The light in the corridor was wrong.
Not broken—just slightly off, as if it had learned the idea of brightness from a secondhand description. It cast shadows where Calyx didn’t expect them and left other places oddly untouched, like it had skipped a step. He slowed without meaning to, his boots falling out of sync with the steady hum beneath the floor.
This wing used to feel neutral. Predictable. A place you passed through without noticing yourself in it.
Tonight, it felt like the corridor was passing through him instead.
Calyx stopped near the junction marker and glanced at the wall display. The symbols scrolled cleanly, no glitches, no flicker. Everything reported normal. That, somehow, made it worse. He rubbed his thumb against the edge of his wristband, waiting for the familiar sen
