Tonight the map of the Great End came back, but quieter.
No diagrams in the sky, no briefing voice, no Gabriel hovering at the edge of the frame. Just a platform hanging in dark air, a single yellow line painted along its edge, and three doors that all opened onto nowhere.
Echo stood on my left, Samira on my right.
We were barefoot. Our vests were gone. Nobody was wearing a badge.
The gate itself wasn't a door so much as an idea of one: a tall, thin rectangle of light that hummed like phone wires do when you put your ear against them. Beyond it, if you squinted, you could see the faint impressions of other places layered over each other—courts, hospitals, schools, offices, all blurred into one long corridor of fluorescent ceilings.
Above us, the threads moved.
They looked less like lines tonight and more like rivers, slow and heavy, pouring past overhead toward a dark hollow point I tried not to stare at.
"The route," Echo said softly. "It's bigger when you're awake inside it."
Their voice echoed oddly, doubled, as if the platform kept a copy of everything anyone said here.
"This isn't awake," Samira said. "This is a stress test."
"Everything we do is a stress test," Echo replied.
I could feel the gate watching us.
Not with eyes. With protocol.
Somewhere far away, Null was humming on its usual frequencies, and sets of rules were running in the background: handlers must report anomalies, subjects must comply, echoes must reflect. All of that was still true up there.
Down here, nothing had been written yet.
"Do you really think we can move through all of that?" I asked, nodding at the sky-rivers. "Three people and a stolen train ticket?"
Echo nudged my shoulder with theirs.
"You're not people, technically," they said. "You're a case file with legs. I'm a bad idea with a clearance code. Samira is a conscience they accidentally hired. Statistically, we're already impossible. Why stop now?"
I smiled. In the dream the movement felt fragile, like a glass cracking but not yet breaking.
Samira didn't smile.
She had her arms folded tightly across her chest, like she was holding her badge there even without wearing it.
"If we do this," she said, "I am betraying everything I signed. My oath, my training, the people who trusted me to keep their work safe. My mother didn't raise me to walk out of a burning building with the matches in my pocket."
"This building is the one lighting the fires," I said.
"I know," she snapped, then winced at herself. Her voice dropped. "That's what scares me."
The threads overhead shifted, as if listening.
"You think they're always watching," I said.
"I know they are," she said. "Every system I've ever worked in has ears. This one has more. If I step through that…" She nodded at the gate. "I become what we've been trained to call hostile. I lose my handler access. I lose the right to stand next to your file and say, 'I am here to protect you.'"
"You stay," I said, "you become the one who signs the forms that send the next version of me to the Pithole."
Silence after that. Not heavy, exactly. Thin. Stretching.
Echo sat down on the platform and let their feet dangle over the edge of the dark.
"You're afraid of betraying the system," they said to Samira. "I'm afraid of betraying us."
Samira looked at them.
"You're echo," she said. "You can't betray. You reflect."
Echo shrugged.
"Reflections lie all the time," they said. "Stand in front of a shop window and tell me you look exactly how you feel. We're allowed to choose what angle we show."
They looked up at the moving threads.
"Up there, I'm supposed to be an instrument," they said. "Down here, I can be a decision. I like that better."
They turned their head to me.
"I'll follow you," they said simply. "Anywhere. If you go through the Great End, I go. We're as one, Noor. That's the whole point of me. I don't know how to be separate anymore."
It was a confession and an anchor at the same time.
Samira exhaled, a long breath that trembled at the end.
"You two keep talking like this is romantic," she said. "It isn't. It's treason."
"Everything meaningful is treason to something," I said.
"Don't start making speeches," she said. "You know what that does to me."
I remembered. First day in the Office, her telling me she hated the word "justice" because it was always followed by a justification. How she stayed anyway.
"The system taught you to protect people," I said quietly. "It just forgot to tell you what to do when the danger is the system itself."
She stared at the gate.
In dream logic, sometimes you can see someone's thoughts in the air around them. Around Samira, I saw the inside of her flat, the stack of old handbooks in her closet, a younger version of her wearing a trainee vest she'd grown into with absolute seriousness.
I saw the faces of cases she'd saved from being misfiled. The ones she'd lost. The way she had memorised their names because the system refused to.
"I don't know how to be anything else," she whispered.
"Then don't be anything else," I said. "Be a handler. Just… change what you're handling."
She laughed, one sharp sound that startled the dark.
"Reassign myself," she said. "From the building to you."
"You already did," Echo said. "You just haven't filed it yet."
She closed her eyes.
When she opened them, the fear was still there, but it had changed shape. Less like a wall, more like a burden she'd decided to pick up instead of lie under.
"If we go," she said, "we go together. If we get lost, we get lost together. I am not letting either of you fall into that hole alone."
She looked up at the threads.
"And if they come for us," she added, "I want to be on the side that made them angry."
Echo grinned.
"There she is," they said. "Our very own righteous traitor."
The gate's light flared, briefly, like approval.
For a moment I could see little labels running along the threads overhead:
COURT-09
HOSPITAL-12
GRID-17
NULL-01
And, faintly, a new one, not yet written, just an outline where a word would go.
It felt like a space waiting for our name.
"I don't know how long we can survive out there," I said.
"Long enough," Echo said.
"Long enough for what?" I asked.
Samira stepped closer to the gate. Its light painted bones under her skin.
"Long enough to make them hesitate," she said. "Long enough to put a crack in the directive."
She held out her hand.
Dreams are generous with gestures. I took it. Echo did too.
We stood there, three bodies in a line, holding on to each other like a misfiled equation.
"We go where you go," Echo said, their fingers tightening. "As one."
"I will be afraid the whole time," Samira warned.
"Good," I said. "So will I."
The gate's hum rose.
The threads overhead shifted, a few of them bending minutely away from the Pithole, like grass when someone steps through it.
We did not step yet.
This was only a rehearsal, a ghost of a decision.
But when I woke up in my cot with the taste of static on my tongue and the Echo Theatre monitors muttering to themselves down the hall, I knew something had already been agreed.
In some quiet buffer zone between Null and the End, the dream had filed itself.
Memoir 003's End - "fatal dream end"