She rows her tender through the circles of stone that have become so familiar to her in such a short time. She’s not certain when these corridors began to feel like home, or even when “home” became an idea she both accepted and even craved, but she’s never felt more safe or welcomed or content in her entire life. The door to Sanitation is open, as most of the doors in the Planning Cadre are. Dyeawan begins to purposefully breathe through her mouth rather than her nose, and wonders what sort of invention she’ll witness today.

The part of her mind that seems to know things before she does recognizes what’s happening as soon as she rolls through the door. It takes the rest of Dyeawan only a moment to catch up.

Sanitation is gone. There should be a wide-open workspace filled with dozens of assemblers performing at least half that many tasks. Instead Dyeawan finds herself in a cramped antechamber no larger than a closet, staring at the entrance to a narrow corridor so long she can’t truly distinguish where or how it ends. A single torch in a single stone sconce lights the space. That becomes even more important in the next moment when the door behind Dyeawan slams shut.

She peers over her shoulder, staring at the heavy slab of wood and metal. She hears a heavy metal “snap” followed by a brief grinding of steel against steel. It doesn’t take a mind as keen as hers to know the door has just been locked from the outside. Dyeawan’s heart begins beating faster and she realizes she’s stopped breathing for several moments. She inhales sharply and grips the edges of her tender’s paddles.

“All right,” she whispers to herself in the darkened space lit only by a few gentle flames. “All right.”

Dyeawan turns from the door and rows her tender forward, halting at the threshold of the corridor. Instead of staring down its pitch length, she examines the entrance and what she can see of its structure.

The corridor is far too narrow to permit her tender. It looks barely wide enough to allow both her shoulders movement through its confines, and that’s if she were to drag herself over the ground as she used to in the streets and alleys of the Capitol. She finds the very thought of doing so here, now, fills her with dread and something deeper, a sense of intense loathing, frustration, and even anger.

Dyeawan pushes herself up on her tender’s platform, straining to reach the torch on the wall above her. Grunting from the effort, she manages to snatch the torch from its sconce without losing her grip and dropping its flaming head. Leaning over the front of her tender, Dyeawan extends the torch to the bottom of the corridor. What she sees first causes her to squint, then makes her eyes widen in disbelief.