Cold gave up and let the new air be nothing at all. There was no smell, which was a smell; there was no sound, which was a sound. He felt floor under his shoes—a surface that wasn't rough or smooth so much as intentionally undecided, like a compromise between materials. Light existed without source, a clean, shadowless wash that refused to choose a direction.
He checked his hands. Card in the right, token gone from the left pocket by design. Breath steady. Pulse high and disciplined. No blood. No new bruises arguing for attention yet.
[ENTRY CONFIRMED]
Text arrived like a sign in a museum, polite and absolute. It hung at eye level until his eyes acknowledged it and then made room for the room.
The room: a box that pretended to be bigger when you weren't looking at the corners. Three walls matte and seamless. The fourth—if it was a wall—read as glass, or as a suggestion of glass, a pane that showed only a gray beyond, like weather with all the weather removed. A bench without legs attached to one wall, slight curve, engineered to be sat on briefly. A pedestal at waist height in the center, black, featureless, waiting.
He took a slow turn and watched for doors. None. The floor accepted his weight like it knew him already.
[ENVIRONMENT: INTERIM NODE][STATUS: SAFE][NON-PARTICIPANTS: NONE][CONDITION: MAINTAIN OPERATIONAL CONTROL OVER SPECIAL ITEM][INTERLUDE: CALIBRATION / BRIEF]
Safe, he thought, was a word rooms use before they get interesting.
He moved to the pedestal. Up close it was still nothing—no seam, no slot, no switch. He let the card hover over it, ring facing down. The pedestal didn't react. He lowered the card until matte kissed matte. Warmth gathered at his palm as if the air under the rectangle had chosen allegiance.
A circle of light drew itself on the pedestal's face, thin as a hairline, a twin to the ring on the card and not the same. The circle widened, then narrowed, then resolved into language.
[PROVISIONAL ID: P-01][RISK CREDIT: 1][OFFER: EXCHANGE 1 CREDIT → OPEN QUERY WINDOW (1)][COST: 1][YES / NO]
He breathed and let his mouth not shape a smile. "Of course you charge for talking."
The bench, the blank gray beyond the pane, the seam-free corners—all of it waited like good furniture. He considered the word later and found he wasn't a man who liked the taste of it. He lifted his left hand, kept the card steady with the right, and touched the ring that wasn't a ring.
The YES didn't appear as a button this time. The circle brightened and then dimmed, as if agreeing was a temperature.
[EXCHANGE CONFIRMED][QUERY WINDOW: OPEN—ONE (1) QUESTION][SCOPE: MECHANICS / DEFINITIONS / PROCEDURE][RESTRICTIONS: NO MAPS / NO SPOILERS / NO NAMES][TIMER: 00:30]
Thirty seconds for a good question. He didn't feel rushed. He had been practicing the shape of need.
"What is P-01?" he asked, evenly.
For a heartbeat the circle forgot it was a circle. Lines ghosted outward, as if a machine had tried to become handwriting and remembered it prefers printing.
[ANSWER: PROVISIONAL ID 01 = FIRST TEMPORARY ENROLLMENT CREATED VIA CORRECTION WHEN SOURCE REGISTRY NOT PRESENT][PRIVILEGES: LIMITED ENTRY; BASIC OBJECTIVES; NO WORLDLINE PERMISSIONS][LIABILITIES: UNDOCUMENTED RISKS; HIGH OBSERVATION][CALIBRATION NOTE: P-01 MAY ACCRUE STATUS → P-LEVEL INCREASE OR CONVERSION TO R-LEVEL WHEN REGISTRY EXISTS]
"R," he said. "Reincarnator."
The circle's thin light acknowledged the word without giving it credit.
He wanted to ask follow-ups. He wanted ten more questions and thirty more seconds. The pedestal didn't care.
[WINDOW CLOSED][RISK CREDIT: 0]
The bench offered nothing, which was honest of it. The pane of gray remained pane and remained gray.
He rolled his shoulders once, quietly. The lack of sound made muscles sound louder. The card remained cool and proud in his palm.
"Calibration," he said. "Do we perform tricks?"
The circle took that personally.
[CALIBRATION BEGINS][TEST 1: RETENTION]
The pedestal extinguished itself. The gray pane stopped being an idea and became a surface with responsibilities. Words bloomed on the glass that wasn't glass, stacked and neat, then collapsed themselves into nothing before his eyes, like a list of groceries a universe didn't intend to admit it needed.
[DISPLAY: 10 LINES / 3 SECONDS][RECALL: MAXIMUM]
Lines flashed—white on gray, quick, too quick to read line by line. He let them be shapes and cadence instead of letters and let a different part of his mind copy the rhythm. Numbers. A string like an invoice. A phrase: COMMERCIAL ARCADE MOCKUP. A name shaped like Kelley. An advisory line about disarm attempts. A timer state. A field note about ring marks. The smell of fryer oil that hadn't been spelled. The sound of chain-link that hadn't been written. He reached for them and didn't grasp, because grasping was how you drop.
The pane went blank.
[RECALL: SPEAK]
He didn't try to be clever. "Ten lines?" he asked.
[SPEAK]
"Don Kelley. Hazard spawn: one. Type: blurred agent. Equipped: long knife. Behavior: seek/approach/test. Advisory: agents test control via disarm attempts. Recommendation: prevent contact with special item. Note: special item interacts with environmental ring marks. Timer: fourteen fifty-nine. Observer shield: N/A." He let breath happen. "Fail state: item loss / critical status."
The pane considered the person he had just been.
[RETENTION: SUFFICIENT][TEST 2: PRIORITY]
Words replaced the clean emptiness with a small menu.
[CHOOSE ONE TO LOSE: OPTIONS—PAIN / FEAR / EMPATHY / DOUBT][TIMER: 00:10]
He could feel the trap under the neatness. Lose was not lose. Lose was curate, and curation changes the museum that is a person. He watched the timer spend itself down the left side of the pane and let the words ask their own question.
He had lived his life with fear and learned to hold it like an insect in a glass. Pain was data. Doubt kept knives from ending up in other people. Empathy—
He thought of Don's leg under a shutter and of telling the man to talk so his hands had a job. Empathy made you inefficient and human and sometimes alive.
"None," he said.
[INVALID ENTRY]
"Then keep my fear," he said. "I like what it does to me."
[SELECTION: FEAR—RETAINED][TRADE: DOUBT (EXCESS) → AWARENESS (MARGINAL)]
The pane dimmed, as if the room disliked that he had named a value.
[TEST 3: OWNERSHIP]
A rectangle appeared on the pane—the shape of a card, white on gray. In the rectangle, a circle waited.
[PLACE SPECIAL ITEM AGAINST IMAGE]
He didn't like it. He kept not liking it while stepping forward. He lifted the card and met symbol with symbol. Matte to light. Ring to ring.
The pane cooled under his skin, a neat avoidance of heat that felt like respect or a workaround.
[BIND CONFIRMED][NOTE: ATTEMPTED PROXY CAPTURE DETECTED—BLOCKED][REWARD: MINOR][RISK CREDIT +1]
"Bold," he told the room. "Trying to pick pockets in a confession booth."
No answer, unless you count honesty.
[CALIBRATION COMPLETE][STATUS: UPDATED][P-01 → P-01]*
The asterisk tucked itself next to his provisional label like a quiet upgrade.
The bench didn't get more comfortable. The pane stopped pretending to be ornamental and decided to be a door. The gray shrank to a lighter gray, then to a square of white at its center, then to a keyhole of pure absence.
He caught the instinct to step back and made himself step forward instead.
[ENTRY SCHEDULED][T—00:20]
He looked at the circle on the pedestal and found it gone; the pedestal had already decided to be furniture again. He stood in the exact middle of the room because the geometry of the space asked for it and because he didn't like the idea of walls making decisions for his spine.
"Next time," he said to the absence, "charge more for talking. You'll make a friend."
The pane's keyhole widened. The not-air near it acquired direction. He felt the first polite pressure on his eardrums.
Something behind the glass moved.
Not light. Not shadow. The suggestion of a figure that wasn't in the room and didn't need to be. A silhouette approached the other side of the pane—human height, human tilt of head, hands at its sides with palms forward in a universal shape: I'm empty.
He didn't move. He angled the card so the ring faced an angle of the glass without committing to an offer.
The silhouette drew closer and the pane made a decision about transparency. The gray lightened into a foggy mirror. Not enough to show a face. Enough to show that the figure on the far side wore a jacket he recognized.
Tie loosened half an inch. Shoulders broad. The patient posture of a man who likes rooms to announce what's wrong with them.
"Detective," Caleb said, softly.
The figure's mouth moved. No sound. The pane refused to transport voices in this direction. A hand lifted, palm still open, as if to say I am nothing but fingers and intent.
The pane produced a line of text so faint he almost forgave it.
[NON-PARTICIPANT DETECTED—OBSERVATION ONLY][SHIELD: ACTIVE]
Stone—if it was Stone; if the room wasn't borrowing a memory like a prop—leaned in to the barrier and said nothing he could hear. Brooks's profile edged into view behind him for a breath and then vanished again, the way real people do when they stand at bad glass.
The keyhole widened to a coin, to a saucer.
He lifted the card an inch, not quite a salute. "I'm working," he told a detective who could not hear him.
The pane trembled a fraction, not mechanically, more like decision percolating.
A new line appeared, colder than the others.
[HAZARD SPAWN: 1][TYPE: BLURRED AGENT][EQUIPPED: NONE][VECTOR: ENTRY SYMMETRY]
That wasn't a direction. It was a style. He pivoted, half expecting a mirrored version of himself to be the next riddle. The room offered only itself.
"Come on, then," he said.
The keyhole focused into a round door and the taste of the air changed—a clean nickel tang like a battery you didn't mean to lick. The pressure at his ears smoothed into inevitability.
He saw it at the last instant—reflected in the pane he wasn't looking at and then there in the room where he was. A shape resolving directly behind him, perfectly centered, translating into his space the way he had been translated into other spaces. Human height. Human reach already reaching.
He spun. The agent's arms were already out, fingers open, not to strike but to take. It opened its hands in the shape of a circle that wanted a smaller circle inside it.
He stepped inside its reach instead of away from it and let his shoulder go where shoulders are useful. Bone met body with a dull, honest sound, and the card's ring kissed the inside of its wrist before the thing could learn from its own plan.
It flinched. It kept trying.
He didn't let his feet make big decisions. The wall would punish them. He shifted enough. One hand on an elbow that didn't belong to him, the other kept the rectangle a small, stubborn fact between sternums.
From the pane, the silhouette of a man with a loosened tie raised a hand against glass he couldn't fix.
The keyhole opened until the room's geometry started to vote for elsewhere.
Caleb planted his weight and set the ring against imitation tendon again. The agent's fingers betrayed it, opening, closing, opening—not because he asked politely but because rules had been written and circles remembered their grammar.
The pressure in his ears steadied. The floor under his soles stopped pretending to be undecided and chose to let go. He tightened his grip on matte black the way men hold railings on moving trains.
The agent bunched for one last attempt to become a door through him.
He denied the promotion—hips under, shoulder through, the quiet leverage of a person who had decided to be present—and pushed it two inches off the place it wanted. The pane's light shifted across its not-face as if a window outside the world had passed a cloud it didn't own.
The door in the glass finished choosing and the room's center forgot what rooms do.
He held the card to his chest and stepped where the circle asked.