Level -3 wasn't on any map.
That was the first problem.
Null had maps for almost everything: evacuation plans, access diagrams, spaghetti-graphs that showed how air moved through ducts and how cases moved through departments. Samira had once joked that if you cut the building open, you'd find floor plans in the cross-section like tree rings.
Level -3 wasn't a ring. It was an omission.
After the Theatre, we didn't go back to the Office.
We tried.
The doors opened. The lights came up. The last thing on the screen was still burning in my head—COME FIND ME, LOCATION: LEVEL -3 – ROOM 0—like someone had written it on the inside of my skull.
Samira was already on the comms to someone higher up.
"Yes, I saw it," she snapped. "No, I didn't authorize it. Yes, I'll file an incident report, after we make sure the client's brain isn't leaking out his ears."
Tess was at the console, fingers moving so fast they blurred.
"Null Theatre log shows no manual intervention," she said. "That feed of his room? It came from a channel that doesn't route through our switches. Oversight's going to pretend they've never heard of it."
"Can we not talk about my bed on speakerphone?" I said.
Echo watched the dead screen like it might start speaking again.
"Level -3," they said softly. "You ever heard of it, Samira?"
"No," she said. "Which, for the record, I hate."
"We have minus floors," I said. "Shelving's technically minus one. Storage, old infrastructure. Maybe minus three is more… storage."
"For what?" Echo asked.
"Apparently for angry dead pilots," I said.
Samira ended the call with a sound that wasn't quite a growl.
"Official line," she said, "is that what we saw was 'a glitch in the training environment' and that 'no client-specific data was compromised.'"
"Must be nice," Echo said. "To live at an altitude where sentences like that sound convincing."
Tess rubbed her eyes with thumb and forefinger.
"They want you back in your room," she said to me. "Observation hold. No field work, no Theatre, no experimental architecture. 'Until the anomaly has been assessed.'"
"And Level -3?" I asked.
"They say there is no Level -3," she said.
"That's one way to keep it classified," Echo murmured.
The coordinates in my head pulsed, quiet and insistent. Level -3. Room 0. Like a thread someone had tied to my ribs and dropped down a stairwell.
"What do you say?" I asked Samira.
She looked tired in a way coffee didn't fix.
"I say they're scared," she said. "And when scared people tell you to sit still, it usually means you're standing on a lever."
"And if I choose not to sit still?" I asked.
"Professionally," she said, "I advise against unauthorized descent into undocumented infrastructure during an active override event."
"And personally?" I said.
She held my gaze.
"Personally," she said, "I think whatever just spoke to you on that screen has been trying to say something for a very long time. And I don't trust the people who've been keeping its mouth shut."
I swallowed.
"So that's a yes," Echo said.
"That's a 'if you go, you're not going alone,'" she said. "Echo, you're with him. Tess—"
"I'll pretend I'm trying to stop you," Tess said. "And log that I failed. That usually buys people a sliver of deniability."
"You're very kind," I said.
"Don't make me regret it," she said.
Samira pulled a thin, battered card out of her pocket and slid it to me.
"This is as far down as my credentials go," she said. "Minus two. Supply and waste. Beyond that, you'll be outside my jurisdiction."
"Comforting," I said.
"Null isn't a haunted house," she said. "It's worse. It's a workplace. Haunted houses don't have forms."
Echo squeezed my shoulder once.
"Ready?" they asked.
"No," I said. "Let's go."
*
The lift didn't like minus floors.
Surface people pressed buttons labeled with positive integers. Everything beneath that was for pipes, servers, structural supports—things that made the building run but weren't supposed to exist in anyone's day.
Samira's card got us to -2.
The doors opened on a corridor that smelled faintly of bleach and metal. Cleaning carts lined one wall. On the other, large steel doors were labeled with helpful phrases like WASTE PROCESSING and WATER TREATMENT.
"This is it for me," Samira said. "Officially."
"Unofficially?" Echo asked.
"Unofficially, I'm going to stand in front of this elevator and start an argument with anyone who tries to use it," she said. "You'd be surprised how far bureaucracy can be delayed with a loud enough complaint."
She took a breath.
"Noor," she added. "If at any point you feel like you're being… rewritten, you get out. Whatever's down there, it's someone's project. Don't let them draft you into their experiment without noticing."
"That's my line," I said.
"I know," she said. "Steal it back."
Echo and I followed the corridor.
"How do we go from -2 to -3 if the lift doesn't know it exists?" I asked.
"Stairs," Echo said.
"There are no stairs on the map," I said.
"There are always stairs," they said. "The question is what someone labeled them as."
We passed a door marked SERVICE ACCESS – AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
"No," Echo said. "Too honest."
Another door: ELECTRICAL – HIGH VOLTAGE.
"Too useful," they said.
A bigger door: ARCHITECTURE. No other details.
Echo slowed.
"Architecture," they said. "Open concept for 'things we don't want to name.'"
I tried the handle. It turned.
Inside: an unremarkable concrete stairwell.
"See?" Echo said. "Stairs."
They started down.
The hum of Null changed as we descended.
On the office levels, the building sounded like fluorescent lights and processors—a bright, buzzing thought. Here, it was lower, a deep vibration underfoot, like the whole place had a heartbeat you only heard when you got close to the spine.
We hit the landing labeled -3 and stopped.
There was a door, plain metal, no window. No label.
On the wall beside it, where the floor number should have been, there was only a small, round metal plate, blank.
I put my palm against it.
For a second, nothing. Then a faint warmth, like a finger tapping back from the other side.
The door clicked.
"You sure about this?" Echo asked.
"No," I said. "Open it."
We stepped through.
*
Level -3 felt less like a floor and more like an idea someone forgot to finish.
The corridor was long and straight, but the lighting didn't quite commit. Pools of illumination floated at irregular intervals, leaving soft gaps where the walls blurred into suggestion.
There were doors. Lots of them. Each identical: metal, no handles, no signs. Just a small number stamped where a peephole might be.
Echo ran their fingers along the nearest one.
"Twenty-three," they read. "Over here: seventeen. There's no order."
"Maybe there is," I said. "Just not ours."
We walked.
The numbers jumped: 19, 5, 88, 2. Nothing that looked like 0.
"Maybe Room 0 is invisible," Echo said. "Or you only get there if you turn in a circle three times and swear loyalty to the custodian."
I kept going until the corridor ended.
No junction, no turn, no dramatic black gate.
Just a wall.
Blank, except for a small, square panel at chest height. On it, a single digit:
0
"Well," Echo said. "Subtle."
I touched the panel.
It didn't depress. No beep, no click.
But something shifted.
Not in the wall.
In the space behind my eyes.
For a heartbeat, I wasn't standing in the corridor. I was looking at it from above, as if the building had opened its blueprints directly into my head: lines of hallways, nodes where doors clustered, ducts, cables.
Level -3 wasn't a floor. It was a pocket. A negative space carved out of the building's logic, stitched in sideways.
At the center of that pocket, a room that didn't connect to any corridor.
Room 0.
The panel under my hand cooled.
The wall in front of us… folded.
Not like a door opening. As if the wall had remembered it was pretending to be solid and reluctantly admitted it.
Beyond, a room.
Empty, at first glance.
Grey walls, grey floor, grey ceiling. No desks, no consoles, no shelves. Just space.
Then my eyes adjusted.
There was a table.
Metal, plain, bolted to the floor. Two chairs. One occupied.
The man sitting there didn't look like he belonged in Null.
Not because he was beautiful or dramatic or any of the adjectives you'd staple to an entrance. Because he looked… composed.
He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled neatly to his forearms. Dark trousers. No tie. No visible badge. His hair was long, straight, white in the way of new paper, not old bones, pulled back loosely at the nape of his neck.
He looked like someone who'd walked out of a painting of a saint and then taken a job at a desk.
Calm. That was the first impression. Calm, and very, very awake.
His eyes went from me to Echo and back again.
"Noor," he said. His voice was soft, unhurried. "And Echo."
Hearing my name in that tone made something in me want to sit up straighter and throw a punch at the same time.
"You have us at a disadvantage," Echo said. "Which I'm sure you enjoy."
The man inclined his head, as if accepting a small compliment.
"Gabriel," he said. "Since we're sharing names."
"Is this your room?" I asked.
"No," he said. "Rooms belong to the system. I'm… borrowing it."
"From who?" Echo said.
"From Pilot-03," he said. "Technically."
The air in my lungs felt thinner.
"So you know them," I said.
"I closed them," he said. "Or thought I did."
He gestured to the empty chair.
"Sit," he said. "If it makes you feel better, consider this an exit interview."
"Are we being fired?" Echo asked.
"That depends how you answer," he said.
I sat.
Echo didn't. They leaned against the wall, arms folded. A small act of defiance, or just preference.
Gabriel watched us with a kind of gentle curiosity, like we were a line of code that had started behaving strangely.
"Let me make one thing clear before we begin," he said. "I'm not here to punish you for coming. If they truly didn't want you here, this door would have stayed part of the wall."
"I thought Oversight said Level -3 doesn't exist," I said.
He smiled slightly.
"Oversight says many things," he said. "Some of them even believe what they're saying."
"And you?" Echo asked. "Where do you fall on the belief spectrum?"
"I believe in consequences," he said. "Everything else is negotiable."
Up close, he looked younger than his hair suggested. Thirties, maybe. Lines at the edges of his eyes, not from smiling— from squinting at screens too long.
His presence had that polished, gentle quality you see in very good doctors and very bad cult leaders.
"If you closed Pilot-03," I said, "why are they talking?"
"Because nothing ever really closes," he said. "We just stop looking at it long enough to pretend."
He steepled his fingers on the table.
"Tell me," he said. "What did you hear in the Theatre?"
"You were there," I said.
"Humour me," he said. "I want your version, not the log."
I swallowed.
"It said we don't get to close a case like that while we're still using it," I said. "Then it told me to come find it. Gave me this room."
"And you came," he said. "Interesting."
"What else was I supposed to do?" I asked. "Stay in my cot and hope the voice goes away?"
"Most people would have," he said. "That's why we get away with as much as we do."
"Who's 'we'?" Echo asked.
"Whichever layer you consider responsible," he said. "Oversight, Archive, Null. Me, if you like a human face on systemic patterns."
"You don't seem very systemic," I said. "You seem like a man in a room having a conversation."
"Good," he said. "That's the impression I try to maintain."
He leaned back slightly.
"I was the lead architect on the Echo Theatre modules," he said. "Including yours. I designed the scenarios trainees see when they click through your life. I chose which of your moments became teaching points and which went in the bin."
My hands tightened on my knees.
"So you edited me," I said.
"I curated you," he said. "It's a distinction without much difference to you, I suspect."
"Why are you telling me that?" I asked.
"Because you hate being turned into content," he said calmly. "And I'm the man who did it. You deserve to know his face."
"That's… unexpectedly honest," Echo said.
"Honesty is cheaper than secrecy," he said. "And more effective with certain clients."
"So you're my villain," I said.
He considered.
"I'm a man who believes we have a responsibility to learn from our mistakes," he said. "And we learn best through stories. You were… an instructive story."
"And Pilot-03?" Echo asked. "What were they?"
He held Echo's gaze.
"An instructive failure," he said.
Silence settled, thick and close.
I forced my voice to stay level.
"What did you do to them?" I asked.
"What they asked me not to," he said.
He paused, as if selecting a phrasing from a shelf.
"Pilot-03 believed, as you do, that no one deserves to be turned into content," he said. "They carved it into metal. Wrote it in complaints. Refused every invitation to participate in their own narrative. So the system did what systems do—it worked around them."
"By closing them," I said.
"By treating them as an internal anomaly," he said. "They were removed from public-facing modules, sealed in Level -3, studied quietly. For 'research.'"
"You sound like you object," Echo said.
"I object to wasted data," he said. "Pilot-03 was difficult, but brilliant. Their resistance exposed every fault line we had. We could have learned so much more if we hadn't been so afraid of what they said."
"And what did they say?" I asked.
"You already know," he replied softly. "You've been saying it in your own language since you could type. They just said it earlier, and louder."
No one deserves to be turned into content.
The sentence scratched into metal. The sentence in my notebook. The sentence in my throat.
"If you regret how they were treated," I said, "why are they a ghost in my file instead of a person in a room?"
He glanced at the wall.
"Because I was overruled," he said. "And because Pilot-03 didn't want what I offered them."
"What did you offer?" Echo asked.
"Participation," he said simply. "Design input. A chance to shape how their case was used, instead of being used badly in secret. They called it collaboration with the enemy."
"And you disagreed," I said.
"I still do," he said. "We cannot stop stories from being told. We can only influence which ones survive. If a tragedy is inevitable, I prefer it be instructive rather than merely entertaining."
"You talk like a priest," I said. "For a temple built of paperwork."
"Everyone serves something," he said. "Even the ones who insist they don't."
Something in the air shifted.
A hum rose, different from the building's background noise. Sharper. Like a filament heating.
Gabriel's eyes flicked past me, to the far wall.
"Ah," he said. "Right on time."
I turned.
The wall opposite the door had been blank.
Now, a line of text was appearing on it, letter by letter, as if written from inside the concrete.
YOU CLOSED ME.
The letters were jagged, inconsistent, like someone carving into metal without the metal.
Gabriel's jaw tightened minutely.
"Hello," he said. "You're being rude."
A second line scraped itself into existence beneath the first.
YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT ME LIKE I'M NOT HERE.
The hair on my arms stood up.
"This is them," I whispered. "Pilot-03?"
"An echo," Gabriel said. "One percent. Enough for attitude, not enough for nuance."
"You're welcome," Echo murmured. "They seem fun."
Gabriel stood, finally, very smoothly.
Up close, I could see a faint tremor in his hand.
"I told you," he said to the wall, "that breaking into active modules was a bad idea."
YOU TURNED ME INTO ONE, the wall replied.
"Correction," he said. "I turned your case into one. You turned yourself into a haunting."
The letters blurred, then resolved into a new sentence.
BETTER THAN TURNING INTO TRAINING MATERIAL.
The hum rose another notch.
The floor vibrated under my feet.
"Is it… safe for us to be here?" I asked.
"No," Gabriel said. "But it's honest."
He stepped between us and the wall, lifted his hand.
He didn't touch it.
He pressed his palm against the air a few inches from the writing, like the metal plate outside.
Under his skin, faint lines lit up, snaking from his wrist to his fingertips—thin, pale circuits, like someone had drawn wires along his veins.
The hum dipped.
The letters on the wall flickered.
"Room 0 is a buffer," he said quietly. "Where the system stores things it doesn't know how to categorize. Pilot-03 lives in that uncertainty. They're pulling themselves along the link your file opened."
"The 0.9%," I said.
He nodded.
"That external echo wasn't a ghost in the Archive," he said. "It was them, lodged in a corner we couldn't quite scrub. When your case lit up with familiar patterns, they hitched a ride."
"You make it sound intentional," Echo said.
"It is," Gabriel said. "They have no body, no login, no badge. But they have conviction and a talent for breaking interfaces. That's enough to be dangerous."
On the wall, the text reorganized, smaller and faster, like someone thinking out loud.
NOOR.
Just my name, underlined so hard the concrete seemed to dent.
"They know you," Gabriel said.
"That's funny," I said. "I don't remember meeting them."
"You haven't," he said. "Not in ways you'd recognize. You are… the next iteration of a problem they once were very interested in."
Another line.
YOU WANT TO VANISH. SO DID I.
"I don't want to vanish," I said automatically. "I want to exist without being—"
TURNED INTO CONTENT, the wall finished.
My throat closed.
"That line," I said. "In the Shelving Floor. That was them."
Gabriel didn't take his hand away.
"Pilot-03 understood the cost of narrative very quickly," he said. "Quicker than anyone upstairs. They refused all offers to frame their case as a lesson. They would rather have been erased entirely than turned into an example."
"And you're saying that… failed," I said.
He looked at me.
"Look at the wall," he said.
YOU CLOSED ME, the earlier words said. YOU STILL USE ME.
"If erasure had succeeded," Gabriel said, "we wouldn't be having this conversation."
The hum surged. The letters smeared sideways, as if the wall were trying to speak faster than its surface allowed.
YOU THINK YOU CAN SOFTEN IT. TRAIN THEM BETTER. YOU'RE JUST MAKING PRETTIER CAGES.
He closed his eyes for a moment.
"I'm not your enemy," he said quietly.
The writing answered.
YOU'RE NOT MY FRIEND EITHER.
Echo exhaled softly.
"I like them," they whispered. "Terrifying, but relatable."
"Can they… hear us?" I asked.
"Room 0 doesn't have microphones," Gabriel said. "But whatever is left of them can read state changes in the system. When you speak, you alter that state. They're… inferring."
"So they're guessing my jokes?" Echo said. "Impressive."
Another line appeared.
I KNOW ENOUGH.
Then, beneath it:
NOOR. WHAT DID YOU DO WITH YOUR THREADS?
I swallowed.
"I cut them," I said. "With help."
The wall scratched.
GOOD.
"And you?" I asked. "What did you do with yours?"
The letters hesitated.
GABRIEL CUT THEM.
Gabriel opened his eyes.
"I did what I was told," he said. "And what I thought would prevent worse stories."
"You sound like my clerk," I said. "Right before she handed me the death certificate."
"I am your clerk," he said. "Just over a different set of forms."
On the wall, a new sentence pushed through, more jagged.
HE THINKS HE CAN USE YOU TO FIX WHAT HE DID TO ME.
Gabriel's jaw tightened.
"Always so charitable," he murmured.
"Is it true?" I asked.
He looked at me.
"I think we are standing at a point in the system where an adjustment could be made," he said. "One that might reduce the number of cases like yours. And theirs."
"By doing what?" Echo asked. "Turning Noor into a design consultant?"
"If he consents," Gabriel said. "Yes."
I laughed, bright and humorless.
"You want me to help you write the module that uses me," I said. "How generous."
"I want you to help rewrite how we use anyone," he said. "The way we train, the way we frame. You've already proven you can sever the most dangerous threads—family, ideology, personal loyalty—without turning anyone into a martyr. That's… rare. We could build protocols around that."
"I didn't do it for you," I said.
"I know," he said. "That's why it worked."
The wall wrote over his words.
HE WILL OFFER YOU PURPOSE. A SEAT AT THE TABLE. YOU'LL BECOME A STORYTELLER FOR THEM.
Gabriel shook his head slightly.
"I'm offering you influence," he said. "And information. You want to know why this place exists? Why Null was built the way it was? Help me, and I can show you parts of the architecture you won't find in any training video."
"You're bribing him with lore," Echo said. "That's dirty."
"Knowledge is the only bribe I have," Gabriel said calmly. "Budget is upstairs."
I sat very still.
The hum, the concrete, the white hair, the scratched sentences—it all blurred into different versions of the same dilemma.
Be used, or disappear badly.
"You said we can't stop stories," I said. "Only influence which ones survive."
"Yes," he said.
"What if I don't want to be part of any story?" I asked.
"Then you have already failed," Pilot-03 wrote on the wall.
Gabriel's eyes flicked to the new line.
"They're not wrong," he said quietly. "You exist in the system. You affect it. Even your refusal becomes data. The question is not 'Will I be content?' but 'Who benefits from the content I become?'"
"That's a horrifying way to phrase ethics," Echo said.
"Welcome to policy," he said.
I felt tired down to the bones I didn't technically have anymore.
"You want me to help you make… better cages," I said.
"I want you to help design doors," he said.
There was no triumph in his voice. No salesman lilt. Just calm conviction, like a man explaining how a lock works.
"What happens if I say no?" I asked.
"Officially," he said, "nothing. You remain Observation Cohort. You continue cutting threads or not, we continue watching, Pilot-03 continues scratching at the walls until someone higher up decides to flush Level -3 for 'stability.'"
"And unofficially?" Echo asked.
"Unofficially," he said, "you become the second P3-case I fail. I'd prefer not to collect them."
The wall disagreed.
YOU DON'T GET TO FIX ME BY FIXING HIM.
"I'm not trying to fix you," he said. "You're beyond my scope."
The letters sprawled.
GOOD.
I pinched the bridge of my nose.
"Pilot-03," I said. "What do you want from me?"
For a moment, nothing.
Then:
DON'T LET HIM TURN YOU INTO A TOOL.
"That's not specific," I said.
TOO LATE, Gabriel murmured.
"I heard that," the wall scratched.
Echo snorted despite themself.
"This is the worst group therapy I've ever attended," they said.
Gabriel sat back down, hands flat on the table.
"Noor," he said. "Here is what I can promise, if you agree to work with me."
"I don't remember saying I was close to agreeing," I said.
"You haven't walked out," he said. "That's closeness."
He counted on his fingers.
"First," he said, "I will get you access to the parts of your own case you haven't seen. Every memo. Every risk assessment. Every draft of the module based on you. No more being talked about in rooms you can't enter."
"Which you can do because?" I asked.
"Because I have keys," he said. "And because Oversight wants to see what you do with them."
"Second," he went on, "I will push for structural changes in how P-class cases are handled using the data you generate. Fewer secret Level -3s. More transparency in post-incident protocols."
"And third?" Echo said.
"Third," he said, "I will tell you what actually happened to Pilot-03."
The hum dipped, then flared.
The wall etched, desperate.
NO.
"You've had your veto already," he said to the concrete. "You wasted it telling me to go to hell."
He looked back at me.
"Knowing may not help you," he said. "But ignorance has its own cost."
I thought of Shelving Floor. Of the carved sentence. Of my mother's hands around a cup. Of Ben's email to himself: stop.
Of my own file, pinned like a butterfly under an override flag.
"You could just tell me now," I said. "For free."
"I could," he said. "But then you'd have no reason to come back."
I hated the logic.
I hated that it made sense.
The wall wrote, slower now, the strokes uneven.
HE WILL ALWAYS CHOOSE THE STORY.
"I will always choose the lesser harm," Gabriel said quietly. "When I can see it. That's the best I can offer."
"You sound very sure you can tell which harm is lesser," Echo said.
"I'm not," he said. "But someone is going to decide. I'd rather it be a man who's closed a case like this and still loses sleep over it, than a committee who only sees the graph."
The room felt very small.
No walls, no doors, just converging pressures.
I looked at him.
"Why me?" I asked. "Out of everyone they've killed on paper, why am I your new project?"
His gaze stayed steady.
"Because you did something no one expected," he said. "You stepped into Null willingly, and then you spent your first weeks dismantling your own afterlife. You refused martyrdom, refused revival, refused quiet assimilation. You cut your threads with surgical precision in ways that reduced harm without feeding the Archive."
"That was the job," I said.
"You turned it into more than a job," he said. "You turned it into a statement. Even if you won't admit that."
On the wall:
CAREFUL. YOU'RE FLATTERING HIM.
Gabriel shook his head.
"He hates flattery," he said. "That's why I chose him."
"You keep saying 'chose,'" I said. "Like I'm not also a statistic."
"You're both," he said. "Human and data. That tension is exactly why you're useful."
Useful.
The ugliest compliment.
I stood up.
Echo straightened, alert.
"Is this the part where we fight?" they murmured. "Because I didn't bring a weapon, unless sarcasm counts."
"No," I said. "No fights."
The hum had faded slightly, as if Pilot-03's one percent was tiring. The letters on the wall were trembling, the edges fraying.
NOOR.
Just my name again.
DON'T LET THEM WRITE THE END FOR YOU.
"We're already in the epilogue," I said.
THEN TEAR THE PAGES.
Gabriel watched me like he was measuring how much weight the words had.
I met his gaze.
"I'm not saying yes," I said. "But I'm not saying no."
"Conditional interest," Echo translated. "He's been to university."
"What conditions?" Gabriel asked.
"First," I said, "you bring Samira in on whatever we do. I'm not sneaking around my own handler like a teenager. She's earned better. And so have I."
A flicker of something—surprise or respect—moved across his face.
"Agreed," he said. "She's more competent than most of my colleagues anyway."
"Second," I said, "you show me the module. The full, current version. Not the sanitized training cut. Every frame. And you don't talk over it."
"I can do that," he said.
"Third," I said, "you don't get to decide unilaterally when I'm done. If I want out, I get out."
"That one," he said, "is harder."
"Then say it," I said. "Say you can't."
He exhaled.
"I can't guarantee a clean exit," he said. "But I can promise I won't trap you without telling you that's what I'm doing."
Echo groaned.
"Nothing like ethically sourced manipulation," they said.
"And one more," I added.
Gabriel waited.
"If I do this," I said, "it's not to help you fix your conscience about Pilot-03. It's because I still believe no one deserves to be turned into content. If I catch you using me to soften that, I walk."
He smiled, very slightly.
"That," he said, "is exactly why this might work."
The wall shuddered.
The last line appeared, faint, like chalk on wet stone.
WE'LL SEE.
Then the writing began to crumble, the letters dissolving back into grey.
The hum faded to the normal background thrum of Null.
Gabriel lowered his hand. The pale lines under his skin dimmed.
He looked tired now. Human-tired, not program-tired. A thin bead of blood trickled from one nostril. He wiped it away with the back of his hand, almost absently.
"You okay?" Echo asked.
"Anchoring a residual takes effort," he said. "Room 0 isn't supposed to host three agendas at once."
"Three?" I said.
"Pilot-03's," he said. "Mine. And now yours."
The not-blood-blood on his hand was an answer to a question I hadn't known I was asking: how mortal he was.
More than I'd thought.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a card. Not plastic. Actual card, heavy stock, edges slightly worn. He slid it across the table.
White, blank, except for a tiny printed symbol in the corner—two circles, overlapping, with an arrow between them. Echo Theatre's icon.
"What's this?" I asked.
"Access," he said. "To a version of the Theatre they don't show in tours. Bring Samira. Bring Echo. Or don't. But if you use it, do it with your eyes open."
I held the card.
It was absurd, how something so small could feel heavy.
"When?" I asked.
"Soon," he said. "Oversight will calm down from this incident in two or three cycles. They'll pretend it was noise. That's when we move. While they think they're in control."
"And Pilot-03?" Echo asked, glancing at the wall.
Gabriel looked at the fading scars.
"They'll rest," he said. "For a while. That outburst will cost them. But they're not gone. The system never really deletes anything. It just buries it under new updates."
I slipped the card into my pocket.
"I'll think about it," I said.
He nodded.
"That's all I wanted to hear," he said.
Echo raised a hand.
"One question," they said.
"Only one?" he replied.
"For now," they said. "Do you regret it? Closing them."
He looked at the wall, at the place where the words had been.
"Yes," he said, simply. "And no. And I think I always will. That's why I'm still useful."
He sat back down.
"You can find your own way out," he said. "Room 0 doesn't like to hold people who haven't agreed to be held."
The door behind us—if it had ever really been a door—shivered, as if a breeze had passed through solid metal.
Echo and I stepped back into the corridor.
The wall folded itself closed, leaving nothing but blank grey and a small panel with a single digit.
0
"On a scale of one to ten," Echo said quietly, "how bad an idea is it to trust him?"
"Eleven," I said. "On a scale of zero to Pilot-03."
"And yet," they said.
"And yet," I agreed.
We walked back toward the stairwell.
At the end of the corridor, I looked back.
The wall of Room 0 was just a wall.
But if I squinted, I could almost see the faintest trace of letters, like a sentence someone had tried very hard to paint over.
YOU DON'T GET TO CLOSE A CASE LIKE ME.
Level -3 hummed around us. Above, Null's mapped floors went on with their humming routines: cases, coffees, training modules. Somewhere in that architecture, a new line was being written into my file. Not closure; not error.
Something else.
I touched the card in my pocket.
Upstairs, in a Theatre that taught people how not to kill citizens by accident, there was a version of my life playing on a loop.
Down here, in a room that officially didn't exist, an old failure had just breathed for the first time in years.
Between them, a man with white hair and steady hands had asked me to help decide which story survived.
As beginnings went, it wasn't clean.
But it was a beginning.
Act tenth's End - "watching me, watching you".