Max had learned that walls could become suggestions.
Unfortunately, only some of them.
He stood in the narrow passage outside Room 17 with one hand pressed against the stone and stared at the next doorway. The corridor beyond it looked perfectly ordinary: pale wall panels, a line of amber lumen strips, and the bottom half of a stairwell turning toward the lower floor.
He had made it to that doorway six times and through it twice. On both occasions, the world had folded sideways before he reached the stairs and deposited him back inside Room 17 with a headache.
Max considered the corridor. The corridor, as usual, showed no guilt.
"Very mature."
His voice came back to him from the empty walls. He stepped forward and put one foot across the threshold.
Then the pressure arrived.
It was not pain exactly. More like walking into deep water that had forgotten to be wet. His chest tightened, and the lights stretched into thin lines. For half a second he could see two versions of the doorway occupying the same place.
Max stopped. He had become much better at stopping, which was not a skill he had expected to develop.
He backed away. The pressure released so suddenly that he had to catch himself against the wall. His pulse hammered under his fingers.
Alive, then.
Still an annoyingly useful fact.
Max waited until the dizziness passed. Through the tall opening at the far end of the corridor, Rivenhall continued without him. An elevated railcar glided across the river district. Lumen signs blinked awake along a market bridge. Somewhere below, metal struck metal three times, followed by voices he could not make out.
Ordinary life, close enough to see and too far to reach.
He looked away before the feeling in his chest became something he would have to name.
Room 17 was waiting.
It usually was.
---
The worktable had changed again. Max noticed it the moment he stepped inside.
A sheet of drafting paper lay where he had left it, held down by his spatial compass and a chipped ceramic weight. The paper was his. The compass was his. The table, unfortunately, still belonged to the building.
The writing did not.
WHO ARE YOU?
Max stopped.
Below it, in a different hand, was another line.
I WAS ABOUT TO ASK YOU THAT.
He stared at the page, then laughed once. "That's my question."
The letters were already fading.
Max pulled the paper closer without moving it far from the center of the table. That mattered. He had learned that much. Marks appeared most often inside a narrow section of the work surface. Move the page too far toward the edge and whatever strange behavior Room 17 was attempting simply stopped.
He had not named the effect. Naming things too early was how people became emotionally attached to bad theories.
The first line was heavier and wider, written in block letters. The second was compact and slightly slanted.
Two hands.
Or one extremely committed hallucination.
Max rubbed his thumb over the edge of the table. The marks did not smear. They were not wet. They seemed less like ink placed on the page and more like the page briefly remembering ink that belonged somewhere else.
That thought was unpleasant enough that he decided not to improve it.
The last letters vanished. Only his own old measurement notes remained.
For the past several days, Room 17 had shown him things it should not contain: light with the wrong color, a rectangular patch of wall darker than the stone around it, small marks that vanished when he tried to measure them.
He had blamed exhaustion.
Then the room had started writing back.
Exhaustion was becoming ambitious.
---
Waiting was worse than testing. Testing, at least, allowed a person to pretend he had control.
Max placed a clean sheet of paper in the center of the worktable and drew a small line near the top.
Nothing.
He added another.
Still nothing.
"Good conversation."
The lumen strip above the table dimmed. Max straightened as a pale gray mark appeared beside his.
There.
He checked the small timing dial on his compass. He did not understand the full pattern yet, but the changes often came in short windows.
He needed a question. Not *Who are you?* They had established that neither side had found that useful. Not *Where are you?* Too broad.
Max looked toward the distant opening where Rivenhall's elevated rail crossed between the buildings, then smiled.
He wrote:
WHAT'S OUTSIDE YOUR WINDOW?
He placed the pen down.
The letters remained. For several seconds, nothing else happened. The room gave a soft creak.
Ten seconds.
Max watched the page.
Twenty.
The gray mark near the top began to fade.
"Come on."
At thirty seconds, a new line appeared beneath his question.
RAIN.
A second line followed.
BRICK BUILDING.
Then:
BLUE PHARMACY SIGN.
The final line came in more slowly.
TRAM WIRES.
---
Max read the message again, then looked toward Room 17's outer opening.
No brick building directly across from him. No pharmacy sign. No tram wires.
Rivenhall used elevated rail through this district, not street tram lines. The nearest commercial sign was amber and green, three buildings south. The rain part was possible, except Rivenhall's sky was currently dry enough to be offensive.
He looked back at the page.
Different place.
That did not mean different world, and it did not even prove there was a person. But whatever was producing the answer was not simply copying information from his room.
That was enough to make his pulse pick up for reasons that had nothing to do with the corridor.
Max wrote quickly before the light returned to normal.
ALL RIGHT.
He hesitated, then added:
YOU'RE INTERESTING.
The sentence looked ridiculous the moment it existed.
Max considered crossing it out, but the gray letters on the other side began to fade.
Too late.
"Excellent."
He sat back and covered his face with one hand.
Somewhere, in some place with rain, brick walls, a blue pharmacy sign, and tram wires, something had just received his first attempt at a serious cross-space investigation.
And he had ended it by sounding like he was flirting with a wall.
Max lowered his hand.
The page was blank again.
For the first time in days, Room 17 felt less empty.
That might have been the most dangerous result yet.