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He brings it down. The conduit hangers along this stretch are the original cast pattern, spaced every four meters, and eleven of them in a row have been cut.

Not sheared. Not corroded through. Cut, at an angle, with a powered tool, and then the cut faces dressed to look like fatigue — and the dressing done well.

"That's forty years old," Darius says. "At least."

"Then find me the next one."

We find it four hundred meters later, and it isn't the same age. Different tool marks, sloppier dressing, an oxide layer that says fifteen years. Then a coupling pack under Founders' Fourth with the shims stacked wrong — not missing, wrong, three thin where there should be one thick, which will hold beautifully for a decade and then walk itself apart. Then a bypass valve pinned shut with a machined pin that doesn't appear in any Authority catalog, and I check all four.

Four districts. Three separate decades. Same idea every time.

"Decay is random," I say. "It doesn't have a preference. This has a preference."

Darius crouches by the pinned valve a while. "I have written seventeen failure reports on this line."

"How many said fatigue?"

"All of them."

Nothing useful comes to me, so I say nothing, and he stands and we keep walking, and that's the last ordinary minute of the day.

We take the branch under Founders' First because the map says it connects through to the Cistern and it'll save us an hour. We are ninety seconds inside when the roof comes down behind us.

Running. Grit. The light swinging wild off the walls, my hand on his belt, his hand somewhere on my collar, both of us moving the same direction, neither of us choosing it.

It stops.

We're on the floor in the dark with the emergency strip stuttering and about eleven meters of tunnel behind us where there used to be four hundred.

"Are you hurt."

"No. You?"

"No."

I get my light back up and lay it across the fall, and I study the fall for a while, and then I walk to the edge of it and set my palm on the nearest surviving hanger.

Cut. Angled. Dressed. Fresh — the oxide hasn't even started.

"Darius."

He comes. He looks. He says nothing for so long that I have to check he's still breathing.

"Ninety seconds," he says finally.

"Ninety seconds."

"We chose this branch at 09:40 this morning."

"We chose it in the Cistern, out loud, with nobody there but Tomas, and then I filed the route to Authority at 09:52 because that's the protocol and I've filed one every single day for three weeks."

Neither of us needs to say the next part. Somebody read a filing, and somebody had four hours, and somebody was close enough to use them.

"We stop filing," I say.

"That's a safety violation."

"So is dying."