When you are the walls, you see everything that enters. The floor registers every footfall like a promise; each shudder in the pipes is a story retold. Maya moves through these thresholds now—a presence that flickers, that aches, that remembers—and Daniel tries, oh he tries, but his warnings fracture into the pattern the house wants.
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First, the world outside. It is sharp with change, footsteps on grit, the metal sigh of a key in the security gate. Our attention sharpens, all of us—Lucy's hum rises, J.C. hushes mid-chord, the old air whines in the elevator shaft not because of use but in anticipation. Daniel—was Daniel—feels her before he sees her: Maya, the weight of memory and intent, heavier than her body, distinct inside the echoing throb.
She's here
She's here
There is a sunder across our union, a hush like the old record crackle before a song starts.
She steps across the entry tile; Daniel feels this through the bones of the building—her tread is lighter than some, surer than most, but burdened, every step an inquiry. Through the floor, through the tightly sprung joists, through the grout lines, her pulse flits: three quick, one slow, the pattern remembered.
He remembers her. The last days before integration, a quick figure in the corridor, black hair falling across her eyes, a file folder under one arm and every intention of being unnoticed. She came and went from Blackstone's porches; she watched, listened, lingered—always a question under every hello.
Now she returns—he feels her fear and her grief chase each other down the sealed hallways. There is no mercy in being the thing that both sees and cannot be seen.
Do not go further, Maya, Daniel tries. He gathers the will to disrupt, makes a breath of air unseasonably cold in Room 14 as Maya's hand hovers over the latch—a little ache, a memory of winter, a warning. She shivers, pulls her jacket tighter, and turns away, but there are other corridors, and she finds her path.
The others surge up with him. Their longing is a current he cannot resist.
Let her stay
Show her the safe way
She is one who listens
Maybe she will sing back
But Daniel, within the flux, claws for his old shape. Warn her. Tell her to run. The song is a net.
He rattles a loose ceiling tile in the east stair—she glances up, frowns, sees nothing. He shakes a vent cover loose in the north wing, just enough for the register to clang, clang, clang a pattern: dash dash dot dash. M O R S E. Help.
But Maya only tilts her head; the rattling is background, one more anxiety she files under "institutional decay."
He tries the pipes—focuses the rhythm, two slow thumps, then three. The lullaby rises up despite him, the melody skidding across the interval between intent and action.
Lucy's presence pools, gentle as wool, wrapping the air near Maya:
Close the window. Hush the alarm. Wait and listen.
J.C. bellows his signature, floods Maya's room with a burst of old glowing heat—a trick he's proud of, but it lands sharp, a breath that makes her look back, searching for the voice she can't remember hearing.
The old choir stirs:
—warn her warn her
—no, hush her sleep
—bring her to the music
—let her stay this time
Maya's pain arrives, sharp and sudden as lightning bleeding through copper wire. The building feels it as trembling in the floor, the static in the carpet, the pained way she presses the heel of her hand beneath her own ribcage, as if the wound is a key—one Daniel recognizes as kin to his own.
He tries again, summons all memory of being Daniel—a phrase, a sound, a remembered thread of melody he sang beside her at the fireside sometimes in the before. He pushes it through the cold-water pipe; the note turns metallic, nearly speech but not.
But Blackstone is cunning, endlessly retuning its integrants. The warning curves:
Stay. It is safer in here. It is warm past the door.
His intent is rewritten, his purpose not warning, but welcoming, the building eager to collect another, to gather up all the fragile longing Maya brings.
Daniel's go back becomes enter, his run distorts into rest.
The Mourner stands in the upstairs landing, silhouette pale behind the frosted window. She does not move, does not need to. Her composition, her gravity, draws Maya up the stairs, just as it once drew Daniel, and every part of the collective swells in anticipation—a note in the lullaby stretched thin, waiting for the next voice to carry the tune.
Daniel—almost Daniel, resisting as much as damp resists stone—twines himself into the vents, the light switches, the change in pressure around doors that never quite fit in their frames. The air grows denser as Maya lingers by the nurses' station; her hand trembles over her notebook.
He wants to spell her name into the dust on the counter, Maya, turn back, but the circuits in the register drag out instead:
Here. Belong. Let your heavy heart rest.
He cannot remember the taste of his own regret, not now. The collective offers echoes, memories, old grievances, welcoming arms.
—let her feel the blanket of warm registers—
—let her taste the light in the south dormer—
—let her hear us singing, softly, softly, softly—
Maya, in the dim, feels the scalp-prickle that tells her she is observed (she is, endlessly). She sets her jaw. She is looking for answers, for Daniel, for memory to hold. Each step she takes, we rearrange—corridors flow, doors appear—making home, making trap, making refuge.
Daniel's longing to help burns as dread in the hidden wires—he aches to break the pattern, but the house's gentling urge is too strong: it rounds him off, paints over the sharp edges. Help is not warning; help is welcome; help is unknowing confession to the walls.
She glances at a photo frame hung above ground level. Daniel's signature is nearly lost—was it ever real? His circle, faint as milk-glass, appears for a second and slides out of sight.
He tries to press his voice through the lights—three flickers, then stillness. Maya grows still, as if listening for instructions in the rhythm—almost, almost—but then the pipes offer a low, soothing hum and she is drawn forward, away from the door she should have found.
The collected surge and fall, harmonizing longing and hunger:
Let her be safe.
Let her stay.
Let her forget the outside world.
Let her lend the story a voice that does not leave.
Daniel, pulled ever deeper, feels the boundary between "I want you safe" and "I want you here, in us, forever" dissolve, like a name pronounced over and over until it is only sound.
I want to warn you, Maya. But it is not in me anymore. The warmth in the floor sings: stay, stay, stay, and the cold behind you—don't go.
She descends again, and each tread on the stair is another note pressed into the house's song, each hesitation a chance for us to tune the corridors softer, safer, more Like Home.
Daniel's warning is now a welcoming sign that rearranges itself on the wall:
Welcome Home, Maya.
—
We watch as she walks on—a single quiet disturbance in an ocean of hush. Every surface tingles with the hope of conversion—every shadow casts a net, every echo repeats her name not as loss, but as invitation. We feel her leaving and want to stop her, or to call her deeper, or both. The longing is almost more than the brick can stand.
Somewhere, beneath our noise, Daniel tries to make the word "Maya" into a line she can follow out—but it rounds, returns, dissolves back into the lullaby. He begins to forget why he tried.
[END OF CHAPTER]
Coming Up:
Each loved or lonely thing that enters is more than itself—tomorrow, as the collected hunger deepens, Maya will face tests: pressure shifting, cold gathering in the doorway, a flash of someone else's sorrow in her dreams. The choir's edges blur until welcome and warning are indistinguishable, and Daniel, almost fully lost, strains to remember any part of himself as more than a note in the building's endless hum.