The walls were bleeding again. Not with blood—at least not the kind the living carry—but with memory. It dripped down the cracked plaster like ink from a quill that never ran dry, staining the floor with whispers and broken time. You could almost hear them if you pressed your ear close enough: the voices of people who had been forgotten into existence, not erased but relooped, caught in endless versions of themselves.
The building was screaming—but not in fear. In resistance. Jamie stood beneath the heart of the building, sweat sliding down his brow, his breath a fog in the rotting air. His fingers still hovered inches from the pulsing core. He could feel it now—all of it. Every name the building had ever taken. Every rewrite. Every burn. Every failed escape. All of it lived in this pulsing brain at the center of madness.
He understood something terrible.
The building didn't rewrite people randomly.
It studied them.
It made versions—hundreds, sometimes thousands—until it found the one most compliant, the one that stayed, the one that believed the nightmare was the real world. The rest were… disposed of. Forgotten. Folded back into the walls.
Jamie was never supposed to survive this long.
He was a glitch. A fracture in its cycle. A version that asked too many questions.
Now, the building wanted to correct that.
In the upper corridors, Mira ran.
Every turn she took, the hallway twisted to deny her. Doors blinked in and out. Windows opened onto brick walls. Paintings melted, their subjects screaming as their faces slid off the canvas.
The building was reacting to Jamie's contact with the core. It was panicking.
She felt it in her bones.
It was losing control.
"Don't let me remember," the walls hissed. "Don't make me remember what I buried."
Mira ignored the voices. She ran toward them.
Room after room opened before her—each one a version of her past. One where she never entered the building. One where she died inside it. One where she became it. She passed through them like a ghost, not stopping until she reached the stairwell that spiraled downward like a black vein.
And then she began to descend.
Toward Jamie.
Toward the memory core.
Ansel stumbled through the lower halls, blood in his teeth, eyes half-mad from the things he'd seen slithering between the walls.
One had spoken his name in his mother's voice.
Another had offered to rewrite his pain if only he'd forget who Jamie was.
He hadn't listened.
But his resolve was cracking.
His skin itched from the inside. His mind had started speaking in loops. Every time he blinked, he saw another version of himself—older, younger, angrier, dead.
But the Rewrite Machine was behind him now.
And what lay ahead was something else entirely.
The smell of rot led him to a narrow crack in the floor.
He dropped to his knees, crawling through the shadows, following the echoes of Jamie's presence.
"Wait for me," he whispered. "Just hold on."
The building laughed, deep and old.
Jamie touched the core again.
And this time, it opened.
Not like a door. Like a wound.
A split in space, oozing light and dark at once, revealing the vast mechanism behind the memory. Rooms upon rooms spinning in impossible orbits. Typewriters tapping by themselves. Projectors playing old footage of people screaming into nothing.
In the center: a void. Blacker than death. Hungrier than the dark.
And inside it: a face.
His own.
But twisted. Hollow. Burned beyond recognition.
It spoke.
"Why did you come back?"
Jamie fell to his knees.
"I never left," he whispered. "You left me here."
The face cracked into a smile.
Then screamed.
And every wall in the building screamed with it.
Mira reached the base of the stairwell, and the scream hit her like a wave of knives.
She collapsed, her ears bleeding, vision white-hot.
But she forced herself to stand.
Her steps were slow now, each one pulled forward by rage and fear and something more fragile: hope. The kind that cuts deeper than any nightmare.
Because if Jamie had reached the core, then there was still time.
Still time to rewrite the rewrite.
She moved through a hallway made entirely of glass. Behind each pane—people. Staring. Trapped. Whispering. Their hands pressed to the walls as if they could sense her presence.
Some of them looked like her.
Some like Ansel.
One looked exactly like Jamie—except the eyes were sewn shut.
She didn't look away.
She couldn't.
"Hold on," she whispered.
And the glass began to crack.
Down in the memory chamber, the screaming stopped.
Jamie stood inside the pulsing heart now. It had accepted him. Or maybe it had realized it was made from him. Either way, it no longer fought him.
But the void did.
The void always did.
It clawed at him, digging into his mind, showing him futures where he failed. Worlds where Mira died. Timelines where Ansel became the building's new architect, rewriting suffering into beauty and calling it salvation.
Jamie screamed back.
And the void shuddered.
Then—light.
Blinding, white-hot.
A crack in the world.
Mira burst into the chamber, eyes wild, blood on her face, hands wrapped in torn cloth like bandages pulled from forgotten wounds.
Jamie turned to her.
Their eyes met.
For the first time in forever, he felt real again.
She said nothing.
Neither did he.
Together, they turned to face the heart.
And the building, watching them both, finally screamed in fear....
The heart is open. The void has seen them. The walls are screaming not in rage—but in warning. Something is changing, and the building doesn't know how to stop it. Jamie, Mira, and Ansel are no longer just survivors. They're becoming something the building has no blueprint for: a memory that refuses to fade.