They fell into the spine like a promise breaking. Cables whipped. Echoes swarmed, a storm of almost-people, their voices misremembered to obedience. Elara wrapped Mara in her coat and tucked her under her chin, a human answer to an inhuman wind.
"Orientation lost," the tower announced. "Proceeding with default narrative."
"Not your narrative," Elara spat, catching a ladder rung that wasn't there until she needed it. She hauled them onto a maintenance ledge that overlooked the entire inner column of the sanctuary—the elevator shafts like organ pipes, the floors like vertebrae. The city beyond the slit-windows was a postcard mailed to no one.
Mark slid down beside them, bleeding from an argument with gravity. "That mop owed me money anyway." He nodded toward a hatch stamped with a sigil she'd seen behind the Merchant's curtain. "Back door to the lattice."
The hatch required a price: the panel lit with options like a cruel survey. PAY WITH: NAME, FACE, EXIT, COMPASS, GUARDIAN.
"I'm out of compass," Elara said. "And the exit's already pawned."
Mara touched the panel with steady fingers. "It doesn't want the word," she said. "It wants the work." She pressed her bracelet to the scanner. The light turned green, then red, then something that hurt to look at.
"Denied," the tower sang. "Guardian misapplied."
Elara pressed her forehead to the panel until it knew her pulse. "Take outcome acceptance," she said quietly. "Take the part of me that needs to justify this."
Silence, as the sanctuary did the kind of math that counts in souls. Then the hatch clicked.
Inside, a room like a brain: nodes pulsing, wires whispering in wet logic. At its center, a console waited with two levers and a window onto the city.
Mark stayed at the threshold. "One lever seals, one opens," he said. "You jammed the Engine. It'll make you pick here."
Elara set Mara down. "If I open it, the Echoes go free. The sanctuary collapses. People die."
"If you seal it," Mark said, "the Echoes go quiet. The sanctuary survives. People live wrong."
Mara climbed onto the console like a small monarch taking a throne too early. "What did you tell the machine?" she asked. "When it wanted outcome acceptance."
"That I'm wrong," Elara said. "That I'm theirs. But not for long."
Mara considered this with the ruthless grace of children. "Then don't accept the outcome," she said. "Accept the cost." She pointed at the space between the levers, where a third groove waited, dusty, unadvertised. "That one's for people who break their own rules."
Elara slid her hand into the hidden channel. The console hissed like relief. The city window widened until she could see the other six sanctuaries on the horizon, lit like false stars.
The tower's voice narrowed to a scalpel. "Unauthorized path."
"Write it down," Elara said. "Make it canon."
She pulled.
The sanctuary convulsed. Floors re-labeled themselves in panic. The spine screamed with the sound of trapped things learning a new tense. Echoes slammed against the glass and then poured through it—not out into the world, but into Elara, into Mara, into Mark—into everyone still inside, seeding them with unfinished stories.
The city did not collapse. It shivered as if waking from a fever.
Mark wept like a man who had misplaced his cynicism. "You didn't open or seal," he said. "You turned it inside out."
The tower gasped. "Outcome rejected."
Elara lifted Mara. The child was heavier with history and light. "No," Elara said, voice hoarse, certain. "Outcome accepted. Cost paid."
Behind them, alarms softened into something like weather. Ahead, a stairwell unfolded—not up or down, but through.
"Where does it go?" Mara asked.
Elara smiled with an ache that would take a lifetime to count. "To the people who think they're safe."
They stepped forward.
The spine closed like a healed wound. The sanctuaries across the horizon flickered, as if listening. Somewhere deep in the tower, the Confession Engine tried to write a sentence and found only a blank it could not erase.
End of Volume One.