The first thought that surfaced was rage.
"Victor, you bastard."
It came before pain, before memory, before even the certainty that she still existed. Beatrice Angelo emerged into awareness suspended in a place that refused definition—neither dark nor light, neither void nor space. There was no gravity to anchor her, no horizon to orient her. It felt less like floating and more like being held in pause, as though the universe itself had inhaled and not yet decided whether to exhale.
Shock clung to her, dense and disorienting. The echo of pain still reverberated through something that no longer felt like a body.
She tried to breathe. There was no air. She tried to move. There was no resistance.
Damn it all, she thought, the indignation sharp even now. I didn't do anything horrible.
The response did not come gently.
"Are you sure about that?"
The voice did not travel. It arrived detonating across the suspension, vast and resonant, felt rather than heard. The emptiness warped around it, silence compressing until Beatrice recoiled on instinct alone, though there was nowhere to recoil to.
She turned.
Behind her loomed a structure at first mistaken for a head—massive, impossibly so, but it did not obey anatomy. Its features shifted as if undecided. One moment it bore the pallor of the dead, skin slack and colorless; the next, it pulsed with the subtle heat of life. Eyes opened and closed across its surface, some human, some utterly alien, all fixed on her with identical attention.
For the first time, Beatrice's confidence faltered.
"Who are you?" she asked. Her voice emerged diminished, stripped of the authority that had once commanded rooms, policies, cities.
The being smiled. It was not a comforting expression. It was too wide, too deliberate—like something that had studied the concept of a smile without learning mercy.
"I am the interval," it said. "The space between outcomes. The moment where probability hesitates." Its gaze did not waver. "And you, Beatrice Angelo, have arrived precisely where hesitation becomes necessary."
The words carried weight not years, not centuries, but inevitability.
"Why," Beatrice asked, steadying herself by force alone, "am I here?"
The being drifted closer. With every fraction of distance it closed, the space around her seemed to stretch, as if scale itself were bending to accommodate its presence.
"Because you are anomalous," it replied. "Not unique. Not rare. Merely… unresolved."
"No. Fuck that," Beatrice snapped. "I was alive."
The being did not disagree.
That was worse.
"You were," it said. "And then you were not. Your body failed. Your systems ceased. Death executed its function cleanly."
Memory surged unbidden: white light, pressure, Victor's voice thinning into something distant and hollow.
"Finality," the being continued, "did not."
The space shifted. Behind it, around it, something vast began to turn.
Beatrice felt it before she saw it: a pressure across causality itself. Then the structure resolved into form—a colossal Wheel, suspended across dimensions she could not name. Its surface was divided into innumerable segments, each etched with symbols, geometries, and laws that contradicted one another. Some glowed with restrained violence. Others whispered with impossible quiet. Each segment rotated past with deliberate indifference, grinding fate against fate.
"What is that?" she whispered.
"The Distribution Mechanism," the being said. "Across realities, when existence fractures beyond correction, the Wheel turns. Outcomes are reassigned. Constants are broken. Capabilities are granted."
Beatrice's attention locked onto it. "Granted to who?"
"To those who fail to end properly," it replied. "To those who slip through conclusions. To unresolved events."
The Wheel continued its rotation.
"You are not dead," the being said. "You are not alive. You are a remainder. And remainders must be processed."
Her throat tightened. "I didn't choose this."
"No," the being agreed. "But neither did reality."
The Wheel slowed. Segments passed by: dominion, entropy, recursion, annihilation, preservation—each heavy with consequence. The space vibrated as if bracing for decision.
"You cannot remain here," the being said, already receding. "This place is for passage, not persistence. The Wheel does not tolerate stasis."
Its many eyes narrowed, not with malice, but with something approaching curiosity.
"When it stops," it added, "you will be Transferred. Not restored. Not redeemed. To a place many times darker than here."
The Wheel began to lock into place.
"Understand this, Beatrice Angelo: things that fail to end are eventually noticed."
And the universe, at last, exhaled. The Wheel landed on Preservation. Then she was transferred to the Null Zone.
Transfer was not motion. There was no sensation of falling, no wrench of displacement. One moment the Wheel existed—vast, grinding, inevitable—and the next it did not.
Beatrice Angelo arrived in nothing. Not darkness. Darkness implied the possibility of light. This was subtraction: a space where qualities had been removed so thoroughly that even absence felt curated.
The Null Zone had no sky, no ground, no horizon. There was depth, but no distance. Space existed only as permission, not structure. She did not float; she was retained, held in a state that suggested gravity had been considered and deliberately rejected.
Sound did not travel here. It failed before it could begin. When she tried to inhale, there was no resistance—no air to deny her, no vacuum to threaten her. Breathing was meaningless, yet her awareness performed it out of habit, a reflex from a life that no longer applied.
Her body—or the memory of one—felt intact. That, she realized with a tightening sense of dread, was the problem.
Pain had been preserved. So had weight. So had balance. Sensation existed without context, nerves firing into a universe that refused to answer them. She could feel herself, sharply and continuously, but there was nowhere for that feeling to go.
In the far, indeterminate distance, something moved. Not approaching. Not retreating. Simply updating its position, as though location were a variable rather than a fact.
The Null Zone did not welcome her. It did not acknowledge her at all. And that, more than anything she had seen beyond death, made it clear: this was not a place meant to be survived. It was a place meant to hold what could not be allowed to end.