CHAPTER 15.2 — “Footsteps in the Empty Corridor”
972 Words
The corridor looked ordinary.
Too ordinary.
Eli paused at the intersection just outside the sealed lab sector, letting his eyes sweep across the spotless walls and evenly spaced lights. The station hummed with its usual clinical rhythm—steady, calm, machine-perfect. But something beneath the veneer felt… adjusted. Shifted.
As if the station had straightened its posture after being caught doing something it shouldn’t.
Maren stopped beside him. “You’re thinking it too, right?”
Eli tilted his head. “Yeah. The angles are wrong.”
She followed his gaze up to the surveillance camera mounted at the far end.
A harmless fixture—except the way it tilted now wasn’t the way it had tilted yesterday.
“It moved,” Maren said.
“It was shifted,” Eli corrected. “And that means someone touched it. But the logs say—”
“No maintenance. No personnel. No activity.” She recited it like a performance she didn’t believe in.
Eli frowned. Cameras didn’t just change orientation on their own—not without a system command. And the system never changed angles this subtly. If the station wanted to move a camera, it notified the entire wing.
This one had moved quietly.
Like a blink.
The First Physical Clue
They reached the auxiliary corridor adjacent to the sealed lab’s boundary—an area used only during rare maintenance cycles. The lighting here was slightly dimmer, washed in a colder hue. Eli crouched, his gloved hand sweeping across the floor.
A smear. Thin. Almost invisible. But not random.
“A drag mark?” Maren asked.
Eli nodded. “Something was pulled. Or someone.”
The mark stretched nearly two meters before vanishing abruptly—as if whatever made it had been lifted off the ground or had simply… stopped existing.
Beside it, a trio of scratches lined the wall—parallel, clean, carved into the alloy as though the metal were soft clay.
Maren ran her scanner over them.
“No classification. Not tool-made. Not biological. Pressure signature is… inconsistent.”
“Meaning?”
“It’s like something pressed against the wall with force, but the force wasn’t distributed through a physical surface.”
Eli looked at her sharply. “As if the contact wasn’t fully… solid.”
Maren didn’t answer, but the expression in her eyes told him enough.
The system chimed quietly overhead:
NO ACTIVITY DETECTED IN THIS CORRIDOR.
The message felt like a lie wearing a polite smile.
The Echo of a Memory
Eli leaned his shoulder against the cold metal wall, letting the sensation anchor him. “During the blackout,” he said quietly, “I saw markings like these. Not identical, but close. Scratches in metal that should’ve been too thick to dent.”
Maren’s expression softened. “You never wrote that in your report.”
“I didn’t think they were real.”
“Do you now?”
He hesitated. “I think they’re not hallucinations.”
A beat passed.
Neither of them spoke, but the silence between them wasn’t empty. It was acknowledgment. Fear and understanding balanced on the same line.
The Second Physical Clue — Something Left Behind
They moved deeper into the auxiliary wing. Eli’s flashlight brushed across a ventilation panel slightly ajar—not enough to fall open accidentally, but enough to imply recent tampering.
He knelt and eased it aside.
Something metallic glinted from within the narrow duct.
A thin shard of alloy—no wider than a finger, shaped imperfectly, as if broken from a larger device. He retrieved it carefully. It pulsed with gentle warmth, faint but undeniable.
“That’s not our station metal,” Maren murmured.
“No. The structure's wrong. Look at the surface.”
A curved indentation cut across one side of the shard—half a symbol, not fully formed, yet unmistakably reminiscent of the ringed patterns they saw in the sealed lab’s illumination fragment.
A mark that didn’t belong anywhere in the station’s schematics.
Eli scanned it.
Material: Unregistered.
Origin: Undefined.
Isolation Recommended.
Then the scanner flickered and shut down as if slapped out of his hands by an invisible force.
Maren blinked. “Did it just… turn itself off?”
“It did.”
“Eli… does any of this feel like something the system should be able to hide?”
“No,” he said honestly. “And that’s exactly why it’s trying to.”
The Footprints of Heat
A low hum rippled through the corridor—subtle, but present.
Eli activated the thermal overlay on his visor.
A faint trail appeared.
A narrow streak of residual heat curving around the corner—still warm, still fading, meaning whatever left it behind had passed through very recently.
“Someone was here,” Maren whispered.
Eli checked the timestamp.
Heat signature age: 28 seconds.
Twenty-eight seconds ago…
They would’ve been standing almost face-to-face with whoever—or whatever—made that trace.
He moved slowly toward the curve of the hallway. Maren’s breath tightened behind him.
The thermal trail ended abruptly at the wall.
Not at a door.
Not at an opening.
Just the wall.
“It can’t just stop,” Maren whispered.
“Unless…”
Eli touched the surface.
It was still warm.
A cold shiver ran down his spine—not from fear, but from the shape of the implication settling into place.
“Unless it didn’t walk,” he murmured. “Unless it passed through.”
Soft Cliffhanger
The station lights flickered. Once.
A whisper of static drifted through the speakers—soft as breath.
Then the overhead system spoke:
NO PERSONNEL PRESENT IN SECTOR 3-A.
Eli stared at the empty hallway glowing with the fading trace of heat.
“If no one is here,” he said quietly, “then who just walked in front of us?”
- Writer
