The ragged, uneven wheezing of Curtis's lungs echoed off the rusted iron of the maintenance stairwell.
Without his UI, the accountant was flying blind. He had no stamina bar to pace himself, no numerical warning for his heart rate. He was just a man in a borrowed tunic running up hundreds of massive, steep stairs in the dark, driven entirely by the heavy, synchronized marching of the Praetorian kill-squads echoing up the central shaft from Level 2.
Don hauled him upward by the collar. The scavenger acted as Curtis's physical metronome, forcing the accountant's trembling legs to keep a rhythm.
Every rotation of the red emergency strobes cast stretching, bloody shadows against the uncirculated, freezing air. Above them, the dead Spiral escalator groaned, the massive gears settling under their own colossal weight.
"My lungs. Don, my lungs," Curtis gasped, stumbling on a grated step and clutching his chest. "The bar has to be at zero. I'm going into cardiac arrest."
