"Veyric... Don’t let me out."
The voice came from beneath the cracked street, carrying my own rhythm, my own pauses, even the slight roughness that appeared when I was tired. That last detail frightened me more than the voice itself because I had never heard anyone imitate it so precisely, and whatever waited underground had somehow learned things about me that I had never told another person.
Nyelle caught my wrist. "Don’t answer it."
"I wasn’t planning to."
"You were looking at the crack like you wanted to."
I dragged my eyes away from the blue light spilling between the broken slabs. She wasn’t wrong, which irritated me more than it should have. Something beneath us was calling me by name, and despite everything that had happened, a part of me wanted to know why.
The stranger stepped between us and the widening fracture. "We need to move."
"Where?" I asked. "The street is breaking apart, the buildings are covered in those silver lines, and something underneath us is apparently using my voice. I’d appreciate a direction that doesn’t involve another mysterious door."
He glanced at the buildings surrounding us, then toward the end of the street where the pale-eyed figure had disappeared. "Away from the opening."
"That narrows it down to the parts of the street that haven’t collapsed."
"Veyric." Nyelle tightened her grip on my wrist. "Move first. Complain later."
For once, I had nothing useful to say to that.
We started toward the nearest building, keeping away from the blue light. The stranger moved ahead of us, watching the road rather than the sky, and I followed with Nyelle close beside me. My ribs hurt with every hurried breath, my injured shoulder had begun to stiffen again, and the dried blood beside my ear pulled whenever I turned my head, but none of those problems mattered as much as the sound following us beneath the pavement.
"Veyric."
I kept walking.
"Please."
The voice sounded younger now. Not exactly like a child, but close enough to make me think of the little boy I had been before I learned that adults could lie, promises could fail, and people could disappear without leaving anything behind except questions.
Nyelle stumbled.
I caught her before she fell. "What happened?"
She stared at the ground behind us, her face drained of color. "It used your voice."
"I heard it."
"No." Her fingers dug into my sleeve. "It used the voice you had when you were little."
The words stopped me more effectively than any threat could have.
I looked at her. "How would you know what I sounded like?"
She opened her mouth, then closed it again. Her eyes moved toward the crack in the road, where the blue light had begun to pulse beneath the silver veins.
"I don’t remember everything," she whispered. "But I remember hearing you cry."
A heavy impact shook the street.
The crack widened behind us, throwing pieces of concrete into the air. Something struck the underside of the road again, and this time the sound travelled through the buildings, rattling windows and shaking dust from the walls. The stranger seized my arm and pulled me forward just as the pavement split across the place where we had been standing.
We ran.
A section of the road dropped into darkness, taking a parked vehicle and half a streetlamp with it. Blue light surged from the opening, briefly illuminating shapes that moved far below, too large and distant to understand. I caught one glimpse of a surface resembling stone, then something shifted beneath it, and the light vanished as though a massive body had passed between us and whatever lay underneath.
The voice did not call again.
That frightened me almost as much as the collapse.
We reached the building and ducked through its shattered entrance. The lobby had once belonged to a small office complex, judging by the reception desk and the faded company logo on the wall, but the floor had buckled and several columns were covered in silver lines. The stranger checked the windows before motioning us toward a corridor at the rear.
"Can you tell me what that thing is?" I asked.
"No."
"Can you tell me what it wants?"
He hesitated. "It wants you to answer."
"That isn’t the same as telling me what it wants."
"No," he said. "It isn’t."
I studied him as we moved. He was afraid, but not in the way he had been when the pale-eyed figure appeared; then, his fear had been mixed with recognition, as though he had encountered something he knew enough to avoid. This time, he kept glancing at me, and every time our eyes met, he looked away first.
"You’ve heard that voice before," I said.
"I’ve heard voices come from places they shouldn’t."
"That’s not what I asked."
"I know."
He stopped beside a doorway and looked back toward the entrance. For a moment, the only sound was the distant collapse of concrete and the faint, irregular vibration passing through the building.
"Twenty-four years ago," he said, "the structure reacted to your birth. The people inside the facility thought they had activated something they could control, but after the reaction began, they stopped behaving like researchers. They behaved like people who had discovered that their experiment was looking back at them."
"Looking back at what?"
"That’s the part I never saw."
It was an answer, at least. Not a satisfying one, but more honest than the explanations he had been avoiding.
Before I could press him further, Nyelle made a small sound beside me. She had been staring at a silver line running along the corridor wall, following its uneven path toward a closed office door. The line had begun to glow more brightly, and a second one was appearing beneath it, forming a symbol I had seen too many times to mistake.
Three overlapping circles.
"Nyelle?" I asked.
She didn’t respond.
I touched her shoulder with my good hand. She flinched, then looked at me as though she had just returned from somewhere far away.
"I’ve seen this room," she said.
"We’re in a corridor."
"No. Not this room." She pointed toward the closed office door. "The room behind it."
The stranger approached the door but didn’t touch it. "What do you remember?"
Nyelle shook her head, visibly fighting to hold on to something just beyond her reach. "White walls. A table. Someone telling me to stay quiet." Her gaze shifted to me. "And you were crying."
My stomach tightened.
"Was I a baby?" I asked.
"I think so."
"Who else was there?"
Her lips parted, but the answer never came. Instead, the silver symbol brightened, and a sharp pain travelled from my right palm to my elbow. I stumbled against the wall, clutching my hand as warmth spread beneath my skin.
The System appeared.
[MEMORY RESPONSE DETECTED.]
I stared at the message.
A second line emerged, flickered, and vanished before I could finish reading it. The remaining text held steady for several seconds.
[EXTERNAL RESPONSE: APPROACHING.]
Then the display disappeared.
"What did it say?" Nyelle asked.
"Something is approaching."
The stranger immediately stepped away from the door. "We need to leave this building."
"Because of the message?"
"Because the last time a structure responded like that, everything inside the facility began answering something outside it."
A low knock came from behind the office door.
All three of us froze.
It was a simple sound, almost polite, like someone waiting for permission to enter a room. After everything we had seen, that ordinary little knock felt grotesquely out of place.
Then it came again.
Nyelle backed away from the door. I moved in front of her, lifting the metal pipe I had carried since the first day, although I knew perfectly well that a pipe wouldn’t help much against whatever had been calling from beneath the street.
"Who’s there?" I asked.
The stranger grabbed my uninjured arm. "Don’t."
I looked at him. "You told me not to answer the thing underground. This is a door."
"Veyric, listen to me."
A third knock sounded.
This time, the voice came from the other side.
"I’m sorry."
My grip tightened around the pipe.
I knew that voice. Not from the System, not from a memory that might have been planted inside my head, and not from something imitating the people I loved.
I knew it because I had spent years trying to remember every ordinary thing about the person who used to say those words when she thought she had disappointed me.
My mother’s voice.
Nyelle made a broken sound behind me. "Mom?"
The stranger pulled her back before she could take a step.
"That’s not her," he said.
The door handle began to turn.
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe that my mother was alive somewhere, that the voice behind the door was a trick, and that the woman we had glimpsed in the street had been nothing more than another cruel imitation. But the handle turned slowly, without a sound, and a thin line of silver light appeared beneath the door.
Then my mother spoke again.
"Veyric, sweetheart. Open the door."
My hand moved before I could stop it.
The stranger caught my wrist.
"Look at me," he ordered.
I barely heard him. Every part of me had narrowed to that voice, to the familiar tenderness in the word sweetheart, to a memory I couldn’t fully reach but desperately wanted to believe was real.
"Your mother never called you that in the facility," the stranger said.
I looked at him.
His expression had changed. He was no longer simply afraid of what stood behind the door; he looked as though he had finally understood why the thing beneath the city had been calling my name.
"She called you something else," he whispered. "Something the researchers were terrified of hearing."
The door opened a fraction.
From the darkness beyond it, my own voice answered.
"Let me out."
And somewhere beneath the building, something knocked back.