Ansel had stopped counting the scratches on the wall.
They didn't matter anymore.
Not when the walls had started bleeding.
He sat curled in the corner of the room he'd renamed his "prison of forgetting," arms wrapped tightly around his knees, staring at the place where her name used to be.
MIRA.
Carved a thousand times, again and again. His fingers were raw, pink ribbons where fingernails had worn away. The building had swallowed the word whole days ago. Or hours. Time didn't mean anything here.
But now… something was wrong.
Not the usual distortion—not the shifting angles or stretching hallways or the low humming that made your bones itch.
This was deeper.
The air had changed. The whole place had gone tense, like a held breath.
The pipes above his head began to groan—long, metallic sobs threaded with whispers. The floor vibrated faintly under his feet. The walls, which usually pulsed with that slow, smug rhythm of control, were fluttering.
Off-beat.
Uneven.
He pressed his hand against the spot where the name had once been. Just a wall now. Damp. Breathing.
And yet—
A sound like a sob passed through the room.
Not his.
The building's.
He inhaled sharply. Something had shifted. The scream—it had torn through everything earlier, not like anything he'd ever heard. Not like the building's usual moans or Mira's cries in the dark. This was different.
Core-deep.
He didn't know what she'd done, but the place was reeling.
And that meant one thing.
She was alive.
Still fighting.
Ansel pushed himself to his feet. His legs were numb, half-dead from disuse, but he forced them into motion. He limped toward the wall again, pressed his bloody palm flat to it, and whispered, "Her name is Mira."
The wall flinched. Subtle. But real.
He said it again, louder this time.
"Mira."
A crack formed. Tiny. Jagged. Leaking something dark and thick like tar.
He leaned in, voice hoarse with use. "MIRA."
The wall didn't swallow the word.
It remembered.
And with a bone-snapping lurch, the entire room twisted sideways.
Ansel screamed as the floor vanished beneath him—not downward, but sideways, like gravity had misread its own rules. His shoulder slammed into a door that hadn't been there a second ago. It exploded inward, and he tumbled out into a hallway that pulsed with sick light.
He landed on a carpet soaked with something warm, coughing, blinking, barely catching his breath.
The corridor was different.
It smelled like wet ash and burnt hair. The wallpaper was melting off in long, fleshy strips. Everything dripped. Everything breathed.
And directly ahead—on the far wall—a mural.
Painted in blood.
His name.
Over and over.
Ansel. Ansel. Ansel.
But each repetition bent slightly. The letters twisted. The strokes were wrong, like the building was trying to remember him, but couldn't quite get the shape right.
He stood slowly. Legs shaky but firm.
The corridor stretched out like a throat, lined with broken furniture and shattered glass. From behind him, he heard the scrape of something soft dragging across the floor.
Then a voice.
Low. Familiar.
"Mira brought you back."
Ansel froze.
From the shadows ahead, a figure stepped into the light.
It looked like a man. But it wasn't.
Dressed in a half-shredded hospital gown. Face pale, undefined, like someone had forgotten to finish drawing it. One eye socket was hollow. The other was full of static. A flicker of Ansel's own reflection pulsed behind the noise.
The thing smiled.
Too wide.
"She cracked the Core," it said. "She tore open the old names. And now you... you've leaked out of the cracks."
"I'm not like you," Ansel said, his voice steady.
"No," it said, tilting its head. "You're worse. You remember her."
It raised its hand and pulled something from its chest.
A shard of mirror.
Cracked. Bloody. Sharp.
"Want to see what she remembers about you?"
Ansel didn't move.
"I know who I am."
The thing chuckled. "No one does in here. Not for long. That's the point."
Behind it, doors began to open.
One after another.
Fast.
And from each one, the forgotten poured out.
Faceless men and women. Children with blank stares and glassy eyes. People stitched together from fragments—father's arms, stranger's voice, empty skin. All of them flickering, unsure of their forms.
All of them angry.
The doppelgänger stepped aside and gestured like a magician revealing his trick. "The building remembers you now. Not just as Ansel. But as the flaw. The breach. The one who brought her back."
They surged.
Ansel turned and ran.
The hallway snapped and reformed around him. Angles buckled. Gravity bucked. Doors slammed behind him in a staccato rhythm, the walls groaning with pain. His lungs burned. His vision tunneled.
But Mira's voice pushed him forward.
He burst through a collapsed archway and slammed the door behind him, jamming a broken chair beneath the handle.
He was inside a theater.
Rows of empty seats.
A blank screen, flickering with static.
He staggered toward the stage, heart racing, chest heaving. Blood soaked his palms.
Then—the screen flickered.
A face appeared.
Mira.
Not now. Then.
Sixteen, maybe. Young. Bruised. Tired. Sitting in front of a camera. Hands shaking in her lap.
"If anyone finds this…" she whispered. "If the building takes me… If I forget…"
She looked up.
"Ansel."
His name. Clear. Steady.
And when she said it, the screen glowed brighter. The static behind her faded.
"I don't want to forget you," she said. "You were the first to believe me. When everyone said I was crazy. Even when I told you about the room that remembers—you believed. You came for me. You always do."
The screen glitched.
But Ansel had heard it.
She had left it for him.
A tether.
An anchor.
He stood slowly. The room shook with distant thuds—bodies slamming against the locked doors.
The forgotten wanted in.
But now, he wasn't afraid.
He looked at the screen. Mira's young face, eyes wide with fear and hope.
"I'm not just a crack," he whispered. "I'm the anchor."
He turned as the back wall of the theater began to bend inward.
Fists.
Hands.
Voices rising in a tidal moan.
He smiled.
Let them come.
He knew who he was now.
He knew who he was fighting for.
And the building?
It had spent too long feeding on grief.
Now, it would choke on memory...
Ansel has reentered the maze—but this time, the building can't erase him so easily. Mira carved his name into the walls of its memory. Now, hunted by the forgotten, facing his own fractured reflection, Ansel steps into a purpose larger than himself: he is the anchor. The one who remembers for both of them.