Floor seventy-eight looked, at first glance, almost exactly like every floor above it.
⠀
That was the part that unsettled Mori the most, if he was being honest with himself. He'd expected the horror to escalate the deeper they went, the way it always seemed to in the stories he'd grown up hearing about places like this: worse lighting, worse smells, worse things waiting around every corner. Instead, floor seventy-eight was just another stretch of gray corridor, another set of stripped offices, another handful of skeletons slumped in chairs that had never gotten the chance to be pushed back in.
⠀
"You'd think after eighteen floors it'd start feeling less like walking through somebody's abandoned apartment," Haddler said, nudging open a door with his boot. Empty desk. Empty chair. A coffee mug, long since gone to dust, still sitting exactly where its owner had left it.
⠀
"Give it time," Prospero said, its voice trailing them now through speakers that had come alive floor by floor as they descended, patched into whatever remained of the facility's ancient wiring. "Every floor down here had its own department with its own purpose. You've simply started with the boring ones. Administrative. Logistics. The floors where DaeSyndicate kept the people whose job it was to make sure the floors doing the actual monstrous work never ran out of paperwork."
⠀
"Comforting," Leopold muttered.
⠀
"I never claimed it would be."
⠀
They moved as a full group now, nine strong, weapons drawn less out of expectation and more out of habit, Mori's scarf trailing its own slow wind at the head of the pack, its light the only real color in a hallway otherwise drained of it. Yuhuan walked close beside him, as he always did. Jianhuan had taken, without quite admitting to it, a similar position on Mori's other flank, close enough to Yuhuan that the two of them kept bumping shoulders and pretending not to notice.
⠀
Pallas walked apart from the rest, as he always did, his eyes moving over every open door, every abandoned desk, every scrap of paper still legible enough to read, with the particular hunger of a man who both needed to know and dreaded finding out.
⠀
It was Saoirse who found the first real crack in the floor's mundane facade, several corridors in, in a room marked, in faded stencil, RECORDS - INTAKE.
⠀
"Guys?"
⠀
The room was lined, floor to ceiling, with filing cabinets, most of them rusted shut, a few standing open where curious hands, three years gone now, had already been through them once. Saoirse held up a single folder, its cover yellowed, its edges soft with age, a photograph clipped to the front corner: a young woman, maybe twenty, smiling awkwardly at whoever had held the camera.
⠀
"CANDIDATE 0447," the folder read. "Status: Approved for Intake. Projected RP Yield: High."
⠀
Pallas took the folder from her without a word, flipping through its contents with the same clinical stillness he'd worn since the day they'd found the first clipboard on floor ninety-nine. Page after page of intake evaluations, psychological profiles, family history, financial records, all of it building toward a single, damning summary line at the bottom of the final page.
⠀
"Subject exhibits high emotional volatility, strong attachment patterns, and minimal support network. Excellent candidate for sustained RP extraction."
⠀
"...What's RP extraction?" Mori asked, though something in his gut had already started answering the question before anyone else could.
⠀
"I don't know," Pallas said, and for the first time in longer than any of them could remember, his voice had gone unsteady. "But I recognize this format. This exact format..." He set the folder down, gently, the way a man sets down something he's afraid might shatter if handled roughly. "I've written reports like this before."
⠀
Nobody said anything to that. Roby's jaw tightened. Yuhuan's hand found the hilt of his sword without any conscious decision behind it.
⠀
"At Adjunct-94?" Jianhuan asked, careful, the way you'd ask a question you already half-regretted asking.
⠀
"At Adjunct-94," Pallas confirmed, and didn't elaborate, and nobody pushed him to.
⠀
There were, according to the drawer Saoirse had opened, several hundred folders just like it in this room alone. None of them checked how many more rooms like it existed on the floors still waiting below.
⠀
They pressed on, floor seventy-seven, floor seventy-six, the corridors bleeding into each other with a sameness that made the descent feel less like exploration and more like wading through something thick and unwilling to let them pass quickly. Prospero filled the silences where it could, offering dry, unhelpful commentary on the architecture, the plumbing, the truly baffling decision to install carpet in a sub-basement research facility.
⠀
"Whoever approved beige as the primary color scheme for a facility studying the outer edges of human consciousness deserves a strongly worded memo," Prospero said, somewhere around floor seventy-five. "I've had three years to stare at it. I'd like it on the record that I've never once forgiven them."
⠀
"You're really committed to the bit, huh," Roby said, almost fond despite himself.
⠀
"It's not a bit, it's grievance. I intend to keep making that distinction until someone apologizes on the original decorator's behalf."
⠀
The levity didn't last. It never seemed to, down here, more than a floor or two at a time.
⠀
On seventy-four, they found the observation cells.
⠀
The room was circular, like the power room had been, but where that space had radiated outward from a single console, this one radiated inward, toward a ring of reinforced glass chambers, each one large enough to hold something considerably bigger than a person, each one fitted with restraints bolted into the floor and walls at angles that made no sense for a human body to occupy.
⠀
"...What were these for?" Leopold asked, running a hand along one of the cracked glass panels.
⠀
Armor had gone very quiet, studying the restraint patterns with the eye of someone who'd spent a career learning how bodies could and couldn't move. "These weren't built for people."
⠀
"They weren't," Prospero confirmed. "This was one of the containment wards. Once an ARCH had been successfully drawn out of a candidate, or successfully bonded to one, the newly formed entity was brought here for evaluation. Behavioral testing. Resonance measurement. Pain threshold studies, in the less charitable phrasing, though I doubt the researchers who wrote the reports ever used that word themselves."
⠀
"Pain threshold studies," Yuhuan repeated, flat.
⠀
"On something that had, in most cases, been a frightened, newly transformed piece of a person's own soul about thirty minutes prior," Prospero said. "I'd like to say it gets easier to describe the longer you say it out loud. It does not."
⠀
Mori's scarf had gone still, its usual restless wind dropping to nothing, as though even it had nothing to say to that.
⠀
Pallas stood at the center of the ring, turning slowly, taking in each cell in turn, and when he finally spoke, his voice had none of its usual composure left in it at all.
⠀
"I authorized studies like this," he said. "Not these exact studies, but studies like this. I told myself it was necessary... That understanding an ARCH's tolerances was the only way to protect the people who'd eventually have to fight the ones that got loose." He pressed a hand flat against the nearest cracked panel of glass. "I never once asked what it cost the thing inside the cell to teach me that."
⠀
Nobody moved to comfort him. Somehow, it felt like the wrong thing to do, standing in a room built for exactly the kind of cruelty he was confessing to having a hand in, however many facilities and however many years removed. Roby, for once, kept his mouth shut entirely. Jianhuan looked away. It was Haddler, finally, who broke the silence, quiet, without judgment, without absolution either.
⠀
"You gonna be able to keep walking?"
⠀
Pallas didn't answer right away. He straightened, slowly, and let his hand fall from the glass.
⠀
"I have to," he said. "Someone should see the rest of this. Someone should remember it happened."
⠀
They kept walking.
⠀
Floor seventy-three offered something almost like mercy: a long stretch of what had once been staff housing, dormitory rooms much like the ones on the hundredth floor, personal effects still scattered where their owners had left them. It wasn't pleasant, exactly, but it was human in a way the observation ward hadn't been, and after the ring of cracked glass cells, human felt like something worth resting in for a while.
⠀
They made camp there for the night, or what passed for night this far beneath the Ring, taking turns at watch in pairs, though nothing in the facility had shown any sign of moving on its own since the elevator first opened on the hundredth floor.
⠀
Saoirse found Leopold sitting alone in the corridor outside the room she'd claimed, turning something small over in his hands.
⠀
"You're staring at me again," she said, dropping down across from him, Stuffy and Arnold both suspiciously quiet at her sides.
⠀
"Sorry. Didn't realize I was that obvious."
⠀
"You're real obvious. Roby already threatened to hit you again if you keep it up!" She tilted her head, studying him with a directness that made him distinctly uncomfortable. "You got a thing for me or somethin'?"
⠀
"It's not like that," Leopold said, quick, a little too quick. "I just... You remind me of someone. That's all."
⠀
"Everybody seems to keep reminding everybody of everybody!" Saoirse said, unconvinced but, for once, not pushing further. "Is this some kind of new trend?!"
⠀
"Yeah..." Leopold said, quiet, watching her go before he let himself release the breath he'd been holding since she sat down. "...it really is."
⠀
Elsewhere in the dormitory wing, Armor had found a similar excuse to sit near Mori, close enough for conversation, careful enough to keep it from looking deliberate.
⠀
"How was your rest?" Armor asked. "Given everything."
⠀
"I slept okay, I guess," Mori said. "You keep checking on me. It's a little weird, not gonna lie."
⠀
"Force of habit," Armor said. "I look out for people. It comes with the job."
⠀
"Sure." Mori studied him a moment, something searching in the look. "So, who do I remind you of?"
⠀
Armor was quiet long enough that Mori thought he wasn't going to answer at all.
⠀
"Maybe someday," he said finally. "Not today."
⠀
Mori didn't push. Something about the way Armor said it, the exact careful weight of it, made it clear pushing wouldn't get him anywhere he actually wanted to go tonight.
⠀
Morning, or the version of it Prospero announced over the intercom out of nothing but habit, came without fanfare. They packed up what little they'd unpacked and pushed on, floor seventy-two, floor seventy-one, the dormitories giving way once more to labs, to offices, to the same tired architecture of a place that had spent years convincing itself its work was worth the walls it hid behind.
⠀
It was on seventy, in a wide, open room lined with corkboards gone soft and warped with age, that they found the tally.
⠀
Someone had kept score, once, in neat black marker across a board the size of an entire wall: rows and columns, names reduced to numbers, numbers reduced to two final categories at the far right edge. SUCCESSFUL BOND. NON-VIABLE.
⠀
The second column was considerably longer than the first.
⠀
"Non-viable," Jianhuan read aloud, something rare and brittle in his usual careless tone. "That's a hell of a word to boil a person down to."
⠀
"Efficient, though," Prospero said, and for once there was no humor in it at all. "DaeSyndicate always did prefer efficient over honest."
⠀
Pallas stood in front of the board for a long time, running the numbers the way only a former researcher could, the ratio of one column to the other settling into him like a stone dropped down a very deep well.
⠀
"Less than one in twelve," he said quietly. "Less than one in twelve candidates survived long enough to bond successfully. And of the ones who did..." He gestured, helplessly, back the way they'd come, toward the ring of cracked glass cells still waiting one floor above. "That was the reward. A cell and a set of restraints, and someone with a clipboard measuring how much pain it took before something broke."
⠀
"You couldn't have known that's what was happening here," Yuhuan said. "This isn't your facility."
⠀
"It didn't have to be my facility for me to have built the same board somewhere else." Pallas's voice cracked, just slightly, the first real fracture any of them had heard in it since the day they'd met him. "I used different words. Cleaner ones. 'Retention rate.' 'Successful integration.' I told myself the softer language meant something different was happening behind it. It didn't. It never did. It was always this."
⠀
Nobody argued with him this time either. There wasn't really an argument to make.
⠀
They found the stairwell down to sixty-nine an hour later, and for the first time since floor seventy-nine, nobody complained about moving on. Some floors, it turned out, were easier to leave behind quickly than to sit with any longer than absolutely necessary.
Floor sixty-nine was quieter than anything they'd walked through yet, and it took the better part of an hour before any of them worked out why: it wasn't a research floor at all. No labs, no offices, no observation wards. Just a long, curving corridor lined with what looked, at first glance, like ordinary apartment doors, numbered in faded brass, a few of them cracked open onto rooms that had once, briefly, tried very hard to look like homes.
⠀
"Housing for the ones who made it," Prospero said, before anyone had to ask. "The successful bonds. Before the observation ward, there was this. A grace period, I suppose you could call it, though I'd argue that word is doing a great deal of work it hasn't earned. A few weeks, sometimes a few months, where the newly bonded were allowed to live somewhere resembling normal life, under close supervision, before someone with a clipboard decided they'd settled enough to be moved along to actual testing."
⠀
"That's somehow worse," Haddler said, peering into one of the open rooms: a child's drawing, still pinned to the wall with a rusted tack, faded beyond recognition except for a bright, careful sun in the corner. "Giving somebody a taste of real life just so you can rip it away on a schedule."
⠀
"I never said it was better," Prospero said. "Only that it existed. There's a difference between kindness and the appearance of kindness, and this facility, in my professional opinion, never once managed the former."
⠀
Roby lingered in the doorway of one particular room longer than the others, close enough to the drawing that Yuhuan noticed and drifted over without a word.
⠀
"You good?"
⠀
"Yeah. Just—" Roby exhaled, long and slow. "Never once had to wonder if somebody was gonna decide I was 'non-viable' someday." He nodded at the faded sun on the wall. "Makes you think about how much of that's just luck. Bein' born on the right side of somebody else's ledger."
⠀
"Didn't peg you for the philosophical type," Yuhuan said, not unkindly.
⠀
"Neither did I, till about three floors ago."
⠀
They moved on before the quiet could settle too deep into any one of them, floor sixty-eight opening into a wide records archive, endless shelves of banker's boxes stretching further back than the emergency lighting could properly reach.
⠀
"You want to know something almost funny?" Prospero offered, as they picked their way down the first aisle. "This is the one floor in the entire facility I never bothered to fully catalogue myself. Three years alone down here, and even I got tired of reading about all of this eventually. There's only so many candidate files a person, or whatever I qualify as, can process before the numbers stop being numbers and start being something closer to a wound."
⠀
"You get tired?" Mori asked, surprised despite himself.
⠀
"In a manner of speaking. I don't sleep, obviously. But there's a version of fatigue that doesn't need a body to set in. I imagine you're all rather familiar with that particular flavor of exhaustion by now."
⠀
Nobody argued with that either.
⠀
They found one box, tucked into a shelf that looked no different from a thousand others, that broke the pattern entirely.
⠀
Leopold pulled it down, and the first folder inside told a story none of them had encountered yet on any floor above: a candidate, bonded successfully, who hadn't gone to the observation ward at all. Whose file, instead, was stamped in faded red ink: REASSIGNED - RESEARCH LIAISON.
⠀
"...What's that mean?" Leopold asked, flipping through pages that read less like a clinical study and more like a personnel record. Performance reviews. A commendation for community outreach. A photograph, near the back, of a young man with an easy, unguarded smile, an arm slung around the shoulders of someone in a lab coat who looked, from the warmth in the image alone, like more of a friend than a supervisor.
⠀
"It means not everyone here was a monster," Prospero said, quieter than before. "There was a small research division, buried under three other departments and mostly ignored by the people actually running this place, that believed the bonded deserved to be studied with their consent, and treated like colleagues instead of specimens once the initial transformation stabilized. It was not popular. It was not well funded. But it existed, for a while, on this floor specifically, before the department overseeing it was quietly folded into something else entirely."
⠀
"What happened to them?" Yuhuan asked. "The people who ran it."
⠀
"I don't know," Prospero admitted. "Their records stop a little over a year before the Season of Folly. I've always assumed the folding-in wasn't voluntary, though I couldn't tell you what became of anyone involved after that. It's one of the very few genuine mysteries left in this archive that even I haven't solved."
⠀
Pallas took the folder from Leopold, studying the photograph for a long moment, something in his expression shifting toward a version of hope so fragile it looked like it might not survive contact with the air.
⠀
"There were people like this at Ninety-Four too," he said. "A handful. I wasn't one of them, not really, though I told myself I was closer to their side of things than the other. I think about that a lot, actually. Whether being closer to decent than most of your colleagues still counts as decent, or whether it's just a slower, gentler way of arriving at the same place."
⠀
"You're being pretty hard on yourself," Jianhuan said, unexpectedly gentle for a man who spent most of his energy being difficult. "For what it's worth."
⠀
"I've earned the right to be." Pallas set the folder carefully back into its box. "But I appreciate you saying it anyway."
⠀
They spent longer on sixty-eight than any floor before it, not because there was more to find, but because, for the first time since the hundredth floor, there was something worth sitting with that didn't feel like it was actively poisoning them to look at.
⠀
They made camp again that night in the archive itself, banker's boxes stacked into makeshift walls, the closest thing to a windbreak nine exhausted travelers could improvise from three-year-old paperwork.
⠀
"So," Roby said, once the watch rotation had been settled and the rest of them had folded themselves into whatever corner offered the illusion of privacy, "anybody wanna talk about how we're just, what, like, family now? Nine of us, from two different Posts that were tryin' to kill each other's coworkers a week ago? ...Okay, quit starin' at me like that, I'm being for real!"
⠀
"Speak for yourself," Jianhuan said. "I'm still deeply unhappy about all of this."
⠀
"You've said maybe four nice things to my brother," Yuhuan pointed out. "That's practically a hug, to his standards"
⠀
"I will end you."
⠀
"Just like home."
⠀
Saoirse, cross-legged atop a stack of boxes with Stuffy and Arnold propped beside her, snorted. "Roby's got a point though... Feels weird. Good weird, but weird."
⠀
"I'd rather die," Jianhuan confirmed.
⠀
"And here we all are," Roby said, undeterred, "diggin' through the worst parts of some dead scientists' filing system together, like it's just a thing we do now. Like we're gonna get matchin' jackets or somethin' when we get outta here."
⠀
"I'd wear that jacket," Haddler said.
⠀
"I would absolutely not," Armor said, though the corner of his mouth had, almost imperceptibly, curved into something that wasn't quite a smile but was standing very close to one.
⠀
Mori, sitting slightly apart with his scarf covering most of his face, found himself smiling for the first time in what felt like days, actual, non-loop days.
⠀
"For what it's worth," he said, quiet enough that only Yuhuan, beside him, really caught it, "I'm glad it's all of us. Even with everything we've seen today. I don't think I could've kept walking through this place with just the six of us anymore."
⠀
"Yeah," Yuhuan agreed, just as quiet. "Me neither. N-No offense."
⠀
Pallas kept the first watch that night, sitting apart from the rest with the folder from the research liaison division open across his knees, rereading it by the thin, wavering light of a single working emergency bulb, as though committing every word of it to memory might, in some small, useless way, make up for all the words in all the other folders on this floor that he'd never get the chance to read.
⠀
They set out again in the morning, floor sixty-seven waiting below them, the descent, and whatever it still had left to show them, far from finished.
⠀
Floor sixty-seven greeted them with something none of the previous floors had bothered to offer: an actual working door, sealed tight, its keypad still faintly lit with a stubborn amber glow that had somehow survived three years of silence.
⠀
"That's new," Haddler said.
⠀
"That's a problem," Pallas corrected, studying the panel with the wary respect of a man who recognized trouble when it hummed at him. "This isn't standard facility power. It's running on an isolated cell, separate from the one you installed on the hundredth floor. Whatever's behind this door, someone wanted it protected even if the rest of the building went dark."
⠀
"Can you open it?" Yuhuan asked.
⠀
"Given time, and the right tools." Pallas ran his badge over the sensor, more out of habit than expectation, and to everyone's mild surprise, the panel blinked green.
⠀
"...Huh," Roby said. "Didn't expect that to just work."
⠀
"Ninety-Four and Thirteen shared a security architecture," Pallas said. "I told you that already. I suppose I should be grateful DaeSyndicate never saw much value in originality."
⠀
The door ground open onto a space unlike anything they'd found on the floors above: a single, pristine laboratory, spared somehow from the dust and decay that had claimed everything else, its equipment gleaming faintly under lights that had clearly never lost power at all. At its center sat a reinforced tank, waist-high, filled with a viscous, faintly luminescent fluid the color of a healing bruise.
⠀
Suspended within it, motionless, was something that had once, unmistakably, been shaped like a person.
⠀
"...Is that alive?" Mori asked, voice barely above a whisper.
⠀
Prospero was quiet for a long moment before answering, and when it did, something in its tone had shifted into a register none of them had heard from it before: careful, almost reverent.
⠀
"I genuinely don't know," it said. "That tank has been running on independent power since before I ever came online. It isn't in my archives. It isn't in any log I've ever had access to. Whatever's inside it, whoever put it there wanted it kept secret from everyone in this facility, myself included."
⠀
Armor stepped closer to the glass, studying the shape within, his usual composure cracking, just slightly, at the edges.
⠀
"...I don't like this," he said. "I don't like this at all."
⠀
"Nobody's asking you to like it," Jianhuan said, though the joke fell flat, even by his own low standards.
⠀
Pallas studied the tank a long moment, then shook his head. "We leave it. Whatever protocol kept this sealed for three years, I'm not confident enough in my own understanding of it to risk breaking it now. Not with nine lives depending on us reaching the bottom of this facility in one piece."
⠀
Nobody argued. Whatever relief the decision brought was thin, and none of them fully turned their backs on the tank until the laboratory door had sealed shut behind them again, the amber light of its keypad the last thing to fade from view as they moved on down the hall.
⠀
They found the stairwell down to sixty-six just past the laboratory, and for once, nobody suggested resting before continuing. Whatever had been floating in that tank had a way of making the idea of standing still feel considerably less appealing than it had an hour before.
⠀
"Sixty-six," Prospero announced, with the weary cheer of a tour guide well past the point of caring whether anyone was still listening. "Thirty-three floors to go before you reach the bottom of this particular nightmare. Do try to pace yourselves. I'd hate for any of you to peak too early."
⠀
Nobody laughed. Nobody had the energy left to. But they kept walking, and for the first time in a while, that felt like enough.