CHAPTER 739: WHEN A FLOOR WANTS TO HUM (END)

"Permission granted," Mikhailis said. "I love a scolding."

He tasted the air and watched the breath ribbon. The blue line swelled, fell, swelled again, always a touch crooked, like a river refusing to run straight.

"Exhale," Thalatha called, just loud enough to carry to the second rank.

Boots moved. The front file stepped into the pendulum gap, each person landing on a green dot that seemed a palm’s width too far until it wasn’t. The nurse captain at midline kept a soft count with her shoulders, not one-two-three, but two, three, five. Eyes were down. Lids at half.

The Hound loped out onto the catwalk, chain ring muffled under its scarf. It began to scribble its ugly loop pattern across the mid-span—curves that never met themselves cleanly, a child’s bad river drawn by a poet who disliked straight roads. The remnant pack leaned to correct for it, and their correction did not agree with itself.

Slimeweave slid on its belly to the crown stones, palms leaving faint clean tracks. It produced a tiny flask of grease and touched the stone with a fingertip, laying a thread so thin it could be mistaken for a mistake. One thread here. A second thread two stones later. Not in a line. Not at a regular distance. Just enough.

The first beetle put a foot down and skated a finger’s length. The second bumped its rear plate. The third corrected, proud and wrong, and brought its front leg into the exact angle that hates friction. Their neat attempt went sideways by itself.

The Sentinel took the only cone the ribs still had in them—a small, resentful slap—and ate it on the coffin-door. The edge hummed. He leaned and side-vented into a dead pocket he and Rodion had chosen earlier with the patience of two men picking a quiet table at the back of a crowded hall.

"Odd only," Thalatha reminded, her hand marking the beat low. "One and five."

Soldiers went low and neat. No lunges. No hero posture. They sliced rear tendons at inside joints on the one and the five and never on the three. When a blade met resistance, another blade arrived half a breath later from a safer angle.

Scurabons breathed through their teeth in little hisses, not from effort, but to mark their own timing. They slipped knives into the gaps you only see if you’ve spent your life looking at joints. Press. Twist. Withdraw. No second try needed.

Workers salted the lane with light sprinkles of mint. The smell made beetle mandibles twitch and then pause, noses arguing with legs. A few pinch of bone meal went down in a dotted scatter. Nothing in a row. The pack’s internal map got confused and started arguing with itself.

A beetle broke left, angry and practical. It met a pendulum on the far-lean. The pendulum wasn’t fast; it was timely. The beetle checked, lifted, and showed the soft seam under its belly by reflex. A soldier’s blade kissed it. The beetle decided to sit down. Permanently.

Mikhailis watched like a proud teacher and forced his mouth to behave. He swallowed a joke and let the craft shine instead.

No speeches. No souvenirs. Nobody licking their own blood to prove a point. Lira would be proud. Cerys would grunt and say "clean." Serelith... Serelith would ask whether the pendulums bite if you say please.

A soldier’s boot scuffed a beat that could have become a pattern. The nurse behind him bumped his calf with her knee. He blinked, adjusted, and added a tiny heel scrap to ruin the repeat. He didn’t look back. He didn’t need thanks. He had work.

The pack came apart the way a bad idea comes apart when nobody is listening—quietly. Three beetles jammed their plates together and discovered geometry can be mean if you’re stubborn. One tried to climb and learned about grease. Another went for the Hound and decided halfway that it respected chain. The Hound did not bark. It simply shifted its loop and made the beetle put its own leg in the wrong place.

"Rear clear," called a worker from the far end, voice low, surprised, almost disappointed at the lack of drama.

"Front clear," answered a soldier, wiping his knife on a rag and tucking it away like a good pen.

The pendulums swung and met only air. The team crossed, exhale by exhale, stepping onto the safer side with shoulders that felt lighter than they had a breath before.

"Now that’s my kind of fight," Mikhailis said lightly. "No speeches, no souvenirs, nobody licking their own blood to prove a point." He glanced down at the slow dark under the catwalk. "Also, nobody falling in and making me write a form."

Lira would be proud. Cerys would call that soft. Serelith would ask if the pendulums bite. I’d say "only if you flirt wrong." She’d make a note. Saints help me.

They re-formed on the far lip and moved into a hall that smelled like old leather and mint in the exact measure of their first days. The Brake Choir’s note settled on the same pitch that had lived under their boots when they were new and trying not to show it. The pitch found the bones in their feet like an old friend tapping a window. Glowcap clusters sat in the precise bracket pattern from the second floor. Bone hooks on the wall had the same nick Thalatha had made with a careless knife weeks ago. She had pretended not to care at the time. The wall had kept the memory anyway.

She stopped. Her expression didn’t do much. But the corner of her mouth thought about fairness. On the wall, a scrap of bone placard survived under a soft film of dust. NO HEROICS, written in her soldier hand, tied with her neat knot that never slipped, even when she was tired.

Mikhailis reached up and almost brushed the knot clean. He stopped his hand a finger’s width away.

"You left yourself a letter," he said softly. He looked at the knot. "It arrived."

You always did this. House rules on the wall so the wall will help. Smart woman. Smarter than me when I’m in a mood, which is often.

The queen-to-be drew a small circle on the resin dust by their feet—house sign for home-adjacent. Tiny detail, big feeling. The nurse council’s antennae traced tiny yeses in the air like sparks.

Rodion printed a quiet caption at the console’s edge.

Architecture match 0.82. Probability of proximity to first three floors: high. Please resist nostalgia; it causes errors.

Mikhailis tapped the rim of his cup once, then caught himself and let the cup settle against his palm. No beat. He looked at Thalatha. She had seen the almost-tap. She let the almost-smile happen, small as a thumbprint.

"Almost home," she said, not loud.

Nobody teased her for it. If anything, three people stood straighter.

They moved into the last room of the run, and it looked friendly—archive shelves low enough to see over, corners you could defend, neat aisles that promised order. The room smelled clean in the wrong way. The air said different: cold slid along the floor like a cat’s back, low and deliberate. Dust lay in a careful sheet. Under it, at the threshold, a polished ironvine lip shone like a coin in a fountain. Coil runes hid like cautious snakes, their tails barely showing.

Rodion’s lights tightened, the console dimming its edges as if squinting.

The forward rank was half a pace from giving the floor exactly what it wanted. Thalatha’s hand shot up; everything stopped like a well-trained horse. Armour creaked softly, then settled. Breaths paused together and then separated again, uneven on purpose.

The Gate Warden hissed its vents closed and made the air thick as blankets. The echo in the room dropped away, starved. The Hound braced, claws testing for a tiny pull. It did not wag. It might have, once. Not here.

The Archivist went to knees with the care you use for a sleeping child and brushed a stripe clean with a soft brush he kept for loved things. Letters rose from the dust like bones from wet ground.

KEEP / REMEMBER / RETURN, the bone said in a grammar that liked to punish bravery. The last word felt smug.

Mikhailis’s chest tightened. A Reset Well. Of course you’d put a smile on the door.

The Hypnoveil let a thin blanket settle over the lip so the well would forget to be interesting. It spread the dull not like fog but like the kind of silence you get in libraries built by patient people. The polished edge lost its itch to be admired.

Mikhailis held out his palm and worker 23 put a pebble in it without looking. The pebble was smooth and cool, a good weight. He weighed it once, breathed out, and pitched it at the yawn point Rodion drew—one neat circle, two finger-widths left of the obvious.

It clicked like yes. The small pull under the floor stuttered and sulked, the way a trap does when you ask it to repeat itself and it realizes it cannot.

"Catch the air," Thalatha murmured.

The Sentinel turned the coffin-door edgewise and made it a wall for wind, bracing heel-to-toe. The door sang a little, a hum you feel more than hear, as the room’s greedy draft pushed and found itself moved aside.

"Reverse," Thalatha said.

Workers reverse-marched on prime-step, faces neutral, shoulders quiet, hands doing little checks because hands like to do that when they live this long—strap, buckle, pouch, knot. The nurse captain at the rear mirrored their count in a low voice, a kindness for tired brains.

The rear guard tied a bold placard at the jamb in the Archivist’s cleanest script. The letters were clear enough to make stubborn people behave.

RESET WELL • DO NOT ENTER • PRIME-STEP ENDS • NO TWIN SHADOWS • ONE PEBBLE ONLY

The Warden shut the hinge with a sound like a book closing at the right sentence. The Reset Well remembered to sulk and nothing more. The dust settled. The room gave up its smile.

Outside, the corridor’s air changed from thin to familiar. The Choir hum underfoot settled into that first-day line that had lived there waiting for them to return. It was almost funny how fast a body will relax to a note it knows.

Mikhailis laughed once, too soft to echo, mostly at himself. He put a hand to his chest like he was apologizing to his ribs for worrying them.

Thalatha let it stand. She met his eyes and, with a straight face that made recruits sit up even when she wasn’t looking at them, said, "Let’s not do that again."

"Seconded," he said, sober for once.

They moved on, the wireframe of the world cleaner than they had found it, the placards doing quiet work behind them like good rules do. They had not been sent down. They were, by all clean signs, back at the beginning’s edge—and moving up.