The inside of W-03 felt nothing like Helix Crown.
There were no glass walls. No open spaces. No architectural attempts at elegance. The corridors were low and wide, built for transport rather than people. The lighting was steady and pale, without warmth or shadow, as if the building had decided emotion was inefficient.
They were processed quickly.
Badges replaced. Biometrics recorded. Personal items scanned and sealed. The airlock doors slid open and closed with a hydraulic patience that made Tae-Hyun acutely aware of how far he now was from anything public.
A woman in a gray administrative coat led them down a long central hall.
"You'll be assigned quarters and departments within the hour," she said. "Movement outside designated zones is restricted. Communication devices will be registered. All requests go through operations."
No one asked questions.
They rarely did, in places like this.
The group split at the first junction. Medical staff turned left. Security followed a separate passage. Tae-Hyun and three others were guided down a narrower corridor marked LOGISTICS – INTAKE & STORAGE.
The temperature dropped again.
This wing reminded him of B11, but stretched wider, deeper. Transport rails ran along the ceiling. Sealed doors lined both sides of the hall, each marked with a code and a small status light.
Green.
Yellow.
A few dimmed to red.
"Your work supports internal distribution," the supervisor said. "You move what you're told to move. You log what you're told to log. You don't open sealed units."
The man stopped before a reinforced door and scanned his badge.
"This is your primary zone."
The door parted.
Cold air flowed out.
Inside lay a storage bay twice the size of anything beneath Helix Crown. Cryogenic vaults stood in organized rows. Mobile containment units rested on magnetic docks. Automated lifts moved silently along tracks embedded in the floor.
Tae-Hyun stepped inside.
The hum within him responded immediately.
Here, it was heavier.
Diffuse.
Like standing near a deep current rather than a narrow stream.
This place held more than material.
It held accumulation.
"You'll start on secondary intake," the supervisor continued. "Shipments arrive every night. Some go inland. Some stay."
"Stay where?" one of the workers asked.
The man looked at him.
"Inside," he said.
No one asked again.
Tae-Hyun spent the first hours learning routes.
Which doors led to cold storage.
Which to live containment.
Which to internal transfer tunnels that stretched toward unseen parts of the complex.
He noted which areas required dual authorization.
Which were guarded.
Which were left to machines.
The most heavily protected wing lay beyond a series of pressure doors marked only with a symbol—a circle intersected by three vertical lines.
No words.
No department label.
The air near that corridor felt wrong.
Not threatening.
Unsettled.
The hum inside him thinned when he passed it, then slowly reorganized once he moved away.
He made himself useful.
Efficient.
Quiet.
The kind of worker people stopped noticing.
By the end of the first shift, he had been scanned four times, logged twice, and reassigned once without explanation.
They were watching.
But not yet closely.
His assigned quarters were small and impersonal. A bed. A desk. A sealed window that displayed a feed of the shoreline rather than the shoreline itself.
He sat on the edge of the mattress and closed his eyes.
Focused inward.
The internal rhythm was different here. Broader. Slower. As if the environment itself had mass.
He touched the bio-monitor beneath his sleeve.
It pulsed once.
Steady.
He activated it briefly, long enough to confirm transmission.
Then shut it down again.
He needed to remain quiet.
That night, he dreamed of water.
Dark and cold, moving over something vast and unseen.
On the third day, he heard his first name.
Not his.
Yoon's.
Two supervisors stood near a control station reviewing shipment data.
"…the chairman wants this wing stabilized before the end of the month," one said. "He's not satisfied with B9's output."
"Is he coming here?" the other asked.
"Not personally," the first replied. "But his people already have."
The second man nodded. "Figures. This site was always his."
Tae-Hyun kept his gaze on the crate he was logging.
His hands didn't slow.
But something settled into place.
This facility wasn't a branch.
It was a possession.
Later that night, while transferring a sealed mobile unit to an interior dock, he felt it.
A focused disturbance.
Close.
Contained.
Alive.
The unit's surface was marked for automated movement only. No personnel access. No content declaration.
The hum within him tightened.
Not sharply.
Curiously.
He rested his palm lightly against the side of the container.
For a moment, the sense was faint.
Then something answered.
A compressed biological signature pressed back through the insulated shell—patterned, aware, struggling against heavy sedation.
His breath slowed.
Whatever this place truly existed for…
it was closer than he'd expected.
He withdrew his hand and completed the transfer.
But as the unit slid away along its track and disappeared through an interior door, the sensation remained.
A thread.
And he knew, with quiet certainty, that following it would lead him to the core of W-03.