Each identical. Each numbered. Not named — numbered, the way things are labeled when the people responsible for them have stopped thinking of them as anything that requires a name.
Liora stood alone. She did not know why she had come here, only that she had walked this corridor before. The knowledge arrived without context, without the memory of a specific occasion, but with the settled certainty of something repeated many times — and the certainty filled her with a dread she could not fully locate or account for, only feel.
She began walking. Door Twelve. Door Fifteen. Door Twenty-One. Each number triggered something as she passed — not full memory but the residue of it, sensation without narrative. Pain. Fear. The particular cold of a needle entering skin. Voices without faces. Hands without context. The fragments surfaced and submerged again before she could hold onto them, leaving only the impression of what they contained.
