Free Read Chapter Vol. 8
Chapter 91
The corridor was exactly what old infrastructure looked like — pipes overhead, cables running along the walls in bundles, the kind of utilitarian construction that exists for function and nothing else. The floor sloped gradually downward for twenty meters and then leveled out.
Derek walked with one hand trailing the wall. Not leaning on it. Just keeping contact in case his legs decided to stop cooperating.
"The arena is still running," he said.
Kael had been thinking the same thing. Above them, distant but audible through the layers of concrete and soil, the crowd noise hadn't stopped. Muffled and indistinct but consistent.
The tournament was continuing without them. Another match, another story, another two people who couldn't escape and didn't have a drone-killing trick available.
"We can't help them from here," Kael said.
"I know." Derek's jaw was tight. "I'm just noting it."
"Noted."
The corridor reached a junction. Four directions. Kael stopped.
"Your mother," Derek said. "Detention Block C."
"I know."
"The message said forty-eight hours. That was—" Derek calculated. "Maybe six hours ago. We have time. But not a lot."
Kael was already looking at the junction. North corridor had a ventilation draft coming through it — recycled air from somewhere that had HVAC.
That meant a larger space. Administrative, possibly. South corridor sloped down further, which meant deeper into the facility, which meant further from any exit.
East ran parallel to the direction they'd come from — probably circled back toward the arena complex.
West ran straight and had nothing notable about it at all.
"West," Kael said.
"Again with the boring option."
"The boring option kept us alive twice."
"Fair point."
They went west.
*
Eighty meters in, the corridor opened into a room that made both of them stop.
Maintenance junction. The functional heart of the facility's infrastructure — power conduits, water systems, environmental controls, data lines.
Everything that kept a building alive ran through a room like this. It smelled like metal and recycled air and the low electrical hum of systems that never turned off.
But it also had a terminal.
Old. Industrial. The kind that facilities forgot about because they'd been superseded by better interfaces and left running because turning them off required paperwork.
Kael crossed to it. The screen was on. Basic system display — power loads, temperature readings, automated maintenance logs.
And a facility map.
Derek appeared beside him. "There."
The map showed the full structure. Kael found their location — maintenance junction, west sublevel. He traced outward.
Detention Block C was four levels up and two sections north. The path there was complicated — it went through areas that were clearly active, staffed, monitored. Not impossible. Not clean either.
But there.
He kept looking. Found the data that mattered less immediately but mattered more eventually.
The server room he'd touched briefly before the escape — it was directly above their current position.
One level up. The processing facility where Council was storing harvested consciousness. Still running.
He could see the power draw on the maintenance display — enormous, constant, the kind of draw that didn't fluctuate because what it was running never paused.
He thought about the signal he'd touched. The one that felt like…
Riley.
He filed it away. Not now.
"We have a problem," Derek said.
Kael looked where Derek was looking. The map had a secondary overlay — security deployment. Dots indicating patrol routes and positions.
Between their current location and Detention Block C, there were a lot of dots.
Council had anticipated that if anything went wrong in the execution chamber, escaped subjects would try to reach prisoners.
The route to Block C was not an oversight. It was a funnel.
"They're expecting us to go there," Kael said.
"Yes."
"So we don't."
Derek looked at him. "Your mother is in there."
"I know. We don't go the direct route." Kael studied the map. "Service tunnels. They run parallel to the main corridors. They're not on the security deployment overlay, which means they're either unmonitored or they're assumed impassable."
"Why would they be assumed impassable?"
Kael found the answer on the maintenance log. "Flooding. Lower service tunnels have had intermittent water intrusion for three months. Maintenance keeps logging it and nobody fixes it." He checked the current status. "Currently at sixty centimeters in the lowest section."
Derek stared at him. "You want to walk through sixty centimeters of water."
"I want to walk through sixty centimeters of water past the security deployment to reach Detention Block C without being shot."
"I hate this plan."
"Better than the alternative."
Derek looked at the security dots again. Looked at the water notation. Looked back at Kael.
"You're buying me new boots after this," Derek said.
"Easy."
Kael pulled up the access point for the service tunnels on the terminal. Found the nearest entry point — a floor panel twelve meters back the way they'd come, marked on the maintenance map with a small wrench icon.
He memorized the route to Block C through the service tunnels. Committed the relevant security positions to memory alongside it.
Then he killed the terminal's display.
Not turning it off — just clearing the screen back to its default view. Anyone checking it would see normal maintenance data. Nothing to indicate it had been used.
Small thing. But small things had kept them alive so far.
"Ready?" he said.
Derek cracked his neck. The burns on his arm had closed another few millimeters while they'd been standing here.
The temporary bridge Kael had built was doing its job.
"No," Derek said. "Let's go anyway."
They went back into the corridor.
