether you like it or not," she said. Flat and certain.
"I know, but I don't intend to give up on it."
"You can't. It's the same object."
"The object has the same client. The Fixer told us different stories around the same core. That means either she double-booked deliberately, which I don't believe, or she has a reason for sending two people into a job that's been burning through contractors, which I also don't fully understand yet. Either way the engine's down there and one of us is going to get to it first."
"Then we have nothing to talk about."
"We have one thing to talk about. The eight people who didn't come out. Good contractors, according to my briefing. Better than either of us by credential, at least one of them."
She was quiet.
"I don't know what's in the third sector. She doesn't know what's in the third sector. That's the thing that should be sitting wrong for both of us. But you can go find out on your own if you want. I'm not stopping you."
She looked at him for another moment, the unreadable mask pointing at him with the specific quality of someone who was very close to a decision and not quite there yet.
Then she turned and walked toward the third sector boundary without another word.
He watched her go.
She moved well, even in the narrow geometry of the second sector, the swords at her back shifting with her movement without snagging, her footfall placing itself automatically in the spots that wouldn't produce sound. Someone who had been doing this long enough to do it without thinking.
She didn't ask my name. I didn't ask hers. That's probably fine.
He turned and went the other way, toward the eastern approach to the third sector boundary that his surface walk yesterday had suggested might be more structurally stable than the central route. He had forty minutes before the Carrot window on the upper two sectors would begin degrading. He wanted to be in and oriented before that happened.
He was two hundred metres from the eastern transition point when he heard it.
Not one construct. Not the lurching, asymmetric movement of an isolated hollow creature following a bio-signature. This was layered sound, the overlapping register of multiple constructs moving in concert, and it was coming from the direction the masked raider had gone.
Then he heard her sword clear its carry. The particular ring of it, sharp and brief in the hollow's ambient hum.
Then the sounds changed quality in the way sounds changed quality when someone who had been moving quietly stopped moving quietly.
She found something. Or something found her.
Not your problem. You told her. She made her choice.
Eight people didn't come out of this hollow.
...Eight. She makes it a tenth.
He was already moving.
* * *
He came around the corridor curve fast and low and took the situation in as a single image: the masked raider with both swords out now in a wide crossing guard, three Ethereal constructs pressing from the front at varying heights, and two more coming in from the flanks that she hadn't seen yet because she was too occupied with the three she had.
The flank constructs were the problem. She could handle three in front. She couldn't handle five from multiple vectors in a space too narrow to fully rotate.
He shot the left flank construct in the mass where its centre of gravity would be if it had one, and hollow constructs at that formation density usually did. The round hit and the construct destabilised, not destroyed but thrown off its vector long enough to matter. He was already tracking right.
The right flank construct was faster and had turned toward the sound of the shot, which constructs sometimes did, which meant it was no longer behind the masked raider and was instead between him and her.
He recalculated in the half-second he had: the corridor wall to his right was dense crystallised Ethereal matter, the good reflective kind, the kind he had been thinking about since he'd walked the surface the night before and identified the Ouyang hollow's lower formations as the compressed, high-density Ethereal type that came from old freight infrastructure.
He fired once, angled high and right. The round came off the wall at a geometry that wouldn't have worked in normal space and absolutely worked here, catching the construct from above-left and driving it into the floor. It went down and stayed down in the way constructs went down when you hit them somewhere between their coherence and their intent.
Two down. Three still on the masked raider.
She had registered him. He could tell because the geometry of her fighting had changed: she was no longer trying to hold all three in front of her in a defensive spread, she was driving left, compressing the angle, using his arrival on the right flank as information and adjusting to it the way you adjusted when you knew you weren't alone anymore.
She pushed one construct hard with a diagonal sweep that made it stumble into the second, bought herself a half-second with the third, used the half-second to step clear of the corridor's narrowest point and into the wider space near the eastern wall.
The third construct followed her into the wider space and immediately had more room to work with than it did in the corridor. She let it commit to an angle, sidestepped with the particular economy of someone who had learned to move as little as necessary and no more, and drove both blades in a crossing line that took it across the coherence point and left it dispersing into loose Ethereal particles that drifted without purpose.
The first two constructs had recovered from each other. They were slower now, the structural disruption of colliding with one another slowing their recalibration cycle, and she handled the first while he managed the second from range, walking his shot off the same eastern wall at a lower angle. The round redirected cleanly. The construct came apart.
Then it was quiet.
The hollow's ambient hum resumed its patient register. Somewhere deeper, below the third sector threshold where the Carrot data's amber lines turned to dots and then to nothing, the geometry shifted in the slow, deliberate way of a hollow that knew it was being visited and had not yet decided what it thought of that.
He reloaded.
She was facing him. Both swords still out, tips lowered but not sheathed. The mask pointed at him, and the body language underneath it was doing several things simultaneously: catching breath, reassessing, and constructing something that might have been reluctant acknowledgment.
"You followed me," she said.
"I heard five constructs."
"I had three."
"You had three in front. You had two more on the flanks that you hadn't seen yet."
A beat of silence.
"I would have seen them."
"Probably. But five in a space that tight doesn't leave a lot of room for probably."
She looked at him for a moment. Then she looked at the wall he'd used for the ricochet, tracking the geometry of what the round had done, working backward from the impact point to where he must have been standing when he fired it.
"That shot came off the wall."
"Yes."
"You aimed it off the wall on purpose."
"Yes."
"In the middle of a moving engagement."
"The direct line was occupied by you. I needed a different line."
She said nothing for a moment. Then she sheathed one sword, not the second, which was a compromise he respected: not fully disarmed, not fully hostile.
"I don't know your name," she said.
"Cael."
"Paz." She paused. "You said eight people didn't come out of this hollow."
"Yes."
"And we're both down here looking for the same engine."
"Yes."
"And neither of us knows what's in the third sector."
"That's the one we're about to walk into, so."
She looked at the third sector boundary: the point where the amber lines on his navigation unit turned dotted and then stopped, the threshold past which the Carrot data became a record of what the hollow had been and not a chart of what it currently was. Somewhere past it, in geometry that shifted faster than maps could follow, an S-rank W-engine was sitting in whatever the hollow had done with the space that used to be the Ouyang freight corridor's sub-basement three.
Nine people had gone past that threshold.
None of them had come back.
From the darkness beyond the boundary line, the hollow's ambient hum dropped half a register, the way it did when something further in was paying attention, and then a sound came through that was not the geometry and not a construct that either of them had seen before: low, layered, with a resonance that the crystallised walls passed on to their feet through the floor.
Multiple constructs. A lot of them. Stationary for now, oriented toward the boundary line, toward the place where two people were standing and deciding.
Paz drew the second sword.
"If I wanted a partner," she said, "you're not who I would have picked."
"Good thing you don't get a choice," Cael said.
The boundary line was five metres in front of them and whatever was waiting beyond it had just decided to stop waiting.
He raised his revolver which has the inscription 'Grampa'. The metal was cold in the hollow's damp air, a familiar and grounding weight. The inscription on the barrel, a name she couldn't see, was worn smooth from years of handling.
"We go in together, or we don't go in at all," she said, her muffled voice tight. "I'm not getting blindsided from behind because you decided to take your own route."
"I wasn't planning on it."
"You were thinking it."
"I think a lot of things. What matters is what I do."
The humming intensified. A faint vibration started in the floor, a tremor you felt more than heard. The third sector was getting more active.
"Now," she said.
They crossed the boundary together.
The third sector of the Ouyang hollow was not a place. It was a process.
The Carrot data had stopped at the line for a reason. Past it, the geometry was not so much unstable as it was undecided, a space where the ghost of the old freight corridor was being continuously rewritten by the hollow's Ethereal matter in real-time.
Walls formed and unformed in slow, crystalline waves. The floor shifted under their feet, a subtle, unsettling motion that made you constantly re-balance. Here and there, patches of open space opened up into blackness, into nothing, and then sealed over again with the same deliberate slowness.