The corridor changed its mind about them approximately forty metres in.

  Not dramatically. The Hollow never did anything dramatically. It simply... recalibrated. Temperature dropped two degrees without announcement. The floor plating transitioned from worn concrete to composite that returned pressure differently under each boot — precise, calibrated, the kind of traction that said we've thought about you falling and decided against it for now. Sound stopped echoing cleanly. Footsteps landed and stayed, swallowed before they could travel, as though the air itself was taking notes.

  Griff felt the shift settle into his back teeth like low-frequency pressure.

  Jake felt it first, naturally. His ranging sweeps stopped — no more nose-work along the seams, no lateral checks. Just forward. Tail low and working. Ears tracking the walls independently of each other, which was a thing Jake did when he was reading a space that had opinions.

  "It's different," Scarab said.

  "Yes," Griff said.

  "Different how?"

  "Different like it's been expecting us."

  Scarab considered this. "I hate that."

  "I know."

  Valley's thumb traced the seam on the phase rig — the slow unconscious circuit that surfaced when grief sat close. He didn't name it. Nobody asked.

  Elin drifted to Griff's left and stayed there, sleeve brushing his, shared vector without commentary. Her knife hand was loose. Her eyes were on the ceiling — the slow sweep she'd developed over seven chapters of the Hollow demonstrating that interesting things happened in ceilings.

  Don walked steadily. The silver thread beneath his bandage pulsed once — quiet, testing — and he pressed his arm against his ribs and it settled. Behaved. For now.

  Mad walked rear guard with the pry bar resting across his shoulders like a man who had decided physical inconvenience was a personality.

  "Fifty-one," Archie said, as they passed a junction on the left.

  "Fifty-one," Kyle confirmed, from the middle of the formation.

  The counting ritual had started as Andrea's. Now it belonged to all of them. Integers didn't lie. Didn't soften. They just added up.

  The corridor ran straight for two minutes. Diffuse white panels woke in sequence ahead, each one confirming their passage before the next permitted itself to illuminate. No shadows to work with. Only assessment.

  "It's watching us walk," Archie said.

  "It's been watching us walk since level one," Elin said.

  "Yes, but now it's watching us walk. There's a quality difference."

  Mad said nothing. His eyes had gone to the ceiling panels — the way they woke on a delay that was just long enough to feel deliberate, just short enough to feel inevitable. He was cataloguing something. He did that. He just never told anyone he was doing it until the information became load-bearing.

  Jake stopped.

  Clean stop. No ramp. There, then not.

  Griff's fist came up and the formation locked mid-stride with the practiced cohesion of people who had learned that Jake stopping was a sentence that required immediate parsing.

  Silence.

  Jake's ears were at maximum deployment. Both forward, independently tracking, doing the thing where his whole skull became an instrument.

  "What's he got?" Scarab murmured.

  "Nothing yet," Griff said.

  "That's reassuring."

  "It wasn't meant to be."

  Jake held position for four seconds. Five. His tail didn't move. His weight stayed forward, distributed across all four feet.

  Then his head tilted.

  Three degrees.

  Right.

  Griff tracked the tilt. Upper right. Vent housing — recessed, flush with the composite, the kind of modification that belonged to a different decade than the corridor around it. He hadn't clocked it on the way in. He clocked it now.

  "Valley."

  Valley was already lifting the rig. He swept it across the vent housing in a slow arc, jaw tight, reading what came back.

  "Something warm," he said. "Three of them."

  Beat.

  "Three of what?" Scarab asked.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  The vent housing opened.

  They came out fast and they came out from three different points simultaneously, which was the part nobody had planned for. The original Leggy — the Ch7 model that Jake had taken apart with quiet professional satisfaction — had come from one direction. One fist-sized drone, one ceiling vent, manageable problem.

  The Hollow had updated its thinking.

  Three vents opened in sequence so rapid it read as simultaneous. Three drones, same chassis as Leggy but deployed in a triangle pattern — one from the right wall, one from the ceiling ahead, one from the left wall behind them — each moving with the calibrated silence of something that had learned from its predecessor's acoustics.

  Jake went for the ceiling drone immediately. Launched from standing — and caught it with both paws from below, driving it into the composite with a crunch that was deeply satisfying and solved exactly one third of the problem.

  The right-wall drone came at Griff's head.

  Griff ducked.

  The drone didn't expect the duck. It had calculated his standing height and committed. It sailed past his ear and hit the far wall with an audible clang and bounced sideways, recalibrating, which gave Griff approximately one and a half seconds to bring the Mosin up.

  He fired.

  The sound was catastrophic.

  That was the only word. In an enclosed composite corridor with a ceiling of less than three metres, the Mosin firing at close range was not a gunshot so much as a physical event. It went through the right-wall drone — satisfactorily, definitively — and also through everyone's ears, through the walls, through the floor, through the specific register of thought that allows rational decision-making, and out the other side.

  Silence.

  Not the system's silence. The silence of eight people standing very still with ringing ears, looking at each other and at the two destroyed drones and at the third drone — the left-wall one, which had been approaching Scarab from behind and had, in the exact moment the Mosin discharged, stopped completely.

  The third drone sat at the entrance to its vent.

  Motionless.

  "...Did the gun scare it?" Archie said.

  "Guns don't scare drones," Valley said. His voice sounded like it was coming through a wall. Everyone's voice sounded like it was coming through a wall.

  "That one stopped."

  "The system pulled it back." Valley lowered the rig. "It lost two units and the data it still needs is in the third. It's not retreating. It's preserving the asset."

  "So it's scared," Scarab said.

  "It doesn't have the architecture for fear."

  "That was definitely fear."

  "It was resource allocation."

  "Same thing with better vocabulary."

  The third drone sat in its vent for two more seconds. Then the housing sealed behind it with a soft, decisive click. Gone. Recalled. Filed.

  Jake trotted back from the ceiling drone and sat beside Griff.

  Pack check. Formation confirmed. Tail moving. Job done, moving on.

  Archie was on the floor. He'd gone down hard when the Mosin fired — not from the blast, but from the ill-timed dive he'd attempted to avoid the ceiling drone before Jake dealt with it, which had resulted in him landing on his already-compromised ribs on the composite with a sound that suggested the universe had delivered a verdict on his agility.

  He lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling.

  "That," he said carefully, "was unexpected."

  Mad crouched beside him without being asked. Professional hands checked the rib wrapping with quick, certain pressure. Archie hissed once.

  "Still wrapped," Mad said.

  "Still hurts."

  "Those are compatible." Mad got a hand under Archie's arm and pulled him upright in one motion. "Up."

  Archie was up. He stood for a moment, taking inventory of himself, then looked at the destroyed drones.

  "There were three of them," he said.

  "Yes," Mad said.

  "From three different places at the same time."

  "Yes."

  "That's coordinated."

  Mad looked at him.

  "I'm just noting," Archie said, "that the previous one was not coordinated. This represents an escalation."

  "Yes."

  "I'm going to call them the Lads."

  "You're not."

  "The Lads failed. That's a good sign."

  "Stop talking."

  Scarab, from across the corridor, not looking up, pressing two fingers into his own ear to try to fix whatever the Mosin had done to it: "I like the Lads."

  "Nobody asked you."

  "Three drones, triangle deployment, came out of separate vents like they'd planned it." Scarab looked at the remains. "The Lads. It works."

  Mad picked up the pry bar. Looked at the two destroyed chassis. At Jake, who was conducting a brief forensic investigation of the one he'd dealt with, nose working the leg articulation, confirming. At the sealed vent where the third had retreated.

  He didn't say anything.

  But he filed it. The angle of deployment. The timing. The way the system had pulled the surviving unit back rather than losing it to a counter-pattern it hadn't finished modelling.

  Three drones was not enough. The Hollow knew that now.

  Mad knew that the Hollow knew that.

  He kept it to himself.

  Griff's wrist was protesting — Mosin recoil at close range loaded force through the joint in a way that the joint had opinions about. He pressed his thumb into the pulse point. Functional. Tender. He'd deal with it.

  "State of play," he said.

  "Ears," said Elin.

  "Same," said Scarab.

  "Temporary," said Valley.

  "Absolutely still here," said Archie, with the specific tone of a man who was being brave about his ribs.

  "We go again in four minutes," Griff said.

  He crouched beside Jake and put his hand on the grey muzzle for a moment longer than necessary.

  "Good work," he said quietly.

  Jake's tail moved. Once. Accepting the assessment without making a speech about it.

  Don was leaning against the wall, good hand flat against the composite, head slightly down. Not distressed. Recalibrating. The silver thread beneath his bandage had steadied back to baseline warm after the noise.

  "Three of them," he said.

  "Yes," Griff said.

  "It sent three because one wasn't enough."

  "Yes."

  Don looked at the sealed vent. "So next time it sends something that isn't three of the same thing."

  "Yes," Griff said.

  Don absorbed that. Straightened off the wall. "Right."

  Kyle had watched the whole exchange. He filed it the way he filed everything Griff did — the shorthand, the logic, the way a three-word conversation between Griff and Don carried enough information to restructure how everyone in the formation was thinking about what came next. He stored it for later. He suspected later was coming faster than he wanted.

  "Fifty-one still," Archie said, from near the damaged drone remains, in the conversational register of a man who was definitely not thinking about his ribs.

  "Still fifty-one," Valley confirmed.

  "Just checking the count survived the noise."

  Mad looked at him. Said nothing. But he positioned himself half a step closer to Archie's left side than formation required, and didn't make anything of it, and Archie didn't mention it, and the formation moved on.

  Behind them, in the sealed corridor, a system logged the encounter.

  ASSET DEPLOYMENT: GENERATION 2 OBJECTIVE: FORMATION DISRUPTION OUTCOME: ASSETS RECOVERED: ONE. ASSETS LOST: TWO. ANOMALY PERFORMANCE: COUNTER-GEOMETRY. NOT ATTACK BEHAVIOUR. NOT RETREAT BEHAVIOUR. CATEGORY: UNRESOLVED. ACOUSTIC WEAPON CONFIRMED: MOSIN NAGANT. RANGE: ENCLOSED. CONSEQUENCE: SIGNIFICANT. CREW PHYSICAL COST: MINOR. WRIST IMPACT. RIB STRAIN. CREW COHESION: MAINTAINED.ASSESSMENT: THREE UNITS INSUFFICIENT AGAINST THE ANOMALY.

  Processing.

  NEW PARAMETER: HEIGHT.

  GENERATION 3: INITIALISING.

  The corridor received them.

  Patient.

  Learning.

  The Lads had failed.

  That was the point.