The next door wasn't a door.

Not the way the Philly one had been. No chipped paint, no handle, no half-remembered stairwell behind it. This one hung in the murk like a piece of someone's loading dock had been torn loose and left to float.

A long dent low on the right where something heavy had kissed it hard. Black-and-yellow hazard stripes stenciled along the bottom edge, scuffed down to ghosts in the middle where boots had kicked them for years.

As we came up on it, the Corridor picked up a smell.

Cold metal first. Then generator exhaust, thin and oily at the back of my throat. Damp canvas. And under that, the unmistakable salt-and-fake-chicken stink of instant noodles left too long in their cups.

The feeling in my chest changed.

Not the sharp stab from the New York door. Not the sudden drop from Philly. This was a slow, even tightening, like someone was turning a strap around my ribs one notch at a time.

Celestial Sonata's shoulder brushed mine as I slowed.

Her eyes went to the stripes, not the dent. "This one's yours too?" she asked quietly.

"Unless I've started moonlighting as a dockworker in my sleep," I said.

It came out drier than I felt.

Mayari drifted closer. She lifted her hand just enough that her fingertips hovered an inch from the ridged metal without quite touching it. Her eyes weren't on the door, but somewhere about a half-meter past it, seeing lines I couldn't.

"Load-bearing," she murmured. "Not a break. A joint."

"Translation from trauma to English?" I said.

Her mouth twitched. "You made a pivotal decision here," she said.

My stomach did a small, unhelpful twist.

Sonata stepped ahead of us, toes almost touching the painted stripes. Her magic went out before her hand did, those soundless ripples I was starting to recognize now. The metal shivered once in response, a low, even note only she seemed to hear.

"It's holding," she said. "Nothing leaning on it from outside. The thing out there hasn't sniffed this one yet."

My palms had gone damp again. I wiped them on my pants.

"Okay," I said. "Let's see what catastrophe I signed up for here then."

Sonata curled her fingers around the bottom lip of the door.

It was solid enough that even in this nowhere-space, I felt the vibration in my teeth when she tugged. The metal rattled, then rolled up along invisible tracks with a grinding rumble that sounded exactly wrong in the liminal corridor.

Cold air spilled out around our feet.

Then light.

Harsh white, the kind you only get from rented floodlights. It cut a hard circle out of the dark and flooded my vision with blown-out edges.

The smell came next in full: exhaust, hot rubber, concrete that had baked all day and was only now starting to let the heat go. Somewhere nearby, someone had recently spilled oil and tried to wipe it up with an old rag. The ghost of broth steam from a kettle clung to everything.

The Corridor stepped back.

The staging yard of a road caravan stepped in.

Night outside the New York zone was never fully dark.

The dead city sat on the horizon, a jagged black line against a low, boiling ceiling of cloud. From here, the glow wasn't neon or glamorous. Just a dirty smear of reflected light where floodlamps, construction rigs, and negentropy towers set up by the vanguard Terran forces fought the sky.

We were huddled in its shadow.

The yard itself was a rough rectangle of cracked asphalt and painted-over lane lines, hemmed in by portable fencing and stacks of prefab barriers. A ring of tall floodlight towers turned the center into a whitewashed bowl of glare. Beyond their reach, the world dropped off into damp, wind and distant siren echoes.

Inside the circle, the caravan looked smaller than it ever had on the road.

Trucks parked nose-to-tail with their tails open. Bikes propped on the wayside. Canvas tarps stretched from vehicle roofs to jury-rigged poles, making low tents where people sat on crates or turned boxes into tables. The backs of a couple of big transport rigs formed walls, their logos half-sanded off.

The workshop truck was near the middle.

Its rear hatch was rolled up, the interior lit by a pair of work lamps clamped to the frame. Shelving along the walls held toolboxes, coils of cable, parts bins with hand-written labels. The truck's old refrigeration unit had been gutted and replaced with power converters and battery racks. Wires ran from it out into the yard like roots.

A bike frame sat on a stand just outside, front wheel off, guts open.

A me from not that long ago lay half under it, knees bent, boots flat, headlamp strap cutting a line across his hair. The lamp's narrow beam picked out the underside of the frame, the lump of a battery pack that did not belong on that model, and the mess of wires being coaxed into some new arrangement.

Every few seconds, his hand came down and smacked the pack lightly, the motion of someone testing for looseness and used to getting answers that way.

Izumi was a streak of motion between him and everyone else.

She'd grown a lot since the Philly memory. Still shorter than most of the adults, but there was more length to her limbs now, more definition to the shoulders under the hoodie. The knees of her jeans were just as wrecked. Her ponytail was trying to escape its tie, strands sticking to her neck with sweat.

She hovered near Blake first, then Alex, then Dad, orbit shrinking closer every pass.

"C'mon," she was saying as she paced, hands cutting sharp shapes in the air. "You know I've got more runs than half the men here already. Yonkers, East Philly, south corridor sweep. Alex made me do the boring ones." She pointed a thumb at the older scout, who didn't look up from cleaning a rifle part.

"I made you learn the grid," Alex corrected without raising his head. "There is no such thing as boring when you're still alive to complain about it."

"And I've done them," Izumi shot back. "I've done it. I'm good at it. Let me sign up for the real run. I'm not dead weight. Front bikes isn't that big a leap. Hazard pay is only fair."

Blake sat on an upside-down crate, elbows on his knees, cradling a chipped mug in his big hands. The floodlights picked out the gray in his scruff and the extra lines around his eyes that hadn't been there when I was eleven.

He watched her go back and forth for a while, letting her talk herself in a circle.

"Little lady," he finally said, tone mild. "You realize front bikes are the ones that eat it first if something's wrong with the route."

She stopped pacing and planted her hands on her hips.

"That's the job," she said. "If we do it right, nobody else does."

The way she said it made my teeth hurt.

Blake blew on his drink, not quite looking at her. "You're twelve," he said.

"Almost thirteen," she shot back.

From under the bike, my past self snorted. "Wow," he said, voice muffled by metal and focus. "That fraction of a year makes all the difference."

Izumi kicked the sole of his boot without looking.

"Shut up, wiz kid," she said. "You're the one who keeps saying we need the front position locked down by people who can actually tell the difference between normal weird and 'run now' weird."

"Yeah," past-me said. "Us."

Us as in me and Dad, obviously. Maybe Alex on a good day. Izumi heard something else and refused to let go of it. That was the problem.

Or the point.

Dad stood a little apart, half facing the workshop truck, half facing his kids. The clipboard in his hand had a printed manifest clipped to it, but the paper served mostly as a reason to stand still and something to hold onto.

His eyes drifted more than his pen did.

From the half-visible soles of my boots to the smudge on my cheek where I'd wiped at sweat with oily fingers. From Izumi's moving mouth to the way her hand kept returning to the silver locket at her throat.

A folding table under a nearby tarp had two kettles and a pile of instant noodle bricks stacked like bricks had no right to be. Beside them, a battered Terran tablet leaned against a toolbox, screen propped at a bad angle.

It was tuned to some official channel.

A scrolling bar of text crawled along the bottom: JOINT NEW YORK CORRIDOR RECLAMATION OPERATION – CIVILIAN TRANSITS PHASE II.

The sound was low enough that most people treated it like background noise. In the weird sharpness of the Echo, I could hear every word.

"…negentropy field strength along the primary route has stabilized within target ranges," a polished voice was saying over stock footage of cranes and drones moving wreckage. "With the support of Northern Coalition patrols, risk levels for authorized caravans have been cleared for supervised transit."

The feed cut to a different angle.

Another version of Sonata filled the little screen, framed by the ruined Manhattan skyline. The costume was the same. The smile was not. That one was smoother. Less tired.

"To all participating families and crews," past-Sonata said, voice bright but measured, "you're not walking this alone. Our patrols are already in position, and our eyes are on your path. Your safety is our first priority. We'll be watching the route so you can look after each other."

Hearing that in the yard was one thing.

Hearing it in the yard while the real Sonata stood three paces away was something else.

Her aura, usually a gentle pulse of pink-gold at the edge of my vision, pulled in tight as she drifted toward the table.

She didn't say anything. She didn't have to.

The wince was in the details: the way her shoulders rounded in a fraction, bowing not to the floodlights but to the tinny echo of her own voice. The way her fingers hovered over the tablet for a second, almost turning it off, then withdrew.

Holo-her kept talking, another sentence about hope and rebuilding and bright futures ahead. Nobody at the time had been listening closely. They'd heard "patrols" and "priority" and filed the rest under good omen.

I watched Dad's jaw tic once when the word "safety" hit the air.

Past-me slid out from under the bike with a scrape of denim on grit. He sat up, pushed his headlamp up onto his forehead, and wiped the back of his wrist across his temple, leaving a darker smear.

"Alright," he said, pushing to his feet. "Pack's stable. We'll get more torque off the line and better response if we goose it to dodge anything dumb."

"Translation," Izumi said, turning on him. "We get the front bikes."

Past-me shrugged one shoulder, trying and failing not to look smug. "Translation," he said, "we're wasting the mod if we tuck in the middle where everyone's already cleared the debris."

Blake's eyes moved between the two of them.

"'We,' huh," he said.

"Me and Izumi," past-me said, too fast. "Obviously. Alex doesn't fit on a bike front."

Alex, who was lugging another crate past, snorted. "I fit fine," he said. "I just have better self-preservation instincts than you gremlins."

Izumi stepped closer to Blake's crate so she could look him squarely in the face. She was breathing a little harder than the conversation warranted.

"Look," she said. "You know I'm going to end up at the front sooner or later. I'd rather do it with you watching my back the first time than getting stuck with whoever we pick up six months from now. Ikki... he won't be here trying to coddle me forever."

Blake's eyes lifted and found Dad's across the space.

The old veteran's mouth flattened. He took a long swallow from his mug, eyes closing briefly, then pushed himself to his feet.

"Zane," he called.

Dad looked up from the clipboard as if he'd been waiting for that.

For a heartbeat, nobody talked.

The generators hummed. A kettle hissed softly somewhere. From beyond the fence, the distant rumble of construction and prep work rolled like far-off thunder.

"They want the front," Blake said, jerking his head toward the modified bike. "Boy's done good work on the frame. She'll handle it."

Dad's gaze dropped to the pack bolted under the seat, the cables disappearing into the bike's guts. He knew exactly what those parts were and where we'd gotten them. He'd helped me tune them.

He also knew what front bikes meant.

Under the harsh wash of the floodlights, the lines around his mouth looked deeper than I remembered.

The yard noise seemed to dip for a second, leaving a pocket of silence around the folding table.

"We need that bonus," I heard my younger self mutter, as if Dad couldn't do that arithmetic on his own. "If we stick to back slots, we'll get boxed out when the second wave comes. The early runs pay more."

Izumi scowled at him. "You know damned well that's not all" she said. Then, to Dad, more quietly: "We can do it. "

He looked from Izumi's determined face to the modified bike frame. Then past them, over the fence, toward the glow of Manhattan. For a second, I wasn't sure what he was seeing. The ruined skyline. The route ahead. Or a version of it where the bike was lying on its side and one or both of us was missing.

Even with a scholarship and Elio's help, sending me off to school meant money. Money that didn't come from easy work.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

That was the unspoken truth of that argument.

He looked at the tablet instead, just for a second. At the grainy holo of a magical girl promising that she would be patrolling the routes.

His eyes slid from the screen to the fence line beyond it, to the faint glow on the horizon where New York waited, and then back to his children.

He exhaled slowly through his nose.

"Front bikes," he said. "You stay within the limits. You report anything off-pattern, you don't play heroes with scavenging or detours. If either of you sees so much as a trash bag move wrong, you call it and you fall back. Clear?"

"Yes, sir," past-me said immediately.

Izumi's hand tightened around the locket until her knuckles blanched.

"Clear," she said.

Dad's hand hovered like he wanted to ruffle her hair and thought better of it halfway. He settled for tapping the manifest instead, pen scratching as he signed off on LEAD SCOUT (2 RIDERS), hazard classification highlighted in orange.

The sound was small, just paper and plastic. In my chest, it landed like a stamp.

Mayari watched the pen move. Her face stayed neutral.

"Informed consent," she said under her breath. "Under economic duress. Perfectly civilized."

Man, Su Yin definitely reminded me of Dior to a painful degree. A different flavor of spice, maybe, but they're definitely cut from the same cloth.

"Can you not phrase my childhood like a contract clause?" I muttered.

She shrugged one shoulder, eyes still on the scene. "You stepped in front of her," she said. "Not with a shield. With a route choice. The form doesn't matter. The intent does."

On the table, the tablet's volume dipped as the segment rolled into something about reconstruction grants and zoning plans. Holo-Sonata smiled one last reassuring smile and faded behind a different anchor.

The real Sonata's jaw was clenched so hard I could see the muscles jump.

"I remember that recording..." she said quietly.

She didn't look at me when she said it. Her eyes stayed on Dad's back as he walked away.

"They had me read three versions," she went on. "One about 'our brave civilian partners.' One about 'operational resilience.' One about 'families.' They picked the families one. Tests better."

Her mouth twisted around the last two words.

"This…" She took a breath that didn't quite make it all the way in. "This is the first time I'm actually seeing who those 'families' were."

My throat felt dry.

"Then... you did a good job," I said, because it was the only true thing I had handy. "We made it."

Her gaze flicked to my younger self and Izumi by the bike, both of them vibrating in place with a mix of nerves and pride.

"I almost didn't," she said.

That pulled my attention off the memory.

"What?!"

She lifted one hand, then let it fall uselessly to her side again.

"Officially," she said, eyes on some point just past the fence line, "that route was assigned a patrol contingent. Unofficially, the command post was watching a different problem spin up nearer the reservoir. Bigger numbers. Worse models. 'Potential cascade event.'"

Her voice wrapped the phrases in contempt without needing to raise volume.

"They told me to hold position..." she said.

Heat pressed behind my ribs.

"In other words," I said, "we were the acceptable, expendable risk."

Her jaw worked.

Sonata's lips quirked.

"And with that, I told them to get bent," she said.

That had me stumbling. "Wait. You… what?"

She shrugged, a small, uncomfortable motion.

In the memory yard, Blake clapped my younger self on the shoulder. Izumi bounced on her toes and hissed a half-whispered "Hell yes," like she'd already started the engine.

I watched them with the new awareness that there had been a second choice, somewhere above their heads, that could have gone the other way.

"You saved our asses," I said. "That day. You probably don't remember but... those chaos beasts had us dead to rights until your arrows started raining out of the sky."

Sonata's mouth flattened.

"It was my job," she said. Then, after a heartbeat: "But when I said 'our eyes are on your path' into that camera, I wasn't thinking about your father's pen or your sister or… any of this."

Her fingers curled in toward her palms.

"I'm thinking about it now," she said.

The yard held there, pinned under the floodlights and the weight of that signed line. Izumi's laughter blurred into the hum of the generators. Dad's shoulders receded toward the truck. Past-me bent to check the battery pack one more time, as if tightening a bolt could hold back the future.

Then the edges of the scene began to feather.

Light from the floodlamps bled into the white of the Corridor. The rumble of distant construction turned to a low, formless roar. The bikes, the trucks, the tarp roofs all thinned, lines going sketchy, then faint.

Izumi lasted longest.

Her outline stayed sharp half a second after everything else had gone to haze, fingers still wrapped around the locket, mouth still moving in some half-heard complaint about curfews and overprotective older brothers.

Then she too unraveled, color leaching away, leaving only the shape of the yard's air — and then that, too, was gone.

We were back in front of the floating cargo door.

The hazard stripes looked duller than before.

My chest felt tight.

"There's an intelligence to this Gossamer Echo and it's very insistent," Mayari said. "That nights like that mattered. It might've been constructed to protect you, but this promise seems very core to your being."

I let out a breath I hadn't noticed I'd been holding.

"I let her ride point into a reclamation zone," I said. "Some protector."

"You didn't put her on the bike," Sonata said, voice low. "She put herself there. You chose to ride with her."

I looked at her.

She didn't meet my eyes. She was looking past me, at the space where the tablet had been. Where her own recorded face had promised a safety she'd had to break to provide.

"There's a difference," she said quietly, "between taking the lead and being the only thing between someone and the abyss."

Her gaze was fixed on the empty space where the yard had been, as if she could still see the dust motes and hear the low rumble of the city. "You stayed on the bike with her. You weren't the one making the promises from a thousand feet up."

The accusation was so gentle it almost wasn't one.

"Even if we wanted to keep her off the road..." I muttered. "Dad couldn't be up front because he'd taken the job of convoy command. The scholarship covered a rent reimbursement, food at St. Antonia's, transportation, but not all of it. I'd never be able to send them the money they needed without taking the riskier jobs. Without the hazard pay."

Sonata's expression was unreadable.

"You think they don't know that?" Mayari asked. "You think they haven't budgeted for it? That the bounties and the payouts are anything but a calibrated bribe to get people to run the routes they won't officially put their own patrols on?"

"It's an open secret," I added, my voice flat. "Believe me. I grew up in it. But the pay... the pay is real. And that money is what kept us from starving."

I huffed. "Child labor laws, civil rights, and the dignity of the human spirit are all luxuries for people who live where the ground doesn't shake. Izumi is sharper than she lets on sometimes. She may not be all that book smart, but she has good intuition for the doors taking this would have opened for our family and group."

Mayari's gaze softened.

"Hazard pay included a refurbished housing unit of our choosing in one of the resettled sectors." I said. "One with a working water purifier. That was what we were shooting for. Not glory. Not thrills. The Reclamation Project works on a credit system. With me out of the picture because of school, our income would've dropped by a third. The bonus from those runs would have covered my relocation and then some."

Sonata flinched. "You went to school so they could have a future. And she..." She trailed off, swallowing. "She tried to do the same."

A deep, tired ache settled in my chest. The kind that came from looking at a problem from two different angles and realizing there was no good answer, only two different ways to lose.

"She was trying to prove she could carry the load without me," I said quietly.

"I understand now, though," Sonata said after a long silence. "The world... didn't leave us much room to be children, did it? We all just... had to grow up where we stood."

My shoulders slumped.

"I suppose... you couldn't have," she finished softly, "kept her off that road without breaking something in her that mattered."

My mouth opened, then closed again.

"She's twelve," I said. "She shouldn't have had to matter like that."

"I was ten when they started flying me into hotspots with a smile and a cute tagline," Sonata said. "Age never stopped anyone from loading weight on our backs. The only thing you got to choose was whether you pretended it wasn't there."

Her fingers flexed once at her sides, like she was resisting the urge to reach for a bow that wasn't here.

"You didn't pretend," she said. "You got on the bike."

The words landed heavier than any compliment.

Behind us, the echo of floodlights and generator hum was already gone, but my body still remembered the angle of the stand, the weight of the tools, the way Izumi had bounced on her toes like the world couldn't wait to meet her.

"This realm is very insistent," Mayari said, breaking the silence. "Whatever that night was to you, it filed it under load-bearing, not background noise."

"Because I volunteered us to be the idiots in front," I said.

"Because you decided what 'protecting her' meant," she corrected. "Not in a screaming disaster. Not with seconds to react. You had time to think. To say no. You still stepped forward."

"Doesn't feel like much of a choice from here," I muttered.

"Of course it doesn't," Mayari said. "If it felt clean, it wouldn't be here."

I frowned. "That's not helpful."

"It's honest." She tipped her head, studying the empty space where the yard had been. "The decisions that hurt most are the ones where every option was wrong and you picked the one you could live with. Your Echo keeps those. Not because it wants to punish you. Because it knows you'll keep reaching for the same lever if you don't notice your hand's already on it. The feelings that made you feel protected and loved are the outer layer, but the joints and foundations are the promises you made and kept."

I stared at the blank space.

"I didn't make her any promises that night," I said. "Not out loud."

Mayari made a quiet sound in her throat, not quite a laugh.

"You were standing next to a bike you'd built," she said. "You'd argued the technical specs. You were pointing at a route on a map. You were the older brother, putting himself between his sister and the road ahead. You made every promise you needed to."

"Of course it doesn't," Mayari said. "They were very careful about that."

"Again," I said, "not actually comforting."

She tilted her head. "You were given one script that ended in hunger and another that ended in hazard pay," she said. "You picked the one with food and plumbing. That's not failure. That's math under duress."

"Yeah, well," I said. "Tell that to the part of me that keeps filing it under 'betrayed little sister to impress grown-ups.'"

I had a strange, strange feeling at this point that both she and Dior had a shared distrust of the Terran military and governments and their ilk. I also couldn't shake the feeling that it was well-earned.

Sonata made a small, sharp sound at that. Not quite a laugh. Not quite a protest.

"You did not sign that form to impress anyone," she said.

"You weren't there."

"I was," she said. "Just not…here."

She gestured vaguely, toward the place where the tablet had been. Her eyes stayed on the empty air, as if she could still see the grainy holo of herself selling reassurance.

"That recording..." she said quietly. "They pulled me into a little studio they'd set up in a commandeered council chamber. Lights, makeup, teleprompter, three very serious people arguing over adjectives."

I could see it, suddenly: not a bunker full of officers, but a municipal chamber turned war room, ringed with glass and screens and too many flags.

"They wanted 'brave civilian partners,'" Sonata went on. "They wanted 'operational resilience.' They wanted me to say 'acceptable risk' with a straight face." Her nose wrinkled. "I told them if they put the word 'acceptable' anywhere near 'dead families' while I was in the room, I was going to redecorate their table through the nearest window."

Mayari's mouth twitched. "Negotiation by implied kinetic energy," she murmured.

"We settled on 'families,'" Sonata said. "'Your safety is our first priority.' 'Our eyes are on your path.' All the right shapes. All the right sounds." She swallowed. "I thought. I hoped—that saying it out loud would force them to back it up."

"And did it?" I asked.

Her lips pressed together.

"Halfway," she said. "They built the patrol schedule. They assigned the escort wing. They ran simulations. Then, a few hours before your run, one of the analysts burst into the room waving a printout about a surge by the reservoir and suddenly everything on the other screens was 'secondary.'"

Her voice turned flat on the last word.

"I was listening to a man in an expensive suit explain to me, very patiently, that it was a better use of my power to hold position sit over a 'potential cascade event' than to 'shadow every nervous convoy of the week,'" she said. "He reminded me of the numbers. The projections. The cost-benefit ratios."

I could almost hear him. I'd grown up around that tone.

"He told me," she added, "that if anything did happen to the caravans, we could always 'manage the narrative.'"

My hands curled without asking permission.

"Why do I have a feeling you sent him through the window instead?" I asked, lips curling into a smile.

"Sadly, I didn't," she said with a smirk. "There were too many cameras in the room."

She huffed out a breath that might once have been a laugh.

"I smiled," she said. "I said something suitably diplomatic about trusting the process. They were very pleased with themselves."

Her fists closed at her sides, knuckles whitening.

"And then," Sonata said, "I took the comms bead out of my ear, and told them to get bent."

I blinked. "Just like that."

She finally looked at me again.

"I couldn't cover every caravan," she said. "I can't be everywhere. But that night? That route?" She nodded toward the closed door. "I knew exactly what I'd just said on that feed. I wasn't going to let it be a lie the first time it aired. Holding as long as I did at the reservoir put you all in danger, but I found you in the end."

The memory of floodlights and engine roar pressed at the edge of my vision. The way the sky had split open in streaks of pink and gold. The moment I'd realized those weren't flares; they were arrows, singing.

"You really were there for us," I murmured.

"It wasn't charity," she said. "You were doing my job for me."

That pulled me up short. "Come again?"

She gestured in the direction Izumi had vanished, as if the Echo hadn't already eaten her outline.

"Terran planners like to pretend magic and machinery are separate categories in spite of the existence of magitech," she said. "But what you and your dad and your sister did? Riding ahead, sniffing out the weird, buying the convoy time? That's reconnaissance. Ward duty. The thing they pay us to do. They just didn't pay you in uniforms."

"They paid us in noodles," I said. "And a shot at a water purifier that didn't cough out rust."

"Exactly," she said. "You took those terms. You rewired that bike anyway. You decided, in a very quiet corner of a very rigged game, that you were going to put yourself between the abyss and the people you loved."

Her gaze sharpened.

"That part was never theirs," she said. "They only exploited it."

Mayari nodded once, like a professor ticking off a box.

"That's what this Echo is marking on some level," she said. "Not just the exploitation. The instinct underneath. It's trying to make sure you can see it before something meaner does."

"The wraith thing," I said.

The New York door gave a low, ugly thrum somewhere behind us, like a bass note from another room.

"It knows where you're soft," Mayari said. "Family. Duty. The urge to step forward so someone shorter doesn't have to. If we leave those joints unexamined, it can lean on them. Hard."

"Great," I said. "So now my love life and my trauma both have ergonomic weaknesses."

"Congratulations," Sonata said dryly. "You're human."

I almost smiled. Almost.

"It's not about talking you out of that instinct," Mayari added. "That would break more than it fixes. It's about getting you to say, out loud, what you're willing to trade it for."

I rubbed at the bridge of my nose.

"Roof," I said finally. "Running water. Enough food. A future where Izumi doesn't have to take hazard pay because I already did."

"Good," Mayari said. "Hold onto that."

She nodded at the now-blank stretch of air.

"That night goes in the 'why,'" she said. "Next time something offers you a different bonus for the same reflex, you can measure it against this and see if it comes up short."

"And if it does?" I asked.

"Then you say 'no,'" she said simply. "Even if your nervous system is screaming to jump."

Sonata exhaled, a small, steadying breath.

"And if they try to put you back in the front as bait," she said, "you don't do it alone."

She took a half-step closer, close enough that her shoulder almost brushed mine again.

"I meant what I said in that recording," she said. "I just didn't understand who I was saying it to. I do now."

Something hot and humiliating pricked at the corners of my eyes. I looked away, at the cargo door.

The hazard stripes had faded to a tired, washed-out yellow. The dent looked deeper.

"Is that it, then?" I asked. "We… sign off on the life lesson and move on?"

The door shuddered once, as if answering. Then, with a softer rumble than before, it rolled itself back down along invisible tracks. Metal met metal with a dull finality.

The smells of exhaust and salt-chicken cup ramen bled away, replaced by the faint ozone tang of the Corridor.

"Joint acknowledged," Mayari said, narrowing her eyes as she looked around. "Load distributed. That's as much as we get for one visit. The Echo is... fighting back."

I let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding. The tightness in my chest didn't vanish, exactly. It just… shifted. Less like a strap. More like a weight I could at least see.

Izumi's locket still burned behind my eyes.

"She was trying to prove she could carry the load without me," I said again, softer this time. "I said yes. I let her try."

"You rode with her," Sonata said. "You didn't throw her off the bike and lock her in a box. That matters."

I wasn't sure I believed her. But I wanted to. That counted for something.

Ahead of us, the Corridor of Almost stretched on. Doors drifted in the haze: some sharp and bright, some blurred like half-remembered dreams.

Sonata bumped her knuckles lightly against my arm, a tiny, grounding contact.

"Pick something else," she said. "Something quieter."

"Define quieter," I said.

"Anything that doesn't come with sirens baked into the drywall," she said. "Low bar."

I let my gaze wander.

Past the nightmare doors, there were others.

A cheap apartment door with three mismatched locks, a cartoon cat, and feng shui charms over the handle. A battered classroom door with a safety poster peeling off the glass. A narrow back door with a line of shoes jumbled in front of it, ghostly streaks of tread and mud.

One of them tugged at me in a small, sideways way. Not terror. Not even dread. Just a tired little ache, like the memory of sore feet and bad fluorescent lighting.

"That one," I said, nodding toward the apartment door with the cartoon cat.

"Less murdery," Sonata said approvingly. "Promising."

"Relatively," I said.

"Relatively is all we get," Mayari said. "Go on."

For the first time since we stepped into the Corridor, the thing waiting on the other side didn't feel like a monster. Just… a life.

But for some reason, Celestial Sonata was staring.

Her shoulders had gone rigid. Her aura, which had finally settled into a quiet pink-gold hum, suddenly dimmed, pulling in tight like a struck nerve.

"Sonata?" I whispered.

Her eyes were wide. Not with memory. With… something else.

Mayari noticed too. Her gaze sharpened.

"You recognize it," Mayari said. It wasn't a question.

Sonata made a noise I couldn't decipher. A small, choked sigh. She opened her mouth, then closed it, shaking her head once, almost imperceptibly.

"Maybe," she breathed.

Before I could ask what she meant, she moved forward, her steps unnervingly certain. She walked past me and Mayari, straight to the cheap apartment door.

Her long, delicate fingers wrapped around the worn brass knob. She didn't pull. She just stood there, her knuckles white, her head bowed like she was listening to voices on the other side.

For a second, I saw a flicker of an image. A small girl in toddlers' clothes with a teddy bear, standing in a normal hallway, the same door in front of her. Her hair was a platinum silver-white in the lighting, not pink, pulled back in a simple ponytail.

She looked… lost.

The image vanished so quickly I thought I'd imagined it.

Sonata took a deep breath.

Then she turned the knob and pushed the door open.

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