After that night, Tae-Hyun began counting doors.
Sector E had thirty-seven rooms.
By the third shift there, he knew which ones were occupied, which lights dimmed at specific hours, which screens displayed neurological patterns and which monitored cardiac stability.
Room E-17 sat slightly apart from the others.
Closer to the inner corridor.
Its systems ran quieter.
Its status light never changed.
He found himself walking past it more often than his assignments required.
He told himself it was observation.
The truth felt thinner each time.
The woman inside E-17 was usually awake.
Sometimes she lay still, eyes closed, the slow rise of her chest syncing with the faint rhythm of the ceiling lights. Sometimes she watched the room around her with a calm attention that didn't belong to someone confined.
Once, he saw her tracing small shapes on the sheet with her fingers.
Once, he saw her turn her head slightly before anyone entered, as if she felt motion before it happened.
Every time he passed, the hum inside him shifted.
Quiet.
Focused.
As if something inside him had found a familiar pattern and was adjusting its breathing around it.
On the seventh night, he was assigned to equipment sanitation in Sector E after midnight. The corridors had emptied. The overhead system pulsed at half-light. Even the sea outside felt distant, its sound reduced to a slow, hollow movement beyond the walls.
He moved from room to room, cleaning control panels, logging routine checks.
When he reached E-17, he paused.
He hadn't planned to.
The door was transparent, its surface faintly reflective. His own shape stood between him and the room.
The woman lay on her side, facing outward.
Her eyes were open.
Already on him.
The space between them felt awake.
He stepped closer.
Her gaze followed.
No confusion.
No fear.
Recognition.
Something in his chest tightened gently.
He raised a hand, resting it against the glass.
The hum responded immediately, gathering in a way he had begun to understand. Not reaching. Listening.
Her breathing changed.
A shallow inhale.
A longer exhale.
The lights above her bed shifted almost imperceptibly.
He felt her presence more clearly now—a structured biological field, layered and contained, like a city sealed beneath glass.
Her lips moved.
The sound system in the room was inactive. He couldn't hear her.
He leaned closer.
She spoke again.
This time, he read it.
"Can you… feel me?"
The question landed inside him before it reached thought.
He nodded once.
Her eyes softened.
"Good," she whispered, though he still couldn't hear it. He knew the word anyway.
He slid his palm slowly along the glass until it aligned with where her heart would be.
The hum deepened.
The sensation sharpened into something intimate and precise. He could sense her internal rhythms, the quiet complexity of her system, the strange balance holding her together.
She lifted her hand.
Placed it against the glass from her side.
The contact was mediated by layers of engineered material.
The response was not.
His breath slowed.
So did hers.
In that stillness, a new awareness surfaced between them.
She was not waiting.
She was monitoring.
Studying herself.
Studying him.
"You're like me," her lips formed.
The words unsettled him.
"No," he said softly.
He hadn't meant to speak aloud.
But the room was empty.
The cameras angled elsewhere.
The building breathed around them, indifferent.
Her gaze sharpened slightly.
"Not the same," she corrected, reading his mouth. "But close."
He watched her carefully.
"How long have you been here?" he asked.
She looked upward, as if searching the ceiling for something.
Then back at him.
"Long enough for the days to stop lining up," she said.
A pause.
"Long enough to know they're preparing us."
"For what?"
Her fingers pressed lightly against the glass.
"For integration."
The word slid through him like cold water.
"Into what?" he asked.
Her eyes moved briefly toward the deeper corridor beyond her room.
Then returned to him.
"Something that doesn't live here yet," she said.
He held her gaze.
"Do you have a name?"
She hesitated.
Then nodded once.
"Eun-chae," she said.
He repeated it quietly.
"Eun-chae."
The hum inside him reorganized.
Not sharply.
Purposefully.
A voice sounded down the corridor.
Footsteps.
He withdrew his hand.
She watched him step back.
Before he turned away, her lips moved one last time.
"Come again."
He inclined his head slightly.
Then continued down the corridor, the rhythm of his steps measured, his expression empty to any camera that might glance his way.
But inside him, something had shifted.
A new thread had been added.
And he knew, with a certainty he could not yet explain, that whatever W-03 had been built to become…
Eun-chae stood closer to its center than anyone else he had seen.