"Right, right.  I'll bring my tools after dinner," said the man.  He took the carafe and ambled out.

"Who was that?" Miles asked, as the cook picked up her spoon again.

"Tenbury.  He's the custodian here."

Miles dimly remembered that term going by a few times earlier, and wondered if its meaning was as far outside the usual as Suze the Secretary's.  But if he really wanted to know where the power came from and the sewage went to, now was his chance.  Should he wait for Jin to broker an introduction?  Miles didn't have infinite time to explore, here . . . his feet were already in motion, deciding for him.

He waved his own thanks to the cook, dropped the refilled mug by Yani, rapped a friendly farewell on the tabletop, and made it to the door just in time to tail Tenbury's receding footsteps.  The worn rubber soles on Miles's scavenged shoes were as silent as he'd hoped.  Hinges squeaked; Miles nipped around the corner to discover a door closing again on another stairwell.  He drew a breath and followed.

The steps descended into stygian blackness.  His breath quickened.  To his intense relief, a sudden glow reflected off the walls ahead—Tenbury had unshipped a hand light.  So, the man didn't see in the dark like a werewolf, good.  At the fourth landing, the scrape of a heavy door being shoved open was followed by loss of the reflected light.  Miles sped his steps, put out his hands, and found the handle.  He opened this door more cautiously, turning sideways to slide through the gap and easing it closed with the minimum sound.

The bobbing light receded to his right; he turned after it, thinking of will-o'-the-wisps luring unwary travelers to their doom.  As he followed, he became aware of tiny twinkles dancing in the corners of his vision like floating fireflies, adding to the night-swamp effect.  He blinked, and they resolved into scattered indicator lights, green for all's-well, tacking randomly up the corridor walls on either side.

Reluctantly, Miles reached out and let his hand trace across the now-familiar bumps of closely-set banks of cryo-drawers.  Except these were not abandoned and cleared, but working, or a portion of them were.  Well insulated, the drawer faces were at room temperature—there was no danger of his skin freezing to the surface and trapping him in a growing cocoon of icicle-glass, really.  He drew in his hands anyway, making his way down the center of the corridor by witch-light.

He stopped short as, at the end of the corridor, another door opened.  Ordinary office-lab-living-quarters glare temporarily blasted his eyes, making a nimbus around a hairy head that fortunately did not turn around.  The door shut, and Miles was plunged into blackness once more.  As his night vision came slowly back the dense dark was relieved, if that was the word, by the scattered green specks.  He could just make out his corpse-light sleeves.