The assessment wing did not feel like the rest of the facility.
It was cleaner. Quieter. The rune lights here ran on a separate cycle — steadier, warmer, the kind of light that was designed to feel safe. The kind of light that took effort to design and therefore meant something about what the people who designed it expected to happen in these rooms.
Echo had noticed this immediately.
She sat on the edge of the assessment bed and looked at the two cups of tea on the table between her and Maren. Neither had been touched since Maren set them down forty minutes ago. The tea had gone cold. Neither of them had commented on it.
Maren was writing in her notebook. Unhurried. The scratch of her pen against the page was the only sound in the room besides the rune lights humming their steady warm cycle.
Echo watched her write.
"You're not going to ask me anything," Echo said.
"I'm going to ask you many things," Maren said without looking up. "I'm simply deciding which ones first."
"You already know the answers."
"Knowing and confirming are different things." Maren turned a page. "You of all people should understand that."
Echo looked at her hands. The Fragment burns mapping her arms in their deliberate patterns caught the warm light differently than they had in the facility's standard corridors — softer here, less stark. Almost like the room was trying to make them look like something other than what they were.
She didn't find that comforting.
"He'll come tomorrow," Echo said.
"Yes," Maren said. "I expect he will."
"You're not worried."
"No."
"You should be."
Maren's pen stopped. Not dramatically — just a half second pause, the kind that meant something had landed closer than expected. Then it resumed.
"Perhaps," she said pleasantly.
Echo looked at the wall.
She felt it before it arrived.
Not with her eyes or her ears, Something instinctual — the Fragment energy mapped across her arms pulsing once, faint and involuntary, like a reflex she hadn't known she had."
She looked at the wall to her left.
Nothing there. Smooth facility surface. Rune etching running along the base at floor level, steady and dim on the night cycle.
She kept looking.
The rune etching flickered.
Just once. Just the section closest to the corner where the left wall met the back wall — a single brief interruption in the steady dim pulse, there and gone before it could be logged as anything worth noting.
Echo's Fragment burns pulsed again.
Slower this time. Deliberate. Like something answering.
She stood up.
"Sit down please," Maren said, still writing.
Echo didn't sit down.
She crossed the room to the corner where the rune etching had flickered and stood in front of it. The smooth facility surface looked exactly as it always had. Cold. Institutional. Giving nothing away.
But the air here was different.
Warmer than it should have been. Not dramatically — not the bone coloured heat of the Hollowlands or the charged warmth of active rune energy. Just a few degrees. The kind of warmth that came from something that had been in a space for a long time.
Living warmth.
Echo put her hand flat against the wall.
Her Fragment burns lit from within — all of them simultaneously, the patterns across both arms responding to something on the other side of the surface that her mind hadn't processed yet but her biology already had.
Resonance.
Not the resonance she knew from Isaac — that had been recognition, two damaged things finding the shape of each other's damage and going still. This was different. Younger. Rawer. The resonance of something that had been alone for so long it had forgotten what not-alone felt like and was remembering now in real time, flooding through the wall between them with the particular desperation of a signal that had been broadcasting into silence for years.
Echo's throat tightened.
"There's someone in the wall," she said.
Maren's pen stopped.
This time it didn't resume.
Echo heard the notebook close. Heard the careful precise sound of Maren setting it on the table. Heard the quality of the silence change — from the silence of someone occupied to the silence of someone paying complete attention.
"Echo," Maren said. Her voice was still measured. Still warm. But something underneath it had shifted in a way that Echo's Fragment biological matter registered before her ears did. "Step away from the wall."
Echo kept her hand where it was.
The resonance coming through the surface intensified — and with it came something else. Not emotion exactly. Not language. Something in between. Fragments of sound that weren't quite words. Bureau phrases broken apart and reassembled wrong. Institutional rhythms that had soaked through the walls over years and been absorbed and were now surfacing in the only form available.
—acceptable parameters—
—log the result—
—she is safe—
Echo pressed her hand harder against the surface.
"They heard everything," she said quietly. "For years. They heard everything from in there."
A beat of silence.
"Step away from the wall," Maren said again. Still measured. But closer now — she had moved without Echo hearing her move and that alone said more about the situation than anything she had said out loud.
The wall surface cracked.
Not structurally — not the crack of something breaking under pressure. A hairline fracture spreading from beneath Echo's palm in a pattern too deliberate to be accidental. The same deliberate pattern as Echo's own Fragment burns. The same geometry. The same intention underneath it.
The rune etching along the base of the wall died completely.
The warm light in the assessment wing flickered.
And through the crack, faint and formless, something that was not quite light and not quite dark seeped into the room — Fragment energy in its most raw uncontained state, feeling its way through the fracture the way roots feel their way through stone. Slow. Patient. Certain.
Echo did not step back.
Her Fragment burns blazed.
The resonance hit her fully then — no wall between them anymore, nothing filtering it — and it wasn't broken Bureau phrases this time. It wasn't fragments of overheard language or institutional memory soaked into restructured tissue.
It was just one thing.
Repeated.
The way Fractured Hollowborn repeated their last words.
Except this wasn't a last word.
This was the only word that had mattered for a very long time.
Here. Here. Here. Here.
Behind Echo, Maren stood completely still.
Her notebook was in her hands. Her pen was uncapped. Her expression had not changed — it was still measured, still warm, still carrying that quality of someone whose most optimistic projection had just been revised upward.
But her eyes had moved to the crack in the wall.
And for the first time since Echo had met her — for the first time possibly in a very long time — Maren Soleis was not writing anything down.
She was just watching.
And her smile, for once, had nothing certain behind it.