The frost pane accepted his weight.
It strengthened as if it had been waiting for belief. The corridor built itself a breath ahead of him—sheet after sheet of pale light knitting into a bridge across weather—while the dome fell away behind like a snow globe someone had stopped shaking. The beam kept a warm thumb on his cheekbone.
Wind pressed from everywhere, bringing sky-cold and the taste of rain not yet admitted by the clouds. The corridor curved, not in space so much as in decision. Ash walked the choice and the choice became a path.
He checked the cut with the heel of his hand. Tug, neat and mean, but stable. Don't test it. Keep moving.
The bell note returned, small and exact. Panes ahead slid into place with the hush of a page turning. A cloud shouldered in, learned manners, became scenery. A gull ghosted by and left only the idea of wings. He kept his eyes on the next pane, then the next.
Light broke to darker gray. Wet brick found his nose. Traffic hissed somewhere below. The corridor eased its height like a pilot lowering wheels. The last pane learned gravity and decided to be a roof.
His boot met tar. Gravel skittered to the parapet. Rain arrived honestly. He let his weight roll into the landing, knees soft, palm to stone. The warmth steadied. He stood on a flat roof three stories up, the type terraces hide from their own facades. Chimneys shouldered the sky. Far off, a railway sang steel on steel.
He tested the body. The cut complained and quit. A rusted ladder clung to brick; he eased over the parapet and took it hand over hand. Rain insisted on knowing his wrists. Two floors down, a window threw television light into the wet—smiling people selling prizes that didn't exist. He kept moving.
The alley met him with wet cardboard and old fry oil. A fox darted, decided he wasn't competition, and vanished. The warmth at his cheek turned his head right. He obeyed. A gate presented a chain it no longer believed in. He slid through sideways, coat whispering rust, and stepped into a service yard where a forgotten toolbox waited to be useful. Inside: flathead screwdriver, dull box cutter, gloves washed and regretted. He took the gloves and the flathead; closed the lid like returning a favor later.
A fire escape fed him to a corridor of back doors. The nudge in his cheek led him to the street, where London went about being London in the rain: buses with their shoulders up; a black cab hissing by; plane trees shaking water; brick that remembered old damage politely. He moved with it, counting lampposts he couldn't see because counting is what you do when faith isn't your language.
The warmth gathered itself opposite a row of terraces with black doors that loved polish. Numbers gleamed. Knockers waited like polite fists. At the seventh house, the paint around the lock wore the ring you get when someone rips a name off a door. New screws in the jamb. The doormat lied: WELCOME.
He ghosted along the rail to the side alley. The gate declined to participate. He climbed. The drainpipe shook hands with him every two feet and promised not to tell. New brick, slick; boot on screw heads, fingers in the mortar's smaller confessions. A ledge under the first-floor sash offered him a choice. The latch cared about paint more than security. The flathead argued; paint yielded. He lifted the sash two inches and let rain talk while he listened.
Voices. Three at least. Male, male, female. The nearest voice drew the room around it with the entitlement of a man who finds religions in machines. A second voice rode under his, managerial, smoothing corners no one had asked to be smoothed. The woman's tone said she had agreed to be here and had begun to regret it on her own schedule.
He slid inside. Floorboards accepted him warily. Heat held the hallway in a grip that made the rain feel like a rebuke. On a side table, a porcelain bowl presented keys with opinions but no jurisdiction. A radiator ticked as if counting its ribs.
The warmth narrowed to a line. Left. Down. He passed a coat stand—two empty hooks, one umbrella that had died heroically—and stepped around a floorboard that complained at the wrong pitch. The stair brought him to an inner landing starved of light.
A door painted black waited at the end. New paint, done fast. The number gone; a cleaner ring telling where it had been. The lock wore a scratch that hadn't come from a key. Ash set his palm to the wood and listened through it the way you listen to a chest.
"…meant to be solved," the confident voice said, smiling with the word. "Puzzle."
The woman: "You promised slow."
The other man: "We don't rush in my house."
Metal touched metal and made a tiny sound evolution had trained ears to respect. The warmth held him like a fingertip under his chin. He set the screwdriver to the strike plate without levering, feeling bruises in the jamb—panic once from the wrong side, later repaired with paint.
A tread whispered on the stair above. A woman in a robe watched him, hair in a towel, cigarette held away from the smoke alarm as if virtue were angle. Her eyes measured the vector of his trouble.
He touched a finger to his lips. Not your mess.
Her mouth pressed flat, then she let the stair take her. The ember hung like a small planet and went out.
He breathed with the door. The thing on the other side whisked as clever surfaces found each other. Glass clinked. The managerial voice said a name—"Frank"—and the room rearranged around it as if the furniture had been waiting.
Frank. He filed it without ceremony.
The knob carried a tremble not his. The warmth stayed steady as if a decision had been made somewhere above him. Inside, the woman again: "Careful."
"Relax," Frank said, tender to the machine. "It likes firm hands."
Ash slid the blade under the latch and mapped the next seconds in his body—shoulder low, left foot braced—and stopped. Timing is a language. He listened for its verbs.
A chain slid off its keeper. The knob turned from the other side. Rain sprinted on the end-window to make the timing feel inevitable.
He stepped back from the jamb to take the door's arc and kept his hands where they read as patience. The bolt snicked. The door edged inward three inches and found modesty.
Warm lamplight. Rug that forgave spills. Frank, exactly the shape the voice promised: handsome, pleased with himself. The older man wore competence like a tie he'd forgotten to take off. The woman's smile had screws. The box sat on velvet and collected attention as tax.
"Evening," Ash said, mild. "Leak in the loft. I'm meant to check the stack."
"There's no leak," the older man said, quickly competent.
"Let's keep it that way." Ash aimed the pen-that-wasn't at the ceiling. "Five minutes."
"We're busy," Frank said, not taking his hands off the box.
"So am I." Ash moved along the wall instead of toward the stair, letting the room read him as routine. He set the pen on a shelf and freed his hand without advertising it. The warmth didn't waver. If the beam were a person, it was holding its breath.
Frank's thumbs knew their religion. He rotated a petaled corner and teased a panel up with the tender arrogance of a man proposing to a lock. Inside lay a thin strip of brass like a bookmark prepared by the box for its own story.
"What's the prize?" Ash asked, because people answer questions they want asked.
"Understanding," Frank said, feeding the strip into a slit. The machine noticed his obedience; something disengaged softly, like a tape measure accepting truth. Air cooled half a degree. The television forgot its lines.
"Five minutes," the older man said again, to own the room.
"Less," Ash said, and found the rug's edge with his boot so he'd know where he stood at speed.
Frank lifted a petal on the opposite face. A second constellation of dots winked awake. He inhaled with the box, like a diver tasting the surface. "Nearly there."
"Prove it moves and then stop," the woman said. Her fingers searched her throat for a necklace that wasn't there.
"If I lift it," Frank said softly, "I'm not stopping."
The warmth on Ash's cheek narrowed to a point—truer, not hotter. Somewhere beyond the reach of this lamp, something old cocked its head to hear the next sound.
Ash set his palm on the velvet, not touching the box, only entering its gravity. "Let me see," he said. "I'll hand it back."
Frank's grip tightened. "No."
The older man's patience made a noise like a glass hitting a coaster too hard. "Frank."
The box gave a small bright tone without a source.
Ash closed the last inches his plan required. His fingers circled Frank's wrist, not rough, but with enough certainty to rename the moment.
"Don't," the woman said, on the inhale.
"Firm hands," Frank repeated, and pulled against Ash's grip to set the brass strip into the second slit.
Ash tightened: not to break skin—just to stop momentum.
"Let go," Frank said.
"Let me hand it back," Ash said.
"No."
The petal lifted anyway—half an inch, because the box had been taught the order of persuasion. The room relaxed and then braced as if the walls had shoulder blades.
The older man moved his glass out of consequence's path. "Enough."
Frank smiled sharper. "Now."
Ash had three choices: break the wrist, break the box, or break the moment.
He broke the moment. He flipped the velvet's corner over the box like a dealer covering a card. The cloth made no sound. The room made five.
Frank swore and clawed for the shape under the cloth. The warmth did not move; it lived there like a sight picture over a target he couldn't yet see.
"Stop," the woman said, louder. "Just—stop."
"Back up," the older man said to everyone, which is how you know it was his house. His hand met Ash's instead of the box and paused at the steadiness there.
Ash kept pressure on the cloth and met Frank's eyes. "If you're inviting something, make sure it's the thing you meant."
"And if it is?" Frank asked, sincere and daring both.
"Then you don't need to rush it," Ash said—I need thirty seconds to think. "Let me look. Then you can do your trick."
"Not a trick," Frank said, and tugged.
The cloth slipped. The corner of the box flashed an etching that might have been ornament or instruction. Air tasted of cold metal in a drawer.
The chain at the front door rattled against the jamb—sound with no hand to make it. The television lost its channel. A pipe banged once downstairs and remembered silence. The rain wrote harder. Something had noticed them noticing it.
"Thirty seconds," the older man said, granting what Ash hadn't asked aloud.
Ash lifted the cloth just enough to study the next move: the strip half seated; the petal ready to pivot left; a notched ring waiting for pressure. He could stop the sequence or finish it cleaner than Frank intended and control the first inch of whatever door this wanted to become.
Pick one.
He pressed the cloth back down and taught the machine stillness with his palm. "Five minutes," he said calmly. "Then you can have your understanding."
Frank's laugh had too many teeth. "You think you can tell it what to do."
"No," Ash said. "I can tell you."
The warmth on his cheek did not argue. It waited, the way a sight waits for the shooter to breathe at the bottom of the exhale.