By the seventh floor, the stairwell had stopped pretending to be part of any ordinary building.
The concrete steps, once merely cracked and dirty, now bowed in the middle as if something too heavy had sat on them for a long time. The air grew thicker, clotted, as if dust and breath and forgotten prayers had been stirred into a paste and smeared along the walls. Even the fluorescent tube above the landing had started to pulse—not the quick, mechanical flicker of faulty wiring, but a slow, vascular throb.
Rajan's hand brushed the railing. It felt damp. When he pulled his fingers back, they shone a faint, sticky red before the color sank into his skin as though his pores were thirsty.
"Stop," Lian hissed.
He froze mid-step. Her pupils were narrow pins in too-wide eyes, the way they got when she was listening to something that wasn't entirely sound.
"What?" he asked, keeping his voice low.
She tilted her head toward the concrete bulkhead above them. "It's breathing."
He listened.
At first it was just the thudding of his own pulse and the stairwell's feeble hum. Then he heard it: a slow inhalation, granular and dragging, like dust being pulled through lungs made of plaster and insulation. The exhale followed, accompanied by a quiet, wet patter—condensation, or maybe something else, dripping down inside the walls.
The building, or what had colonized it, was breathing around them.
Lian's hand grazed his forearm. She didn't seem to realize she was doing it; her Illusory Threads were already unfurling, translucent filaments that only he could see because the Echo clung to him like a second sight. They shimmered around her fingers like spider silk dipped in oil, probing for fault lines in reality.
"You feel it?" she murmured.
He did. The Karmic Echo in his chest stirred, a sluggish monster roused in its sleep. The air around him distorted, like heat mirages rising off asphalt, except the heat was wrong—cold at the same time, as if his body couldn't decide which way to react. Every unresolved guilt in the building, every whispered resentment, every quiet despairing thought seeped toward him, drawn like iron filings to a magnet.
The Veil here was thin. The Realm of Echoes was pressing its face to the glass.
"How many units?" he asked.
"Twenty per floor up top," she said. "More on the lower ones, but this—" She swallowed. "This doesn't feel like twenty separate pockets. It's clustered. Coiled. Like something's braided them together."
They climbed.
On the eighth floor landing, a child's crayon drawing had been taped to the wall: a figure with too many arms and a smile that was just a black, thick oval filling its whole face. The wax had melted in runnels down the paper, turning the arms into dripping, elongated limbs that trailed black toward the floor.
Lian plucked at one of her Threads, humming under her breath. The drawing flickered. For a sick moment, the figure on the page turned its head toward them, its crayon eyes two ovals of uncolored paper, blank and ravenous. Then her illusion snapped over it like a sheet, and the drawing was just a drawing again.
"That's not how I remember it," she muttered.
"What?" Rajan asked.
"Nothing." Her tongue darted across her lips, a nervous habit he'd catalogued without meaning to. "We're close. Whatever is sitting up there—"
"Waiting for me," he finished.
She didn't argue.
The ninth floor door was jammed. Rajan pressed his palm flat against the cold metal. Faint vibrations tremored under his skin—like a heartbeat, but off-rhythm, arrhythmic, stumbling over itself. His Echo shivered in response, tasting that wrongness.
"You're sure about this?" Lian asked. Her voice was steady. Her other hand was not; he caught the tremor.
"No," he said. "Open it."
She smiled without humor and slid a filament of illusion through the narrow gap at the bottom. The crack widened soundlessly, the door's rust-rotted hinges opening on a scene that punched the breath from his lungs.
They stepped into a corridor that had no right to exist in a modern apartment building.
The walls were a patchwork of old plaster and exposed rebar, sagging wallpaper printed with lotus blossoms and cranes, segments of carved wood that looked stolen from shrines and temples. Light crawled instead of shone. Every tube, every bulb, was clogged with something dark that filtered the glow into a sickly, pulsing gray.
The floor was carpeted. Not with fabric.
Rajan looked down and saw clothes—shirts, saris, uniforms, children's pajamas—pressed flat into the ground, seams and buttons and zippers stitched together by some invisible hand. They rustled ever so slightly, a fabric ocean shifting in a draft that did not touch his skin.
"Don't look for faces," Lian said abruptly.
He hadn't been. Now he saw them.
In the patterns of the clothes, in the folds and wrinkles, in the way a flower print puckered or a pocket bulged, the suggestions of features emerged. A nose where two seams met. Eyes hinted by twin shirt buttons. A mouth drawn from a ragged tear. Hundreds of almost-faces stared up at them from the carpet, their expressions frozen mid-scream or mid-plea or worse, mid-resignation.
He stepped forward. The carpet exhaled, a sound like air leaving lungs after the heart has already stopped.
"Careful," Lian whispered.
She threaded an illusion outward, weaving the corridor into a mirrored maze. For anyone—or anything—looking, they would be just two more distorted reflections, lost in an endless loop of themselves. But the Threads shook as they extended, like taut lines in a storm. Something heavy moved at the far end of the hallway, pressing against her illusion from the other side.
"You can't hide from it," Rajan said.
"I can make it miss once," she replied. "Sometimes once is the difference between an injury and a corpse."
He wanted to tell her to stay behind him. He wanted to tell her to run, to get out while she still could, to not be here when the Echo inside him answered whatever was calling it from this place. Instead he did what he always did: swallowed the impulse and walked toward the hunger.
Each door along the corridor had been marked. Not with numbers, but with talismans: prayer slips in Sanskrit, Japanese ofuda, crimson paper seals scribbled in hurried Chinese calligraphy. All of them were ruptured, torn down the middle, their ink run and swollen like infected wounds.
"The wards are all broken," Lian said needlessly.
"Not broken," Rajan murmured. "Reversed." He could feel the direction of the flow. The talismans weren't keeping something out anymore. They were funnels, turned inward. Channeling.
At the last door, the wood wasn't just splintered; it had been chewed. Teeth marks, human-sized but far too many of them, dented the frame. The fabric floor thickened here, rising in a clotted wave that lapped at Rajan's boots like a tide.
Lian sucked in a breath. "This is the unit from the call log. 9D."
The phone in Rajan's pocket buzzed once, although he'd turned it off three floors ago. A faint voice, the echo of the woman who had called, whispered up through the dead device: "Help—please, my husband—something—"
Then the voice gargled itself into silence.
The door opened before he touched it.
What lay beyond did not fit into the geometry of the building.
The room was too deep, stretching away at an angle that made his eyes water. The ceiling sloped down and up and down again like the inside of a throat. Furniture hung at wrong orientations—chairs jutting sideways from the wall, a table glued to the ceiling, a television lying flat on the far "floor" as though it had accepted gravity's new orders.
The smell hit him: copper and mold and the faint, acrid tang of burned incense. Underneath it all, something sour and intimate, like the sweat trapped in the sheets of a bed that has not been left in months.
In the center of the room, where gravity seemed grudgingly willing to act normally, a man knelt.
Or what had been a man.
His skin had gone translucent, veins and tendons drawn in fragile blue beneath. His arms were spread wide, pinned to the walls by cords of congealed clothing that grew directly from the fabric floor. Shirtsleeves twisted into rope, denim seams unwound into tendrils, all spiraled out of the carpet to tether him in place like a grotesque marionette.
His chest was open. Not cut, not ripped. Bloomed. Ribs peeled back like petals, each bone thin and pale and slick, curled outward to reveal the cavity inside. It was not full of organs.
It was full of f