Morning rehearsed the same gray and performed it better. Kael woke to the sound of a city teaching itself to whisper. He stayed still and let the building speak first. Pipes ticked; the transformer hummed its monkish note; the stairwell held a silence with edges. The bell had not rung. This counted as mercy.
He cranked the lamp, drank measured water, and wrote the date as if paper were the only calendar that mattered. The System took its place like a tool laid on a workbench.
[System: Day Plan] - Checkpoints: door, window, water, energy, signals. - Priority: Window Frame Locking (I), Silent Exit Kit, Hydration Protocol test, radio mapping. - Advisory: mimic cluster east remains active; name - use attempts trending upward. - Note: consider neighbor check (Madame B.).
He ate rice from last night with a spoon that had become part of the religion. He checked the screws. They held with a satisfaction that felt local and honest. The blackout cloth at the window admitted no light, but the window still had a flaw: it would open if asked. Flaws that ask to be used prefer answers.
[System: Mission #0009 - Window Frame Locking (I)]
Objective: prevent window opening from outside pressure; reduce rattle and light leak.
Materials: wood strips, screws (>= 30 mm acceptable), cordage, tape, cloth.
Steps:
1) Measure inner frame; cut strips to wedge along sash.
2) Pre - drill (if possible); screw strips to jamb (non - structural) or wedge friction - fit.
3) Add cloth seal; test with applied pressure.
Reward: Fabrication (I) branch: Aperture Control.
He did not own a saw. He owned a will. He used the dull knife he had bullied into being marginally useful and shaved the shelf board until two strips surrendered to the correct length. It took time, which is to say it took the only resource that still obeyed him. He worked slow to avoid noise, slow to avoid splinters, slow to convince himself that every pass earned something.
He wedged the first strip along the sash and pressed. The frame accepted the pressure with a small groan that he told himself sounded like gratitude. He drilled pilot holes with the smallest bit and the most patience in the building. He drove screws. He set cloth along the seam and taped it into blackness. He pushed again. The window said no the way polite people say no: with explanations.
A second strip at the bottom cut the rattle down until it was merely a rumor. He tested the blackout in darkness with the crank lamp as a star. No leaks. He wrote: WINDOW LOCKS - DONE and drew a box for the checkmark he later allowed himself to draw.
[System: Mission #0009]
Status: complete.
Reward unlocked: Aperture Control (I).
The panel unrolled possibilities that felt like spells: window shutters made from cloth and card, vent baffles, mirror periscope for exterior checks. He circled the periscope with his eyes. Later. He did not trust mirrors.
He packed the Silent Exit Kit next. The phrase felt heroic despite being a bag with manners. Water (500 ml), rags, tape, the knife that was learning to be sharp, a small screwdriver with bits, cordage, a flat roll of trash bags, two protein bars that pretended to be food, a single tea light, the crank lamp, and a folded note that read If found, this is not for you - put it down. He added the radio, then removed it; silence travels faster than hope.
He tested the kit by lifting it and putting it down. The sound was acceptable. Weight negotiates with risk; he liked the terms.
Hydration Protocol wanted a trial. He boiled BOILER A and drank a cup, then waited and listened, like a doctor and a patient alone in a clinic made of stubbornness. No immediate betrayal from his stomach. He labeled the time. He refused to invent symptoms because fear is a playwright with a lazy writer's room.
The radio gave them a carrier without sentence, then a sentence without context. A man read a list of instructions that had been recorded while optimism still held office. Kael wrote them anyway because writing was a spell against forgetting, and forgetting had a new appetite.
He checked on Madame Bourdain. Three soft bell taps (their code), palm near the seam but not touching. Her voice came as a thread drawn under the door. "I am here," she said. "The kettle loves me this morning." It's something, he wrote. He slid a small sachet of soup under the door and received, eventually, a sugar cube in return. Economy lives wherever it can.
He was recording the exchange in the notebook when the System nudged his attention with a rectangle that felt like a weather change.
[System: Advisory - Perimeter Test] - Pattern detected: synchronized knocks in east corridor, floors 1 - 3. - Timing offset: human - imperfect, suggesting coordination not echo. - Note: avoid answering un - coded signals; reinforce door.
Kael didn't need the advisory, and he needed it desperately. He tightened the belt across the brace. He picked up the knife and felt foolish and nevertheless stronger.
The first test arrived twenty minutes later: three knocks at his door, not quite his code, not quite not his code. He waited. They repeated, closer to correct, like someone learning a language from a phrasebook without culture.
"Password," he said, the word as low as he could bring it without losing its shape.
"Red book," a voice answered. The vowels wore uncomfortable shoes.
"Number," Kael said.
"Three."
He did not open. The hallway air cooled another degree out of spite. Footsteps moved on to try elsewhere, the sales technique of a century and a half.
He exhaled. He wrote: hostile test passed. He underlined hostile and wished the pen would argue.
[System: Note] - Signal discipline effective. - Recommendation: rotate password daily; add fallback sign (non - verbal).
He drew a sign in the margin - two fingers against the door seam, horizontal, then vertical. He and Nox would agree to the geometry later.
Work returned him to himself. He opened Aperture Control again and built a periscope from two pieces of card and a mirror he did not like looking into. He caught a sliver of the hall through the door's eye and saw nothing useful - which is to say he saw an empty hallway that the mind wanted to populate with absence - shaped things. He put the periscope away. Tools that teach you to invent can betray you.
He tried the radio at a different angle, the wire snake of a hacked antenna thrown across the curtain rod, not that you should have a rod anymore, not that the room needed that sentence. A voice emerged like a diver breaking the surface: " - if you can hear, do not travel alone - " The voice dissolved. It returned as a list of intersections again, but not the same list as last night. He drew a map that deserved a better artist and labeled the centers: choir, corridor, hospital rumor.
He thought of Nox and pretended it was strategy. The building borrowed a breeze from a place that still had windows and pushed it down the stairwell. The breeze smelled like metal and the old perfume of a neighbor who wanted to be remembered by enzymatic molecules.
"Now," he said to the System, and meant: give me something that will be true an hour from now.
[System: Mission #0010 - Door Audit Plus]
Objective: test reinforcement under controlled pressure; evaluate failure modes.
Steps:
1) Apply incremental force (15 N to 150 N) from inside (simulate shoulder hit).
2) Listen for latch chatter, jamb flex, brace slip.
3) Measure wedge bite; adjust angle.
4) Document and re - test.
Reward: Structural Insight (I).
He did the absurd thing: he hit his own door with his shoulder, gently at first, then like a man who gently refused to be evicted from his live - in calculation. The latch chattered at 60 N and quieted at 80 N after he adjusted the wedge a degree more arrogant. The brace slipped three millimeters and then learned humility when he tightened the belt and placed a rug scrap beneath its foot. He wrote the numbers and the words as if writing could carry force into tomorrow.
[System: Mission #0010]
Status: complete.
Reward unlocked: Structural Insight (I). - Observation: hinge side robust; latch side improved; recommend crossbar (II) when materials allow.
Crossbar (II) felt like a promise to a future that had lumber. He did not have lumber, only furniture. He looked at the table. The table looked back with the dignity of a tool that held ink and plans and soup. Not yet, he told it. The table forgave his cowardice, or pretended to.
The day held. Holding was an accomplishment. Afternoon darkened earlier than his memory of this season liked to permit. The city changed keys. Somewhere, a generator found a stuttering tempo. Somewhere else, a choir added a second voice. He turned the radio down until it was a suggestion.
The first hostile contact arrived at dusk. It did not announce itself as hostile. It announced itself as polite. Soft steps in the hall. A quiet presence near the seam below the handle. No knock. The stance of someone listening to a locked thing and asking it to reconsider.
Kael stood to the side and set the knife on the table because knives tell you lies about bravery when they are in your hand. He held the crank lamp and let its glow live behind him so the door would not know it had an audience. He rolled his shoulders like a man about to lift something that might regret being lifted and listened with the Filter open.
[System: Context Audio Filter] - Source: hall, 0.5 m from door, height ~1.6 m (estimate). - Signature: breathing irregular (short, exploratory), clothing rustle minimal, footfall drag (left). - Confidence: medium - high. - Annotation: not consistent with Madame Bourdain.
The presence stayed. It exhaled in bursts as if new lungs were trying out old instructions. It did not use his name, which made him like it more. This worried him - liking the thing that is more honest about being wrong.
He coughed, two short, not their signal, just sound. The presence answered with a copy of his cough, a fraction of a second late. The Filter loved this. It labeled the lag. It drew a halo like ants moving in agreement.
"Password," Kael said, low.
The presence tried. "Red... book." The vowel wore borrowed shoes again and turned its ankle.
Kael reached up and rattled the chain lightly - the small metallic speech of a boundary clearing its throat. The presence flinched hard enough to scuff the carpet. The drag on the left was real. He pictured a foot that had lost interest in ankle duties.
He didn't open. He placed his palm flat on the wood and let the door feel that someone worthy of being locked in existed. The presence listened, then moved away with a softness that had learned in a different school. He counted to sixty and only then allowed his shoulders to admit they had risen.
[System: Note] - Hostile contact at threshold repelled without engagement. - Mimicry incomplete (lag, vowel error). - Continue signal discipline; avoid name - use. Rotate password tomorrow.
He sat on the rug and did nothing for a minute, which had become a skill. When the minute was over, he wrote it down and called it meditation to give it permission to exist.
He thought of Nox again and decided that this counted as planning. He needed a rendezvous code that would survive mimicry and panic. He wrote a scheme: two objects (red book/blue cable), one number (2 - 5), and one gesture (hand sign). Change daily. He would build a tiny deck of paper slips and shuffle them in the morning like a gambler who only knows how to lose better.
The radio found words that had once been instructions and now sounded like apologies. He turned it off so that the silence could do the job instead.
Night arrived like an auditor. He boiled water because it was in the plan. He ate a little rice and a bite of a protein bar and convinced his body that this was a meal by thinking about the word meal for a long time. He listened for the stairwell. It didn't breathe. He marked that down. Maybe the thing that had breathed had found a different door to practice on.
He lay down on the rug and let tradition do the remaining work. The building rewarded him with a new sound, a metallic rattle from a floor above. The Filter circled it: WINDOW IMPACT, GLAZING RATTLE. He thanked the strips he had made and hoped someone above had someone like him below them.
He tracked the city's fire by its smell, which had learned plastic and then cloth and then something else. He considered the roof again and wrote not yet. He closed his eyes. Sleep treated him like a colleague instead of a client.
The bell rang. Not the soft code. Not the polite test. One long ring - a note pressed and held. Kael rolled to his knees in a single movement the body owned from older emergencies. One long had been defined as no. He breathed in, out, then spoke to the door in the tone reserved for machinery that disagrees with you for reasons you respect.
"Move away," he said.
Nothing. The long ring continued, a bad idea that had learned endurance. He looked at the bell line; it was taut at a wrong angle. Someone had hooked it. He pictured a hand, and the hand was patient.
He did the one thing he had promised not to do, and did it correctly: he broke his own rule with a new rule. He blew the crank lamp out, earning himself total dark. He stepped to the left. He held the knife but not like a hero, like a man holding a tool he didn't trust. He spoke a sentence he had practiced until it belonged to him.
"If it is you, show me the sign." He didn't say which sign.
The bell stopped. Silence reached both ways. Then, under the door, two fingers slid into the crack and made a small rectangle in the air - two lines, horizontal, then vertical. Nox's sign, but a clumsy version. Kael felt anger try to make a plan in his chest. He refused to let it propose one.
"The second sign," he said.
The fingers hesitated, then fumbled a palm cut sideways above the seam - danger, mimicry. The fingers were too long by a little. The joints belonged to wrong math. Kael shut his eyes to make the world simpler.
"Leave," he said. "I am not your door." He put his palm against the wood so the door would believe him.
The fingers withdrew. The hall learned again how to be a hall. The bell line fell slack, reclaimed by gravity, a law that had not yet been privatized.
He waited until the kind of minute you can live inside had passed, then reset the bell because rituals require maintenance. He sat. He wrote. He let the knife be ugly on the table. He did not cry. He was not brave. He was correct.
[System: Advisory - Signal Update] - Add: no sign performed twice in same order; require reversal on request. - Add: third object - of - the - day for emergency challenge. - Add: silence window (do not respond for first 20 seconds of any unplanned contact).
He wrote the additions and nodded as if the room had proposed them. It had. The room is where you go to agree with yourself.
He slept eventually because exhaustion saw an advantage and took it. Morning would rehearse gray again. He would rehearse being the kind of man who did not open doors without math.
Outside, somewhere close, glass finally failed a test it had been passing all day. The sound was a decision made in public.