The maintenance corridor had never felt longer than it did with the Vel-Thak head's voice echoing through the palace above them like a storm that had just realized where the lightning should go.
Max moved through the infrastructure passage at the pace the ceiling height allowed, which was not the pace he wanted and was the pace he had. Thura was ahead with the efficiency of someone who had navigated this route for two years and did not need light to do it. Behind them, the sound above was changing — the quality of a palace at rest being converted, rapidly and with professional organization, into a palace conducting a search.
He had expected this. What he had not expected was the speed of it. They were forty meters from the maintenance passage exit when the sound above shifted from general alarm to directed movement, and directed movement meant someone had identified the maintenance corridor as a priority exit route.
'They know about the passage,' Thura said, without stopping.
