The debrief room always smelled faintly of burned coffee and dry-erase markers.
TEAM 1 sat around the scuffed metal table, armor unbuckled, weapons stowed outside. A single overhead light cast hard-edged shadows across their faces. The wall screen behind OWL showed a frozen stairwell frame—chalk marks, a strip of fluorescent tape, the edge of a strobe.
"Start from first contact," OWL said. His voice was calm, unhurried. "Three-sentence summary, FULCRUM."
FULCRUM leaned back just enough to be comfortable, hands folded loosely on the table.
"Exterior geometry suggested four floors," he said. "Interior route attempted to loop us between floors via extended stairwell. We established physical and visual markers, confirmed recursion, then backtracked to the nearest 'real' landing and extracted civilians along a controlled path."
OWL nodded once. "Good. RATCHET, anything to add?"
"Loop confirmed by beacons and chalk marks," RATCHET said. "ZERO-NINE-SEVEN-ZERO behavior tracks with brief—repetition, spatial lies, no obvious memetic bleed. Building didn't like us ignoring its little tricks, but it didn't escalate."
"Vitals were stable throughout," DOCSTRING added from the far end of the table, tablet in hand. "Minor spike in FULCRUM at the top of the loop—exertion and frustration, not anomaly. No one reported time loss or dissociation."
"Yet," RATCHET muttered.
"Yet," DOCSTRING agreed. "We'll check again in twenty-four."
BASTION sat with arms crossed, shield propped against the wall behind him. HARROW idly rolled a stress ball between his palms, the foam creaking under his grip.
"Civilian behavior?" OWL asked.
"Compliant once we got them focused on the shield," FULCRUM said. "They responded well to simple, repeated instructions. Boy asked if it was real."
"And?" OWL prompted.
"I said yes," FULCRUM replied.
There was a flicker of something around OWL's eyes. Not disapproval. Not exactly approval either.
"Honesty is a risk," DOCSTRING said mildly.
"They'll forget the specifics," FULCRUM said. "The amnestics will sand it down. But the body remembers when you lie to it. I prefer to give it one true thing to hang on to."
"Philosophy noted," DOCSTRING said. "We'll see how the follow-up interviews go."
The door hissed open. PATCH$1 slipped inside, tablet hugged to her chest.
"Sorry," she said softly. "Was finishing intake on the kid."
"Sit," OWL said, gesturing to an empty chair. "Anything to add?"
She took the seat between FUSE and VANTAGE, setting the tablet down.
"They're shaken," she said. "Normal trauma markers, nothing anomalous. Uncle's blood pressure is a problem for regular reasons, not SCP reasons. The boy… he'll probably have nightmares about stairs for a while." She sighed. "I told him that's okay."
"Good," OWL said. He tapped a key, pulling up another screen—helmet cam footage from FULCRUM's POV. The loop, the beacon, the descent.
He let it play in silence for a minute.
"Your loop discipline is tight," he said finally. "Minimal chatter, clear commands, no grandstanding. You did not try to 'beat' the anomaly. You negotiated with it. That's what I want from TEAM 1."
"Thank you, sir," FULCRUM said.
Across the table, FUSE watched FULCRUM with an expression that sat somewhere between respect and irritation.
"Anything you'd change?" OWL asked.
"Bring rope next time," RATCHET said. "And a sledgehammer. At some point, I'd like to hit the building back."
"We're not testing whether blunt force works on non-Euclidean layouts," DOCSTRING said dryly.
"Not officially," HARROW muttered.
A small crack ran through the tension. OWL allowed it. A little pressure bleed was healthy.
"All right," OWL said. "Here's how this goes. You file your written AARs, you eat something that isn't vending machine sugar, you hydrate, and you actually try to sleep. DOCSTRING will schedule follow-ups. If you dream of stairs, write them down before you forget."
He glanced specifically at FULCRUM.
"That includes you," he added.
"Yes, sir," FULCRUM said.
"Questions?" OWL asked.
None of them did.
"Dismissed," he said.
Chairs scraped. Armor creaked. TEAM 1 filtered out in ones and twos—RATCHET still grumbling about hammers, HARROW stretching until his spine popped, BASTION moving as if he weighed the whole room.
FUSE paused by the door, waiting for PATCH$1. When she rose, he fell into step with her, shoulder brushing hers.
"You good?" he asked under his breath.
"I'm fine," she said. "They're fine. For now."
He grunted, unconvinced, but let it pass.
FULCRUM left last, nodding once to OWL.
"Good work," OWL said simply.
"Thank you, sir," FULCRUM replied, then stepped into the corridor.
Later, OWL sat alone in the debrief room, the light dimmed. The screen still showed FULCRUM's POV paused at the moment he turned around in the loop.
He keyed a different channel.
"Command Observers, this is OWL," he said. "Package two ready for review."
A moment passed. Then a new voice answered—a woman's, clipped and precise.
"ALPHA-1 Overwatch online," PRIORESS said. "Feed is live."
"Loop footage is yours," OWL said. "Doc notes appended. I'm flagging his response to the compulsion at the door and his decision to reverse direction rather than push through."
"Well within expected profile," PRIORESS said. "Clean work."
He hesitated. "You've seen something like this before," he said. It wasn't quite a question.
There was the faintest pause on the line.
"Yes," she said at last. "Different building. Different city. Different man."
"Same pattern?" OWL asked.
"Same edge," she replied.
OWL looked at the frozen frame on the screen—FULCRUM's gloved hand on the rail, the chalk mark on the wall, the strip of tape catching helmet-light.
"Assessment?" he asked.
"Stable," PRIORESS said. "For now. Maintain current tempo. Do not stack him with higher-risk Keter assets during this rotation. He is still in observation phase."
"Understood," OWL said.
On the other end of the link, she switched channels without ending the connection.
"Shadow channel, online," PRIORESS said quietly.
The voice that answered was lower, blurred slightly by distortion.
"Here," it said.
OWL didn't know the callsign attached to that voice. He wasn't supposed to. He only heard enough to know it existed.
"You saw his loop discipline?" PRIORESS asked.
"Yeah," the man said. "The way he refused the urge to push deeper just to 'solve' it. He turned around instead. That's… familiar."
"How familiar?" she asked.
On the screen, FULCRUM's frozen frame stared back at OWL, oblivious.
"On a scale of one to ten?" the hidden man said. "Eight. Maybe nine."
"Noted," PRIORESS said. "We'll discuss it off-record."
The shadow channel winked out.
OWL sat there for a moment longer, listening to the quiet hum of the building.
Then he keyed a private note into his tablet:
SUBJECT: FULCRUM
Handles ZERO-ZERO-ONE-TWO and ZERO-NINE-SEVEN-ZERO within tolerance.
Displays high procedural adherence under spatial stress.
Emotional affect: flat, self-controlled. Aware of others' investment in him; does not engage.
ALPHA-1 expresses 'familiarity' with pattern.
He tagged the note for internal Nu-7 review only and locked the file.
Outside, in the dorm corridor, footsteps passed and faded.
The city beyond the Site walls kept its own crooked rhythm.
And in one of the private quarters reserved for people above a certain pay grade, someone else looked at the same footage on a smaller, more intimate screen, thumb hovering over the replay button, thinking about how many edges one man could stand on before something finally slipped.