The hallway outside Room 7 felt longer than it should have. The faded carpet was a pattern of brown swirls that seemed to move if you didn't look right at them. Arjun walked ahead, his slippers making a soft shuff-shuff sound. I limped behind, the jacket he gave me smelling like a wet ashtray. It was too big. The sleeves covered my hands.
"Don't talk unless spoken to," Arjun said, not looking back. His voice was a low grumble. "Don't make eye contact for too long. Don't touch anything. Especially don't touch anyone."
"What are they like?"
"Like feral cats that learned to talk. Useful, but they'll scratch you if you pet them wrong."
We didn't go out the front. He led me to a door at the end of the hall marked 'BOILER'. Inside wasn't a boiler room. It was a narrow, cluttered storage space. He moved aside a stack of moldy cardboard boxes to reveal a hatch in the floor, like a submarine door. He pulled it open. A ladder led down into darkness that smelled of damp soil and rust.
"After you."
I climbed down, my bad ankle screaming with every rung. The ladder went down about ten feet. I stepped off onto a concrete floor. Arjun followed, pulling the hatch shut above us with a final clang.
He flicked a switch. A single, bare bulb buzzed to life. We were in a low tunnel, pipes running along the ceiling, dripping with condensation. It was a utility tunnel.
"This way."
We walked for maybe ten minutes, the tunnel branching and turning. It felt like we were moving away from the hotel, under the streets. The air got colder. I could hear the distant rumble of something big—a subway line, maybe.
Finally, Arjun stopped at a metal door set into the tunnel wall. It was painted a grimy green. There was no handle. In the center was a symbol, crudely welded from scrap iron: a bell with a jagged crack down the middle.
Arjun knocked. Not a normal knock. A sequence: tap-tap-tap… pause… tap-tap.
A slit opened at eye level. A single, bloodshot eye peered out. It looked me up and down, then Arjun.
"Curator." The voice from behind the door was gravelly. "You're late. And you brought a puppy. He smells like fear and cheap noodles."
"He's with me, Marcus. He's clean. Mostly."
The eye stared a second longer. Then the slit slammed shut. Bolts clanked on the other side, heavy sounds. The door swung inward with a groan.
The smell hit me first. It wasn't one smell. It was a layer cake of smells. Old beer. Cigarette smoke. Ozone, like after a lightning strike. And underneath it all, something sweet and rotten, like flowers left in a closed-up car.
The room was bigger than I expected. It looked like someone tried to make a bar in a subway maintenance room. A long counter made of scrap wood ran along one wall, bottles of weird-colored liquids on shelves behind it. Mismatched chairs and tables were scattered around. A few old arcade games hummed in a corner, their screens showing static or geometric patterns that hurt to look at.
But the people.
There were maybe fifteen of them. They all stopped what they were doing when we walked in. They weren't monsters. They looked… off.
A woman by the bar had hair that changed color slowly, from blue to green, like a mood ring. A man playing solitaire at a table had six fingers on his right hand, and he was using all of them to shuffle the cards with impossible speed. Another guy in the corner was just… blurry. Like a bad TV signal. You couldn't focus on his face.
These were the Static. The glitch-aware.
The door thudded shut behind us. The guy who'd opened it, Marcus, was huge. Built like a fridge, with a shaved head and a tattoo of a spiraling equation on his neck. He crossed his arms.
"Who's the kid, Arjun? And don't give me your 'he's clean' crap. I can hear the resonance humming off him. He's thin as tissue paper."
"His name's Eryx," Arjun said, keeping his voice calm. "He's got a… situation. He needs information."
A laugh came from the bar. The woman with the color-changing hair. "A situation! We've all got a situation, Curator. Ours is staying alive and un-smoothed. What's his?"
"He's linked," Arjun said. The room got very quiet. "To an active, self-aware anomaly. A Protocol."
The word 'Protocol' landed in the room like a stone in a pond. The blurry man in the corner solidified for a second. I saw a sharp, pale face, then he went fuzzy again. The card-player stopped shuffling.
"A Protocol," Marcus breathed. "One of the Lost Ones? You're sure?"
"I've seen it. It's reassembling. It's collected one fragment already."
The color-hair woman slid off her stool. She walked over, moving with a dancer's grace. Up close, I could see her eyes were two different colors—one brown, one grey. She circled me, looking me up and down like I was a car she might buy.
"He doesn't look like a Catalyst. He looks like a strong wind would break him."
"I'm right here," I muttered.
She smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. "He talks, too. Cute. What's the Protocol's designation? Its core drive?"
I looked at Arjun. He gave a slight nod. "Krivya," I said. My voice didn't shake. "She… it… wants to recompile. Find its other fragments."
"Krivya," the woman repeated, tasting the name. "Pretty. Not a standard designation. Must be a custom job. A bespoke ghost." She stopped in front of me. "I'm Lyra. I read data streams. Yours is… messy. Full of cross-talk. You're not just linked. You're entangled. That's dangerous, puppy. For you."
"I need to know where the other fragments might be," I said, trying to sound braver than I felt. "She said the next one feels like… confinement. And medicine."
Lyra's mismatched eyes narrowed. "A hospital. Or a clinic. Any place of sanctioned suffering. The Janitors love hospitals. Lots of rules. Easy to hide corrections." She looked at Arjun. "You want us to point you at a Janitor nest? For free?"
"What do you want?" Arjun asked.
Marcus spoke up. "The kid. For a day."
My blood went cold. "What?"
"Not like that," Marcus grunted. "We need a thin one. For a dive. There's a data-nexus under the old power station. Heavily warded. We can't get a clean read. A Catalyst, even a baby one… you could be a key. You go in with us, help us retrieve a specific packet of data we're after, and we give you the location of the most likely fragment cache in the medical district. And a map of their patrol cycles."
"No," Arjun said immediately. "He's not a diver. He'd get erased in seconds."
"He's got a Protocol in his head! That's better than any ward-breaking gear we've got!" the blurry man said, his voice coming from everywhere and nowhere.
"It's too dangerous."
"Everything's dangerous!" Lyra snapped. "That's the point! That's the game! You brought him here for a trade. This is the trade. His service for our intel. Otherwise, get out and take your 'situation' with you."
They all looked at me. The Static. Their faces were hard. This wasn't a support group. This was a marketplace. And I was the currency.
"What's in the data-nexus?" I asked.
"None of your business," Marcus said.
"If I'm going to risk getting deleted, it is my business."
Lyra and Marcus exchanged a look. Lyra sighed. "Fine. It's a manifest. A list of every planned 'smoothing' and 'correction' scheduled for this sector over the next month. Names, times, locations. With that, we can warn people. We can… interfere."
So they weren't just hiding. They were fighting back. In their own messed-up way.
My ankle throbbed. I thought of Krivya, back in the hotel room, flickering. Waiting. I thought of Eli's empty smile in the photograph.
"Okay," I said.
Arjun grabbed my arm. "Kid, you don't know what you're saying. A dive… it's not like the real world. It's the raw code. If you lose focus for a second, it can overwrite you. Turn you into a loop. A smiling idiot repeating the same action forever."
"I have to do something," I said, pulling my arm away. "I can't just hide."
Lyra clapped her hands together, a sharp sound. "Good! The puppy has teeth. We go at 4 AM. The Janitors do a system-wide diagnostic then. Lowest patrol density. Gives us a twenty-minute window." She pointed to a stained couch in the corner. "You. Sit. Rest. You look like you're about to fall over."
I limped to the couch and sank into it. The springs were broken. I was sitting at a steep tilt. The room went back to its weird activities. The card player went back to his game. The blurry man faded into a corner. Lyra went back to the bar and started polishing a glass that already looked clean.
Arjun sat next to me, his face grim. "This is a mistake."
"You said they could help."
"I said they might. I didn't say they'd help you. They're helping themselves. You're a tool to them."
"I'm a tool to everyone," I mumbled. "To Krivya. To the Janitors. To you. At least this way, I'm choosing which hands I get used by."
He didn't have an answer for that.
Time passed weirdly in The Cracked Bell. A clock on the wall had hands that sometimes moved backward. People came and went through other doors I hadn't noticed. One guy walked in, covered in what looked like glittering salt, muttered "The beach is singing the wrong song," and walked straight into a wall, vanishing.
My eyes grew heavy. The hum of the arcade games, the low murmur of conversation, the weird sweet-rotten smell… it all blended together. I must have dozed off.
I was jerked awake by a hand on my shoulder. Lyra.
"Time to go, puppy. The window's opening."
I stood, my body stiff. Marcus was by the green door, holding a weird device—it looked like a cross between a Geiger counter and a walkie-talkie, made of old circuit boards and copper wire.
"Stay close," he said. "Don't touch anything that looks like light. Don't listen to anything that sounds like your name. And for the love of the broken code, don't get curious."
He opened the door. We didn't go back into the utility tunnel. We went into a darkness so complete it felt solid.
Lyra produced a small orb from her pocket. It glowed with a cold, blue light. It illuminated a… space. It wasn't a tunnel. It wasn't a room. The walls, if you could call them that, were shifting planes of darkness, occasionally streaked with lines of rushing green symbols—the code. The floor was a grid of faint white lines hovering in nothing. The air had a pressure to it, a psychic weight. It hummed with a sound just below hearing, a sound that made my teeth ache.
This was the back-end. The place behind the world.
"Follow the grid," Marcus whispered, his voice strangely muffled. "Step off it, and you fall into non-processing space. You'll be garbage-collected."
We walked. The grid lines shifted under my feet, but held. I saw things in the rushing code. Faces. Fragments of buildings. A spinning bicycle wheel. A baby crying. All flowing past in the green river of data.
Then, ahead, a structure. It looked like a giant, black cube, floating in the void. Lines of crimson light pulsed across its surface in complex patterns. A ward.
"The nexus," Lyra breathed. "The manifest is inside. The ward reads intent. If it reads hostility, it triggers a suppression pulse that'll fry our neural patterns. That's where you come in, puppy. You're a blank slate. A neutral carrier. And you're tangled with a Protocol's signature. The ward might mistake you for a system process. You need to walk up, place your hand on it, and think… nothing. Empty. Hollow."
The hollow. My old friend. They wanted me to use the hollow.
"What do I do then?"
"We'll do the rest. Just keep the door open."
I looked at the black cube. The crimson light pulsed like a slow, evil heartbeat. I thought of Krivya, waiting. Of the next fragment.
I stepped off the grid line, onto a narrow bridge of solid light that led to the cube. My sneakers made no sound. With every step, the pressure increased. It felt like walking into deep water.
I reached the cube. Up close, it wasn't smooth. It was made of billions of tiny, interlocking black scales, each etched with a micro-symbol. The crimson light was a liquid that flowed in the grooves between them.
I took a deep breath. I thought of nothing. I let the hollow fill me. The ache of being nobody, nowhere.
I placed my palm flat against the cube.
It was cold. Not temperature cold. A cold that meant absence.
For a second, nothing. Then, the crimson light flowing near my hand changed course. It swirled, avoiding my touch. A circular section of the scales under my palm retracted silently, sinking inward, revealing a dark opening just big enough to crawl through.
"Go!" Lyra hissed from behind me.
I got on my knees and crawled into the black cube.
Inside was a single, bright point of white light, suspended in the center. Hanging in the air around it were lines of text, glowing softly. Names. Dates. Times. *Maya Lin - Smoothing - 4:15 AM - Corner of 5th and Elm.* David Chen - Correction - Midnight - His apartment. On and on. Dozens of them.
This was it. The manifest.
A shape moved beside me. Lyra had slipped in. She held up her orb. She didn't read the list. She stared at it, her eyes wide, the colors in her hair cycling fast—red, purple, black. She was downloading it. Memorizing it.
Then she grabbed my shoulder. "Got it. Out. Now!"
We scrambled back out the hole. As soon as we cleared it, the scales snapped back into place. The crimson light flow returned to normal.
"Run!" Marcus barked.
We didn't walk back. We ran along the grid lines. The void around us seemed to growl. The code-rivers churned angrily. We'd tripped an alarm, just a quiet one.
We burst back through the door into The Cracked Bell. Marcus slammed it shut and threw three heavy bolts.
Lyra slumped against the wall, breathing hard. Her hair was a static grey now. "Got it," she panted. "All of it."
Marcus nodded, then looked at me. "You held up your end, puppy." He walked to the bar, grabbed a napkin and a pen. He scribbled something, then came back and shoved the napkin into my hand.
On it was an address: *St. Margaret's Hospice - Sub-Basement 3 - The Silent Room.*
"The fragment's there. In the place where they store the bodies of the ones who died alone. No family. No noise. Maximum confinement." He also gave me another piece of paper—a hand-drawn map with patrol routes marked in red. "Janitors do a circuit every 47 minutes. You have a 9-minute gap between cycles. Don't be late."
I stared at the napkin. A hospice. A room for the unclaimed dead.
"Thank you," I said, my voice hoarse.
"Don't thank us," Lyra said, her voice tired. "We traded. Now get out. And Eryx?" I looked at her. Her mismatched eyes were serious. "That Protocol in your head… be careful. Protocols were made to change the system. Changing a broken system sometimes looks a lot like breaking it completely."
Arjun touched my arm. "Come on. We need to get back before sunrise."
As we left, I took one last look at The Cracked Bell. The feral cats in their hidden room, fighting a war nobody else knew existed. I had the next piece of the puzzle. And a new, heavier fear.