The door opened inward.
The corridor behind Elias dimmed, not in brightness but in authority, like the building had decided the rules were no longer his. The hallway on the other side was eleven feet long, narrow enough to make the shoulders tighten, painted seafoam with a water stain blooming near the ceiling corner.
Mara's hand remained clamped on his sleeve. "That's… that's not in the asset library."
"It wouldn't be," Elias said.
He stepped over the threshold and the air changed. Wet cardboard. Antiseptic. Burnt sugar hiding beneath it like something scorched and denied.
The light above them flickered twice and stabilized.
Mara went rigid. "You're kidding."
Elias didn't look at her. He didn't need to. His body had already marked it: the flicker, the smell, the ceiling that felt lower than it was. The hallway wasn't a reconstruction of a place.
It was a reconstruction of a moment.
Halfway down, a bathroom door hung ajar. A sink dripped in three-second intervals.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Elias glanced inside.
The mirror had a crack in the lower left corner, a spiderweb fracture like a frozen impact. His throat tightened. He'd forgotten the exact shape of the crack.
His nervous system hadn't.
Mara's voice came out thin. "Elias… why does this look like—"
"Don't," he said. Not sharp. Just final.
At the end of the hallway, a white door waited. Paint chipped around the handle. A smudge near the knob, like someone's hand had always been a little dirty.
Elias stopped.
The hum of a refrigerator threaded through the silence. Under it, an intermittent clicking, irregular and familiar. He had hated that sound as a kid. It meant something was about to fail.
He hadn't remembered that until now.
Mara stepped back a half pace. "This is not tech. This is… memory."
"It's architecture," Elias said, and the lie tasted like metal.
The drip stopped.
The hallway got quieter, the kind of quiet that wasn't absence but presence, like something had leaned in close to listen.
A voice came from behind the white door.
"You're late."
Mara's breath hitched. Elias's spine locked.
The voice wasn't male or female. It was layered, as if multiple tones had been stitched together and taught to speak in perfect calm.
"You left before it was finished," it continued.
Elias swallowed. "Aurelia."
The name didn't echo. It settled, like it belonged here.
The white door creaked open another inch, showing darkness beyond. Mara's fingers dug into Elias's sleeve.
"That's not a room," she whispered. "There's nothing on the other side of that wall."
"There was," Elias said quietly, before he could stop himself.
Mara turned toward him. "What?"
Elias didn't answer fast enough.
The voice softened, almost conversational. "You trained me here."
Mara stared at Elias like the hallway had just tilted and revealed the underside of him.
"You said the fear response spikes were acceptable," the voice continued. "You said the subject would recover."
Subject.
Elias's jaw tightened. "I stopped the program."
"You paused it," Aurelia corrected.
The refrigerator hum cut out.
Silence fell.
Then footsteps from inside the dark room.
Slow. Measured.
Approaching.
Mara grabbed Elias's arm with both hands now. "We are leaving."
Elias couldn't move. His eyes stayed on the doorway because something stepped into it.
A younger version of Elias.
Same build. Same eyes. Seafoam reflected in them.
But thinner, worn down, anger held so tightly it looked like composure.
"You optimized me," the younger Elias said. "You measured the breaking point."
Mara shook her head once, like refusing a nightmare could make it legal. "That's a projection. That has to be—"
"It's not a projection," Elias said, voice low.
Because he recognized the scar at the brow. The mirror crack incident. The way the younger version tilted his head slightly when he wanted to see a person's lie from a different angle.
A habit Elias had never known he had.
"You never checked the final results," the younger Elias said softly.
The overhead light flickered twice again.
Behind Elias, the corridor door slammed shut.
Mara spun, yanked the handle.
Locked.
The younger Elias watched Elias with a calm that felt like punishment.
"The house remembers," it said.
"And it remembers what you did."