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My footsteps echoed against the polished floor as I walked back toward the elevator. For the first time since arriving at Blackwood Hall, Aurora felt beyond my reach.

The elevator arrived at once. I stepped inside and pressed the button for the lobby. The doors closed.

For several seconds, nothing happened beyond the mechanical hum I had heard hundreds of times before. I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes, grateful for the brief illusion that I could postpone every decision until tomorrow.

Then the elevator slowed. I looked up.

The display had stopped on a floor I had not selected. For a single suspended heartbeat, I simply stared at it. Then Margaret’s voice returned to me with startling clarity.

“If an elevator ever stops on a floor you didn’t choose…”

My hand moved instinctively toward the button panel.

“Stay inside.”

The elevator doors opened. The ninth floor.

For a moment, I didn’t understand what I was looking at.

The corridor beyond was familiar enough that my mind accepted it before my eyes did. Glass walls. Laboratories. Stainless steel benches. The same architectural language Blackwood Hall spoke everywhere else. They looked almost identical to Aurora.

Then the differences emerged.

Dust lay across the floor in a thin, undisturbed layer. The lights overhead flickered faintly, several of them no longer working at all. Plastic sheeting covered equipment that had not been touched in years. A faded evacuation notice still clung to one of the many doors, its corners curling away from the glass.

No voices. No footsteps. No movements.

Only silence.

A silence so complete that I could hear my own breathing. I should have pressed “Door Close.” I know that now. The elevator doors gave their warning chime. I stepped out before I could stop myself. I turned, the elevator doors were still open. I had time to change my mind.

I didn’t.

I took one cautious step into the corridor. Whatever had once happened here had ended so completely that the rooms no longer felt abandoned. They felt forgotten.

The elevator doors closed behind me. The sound echoed through the empty floor. Instinctively, I looked back. The indicator panel glowed above the doors. The elevator had already begun its descent. I watched as the numbers changed. I considered pressing the call button.

Then something caught my attention.

One office, halfway down the corridor, was illuminated. Not brightly, just enough to make the glass reflect differently from every other room on the floor. It made no sense. I started moving toward it.

The habit was older than reason. Laboratories are built upon anomalies. Every meaningful discovery I had ever made had begun with something that refused to behave the way it should. A result that didn’t belong. A number that couldn’t be explained. An answer that insisted on being questioned.

I reached the doorway.

The office was furnished differently than the spaces around it. Larger desk. Executive seating. Shelves lined with binders whose labels had long since yellowed with age.

One photograph still stood upright in the center of the desk. I couldn’t make out the faces.

“Dr. Rossi.”

The voice was calm. Cultured. Welcoming, even. I turned.

A woman stood in the doorway opposite mine. She was elegantly dressed, composed, perhaps a few years older than I was. Nothing about her suggested danger. If I had passed her in the corridors of Blackwood Hall, I would have assumed she belonged there.

“We’ve never been formally introduced,” she said. “I’m Victoria.”

The name meant nothing. I looked at her more carefully. There was something familiar in the way she held herself, in the quiet certainty with which she occupied the room, as though she belonged there and always had. Then the memory found me.