Chapter 284: Chaoter 275 — Back to the Tower II

It went.

Team Zero took the right-hand passage, and for eleven minutes James had a second set of eyes running the parallel street two walls away, and it was the most comfortable he had felt since he arrived.

---

Then the city moved.

It started underfoot — a low grinding vibration that came up through the flagstones into the soles of his boots and into his teeth.

Ronan stopped dead with his fist up and everybody froze behind him.

Twenty metres ahead, a slab of wall four metres high slid sideways out of the face of a building with a sound like a millstone and crossed the passage and locked into the opposite wall, and the corridor they had been walking toward stopped existing.

Behind them, something opened.

To their left, a staircase they had passed ten minutes ago rotated on its own axis, ground round through ninety degrees, and set its top step down against a doorway it had not been anywhere near.

The dust came off the ceiling in long grey ropes.

Then it stopped, and the silence afterwards was worse than the noise.

`[LABYRINTH SHIFT COMPLETE]`

`[NEXT RECONFIGURATION: 00:14:59]`

James felt for his skeleton.

The thread was still there. Intact, unbroken, the small dumb pressure at the back of his skull that told him the thing was standing somewhere in the dark with its head cocked, alive and perfectly fine and awaiting instruction.

He turned in a slow circle.

"It’s alive," he said.

"Good," said Ronan.

"There’s no way to it." James pointed at the new wall, and then at the place where a junction had been forty seconds ago and was now a blank stone face with a window frame in it. "It’s two streets that way and there isn’t a two streets that way anymore. I can feel it. I can’t reach it."

Nobody spoke for a second.

Cillian worked it out first, and went slightly grey.

"That’s us as well."

"That’s us as well," said Finn.

"If we’d split — if we’d taken two routes and that happened—"

"Then whoever’s on the wrong side is on the wrong side," James said, "for fifteen minutes, or an hour, or forever. On their own. On a hunt floor."

Alice was looking at the new wall with her head tilted.

"I cannot fix this," she said.

She said it flatly, as an inventory statement, the way she had said *that is a great deal* about money.

"I can break the wall," she went on, "and behind that wall is forty metres of packed earth and another street, and behind that is more of the same. I could dig for a week. That is not strength. That is a different problem entirely."

"Yeah," said James.

"I dislike it."

"Yeah."

---

So they did it properly.

Maeve went first, because Maeve read stone.

She started noting the marks — the shallow grooves cut at the base of certain doorways, the difference between the blocks that had been laid and the blocks that had been *fitted*, the places where the flagstones had been worn by something sliding across them ten thousand times.

"That’s a track," she said, kneeling. "That whole run of floor is a track. This one moves."

Ronan marked what she confirmed. He had a stick of chalk from his kit and he put a number at every intersection they cleared, at knee height, with an arrow, and he did it every single time even when they were moving fast.

Cillian stopped watching sightlines and started listening.

"There’s a run-up on it," he said, after the second time. "Before it goes. It’s about four seconds of a hum you feel in your back teeth before anything actually moves. If we’re not standing in a doorway when I call it, that’s on us."

"Can you feel it far off?" James asked.

"I can feel it here." Cillian tapped his sternum, and then, because he was Cillian, said the rest of it flatly instead of letting anyone ask. "Don’t go giving me a job that needs range. My ceiling’s where it is now and it’s not going back up."

Nobody argued with him, and nobody made a thing of it.

Finn tried the other way first, because somebody always has to.

He picked a wall, set his feet, and put both axes into the same point twice.

The stone cracked. Behind the stone was fill, and behind the fill, when he had cleared a forearm’s depth of it, was more stone.

He stepped back and looked up at the ceiling of packed earth and root and the weight of a buried city sitting on top of it.

"No," he said. "Not that. We’d be a month and we’d bring the roof down on ourselves in a week."

And James put a hard leash on the scouting. Nothing further than a skeleton could run and return inside the shift window, no exceptions, and he watched the counter in the corner of his eye like a man watching a tide come in.

---

The second reconfiguration came at fourteen fifty-nine.

Cillian called it four seconds early — "*Doorways*" — and the six of them were in doorways when the city moved.

James watched it from a stone frame with Alice’s wing folded against his shoulder.

A plaza fifty metres ahead closed like a fist. Two whole building fronts slid toward each other and met, and a street that had run north stopped running anywhere at all. Above them, the staircase went round again. Everything Ronan had chalked in the last quarter of an hour went somewhere else, and the numbers went with it, and that was the point of the numbers.

It lasted nineteen seconds.

Maeve came out of her doorway before the dust had finished dropping and stood in the middle of the junction, turning slowly, staff in both hands.

Then she stopped turning.

"James."

"Yeah."

"Number four."

Ronan’s chalk was still there. A white 4 at knee height on the corner block of a passage running east, with his arrow under it, exactly where he had put it eleven minutes ago.

Every other mark they had made in the entire quarter had moved.

"Everything on this junction went," Maeve said. "That one didn’t. Not a centimetre. And look at the floor of it—" she crouched, ran her palm across the flagstones at the mouth of the corridor, "—there’s no track. No grooves. Nothing’s ever slid across that. Not once."

The corridor ran east into the dark, straight, narrow, and older-looking than the streets around it.

James felt the shape of the thing land in his chest.

"It’s not random," he said.

"No."

"There’s a road through it. There’s a road that doesn’t move and the rest of it turns around the road."

"That’s how I’d build it," said Maeve.

Finn was already looking down the corridor with his jaw set.

"Then that’s where the Warden is."

---

James needed a body and the bodies were gone, sealed off behind a shift two junctions back.

Finn solved it forty metres later by taking the head off a stalker that came out of a window frame at Ronan, and James had his hand on its chest before it had finished falling.

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,940 / 3,100]`

The second scout came up thinner than the first, long and low and wrong-jointed.

James walked it to the mouth of the unmoving corridor and sent it in.

Then he stood at the entrance with his hand on the stone and his eyes half shut, feeling it go.

Fifty metres.

A hundred.

Two hundred, which was as far as anything had gone all day, and the corridor kept running dead straight, and the thread stayed thin and clear and steady in the back of his skull.

"It’s still going," he said.

Three hundred.

"Still going—"

Four hundred metres, and the counter in the corner of his vision said 00:09:12 to the next shift, and the corridor was still not turning, and James was starting to smile.

Then the thread went.

It did not fray, and it did not stretch, and it did not fade out the way distance faded, and there was no grinding underfoot and no hum in anybody’s teeth and the counter was still sitting there at nine minutes and four seconds.

It was there, and then there was nothing on the other end of it, and the place where it had been felt bitten off.

James’s hand came off the wall.

"James?" said Ronan.

`[REANIMATED UNIT — DESTROYED]`

"Something killed it," James said.

And out of the dark, from somewhere down the one corridor in this entire city that had never moved, came a sound.

A footstep. Stone under something extremely heavy.

Then another.

Unhurried. Evenly spaced. Coming up the straight.

Ronan put himself across the mouth of the corridor and got the shield up.

Finn’s axes came level.

James pulled the mana up out of his chest with his palms open and the grey light crawling over his fingers.

And beside him, for the first time since she had walked into a shopping centre in Santry with her hands in her pockets, Alice’s wings began to unfold.

She was looking down the corridor with her head slightly tilted and an expression James had seen exactly once before, on a field, with a prince coming at her.

"Oh," she said. "Now that is interesting."