The second scene of the night smelled like wet concrete and cheap paint.
Three blocks east of the tenement, TEAM 1 stood in front of a squat, four-story building that looked like every other neglected wedge of city housing. Brick facade, security grate half-bent, buzzers that probably hadn't worked in a decade.
Tonight, it was eating its own floor plan.
"Outer geometry scans don't match interior routing," FUSE said in FULCRUM's ear, his voice riding the encrypted channel. "You've got more hallway on the inside than the exterior shell can support. Sector two keeps mirroring itself on my feed."
"So it's lying about how big it is," RATCHET said. "Cool. Love that for us."
"ZERO-NINE-SEVEN-ZERO conditions," OWL confirmed from the forward command truck. "Primary objective: confirm recursion, mark safe path, extract any civilians without introducing further contamination. This is not a hero run, TEAM 1. You get eyes, you get people, you get out."
"Copy," FULCRUM said.
"ALPHA-1 Overwatch online," PRIORESS added, her tone quieter but razor-sharp. "Memetic risk on this is minimal, spatial risk is not. Tethers, marks, buddy checks every thirty seconds. No one goes wandering."
"Understood," FULCRUM replied.
He studied the building's entryway: double doors, one propped open with a brick, the other permanently crooked on its hinge. Inside, he could see a narrow lobby, a stairwell rising to the right.
Normal. Ordinary. That was the trick.
"Any confirmed civvies inside?" BASTION asked.
"Five heat signatures," FUSE said. "Three clustered at the third-floor landing, two on four. Thermal's… weird. Might be distortion, might be whatever the building's doing."
"Audible?" VANTAGE asked, scanning the nearby windows.
"Distant voices on the stairwell mics," FUSE said. "Sound comes and goes like it's bouncing between floors. Hard to localize."
"PSI-7 MedIntel here," PATCH$1 chimed in, softer. "Same drill as before. If anyone gets disoriented beyond normal, you tag it, log it, and we get you out. Your inner ear isn't built for rooms that lie."
FULCRUM felt the familiar pull in her voice—the quiet concern she never quite masked. He let it pass through him, acknowledged and uncollected.
"I'll keep vertical," he said. "If I start seeing floors that don't exist, I'll let you know."
"Please do," she said.
"Stack it," FULCRUM ordered.
BASTION took the front with his shield, HARROW just behind, close enough to pivot past if needed. RATCHET and VANTAGE filled the back of the stack. FULCRUM slotted in second, KSG up, eyes on the door frame.
"Mechanical breach," he said out of habit, though the door was already open. "No bang. No flash."
They flowed through the entrance, weapons low, angles covered.
The lobby was small and ugly. Stained tile floor, yellowed walls, mailboxes with more rust than metal. A single CCTV camera blinked in the corner, its little red light doing nothing to comfort anyone.
"Camera just glitched," FUSE muttered. "Feed jumped ahead three seconds."
"Three?" RATCHET asked. "Not two, not four?"
"I know what I saw," FUSE snapped.
"Log it," OWL said. "Anomaly in recording is still an anomaly."
Stairwell ahead. Concrete steps, a metal railing, walls painted that noncommittal off-white that every city building seemed to agree on by committee.
FULCRUM took point, boot on the first step. He pulled a roll of fluorescent marker tape from his harness, tore a strip with his teeth, and slapped it onto the banister.
"Trail markers every ten steps," he said. "Left side up, right side down. RATCHET, chalk the wall with arrows and numbers. If this thing loops, I want proof we're not just losing count."
"You got it," RATCHET said, pulling a stick of bright orange chalk from a pouch.
They started up.
The first flight was ordinary. So was the second.
"Landing," HARROW murmured.
A door labeled '2' sat flush in the wall. Someone had jammed an empty takeout container into the frame at some point; dried sauce flaked onto the floor.
RATCHET scrawled 2↑ with an arrow pointing up, then 2↓ with one pointing down, on the wall by the stairhead.
"Heat signatures?" FULCRUM asked.
"Still above you," FUSE said. "No movement. Building layout still insists you're on one-point-five floors instead of two. Love that."
They climbed again.
The stairwell did the same thing: two flights, a landing, a door labeled '3'. RATCHET added more arrows. The air felt just a little heavier.
On the third landing, the acoustics shifted. FULCRUM's footsteps came back to him a half-beat delayed.
"Echo's wrong," VANTAGE said quietly.
"Yeah," FULCRUM said.
He could feel the slight wrongness as a pressure in his sinuses. Like standing too close to a bass speaker.
"Voices?" he asked.
"Closer," FUSE said. "Stairwell mic says three bodies just above you. Thermal agrees. But from exterior perspective, you should be at the top of the building already."
"Understood," FULCRUM said. "We're going to keep pretending Euclid applies until it doesn't."
"Make it a short pretense," OWL said.
They took the next flight.
This time, there was no landing.
The stairs just… kept going. Same paint, same rail, same scuff pattern on the edge of each step. No door, no turn, just up.
"Mark," FULCRUM said.
RATCHET chalked an arrow on the wall at what should have been the landing level and wrote 3? next to it.
Ten more steps. Another strip of tape on the rail.
"FUSE?" FULCRUM asked.
"I've got you between floors," FUSE said, tension under the words. "If I overlay your GPS with the building shell, you're either in the ceiling or in a hallway that doesn't exist. Your vitals are normal. That's something."
"Civilians?"
"Still reading above. Or below. Or both," FUSE said. "ZERO-NINE-SEVEN-ZERO loves its tricks. These signatures could be you, echoing."
"I feel very echoed," HARROW muttered.
They climbed until FULCRUM's calves began to burn. The monotony was the worst part. No landmark, no change. Just steps.
"Stop," FULCRUM said finally.
They halted. RATCHET looked back down the well.
The marker tape and chalk shouldn't have been visible from here. They were too high up. But he could see the last five strips, looping away below like reflections in facing mirrors.
"Yeah," he said. "We're in it."
"Log entry," DOCSTRING's voice cut in. "Subjective exertion?"
"Moderate," FULCRUM said. "No vertigo, no nausea. Just repetition."
"Good," DOCSTRING said. "Keep monitoring. If your sense of time begins to slip, you retreat."
"Understood," FULCRUM replied.
He took a breath, then another. Counted heartbeats. Two per inhale, two per exhale. Baseline.
"All right," he said. "We're not wandering this loop blind. RATCHET, drop a countermeasure."
"Which kind?" RATCHET asked, already digging into his pack.
"The rude kind," FULCRUM said. "Something the building can't pretend isn't there."
RATCHET grinned despite the situation, pulling out a compact, battery-powered strobe and a small sensor puck.
He slapped the sensor to the wall, then turned on the strobe and set it at the edge of the stairwell so the light splashed down the steps.
"Beacon online," he said. "Every time we pass this, we know we've been here before."
"Radio tag added," FUSE said. "I'll scream in your ears if your signals come back around to this point."
"Appreciated," FULCRUM said.
He resumed climbing.
Within twenty seconds, the strobe light appeared above them.
"Fuck," HARROW said.
"Language," BASTION rumbled.
"That's not language, that's theology," RATCHET muttered.
"Confirm loop," FUSE said tightly. "Your signal just tagged the same sensor ID from a different temporal index. You've moved, but you haven't."
"Okay," FULCRUM said calmly. "We're not going up, then."
He turned around.
"Back down," he ordered.
They passed the strobe again. RATCHET watched it with narrowed eyes.
"Feels backwards," he said.
"Better than infinite," FULCRUM replied.
As they descended, the air lightened. The pressure eased. After what felt like too little walking for how far they'd gone, the proper third-floor landing appeared, door and all.
"Door," VANTAGE said, more grateful than he meant to sound.
RATCHET chalked 3 REAL on the wall with a double underline.
"Civvies?" FULCRUM asked.
"Three behind that door," FUSE said. "Their biosigns are stressed but stable. You probably sound like angels to them right now."
"Let's try to live up to the marketing," FULCRUM said.
He knocked on the door with his knuckles.
"Foundation," he called. "Don't open. Just speak."
There was a beat of silence, then a tremulous voice from the other side.
"Y-you're the ones with the— with the letters?" a man asked. "The cops said letter people were coming."
"That's us," FULCRUM said. "How many in there?"
"Three," the man said. "Me, my sister, my nephew. We tried to go down but the stairs kept… repeating. I threw up. The kid started crying and then we just… we stayed."
"You did the right thing," FULCRUM said. "We're going to get you out. I need you to listen carefully. When we open this door, you're going to look at my shield man's back and only his back. You do not look past him, up or down the stairs, or at anything that feels wrong. You focus on the paint scratch between his shoulder blades. Understand?"
"Y-yeah," the man said.
"Good. That's your whole world until we say otherwise," FULCRUM said. "Shield up."
BASTION shifted, planting his boots, shield ready.
They popped the door. A man in a stained T-shirt hovered just behind the threshold, eyes wide, arm wrapped around a small boy. A young woman clung to the boy's other side, knuckles white.
"Eyes on the shield," FULCRUM reminded them. "Move when I say move."
He stepped back, giving them room.
"Out," he said. "Hands on the shield. Don't look anywhere else."
They filed out, hands touching the battered ballistic surface like it was holy.
"VANTAGE, rear guard. HARROW, clear our passage. RATCHET, keep marking. We follow our own breadcrumbs."
They began the descent, talking the civilians through each step.
"You're doing great," PATCH$1 said over comms, voice softer now, meant for the kid as much as for the team. "Just follow the shield. Don't listen to the echoes. They're just the building throwing a tantrum."
It worked. The boy's sobbing slowed.
Halfway down, the strobe came into view again, flickering at the edge of perception.
"Don't look at the light," FULCRUM warned the civvies. "We're almost out."
They stepped past the beacon.
The next turn spat them into the real second floor, door '2' exactly where it should be, RATCHET's chalk marks smugly intact.
"Geometry's normalizing in your wake," FUSE said, some of the strain leaving his voice. "Stairwell's behaving like stairs again. For now."
"One problem at a time," FULCRUM said.
When they finally spilled out into the lobby, the civilians clung harder to the shield before realizing they were outside. The man's legs buckled. HARROW and BASTION caught him, easing him down onto a crate.
"You're okay," FULCRUM said. "You're out. EMTs will check you. You'll get some medicine that'll make this feel like a weird dream you don't quite remember."
"Was it real?" the boy asked, peeking around the edge of the shield to look up at him.
FULCRUM hesitated for only half a heartbeat.
"Yes," he said. "That's why we're here."
OWL's voice crackled in his ear.
"Good extraction, TEAM 1," he said. "Mark the structure for ongoing observation. We'll have ZETA-9 and structural come in daylight for deeper analysis. For now, you've stopped the immediate bleed."
"Copy," FULCRUM said.
"ALPHA-1 Overwatch," PRIORESS added, less formal now. "You did well. Your loop discipline is… very clean."
There was something in the way she said it. The tiniest hesitation.
"Thank you, ma'am," FULCRUM said.
On another channel, one he wasn't on, she spoke more quietly.
"Overwatch to shadow channel," she said.
There was a brief pause as a different indicator lit up in the secured monitoring room. Someone else listened.
"You seeing this?" PRIORESS asked.
A low male voice, unreadable through distortion: "Yeah. The way he marked, the way he turned the loop. It's… familiar."
"Familiar how?" she asked.
"Like watching a move I've seen before," the voice said. "Different man. Same edge."
"Log it," PRIORESS said. "We'll revisit after debrief."
The shadow channel went dark again.
Out on the street, FULCRUM watched the EMTs take the civilians, PATCH$1 hovering nearby with a clipboard and a soft word for each of them. FUSE stood a little too close to her, eyes flicking between her and FULCRUM, like he couldn't decide which threat needed managing more.
RATCHET drew a final symbol on the building's outer wall: a square with a broken arrow through it. Foundation shorthand for "This place lies."
"Zero-one-two, zero-nine-seven-zero," VANTAGE said under his breath. "What's next, boss?"
FULCRUM checked the time, then glanced at the dark sky above the city. His muscles ached in that familiar, manageable way.
"Next?" he said. "We wait for OWL to tell us whether we get to sleep, or if this is just act one."
The radio answered for him.
"Nu-7, TEAM 1," OWL said. "Stow gear, hydrate, return to FOB. Debrief in forty-five. After that, if nothing else is on fire, you're off until oh-eight-hundred."
A ripple of quiet relief went through the squad.
"Copy," FULCRUM said.
He didn't relax. Not yet. The knife's edge hadn't dulled; it just wasn't cutting him this minute.
As TEAM 1 moved back toward the van, he caught PATCH$1's gaze across the lot. She lifted a hand—more a check-in than a wave. He dipped his chin in acknowledgment. That was all.
He felt FUSE's stare like a physical pressure at his shoulder and let it slide off.
He had other edges to worry about.
Behind them, the building sat in the night, looking perfectly ordinary.
Inside its walls, marks of chalk, tape, and stubborn human refusal glowed faintly in the dim.
For now, that was enough.