The floor of the false Heart chamber came apart in sections while Ossian was still twenty feet from the west wall.
Slabs dropped through the water in front of him, and he counted them instead of running.
Counting falling rock was porter work, since the number of pieces already down tells a man how much roof is still over his head.
'Three down on the left, one behind me... the ceiling is going in a line toward the west wall,' he pressed his back into the rock, 'wait for the fourth, then move.'
A woman's voice came through the observation comm bolted beside him, on a channel that had no reason to be live.
"Movement in the lower basin, whoever you are, hold where you are," the voice came in flat under the static, with no guild rank attached to it.
'That is not a captain's channel... nobody with a rank talks to a basin they have written off,' Ossian looked at the speaker grille with water at his knees, 'listen first, answer nothing.'
"Drone operations," the woman offered, which is a job rather than a rank, and not one that comes with access to a private extraction channel.
Ruan's command frequency stayed open above both of them, and nobody on it said a single word.
'The captain can hear this too... he is listening to somebody find me alive and staying quiet,' the static rose as the drone lost height, 'move, the water is at your knees.'
Down in the basin the current had started pulling toward the collapse instead of away from it.
Ossian triggered the pursuit skill and let it take him, four steps across the broken floor for four body lengths of ground.
His bad leg took the landing, and the bone in his thigh made a sound that reached his ears through the inside of his own body.
'That leg should not be taking landings... damn it, I have four more of those in me at the most,' he put a hand out onto the rock, 'shaft first, count the cost later.'
He tried to take a fifth step while the floor behind him was still going down.
[Grave Rush asks for four steps and takes four steps]
[A fifth is not something you are permitted]
The count was a hard limit rather than a warning, and the stored speed came back through his shins the moment he broke the run early.
'Four exactly, every single time... the system is not negotiating about that,' he went down onto the good knee in the water, 'up, the west wall is still standing.'
"The main tunnel is under rubble, so stop looking at it," the woman told him, reading something off a screen he could not see.
She was mapping the chamber with a damaged drone, and the picture she was working from was dying while she used it.
"There's a maintenance shaft forty feet west of you," she continued, giving him the route like a set of coordinates rather than a rescue.
'Forty feet, and I get four steps at a time... that is two runs with a limp in the middle,' the water came up over his belt, 'go.'
A system screen opened across the flooded chamber then, and it posted a number he had never asked to see.
[Identity Fracture, six percent]
[This is what wearing a monster costs, and it does not walk itself back]
That figure meant nothing to him on its own, since the system offered no scale to measure six percent against.
'Six percent of what... of me, obviously, there is nothing else on the table down here,' Ossian dragged his leg through the current, 'later, walk.'
The Jackal's preference arrived next, well ahead of anything Ossian had decided for himself.
It wanted the collapsing half of the room, where broken ground favours an animal that does not care what the footing costs it.
'That was not me deciding... I want the shaft, and this thing wants the falling side of the room,' he stopped moving for a second, 'that is the mask talking.'
[Wear the Carrion Jackal and this lair stops mattering to you]
[The body you are using now is worse in every column that keeps a creature alive]
The system put both forms into two columns on one panel, and the human column lost on every line of it.
'It has my own body written down as the inferior option... in a table, with the numbers lined up,' Ossian read the panel while the water climbed, 'no.'
Wearing the Jackal would take the pain out of his leg for as long as he kept the mask on his face.
It would also cost him more of whatever that six percent was counting, and the system did not say how much.
'Press it and the leg stops screaming... so I walk out of here as more of that thing than I am now,' his thumb hovered over the accept panel, 'shit, walk.'
He dismissed the offer and started walking, which cost him time he did not have.
The walk to the pump housing took two minutes on a broken leg, where a Jackal would have covered the same ground in twenty seconds.
'Two minutes for pride... and the leg is going to bill me a week of work for it,' he went past the housing with a palm flat on the rock, 'find the ladder.'
Her directions kept coming while the drone above him lost altitude, picture quality, then most of its audio.
"Left of the housing, then up, the rungs start at chest height," she read out, with the static eating one word in every five.
The drone gave out somewhere above the pump housing, and she kept calling turns off a map she had read before it died.
He found the ladder where she said it would be, rusted through in three places and bolted to wet rock.
'She has been right about every turn so far... which is more than the man with the rank has managed,' Ossian got both hands on the third rung, 'climb.'
"Who are you?" the woman asked, once the water was below him and the immediate danger had passed.
'Do not answer her... if Ruan hears I walked out of that basin, he sends somebody to correct it,' the question sat there on the open channel, 'keep climbing, give her silence.'
Ossian kept climbing and let the silence run out over the frequency.
She let it stand without pushing at him, then went back to reading out the route, and he noticed her doing it.
Nothing on the guild frequency changed through any of it, and that silence overhead had started to sound like a decision somebody made.
The climb took twenty minutes on one working leg, so he counted rungs to keep from counting the drop underneath him.
He came out into a concrete service corridor well outside the Gate boundary, where the lights were bright enough to hurt his eyes.
Somebody running a floor machine took one look at the state of him and moved across to the far wall.
A public information screen at the end of that corridor was running Ivory Banner's statement on a loop.
Ruan stood at a podium in the picture, and the caption under him named a porter who died after ignoring an evacuation order.
They had put a photograph of him up beside Ruan, taken on the day he signed his first porter contract.
Eleven other people were standing in that corridor, and not one of them looked at the screen for longer than a second.
'They have already filed it... I have been dead since about lunchtime,' Ossian wiped the blood off his mouth and read the caption twice, 'shit, that is my name up there.'
Being dead on paper would keep Ivory Banner from looking for him, and it also cancelled every credit that building owed him.
A dead porter does not receive a badge, a clinic rate, or a permanent contract with his name printed on it.
Five miles of city stood between that corridor and his room, with a camera watching every transit gate on the way.
He turned away from the screen and started walking toward the station on a leg that had another week of damage in it.