I was with Meera when it happened.
She hadn't been able to sit still since the corridor incident. She kept touching the walls, the pillars, the edges of doorways, as if her hands were looking for something her eyes couldn't see. I understood the feeling too well. When your senses change, stillness starts to feel like lying.
We were in one of the old residential halls, a long, low space broken by half-collapsed arches. Pale light drifted in from somewhere far above. Dust lay thick in the grooves of the stone floor. Every step left a mark.
Meera was walking a few feet ahead of me.
Slow. Careful.
Then she stopped so suddenly I almost ran into her.
"Do you feel that?" she asked.
I opened my mouth to say yes—and then I felt it.
Not pressure.
Invitation.
A narrow stretch of the wall to our left looked no different than any other. Same pale stone. Same faint veins running through it. But something about that place felt… unfinished. Like a thought that had never reached its last word.
"It's thin there," Meera whispered.
I took a step closer. My chest tightened.
"It is," I said. "Don't touch it."
She didn't answer.
She lifted her hand.
"Meera—"
Her fingers brushed the stone.
The reaction was immediate.
The wall didn't ripple the way it had before. It sank.
Not inward.
Away.
Like a surface losing the memory of being solid.
Meera gasped and stumbled forward as her hand went through it.
Not into a corridor.
Into nothing.
Her arm disappeared to the elbow.
She screamed.
I grabbed her wrist and pulled hard.
The stone resisted me—not like a wall, but like something trying to remember what resistance meant.
"Devansh!" I shouted.
Meera was crying, half from fear, half from the wrongness of the sensation. "It's cold. It's not empty. It's… wrong."
I planted my feet and pulled again.
My chest burned.
The heaviness surged, sharp and disorienting.
The wall flickered.
Then suddenly, violently, it snapped back.
Meera collapsed against me, sobbing. Her arm came free. Whole. Unmarked.
But the stone where it had happened was no longer smooth.
A faint dark seam ran through it.
Like a scar.
Devansh and Rehaan reached us moments later.
"What did she do?" Rehaan demanded.
"She touched it," I said, my voice shaking. "And it… let her."
Devansh knelt in front of Meera, examining her arm, her hands, her breathing.
"You crossed an unstructured margin," he said quietly.
Meera looked up at him, eyes wide and wet. "I didn't mean to. It felt like the city was… waiting."
My stomach dropped.
Devansh's gaze lifted to the scar in the wall.
"It was," he said.
And I understood something then that made my skin go cold.
The city hadn't failed to notice her.
It had made room.