They left the utility building and headed northeast, the hub's glow dragging the horizon forward in orange, steady, and now annoyingly close, which is how distance likes to behave once you have decided to take it seriously.
The zone's lighting thinned as they went deeper, overhead strips giving way to emergency runs at floor level, red lines in the dark, the sort of lighting that said a place was working while refusing to promise anything warmer.
Proxy had mapped two routes from the walkway.
One cut across an open maintenance yard between two structures, faster, direct, and visible from every window on the hub. The other was a covered conduit corridor running parallel to the yard, pipe runs on both sides, corrugated metal roof, single-file at its narrowest point.
"We're taking the covered route," he said.
"Okay~" Nyx said.
The conduit corridor was narrow and smelled of ozone and hot metal that had been locked in a small space for far too long.
