The passage opened as Colette said it would.

  A cavern, not rge, the kind of space the dungeon produced between its connective passages, roughly circur, the walls close enough that the mineral light from two deposits on opposite sides reached each other and produced something approaching adequate illumination in the center.

  The floor was wet.

  Not flooded. A thin film of water across the stone, fed by the dripping from above, the source of the sound they'd been following. The ceiling here was visible, low enough that Aris could have touched it by reaching up, and from it water came in the thin single thread of a drip that had been falling long enough to have worn a small depression in the floor below where it nded.

  Drip.

  The water hit the depression and spread outward in a circle too small to see individually but present in aggregate, the floor around the depression slightly more worn than the floor further from it, years of small circles producing one rger result.

  Aris looked at the cavern.

  He looked at the three passages leading out of it, left, right, and forward, and the specific quality of dark in each of them, and the way the water film on the floor reflected the mineral light in the thin unreliable way that wet stone reflected things.

  He looked at the right passage.

  Something in it.

  Not movement. The suggestion of movement, the quality of dark that dark has when something is in it rather than when it is simply dark, the difference between an empty room and a room with someone standing quietly in the corner.

  "Colette," he said.

  "I see it," she said.

  It came out of the right passage at the speed of something that had decided the assessment period was over.

  White.

  The White Rabbit of Floor 7 was not the White Rabbit of Floor 4. Aris knew the Floor 4 variety with the specific intimate knowledge of something he had encountered dozens of times and had developed efficient routes to avoid. Floor 4 White Rabbits were the size of a rge cat, fast, territorial, their primary attack a coordinated rush that was dangerous in groups and manageable alone.

  The Floor 7 version was the size of a rge dog.

  It came across the wet floor without slipping, the paws finding purchase on the wet stone with the ease of something that had been navigating this floor its entire life, and its eyes in the mineral light were red, a deep ft red that had no warmth in it, and its teeth when its mouth opened were not the teeth of something that ate pnts.

  "I hate these things," Aris said.

  "Universally," Colette said, stepping left.

  Aris stepped right.

  He reached for the sword at his hip, the motion automatic, and his hand found the grip and pulled it free and it was only as the bde came out and caught the mineral light that he registered what he was holding.

  Elysse's sword.

  The grip, the bance, the specific weight of it that was calibrated for someone taller than him with a longer reach and a different center of gravity. He had picked it up in the church weeks ago to carry it to the clinic and had put it on the hook by the door and had taken it with him this morning without thinking and had not thought about it once since.

  He had Elysse's sword.

  He did not have time to think about this further because the Rabbit reached him.

  He swung.

  Not well. The reach was wrong, the bance unfamiliar, the arc of the swing longer than his body expected, and the bde caught the Rabbit across the side of the neck rather than through it, a cut that was deep enough to be decisive and messy enough to suggest that swordsmanship was not his primary skill set.

  The Rabbit went down.

  The wet floor received it.

  "Good," Colette said, from the left side of the cavern.

  "It's Elysse's sword," Aris said.

  "I noticed," Colette said.

  "I forgot to give it back."

  "Aris."

  "Yes."

  "Focus."

  He focused.

  The second Rabbit came from the forward passage.

  The third from the left, which required Colette to move quickly and put the cavern wall at her back.

  Aris took the second Rabbit with a better swing, the bance of the sword less unfamiliar now, the longer reach becoming an advantage rather than a liability as he adjusted for it.

  The third reached Colette before he could redirect.

  She stepped inside its rush and drove her elbow into the side of its skull with the practiced efficiency of someone who had been in enough situations where the sword wasn't the fastest avaible option, and the Rabbit staggered and she followed up with the pommel of her own bde across the base of its neck and it went down in the way things went down when the base of the neck had been addressed correctly.

  She looked at him.

  He looked at her.

  Three Rabbits on the wet floor of the cavern and the drip continuing above them, patient and indifferent.

  "How many more," Aris said.

  Colette looked at the right passage.

  The dark in it had changed quality.

  Not the suggestion of movement this time. Movement itself, the specific quality of dark that dark has when many things are in it, the aggregate of presence, the way a crowd makes a space feel different from a single person even before you can see the individuals.

  From the dark, red eyes.

  Not two. Not four. A quantity that the dark made difficult to count precisely, which was its own kind of answer, the dungeon's Floor 7 White Rabbit popution expressing an opinion about the cavern and the two people in it and the three of their number currently on the wet floor.

  Drip.

  The sound of the water in the new silence was very clear.

  Then the dark moved forward and the eyes came with it, the horde pouring out of the right passage and spreading across the cavern floor like water finding its level, the wet stone reflecting the red of them in thin broken lines across the surface, and the sound of them was the sound of many things moving with one intention across a floor that amplified every contact.

  Aris held Elysse's sword.

  Colette stood to his left.

  "Now," she said, "would be an appropriate time to be concerned."

  "I've been concerned," Aris said. "Since the first one."

  "Good," she said. "Hold that."

  The horde reached the center of the cavern and kept coming.

  Colette's dagger came out of the sheath at her left hip with the clean ease of something that had been drawn many times before and knew the motion. It was not a fighting dagger, not the weighted utilitarian bde that lower district Wanderers carried for dungeon work. The handle was dark wood with a silver iny at the guard, the bde itself narrow and slightly longer than standard, the work of someone who had made it for a specific hand and a specific purpose. It caught the mineral light the way good steel caught light, cleanly and without showing off about it.

  She used it like she didn't want to.

  That was the most accurate description Aris could find for what he watched her do with the second and third Rabbits, the dagger finding the necessary angles with the precision of genuine training and the specific reluctance of someone who had decided that this weapon was for genuine emergencies and was currently operating just below that threshold. Efficient. Unhappy about being efficient.

  "Nice dagger," Aris said.

  "Don't compliment the dagger," Colette said. "I don't like using it."

  "You're good with it."

  "That's not the point."

  The third Rabbit went down and they stood in the cavern with the wet floor and the drip and the three Rabbits and the dark in the right passage that had changed quality and was continuing to change quality in a direction that neither of them found encouraging.

  "Other passage," Colette said, already moving toward the forward one. "Floor 8 is accessible from the left branch further ahead. I know this floor."

  "You said that," Aris said, following.

  "I mean it more now," she said.

  The forward passage ran longer than the one they'd entered from, the mineral deposits here more sparse, the dark between them genuine dark, the kind that made the next deposit visible as a destination rather than simply part of a continuous ambient light. The water sound faded behind them as they moved, repced by the passage's own quiet, the specific silence of enclosed stone that absorbed sound rather than reflecting it.

  Colette's hand was on the left wall again.

  Aris watched where he put his feet, the floor here uneven in a way that Floor 6 wasn't, the stone raised in irregur formations that caught boots if you weren't paying attention. He paid attention.

  "Branch ahead," Colette said. "Forty meters."

  "How many times have you been to Floor 7," Aris said.

  "Guild navigation training covered floors 1 through 15," she said. "Repeated until the geography was retained. I haven't been here since the training but the dungeon's primary passages don't change."

  "Primary."

  "The secondary ones shift occasionally," she said. "The dungeon's geology is active. Passages open and close on a long cycle."

  "How long."

  "Years typically," she said. "Sometimes less."

  "Comforting," Aris said.

  "I said primary passages don't change," she said. "We're in a primary passage."

  The branch appeared at the edge of the next mineral deposit's light. Left and right, the passage dividing cleanly, the left branch angled slightly downward, the right branch level.

  Colette stopped.

  She looked at the right branch.

  Then she looked at it differently, with the specific attention of someone who has recognized something and is checking the recognition against what they remember.

  "That wasn't there," she said.

  "The branch," Aris said.

  "The right branch," she said. "Last time this was a left only junction."

  She looked at the right branch's dark with the expression of someone revising their internal map.

  "Secondary passage," Aris said.

  "Apparently," she said.

  "You said years typically."

  "I said typically."

  She looked at the right branch for another moment, the professional assessment of a former guild captain reading a changed situation and updating accordingly, and then she looked at the left branch.

  "Left," she said. "Same as before."

  They went left.