The door took his vision.
Light didn't go dark. It obeyed. Lamps, curtains, the white rectangle of the television—all simplified to clean vectors and measured planes, the way an engineer sketches a room and gets more truth than a photograph. Selector's warmth pressed firm between his eyes, a bright coin holding him on the exact line. The seam became a razor-fine diagram; the air beyond drew faint glyphs like notations in a manual someone had lived with long enough to stop reading aloud.
He blinked and nothing changed, which taught him blinking was for light, not for lines.
The strap-held ring stayed where he'd caged it; the pawl sat, sullen and faithful. The crystal bowl owned the tail; the heavy books pinned the same velvet corner without pride. Caliper-fingers kept his right hand as if it were a fragile tool; the cuff on his wrist kept tolerances the way a promise keeps its own shape. His left hand was free.
"Status," the voice said from the seam and the bones under his ear. "Vector."
"Maintained."
"Terms," it said.
"Vector only. Room spared. Noise contained."
"Accept," Angle said. "Selector index aligned."
Warmth: yes. Stay on me. If I walk back, you pull the line.
Behind him came the soft, necessary sounds of a room being good: the woman's careful breath; the older man's weight distributed through heels he trusted; Frank's small, broken noises that didn't quite qualify as speech. Rain tapped equal intervals on glass, proud of its new discipline.
The seam lifted across his brow and wrote a fine cold line there like a signature. He didn't close his eyes. Don't give it panic. Give it procedure. He inhaled on the count he'd set for himself, held when the line asked, exhaled into the part of the second that didn't belong to Math.
The velvet brake crept a whisper.
"Book," Ash said.
The older man slid a second anthology an inch onto the corner. The cloth turned pride into drag. The lid under velvet remembered it wasn't the driver.
"Angle," Ash said. "If I go eyes-first, you keep the vector strictly on me."
"Kept."
"Return path: you keep the memory, but the Selector draws me home."
"Correct." A precisely measured pause. "Do not request stop without Selector."
"Noted." Don't ask for a favor that costs more than its truth.
The seam crossed the bridge of his nose and accepted the decision already written on his face. His left hand floated in the air beside the ring, not touching it, close enough to take over if the strap slipped. He flexed the fingers once and the room redrew them as clean lines—phalanges as segments, knuckles as measured radii.
Frank tried to twist free again, made the sound men make when the story moves on without them, and hit the older man's forearm like furniture that respected history.
"Let me—" Frank began.
"No," the older man said, and the word fit the diagram.
"Noise," Angle said, polite and absolute. The diagonal brightened by a hair, like a margin note agreeing with itself.
The seam reached his temples. Cold touched the hinge of jaw and thought at the same time, and he felt the idea of pain consider itself and settle into a tidy rectangle it could live in. He breathed through the count, a swimmer turning under a lane line.
"Proceed," Angle said.
"Brake locked," he answered. "Take the head."
"Accept."
Sight reorganized again, not into blur but into intention. The room remained itself and also became a map with the clutter taken out: the measured corridor beyond the seam showed a faint, moving lattice, each intersection a waypoint dim as star-chart ink. He could tell which points had been used recently and which waited to exist until someone's weight asked them to.
"What do I see?" he asked, because naming feeds patience.
"Waypoints," Angle said. "Vector memory."
"For me?"
"For all vectors. Selector chooses index. Angle maintains planarity."
"Planarity," he said, because saying the right words is sometimes what keeps a body in one piece.
"Accept," Angle said, as if stamping a form.
The Selector's warmth pushed a fractional degree harder between his eyes, aligning with one of the faint waypoints the lattice had proposed. The pressure felt like a fingertip on a map: there.
"Zero," Angle said.
"My zero?"
"Yours," it said. "Named by Selector."
Bookmark, he thought. If I come back, I'm coming back to that dot and not some romantic idea of doorways.
The velvet shifted a grain. He heard the bowl slide a thumbnail's width, a small glass sound translated by the room into units of risk. He raised his left hand and set two fingers gently along the strap's spine: not pressure, presence. The ring remembered it was being watched.
"Hold," he said.
"Holding," Angle said.
He bent his knees one disciplined degree and let the chain invite his skull across. Cold wrote his scalp in tidy strokes; every hair decided whether it belonged to geometry and chose yes to avoid argument. Pain stayed in its drawer. Breath learned the corridors's grammar: counts and pauses, the thin admission that was not human generosity so much as policy.
Frank's voice arrived like someone had tried to swallow glass and hadn't given up. "If he dies—"
"He won't," the woman said, not because she could know, because she knew how to speak to rooms.
"Selector," Angle announced to no one, and the warmth answered by existing harder, steady as a hand on the rim of a cup.
"Angle," Ash said. "If I speak from inside, do they hear me?"
"Vector speech transcribes to air," it said. "Volume reduces with distance from seam. Room hears enough."
"Good." He let the line take his forehead. Sight became vector entirely. The room's annotation gained a layer: subtle glyphs near the seam labeled tiny behaviors—lamps humming in frequencies; curtains hanging in plumb; the television's white field narrowing to a filament. He had the irrational desire to correct the one crooked painting in the hall. Later, he told himself, and the later existed because the diagram said so.
The chain asked for the back of his head—the soft place where balance keeps its spare coins. He gave it and kept his jaw steady. The cuff's tolerances closed one more millimeter, precise as a good bolt. Caliper-fingers adjusted, respecting the neck as a hinge, not a handle.
"Status," Angle said.
"Maintained."
"Proceed."
"Wait," he said, and made the second pay for him instead of for panic. "Tell me the rule if Selector leaves."
"Return path dissolves. Room risk increases if brake releases. Angle will seek new vector with least resistance."
"Which is noise," he said, and Frank flinched before anyone used the word for him.
"Correct."
"Then Selector doesn't leave," Ash said, and the warmth agreed: a clean, precise press that promised nothing except the pressure itself.
He let the last of his skull cross. A gentle, exact touch found the base of it—not hand, not clamp, not machine, an idea of grip rendered in cold. It had the calm of a medical instrument and the arrogance of a law.
Behind him, the woman moved one foot because bodies like to redistribute faith. The older man didn't. He stood as if holding the shape of kindness with his back. Frank's breath climbed; he put a palm to the wall like the building could pick a side.
"Angle," Ash said. "State the next instruction."
"Cross," Angle said. "Neck."
His throat remembered the earlier count and turned it into a habit. He opened the space in his mouth enough to keep air and words from fighting and found the narrow, lawful breath between numbers. The seam brightened to his larynx; the line became a fine blade under the skin. If he leaned wrong, it would be ugly. If he leaned right, it would still be exact.
"Proceed," Angle said.
He felt the strap tick—once, the sound a leather thing makes when duty learns a second shift is required. The pawl hummed a half-thought upward, then settled when the strap cut its hunger into tolerable shapes. The ring remembered fact.
"Hold," the older man said, and for a moment the word belonged to everyone.
"Vector," Angle said, all the calm of a voice that knows it was built to outlast the room. "Cross."
Ash wasn't sure if he nodded or if the line borrowed his head to nod for him. He bent into the angle that cost the room least. His neck entered the measured cold.
Inside, the corridor was not a place so much as a committee of correct decisions: lattice-light marking waypoints; a long hush with phrases; counters ticking somewhere responsible. He could feel the distance to Zero the way you feel a step down in the dark after you've memorized the staircase—knowledge stored in calves and teeth.
"Selector," Angle said again, because the procedure enjoyed proving it could repeat and be right. "Index aligned."
The warmth didn't move. That was its reply.
"Angle," Ash said. "You promised vector only."
"Kept," it said.
"Then take the head on me—and nothing else."
"Proceed."
The grip at the base of his skull tightened a millimeter. The chain considered the spine and decided the next inch would live there. A bright, exact pressure touched the notch where neck becomes back. It felt like the first contact of a caliper measuring a secret it already knew.
He had one useless impulse left—to look back—and he killed it before it gained shape. Forward is cheaper. He tasted paper, clean oil, a filament of cold that felt like mercy engineered for the impatient.
"Now," Angle said.
Behind him the strap ticked once more. The pawl twitched, ambitious.
He moved his left fingers from presence to pressure on the strap, two knuckles white, because some parts of this still belonged to hands.
"Now," Angle repeated, exact.
And something precise as a drawn line touched the base of his skull.