He dropped Surface Shift. The cool pressure faded, and his face resolved into itself again, the bones and the jaw and the dark circles that hadn't changed no matter what rank he reached. The guards stared. The B-rank's expression flickered through recognition and then the careful blankness of someone filing a report they weren't going to write.
He followed Daven through the door. The interior was the same as he remembered, dim and quiet, the dimensional shielding humming at a frequency just below hearing. The corridor led past a security station, past a door marked with the same symbol he'd found on the buried object and the data slate and the gate, past the room where Sera Aldric had first told him the membrane was failing and the Hollow class was the only thing that could fix it.
Fen C
