The tunnels past the pressure lock were darker than the rest. Not in the way light faded, but in how memory failed to stick. Kesh called them thread gaps — places where the Hole's breath reached just deep enough to unravel a moment before it settled. You could walk fifteen steps, blink, and wonder how you'd already passed a door you didn't remember opening. She said it wasn't dangerous if you moved with purpose. He wasn't sure what that meant yet, but he followed closely, one hand clutching the anchorbone in his coat pocket, the other resting against the cool metal of the left-hand wall. The same wall he wasn't supposed to touch yesterday. He hadn't asked why.
They were heading toward a dead sector, something Kesh had referred to only once, in a whisper, as the listening zone. It was abandoned. Everything in the Lower Halves had some kind of noise — machinery, water, people, wind. This place didn't. She told him ahead of time not to speak, not to breathe too loud, not even to think too sharply. Something in the old wires could pick it up. And it wasn't blind.
The silence was thick and uneven. Footsteps didn't echo here. They arrived, then vanished, as if the ground had absorbed them. Even his breathing felt flattened in his own chest. For a long while, the only sound was the soft crunch of Kesh's boots against rust flakes and the quiet scuff of his own hesitation.
Eventually they reached what had once been a gate — not a door, just a bend in the tunnel that had been closed off by a vertical slab of welded scrap and iron. Carvings covered it, though not like the spiral sigils that had begun showing up everywhere since the Truth awakened. These were crude: childlike, jagged, chaotic. Most were eyes. Some open. Some stitched shut. All of them were bleeding.
"This is a watch point," Kesh said quietly, keeping her eyes low. "There's no one on the other side anymore. But it still remembers who passed through."
He nodded, though something about the wall made his hands go cold. Or colder than usual. It was hard to tell what was real now. His sense of touch wasn't gone, but it was dulled. Like everything he held passed through a layer of fog first.
"You're starting to feel it more now, aren't you?" Kesh turned and looked at him directly. "The pain doesn't hit. The hunger doesn't register. You walk longer. Rest shorter. But somewhere in the back of your head, you know you're burning more fuel than you're replacing. That's the mutation working. Pain isn't just a reaction. It's a warning system. Without it, your body starts cheating you. And you start letting it."
He didn't respond. He couldn't. Not without sounding hollow.
They moved past the gate, through a jagged tear that looked like it had been pulled open from the inside. The silence deepened. Not in volume, but in texture. The air felt padded, like sound couldn't land here even if it wanted to. Kesh stopped walking and motioned toward the floor ahead. He looked — and saw dozens of small, round stains. Too old to be red. Too deliberate to be random.
"These are from the ones who couldn't finish the first Truth," she said. "Some tried to cut it out. Others walked into their dreams and never came back. One or two just... stopped being noticed."
He stepped carefully around the stains. The spiral on his wrist had stopped pulsing. That made him nervous. It wasn't fading — it was waiting.
They reached the center of the zone. A wide circle of collapsed tiles and rusted prayer scaffolding surrounded what had once been a communion platform. Whatever rituals happened here had long been abandoned, but the shape of them still lingered. He stood quietly as Kesh circled the edge, placing small copper disks into the floor — not for magic, she said, but for resonance. Something to ground the mind when the silence tried to slip in.
It didn't take long.
He blinked once, and Kesh was across the room. Blinked again, and she was gone.
The platform was empty.
Then the eyes appeared.
Not real ones — not at first. Just the idea of them. A presence. A knowing. A pressure in the space behind his own thoughts, like something had reached in without asking and begun reading memories he hadn't chosen to recall.
One by one, the carvings on the wall began to open.
Not physically — not even visibly. But he felt them.
Watching.
Waiting.
And then a voice, not in his ears, but beneath his skin:
"You do not cry. You do not scream. Let us see if you still bleed."
He reached for the anchorbone.