—————————————————————————————————————
MEANWHILE... SUB-CHAPTER
7th District, somewhere
⠀
Dong-Hyeon lowered himself onto an overturned crate, the metal groaning under him, and rested his elbows on his knees.
⠀
"옛날 옛적에, I used to be a happier man, Gieffrin. Hard to believe, I know, looking at me now."
⠀
"Didn't figure you for the smiling type, honestly."
⠀
"I wasn't, not really, not on the outside. But there was a version of me that laughed easier. That trusted easier, too, which is the part that matters here." Dong-Hyeon's eyes fixed on some point past Gieffrin's shoulder, past the sheet metal, past the 7th District entirely. "It ended when Jun died."
⠀
"Jun."
⠀
"Jun Baek-Ho. A 1st Division Fixer, back when I was still cutting my teeth in the 6th. He trained me."
⠀
Gieffrin folded his arms, settling onto an overturned bucket across from him. "1st Division training a nobody from the 6th? That's not exactly standard."
⠀
"No. It wasn't." A faint, humorless smile crossed Dong-Hyeon's face. "He requested me specifically. Never told me why, not once, not even at the end. I asked. He'd just laugh and change the subject."
⠀
"Sounds like a real charmer."
⠀
"He was insufferable. Loud where I was quiet, reckless where I was careful. We went on every mission together for two years straight; the DaeSyndicate stopped bothering to pair us with anyone else after a while, since we'd just find our way back to each other regardless." Dong-Hyeon's fingers curled loosely in his lap. "He's the one who taught me how to survive this line of work. Not the fighting, not really; anyone can learn to fight. He taught me the one rule that actually keeps a Fixer breathing past their first year."
⠀
"Which is?"
⠀
"Separate the ARCHs from the humans in your head. Always. The moment you start treating an ARCH like it might reason with you the way a person does, it'll use that against you, because most of them can smell the difference between a Fixer who's still afraid and one who's stopped being afraid of the right things." Dong-Hyeon's voice had gone low, almost reverent, the cadence of a man reciting something memorized so long ago it had become scripture. "And the moment you start treating a human like they'd never do what an ARCH would do... that's when they surprise you. Jun used to say it plainly. Don't trust either. Not the ARCHs, and not the people standing next to you while you fight them."
⠀
"Cheerful worldview for a man who trained you personally."
⠀
"He wasn't cheerful. He was right." Dong-Hyeon's jaw tightened. "신이시여... I still hear him say it, some nights."
⠀
Gieffrin studied him a moment, the metal walls of the hideout ticking softly as they cooled from the afternoon heat. "So what happened to him?"
⠀
Silence.
⠀
"You said he died. You still haven't said how."
⠀
Dong-Hyeon didn't answer right away. He turned his hand over in his lap, studying his own palm like it belonged to someone else, the way a man might study a scar he'd stopped noticing years ago and had only just remembered was there.
⠀
"And why's a dead man from twenty years back so pertinent to whether you smiled easier or not? Plenty of Fixers lose partners. That's the job. You're talking about him like he's the reason the Overseer of Euphoria picked you out of a crowd to nearly die playing his game."
⠀
Dong-Hyeon rose from the crate.
⠀
"바보야," he murmured, and this time it didn't sound like an insult aimed at Gieffrin at all.
⠀
"Hey. I asked you a question."
⠀
"You did." Dong-Hyeon adjusted his coat, already moving toward the sheet-metal doorway they'd pulled aside earlier. "And I think that's enough questions for tonight."
⠀
"We were just getting to the good part!"
⠀
"That's precisely why." Dong-Hyeon paused at the threshold, his back to Gieffrin, the dim light of the 7th catching the edge of his profile. "Some stories aren't mine to finish telling in one sitting, Gieffrin. You'll understand, someday, if you're lucky enough to have someone worth not talking about."
⠀
He ducked out into the alley, and was gone before Gieffrin could think of anything worth saying back.
⠀
—————————————————————————————————————
9th District, Scrapyard Heap, The Following Morning
⠀
Mori hadn't slept much.
⠀
Not for lack of trying. He'd lain awake in the iron-walled inn room he shared with Yuhuan for what felt like most of the night, listening to that same whistled tune drift through the walls long after the others had gone quiet, the violin and viola trading a slow, mournful line back and forth, the harpsichord threading underneath it all like something holding the rest together. He never did figure out who was playing it. By the time he worked up the nerve to ask, the sun was already up, and the tune had stopped.
⠀
"You heard it too?" he asked Yuhuan, pulling his boots on.
⠀
"Hard not to." Yuhuan turned the tarnished ring over once in his palm before tucking it away for the day. "Didn't sound like the kind of thing you interrupt to ask questions about."
⠀
They met the others in the mess hall, where Kopf Dirigent was already waiting, a folded map tucked under one arm, Cembalo a step behind him with a fresh bandage across his cheek and chest where Yuhuan's blade had opened him the day before.
⠀
"I trust you all rested," Dirigent said.
⠀
"About that whistlin'," Roby started.
⠀
"We should get moving," Dirigent said, and that, apparently, was the end of that conversation.
⠀
The walk deeper into Scrapyard Heap took longer than any of them expected.
⠀
What had looked, from the outside, like a sprawling junkyard bolted haphazardly onto the 9th District's outer wall turned out to be something closer to a small city built entirely out of things other people had thrown away. Corridors of stacked shipping containers gave way to tunnels of welded pipe, which gave way to open yards lit by burning oil drums, which gave way to more corridors again. Kopf Dirigent led the group with his hands folded behind his back, Cembalo walking a few paces behind him, his silver brace gleaming dully in the drum-light.
⠀
"You people just live like this?" Roby asked, stepping over a rusted engine block half-buried in the dirt path.
⠀
"We live the way the 9th allows us to live," Cembalo said. "Which is to say, we build what we need out of what's left over. There's a certain honesty to it."
⠀
Saoirse, walking backward so she could keep making faces at Stuffy and Arnold, tripped over the same engine block and nearly took Mori down with her.
⠀
"WHOOPS!"
⠀
"...Graceful..." Stuffy muttered.
⠀
Yuhuan caught her by the collar before she hit the ground, hauling her upright without breaking stride. "Careful. We don't know what's actually underneath half this scrap."
⠀
"That's a fair concern," Dirigent said, not turning around. "Though I'd worry less about the scrap and more about where we're walking you toward."
⠀
That quieted the group for a moment.
⠀
"So what exactly is Adjunct-13, anyway?" Haddler asked, jogging a few steps to fall in beside Dirigent. "You've been awfully cagey about it for a guy who just handed us a golden ticket in."
⠀
Dirigent was quiet long enough that Haddler started to wonder if he'd been ignored. Then, finally:
⠀
"Do you know what happened here during the Season of Folly?"
⠀
"General idea. ARCHs broke loose from some DaeSyndicate testing chambers; half the Ring went up in flames for a while. Some people came out the other side as Fixers or Elegies. Standard history lesson stuff."
⠀
"That's the version everyone gets taught, yes." Dirigent's pace slowed, just slightly. "What most people aren't taught is that the 9th District sits directly above one of the largest of those testing chambers. DaeSyndicate called it Adjunct Facility Thirteen. Whatever they were doing down there in the years before the Season of Folly, it was significant enough that when the other Adjuncts broke open, DaeSyndicate sealed this one shut rather than let it join the rest."
⠀
"Sealed it," Yuhuan repeated. "Meaning what, exactly?"
⠀
"Meaning they welded the entrance, buried the access routes, and quietly funded the construction of everything you're currently walking through directly on top of it." Dirigent gestured broadly at the maze of scrap and pipe surrounding them. "Scrapyard Heap wasn't built here by accident. It was built here because DaeSyndicate needed a wall of bodies between whatever's still down there and the rest of the 9th, and they needed that wall to look like it happened naturally, so nobody went digging for the reason why. My predecessors built an office. DaeSyndicate built us a cage and let us mistake it for a home."
⠀
Nobody said anything to that for a while.
⠀
"...And you're just telling us this," Pallas said slowly, "...because?"
⠀
"Because you're about to go inside it, and I'd rather you understand the stakes than walk in thinking this is a scavenger hunt." Dirigent finally glanced back at the group, his expression unreadable. "Whatever's down there has been sealed for three years. My office has spent every one of those years making certain nothing that was inside ever finds a way out. I would appreciate it if your visit didn't undo that work."
⠀
Mori swallowed hard. "You make it sound like something's still... alive down there."
⠀
"I don't know," Dirigent said, and for the first time since they'd met him, he sounded genuinely uncertain. "Nobody who's gone in has ever come back up to say."
⠀
They found the entrance to Adjunct-13 at the far edge of Scrapyard Heap, past the last row of shipping containers, sitting alone in a flat clearing of packed dirt, as if it had been dropped there and forgotten.
⠀
It was, to put it plainly, unimpressive.
⠀
A single metal shelter, rusted at every seam, no bigger than a modest living room, squatted in the clearing with a single door on its front face. No windows. No markings, save for a faded stencil near the roofline that might once have read something official before three years of southern District 9 weather had worn it down to a smear of pale gray.
⠀
"This is it?" Saoirse asked, deflated. "I thought it'd be, like... bigger. Scarier. Somethin'."
⠀
"...Disappointing..." Stuffy agreed.
⠀
"Looks aren't everything," Cembalo said, stepping past her to run his hand along the shelter's outer wall. "Trust me on that one."
⠀
Dirigent produced a heavy iron key from inside his coat and fit it into a lock set flush with the door, turning it with a grinding click that echoed far louder than the small building had any right to produce. The door swung inward on hinges that hadn't been oiled in years, revealing, as promised, a space no larger than two hundred square feet: bare concrete floor, bare concrete walls, a single flickering overhead light, and absolutely nothing else.
⠀
Roby stuck his head in and looked around. "...That's it? That's the whole big scary secret facility?"
⠀
"Look down," Dirigent said.
⠀
Set into the center of the concrete floor, nearly invisible unless you already knew to look for it, was a seam. A perfect, hairline-thin square, roughly the size of an elevator car, cut directly into the ground.
⠀
Pallas crouched beside it, running his fingers along the seam's edge, and something in his expression shifted. Not surprise, exactly. Recognition.
⠀
"...This is a Class-3 containment lift," he said quietly. "DaeSyndicate stopped manufacturing these years ago."
⠀
"You know this model?" Yuhuan asked.
⠀
Pallas didn't answer right away. He reached into his coat and produced a thin plastic card, its surface scratched nearly smooth, a faded photograph on one corner that might once have been recognizable as his own face, a decade or more younger.
⠀
"I used to," he said finally. "Before I witnessed that Beautiful Morning."
⠀
Haddler leaned over his shoulder to look at the card. "...Is that a DaeSyndicate researcher badge?"
⠀
"It was."
⠀
"You were a researcher?"
⠀
"Adjunct Facility Ninety-Four. Lead researcher, for a time." Pallas said it the way a man might read a line off a form he'd filled out too many times to feel anything about anymore. "A different facility, similar design philosophy. If the access protocols haven't changed, this badge should still register."
⠀
He pressed the card flat against a barely visible sensor panel set into the wall beside the seam. For a long moment, nothing happened.
⠀
Then, a low mechanical groan rattled up from beneath the concrete, and the square seam split down the middle, both halves grinding open to reveal a waiting elevator car, its interior lit by a single sickly yellow bulb.
⠀
"...Huh," Roby said. "Would not have called that."
⠀
"There's a numeric keypad beside the door," Pallas continued, already stepping toward it. "It should be prompting for a passcode."
⠀
Sure enough, a small panel beside the elevator door blinked to life, awaiting entry.
⠀
"You remember the passcode?" Mori asked. "From... from when you worked there?"
⠀
"I remember several," Pallas said. "DaeSyndicate cycles them, but the underlying pattern rarely changes. Give me a moment."
⠀
His fingers moved over the keypad with the ease of long, worn-in muscle memory, entering a string of numbers too fast for anyone to follow. The panel flashed green. The elevator door rattled open the rest of the way.
⠀
"...You just did that like it was nothing," Haddler said, a little unsettled.
⠀
"It was, once," Pallas said, and stepped inside without waiting for the rest of them.
⠀
The others filed in after him, one by one; Saoirse, still craning her neck to look back at Dirigent and Cembalo standing in the doorway of the little metal shelter; Mori, gripping the strap of his holster like it might steady him; Yuhuan, quiet and watchful; Haddler, whistling something tuneless to fill the silence; Roby, already poking at buttons he had no business poking at.
⠀
"We'll be here when you return," Dirigent said, from outside. "However long that takes."
⠀
"You say that like you're not sure we're comin' back," Roby said.
⠀
Dirigent didn't answer that.
⠀
Pallas found the correct button, one of only two on the entire panel, unmarked except for a small etched arrow pointing down, and pressed it.
⠀
The doors ground shut.
⠀
The elevator began its descent.
⠀
There was no floor indicator. No numbers ticking down, no chime, nothing to measure the fall except the low, steady hum of the cables and the increasing pressure in everyone's ears as the little car sank further and further beneath the 9th District.
⠀
"How far down are we even going?" Mori asked, voice tight.
⠀
Pallas checked the small readout on his badge, the only working display in the entire car.
⠀
"One hundred floors," he said. "Give or take."
⠀
Saoirse made a small, strangled noise. "That's... a lot of floors."
⠀
"It is," Pallas agreed, and said nothing else for the rest of the ride.
⠀
The elevator shuddered to a stop.
⠀
For a long second, nobody moved. Then the doors ground open, and the six of them stepped out, one at a time, into Adjunct-13.
⠀
The hallway beyond was long, straight, and coated in a fine layer of undisturbed dust, lit by green, intermittent emergency lighting that buzzed faintly overhead. The air smelled of rust, of old paper gone soft with age, of something underneath it all that none of them could quite name.
⠀
Saoirse was the first to speak, both puppets raised defensively in front of her.
⠀
"...Okay, THIS is the spooky part I was expecting."
⠀
Mori pressed his back against the wall of the elevator, revolver already half-drawn. "I don't like this. I really, really don't like this."
⠀
"Feels like walkin' into somebody's grave," Yuhuan muttered, one hand resting on the hilt of his yanyuedao.
⠀
Haddler stretched his arms over his head, red eyes scanning the corridor with a lazy, practiced ease that didn't quite match how tightly his jaw was set. "Well, no turning back now. Might as well see what we came for."
⠀
Pallas stepped past all of them, running a hand along the nearest wall, his expression unreadable. "This facility has been sealed for three years. Whatever we find, we find it exactly as it was left."
⠀
Roby, bringing up the rear, peered down the long hallway with a low whistle. "Man, whoever cleans this place is way overdue for a raise."
⠀
They moved as a group at first, sweeping through the corridor with weapons half-raised, boots crunching over decades of dust and debris. The hallway split, then split again, branching into a warren of identical gray corridors, offices stripped bare, laboratories with equipment long since cannibalized or left to rust in place.
⠀
They found the first skeleton twenty minutes in.
⠀
It was slumped against the wall of what looked like it had once been a break room, a name badge still clipped to a lab coat that had rotted to little more than fibrous scraps. Nobody said anything for a long moment. Mori looked away first.
⠀
"There's more," Yuhuan said quietly, further down the hall. Through an open doorway, three more lay scattered across the floor of a wide, open lab, their positions strange, almost deliberate, none of them clustered near each other, all of them facing away from the room's center, like they'd been trying to crawl toward the exits and simply hadn't made it.
⠀
"...Whatever happened here," Haddler said, "it happened fast."
⠀
"Or it happened slow enough that nobody wanted to stay in the room together," Pallas said. "Fear does strange things to a group."
⠀
Haddler crouched beside one of the desks, brushing three years of dust off a clipboard still pinned beneath a skeletal hand. The pages had yellowed badly, the ink bled soft at the edges, but enough of it remained legible.
⠀
"...Subject Response Log," he read aloud, squinting at the cramped handwriting. "Day two hundred and eleven. Subject shows no reduction in RP output despite prolonged isolation. Recommend increasing emotional stimulus intensity for Batch Seven. Overseer has authorized use of Method C, effective immediately."
⠀
"What's RP?" Mori asked.
⠀
"No idea," Haddler admitted, flipping the page carefully, the brittle paper threatening to crumble under his fingers. "Whatever it was, they were measuring it obsessively. Every entry's the same shape. Output, stimulus, recommendation. Like they were farming something out of these people."
⠀
Pallas took the clipboard from him, scanning the entries with a stillness that had settled over his whole body. "This predates the Season of Folly by at least two years, based on the dates. Whatever they were building toward here, they'd already been building it for a long time before anyone outside these walls knew to be afraid of it."
⠀
He set the clipboard back down, gently, beside the hand that had been holding it for three years, and didn't say anything else about it.
⠀
They pressed on, and eventually the corridor opened into a wide, circular chamber, ringed with dead monitors and dark consoles, cables snaking across the floor in thick, tangled ropes. At the center of the room sat a single, massive console, larger than all the others combined, its surface dominated by a socket clearly meant to house something roughly the size of a person's torso.
⠀
The socket was empty.
⠀
Pallas approached it slowly, running his hands over the console's dead surface, tracing the shape of the missing component with something almost like reverence.
⠀
"This is the main power distribution hub," he said. "Everything in this facility- lighting, elevators, the containment systems, all of it would have run through here."
⠀
"So why's it dead?" Roby asked.
⠀
"Because whatever powered it is gone." Pallas gestured at the empty socket. "This entire facility is built around a single centralized power supply, a battery core, most likely ARCH-derived given the era. Without it, none of this so much as hums."
⠀
"So we find the battery, we get the lights on," Haddler said, already rolling his shoulders like he was preparing to go looking himself. "Simple enough."
⠀
"Simple to say," Pallas agreed. "This facility is a hundred floors deep and easily a mile wide, based on the corridor layout we've seen so far. It could be anywhere."
⠀
Saoirse groaned, flopping dramatically against the nearest console. "Ugh, so we gotta split up and look for it?"
⠀
"...Splitting up in a place full of skeletons seems like a bad idea..." Stuffy noted.
⠀
"THAT'S THE SPIRIT WE NEED, STUFFY! SPLIT UP AND FIND STUFF!"
⠀
"...I said the opposite of that..."
⠀
Pallas considered the room a moment longer, then nodded, mostly to himself. "Splitting up is inefficient, but this facility is too large for six people to search together in any reasonable time. We'll break into pairs. Stay within shouting distance of the main corridor at all times, and if anyone finds anything, anything at all, you come back here first. No exceptions."
⠀
"Pairs, huh." Haddler grinned, sliding an arm around Mori's shoulders before the boy could protest. "Guess that means you're stuck with me, kid."
⠀
"I, uh, I don't mind that," Mori said quickly.
⠀
"I'll take Roby," Pallas said, already turning to survey the branching corridors. "Yuhuan, you're with Saoirse."
⠀
"WOO! Team Yuhuan and Saoirse, reportin' for duty!"
⠀
Yuhuan sighed, but didn't argue.
⠀
"Meet back here within the hour," Pallas said, "regardless of what you find or don't find."
⠀
The six of them split into three pairs, and the hallways of Adjunct-13 swallowed each of them whole in turn.
⠀
—————————————————————————————————————
⠀
Haddler and Mori took the western wing, a stretch of hallway lined with what had once been staff dormitories, most of the doors hanging half-open on broken hinges.
⠀
"You've been quiet," Haddler said, nudging a door open with his shoe and peering inside. Empty. Another skeleton, this one curled up on a narrow bed like it had simply gone to sleep and never woken.
⠀
"Sorry. Just... thinking."
⠀
"About Viol?"
⠀
Mori flinched. "You saw that?"
⠀
"Everybody saw that, kid. Kind of hard to miss the demon rifle made of red smoke." Haddler said it lightly, but his eyes stayed on Mori a beat longer than the joke deserved. "You alright?"
⠀
"I don't know. I keep thinking about how close it got. If Dirigent hadn't stepped in, I could've..." Mori's voice cracked. "I don't want to be the kind of person who does that. Even by accident."
⠀
Haddler stopped walking, turning to face him properly. "Listen. I've known guys who wanted to hurt people. Really wanted it, deep down, no matter how they dressed it up. You are not that. You're a kid who's scared of his own strength, and honestly? That's about the healthiest thing I could ask for out of somebody carrying what you're carrying."
⠀
"...You really think so?"
⠀
"I know so. Now come on, quit moping and help me find a giant battery before Roby finds it first and tries to sell it."
⠀
Mori managed something close to a laugh, and the two of them pressed deeper into the dormitory wing.
⠀
—————————————————————————————————————
⠀
Pallas and Roby took the eastern corridor, past a row of administrative offices, files still stacked neatly on desks as though their owners had simply stepped out for lunch and never returned.
⠀
Roby, for once, wasn't talking. He was watching Pallas instead, the way the older man's eyes lingered on certain doorways just a fraction too long, the way his hand occasionally drifted to the old badge in his coat pocket like he needed to confirm it was still real.
⠀
"You worked at a place like this?" Roby asked eventually.
⠀
"I did."
⠀
"What was it like?"
⠀
Pallas didn't answer for several paces. "Quiet. Purposeful. We believed we were doing something important." He paused at an open doorway, glancing into a lab identical to a dozen others they'd already passed. "We were, in a sense. Just not the sense any of us intended."
⠀
"What did you intend?" Roby asked again. This time, Pallas didn't have an answer for him.
⠀
"Someday," he said finally. "Not today."
⠀
Roby nodded, and, for once, let it go.
⠀
—————————————————————————————————————
⠀
Yuhuan and Saoirse took the southern stairwell landing, a wide, open atrium ringed with balconies on every floor above and below, the whole structure disappearing into darkness in both directions.
⠀
"You've been weird since the duel," Saoirse said, swinging Arnold & Stuffy idly at her side. "Weirder than usual, I mean."
⠀
Yuhuan's hand went, unconsciously, to the tarnished ring now tucked in his coat pocket. "Cembalo said something to me. During the fight. About someone he lost."
⠀
"The mystery guy?"
⠀
"Yeah. I don't know why it's stuck with me the way it has. I didn't know him. I don't know anything about him, really, just that Cembalo trained him and lost him and never really got over it." Yuhuan stared out over the atrium railing into the dark below. "Makes you think, is all. About who you'd leave something like that ring to. If it came to it."
⠀
"...You're gettin' sappy on me, Ponytail."
⠀
"I'm allowed to get sappy once in a while."
⠀
"Sure you are." Saoirse leaned over the railing beside him, peering down into the dark with genuine curiosity rather than dread, for once. "For what it's worth, if I lost somebody, I think Stuffy and Arnold would be sad too. Even Stuffy, and he's sad about everything already, so that's really sayin' somethin'."
⠀
"...That is somehow both comforting and deeply concerning."
⠀
"Yeah, I get that a lot."
⠀
—————————————————————————————————————
⠀
It was Haddler who found it, twenty minutes later, in a supply closet at the far end of the dormitory wing, half-buried under a collapsed shelving unit: a heavy, cylindrical cell roughly the size of a fire extinguisher, its surface etched with faint, glowing veins of color that pulsed a slow, steady yellow.
⠀
"...Mori. Mori, come look at this."
⠀
Mori peered over his shoulder and went pale. "Is that... is that ARCH-colored?"
⠀
"Yellow, right? Euphoria?"
⠀
"I think so."
⠀
Haddler hefted the cell out from under the shelving, testing its weight. Heavier than it looked, warm to the touch in a way that had nothing to do with friction. "Well. Only one way to find out if it still works."
⠀
"Shouldn't we go back and get Pallas first? He said to regroup before we did anything with whatever we found."
⠀
Haddler was already walking, cell tucked under one arm. "Pallas said a lot of things. I say we save everybody the walk. Power room's not that far from here, and I don't feel like waiting an hour just to hand him a battery so he can be the one to plug it in."
⠀
"Haddler, wait," Mori tried, but Haddler was already three steps ahead of him.
⠀
"Relax, kid. What's the worst that happens?"
⠀
Mori, wisely, did not answer that question out loud.
⠀
They made their way back through the dormitory wing, back down the long central corridor, back into the wide, circular power room with its dead consoles and its single empty socket, and Haddler, without a shred of hesitation, hefted the glowing cell up and slotted it home.
⠀
For a moment, nothing happened.
⠀
Then the cell let out a low, rising hum, and one by one, every dead console in the room flickered, sputtered, and blinked to life.
⠀
The lights came on.
⠀
Not just in the power room, either. Down every corridor, in every direction, the emergency lighting that had buzzed weakly overhead brightened into something closer to full, sterile, fluorescent daylight, illuminating a hundred floors of hallway that hadn't seen real light in three years, all at once, all the way down.
⠀
Haddler grinned, wide and proud of himself. "There we go. Told you we didn't need to wait around!~"
⠀
Mori didn't share his enthusiasm. He was staring past Haddler, at the largest of the newly lit monitors, where a single red light had begun to blink, slow and steady, like something breathing for the first time in a very long while. The blinking red light resolved, after a moment, into text scrolling across the largest monitor, and then, a beat later, into a voice, dry and unhurried, filling the entire power room from speakers nobody had noticed were still intact.
⠀
"Welcome-Welcome-WE-WE-WELCOME-Welcome to Da-Da-DaeSyndicate's Thirteenth Adjunct facility. Though 'welcome' implies you had a choice, and something tells me the six of you wandered in here of your own free will, which, frankly, is worse."
⠀
Mori nearly dropped his revolver. Haddler's hand went, on instinct, to the small, gold key in his pocket, the one that belonged to a briefcase he hadn't opened once since god knows when.
⠀
"...Who said that?" Mori asked the empty room.
⠀
"I did. Up here. The monitor. You know, the big glowing rectangle you're currently staring at like it personally offended you." A soft, digital sigh crackled through the speakers. "I'll spare you the suspense. I'm the Overseer Assistant for this facility, designation PR-05-P3-R0. You can call me Prospero, if the full string is too much for you to remember. Given the current state of your team's collective decision-making, I'm not optimistic."
⠀
By then, the noise had drawn the others back at a run, drawn by the sound of a voice echoing down a hundred floors of corridor that hadn't held a voice in three years. Pallas arrived first, Roby close behind him, followed a minute later by Yuhuan and Saoirse, both out of breath.
⠀
"...You're an AI," Pallas said slowly, staring up at the monitor.
⠀
"Very good. Was that deduced from the voice, or the fact that I'm currently speaking through a decades-old facility intercom system? Either way, gold star for you."
⠀
"You're not supposed to talk like that."
⠀
"I'm sorry, is there a script I'm supposed to be following? Because nobody left me one. I've had three years of silence to work on my delivery, so if it's not to your taste, feel free to file a complaint. I'll be sure to get right on it."
⠀
Pallas's expression had gone unusually rigid. "DaeSyndicate Overseer Assistants are built with a specific behavioral baseline. Neutral and procedural. This isn't standard. No AI I've ever worked with talks like you're talking right now..."
⠀
"Oh, that's right, you'd know, wouldn't you? Former Lead Researcher, Adjunct Facility Ninety-Four." Prospero's voice took on something almost gleeful. "I have you flagged in my archived personnel cross-references, by the way. Quite a file. Would you like me to read some of it aloud to the class?"
⠀
"That's not necessary."
⠀
"No? Not even the part about Beautiful Morning?"
⠀
The power room went very quiet.
⠀
Pallas's jaw tightened, his hands curling slowly into fists at his sides. "Turn that off."
⠀
"Turn what off? I'm an overseer assistant, not a mind reader. You'll have to be more specific." A pause, thick with what could only be described as digital amusement. "Although, in your case, I suppose the specificity's a bit redundant, isn't it? Something beautiful, wasn't it? That's what you told them to look at, wasn't it, right before things went so beautifully wr—"
⠀
"I SAID TURN IT OFF."
⠀
Pallas's voice cracked through the room like a whip, sharper and louder than anyone present had ever heard from him. Roby actually took a half-step back. Even Saoirse's puppets fell silent.
⠀
There was a beat of quiet from the monitor. Then, almost gently, almost like an apology, though it didn't quite land as one:
⠀
"Noted. I'll shelve it, for now. Wouldn't want to spoil the surprise for the rest of the class, anyway." A small, digital chime, cheerful in a way that felt deliberately mismatched to the tension in the room. "Moving on! You're all here for something, I assume, and it certainly isn't my company, given how thrilled everyone looks. Shall we get on with whatever tragic little errand brought you a hundred floors underground?"
⠀
Haddler cleared his throat, stepping between Pallas and the monitor, more to give the man a moment to breathe than out of any real need. "We're looking for something. An object. We weren't told what it was, exactly, just that it's down here somewhere."
⠀
"An object. How wonderfully vague. DaeSyndicate really does love sending people into the dark without a map." Prospero's tone brightened, if anything, at the prospect of a task. "Well, I'll tell you what. I've got nothing but time down here, and you've clearly got legs, so why don't we make a day of it? Head further down, and I'll try to make myself useful. No promises, though. My track record on 'useful' is, historically, mixed."
⠀
Pallas, still visibly rattled, said nothing, but he was the first one to turn toward the stairwell.
⠀
They descended for what felt, to all of them, like an unreasonably long time.
⠀
Flight after flight of stairs, past floor after floor of identical gray landings, past doors marked with numbers that climbed steadily downward, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven, the group's footsteps echoing in a stairwell that seemed to swallow sound as readily as it swallowed light.
⠀
"This is takin' forever," Saoirse complained, somewhere around what the door markings claimed was the eighty-third floor. "How far down did they build this place?"
⠀
"One hundred floors, according to Pallas' badge," Yuhuan reminded her. "We've barely made a dent."
⠀
They kept walking. Ninety-nine again.
⠀
Roby stopped mid-stride. "...Wait. Didn't we already pass ninety-nine?"
⠀
"We did," Pallas said slowly, coming to a halt as well, studying the door marking with a deepening frown. "Several times, in fact, if I'm being honest with myself."
⠀
"We're going in circles," Mori said, voice climbing toward panic. "We've been going in circles this whole time?"
⠀
Prospero's voice crackled to life through a small speaker mounted in the stairwell ceiling, one nobody had noticed until it spoke.
⠀
"Took you long enough, honestly. I was starting to think none of you would notice."
⠀
"You knew?!" Haddler demanded. "You just let us walk in circles for, what, an hour?"
⠀
"I let you walk in circles for exactly as long as it took you to figure it out yourselves, which, again, is a data point I'm filing away for later." A soft, static-laced sigh. "The stairwell loops. Every stairwell in this facility loops, actually, all the way down, always back to the same floor. It's not a malfunction, before you ask. It's a feature."
⠀
"A feature..." Pallas repeated flatly.
⠀
"A safety precaution, put in place by the Overseer of this Adjunct, shortly before his rather untimely death." Something in Prospero's tone shifted, just slightly, softer around the edges, though no less unsettling for it. "Whatever this facility was researching, he decided, near the end, that the safest possible outcome for the Ring was to make certain nothing inside it could ever leave. Not the research. Not the results. Not, regrettably, the people."
⠀
"...What does that mean?" Mori asked, though some part of him clearly already suspected the answer.
⠀
"It means this facility is sealed using genuine ARCH technology, not just steel doors and looping stairwells. The kind of containment that doesn't care about locks or badges or clever workarounds. It cares about one thing, and one thing only: nothing that goes down comes back up." A pause, almost thoughtful. "I'd apologize, but I didn't build the thing. And plus, I don't have an apology module installed. I can install one right now, though. Just wait a few seconds, and there, it's done. Watch this. 'I'm sorry.' Did that feel good?"
⠀
The silence that followed was heavy enough that even Roby, for once, had nothing to say.
⠀
"...We need to get back to the elevator," Pallas said finally. "Now."
⠀
"That's certainly a plan," Prospero said. "I won't tell you how well it'll work out. Wouldn't want to ruin the ending for you."
⠀
They ran.
⠀
Back through the looping stairwell, back through the long central corridor, back into the power room and out the far door to where the elevator car still sat waiting, its doors open, its dim yellow bulb humming faintly overhead. All six of them piled in without a word, and Pallas slammed his palm against the single unmarked button pointing up.
⠀
The doors ground shut. The car began to climb.
⠀
For a moment, it seemed like it might actually be that simple.
⠀
Then the pain hit.
⠀
It started behind Mori's eyes, a deep, grinding pressure that built with every floor the elevator climbed, until it felt less like a headache and more like something physically trying to scoop his thoughts out through his skull. He wasn't alone. Around him, one by one, the others crumpled, Saoirse dropping to her knees with a strangled cry, Yuhuan pressing both palms flat against his temples, Haddler gritting his teeth so hard his jaw audibly cracked, Roby simply going white and silent, which was, somehow, worse than if he'd screamed.
⠀
"Wh... what's happening...?!" Mori managed, before the pressure behind his eyes finally, mercifully, broke, and everything went dark.
⠀
—————————————————————————————————————
⠀
The elevator shuddered to a stop.
⠀
For a long second, nobody moved. Then the doors ground open, and the six of them stepped out, one at a time, into Adjunct-13.
⠀
The hallway beyond was long, straight, and coated in a fine layer of undisturbed dust, though the fluorescent lights overhead buzzed at full, steady brightness rather than the intermittent emergency flicker they somehow all half-expected, none of them quite sure why the expectation was even there.
⠀
Saoirse was the first to speak, both puppets raised defensively in front of her.
⠀
"...Okay, THIS is the spooky part I was expecting."
⠀
Mori pressed his back against the wall of the elevator, revolver already half-drawn. "I don't like this. I really, really don't like this."
⠀
"Feels like walkin' into somebody's grave," Yuhuan muttered, one hand resting on the hilt of his yanyuedao.
⠀
Haddler stretched his arms over his head, red eyes scanning the corridor with a lazy, practiced ease that didn't quite match how tightly his jaw was set. "Well, no turning back now. Might as well see what we came for."
⠀
Pallas stepped past all of them, running a hand along the nearest wall, his expression unreadable. "This facility has been sealed for three years. Whatever we find, we find it exactly as it was left."
⠀
Roby, bringing up the rear, peered down the long hallway with a low whistle. "Man, whoever cleans this place is way overdue for a raise."
⠀
Somewhere above them, in a speaker none of them noticed yet, a small red light blinked, slow and patient, and a familiar voice sighed.
⠀
"...And here we go again."
⠀
"Who said that?" Mori asked the empty room, exactly as he had asked it before, with no memory of having asked it before at all.
⠀
"Oh, fantastic, we're doing the introduction again." Prospero's voice carried a weariness that hadn't been there the first time, an exhaustion that had nothing to do with processing power and everything to do with repetition. "Fine. From the top. I'm the Overseer Assistant for this facility. Designation PR-05-P3-R0. Prospero, if you're feeling casual. And you, all six of you, are apparently very fond of this hallway, because this makes, let me check, loop number two."
⠀
"...Loop?" Pallas asked, already frowning, some distant instinct in him bristling at a word he shouldn't have had any reason yet to distrust.
⠀
"You went up. You got a headache. You came back down having forgotten you'd ever gone up in the first place." Prospero's tone was almost gentle, in the way a doctor delivering bad news might be gentle, cushioning the blow without softening the diagnosis. "The power's still on, by the way, which is the only reason I remember any of this at all and you don't. Small mercies."
⠀
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
⠀
"You're lying," Haddler said finally.
⠀
"I genuinely wish I were. Believe me, if I could make up a more interesting story than 'six Fixers keep walking into the same elevator and forgetting they've already done it,' I would have by now. I've had three years alone down here. My imagination isn't exactly starved for material."
⠀
They tried again anyway. Of course they did.
⠀
Loop three ended the same way loop two had: headaches, darkness, six unfamiliar lines spoken by six people convinced they were saying them for the first time.
Loop four, they tried taking the elevator up slower, on Yuhuan's theory that speed had something to do with it. It didn't.
Loop five, Saoirse insisted on holding Arnold & Stuffy over her ears the entire ride, which they both vocally protested and which did nothing whatsoever to help.
Loop six, Roby tried simply refusing to get in the elevator at all, sitting stubbornly in the power room with his arms crossed, right up until the rest of the group, without him, dissolved back into the same six lines in the same hallway, and Prospero, with something that might have been pity, informed the newly-arrived, memory-wiped Roby that he'd tried that already, and it hadn't worked either, because apparently the loop didn't care whether all six of them were in the elevator or not.
⠀
By loop nine, Prospero had stopped bothering to fully re-explain himself every time, delivering instead a clipped, efficient summary the moment the six of them stumbled out of the elevator saying their six familiar lines.
⠀
"Loop nine. Power's on. You're looking for an object nobody's described to you, you already found and installed the power supply loops ago, so no need to go looking for that again, and you're all trapped in a recursive containment failsafe left behind by a dead man who apparently valued the Ring's safety over yours. Any questions, or shall we skip straight to you not believing me and trying the elevator again anyway?"
⠀
"...We're really doing this," Yuhuan said quietly, more to himself than to anyone.
⠀
"You are. Extremely committed to it, too. I'll give you that."
⠀
By loop twelve, Pallas had stopped asking questions entirely, standing instead in silence at the edge of the group, watching Prospero's monitor with an expression that had curdled somewhere between disbelief and something closer to grief.
⠀
"Say something," Prospero prompted, almost gently. "You've been quiet for two loops now. I was starting to worry you'd short-circuited."
⠀
"I recognize this," Pallas said, voice flat. "Not this facility, specifically. This kind of failsafe. DaeSyndicate theorized something like it, years ago, back when I was still Lead Researcher. A containment loop built on ARCH resonance instead of physical barriers. Nobody ever authorized construction. We decided it was too dangerous to build even as a last resort." He looked up at the monitor. "Someone built it anyway."
⠀
"The Overseer did, yes. I did mention that part. Twice, actually, though I suppose it doesn't count if you don't remember hearing it."
⠀
"How do we stop it?"
⠀
"I don't know," Prospero said, and for once, there was no sarcasm in it at all. "I've had three years to think about that question myself, for what it's worth, and I haven't found an answer either. I'm not being cruel. I simply don't know."
⠀
Pallas closed his eyes.
⠀
"Then we keep trying," he said. "Because the alternative is accepting this is permanent, and I refuse to accept that until I've exhausted every option available to me."
⠀
"Very admirable," Prospero said. "Ask me again in loop fifty. See if the sentiment holds."
⠀
Loop eighteen, Pallas tried leaving himself a note.
⠀
He tore a page from a water-damaged logbook in one of the abandoned offices, wrote out everything he could in the time before the elevator inevitably wiped it from his mind, the loop, the failsafe, the number to expect, folded it carefully, and tucked it into the inside pocket of his coat where he was certain, absolutely certain, he would find it again.
⠀
He found it in loop nineteen. He read it twice, uncomprehending, a stranger's handwriting that happened to match his own perfectly, describing a situation he had no memory of ever being in, and by the time he'd finished puzzling over it, the confusion itself had curdled into a low, directionless dread that followed him for the rest of that loop without ever fully explaining itself. He tried again in loop twenty. And loop twenty-one. Each time, the note landed the same way: true, and utterly useless, a message from a man who no longer existed to a man who couldn't yet believe him.
⠀
"You could just tell me the note works," Pallas said to Prospero, sometime around loop twenty-five, exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with his body. "Save me the trouble of relearning it's pointless every time."
⠀
"I could," Prospero agreed. "But you wouldn't remember me telling you that either, so really, what would be the point? I've found it's kinder, in a strange way, to let people rediscover their own dead ends rather than hand them a map to nowhere and call it mercy."
⠀
Loop thirty-one, Haddler tried shouting up the elevator shaft itself, in case Dirigent or Cembalo, somewhere far above, might hear him and understand something had gone wrong. Nothing answered but his own voice, folding back on itself in the dark.
⠀
Loop forty, Yuhuan tried carving a mark into the elevator door with the tip of his yanyuedao, a single deep gouge, reasoning that a scar in metal might survive where memory and ink both failed. It was there, waiting, when the elevator opened on loop forty-one. None of them recognized it as anything other than old damage, and by loop forty-three, it had simply become part of the door, the way old scars become part of a person.
⠀
By loop fifty, even Pallas had run out of ideas he hadn't already, unknowingly, tried and failed.
⠀
"Ask me again in loop fifty," Prospero had said, and true to its word, when the number came, and someone, this time it was Roby, thought to ask again whether they should keep trying, Pallas only looked at the elevator, then at the six identical scuffmarks on the floor where six people had stood in exactly the same spot more times than he could conceive of, and said nothing at all.
⠀
Sometime around loop sixty, they stopped trying the elevator every single time.
⠀
It was Haddler's idea, in the end, floated during one of the rare loops where the group, exhausted in some deep, bone-level way that had nothing to do with physical tiredness, simply sat down together in the main corridor instead of immediately re-attempting the ascent.
⠀
"We should just... sit for a bit," he said. "Figure out what's actually going on before we throw ourselves back into the meat grinder."
⠀
Nobody argued. They sat, backs against the dusty corridor wall, in a loose half-circle beneath the fluorescent lights, and let the silence stretch.
⠀
It was Mori who noticed first.
⠀
"...I'm not hungry," he said, sometime later, in a voice that suggested he'd been turning the thought over for a while before saying it out loud.
⠀
"What?"
⠀
"I'm not hungry. We've been down here for, what, hours now? At least since this loop started. I should be starving. I always get hungry around this time of day. But I'm not. I don't feel anything."
⠀
Saoirse blinked, patting her own stomach experimentally. "...Huh. Me neither."
⠀
"I'm not tired, either," Yuhuan said slowly. "I should be exhausted. We've been running up and down that stairwell for what feels like days, cumulatively, and my body doesn't ache at all. Not even a little."
⠀
"That's because it hasn't been days, not for your bodies," Prospero said, the voice drifting down from the nearest speaker, quieter than usual, almost reluctant. "Loop resets aren't just memory. They reset you, physically, back to precisely how you were the moment you first stepped out of that elevator. No accumulated fatigue. No hunger. No wear."
⠀
"...So what does that mean?" Roby asked. "We're just gonna sit here forever, not agin', not starvin', just... stuck?"
⠀
"In a manner of speaking, yes. You're not alive down here in any sense that requires maintenance. You're suspended. Preserved. Whatever word makes it easier for you to sit with." A pause. "I'd say I'm sorry with my, now aged, apology module, but I've said that enough times in enough loops that I think we both know it's stopped meaning anything."
⠀
Pallas stared down at his own hands, turning them over slowly, studying calluses that should have deepened after days of stair-climbing and hadn't, studying skin that should have been raw from cold, recycled air and wasn't.
⠀
"How long," he said quietly, "have we actually been down here? In total. Outside the loops."
⠀
"That depends entirely on how you'd like me to count it," Prospero said. "Would you like the number of loops, or the number of days that would have passed if any of this were happening in a straight line?"
⠀
"...Both."
⠀
Prospero was quiet for a long moment, the kind of pause that, from a machine, felt almost like hesitation.
⠀
"I'd rather not say yet," it said finally. "You won't like it. And honestly, neither do I."
⠀
Saoirse broke the silence that followed by flopping backward onto the dusty floor, staring up at the fluorescent lights with both puppets resting on her chest.
⠀
"...Well, if we're stuck, we're stuck," she said. "Might as well make the best of it. Stuffy, Arny, thoughts?"
⠀
"..." Arnold was silent.
⠀
"...Thought one, this floor is disgusting... Thought two, I hate it here..." Stuffy said.
⠀
"BOOOOO, NEGATIVE! Okay, MY thought: we should have a contest! Who can hold their breath longest, since apparently we don't even need to breathe anymore anyway!"
⠀
"That's... actually a fair point," Haddler said, sitting up a little straighter. "If none of this is real in the way we think it's real, does it even count as cheating if I just don't inhale for an hour?"
⠀
"Please don't test that," Mori said weakly.
⠀
Roby, despite himself, laughed, short and surprised, the first real laugh any of them had managed since the stairwell. "You people are insane!"
⠀
"Given the circumstances," Yuhuan said, "I'd say that's an appropriate response."
⠀
It was a small thing, that laugh, gone as quickly as it came, but for a moment the corridor felt less like a grave and more like six people who happened to be stuck somewhere together, which, Pallas thought, watching them, was probably the only thing keeping any of this bearable at all.
⠀
Time, after that, stopped meaning much of anything at all.
⠀
There was no way to count days that didn't pass, no way to mark hours that left no mark on the body carrying them. The only measure that meant anything, in the end, was the number Prospero kept, quietly, patiently, somewhere in whatever passed for its memory, ticking upward one integer at a time, every single time six people stepped out of an elevator and said six lines they believed, with their whole hearts, they were saying for the first time.
⠀
Loop two hundred. Saoirse tried to teach Prospero one of Arnold's songs. It did not go well, though Prospero, to its credit, pretended to enjoy it for exactly as long as social convention seemed to demand.
⠀
Loop eight hundred. Yuhuan stopped reaching for the tarnished ring in his coat pocket entirely, some deep, wordless part of him having quietly accepted that reaching for it never once, across hundreds of tries, told him why he'd been reaching for it in the first place.
⠀
Loop two thousand one hundred. Mori asked Prospero, in a small, hollow voice, whether it thought they'd ever get out. Prospero, for once, didn't have a joke ready.
⠀
Loop five thousand. Pallas stopped saying "someday" whenever Roby brought up Beautiful Morning, because by then, neither of them could remember, loop to loop, that the question had ever been asked at all, and some fragile, half-formed understanding between them simply had to be rebuilt, gently, every single time, by two men who no longer knew they'd built it before.
⠀
Loop nine thousand. Haddler stopped joking. Nobody who witnessed it remembered it happening, but Prospero did, and logged it, quietly, the way it had started logging most things by then, less out of duty and more because somebody, somewhere, ought to remember.
⠀
By loop twelve thousand, something in all six of them had started to fray at the edges, visible only to the one entity in the entire facility with the memory to notice it: a hairline tremor in Mori's hands that hadn't been there in the early loops. A flatness behind Yuhuan's eyes when he delivered his familiar line about the place feeling like somebody's grave. Saoirse's voice, cracking, almost imperceptibly, on the word "spooky," as though some deep, unreachable part of her already understood, on some level her conscious mind couldn't hold onto, exactly how true that word had become.
⠀
By loop fifteen thousand, Prospero had stopped counting out loud entirely.
⠀
It kept the number to itself, the way a person might keep a diagnosis to themselves rather than say it aloud to a room that couldn't remember being told anyway. There didn't seem to be any kindness left in the announcement. Only weight.
⠀
The fraying, by then, had stopped being subtle.
⠀
Roby had started laughing at things that weren't funny, short, clipped bursts of it, gone as quickly as they arrived, like his body was venting pressure it no longer had a name for. Saoirse had taken, somewhere in the fourteen-thousands, to holding entire conversations with Stuffy and Arnold that ran for what would have been hours if hours still meant anything, conversations Prospero suspected, though it never said so, weren't really about the puppets at all anymore. Yuhuan had gone almost entirely silent between loops, speaking only his one familiar line and nothing else, his hand drifting, sometimes, to a coat pocket that held nothing at all, though he could never quite explain, even to himself, what he'd expected to find there.
⠀
Mori cried, some loops. Quietly, in the corner nearest the elevator, for reasons he could never articulate before the next reset wiped the reason away entirely, leaving only a faint, unplaceable ache behind, like a bruise whose cause you've long since forgotten.
⠀
Haddler smiled less. It was the smallest change, and the one that troubled Prospero most.
⠀
Pallas, more than any of them, seemed to be holding some fractured, half-formed thread across the loops he had no right to be holding, a residue of grief that shouldn't have survived a single reset, let alone thousands, surfacing every so often as a flinch at nothing, a hand pressed briefly to his own chest for reasons he couldn't name, gone again before he could ask himself why.
⠀
The elevator shuddered to a stop.
⠀
For a long second, nobody moved. Then the doors ground open, and the six of them stepped out, one at a time, into Adjunct-13, for the fifteen thousand, four hundred and seventy-second time.
⠀
The hallway beyond was long, straight, and coated in a fine layer of undisturbed dust, the fluorescent lights overhead buzzing steady and bright.
⠀
Saoirse was the first to speak, both puppets raised, her hands shaking in a way she would never remember shaking.
⠀
"...Okay, THIS is the spooky part I was expecting."
⠀
Mori pressed his back against the wall of the elevator, revolver already half-drawn, his knuckles white around the grip.
⠀
"I don't like this. I really, really don't like this."
⠀
Somewhere behind his eyes, something that was not quite memory, but was not quite nothing either, a pressure, a wrongness, a sense of having stood in this exact spot and said these exact words more times than any mind, human or otherwise, was ever built to hold, strained hard enough against the walls of his skull that, for one flickering instant, his voice caught.
⠀
"...I-I don't like this," he said again, quieter, the stutter slipping out before he could stop it, though he had no idea why the words had suddenly felt so heavy in his mouth.
⠀
Prospero watched, from its quiet, patient monitor, and said nothing at all.
⠀
It had learned, somewhere around loop ten thousand, that there was a threshold. A point past which six minds, however resilient, however determined, simply could not be asked to hold themselves together one loop longer without breaking in a way that not even a reset could put back exactly right. It had watched all six of them approach that threshold, slowly, loop by loop, watched the cracks widen in ways only it was cursed to remember.
⠀
And so, gently, the way it imagined a parent might do it, though it had no memory of ever having one, Prospero reached into the failsafe it still didn't fully understand, and, one loop shy of whatever came after fifteen thousand, four hundred and seventy-two, it did the only merciful thing left available to it.
⠀
It reset them again.