The corridor tightened without visibly changing.

  No seam declared it. No mechanism announced it. Yet the formation drew inward by instinct, shoulders edging closer as the air cooled into a thinner register. Even sound felt rationed — footfalls returning on a delay too precise to be echo.

  Jake's nails clicked against the floor.

  The sound died quickly.

  Griff lifted a hand, slowing the pack without stopping.

  The walls carried a faint vertical grain now, barely visible until light slid across it. Manufacture. A corridor shaped rather than built.

  "Feels different," Archie said.

  "It is," Valley replied. "Processing tier. The system uses this space for something."

  "Used to," Mad said. "Before whatever happened up there happened."

  "Whatever happened up there is still happening," Scarab said. "Just slower."

  They moved.

  Andrea walked third in formation, behind Elin and ahead of Don, sensor wrist angled slightly outward from her body — a habit so ingrained she no longer noticed it. She'd been counting since the ledge. It helped. Integers didn't lie, didn't soften, didn't try to make sense of anything. They just added up.

  "Thirty-one," she murmured.

  "What are you counting?" Archie asked from behind her.

  "Steps since the last junction."

  "Why?"

  "Because the junctions are the decision points. Everything between them is just distance."

  Archie considered that for a moment. "That's either very calming or very grim."

  "Both," she said. "Depending on the junction."

  Scarab made a small sound — not quite a laugh. Andrea had that effect. She didn't try to be funny. She just was, in the dry, factual way of someone who had spent too long in places where sentiment got you killed.

  Don said nothing. His arm had been warm for the last ten minutes — not painfully, but persistently, the silver thread beneath the bandage pulsing at intervals too regular for comfort. He pressed it against his torso when it grew distracting. The warmth faded each time. Returned when he stopped.

  He kept that to himself.

  Jake slowed.

  Ears angled forward.

  The corridor breathed in — barely perceptible, a fractional pressure change — and Griff caught it the same moment the dog did.

  "Close up."

  The formation tightened to near-contact.

  For thirty seconds nothing changed.

  Then the floor opened beneath Andrea's right foot.

  Not a fall. A fold. The panel between her strides articulated inward with surgical precision, timed to the exact moment weight transferred forward. Her next step found nothing.

  She dropped to the knee before instinct caught up. Palms struck composite hard enough to split the skin across both heels of her hands.

  She did not scream.

  "Hold," Griff snapped.

  The formation froze.

  The opening was narrow — barely wider than a boot — but it had no bottom. White filaments glimmered far below, extruding upward with patient deliberateness.

  Waiting for weight.

  Scarab was already moving, dropping flat and seizing her harness with both hands.

  "Got you."

  "I know," Andrea said, voice even. "Don't pull yet — check the geometry first."

  Scarab did not check the geometry. He pulled anyway.

  The floor answered.

  More panels articulated silently, expanding the aperture around her trapped leg with the quiet efficiency of something accommodating a process, not responding to one.

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  "Stop," Griff said. "Scarab — stop."

  Scarab stopped. His knuckles were white on the harness strap.

  Valley drove the phase rig downward. Interference tremored through the aperture rim. The filaments flickered, reached, did not retract.

  Elin dropped beside Scarab, knife probing the seam edge. The blade skated off — surface too smooth, composite too dense, no purchase anywhere.

  "Response latency is gone," Kyle said. His voice came out controlled but tight, the way it did when he was frightened and managing it. "It isn't reacting to us — it's predicting load. It made this decision before she stepped."

  Griff didn't look at him.

  He was doing the maths.

  Load paths. Composite tolerance. How far the aperture could expand before it reached Scarab's position. Whether Valley's interference was doing anything meaningful or just noise. Whether there was a configuration — any configuration — that ended differently.

  The maths kept arriving at the same answer.

  Andrea looked back at him.

  The understanding in her face was already complete. She had done her own version faster.

  "You already know," she said.

  Not accusation. Not fear. Just recognition of a shared conclusion.

  "Don't trade the pack for one variable."

  Griff did not answer.

  Because she was correct, and she knew he could see it, and anything he said would be cruelty dressed as comfort.

  Jake surged forward, harness snapping taut as Elin caught him around the chest. He fought with a sound that had nothing domestic left in it — raw, furious, the noise of an animal refusing the logic of loss.

  "Keep him irregular," Andrea said, watching Jake struggle. Something in her face had softened. "Dogs break their patterns. Whatever that's worth."

  The first filament touched her ankle.

  Amber raced upward instantly — not heat, not pain. Integration. Her nervous system registering contact with something that was neither hostile nor neutral. Simply purposeful.

  Her breath hitched once despite herself. Then steadied.

  Scarab pulled harder, one last attempt, tendons rigid in his neck. The aperture responded, sketching invitation geometry beneath his chest — one more inch and it would make room for two.

  Griff caught his harness and hauled him back.

  "Enough."

  "We can still—"

  "No."

  The word landed with the weight of a door closing. Scarab's face crumpled briefly — one second, no more — then closed down into something harder and quieter.

  Andrea watched the decision finalise in Griff's eyes. Something like relief crossed her face so quickly it barely existed.

  "Good," she whispered.

  The amber had reached her calf now, translucent layers folding with intimate, terrible precision. Her leg had stopped belonging entirely to gravity.

  Griff moved closer until the white line spreading from the aperture met his boots. He stopped there.

  "I'm sorry."

  "Don't be," Andrea said. Then, after a moment: "Count them out."

  Professional to the end.

  He swallowed once.

  "Seven."

  "Good."

  Amber climbed her spine. Her posture straightened involuntarily as the lattice accepted her mass, the way a person straightens when something they've been carrying is finally taken from them. For a moment she looked taller. Lighter. The word for it was wrong — chosen — and Griff made himself not think it.

  "Tell them," she said, her voice smoothing as the material traced her ribs — not slurring, just evening out, the way a recording plays when the source is no longer present — "spacing is survival."

  The sheath closed over her shoulders.

  Archie made a sound that he swallowed before it became anything. Mad turned away, jaw locked. Kyle stood very still with his eyes slightly too wide, the way of someone performing calm over the top of something that wasn't calm at all.

  Her final breath fogged the air near her face.

  Then even that was gone.

  The corridor brightened.

  Not alarm. Completion. An administrative acknowledgement so quiet it was almost respectful.

  The floor sealed with frictionless finality. No seam. No residue. No mark in the composite where anything had occurred.

  Only uninterrupted surface where a crew member had stood.

  Silence settled.

  Jake whimpered once — a sound so small and certain it was worse than anything louder would have been. Elin still held him. She pressed her face briefly into the fur at the back of his neck.

  Griff waited for the formation to compress on its own.

  It did.

  One interval gone. The system adjusted with indifferent efficiency. Somewhere in its architecture, a variable updated.

  Jake pulled free of Elin's grip and went to the place where Andrea had been. He circled it twice, nose working the composite, refusing what the surface was telling him. A low sound gathered in his throat and stayed there.

  Elin crouched beside him.

  "Forward," she said quietly.

  Jake resisted one heartbeat.

  Then followed.

  Mad was the one who finally spoke. He'd been staring at the floor for forty metres and he said it without looking up, voice stripped down to something flat and factual.

  "She counted everything."

  Nobody answered right away.

  "Steps," Scarab said eventually. "She was counting steps."

  "I know what she was counting."

  Silence.

  Archie's breathing was careful and deliberate — managing his ribs, managing everything else at the same time. Kyle had drifted two steps closer to Griff than his usual position without appearing to notice. Don kept his arm pressed to his side and said nothing, the warmth in his stump steady now, no longer intermittent.

  Logged.

  "Don't make them clean," Don said quietly.

  Griff glanced at him.

  "The exchanges," Don said. "Valley said it learns faster when they're clean. So we don't make them clean."

  Valley looked at Don for a moment. "That's correct."

  "Then that's the rule."

  Nobody argued. The formation moved tighter still — not commanded, just adjusted. The body learning faster than the mind what the new mathematics required.

  Ahead, a thin band of light traced across the floor. Jake paused at it, then stepped over. Nothing struck. No filament descended.

  Griff crossed next.

  A clinical awareness passed over his skin — brief, impersonal, the sensation of a system registering the fact of him.

  Elin followed. The shimmer beneath her tagged wrist sharpened without brightening.

  Don stepped across last.

  The silver thread pulsed once — brighter than before, then subsiding.

  A panel woke on the far wall. Pale text assembled without flourish.

  VARIABLE SET: CREW

  COUNT: 7 + ANOMALY

  LOSS REGISTERED: SEPARATION (SUB-LEVEL γ)

  STATUS: CONTINUITY MAINTAINED

  No names. Functions only. Scarab stood in front of it longer than the others, reading the word LOSS until the panel dimmed itself back into the wall.

  "That's it?" he said.

  "That's always it," Griff replied.

  Jake pressed briefly against his knee.

  Alive check. Accepted.

  The corridor widened ahead — not generous, simply sufficient. Making room for what remained.

  Griff carried one thought forward into the wider space:

  They weren't just surviving the system anymore.

  They were teaching it what removal cost.

  "Stay tight," he said.

  The reduced formation moved on — quieter, closer, already adjusting to a mathematics that no longer included her.