Chapter 358: Empty.

I picked up the tray and started for Sophia’s room.

That boy is going to be a problem.

Monica’s thoughts, clear and close, sliding through the wood of her closed door behind me.

He’s going to be an actual problem if we stay this close.

I stopped in the corridor with the tray in my hands. Two minutes ago she’d been face down on that small mattress letting a stranger work her spine, and now she was lying in there deciding what I was. The first move had landed and it had landed harder than I’d aimed it.

You need to tell me everything.

I put it to the system directly, because something in this cell wasn’t sitting right.

The sealed door at the far end had closed at dawn. The light through the hole in the ceiling had shifted from pale grey to the flat, colourless tone of evening. In all those hours neither Sophia nor Monica had stepped out of a room. Not once. Not to eat. Not to wash. Not to stand under the hole the way I had done four separate times.

Their food came to them. I’d carried it.

And I’d been in both their heads all day, because there was nothing else down here to do.

[ You don’t need to worry about anything. As I told you earlier. This is the best possible place to be if you intend to extract two sources. ]

You keep saying that.

I started walking again. The tray was light. Institutional. The same anonymous portion that had been coming through the gap all day.

And you haven’t explained one thing to me since that door shut. Not one.

[ I tell you what I know. ]

[ I learn things the way you learn them. ]

[ Your advantage in this room is that you hear their thoughts. Use it. ]

Fine.

I reached Sophia’s door and pushed it.

Locked.

It had not been locked at lunch. I had walked straight in with a tray then. She had been sitting on the metal frame of the bed, hands folded in her lap, and told me to put it on the mattress without looking up.

And nothing was coming out of her. No thoughts at all.

I opened my hearing.

She wasn’t asleep.

She was pulling air in fast and ragged, the breath catching hard on every third draw, the sound of someone wrestling something that was not in the room with her—something with a grip from the inside, tightening and releasing in time with her lungs.

What is happening in there?

I knocked once. The sound was small and sharp in the quiet corridor.

The breathing cut off mid-inhale. Instant. The way a person stops when they realise they have been heard.

But the fight didn’t stop. I could still hear it underneath, in the way she was pulling air. Shorter now, controlled by force, the deliberate flattening of somebody who’s been caught and is putting the performance back together one lungful at a time.

I knocked again.

"I’ve brought food."

"Leave it at the door." Her voice came through the wood thin and flat, nothing left in it. "Thank you."

"Okay."

I set the tray down on the floor. Plastic met stone with a soft, final click. The gap under her door was the same narrow width as the gap under the sealed entrance at the end of the corridor. Neither of them wide enough for anything useful.

Whatever that is, I don’t want to be in the room for it.

I turned to go, weight already shifting onto my back foot.

Something hit the door from the inside—both palms, flat and hard. The full weight of a body using the door as the only vertical surface left to hold itself upright.

I stopped mid-step and turned back.

"Abram."

Closer now. Right at the door.

She’s holding herself up on it.

"Tell Monica I need her." Her voice shook on the last word and she let it shake. "Tell her now. Please."

"Alright."

I walked back up the corridor. She was awake, on her feet, speaking to me through a door with her hands braced on it, and there was nothing in her head at all.

She isn’t thinking. That’s what it feels like. Not blocked, not guarded. Empty.

I kept walking, the corridor stretching ahead of me.

The system has been quiet since I left Abuela’s last night.

It said nothing while I was on that road. Nothing when I reached the cage. Nothing while I watched a man come apart on that roof.

Then, suddenly, it told me to get to the headquarters.

Then it told me this cell was the best place to be.

I’m not here by accident.

I reached Monica’s door and stopped and stood close to it.

A breath, held far too long on the other side. Then let out slow and shaky, the sound of someone counting their way through it, forcing the air to leave in a controlled line.

Something shifted. Her weight coming off the metal frame. The soft complaint of the empty bed she had been sitting on when I left her with the earlier tray.

Then it went still.

Too still. The stillness of a person catching themselves. Not sleep. The deliberate freeze of somebody who’s heard a footstep outside and is waiting to find out whether the footstep knows what it’s walked up on.

"No." Barely there. "No. Come on."

The silence stretched a beat longer than silence should, the kind of pause that has weight.

Then the breathing again, forced even now—a calm laid carefully on top of something that was not calm at all. The same ragged edge I had heard through Sophia’s door, only further along. Further into whatever had taken the thoughts first and was now working on the body, tightening the muscles, shortening the air, making every breath a decision.

I stood outside that door with my hand up and didn’t knock.

No privacy.

I pushed the door open.