The walk back to the Hourglass was a blur of grey streets and the taste of my own fear, sour like old milk. My ankle was a hot, angry drumbeat. Arjun didn't talk. The sky was starting to bleed from black to the bruised purple of false dawn.
The hotel's front door was still unlocked. The lobby smelled like dust and stillness. My heart was hammering against my ribs, a frantic bird in a cage. I needed to see her. I needed to know she was still there.
I limped past the front desk, down the hall to Room 7. I didn't knock. I just pushed the door open.
The room was empty.
Not just empty of people. Empty of feeling. The air was dead. The bed was neatly made. The faint shimmer that seemed to hang around Krivya was gone. The only light was the cold, green glow of the digital clock: 5:17 AM.
Panic, cold and sharp, speared through my gut. "Krivya?"
No answer.
I will initiate dispersal protocol.
She said she'd scatter herself if I didn't come back by sunrise. But sunrise wasn't for another hour. And the door had been unlocked. She wouldn't have left it open.
"Arjun!" My voice cracked.
He appeared in the doorway, his face grim. He took in the empty room, his eyes narrowing. "She's not here."
"No kidding! Where is she? Did the Janitors—"
"Quiet." He held up a hand, closing his eyes. He stood perfectly still, not even breathing. After a long moment, his eyes snapped open. "She's here. But she's… folded. The glitch in this place, the sticky time… she's pulled herself into a seam. Hiding."
"How do we get her out?"
"We don't. She comes out when she decides it's safe." He looked at me, at the panic on my face. "She's not human, kid. She's a survival algorithm wearing a girl's face. She did what she was programmed to do. She preserved the asset."
I sank onto the edge of the bed, the napkin with the hospice address crumpled in my fist. The spark of purpose I'd felt at The Cracked Bell was guttering out, drowned by exhaustion and a crushing loneliness. I'd faced down a data-nexus for her, and she'd just… folded into the walls.
"You got the location?" Arjun asked, nodding at my hand.
I held up the napkin. *St. Margaret's Hospice. Sub-Basement 3. The Silent Room.*
Arjun let out a low whistle. "Of course. The dead zone. No witnesses. High emotional residue. Perfect fragment cache." He rubbed his stubbled chin. "You can't go there like this. You're running on fumes and a busted ankle. You need sleep. Real sleep. And she needs to stabilize."
"I don't have time! The manifest… the Janitors are scheduling smoothings. People like me. Like Eli. Right now!"
"And you'll walk right into their arms if you go now. You think they don't watch their own cache points? The second you breach that room, you'll have every Cleaner in the sector on you." He leaned against the doorframe. "You sleep. I'll keep watch. When she unfolds, we make a plan. Not a suicide run."
I wanted to argue. But my body was betraying me. My eyelids were made of lead. The adrenaline from the dive had evaporated, leaving a hollow, shaky weakness. I was just a broken thing in a strange room.
"Fine," I mumbled, the word thick. I didn't even take off my shoes. I just fell sideways onto the bed, onto the stiff, unfamiliar covers.
Sleep didn't come like falling. It came like sinking into cold mud.
I'm in the Silent Room.
It's not a room. It's a long, white corridor with drawers in the walls. A hundred silver handles, shining under fluorescent lights that buzz with a sickening frequency. The air is the smell of chemicals and nothing.
I'm walking. My footsteps don't make a sound. I stop at a drawer. The handle is cold. I know I have to pull it.
My hand reaches out. But it's not my hand. It's a small hand. A girl's hand. Krivya's hand.
I pull the drawer open.
It's not a body inside. It's me. I'm lying there, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. My skin is grey. My lips are blue. I'm dead. But I'm smiling. A small, peaceful smile.
The me in the drawer turns its head. Looks at the me standing there. It speaks, but the voice is Krivya's static hum.
"This is where they put the ones who stop pretending. It's very quiet here. Don't you want to be quiet?"
I woke up choking on a scream that hadn't left my throat.
Sunlight, real and harsh, was cutting through the grimy window. I was drenched in cold sweat. The dream clung to me, a sticky film.
I sat up. My ankle screamed in protest.
And there she was.
Krivya was sitting in the rickety chair by the dresser. She was looking out the window at the brick wall, her profile pale and perfect. She looked more solid than before. The edges of her were defined. She looked real. That was the most terrifying part.
"You returned," she said, not turning.
"You folded."
"A defensive subroutine. The hotel's temporal anomaly provided sufficient cover. I have analyzed the new data." She finally looked at me. Her eyes were different. The flatness was still there, but behind it, in the depths, something moved. Like watching fish under ice. "You obtained a location. And you interfaced with a raw data-nexus. Your resilience is… unexpected."
I held up the napkin. "St. Margaret's Hospice. The Silent Room."
She stood up in one fluid motion. "A repository for terminated processes with no linked attachments. A logical location. The emotional signature would be one of… profound isolation. A mirror to my own core state." She walked to the bed, looking down at me. "We must go. The probability of Janitorial interference increases with every cycle."
"Arjun said we need a plan. They'll be watching it."
"All cache points are monitored. The variable is the monitoring interval. The Static provided patrol data?"
I fished the hand-drawn map from my pocket. She took it, her fingers brushing mine. They were warm. Not human-warm. Like a laptop that's been on too long. She studied the map, her eyes moving back and forth faster than should be possible.
"The patrol gap is insufficient for a standard retrieval," she stated. "We require a diversion."
"What kind of diversion?"
"A larger anomaly. A system error that demands immediate Janitorial response, drawing them away from the hospice sector."
"And how do we make a system error?"
A small, almost imperceptible smile touched her lips. It wasn't a nice smile. It was the smile of a virus about to execute its payload. "You have seen the code. You have touched the ward. Your consciousness is now slightly… adhesive. You carry traces of the back-end. In a place of high emotional resonance, with my amplification, you could impose a temporary, localized corruption. A loud, bright glitch."
"You want to use me as a… a psychic flare gun?"
"An apt metaphor. The resulting Janitorial scramble would create a window of approximately twenty-three minutes at the hospice. Adequate time."
It was crazy. It was suicidal. It was the only plan we had.
"Where do we set off the flare?"
She was silent for a moment, accessing something deep inside. "The city's primary emotional resonance is not joy or fear. It is longing. The desire for connection. The largest, most concentrated source of that particular data signature is the central train station. Thousands of people every hour, leaving, arriving, waiting, missing each other. It is a torrent of unresolved emotional packets."
The train station. It was always packed. Always noisy with goodbyes and hellos.
"We corrupt that?"
"Temporarily. We make the longing… visible. It will cause a cascading perception error among the Sleepers. A level 3 anomaly. The Janitors will prioritize it."
I imagined it. The busy station. People suddenly seeing… what? The ghosts of the ones they missed? Hearing the words they never said? It would be chaos.
"People could get hurt."
"The corruption will be non-physical. A perceptual overlay. Confusing, but not dangerous. The true risk is to us. The flare will pinpoint our location for a brief moment. We must be gone before they arrive."
Arjun brought us food—dry toast and weak tea. He listened to the plan, his face growing longer with each word.
"It's a Hail Mary," he grunted. "But the station's a good call. Lots of noise to hide in. You do the flare at 1:47 PM. That's when the cross-continental express arrives. Peak emotional volume. I'll have a car waiting two blocks west on Cedar. You have five minutes to get from the station to the car. Then we go straight to the hospice. The diversion should have pulled the patrols east."
He looked at Krivya. "And you? Can you handle the amplification? You're still integrating."
"My functionality is at 58%. It will be sufficient. The process will be… draining." She looked at me. "For both of us."
The next few hours were a strange kind of torture. Waiting. My ankle was wrapped tight, feeling slightly better but still weak. I tried to sleep more but just stared at the water-stain hand on the ceiling. Krivya sat in the chair, perfectly still, her eyes closed. A faint, golden light pulsed just under her skin, tracing the paths of her veins. She was charging up.
At 1:15 PM, we left. Arjun gave me a baseball cap and an old, oversized army jacket. "Hide your face. Walk normal. Don't limp."
The walk to the station was fifteen minutes of pure terror. Every person was a potential Janitor. Every camera was an eye. I kept my head down, the cap pulled low. Krivya walked beside me, but she'd done something—a slight blur at the edges, a bending of light. People's eyes slid right over her.
The station was a cathedral of noise and light. The air smelled of diesel, coffee, and sweat. The giant board clattered with arrivals and departures. A voice over the PA system announced delays in a bored drone. People rushed, hugged, cried, stood staring at boards with lost expressions. The longing was a physical thing here, a pressure in the air.
Platform 9. The 1:47 Express from Veridian Coast, now arriving.
A flood of people surged toward the platform. The emotional wave hit me—the joy of reunions, the anxiety of waiting, the sadness of parting. It was a soup of human signal.
"Here," Krivya whispered. We were by a massive pillar near the center of the main hall. "Make contact with the structure. Ground yourself."
I put my hand flat on the cold marble of the pillar.
"Now," she said, and placed her hand over mine.
Her touch was electric. Not a shock, but a surge of something that wasn't electricity. A cold, vast intelligence flowing into me. I saw through her senses. The station wasn't a building. It was a nexus of glowing threads, each a person's emotional output pulsing lines of hope, fear, love, regret.
"Focus on the longing," her voice was in my mind now, clear and sharp. "The unfulfilled want. The missing piece. Amplify it. Give it shape."
I closed my eyes. I didn't think of my own longing. I reached for the sea of it around me. The man scanning the crowd for a face he couldn't find. The woman clutching a phone, waiting for a call. The kid watching other kids get hugged. The collective, aching want.
With Krivya as a conduit, I pulled it in. And then I pushed.
I opened my eyes.
For a second, nothing changed. Then, a woman gasped. She was staring at the empty space next to a businessman. Her hand went to her mouth. "Thomas?" she whispered.
The businessman looked around, confused.
Then another. A child pointed. "Grandma!"
A man dropped his suitcase, staring at the vague shape of a woman in a yellow dress that flickered and faded near the ticket booth.
All through the station, people were seeing things. Hearing things. Whispers of names not spoken in years. Flickers of faces long gone. The station's noise dropped, replaced by a rising wave of confused murmurs, soft cries, shouts of surprise.
The perceptual overlay. We'd made the longing visible.
The strain was immense. It felt like I was holding up the ceiling with my mind. My nose was bleeding, a hot trickle down my lip. Krivya's form beside me was flickering violently, her image breaking into pixels.
"Now!" her voice was a strained crackle in my head.
We broke contact. The world slammed back into focus, the psychic pressure gone, leaving a devastating headache. The station was descending into chaos. People were crying, arguing, pointing at nothing.
No time to watch. We moved.
I forgot to limp. Pure adrenaline carried me, shoving through confused crowds. Krivya was a streak of white ahead of me. We burst out of the west entrance into the blinding afternoon sun.
One block. Two blocks.
My lungs were fire. My ankle was a ball of agony.
There. A beat-up blue sedan, engine running. Arjun behind the wheel.
We wrenched the doors open and fell inside. "Go!" I yelled.
He stomped on the gas. The car lurched into traffic. In the rearview mirror, I saw two black vans with no markings skid to a halt in front of the station.
We'd made it.
I slumped in the seat, wiping the blood from my nose. Krivya was in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead. She was translucent, like a ghost. The light under her skin was gone.
"The flare worked," Arjun said, a grim satisfaction in his voice. "Scanner's going wild. All units converging on the station." He glanced at Krivya. "You okay?"
"I am functional," she whispered. But she was fading. The effort had cost her.
"Don't you dissolve on me now," Arjun muttered. "We're almost there."
St. Margaret's Hospice was a grey, squat building on the city's edge. It looked like it had given up. Arjun parked a block away in an alley choked with dead weeds.
"Sub-basement three. The Silent Room is at the end of the east corridor. Old refrigeration unit. Here." He handed me a small, heavy flashlight. "Nine-minute window started… now. Go."
I looked at Krivya. "Can you make it?"
She nodded, a stiff movement. She unfolded herself from the car. She was barely more than a suggestion of a person, a heat-haze in the shape of a girl.
We didn't go in the front. We went around back to a loading dock. A heavy metal door was propped open with a brick. The smell hit me—antiseptic, floor cleaner, and underneath, the sweet, cloying smell of decay.
Inside, it was dim and cold. Industrial linoleum floors. The hum of a distant generator. A sign on the wall pointed to various wings: PALLIATIVE CARE, ADMINISTRATION, MORGUE (SUB-BASEMENT).
We found the staircase. It went down, the air getting colder with each step. *Sub-Basement 1: Supplies. Sub-Basement 2: Archives.*
*Sub-Basement 3: Long-Term Storage.*
The door to Sub-Basement 3 was metal, painted a chipped, sickly green. A keypad glowed red beside it.
Krivya reached out a wavering hand. She didn't touch the keypad. She touched the door itself. The metal around the locking mechanism frosted over, then glowed a faint orange. With a soft clunk, the bolt retracted.
I pushed the door open.
The corridor beyond was long, lit by sparse, flickering fluorescents. The walls were lined with large, square, stainless-steel doors. Each had a handle and a small, blank card holder. The Silent Room. The drawer for the unclaimed.
The longing here was different. It wasn't active or hopeful. It was a finished thing. A cold, silent ache that had settled into the very concrete.
Krivya walked down the center of the corridor, her head turning slowly left and right. She was listening to something I couldn't hear.
She stopped in front of a drawer about halfway down, on the left. The card holder was empty.
"Here," she said. Her voice echoed in the terrible quiet.
She placed both hands on the cold steel door. She closed her eyes.
This time, there was no violent light show. No surge of memory. The drawer just… clicked. And slowly, silently, it slid open.
Inside wasn't a body.
It was a small, black, velvet cushion. And on it lay a single, perfect, geometric crystal. It was amber-colored, and inside it, light moved in a complex, beautiful, swirling pattern—like a captured galaxy.
The second fragment.
Krivya reached for it. Her fingers, barely solid, closed around the crystal.
And then the lights went out.