The tunnel didn't change all at once.
That would've been easy.
One step, normal. Next step, wrong.
Instead, it shifted in little ways.
The way the sound of their boots stopped matching the distance they'd walked.
The way CATACOMB's flashlight beam seemed to stretch farther than it should and then snap back when she looked directly at it.
The way FULCRUM's internal clock kept insisting they'd been on this stretch for three minutes when his HUD timer said ninety seconds.
"Angle still off?" he asked quietly.
"Inclinometer says four degrees," CATACOMB said. "Plans say three. My stomach says 'go home.'"
Ahead, Zeta-9's point man dropped another marker puck.
"Tag two," CATACOMB reported. "Geometry weirdness: mild. Time stamps: twitchy, but no hard jumps."
"Logged," FUSE said from the command van. "If the tunnel starts bending so hard it eats itself, I'll throw confetti on your map."
"Please don't," CATACOMB said. "We've already got enough noise."
FULCRUM kept to his position at the hinge—far enough down that the weird pressed against his skin, close enough to the ladder that daylight still felt like something he could reach if he needed to.
Above him, unseen but not unfelt, KESTREL held Nu-7's upper anchor.
"Any sensation of drag?" PATCH asked over MedIntel band. "Sluggish movement, vertigo, déjà vu?"
"Yes," FULCRUM said.
A pause.
"Clarify," Patch said. Her tone was dry but tighter than usual.
"Feels like the corridor is longer than it looks," he said. "Like we're walking in place and moving forward at the same time."
"Okay," she said. "Vitals are elevated but within normal range for current exertion. Keep talking if it gets worse. Don't be stoic at me."
He almost said That's my job.
Instead he said, "Understood."
The first real slip came without fanfare.
One blink, CATACOMB was ahead of him by three steps.
Next blink, she was ten meters away.
"CATACOMB , hold," he snapped.
She froze.
"What?" she said.
"You jumped," he said.
"I walked," she said.
His HUD rewound the last few seconds automatically.
On the replay, her position marker hopped like a frame skip.
"Time stamp on your cam just dropped three seconds," FUSE said. "We lost a slice."
"Only three?" CATACOMB asked.
"For now," FUSE said.
FULCRUM moved up until he was at her side again.
"Stay within reach," he said.
"You volunteering to be my emotional support Nu-7?" she said.
"Yes," he said.
She snorted softly.
"Greedy," she said. "I thought Kestrel had that slot."
"She's topside," he said. "You've got me."
"Lucky me," CATACOMB murmured.
On a private band, Kestrel's voice came, quiet.
"Did you just call yourself her emotional support?" she asked.
"I said 'support,'" he said. "You added the rest."
"Semantics," she said. "Don't die."
"I'm working on it," he said.
They found the first sign of the unauthorized shaft fifteen minutes later.
Graffiti changed.
The earlier tags had been the usual station scrawl—initials, crude drawings, political slogans.
Here, the paint was fresher. Colors brighter.
A cartoon train with teeth. A door drawn on concrete where no door existed. A stick figure falling into a spiraling hole.
CATACOMB swept her light over it.
"Teenage doom poets," she muttered.
FULCRUM 's beam caught something lower down.
A crushed energy drink can. A wrapper from a brand of chips that hadn't been on shelves for years.
He crouched.
"Recent," he said. "Month or two. Maybe less."
"Yeah," CATACOMB said. "They've been exploring. Idiots."
She tapped her tablet.
"Zeta-9, stop at next junction," she ordered. "We're close."
"Copy," Zeta-9 point said.
The tunnel opened into a wider node—a round chamber where multiple service lines met.
Two of the exits matched CATACOMB's map.
The third was a jagged hole cut through old concrete.
"Unauthorized shaft," CATACOMB said. "Found it."
FULCRUM stepped closer, keeping his weight clear of the edge.
It dropped out of sight into darkness.
A faint chill breathed up from below.
"Thermal?" Owl asked.
"Cooler than surroundings," Nova said. "No clear body heat, but the air's moving."
"Any sign of structural compromise?" Owl asked.
"Plenty," Nova said. "Whoever dug this didn't ask Engineering for advice. Or a brain."
FULCRUM swept his light along the lip.
Footprints in dust. Shoe tread, small. Another set, bigger. At least two different people had stood here.
"See that?" he asked.
CATACOMB nodded.
"FUSE ," she said. "Can you run a time differential between when this footage was taken and when those snack brands went out of circulation in our sector?"
FUSE sighed softly.
"I am not your shopper," he said. "But yes."
A pause.
"Best estimate," he said. "Three to six weeks for the chips, less than two for the can. That's real-world time, not tunnel time."
"So if they went down there," CATACOMB said, staring into the dark, "they might still be somewhere we can reach."
"Or somewhere we can't," Docstring said. "Don't assume accessibility just because they haven't aged into dust."
CATACOMB 's jaw clenched.
"Still going to try," she said.
"Within parameters," Owl said pointedly.
CATACOMB blew out a breath.
"Within parameters," she echoed.
She looked at FULCRUM .
"That hinge position you like so much?" she said. "Congratulations. You just got promoted to 'choke on an illegal shaft.'"
"Promotion accepted," he said.
She huffed.
"You and your promotions," she muttered.
They set up fast.
Zeta-9 dropped anchor points away from the edge, clipping lines to their harnesses.
Nova marked structural stress on the walls, muttering to himself about amateurs with shovels.
FULCRUM planted himself where CATACOMB pointed—between the mapped tunnels and the hole, a physical barrier with a gun.
"Nu-7, you hold that line," Owl said. "If anything comes out that isn't on our roster, you make sure it doesn't make it to the platforms."
"Understood," FULCRUM said.
Kestrel's voice came over the topside band.
"Understood," she echoed.
He could imagine her fingers flexing on her own rope.
CATACOMB clipped her line with practiced motions.
"You're not going down," FULCRUM said.
She blinked at him.
"Excuse me?" she said.
"You're route control," he said. "You stay at the top. You've got the map. You're not the probe."
Her eyes narrowed.
"Look at you," she said. "Learning from my bad habits."
"Trying to," he said.
She hesitated.
"Fine," she said. "Zeta-9, Mole-Rat-Three goes first. I stay on the lip. Fox in the middle, Nu-7 at the hinge. Everybody happy?"
"Define 'happy,'" Bay-4 muttered.
"Alive," CATACOMB said. "That's the only metric I care about."
A Zeta-9 operator clipped in and started down, rope hissing through the descender.
FULCRUM watched the line pay out.
"Depth?" he asked.
"Seven meters," CATACOMB said, watching the counter on her tablet. "Ten. Twelve."
"Wall structure's changing," Nova said. "Less concrete, more... something else."
"Define 'something else,'" Docstring said.
"Rock," Nova said. "Or whatever passes for it down here. Could just be old bedrock. Could be the anomaly remixing the geology."
"Helpful," Docstring said.
At fifteen meters, the rope stopped moving.
"Mole-Rat-Three on station," came a voice from the shaft. "Chamber down here. Feels... wrong."
CATACOMB knuckles whitened on her tablet.
"Specify wrong," she said.
"Sound's weird," the operator replied. "Like... echoes from the wrong direction."
"Any sign of civilians?" FULCRUM asked.
"Graffiti," the voice said. "Trash. No bodies. No movement."
"Time stamps?" CATACOMB asked.
"Clean," FUSE said. "No jumps yet."
"Okay," CATACOMB said. "Tag the room. Do not go into any corridor that isn't on your feed. If you feel time slip, you haul your ass back up that line."
"Copy," Mole-Rat-Three said.
FULCRUM listened to the rope creak softly.
His chest felt too tight.
Patch's voice nudged into his ear.
"Breathing," she reminded him.
He exhaled.
"Working on it," he said.
They almost lost him on the way back up.
Mole-Rat-Three counted meters as he ascended.
"Ten... eight... six..."
The rope moved.
His icon crept up the shaft on FULCRUM's HUD.
Then the voice cut.
"...two... three..."
FULCRUM frowned.
"Repeat last," CATACOMB said sharply.
"Five," the operator said. "Three. Two."
"Your count just went nine, ten, eight, six, two, three, five," FUSE said. "Congratulations, you broke the concept of integers."
"Time just skipped," Docstring said. "We lost about four seconds of audio and one meter of rope."
Mole-Rat-Three's helmet appeared at the lip.
He hauled himself out, breathing hard.
"Did you stop?" FULCRUM asked.
"No," the operator said. "Felt... thicker. Like the air went syrupy for a second. Then I was closer to the top."
CATACOMB's face was pale beneath the tunnel grime.
"Any nausea?" she asked. "Headache, buzzing, anything cognitive?"
"Bit of a ring in my ears," he said. "Otherwise fine."
"Med check when you're topside," Patch said. "No arguments."
"Wasn't planning any," Mole-Rat-Three muttered.
CATACOMB leaned back from the edge.
"Okay," she said. "We found your dumb hole, we tagged your weird chamber, and we confirmed the time nonsense. I vote we pull back, lock this gate, and let someone with a reality anchor deal with the rest."
"Seconded," Nova said.
"Agreed," Owl said. "You've met objectives. Begin withdrawal."
FULCRUM felt tension bleed out of his shoulders.
Then something moved in the dark.
It started as a sound.
A scuff. A scrape.
Not from the shaft.
From the tunnel behind them.
FULCRUM turned.
His light cut down the corridor they'd come from.
For a second, there was nothing—just dust motes and the curve of concrete.
Then a figure stepped into the beam.
"Hold," FULCRUM snapped.
Everyone froze.
The figure flinched, throwing up a hand against the light.
"Don't shoot!" a voice yelled. "Please don't—Jesus—"
FULCRUM's finger eased away from the trigger by a millimeter.
"Hands where I can see them," he said. "Slow."
The person obeyed.
Young. Hoodie. Jeans. Thin face smudged with grime.
A civilian.
Kestrel's voice crackled in his ear.
"Contact?" she asked.
"Civilian," he said. "Approaching from warp-adjacent tunnel."
"How the hell—" FUSE started.
"Later," FULCRUM said.
He stepped forward slowly, keeping enough distance to move if the tunnel decided to do something worse.
"You alone?" he asked.
The kid nodded too fast.
"Y-yeah," the civilian said. "I... I think so. I don't know. We were down here and then there was this... stretch... and I turned around and Tim was just... gone."
"Name?" FULCRUM asked.
"Liam," the kid said. "Liam Torres."
"How long have you been down here, Liam?" CATACOMB asked gently.
Liam squinted, thinking hard.
"A couple hours?" he said. "We skipped class. Took the service stairs. There was this shaft... we dropped some stuff down it. I... I think I fell? Or I walked? It's fuzzy."
CATACOMB's eyes met FULCRUM's over the kid's head.
Patch's voice came in tight.
"I'm looking at his vitals," she said. "Mild dehydration. Elevated heart rate. No obvious signs of long-term starvation. He hasn't been down there days."
"From his perspective," Docstring said. "We don't know what the tunnel thinks."
FULCRUM held Liam's gaze.
"You're going to walk with me, Liam," he said. "You're not going to run. You're not going to look back. You're going to do exactly what I tell you. Understand?"
Liam nodded, eyes wide.
"Okay," Liam said.
FULCRUM reached out, wrapping a hand firmly around the kid's forearm.
CATACOMB stepped up on the other side, clipping a spare line to Liam's hoodie.
"You let go," she told the kid, "we drag you anyway. Got it?"
"Yes, ma'am," Liam said.
"Good," she said.
FULCRUM felt the faint tremor in the kid's muscles.
"Nu-7, we're bringing one up," he said. "Possible companion still lost. No pursuit into red corridors without new tasking."
"Kestrel's waiting," Waypoint said softly.
"Copy," FULCRUM said.
They started back toward the ladder.
For three steps, everything felt normal.
On the fourth, the light dimmed.
"CATACOMB ," FULCRUM said.
"I see it," she said.
The tunnel seemed to stretch, the ladder farther away than it had been a breath ago.
Liam stumbled.
"Keep your feet," FULCRUM said.
"I can't—" Liam said.
"Yes, you can," FULCRUM said. "One step at a time. Don't look at the distance. Look at your feet. One. Then the next."
He matched his pace to Liam's, resisting the urge to push harder.
"Vitals spiking," PATCH said. "All three of you. Breathe."
"Working on it," CATACOMB said.
The tunnel pulsed.
For a heartbeat, FULCRUM saw himself from two steps back—an afterimage, staggered.
Then it snapped.
He took another step.
The ladder was closer.
"Time slip," FUSE said. "We lost three seconds. Came out ahead."
"I'll bill the tunnel later," CATACOMB said through her teeth.
They reached the ladder.
"KESTREL," FULCRUM said. "Ready up."
"Line's clear," KESTREL said. "Send him."
FULCRUM put Liam's hands on the rungs.
"You climb," he said. "You don't stop until you see someone in a stupid yellow vest and too much authority. That's WAYPOINT. You listen to her like she's God. Understood?"
"Y-yes," Liam said.
"Go," FULCRUM said.
The kid climbed.
Halfway up, he looked down.
"Don't," FULCRUM said.
Liam jerked his gaze up again.
KESTREL's voice came, a second later.
"I've got him," she said.
Relief loosened something sharp in FULCRUM's chest.
"Copy," he said.
CATACOMB leaned her shoulder briefly against his.
"Not bad for a first date," she muttered.
He huffed a laugh.
"Your standards are strange," he said.
"Occupational hazard," she replied.
Topside, the station looked the same.
Still holding its breath.
At the gate, KESTREL kept one hand on Liam's shoulder while Waypoint ran through a practiced spiel about "restricted areas" and "dangerous equipment" and "you are very lucky maintenance staff found you when they did."
Liam nodded a lot and looked like he might throw up.
PATCH waited by the command van with a water bottle and a scanner.
"Sit," she told Liam.
He sat.
She checked his pupils, pulse, responses.
"Any gaps?" she asked. "Missing chunks of time?"
"I... I don't remember how we got from the stairs to the hole," he said. "Or from the hole to... there."
He gestured vaguely downward.
"That tracks," DOCSTRING said over her shoulder. "We'll get him to a Site, run deeper cognitive tests. For now, hydrate him and don't let him go home with a pocket full of extra seconds."
Liam blinked.
"I'm in trouble, aren't I," he said.
"Yes," WAYPOINT said kindly. "But you're alive trouble. That's the better kind."
Down in the tunnel, FULCRUM watched CATACOMB set a final marker at the shaft edge.
"This is as far as we go today," she said.
"Agreed," OWL said.
E-11 and Zeta-9 began their withdrawal.
FULCRUM lingered a second longer.
He could feel the pull of the red corridors like a draft.
"Don't," CATACOMB said quietly.
He looked at her.
"You're thinking about it," she said. "I know that face. 'If I just take two more steps, I can get better intel.'"
He didn't deny it.
"Maze runs stick," she said. "We got a kid out. We tagged your weird room. Nobody died. Don't undo that because the anomaly's batting its eyelashes at you."
He exhaled.
"Okay," he said.
She stared at him like she was waiting for a trap.
"Okay," he repeated.
She bumped her shoulder against his.
"Good boy," she said.
He let that stand.
They turned their backs on the hole and walked toward the ladder.
Behind them, the tunnel breathed.
The marker at the shaft edge blinked.
On OVERWATCH, FOXHAMMER watched the feed.
"He walked away," he said.
"Yes," PRIORESS said.
"First time?" he asked.
"Probably not," she said. "But it's the first time we get to keep the footage."
FOXHAMMER's chuckle was a dry rasp.
"Send me a copy," he said.
"For training purposes?" she asked.
"For when I have to yell at him later," he said.
She smiled faintly.
"Soon," she said.
Down in the tunnel, FULCRUM climbed toward the surface—toward KESTREL's steady grip, PATCH's scanner, FUSE's sarcasm, WAYPOINT's tired smile, and a station full of people who would never know how close their commute had come to being rerouted through a hole in reality.
His muscles burned.
His head throbbed with the memory of stretched seconds.
He kept going.
Time slipped.
He held the line.
For now.