Ty hated the pediatric hall more than the morgue.
The morgue had been cruel with honesty. Drawers, labels, steel, cold air. It told the body what kind of room it had entered.
The hall behind freezer B 3 wore painted fish on the walls.
Frost filmed over the cartoon eyes. Stickers peeled from cracked glass. Tiny plastic chairs sat bolted beneath a dead television, each chair built for a child who had once waited while adults used words like intake and overflow.
Someone had scraped at the ice on the television screen and left thin marks behind.
JJ stopped at the threshold.
"I hate this hallway more than the morgue already."
Yun-Jin looked at the chairs first, then at the blue line running from Ty’s missing finger back toward the cup.
"Children waited here, and Mercy kept the chairs."
Heissman tried for his usual voice and only found half of it.
"I am choosing the floor-plan explanation until evidence ruins me."
"This route likes ruining people with furniture and old waiting rooms."
Omina stood beside Ty and studied the old visitor badge floating ahead of them. Mara Whitlock’s name remained on it, along with the temporary escort title the route had dragged out of storage.
The badge drifted forward.
The floor remade itself one square at a time. Freezer grooves vanished under hospital tile. Warm air carried coffee gone sour, disinfectant, and plastic from a toy bin.
Ty hated the warmth. Cold had told the truth.
He pointed his sickle down the hall.
"Show us the object tied to Mason’s toy."
The badge stopped in front of a waist-high cabinet with pediatric temporary property printed on a yellow strip.
Omina lifted one hand.
"Evidence cabinets inside hostile routes earn caution first."
Ty kept the sickle low.
"The cabinet has a child’s toy shape inside it."
"That is exactly why caution comes before opening it."
The cabinet opened by itself.
Inside sat a clear plastic bag with a cracked label and nothing in it but the pressed outline of an old toy. Small claws. Crooked tail. One leg bent where tape had once held it wrong.
The cabinet identified the item as a green toy dinosaur with a damaged leg and tape repair. The temporary holder had been Kieran Stahl. The transfer had ended when the memory was removed.
Ty stared at the empty shape in the plastic. It bothered him more than a broken toy would have. A broken toy could still be held. This bag held the place where holding used to be.
He pictured Mason’s thumb rubbing the taped leg in the shelter cafeteria. The motion had looked small from the outside. Now it looked like a child checking whether one piece of the world still answered to him.
JJ’s face tightened.
"Mason is holding the dinosaur on our side."
The empty bag twitched when she said his name.
Ty’s missing finger burned blue in the cup behind them. The burn ran through the floor and reached the cabinet like a vein finding an old wound. The plastic bag folded inward, then held its shape again.
Yun-Jin took one step back.
"The records are bridging through the toy and finger."
The television above the tiny chairs clicked on.
Zunoder appeared with Ty’s living face.
The face had dirt in useful places, dried blood where a rescuer might have earned it, and exhaustion arranged into something civilians trusted. Ty looked at it and felt a sickness too old for the body he had now.
That was the worst part of the stolen face. It knew how to look tired in the right way. It knew how to make a stranger reach for water, a chair, a door held open. Zunoder wore rescue like a borrowed coat.
Zunoder smiled at the empty toy bag.
"Children remember bodies before explanations, especially when a body pulls them under a chair."
JJ lifted her panel.
"Nobody gives him answers he can turn into bait."
Zunoder looked at her through the screen.
"You keep saying that because you know answers have value."
Omina set a thin line of gold green aura around the cabinet.
"State the claim you think this toy proves."
"The child saw Ty’s body protect him before anyone explained a sponsor."
Zunoder let the sentence sit there, soft and rotten.
"Flesh and heat, hand and voice. The body acted first."
Ty stepped closer to the television. The glass reflected his skull over Zunoder’s borrowed face, and for one ugly angle the two lined up.
"The body did one good thing before you stole its face."
Zunoder’s smile cracked at the corner.
Heissman let out a soft laugh he probably should have kept.
"Useful fact accepted, ownership claim still denied by every sane standard."
Zunoder’s eyes moved to him.
"Words are expensive for people whose rooms keep changing."
"Words have survived rooms with worse opinions than yours."
The cabinet drawer slammed open hard enough to shake frost from the glass.
The route named Mason Bell as the current holder.
JJ pressed both hands to her panel.
"Earth side sees it, and Jade says Mason’s toy just moved."
The chairs scraped toward the television, a small motion that made the hall shrink.
Yun-Jin cut through the nearest chair leg before it moved again.
"Stop crowding the child through a toy he still needs."
The chair froze.
Omina glanced at her.
Yun-Jin kept her blade low.
"It listened because the toy is already connected."
Zunoder looked almost amused.
"The child already knows me as the body that saved him."
Ty touched the sickle point to the television glass.
"Say the child’s name as the record knows it."
"Mason Bell is the name the shelter likes using."
The empty bag trembled.
Ty pressed the sickle harder.
"That is the current child, not the removed memory."
Omina stepped in before Zunoder could twist the correction.
"Mason Bell is the current witness, and Stahl is the removed record."
Heissman nodded once.
"That is clean enough to make me suspicious."
The television image distorted. Zunoder’s face stretched into a shape the screen could barely hold, then snapped back into black.
The cabinet spat out a narrow strip of paper offering forced child testimony and naming witness fracture as the cost.
Its calm was the ugly part, turning fracture into a filing fee and child pain into a processing step before the memory came out.
Ty read it once and felt the want hit him before he could make his hand still.
There was proof behind Mason’s fear: the face in the waiting room, the body that had protected the child, and the thread tying Erebos, Zunoder, Ty, Jade, and the missing memory into a claim the route would have trouble swallowing.
JJ saw the want.
"Ty, remember who pays if you take that shortcut."
He looked at the empty toy bag and thought of Jade kneeling in Mercy with rain in her hair, of a child under a chair with a taped dinosaur, of every adult tonight who had wanted the useful part of Mason before asking what it cost him to give it.
"Forced testimony stays off the table for Mason."
The tiny chairs turned toward him together.
One chair dragged its bolted feet hard enough to leave white scratches in the waxed tile. Another tipped forward until the front legs strained against the screws. The hall wanted a child fixed in a chair while adults called extraction a procedure.
JJ breathed out through her teeth.
"If we tear open a child for proof, we become the claim."
Heissman lifted one finger.
"Coerced testimony poisons the record before it helps the case."
"Mine sounds less dead inside, but keep yours too."
Omina kept her attention on the chairs.
"The witness stays a person, or Zunoder wins through our hands."
Ty watched the empty bag settle.
He wanted the answer. He wanted the camera angle, the old face, the sentence that would let him cut cleanly through the claim wearing his living skin.
Wanting proof gave him no right to use Mason as a tool.
"We wait until Mason can choose what he gives."
The overhead lights buzzed harder.
The cabinet tried to open again. Omina shut it with the heel of her hand and kept her palm there, gold green aura crawling between her fingers.
"No cabinet gets to ask twice after a refusal."
Yun-Jin tightened her grip on the bow.
"This place hates being forced to wait for consent."
"Good. It can hate something honest for once."
The badge drifted down the hall and stopped above the next door.
Waiting Room 214 had been scratched into the sign by hand.
Beneath the number, the route offered the last preserved memory: a child hidden under a chair.