Ansel didn't move.
Neither did Mira.
Behind her, the hallway throbbed like a wounded animal—still twitching from the chase but retreating for now. The walls hissed and sighed, disappointed. But not gone.
Not ever gone.
"What do you mean, you haven't died yet?" he asked, his voice hoarse and ragged from running and fear.
Mira looked at him for a long, heavy second. Not with pity. Not with empathy.
Like she was trying to decide if he was worth the energy.
Or if the hallway would just take him anyway.
"You're new," she finally said. Still got skin on your face. Still breathing like you think air matters. That won't last."
She turned and started walking—her boots crunching on old bone fragments embedded in the floor like fossils.
Ansel didn't follow.
"Answer the question."
Mira paused. Just enough to show she wasn't used to being questioned down here.
Then she turned back.
"I mean, I've been in this place long enough to know it doesn't kill you the way you think it will. It wears you. Chews on your soul until there's nothing left but instinct. Memory. Regret."
She stepped closer. The dim light from a cracked ceiling fixture caught her face—revealing skin that wasn't quite whole. Something beneath it shifted ever so slightly, like her bones didn't trust her muscles anymore.
"It's not death down here. Not really. It's forgetting. And I still remember who I am. So no—I haven't died. Not yet."
Ansel felt a chill crawl down his spine, coiling at the base of his skull.
"How long have you been here?"
Her face shifted.
Not with emotion.
With damage.
Like her skin remembered something she didn't want to say aloud.
"Time's not real here. "Not the way you're thinking." She rubbed her arm absently, where a deep scar spiraled like a burn that tried to become a symbol. "But if I had to guess... years. Maybe more. Decades, even."
Ansel couldn't breathe for a moment.
His chest tightened.
"And you've been alone that whole time?"
Mira gave a bitter smile. "At first. Then there were others."
"What happened to them?"
She didn't answer.
The silence stretched until it started to feel alive.
Then: skritch-skritch-skritch.
That sound again.
The one Ansel had heard since Episode 1.
Nails on bone.
Somewhere far behind them. Or below them. Or… inside the walls.
Mira's head snapped toward the sound. Her entire body tensed like a hunting dog catching a scent.
"Shit," she whispered. "It's moving again."
"What is?"
She looked at him. Her pupils had narrowed. "The hallway."
"No—the thing in the hallway. I've been hearing it since I got here."
Mira's eyes narrowed. "Describe it."
He hesitated. "It… follows. Scrapes along the walls. Never seen it. Only heard it. Like it's crawling just behind the edge."
Mira's expression changed. Not quite fear.
But recognition.
Deep. Old. Dangerous.
"You heard it that early?" she muttered.
"That means it knows you."
"What is it?" Ansel pressed.
But Mira wasn't listening. She was reaching into her coat, pulling something from the inner lining.
A small, jagged piece of mirror. Its surface was cracked in a pattern that looked like veins.
She held it up to the wall.
And we waited.
The mirror began to fog.
Then drip.
Not steam.
Not water.
Blood.
A single droplet hit the floor and hissed like acid, eating through the tile and releasing a puff of greasy smoke.
Ansel backed up instinctively. "What the hell is that?"
"Tracker," Mira said, voice flat. "It watches from behind the mirrors. It doesn't move unless it thinks you're forgetting who you are."
She met his eyes, and for the first time, Ansel saw just how tired hers were. How heavy her memories must be.
"You still remember your name?"
"Yes."
"Your birthday?"
"…Yeah."
"Your worst memory?"
That one stopped him.
Stopped everything.
Images flickered through his mind like broken film:
An empty crib.
A staircase slick with something dark.
The phone that rang and rang—and nobody picked up.
But he nodded.
Mira exhaled. "Good. You've still got time."
"Time for what?"
"Time to fight back."
A deep, wet moan echoed from the direction they came.
It vibrated the floor.
The walls.
The inside of Ansel's teeth.
Mira tucked the mirror away.
"Let's move."
"Wait," he said. "I'm not going anywhere until I know what this place is. Why it's like this. What it wants."
Mira stared at him.
Then she turned her head slightly, as if listening to something deep on the floor.
"It doesn't want anything," she said at last. It won't. It's hunger without shape. Guilt without memory. It grows when people come looking for things they shouldn't. And when they get too close to the truth… it becomes home."
She stepped past him.
Paused at the next tunnel—a crooked corridor that smelled like sulfur and old paper.
"You want answers?" she said without looking back.
"Yes."
'Then you better hold onto your name. Because the deeper you go, the more it tries to make you forget you were ever human."
Ansel swallowed.
The hallway ahead opened like a wound.
Flickering lights revealed bone, roots, and something breathing in the ceiling.
Still, he stepped forward.
Mira smiled.
Just a little.
"Careful," she said. "You keep acting brave like that, and this place will start to like you."
And then they were gone, swallowed by the twisting corridor—two souls walking willingly into the gut of something ancient.
Something is awake.
Something that had waited a long, long time.
As they moved deeper, the architecture began to change.
The walls breathed more openly, pulses visible beneath transparent patches like embryonic skin. Wires hung like veins. Floor tiles curled at the corners like decaying leaves.
Ansel could hear the building thinking.
Remembering.
The air grew warmer, thicker. The silence wasn't silence anymore. It was listening.
"Does it have a heart?" he asked suddenly.
Mira stopped. Her silhouette was framed by a wall that had begun to sweat blood.
"Yes," she said. "And we're walking into it."
Beneath this place is a room that remembers too much. A place where every memory is edited, twisted until you don't know if you ever existed outside these walls at all.
If the building has a heart, what happens when it starts to beat?