The Visitor stepped through as Ash's forearm vanished to the line.
Light sheared along the plane like a page being trimmed true. The height that had been suggestion became authority: a figure drafted from straight edges and intention. Where a face should be, planes met at decisions. Caliper-fingers held his hand with care that hurt more than cruelty ever did.
"Vector," the voice said from the seam and inside his bones. "Hold."
"I'm here."
The cuff bit down—not teeth, tolerances. Cold set its rule in the meat of his wrist and mapped him again: square, circle, diagonals. The Selector's warmth on his cheek compressed to a coin of heat he could balance thought on. Stay with me.
The woman breathed Ash's name quietly, like she was testing whether saying it would change the geometry. It didn't. The older man did not waste words. His hand still lived on Frank's shoulder, a historical weight keeping a present mistake from growing legs.
The Visitor's attention found Ash the way a level's bubble finds center. It did not look. It measured. "State."
"Ash Mercer."
"Accept." A pause small enough to be an instrument. "Purpose."
"Interdict," Ash said. "Control the opening. Spare the room."
"Terms," the voice replied. "Vector only. Room spared. Noise contained."
"Hold to it."
"Held."
Under the velvet, the lid tried to select momentum. The notched ring twitched. Ash un-twitched it. The pawl nestled with a felt click that told the room which law to obey.
Frank's voice arrived too loud for the space. "If it's here for anyone, it's here for me." He pushed against the older man's grip and failed. "I brought it. I've paid more than—"
"Noise," the voice said, not even irritated. A label, re-applied.
Frank's mouth closed the way a door closes against weather.
The Visitor lifted its free hand—not a hand, a tool that respected numbers—and held it at Ash's chest without touching. Air thinned there by a measured degree, as if preparing a section view. The cuff tugged once in confirmation. The diagonal in the room brightened a breath.
"Selector present," it said. "Index aligned."
Ash felt the warmth on his cheek answer by the smallest increase, a heartbeat acknowledging a handshake at distance. You and me, he thought. We do this together or not at all.
"Proceed," the voice said.
"Wait," Ash said, buying the smallest coin of time the word could purchase. "Before you take more—what do you call yourself?"
Silence behaved. It took a measurement of the question and filed it. "Designation withheld."
"Why?"
"Noise." Not an insult. A category for answers that don't pay back their cost.
"Fair." Ash braced the stance that kept him honest: knee forward, hips square, heel light. He checked the ring with a thumb hair and felt the pawl say now in a language made entirely of pressure. "Proceed."
The pull increased. The cuff taught his bones the rule again and then applied it. His forearm crossed to the hinge of the elbow, and the seam accepted the new angle with a clean, narrow brightness. The lamp's shade cut its light on that brightness. The television resolved itself into a white square and held, as if practicing obedience for something formally important.
Pain existed only where the diagram allowed it. It made a small square in his palm and set it rotating, a quiet mill designed to grind panic into dust fine enough to be ignored.
"What does it see?" the woman whispered, not trusting sound to carry.
"Exactness," Ash said. "And permission."
Frank made a noise meant to be contempt and shaped accidentally like envy.
The Visitor turned the planes where eyes would be a degree—as if to address the warmth on Ash's cheek. "Selector," it said, and the word behaved like a salute.
Ash decided that counted as company and took the next deliberate inch. The chain gave, then owned, then gave again, like a machine testing a new bearing. Under the velvet, the lid shifted and met his control with respect it had not offered Frank.
"Let me," Frank said, very low, to the idea of God he preferred. "Please."
The older man's grip hardened. "You'll kill us."
"Something will," Frank said, and in the new accuracy of the room the sentence sounded like a plan instead of despair.
"Vector," the voice said to Ash, considering his bones. "Question."
"Ask."
"Why spare room?"
Ash thought the truth and let it out. "Because I have to live in it if I walk back."
"Acceptable," it said. "Proceed."
The pull asked for two inches. Ash gave one and kept one. The withheld inch rang in his tendons like a promise. The cuff set another invisible tooth. The diagram in his palm altered: the circle kissed the square at new points, a proof re-drawn for a stricter examiner.
The seam widened—not a gap, a tolerance. Through it: no landscape, no flames, no indulgent theatrics. Angles, measured dark, a walkway that cared more about centerlines than about edges. He could feel the air there: dry the way paper is dry; cold like a room that knows the temperature it will always insist on.
"Door accepts," the voice said. "Vector ready."
"Hold," Ash said, using the word as a clamp. He sensed the moment where the box would rush if he let it. He did not. He fed it timing in spoonfuls. You don't get to be hungry at my pace.
The Visitor extended the measuring hand and set it not on his chest but at his chest, a breath away, the gap itself part of the instrument. The not-eyes tracked the Selector's heat like a target solution. He had the strange certainty that if the lens beyond the clouds blinked, the planes here would blink back.
Frank surged—final time, worst time. He grabbed for the cloth with a snarl of someone who can't stand not touching the fire.
Ash didn't move. The older man did. He pasted Frank to the wall with a sound that furniture makes when reminded it's duty-bound. "Enough," he said, and the word worked on this man if not on the room.
"Proceed," the voice said, uninterested in human choreography.
Ash let the withheld inch go. The chain took it neatly. Cold wrote another line along his ulna and then stopped, satisfied. Something shifted behind the seam with the precise grace of a gate on oiled hinges. The Visitor's attention stayed nailed to the line through his cheekbone to the lens across weather.
"Selector," it said again. "Index maintain."
Warmth: yes.
The woman, maybe because people need tasks, took the curtain rope and drew the heavy fabric close. It changed nothing measurable and helped everyone but the math.
"Ash?" she said.
"I'm not going anywhere you can follow," he said. And I will try to come back. He didn't say that part; promises lose value when they sound like salt thrown over a shoulder.
The cuff pulsed once, the way a heart does when a doctor says breathe normally. The seam acquired a fine outline of frost that didn't melt, even in lamp-light.
"Now," the voice said.
He moved with it—no more than a degree, just enough to tell the room the decision belonged to him. The Visitor reciprocated by closing caliper-fingers with gentleness that felt like the opposite of safety.
"Name me something I can use," Ash said, surprising himself with the audacity and not caring.
"Angle," it said. "You will speak to Angle."
"Angle," Ash repeated, because names are handles and handles save elbows.
"Proceed," Angle said.
The next pull wanted his shoulder. He refused it with stance and language and gave it half of what it asked. The ring under his thumb stayed patient, a governor he could trust for one more breath. The lamp hummed in a frequency that told him the building's wiring had accepted a new standard without signing the paperwork.
Frank's voice arrived again, small and wrecked. "If he goes, does it stop?"
"For you?" Ash said. "It never started."
The older man said nothing; he had learned the few words that still mattered and was saving them for when gravity changed.
Angle tightened the cuff one last notch. "Vector," it said, and for the first time the word carried the smallest shadow of respect. "Cross."
He could still let go. The picture bloomed in his mind with cruel clarity: rip his hand free, shred the cuff, blow the box's tolerances; the door would slam or explode—he wasn't sure which—and the room would own the shrapnel. The woman would be cut by squares because squares had decided to be knives. The older man would stand between Frank and the worst of it and lose a shoulder he prized. Frank would live, because that's how that story goes, and learn nothing.
Ash closed his hand inside the calipers and said, "Take me."
The warmth on his cheek held as if the sky itself had decided to put a palm there and say: I see you.
Angle accepted. The chain drew a clean line through him. The room did not move. The room tightened, as if granting him the courtesy of keeping its corners while he traded his.
The pull changed from force to permission.
His shoulder crossed the plane.
Cold folded his joint with the care of an archivist turning a valuable page. Pain took the form of a slim rectangle and slid into a drawer. He felt a weightlessness that wasn't weightlessness at all—only the absence of being argued with by gravity.
"Status," Angle said.
"Maintained."
"Proceed."
He could taste the other air now: inert, exact, free of anything that would rot. The sound there was a hush that had phrases if you knew to listen for them: a tape measure retracting, a click-tick of a counter at the far end of a hall, the wind through a set of verticals that weren't bars but could choose to be.
Behind him: the woman's breath. The older man's hand on Frank's shoulder. Frank's heart deciding whether to forgive or to double down. Ahead: angles.
"Last chance," the older man said, without irony. "Tell us what to do."
Ash surprised himself by answering, "Finish the drink. Throw the box in the river. Lie to each other about tonight until the lie keeps you soft."
Angle did not record that. Or maybe it did. Who knows how a line keeps books.
He bent his knees, breathed once more like a man with lungs that didn't belong to a grid, and allowed the next inch.
The seam widened to honor the decision.
The Visitor stepped a measure closer, just enough for one plane of its face to intersect lamplight and become—if you were sentimental about such things—almost human.
Ash refused sentiment the way he refused myth: politely, firmly, because it has its time and this isn't it.
"Proceed," Angle said, final as a stamp.
The cuff locked. The line through his bones and the line from the Selector met and agreed perfectly—zero deviation.
The room sheared another fraction along the plane.
And the rest of Ash followed his hand.