The elevator doors opened to silence.
Dr. Elara Kane stepped onto the seventh floor, her footsteps echoing against pristine white tiles that shouldn't exist in a post-apocalyptic world. Three months ago, she'd arrived at Sanctuary Tower with nothing but trauma and the clothes on her back. Three months of climbing, floor by floor, each level promising answers that only bred more questions.
The seventh floor was different.
It was too clean. Too quiet. Too perfect.
"Welcome, Dr. Kane," a voice emerged from everywhere and nowhere. "We've been expecting you."
Elara's hand instinctively moved to the surgical scalpel hidden in her sleeve—the only weapon that had survived her journey here. "Who are you?"
"We are the Echoes. We are what remains when everything else is forgotten."
The lights flickered. In that microsecond of darkness, Elara saw them: shadowy figures lining the corridor walls, their forms shifting between human and something else entirely. When the lights returned, the hallway appeared empty again.
But she knew better now.
"You're not real," she whispered, forcing her breathing to steady. Her psychiatric training screamed that this was a hallucination, possibly from the contaminated air, maybe from stress-induced psychosis.
"Aren't we?" The voice almost sounded amused. "Tell us, Doctor—what's the difference between reality and collective delusion? If everyone in this sanctuary believes we exist, does that make us real?"
A door at the end of the hallway opened by itself. Crimson light spilled out, and with it came a sound Elara had hoped never to hear again: her daughter's laughter.
Her daughter who had died six months ago.
Her daughter who she'd left behind in the ruins of Chicago.
Her daughter who couldn't possibly be here.
"Mommy?" The voice was perfect, down to the slight lisp on the 's'. "Mommy, why did you leave me?"
Elara's scalpel clattered to the floor. Her knees weakened. "No. No, you're not real. She's gone. I saw her—"
"Did you?" The Echo's voice twisted with something between sympathy and cruelty. "Or did you run before you could bear to look? The seventh floor shows what you've buried, Dr. Kane. The question is: are you brave enough to remember?"
The laughter grew louder, mixing with other voices now—patients she couldn't save, colleagues who'd turned on each other when the water ran out, the man she'd killed to survive.
Elara forced herself to stand. To walk forward. Because the only way out was through, and she'd come too far to break now. Whatever waited in that crimson light, whatever truth the Echoes promised, she would face it.
She had to.
Because somewhere between the ground floor and here, Elara Kane had started to suspect something terrible: that she hadn't survived the apocalypse at all. That perhaps she'd died in Chicago with everyone else, and this sanctuary—this perfect, impossible tower—was something else entirely.
Hell. Purgatory. Or worse—a psychological experiment with no exit.
The door beckoned. Her daughter's voice called. And Elara stepped forward, crossing the threshold into the crimson light.
The door slammed shut behind her.
And in the darkness that followed, she heard the Echo whisper one final truth:
"Welcome to the real sanctuary, Dr. Kane. Where the dead remember, and the living forget. The question you should be asking isn't whether you died in Chicago."
A pause. A breath.
"It's how many times you've died since."