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[indent]The air changed as soon as she stepped past the threshold. The warmth wasn’t the steady hum of regulated heat like in the upper levels—it clung like a fever, thick and cloying, as though the walls themselves were breathing decay. These ducts weren’t merely antiquated; they were necrotic, severed from the city’s pulse by decades of neglect. Selene had heard the myths traded in the market: tunnels carved during the colony’s infancy, abandoned when ambition outpaced infrastructure. No surveillance. No patrols. Just a vacuum perfect for contraband. Or corpses.

She’d passed through places like this before—not as deep, not as decrepit—but close enough to feel the shape of danger. There was a high likelihood of her suddenly disappearing here without a trace, with no hope of being found, even by her family. But Selene also knew that disappearance didn’t always mean death. Some simply went off-grid, too deep and too far for even the Council to bother. Others were forced down here—runners, fugitives, or just kids who owed the wrong people too much. In the underbelly of Dominion, vanishing was never clean. It was messy, and it always left behind questions no one wanted to answer.

So, the danger wasn’t the dark, nor the crumbling architecture. It was the uncertainty of walking on a bridge rigged with traps by strangers, decades dead. 

Her boots struck the grating with hollow reverberations, each step flaking rust like dried blood. The metal groaned, its structural fatigue palpable. Above, exposed cables hung like nooses, their rubber sheathing peeled back to reveal copper sinew. One cluster bore scorch marks—a past explosion, or a purge. Selene noted it all, her gloved hand brushing a wall as the metal crumbled slightly, leaving a film of oxidized dust on her fingertips. Ahead, a soft hiss escaped a pressure valve, releasing a thin stream of steam that sliced the corridor like a veil. Selene ducked through it without pause, ignoring the brief sting of heat across her face. Behind that veil, the walls narrowed again—and that’s where she saw, or better yet heard, the first sign something had gone wrong.

A sudden scream tore through the space around her. Selene’s muscles locked, her breath suspended mid-inhale. Instincts honed in Dominion’s underbelly parsed the sound: youthful timbre, raw panic, cut short without echo. Not staged, she decided. Authentic terror had a texture to it, a raggedness no actor could replicate. Her gloved fingers tightened around the case, its edges digging into her ribs as she catalogued the absence of follow-up noise—no scuffle, no whimper, no mechanical whir of a trap resetting. Only the drip of condensation and the creak of fatigued metal.

Selene moved even faster now, because there was no doubt in her mind that the voice belonged to her tail. What were the chances that it was anyone else, given the timing? 

The narrow passage opened just ahead, revealing a section of floor that had collapsed inward, its metal paneling twisted like peeled skin. Selene approached with care. Rust flaked from the edges. A few bolts still clung to the frame, but the rest had been torn free—whether from force or erosion was anyone’s guess. She crouched, angling the black case under her arm and peering into the open void below.

Darkness. A long drop. Then, a weak beam, bobbing just enough to catch on the curve of metal and then vanish again. Not much, but enough to confirm one thing. Someone was down there.

“Hey, Curious Boy, that you down there?” she yelled loud enough for him to hear.

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