Chương 41: “Twelve Floors”

He went down on a Monday night with a specific purpose, because he was beginning to run out of time and he knew it. The twentieth floor opened the same method the last five did: not forced, just recognized, the dungeon letting him back in like a house that had been waiting for its owner. He didn't stop to marvel at this. He noted it and moved on. Twenty-first. Twenty-second.

He worked until the geometry of the deep floors started to resist him, not the collapsed geometry of neglect but something else, the original scheme of what he was at full depth, which had its own ideas about being woken up and did not simply comply. He stopped at the twenty-third. It was locked, and this time not sealed the way dormant floors were sealed but actually locked, deliberately, from the inside, which should not be possible because he was the inside.

He pressed his awareness against it and found the lock and found, on the other side of the lock, the texture of something he had put there himself a very long time ago. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site. And this was more than just a memory. It was a full decision. He had sealed something here deliberately. Something he had decided, at some point in the long dark of his dormancy, should not be accessible. He had reasons. He could not remember the reasons.

He was standing in front of his own lock and he could not remember why he had turned the key and he was not sure whether that meant he had changed enough that the reason no longer applied or whether it meant the reason was exactly as relevant as it had been and he had simply forgotten the parts of himself that understood why. He went back up. He returned to the windowsill. Twelve floors. Twenty-third locked. The Ledger coming. He did the arithmetic of it and the arithmetic was not comfortable.

He thought about what June had said: I don't know what I want to be when I grow up either. He thought: he knew now. He just had to survive long enough to be it.