The Confession Engine's rules stuttered, then rewrote themselves on the skin-screen: PRICE UPDATE.
The two doors merged into a revolving one that spun too slowly to be polite. Each rotation changed the writing etched on its glass.
KEEP YOURSELF—PAY IN OTHERS.
KEEP OTHERS—PAY IN YOURSELF.
"Classic," Mark muttered. "Make the victim the cashier."
"Elara," the tower crooned, intimate as a needle. "You erased the guardian line because you didn't want to know whether love would make you slow. It will. Slowness kills."
The bracelet on the pew gleamed like an accusation. Elara picked it up. The ink was still damp. GUARDIAN: ELARA KANE.
"What does it guard?" she asked.
"Not what," Mark said. "Who." He nodded toward the back of the chamber.
A door she hadn't noticed creaked open. A child stepped out. Barefoot. Braided hair. Eyes like a dawn that almost doesn't happen. Her little hospital gown bore the sanctuary logo where superheroes used to go.
The child's bracelet named her: KANE, M. GUARDIAN: ELARA KANE.
Elara forgot how to stand. Memory rearranged itself with surgical certainty. The erased line had always been this: not a lover, not a parent, but responsibility that felt like both. The voice in the sea. The laughter that turned into a scream.
"I picked me," Elara whispered, and the child—Mara—flinched at a memory she had not been present to survive.
The tower purred. "Final offer." The revolving door stilled, displaying two options like commandments:
— OPEN THE SPINE. THE ECHOES EAT THE FRAME. MARA LEAVES WITH YOU.
— SEAL THE SPINE. THE ECHOES BECOME SILENT. MARA STAYS. YOU DON'T.
Mara took Elara's hand with the calm of a person who has practiced being brave in front of terrified adults. "El," she said. "If we run, you'll keep running. If you stay, at least I stop."
Mark swore softly. "Don't let the building write your love story."
Elara looked at the revolving door, at the bite-microphone, at the bruised screen making sentences out of punishment. She thought of borrowed bones and drowning truths and the way the tower makes optimists of cowards.
She knelt to Mara's height. "I can't fix what I did," she said. "But I can aim where the break goes next."
Mara nodded once. "Aim it at me?"
Elara's breath shattered. "Never." She stood. "Aim it at the machine."
She took off the bracelet and snapped it around the switch housing. Metal groaned. The Confession Engine shuddered, as if remembering it had a heart and hated it.
"Choose," the tower hissed.
Elara grabbed Mark's mop and jammed it into the revolving door's spokes. The door bucked, glass screaming. "I choose to jam your choices," she said. "Write that sentence."
Alarms bloomed.
The ceiling cracked. A seam opened to the spine—the tangled wire throat. Echoes poured like hungry weather.
Elara lifted Mara. "Hold on."
She sprinted for Door A as it tried to become Door B.
At the threshold, the tower whispered in her ear: "Outcome acceptance required."
Elara didn't look back. "I accept that I'm wrong," she said. "I accept that I'm yours." And then, quieter, to Mara, "But not for long."
They leapt.