They gave Echo a room on the third floor.
Clean walls. A bed with actual sheets. A window with reinforced glass looking out over the facility courtyard.
Better than the shelter by every measurable standard.
She stood in the middle of it and said nothing for a long time.
Isaac leaned against the doorframe. He hadn't been asked to stay. He hadn't been told to leave.
So he stayed.
"It smells like disinfectant," Echo said finally.
"It always does."
She looked at the window. The courtyard below was quiet — soldiers on rotation, rune lights humming along the walls, everything ordered and exactly where it was supposed to be.
"They're going to try to take me," she said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"Soon?"
"Probably tonight."
Echo nodded. Like that was perfectly acceptable information to have. Like she had already filed it away and moved on.
She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her hands. The Fragment burns mapping her arms in their deliberate patterns. The skin pale and slightly wrong under the facility's clean light.
"Does it hurt?" Isaac asked.
She looked up at him. Something shifted in her expression. Not surprise. More like careful attention. Like she was noting that he had asked.
"Not anymore," she said.
Isaac said nothing.
"Did yours?" she asked.
Silence.
"Still does," he said quietly.
Echo looked at him for a moment longer. Then she lay down, pulled the sheets around her, and closed her eyes.
Isaac stayed in the doorframe until her breathing evened out.
Then he stepped back and let the door close.
They came at three in the morning.
Four soldiers. Bureau standard issue. Clean uniforms, rune etched equipment, faces neutral the way faces get when the order has already been processed and the only remaining step is execution.
They didn't knock.
The door slid open. The lights came up automatically.
Echo was already sitting upright before any of them crossed the threshold. Eyes open. Expression unchanged.
"Miss." The lead soldier's voice was polite. Professional. "You're being transferred to the assessment wing for processing. Please come with us."
Echo looked at them.
Then she looked at the empty doorframe where Isaac had been standing hours ago.
"No," she said.
"This isn't optional." The soldier was already moving.
The first one crossed the threshold.
The air changed.
No sound. No light. No warning.
Just a shift — sudden and total — like the pressure in the room had decided to become something else entirely.
The soldier stopped.
The walls were the same walls. The ceiling was the same ceiling. But the light had gone the colour of old bone and the floor beneath their boots felt wrong in a way that bypassed rational thought and went straight to something older and more afraid.
The second soldier stepped back.
The cracks came next.
Hairline fractures spreading across the walls in patterns too deliberate to be structural damage. The rune lights along the corridor flickered and died one by one, replaced by a pale luminescence that came from nowhere specific and everywhere at once.
The air tasted like copper and silence.
The Hollowlands.
It was the Hollowlands and it was the third floor of a Bureau facility and it was both at once and the soldiers in the doorway had trained for Fragment incidents and rune failures and combat in three terrain types.
Not this.
Never this.
Echo sat in the centre of it, eyes wide, hands pressed flat against the sheets. Her Fragment burns were lit from within, pulsing with light that had no colour name. Her breathing had gone ragged.
It was the first genuinely frightened thing Isaac had ever seen from her.
The distortion spread.
Down through the floor. Out through the walls. The entire third floor groaning under the weight of something that had been compressed too long in too small a space and had finally found room to move.
Alarms triggered somewhere below.
Already too late.
Isaac was in the corridor before the first alarm cycle finished.
The soldiers outside Echo's room had backed against the far wall, equipment dark, rune etchings stuttering out one by one. One raised his comm.
It died in his hand.
Isaac pushed the door open.
The distortion hit immediately — Hollowlands energy thick and displaced, pressing against his curse with the particular insistence of something that recognised what it was pushing against.
He crossed the room and sat beside her.
No words. No instructions.
He put his hand over hers where they were pressed flat against the sheets.
The curse stirred.
Not with hunger. Not with the low whisper of something wanting to feed.
Something quieter. Deeper.
A resonance.
Two damaged things recognising the shape of each other's damage.
Despair recognised despair.
The Fragment burns on Echo's arms pulsed once — bright, total — and began to dim.
The cracks in the walls slowed.
The bone coloured light pulled back by degrees, the facility rune lights stuttering to life in its wake, the copper taste thinning until it was just disinfectant again.
The floor stopped feeling wrong.
The Hollowlands retreated.
Echo's breathing slowed. Her eyes found his blindfold and stayed there.
"I told you they would come," Isaac said.
"You did," she said.
Silence.
"How did you do that?" she asked.
Isaac looked at their hands for a moment.
"I don't know," he said.
Which was the most honest thing he had said in years.
Three floors below, Maren Soleis stood in the monitoring room and watched the readings normalise on a screen that had spent four minutes producing data she had never seen before.
She stood very still.
Then she picked up her tablet and began to write.
Not a report.
A hypothesis.
Her pen moved quickly. Precisely. With the energy of someone whose most optimistic projection had just turned out to be a significant underestimate.
She was smiling.
She was always smiling.
But this one was different.
This one was genuine.
In the corridor Cael Calder stood among the shaken soldiers, borrowed comm dark in his hand, and looked at the closed door of Echo's room.
For once he said nothing.
He just looked.
And for the first time since this assignment began, his smile was slightly less certain than it had been before.
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