“Natasha?”Ciro said her name before he could stop himself, and the room seemed to answer him with another tremor. The speaker hissed, carrying the sound of his sister’s breathing, shallow and uneven, just as it had been when she first woke in the hospital.“Ciro, don’t let them bring me back.”He moved toward the sealed inner door, but Daniel caught his shoulder.“Don’t answer her,” Daniel said.Ciro turned on him. “You just told me there were two chambers. Now I hear my sister asking for help, and you want me to stand here?”“I want you to understand that the system can reproduce voices from its records. It has years of recordings from her childhood. It knows how she spoke, how she cried, what she called you. It can make you believe she is in that room.”“That sounded like her.”“That is why it was built to work.”The warning display blinked again. The countdown had reached forty-three seconds, and the line identifying Natasha as the compatible subject flashed in time with the pulsi

“Adrian… you promised I could have his body.”The voice came from beyond the inner door, and it was nothing like Ciro’s father. It was lower, rougher, with a strange, patient hunger that made the hairs rise on Ciro’s arms. Adrian had gone rigid beneath Ciro’s grip. For the first time since entering Room 17, he looked like a man who had walked into a trap he had mistaken for his own design.“Let go of me,” Adrian said.“Not until you tell me what that means,” Ciro replied.Adrian’s eyes flicked toward the case. “You don’t understand what you’re holding.”“I’m beginning to understand that everyone in this place has been lying to me.”The inner lock turned another fraction. A narrow line of white light appeared around the door, then vanished as the emergency system tried to seal it again. The display showed thirty-four percent containment failure. The number had risen while the lights were out, and now it was climbing more slowly, as if whatever was inside had paused to listen.Daniel mo

Adrian did not deny it.That was what unsettled Ciro most. The man had spent the night turning every question into another question, every accusation into a warning, and every uncertainty into a reason Ciro should trust him. Yet when the witness asked what he had done with the body, Adrian stood motionless beside the console, his eyes fixed on the narrow opening of Room 17.“Answer me,” Ciro said. “What did you do with my father’s body?”Adrian’s gaze shifted to him. “I didn’t kill your father.”“That wasn’t my question.”“The body was transferred to a private facility because the accident report was incomplete. Your grandfather arranged it.”“Evelyn said the body was moved before official identification. She didn’t say you were involved.”“I was there.”The words landed heavily. Ciro felt the old questions he had carried since childhood rise all at once: the funeral he barely remembered, the adults who stopped talking whenever he entered a room, the years when his grandfather became

For one terrible second, Ciro couldn’t understand what he was looking at.The screen had gone dark, the restoration had begun, and somewhere beneath Blackwood, a system that had remained dormant for seventeen years was responding to his sister’s voice. He still had his phone pressed against his ear, but Natasha wasn’t speaking anymore. All he could hear was the faint sound of her breathing and, somewhere in the background, that same unfamiliar humming she had described from her childhood.“Natasha, answer me.”“Ciro?”Her voice returned, but it sounded distant.“I’m here. Don’t agree to anything else. Do you understand me?”“I didn’t agree.”Ciro looked at the console. “The system says you did.”“I said no.” Her voice trembled. “I told him I didn’t want him to come out, but he said I was too late.”The lights above them flickered.Daniel immediately moved to the manual panel, pressing several controls in rapid succession, but the console refused to respond. The display remained black

Ciro had imagined finding his father alive more times than he cared to admit, usually during the years immediately after the accident when he was still young enough to believe that adults could make mistakes about death and that one day someone would arrive at their house with an explanation for everything. Those fantasies had disappeared as he grew older, replaced by the understanding that some questions never received answers, but standing inside the lower archive of Blackwood with two men carrying his father’s face had made him question whether he had ever understood anything at all.The man behind the glass was struggling to breathe.The man in the black suit stood in the corridor with his hands loosely clasped before him, looking at Ciro with an expression that might have been affection if it had not carried so much calculation.“Hello, son,” he repeated. “You’ve taken long enough.”Ciro did not answer immediately. He looked from the enclosure to the man in the corridor, studying