Chapter 160 - 158 — Twelve Still Standing I

*POV: Christopher*

The stone started moving before the medic had the injured man through the gap.

I felt it through my boots first, a low vibration that came up through the floor and settled behind my knees, and then the dust began lifting out of the grooves around us in thin grey lines.

"Rotation."

Nobody needed the warning twice.

The opening ahead was already narrowing.

Two of ours had the injured man between them, one arm over each shoulder, but the case strapped across his back kept catching against the stone whenever his bad leg failed to clear the step. It had seemed worth carrying twenty minutes ago. Medical supplies, spare plating, tools, enough weight that two people had argued about its position when we packed the loads back home.

Now it was making him slower.

"Cut it."

The Player on his right looked back once.

"The whole case?"

"The whole case."

A knife went through both straps.

The case hit the floor hard enough to open one catch, and something metal rolled out across the stone while they dragged the injured man forward without it.

I was already moving toward them.

Behind us, the chamber had begun to shift.

The mountain did not move quickly at first. That was one of the things Ashford’s report failed to communicate properly, because a sentence about rotating architecture makes you imagine violence from the first second.

It was worse than that.

The beginning was slow enough to make you think you still had time.

The wall on my left started sliding away from us. A carved line that had been level with my shoulder drifted down by inches while another section rose on the opposite side of the passage, and the opening ahead became narrower as two different layers of stone moved past each other.

"Three metres."

The route scout stood beyond the gap, one hand against the wall, calling distance instead of time. Better that way. Nobody cared how many seconds were left if the opening was still wide enough to use.

Muir went through first and turned immediately, reaching back for the injured man.

"Two and a half."

The man’s left foot caught.

His body went down between the two people carrying him.

I got a hand under the back of his armour before his knee struck the edge and shoved upward while Muir caught his forearm from the other side.

The injured man swore into somebody’s shoulder.

Good.

A man who can swear has time to spare.

"Two."

The case we had abandoned slid past behind us as the floor tilted just enough to take it.

Nobody looked back.

The two supporting him went through together, almost sideways, and Muir hauled the injured man clear while I stayed at the edge of the opening and counted the rest as they crossed.

Nine.

Ten.

Eleven.

The last woman came at a run with the stone moving behind her. She did not jump until the final step, because jumping before you have to is how you discover that the landing point is moving too.

Her boots hit our side.

I caught one shoulder, Muir got the other, and the opening narrowed behind her until the two stone sections passed completely out of alignment.

For another ten seconds there was nothing between us and the chamber we had left except a vertical strip of darkness.

Then even that disappeared.

Stone slid into place.

The vibration faded.

Nobody spoke.

I counted again.

Not because I had lost track.

Because there is a difference between knowing twelve people crossed a route and seeing twelve people standing after it closes.

Muir was on one knee beside the injured man. The medic was already cutting through the damaged section of his trouser leg. Four people had their weapons up, watching two separate passages. The route scout was at the wall, checking the markings we had made before the rotation.

The others were still breathing hard, but they were there.

Twelve.

I let myself have that much.

Then I looked at the floor where the supply case should have been.

"Inventory."

Someone started calling losses.

The medic did not turn from the leg.

"We lost the second trauma case."

"I know."

"Then I’m saying it twice."

"That doesn’t make it come back."

"No. It means the next person who decides to get injured should do it selectively."

Nobody laughed.

She had not been trying to make them.

I moved over while she finished cutting the fabric away.

The injury was ugly, but not immediately worse than it had been before the crossing. Deep impact damage around the knee, swelling already rising underneath the brace she had put on earlier, no bone through the skin.

"How long can he move?"

"With help? Depends how much more of this floor you intend to throw under him."

"Give me the useful answer."

"That was the useful answer."

She finally looked up.

"Short distances with support. No running. If the next rotation turns the floor into another race, he becomes everybody’s problem."

He heard her and opened his mouth.

She put one hand flat against his chest without looking at him.

"No."

He closed it again.

Good woman.

I looked toward the passage behind us.

It was gone.

Not blocked. Gone.

There was solid stone where twelve people had crossed less than a minute ago.

Ashford had warned us about that too.

They had used three paragraphs.

Three paragraphs was not enough.

"Five minutes," I said. "Then we move."

Muir stood.

"To where?"

I turned toward the far side of the chamber.

There was another circular mechanism set into the stone there.

Same concentric channels.

Same dark centre.

Another Lockstone.

"First we find out whether Ashford understood that properly."

---

We had seen four of them since entering Floor Three.

The first had been in an Alignment Chamber not far beyond the route Ashford mapped. The second was buried under enough fallen stone that we could confirm the pattern but not touch it. The third had been on the wrong side of a rotation by the time we understood what we were looking at.

This was the fourth.

It sat exactly where two independently moving sections met.

That was becoming difficult to dismiss as coincidence.

Muir came up beside me while the others reorganized loads around the supplies we still had.

"You’re thinking the same thing."

"Probably not."

"That they’re not retreat mechanisms."

"That part."

He folded his arms.

"Ashford used one to retreat."

"Ashford used rope to lower two injured people. That does not mean the Tower installed rope for them."

He looked at the Lockstone.

"That analogy gets worse the longer I think about it."

"It only needed to survive one sentence."

Behind us, the medic was arguing with the injured man about whether he could carry his own pack.

He lost.

I waited until the team had redistributed the weight and then called the route scout over.

"What do we know about this chamber?"

"Beyond Ashford?"

"Yes."

He opened the map on his forearm display.

"Our position is deeper than their last confirmed point. The section behind us has rotated out. There should be another ring past the eastern passage, but the last movement changed its orientation."

"Can we see it?"

"From the far edge."

I went with him.