The emergency barrier hadn't been deployed yet.
Good. Yara hated being late.
Dust still hung in the air at the mouth of the station—thick enough to taste, faintly metallic. People crowded the steps, coughing, shouting, filming. She cut through them with the steadiness of someone who had walked into half-collapsed sites before.
Two security staff tried to block her.
"Ma'am, you can't—"
"I'm with Civil Infrastructure," she said, flashing her ID before either could finish. "If the failure is propagating, every second counts. Step aside."
They hesitated. The younger one moved first. "Yes, engineer—just be careful—"
"I always am."
She descended quickly.
The first landing was cracked.
The fissure wasn't from impact; it was too clean, like a line traced by something internal. She crouched briefly, running a finger lightly along its edge.
Temperature shift again. Warm below, cool above.
Not normal.
The structural failure had a pattern.
At the second landing, visibility dropped sharply. The lights flickered, then steadied into a dull, unreliable glow. She heard movement—boots, radios, a distant cough.
Then something else.
Air.
Pulling downward.
Not rushing, not escaping—drawing.
A directional flow, like the station had developed a second throat below the original structure.
She kept moving.
At the platform, she found three transit officers standing near a fresh break in the floor. Debris framed a jagged opening about a meter wide, descending into darkness deeper than any maintenance shaft should allow.
One officer turned as she approached.
"Who are you?"
"Engineer Lin. What's the current status?"
He gestured helplessly at the hole. "We… don't know. That wasn't there five minutes ago."
Yara stepped past him for a clearer view.
The edges weren't shattered; they were pulled, bent inward like softened metal instead of concrete. She clicked her tongue softly. No tunnel blueprint she knew had materials with plasticity like this.
"Any injured down there?" she asked.
"No, no one fell."
A beat. "We heard something move, though."
She didn't comment. Anyone could "hear something" in a crisis.
She checked her watch. Then she knelt at the edge of the opening, ignoring the officer's alarmed "Hey—careful!"
Her voice was calm. "If I were going to fall, I wouldn't kneel."
She pulled a small penlight from her pocket and aimed it down.
The beam should have hit concrete six meters below.
Instead, the light vanished into a vertical shaft that continued farther than her tool was designed to measure. The walls weren't regular tunnel walls, either.
They were smoothed.
Patterned.
Not by water.
She leaned closer.
Not fear—curiosity. A clean, sharp mental click. Something here made sense to her even before she understood it.
A faint breath of warm air slid past her cheek—rising from the darkness.
Directional again.
Consistent.
Like the pulse of a living system.
Behind her, someone ran down the stairs shouting for evacuation. The platform lights dimmed again, metal groaning overhead.
Yara stood, dusted concrete from her palms, and turned to the officers.
"Seal the entrance," she said. "No civilians near this point. And get me access to the station schematics—full underground distribution, including disused sections."
The officer blinked. "You think this was planned?"
"No."
She looked back at the impossible shaft.
"But it's aligned."
"Aligned with what?"
She didn't answer immediately. Instead, she replayed the echo under the pavement, the airflow, the warm ground.
And the stranger's words:
The city opens before it breaks.
Yara exhaled once.
Controlled. Focused.
"I'll tell you once I confirm," she said. "But whatever this is—it didn't start today."
She turned away from the officers, already forming the next twelve steps in her head.
Whatever was underneath Liria was waking up.
And she intended to open it before anyone else did.