The crack in the wall spread slowly.
Not with sound. Not with force. Just a quiet branching — hairline fractures following the geometry of Echo's Fragment burns like they already knew the pattern and were tracing it from the other side.
Echo stood with her hand against the surface and did not step back.
The resonance coming through had changed. Not the broken Bureau phrases anymore. Not the desperate signal of something broadcasting into silence. Something steadier now. More certain. The way a voice gets steadier when it realizes someone is finally listening.
Here.
The wall gave.
Not all at once — not dramatically, not with the violence of something breaking. More like a surface tension releasing. Like the wall had been holding something in for a very long time and had simply decided it was done.
The child stepped through.
Echo's first impression was edges.
Or the lack of them.
The child was there — clearly there, clearly present, the shape of a person standing where wall had been a moment ago — but where they ended and the room began was wrong. At the shoulders. At the fingertips. At the line where their hair should have met air. Everything slightly uncertain. Like looking at something through water that was almost but not quite still.
Otherwise — a child. Slight. Pale in the way everything in this facility was pale. Eyes that had the particular quality of things that had been open in the dark for a very long time and had learned to see differently.
They were looking at Echo.
Only at Echo.
Like Maren wasn't in the room at all.
One hand rose — slowly, with the careful deliberateness of something relearning a gesture it had known once and was not certain it still remembered correctly — and reached toward her.
Not grabbing. Not threatening.
Just reaching.
Echo's Fragment burns blazed.
She reached back.
Their fingers met in the space between them and the resonance hit fully — no wall, no distance, nothing between the two Fragment bonds — and Echo felt years of it all at once. Dark and close and humming with rune energy and Bureau voices bleeding through from the other side. Felt the particular quality of alone that came from being surrounded by people who couldn't see you. Felt the moment Echo's Fragment had destabilized on the third floor weeks ago and the vibration of it had moved through every rune line in the facility and reached something dormant in the walls and said —
You are not the only one.
Echo exhaled.
The child's edges steadied slightly. Just slightly. Like contact was doing something proximity hadn't been able to do alone.
"Who are you," Echo said.
The child's mouth moved.
What came out wasn't quite a name. It was something that had been a name once — before years of silence and rune energy and the slow restructuring of everything that made a person who they were. It arrived in pieces. Broken at the edges the same way the child was broken at the edges.
But it was there.
Echo listened to it carefully.
Then she nodded. Once. Like she had filed it away somewhere it would be kept properly.
Behind them Maren had not moved.
She stood beside the table with the cold tea and the closed notebook and watched the two children in the centre of the room with an expression that had no category in the long list of expressions Echo had catalogued on her face since arriving.
Not warm. Not calculating. Not the particular smile that meant she was three steps ahead.
Just watching.
Like she was seeing something she had designed the conditions for without knowing what she was designing the conditions for.
Her pen was still uncapped.
She hadn't written a single word.
Three floors up Isaac's eyes opened.
He hadn't been asleep. He had been lying on the cot in the specific stillness of someone whose body was resting and whose mind was doing something else entirely — mapping corridors, timing patrol rotations, calculating the distance between his room and the assessment wing in seconds rather than steps.
Then the resonance hit.
Not Echo's — he knew Echo's. This was different. Adjacent to it. The same origin, the same fundamental Fragment energy underneath, but shaped differently. Restructured differently. Like hearing a voice that shared a language with someone you knew but had learned it somewhere else entirely.
Isaac sat up.
The entity stirred.
Not with hunger. With the particular attention it paid to things it hadn't encountered before and wanted to understand — the same attention it had paid to Echo in the Hollowlands, the same attention it had paid to Maren in the courtyard.
There is another one, it said.
"I know," Isaac said quietly.
He was already standing.
Already moving toward the door.
The camera in the corner of his room caught his silhouette as he crossed toward the exit — and in the dark surface of the lens, the reflection watched him go with an expression that wasn't quite satisfaction and wasn't quite worry and was something that lived exactly between the two.
It said nothing.
For once it said nothing at all.
Isaac stepped into the corridor.
His shadow went ahead of him.