On the plane, Araari brings up being incompetently threatened. “Two men stopped me yesterday. From Captain Walker. They wanted me to tell you that continuing on this path is dangerous. —They meant because of them, because they will hurt you if you continue, but I suspect they are not the most dangerous thing we will encounter if we continue.”
Martin did NOT SURVIVE THIS LONG BY LISTENING TO PEOPLE WHEN THEY SAID THINGS AREN'T FATAL.
Zoe's stance here is that if he wants the Black Pharaoh Cast Out then he is going to have to do somethings that are potentially fatal.
"When you say to beware these traps is it just a matter of looking for and going around them or is it more complicated than that."
"Remove only the posts you must, replace all the posts you can?? What's the deal with these posts?
Also how flooded are the flooded catacombs."
"Given all of the traps and the flooded tunnels do we maybe want to... revise this plan... such that we don't have to worry about blades dropping from the ceiling."
"There's kind of a lot of nectar?"
"If you know the trap is there it's not that hard to avoid."
Martin feels that the traps are less scary than the men with guns. Traps behave predictably.
"When you say flooded how deep are we talking. Is this wading through the stuff or would we be better off, I don't know, bringing a raft."
"Some got in her mouth," says Oswald, who was there and definitely tracking what Nectar was going where that night because it was terrifying. "--Zoe did get burned by Nectar. Probably that was a. special variant. and not what's in these tunnels."
"I have no idea if what that one Mouth spat at me was Nectar. Is everything that comes out of them Nectar?"
Martin shrugs.
"So the traps aren't intended to catch people who... know they're there?"
"Right but knowing that there is a trap is not the same as knowing... what it looks like, what triggers it, how fast it goes once it's triggered, how it moves, all that stuff?"
"Like, okay. In this part you wrote 'blade drops from ceiling'. What kind of blade? Does it drop straight down, or move in an arc? What makes it drop?"
Mordred feels that he has spent years doing crimes in broad daylight by walking in the front door and is very reluctant to set aside years of front-door-walking expertise in favor of wading through Nectar and avoiding blade traps.
He will grudgingly concede that they do in fact have reasons to not want to walk in the front door this time but like. Come on.
Oswald got away with all his crimes mostly by sitting at a desk in an out-of-the-way office doing numbers and never interacting with anyone. He for one is glad of a plan that does not involve interacting with anyone. (Not like it's much more deadly than all of their other plans, he tells himself, even though this is a much more tangible danger than usual.)