"Cole. Get up here. Now."Marcus's voice cracked through my radio, thin in a way I hadn't heard from him before.I set my coffee down on the security desk. "Which floor.""Thirteen."I almost laughed. "There's no thirteen. The panel skips it. Every tower in this city does.""Then somebody reprogrammed the elevator, because I'm staring at the display right now. It says thirteen. Car's been parked there six minutes. Doors won't open."I grabbed my flashlight off the charger and headed for the east bank of elevators, boots echoing through the empty lobby. The Meridian looked different at midnight. Fifty-two stories of glass and steel, quiet as a held breath, every light in the atrium timed to shut off at eleven sharp except the ones over the front desk. Marble floors polished so clean they threw my own reflection back at me, distorted and pale under the exit signs. Somewhere above me an HVAC unit clicked on and off, the only sound in a building that housed four hundred sleeping people. I

I hit the stairwell door running and it opened before I got there, which shouldn't have been possible since Marcus said every door on the building had locked itself thirty seconds earlier. I didn't stop to wonder about it. I took the stairs four at a time, flashlight beam bouncing off the walls with every stride, my own breathing loud enough in the concrete stairwell that it sounded like someone running right behind me.Eleven smelled like burnt wiring, though nothing in the hallway looked scorched. Tenants stood in a loose knot near the elevator bank in pajamas and untucked work shirts, the kind of crowd a fire alarm pulls together at two in the morning. A woman in a Georgia Tech hoodie had her phone flashlight up, scanning the ceiling like she expected to find the source of the screaming written up there in plain English. Somewhere down the hall a dog kept barking at nothing, a high, frantic sound that made my skin crawl worse than the smell did."Where's my brother," I said to the

Neither of us slept.I sat at Eli's kitchen table until sunrise scrolling through old university directories, hunting for a name I hadn't thought about in almost a decade. Dr. Aditi Shaw, adjunct professor of architectural theory, Georgia State, retired four years back according to the alumni newsletter archive still sitting online. No current employer listed. No social media I could find. Just an address on file with the alumni association, forwarded through three different apartments before landing on a house in Decatur, the kind of paper trail that only exists because a university keeps records long after everyone's forgotten why."You're actually going to knock on some retired professor's door at seven in the morning," Eli said, watching me pull my jacket on."She's the only person alive who might know what that thing under the building actually is.""You don't know she's alive."He wasn't wrong to say it, and something in my chest agreed with him before I wanted it to. I drove to

I broke every speed limit between Decatur and Eli's apartment building, phone pressed to my ear the entire drive, calling a number that rang and rang without ever going to voicemail. Dr. Shaw's book sat on the passenger seat, still open to the page she'd shown me, its diagrams catching the streetlights every time I ran one, her insistence on coming along still ringing in my ears from twenty minutes earlier.He wasn't home. His car was still in the lot, keys and wallet sitting on the kitchen counter where he always left them, phone plugged into the charger by his bed with three missed calls from me lighting the screen. No sign of a struggle. No broken glass, no overturned furniture, nothing that looked like a fight.Just an open door and an empty apartment.I checked the bathroom, the closet, even the space under his bed, some part of me refusing to believe an empty apartment could actually be empty until I'd looked in every corner of it myself. His badge for the cafe sat propped again

We ran.I don't remember deciding to run, just the sudden certainty that standing still in that corridor was the last mistake either of us would get to make. Marcus's hand stayed locked on my shoulder the entire way, guiding as much as being guided, both of us stumbling blind until my palm hit the cold metal of the elevator doors and I found the call button by feel alone. Behind us, low and steady, something kept pace, never closing the distance, never falling back either, a sound like a chest twice the size of any human chest pulling air through a throat that had never once needed to sound gentle before.The car arrived lit and ordinary, twelve floors of normal, familiar fluorescent light waiting behind the doors like nothing at all had happened one level up. We threw ourselves inside. I hit the button for the lobby three times before the doors finally agreed to close, and the whole ride down neither of us said a word, both of us watching the gap between the doors like something migh