The chain took the next inch and made a rule out of it.
Cold threaded his wrist with a draftsman's care, not hunting pain but confining it to shape. Under the velvet, the box tested his restraint and found the brake still present—the notched ring firm beneath his left thumb, the pawl seated. Lamp-light shaved itself obediently along the seam. The tall outline in the cut arranged its height with the authority of a blueprint.
"Vector," the voice said, the syllables clean as numbers. "Conduit."
"Yes."
"Room spared," it said. "Noise contained."
"Hold to it," Ash said. "I'll hold mine."
The warmth at his cheek compressed into a perfect point and stayed. Selector's on me, he thought. Stay there.
The entity clarified without growing nearer: head sketched by planes, a calm mouth suggested by straight lines meeting inevitability. Where eyes would be, the air held a steadiness that read as attention. He could feel it choose him the way a builder chooses level before nail.
The diagonal across the room brightened a hair, walking off the picture frame and through air toward his arm. The chain cinched one tooth tighter, testing whether bones would comply. They did.
"Name," the voice said again, not because it had forgotten, but because procedure likes to confirm itself.
"Ash Mercer."
"Accept." A pause so small it counted as precision. "Proceed."
The cloth tugged as the lid beneath it tried to own the moment. The ring twitched; he brought it back the thickness of a breath and felt the box accept the correction as fact.
Frank couldn't bear being irrelevant. "Lift it," he said, lurching forward.
The older man caught him at the sternum and walked him backward two steps with a quiet violence that had nothing to prove.
"Don't earn a worse word," the older man said.
"What word?" Frank spat, and hated the answer before it came.
"Noise," the voice said from the cut, polite and terminal.
The woman stood near Ash's shoulder, hands empty, trying to invent a useful verb. She didn't touch him. She had learned the cost of squares.
The pull increased. Cold drew a grid into his palm—square over square—and then added a circle that touched each mid-point as if proving acquaintance. The mark didn't burn. It named. When the circle closed, the cuff settled like a signature pressed into wax.
"Pain," the voice said. "State."
"Contained."
"Proceed."
He gave the ring a measured degree clockwise, not to open but to align. The seam—obedient—leaned toward his chest, choosing him over the carpet, the furniture, every mistake the room might offer as a cheaper path.
"What do you see?" the woman whispered.
"A hallway," Ash said, because he had to give the fear a picture if he wanted it quiet. "Angles instead of walls. Dark that knows where it's supposed to be."
"Holy," Frank breathed, because vanity loves big words.
"Accurate," Ash said, because he refused to give myth a free dinner.
Caliper-fingers assembled in the cut—long, exact, joints like thought rather than bone. They reached with the care of someone placing a fragile tool into a lathe and closed around his hand without haste.
The cuff tightened a decisive millimeter.
The first real pull came—no jerk, no drama. Just a line deciding to own a body. Floor weight tipped under him along the vector. He matched it with stance: knee braced, hips square, shoulders quiet. The ring under his thumb held the pawl where he wanted it.
"Stop," the older man said to the room because men like him try that word first.
The room ignored him and obeyed the math.
Frank's breath scratched at the edges of words. He didn't find one.
"Vector," the voice said. "Maintain."
"I'm here," Ash said. He let the next half-inch happen, controlled. The seam brightened and thinned at the same time, like a blade being honed in front of its own reflection.
The lamp's light split on a plane that hadn't existed a second earlier and now demanded manners. The television accepted a narrow, perfect rectangle of white and held it like obligation. Rain at the window arrived at equal intervals; the city had been moved onto graph paper without being asked.
The entity's caliper-fingers adjusted their hold, not to hurt, but to measure. A second filament slid from the seam, tasted the line above his elbow, and sought purchase. He met it with pressure on the ring and a slow twist of his wrist that made that extra contact more expensive than the doorway wanted to afford.
The filament withdrew. Rules acknowledged.
"Terms honored," the voice said. "Vector only."
"Keep saying that," Ash said. "Out loud."
Frank laughed once, raw. "You think it cares about promises?"
"It cares about language," Ash said. "Language is cheaper than blood."
The seam leaned another hair toward his chest, accepting the leverage. The pull grew. He let his forearm cross the plane to the elbow, no more.
Cold learned his bones, then forgot how to be cold and became method. Nerves stopped complaining. The mark in his palm brightened until it didn't need light to exist. The Selector's warmth on his cheek steadied harder—one more integer of yes.
"Status," the voice said.
"Maintained."
"Proceed."
"Wait," the older man said. He wasn't pleading. He was tallying. "Before you go—if you go—tell me what to do after."
"Close the curtains," Ash said, and almost smiled. "It won't help. Do it anyway. Keep your hands off boxes."
The woman swallowed and made that her ritual.
"Don't be noble," Frank said, a little wild. "Nobility is a cheap suit. Take your hand away and it picks me."
"It tried," Ash said. "It found you wanting."
The voice confirmed with a precision that would have been cruelty if cruelty had bothered with style. "Noise."
Frank flinched like a slap had found him.
Ash took the ring another tooth—controlled, exact. The pawl seated, the lid stayed obedient, and the seam brightened a shade past permission. Caliper-fingers set his wrist at a pure angle and held. If this was brutality, it was the tidy kind: instructions that make pain smaller by making it specific.
This is where you stop, he told himself. Or this is where you go. He didn't add why. Reasons are for afterward.
"Selector," he said—testing whether the word could live in a mouth that wasn't the voice's. "Are you with me?"
Warmth. No sound. The yes lived as pressure where cheekbone meets skin.
The entity in the cut cocked the plane of its head, acknowledging a third participant without ceding authority. The voice commented on it like a clerk noting a stamp. "Index present."
"What happens if I refuse now?" Ash asked.
"Angle seeks least resistance," the voice said. "Reassignment." It didn't look at Frank. It didn't have to.
He took the next inch.
The room complied. The floor's argument against leaving softened into a glide. The mark in his palm cooled to something like consent. The cuff found the sweet spot between liberty and lesson and closed there.
Caliper-fingers shifted, accepting new load. For a breath, his pulse and the chain's tiny internal ticks matched. That would have been comfort elsewhere. Here it was just data agreeing with itself.
"Proceed," the voice said, and he realized it always said that at the exact moment you could still change your mind.
"Noted," he said. He didn't change his mind.
The woman's hand hovered and then stopped, learning from the squared chill that had leapt to her skin before. "Ash."
"Stay behind me."
"I am."
"Good."
Frank gathered a last, shabby piece of courage and tried the cloth again. The older man didn't bother wrestling. He took the back of Frank's neck and set him against the wall with a firm, historical kindness men reserve for a younger self they don't wish on anyone.
"Enough," the older man said, at last finding a use for the word.
The pull asked for two inches. He granted one and a half. The difference stayed in his bones and waited for later.
The seam offered the face again—planes arranged into mouth, nose, stillness. Where eyes should be, the line of the Selector rested. When that line and the doorway's vector crossed, it did so exactly inside his skull.
"Ready," the voice said.
"Say my name," Ash said.
"Conduit," it said. "Ash Mercer."
"Good," he said, because yes had become a currency and someone had to spend it.
The chain tightened, honest now.
He lifted his knee off the carpet, choosing the floating inch the vector wanted, and the room tilted by respect rather than gravity. The lamp's shade cut its light cleanly on the seam and sent the rest to attend to furniture. The television decided to be a white square and then a black one and then obedient snow.
Weight redistributed from floor to line. His shoulder eased forward by the amount you lend a door when you already know who's on the other side.
"Proceed," the voice said again, each time the word a smaller distance from the shape of his bones.
He moved.
His elbow crossed. Cold wrote the equation into him and stopped writing. The cuff locked. The caliper-grip owned his hand without bruising it. The seam widened not to admit him but to admit the idea of him.
Frank made a sound that wanted to be worship and came out as relief. The older man breathed. The woman didn't.
"Vector," the voice said, almost—almost—satisfied. "Hold."
"I'm here."
"Now," it said, and the plane brightened as if someone had drawn a clean line on the world and sharpened the pencil.
The floor's argument ended with a gentleman's handshake. The room watched itself be exact.
And with the last tooth of the cuff seating true, the Visitor stepped through as Ash's forearm vanished to the line.