The only thing Eli noticed about the cell was its constant sound.
Nothing loud like shouting or doors slamming every few minutes. Just the constant low hum from the fluorescent lights above him, lights that looked like they had been installed decades ago and forgotten about entirely. The kind of fixtures that buzzed at the same pitch all day and all night without variation, without mercy.
He sat on the narrow bench bolted to the wall and stared at the opposite set of bars. They were close enough that if he stretched his legs out fully he could almost prop his feet up between the metal rails. Instead he kept his sneakers flat against the cold concrete and stared at the bars and tried to think.
They had taken his hoodie, his phone, and even his shoelaces.
What the hell would I even do with shoelaces, he thought. The thought came too quickly and he pushed it away even faster.
His wrists still ached from the metal cuffs and flexing them didn't make it any better. But he couldn't stop clenching them either.
Suspicion of violent misconduct.
The words replayed in his head until they stopped sounding like words at all. He kept trying to reconstruct the previous night in the right order. His birthday dinner. Feeling the heat. Collapsing. Then the warped apartment, the layers folding in on themselves, the seam splitting down the middle of his kitchen and mirroring the world in half.
It all felt like a puzzle his brain had invented and was keeping all the important pieces hidden from him.
Maybe he really had blacked out completely. Maybe he had destroyed the apartment himself. Maybe he had even k—
No.
He knew he could never do that. There was no possible version of him that would. His mom was the only thing in his life that had never moved on him. It was always the two of them orbiting the same small space in that apartment on the fourth floor of Mariner Heights, keeping each other steady without ever having to say that was what they were doing.
The idea that he could harm her felt so foreign that it almost made him angry at himself just for letting it cross his mind at all. He held onto the anger because it felt real, and he hadn't felt very real for the past couple of days.
Sixteen years old and sitting in a holding cell on his birthday. His mom used to say Port Virel was safe. Organized. Predictable. He wondered what she'd call this.
He pressed his palms hard into his eyes until little stars bloomed in the dark behind them.
The hum of the lights never stopped or faltered. Just that steady toneless vibration sitting underneath the silence and making it feel worse than silence would have on its own.
The PVPD holding area sat in the lower level of the precinct, a long corridor of cells tucked beneath the main building where the natural light didn't reach. The walls were painted an institutional green that had gone slightly yellow at the ceiling line from years of fluorescent exposure. The floor was bare concrete, scuffed and faintly stained in patterns that had been there long enough to become part of the surface. The bars across the front of each cell were thick dark iron, bolted into the concrete floor and ceiling with the kind of permanence that made it clear nobody had ever seriously considered removing them. The whole place had the specific smell of a room that got mopped regularly but never actually came clean, bleach sitting on top of something older underneath it.
If he focused past the hum he could pick out other sounds. A sickly, wet cough from somewhere further down the row, the kind that had clearly been going on for hours. Fabric shifting. The faint squeak of a rubber sole adjusting on concrete. He wasn't isolated back here, just separated from whoever else had been processed and walked down this corridor by the thick walls and the bars between them.
He wasn't sure if that made it better or worse.
"You in for something real? Or just unlucky?"
The voice came from somewhere to his right. Not aggressive, not trying to start anything. Neutral in the specific way of someone who had been in a situation like this before and had stopped finding it remarkable.
Eli flinched before he could stop himself, though the voice hadn't done anything to earn it. "What?"
"Ah, must be your first time in one of these," the voice continued calmly. "You're breathing hard enough for the whole room to hear."
Eli swallowed something down and forced himself to inhale slower. "Yeah. First time."
"Yeah, figured," the voice said. "You got that pacing energy in you."
"I wasn't pacing."
"You were, man. For like ten minutes."
Eli hadn't realized that. He looked down at the concrete between his feet half expecting to see grooves worn into it from where his sneakers had been going back and forth.
"Hey man, don't mind me if I sound a little off," the voice added, easy and unbothered about it. "Took something dumb before they grabbed me. My head is still kind of buzzing."
There was a short pause.
"Name's Mateo," the voice said. "You?"
Eli hesitated for half a second. He couldn't quite explain why. "Eli."
"Eli," Mateo repeated, like he was just placing it somewhere. "Alright Eli. I'm in here for missing my last court date. Stupid stuff. They always make it so dramatic when they book you though. What're they trying to get you with?"
Eli felt his jaw tighten. "They think I hurt someone."
There was a short silence after that. Not judgment. Something more like processing.
"You?" Mateo asked carefully. "You sound like you're about to puke kid, not like you swung on anyone."
"I didn't," Eli said quickly. His own voice surprised him a little with how steady it came out.
"Okay," Mateo replied simply. "Then you didn't."
A second voice came from the left side of the row, further down and quieter, much raspier and older sounding. Probably the same wet cough he'd been hearing since he sat down.
"They usually don't keep minors here too long," it said.
"You a minor?" Mateo asked.
"Yeah. Sixteen," Eli replied.
"You get picked up this morning or something?" Mateo asked.
"Yeah," Eli said. "Perfect wake-up call."
He tried to make it land like a joke. It didn't quite get there.
"Jeez, my head feels like it's a half-second behind right now," Mateo muttered, more to himself than anyone. "Like the room is lagging behind me."
"The morning helps you think about the night before," the second voice spoke up again from the left.
"You've been in here before?" Mateo asked.
"Yes," the quieter voice replied.
Mateo huffed. "Figures."
Eli kept his eyes on the bars across from him. The second voice made something in his nerves do a thing he couldn't name. It wasn't aggressive, it wasn't mean, it didn't even seem particularly interested in being part of the conversation. It just lingered there on the left side of the row like it had always been there and always would be.
"You got any family coming?" Mateo seemed to direct at Eli again.
"Just my mom really," Eli replied. "But I'm not sure if she is coming."
"Just her?"
Eli shifted on the bench, the cold edge of the metal pressing through the back of his jeans. "Yeah."
Mateo let out a soft exhale. "That's rough."
The silence settled back in around them.
The hum stretched across the ceiling above him, filling every inch of the space it could find.
"Are you close?" the quieter voice asked.
"Yeah, of course," Eli said without even thinking about it.
"How close?"
Mateo snorted from the other side of the wall. "Dude, what the hell kind of a question is that?"
The quieter voice did not respond to him.
Eli hesitated, not sure now why he had answered the first question so quickly. "It's just been the two of us," he said. "For a long time."
"For how long?" the quieter voice asked.
"Always," Eli replied. More edge in it than he intended.
"You doing interviews in here or something? Got your own background checks?" Mateo shifted something out of sight on his side of the wall. "Do me next with your twenty questions."
Still nothing from the voice in acknowledgment of him.
"Always," the quieter voice echoed, a little softer now, like it was noting something down somewhere. "Do you rely on her?"
Eli swallowed. "Yeah."
"If she were gone," it continued at the same flat even pace, "what would you think?"
Mateo let out a confused laugh. "Ok, that's just getting weird."
Eli's fingers tightened around the edge of the bench. "She's not gone," he said firmly.
"You don't know that," the voice replied.
His pulse ticked up a few notches.
"You don't remember," it added.
Mateo shifted again, the bench on his side creaking faintly. "Remember what?"
The voice still ignored him completely.
"The heat," it said.
Eli's stomach dropped.
"The pressure in your throat. The room bending at its corners. The split down the center."
The hum above them dipped down a couple of notes. Just barely. Just enough to notice.
Eli's eyes snapped to the bars and past them, out to the empty corridor beyond, the pale green walls sitting under their own flickering lights. He had not told anyone that. He had not said a single word about any of it since they had put him in this cell.
"You're guessing," Eli said quickly.
"No," the voice answered. "I'm not."
Mateo swore under his breath. "Aight, I must not be a part of this joke or something, because now I'm completely lost."
Eli's breathing had gone shallow again without him deciding to let it. He forced himself to pull a longer breath in. The air tasted like concrete and bleach and something faintly metallic underneath both of them.
"I didn't tell you that," Eli said.
"Tell me what?" Mateo asked, genuinely confused now.
"The heat," the quieter voice continued calmly. "The way your hands shook before you dropped."
Mateo shifted harder on his bench. "Okay, hold up. I didn't hear anything about heat. What are you two talking about?"
Eli's pulse kept climbing.
"You don't remember everything," it said. "That's the problem."
"I do remember," Eli snapped. Though he wasn't entirely sure he could believe himself on that.
"Do you?"
The question wasn't loud. It wasn't aggressive. It was almost gentle, which made it worse than either of those things would have been.
"You remember sitting at the table," it continued. "You remember the first bite. The warmth. After that?"
Eli's mind tried to rewind. Tried to lay the sequence out in the right order.
"I passed out," he said.
"Did you?" the voice asked.
Mateo muttered something under his breath.
"You say you would never hurt her," it continued at the same even pace. "But you don't actually know what you did."
Eli's jaw tightened until it ached. "I didn't hurt her."
"But you can't remember," the voice said.
The fluorescent hum seemed to sharpen slightly. Thinner and closer than it had been.
"You blacked out, right?" it continued. "People do all sorts of things when they black out."
A cold line moved slowly down the back of Eli's neck.
"You felt the room shift," the voice went on. "You remember that part clearly. Why does that part feel so vivid? But the rest is a blank?"
Eli swallowed.
The seam. The layered ceilings stacking down toward him. The apartment folded behind itself going further back than the wall had any right to allow. Those images were sharp and specific and detailed in a way that the moments just before he hit the floor simply were not.
He had no answer for why.
"Ok, I think I'm starting to lose it now," Mateo said under his breath. "If I start seeing shapes in the walls or something else, just ignore me. This stuff messes with your depth perception."
Footsteps echoed down the corridor outside their row.
An officer slowed as he passed, not stopping at first, just doing a lazy pass along the bar fronts with the look of someone checking a box.
"Keep it down back here," he muttered. "You two are louder than the drunks from last night."
Mateo let out a small laugh. "Chill, it's early man. We're just talking."
"Yeah," the officer said, already moving again down the corridor. "Well, keep it amongst yourselves."
His footsteps continued down the hall, past the other cells, fading into the low mechanical noise the building made all on its own until they were gone entirely.
Silence settled back in.
Mateo let out a breath. "What a prick. We're not even being loud."
Eli didn't answer right away.
"He said two," Eli said quietly.
Mateo snorted. "Yeah man. You and me. That's how counting works."
"No," Eli said, his voice tighter now. "He said you two."
There was a short pause.
"So?" Mateo replied.
"So, there has been three of us talking."
Mateo shifted on his bench. "Yeah. Obviously."
Eli stared at the bars.
The third voice spoke again, calm and steady from wherever it actually was.
"They can't respond to what they don't perceive."
Mateo gave a dry chuckle. "Man, you hear that? Dude's acting like he's invisible."
"You don't find that weird?" Eli asked.
"What?" Mateo replied. "Cops messing up paperwork? That's not all that weird."
"No. That he didn't hear him."
"Okay," Mateo said slowly. "Either this Nex I took is hitting me way harder than I thought, or you two are running some kind of strange prank show."
"I'm not messing around," Eli said.
His mouth had gone dry and his heartbeat had started thudding in his ears, deep and uneven against the steady backdrop of the hum.
"You're sure?" Mateo asked. "Because my depth's already off. The bars keep looking further away than they are."
Eli swallowed and forced himself to focus on the metal in front of him. The vertical lines were straight. Solid. Fixed in the concrete floor and ceiling exactly where they had always been.
"You're the one who said your head was lagging," Eli replied. "Maybe that's all this is."
"That's what I'm hoping at least," Mateo muttered. "I tried Nex for the first time last night. Some synthetic stuff my cousin swore was clean. Said it's like taking mushrooms but way more intense."
"Nex," Eli repeated faintly.
"Yeah," Mateo continued, talking a little faster now like getting it out helped keep him level. "It feels like everything is separating. Like sounds don't line up right with where they come from. It's hard to explain. That's why lagging fits the description best."
The third voice did not react to any of it.
"You all rely on your excuses," it said instead, almost thoughtful about it. "One of you blames chemicals. The other blames exhaustion. You both avoid the simpler conclusion."
Eli felt something shift in the cell around him. That same tightness from the apartment pressing in at the edges, smaller and more concentrated but unmistakably the same thing. The bare concrete walls seemed to pull the remaining warmth out of the air. The bench under him felt colder than it had a few minutes ago.
"What simpler conclusion is that Einstein?" Mateo shot back, irritation rising through whatever the Nex had done to his voice. "That we're all just crazy, locked up in an asylum somewhere?"
"That you are unstable," the voice replied. "Both of you."
The hum above them wavered. Not louder exactly. Just closer, like the source of it had moved down from the ceiling toward them.
Mateo inhaled sharply. "Okay. What the hell. Now my ears are ringing."
Eli could barely track him. The space between the bars looked wrong in a way he couldn't isolate or name. The bars were still straight, still vertical, still fixed in their concrete moorings, but the air between them had taken on a visible density, the same slow distorting shimmer of heat rising off summer asphalt on the Port Virel waterfront.
"I don't like this," Mateo muttered. "I really don't like this."
Eli felt something pressing at him from behind his thoughts. Not his chest this time, not his stomach. Behind his thoughts, like careful fingers moving slowly through a drawer, looking for something specific without disturbing anything else.
A new image flickered into his head. Not a memory. An intrusion. His kitchen from an angle he had never stood at, the kitchen knife lying on the counter, and an unmistakable pool of dark red spreading slowly into the grout lines of the tile, reaching outward at the edges like it had somewhere it needed to go.
"That's not real," he whispered.
Mateo's breathing had shifted from irritated to genuinely uneven. "The walls feel further away," he said quietly. "Or I'm getting further back. I just can't tell."
The hum overhead deepened into something almost tonal, almost harmonic, a low sustained note that seemed to come from the walls themselves rather than the fixtures above. Like the building itself was holding one long breath.
The third voice no longer sounded like it came from the left side of the row, or the right either. It sounded woven into the hum now, coming from everywhere the hum reached.
"Your mind is splitting," it said quietly. "From certainty. From structure. From yourself."
The air thickened. Not as a figure of speech. Each breath required actual deliberate attention now, a conscious pull against something with low resistance that built up slowly with every inhale, like trying to breathe through a wet towel held just far enough away that you kept thinking it would get easier.
Mateo made a sudden strangled noise from his side of the wall.
"Okay," he said quickly, too quickly. "Okay no. No. That's just messed up."
A dull scrape came from the right. From Mateo's cell. Something flat and hard dragged against the concrete floor.
"Mateo?" Eli called.
"I'm fine," Mateo snapped, but his voice cracked clean through on the second word. "I'm fine, I'm just—"
Another scraping sound cut him off. Harder. Irregular. Then faster.
"What are you doing?" Eli asked.
The scraping sped up into something continuous.
"Stop," Mateo muttered to himself. Not to Eli. "Stop moving."
"I'm not moving," Eli said.
"Not you," Mateo breathed.
The bars across from Eli refused to hold a consistent depth at the edges of his vision, not bending exactly but losing their solidity, like his eyes couldn't decide how far away they were. His feet looked too far from them when he stretched his legs out. The cell swelled wide and then immediately compressed narrow. The ceiling pulled upward and the fluorescent fixtures above him thinned into a single wire of pale light that looked like it might snap if the air shifted wrong.
"I can't feel the wall at all," Mateo said, and the panic was fully out now, nothing holding it back anymore. "I'm touching it but I can't feel it."
The scraping turned wet. Frantic. Rhythmic in the specific way of something that had long since stopped being a decision.
Eli's throat closed.
The kitchen image forced itself back harder this time. The knife. The tile. The dark red spreading further than it should, past the grout lines, toward the edge of the counter, moving with a slow patient purpose that made his stomach lurch.
"Stop it," he said, barely above a whisper. "That's not real."
"You do not know that," the voice replied, right at the edge now, intimate in a way that felt like a violation of something. "You do not know what you did after you lost control."
The pressure inside his skull built steadily from the inside outward.
Mateo was crying now. Small broken sounds, barely audible, cut through by the wet rhythmic scraping of his hands working against the concrete cell wall.
"I can't feel my hands," he choked out. "My fingers. I can't..."
Something moved through Eli's mind that wasn't entirely his own. A quick quiet inventory running itself without his permission. The shoelaces they had taken. The hoodie balled up in a property bag somewhere down the hall. The bench bolted to the wall. Any possible way out of a room built to have none.
He recognized it the moment it finished.
It hadn't come from him.
Something was feeding it to him.
The voice pressed harder.
"You are already unstable. You only need confirmation."
Mateo screamed.
Not loud. Not theatrical. A short raw sound cut off exactly halfway through, like something had reached into his throat from the inside and simply closed it.
The bars in front of Eli flared white at their edges and snapped back to solid iron.
The hum dropped out completely.
Bootsteps hit the corridor hard. Not the lazy shuffle of the patrol officer from earlier. Heavy and deliberate and fast, each one landing with the specific weight of someone who had already decided where they were going before they started moving.
The presence in the cell pulled back all at once. Tightened itself into something small and still and unseen, the way something caught in a sudden light goes completely motionless and waits.
The cell returned to its correct dimensions. Floor level. Ceiling where it belonged. The bars straight and solid and at exactly the right distance from his feet.
Mateo was breathing in small broken pieces on the other side of the concrete wall. Short gasping sounds with too much silence between them.
A figure stopped at the front of the row.
"Enough," a man's voice said. Calm and grounded and placed in the air like something solid being set down on a table.
The word landed and held there.
Whatever had been working at the edges of the cell and behind Eli's thoughts drew back completely, pulling away from it the way a hand pulls back from something hot before the brain has even finished deciding to pull.
Eli didn't know who the man was yet.
But the pressure was gone.
He was still on the bench. His fingers had dug into the edge of it hard enough that the metal had left marks pressed into his knuckles. He looked down at his hands.
He unclenched them one finger at a time.
For the first time since the pressure had started, he realized how badly he had been shaking.