The cafeteria felt wrong, but it felt less wrong than the corridor.
Isaac stood just inside the doors and let his eyes sweep.
Tables bolted down.
Benches fixed.
A service window with a metal lip scratched by a thousand tray slides.
A keypad door that looked dead.
A dispenser with a cracked faceplate and a slot beneath it.
Dust everywhere it was allowed to exist, and bare strips where it was refused.
Tetley moved like he had a pass.
He padded along a clean strip without triggering anything, six paws landing soft, each step placed like he knew where the floor listened.
Zoya watched the strip like it could bite.
Her thumb found the knot at her wrist anyway, not grinding this time, just holding it.
Tetley hopped onto the nearest bench, too light for how deliberate it was.
He crossed the tabletop.
One of his rear limbs stepped twice on the same place, and the room did nothing.
That mattered.
He reached the far wall and stopped in front of a recess Isaac hadn’t clocked the first time.
Not a cupboard.
Isaac could see hinge scars that didn’t match any human use, and the latch line sat too low for fingers.
A bay built for something small.
There was a plate beside it, flush with rootstone, stamped with the same animal silhouette Isaac had seen earlier.
A cat inside a simple box.
Tetley sat square to it.
He waited long enough to feel trained.
Then he pressed once with one front paw.
The plate answered.
No chime.
A tired clunk from inside the wall, like a latch doing its job for too long.
A shallow tray slid out.
Something dropped into it.
A sealed pouch.
Zoya leaned forward without moving her feet.
Her voice came out thin.
“That’s his.”
Isaac didn’t soften the thought.
“Assigned.”
Tetley nosed the pouch like he was checking the seal, then hooked it with a claw and dragged it onto the bench.
The pouch was stiff, foil-fabric laminate, edges slightly translucent where seamlight hit.
It didn’t look like comfort.
It looked like supply.
Along the seal, a repeating stamp ran in a tight band, like safety tape.
The icon again.
Then bruised print Isaac could still read in parts.
AUTH FAUNA.
RATION A.
Below it, smaller, half flaked.
SECTOR 03.
Zoya couldn’t read it, but she stared at the shapes like her body understood what they meant.
“That’s a ration,” she said.
“It’s not a treat.”
Tetley ripped it open with a practiced bite.
Inside were dense nutrient tiles.
Dark slabs cut into neat rectangles, standardized hunger.
They had a cold dry sheen, mineral and preserved, like they were never meant to spoil and never meant to taste good.
Tetley took the first bite.
The collar node at his throat pulsed once, darkening, then holding.
A purr started low.
It didn’t fill the air.
It lived in Isaac’s teeth.
The cafeteria airflow shifted.
Not a gust.
A smoothing.
Pressure easing, like the room let something go.
Zoya’s shoulders dropped a fraction.
She noticed.
Hated that she noticed.
“Of course,” she muttered. “We find a cafeteria and the cat’s eating compliance.”
Isaac’s mouth twitched once and vanished.
“That’s about right.”
Zoya still didn’t sit.
Her eyes kept moving.
Clean strip.
Service window.
Tray stack.
Dispenser in the corner.
The floor refused dust in straight lines that were too intentional to ignore.
Isaac kept his boots off those lines without having to think about it now.
He set his wings a little closer to his back.
Fold, not flare.
The resin bind on the left plate held.
The crack under it stayed quiet.
Zoya’s gaze dropped to his hands.
Not skin.
Black hide, like old leather turned to stone.
Dark hooked nails that looked like they belonged on something that didn’t need tools.
She stared longer this time.
Not curiosity.
A careful kind of fear.
“You’re not normal,” she said.
Isaac didn’t look offended.
He didn’t look anything.
“Yeah.”
Zoya’s eyes flicked up his arms, then to the wings.
The crystal plates were scarred and chipped in places now.
The left side held the resin bind like a brace.
The size of them made the room feel smaller.
“You fell out of the sky,” she said, like she was testing the words.
Then she looked at his face, like she expected it to argue back.
“Heaven wouldn’t take me,” he said.
Zoya gave a tight sound that wasn’t quite humour.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the closest I’ve got.”
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She stared at him like she was deciding whether to call him a liar or a curse.
Then her eyes flicked to his wings again.
“You don’t talk like Brimwick,” she said. “You don’t look like anything I’ve seen. And you act like you’re guessing half the time.”
Isaac didn’t move.
He kept his wings close, kept his hands loose.
The black hide on his forearms caught the seamlight and didn’t shine.
“I am guessing,” he said.
Zoya’s brows pulled together.
“That’s… not better.”
Isaac swallowed.
The act felt familiar.
The reason didn’t.
“I don’t remember anything,” he said.
Zoya didn’t answer right away.
Her thumb found the knot at her wrist and held it hard.
“What do you mean, you don’t remember,” she said.
“I mean I woke up in the mud and the only thing I had was a name,” Isaac said.
“Isaac. That’s it.”
Zoya’s gaze went sharp.
Like she’d heard lies all her life and could smell them.
“You’re telling me you don’t know where you came from,” she said.
“No.”
“You don’t know what you are.”
“No.”
She nodded once, slow, like the word tasted bad.
“And you still jumped.”
Isaac’s jaw tightened.
“I saw you,” he said. “I saw the rope. I saw the drop. I didn’t… I didn’t have a reason that made sense. I just moved.”
Zoya’s eyes narrowed, then softened a fraction, then hardened again like she hated the softness.
“You remember the word ‘heaven,’” she said.
“I remember words,” Isaac said. “Some of them. Shapes. Functions.”
He glanced at the dispenser and then back to her.
“I look at things and they feel like they belong in my head, even when nothing else does.”
Zoya breathed out through her nose, slow.
“That’s convenient.”
Isaac didn’t flinch.
“It’s terrifying,” he said, quieter. “Because it’s the only thing that answers when I ask myself anything.”
Tetley’s purr ran under the silence like a low engine.
Isaac felt it in his teeth and hated how much he needed it.
Zoya’s voice dropped.
“Do you remember your mother.”
Isaac stared at her.
The question landed like a stone in an empty bucket.
“No,” he said.
“Your father.”
“No.”
“A home.”
Isaac shook his head once.
Zoya looked away, and the movement wasn’t dismissal.
It was her trying to put the thought somewhere that didn’t hurt.
“So you’re alone,” she said.
Isaac’s mouth opened, closed.
He didn’t know how to answer a thing that big without making it into a speech.
“I’m… blank,” he said finally. “And I keep waiting for it to fill. It doesn’t.”
Zoya’s fingers tightened on her linehook handle, then loosened.
Zoya stared at him a long moment, like she was weighing a debt she hadn’t asked for.
Her eyes dropped to his hands again.
Black hide.
Dark hooked nails.
Not human.
Then up to the wings, the crystal plates sitting on his back like armour he couldn’t take off.
“You don’t even look like you belong in the same sky as Brimwick,” she said.
Isaac’s gaze drifted, not away from her, but past her, to the dispenser and the doorframe and the dustless strips.
Like the room was a puzzle he could only solve by staring hard enough.
Zoya caught the drift and hated how fast her body moved to correct it.
She leaned forward and knocked her knuckles once against the edge of the bench, sharp.
Isaac’s eyes snapped back to her.
“Here,” she said. Not loud. Not gentle. Just placed. “When I’m talking to you, you stay here.”
Isaac blinked once.
Then he nodded, like the instruction slid into a slot in him that had been empty.
Tetley’s purr pressed low through the table and made Isaac’s jaw tighten.
The sound didn’t scare him.
It steadied him, and that fact made him look angry with himself for a second.
Zoya saw it.
She didn’t comment.
She just shifted, a little, putting herself where he’d have to look at her to look at anything.
“You said heaven,” she said. “Like it’s a real place.”
“It’s a word,” Isaac said.
Zoya’s brows pulled together.
He said it wrong.
Not the word, the weight behind it.
Like he knew the shape and not the meaning.
She waited one beat, watching him, and the answer arrived without him meaning to give it.
He didn’t have the memory attached.
Zoya exhaled through her nose.
“Fine,” she said. “Then don’t use words you don’t understand up there. They make you Due.”
Isaac’s eyes narrowed.
“Due,” he repeated, like he was trying to taste it.
Zoya’s thumb went to the knot at her wrist and held it hard.
Her jaw flexed once.
A small motion, ugly with instinct.
“Don’t,” she said, and it came out sharper than she meant. “Don’t say it like that. Not like you’re curious.”
Isaac froze.
A slow breath.
Then he nodded again, smaller.
Zoya held the knot until her fingers ached.
She let go like it burned, then set her palm flat on her knee, grounding.
Her gaze flicked to the door, then back to him.
Too quick.
Like she was counting how many things she’d already started managing.
Her gaze flicked to his wings.
“You blocked the fall with those,” she said. “You took it like it was nothing.”
Isaac’s mouth twitched, then stopped.
“It wasn’t nothing.”
Zoya watched his left side, the resin bind, the way he held the wing close without thinking.
Protecting the crack.
She didn’t ask if it hurt.
She didn’t give him that softness.
Instead she went practical, because practical was safer.
“You can do that again,” she said.
Isaac didn’t answer fast.
Not because he was hiding.
Because he was measuring whether he was allowed to say yes to something he hadn’t promised before.
Zoya didn’t wait for permission.
“My mother is still up there,” she said, like she was stating a location on a map. “On the rim. She’s not built for running. And Brimwick doesn’t forgive debts.”
Isaac’s eyes held on her face now.
No drift.
No puzzle.
Just attention.
Zoya kept her voice flat, even though her throat tightened.
“If you can take a hit meant to split bone,” she said, nodding at his wings, “then you can get one person past a rope line.”
Isaac swallowed.
He looked at his hands again, like he was checking if they were real.
Then he looked back at her.
“I don’t know what I am,” he said.
Zoya’s tight sound came out again, almost humour, almost not.
“Neither do I,” she said. “But I watched you fall.”
Isaac went still.
Zoya leaned in, just a fraction, eyes sharp.
“You didn’t scream,” she said. “Not like someone who knows what dying feels like.”
Isaac’s jaw tightened.
He didn’t deny it.
He didn’t confirm it.
The silence did the work.
Zoya sat back.
Something in her settled.
Not kindness.
Not comfort.
Just a choice she was going to have to live with.
“Alright,” she said. “Then you do what you do. And you let me handle the parts you don’t know you don’t know.”
Isaac held her gaze.
A beat.
Then he nodded.
“Okay,” he said.
Zoya’s thumb tapped the knot once.
Commit.
“Good,” she said. “Because when we get out of this place, you’re going to need someone to tell you which way the knives point.”
Zoya swallowed.
Then she said it once.
Clean.
Without armour.
“Thank you.”
Isaac nodded once.
No smile.
No joke.
No speech.
“Yeah,” he said.
The room kept breathing.
Tetley kept chewing.
Nothing tried to fix it.
That was why it held.
Zoya rubbed her palm over her knee once, fast, like wiping away the fact she’d said it.
Then she looked up and put her blade back in her voice.
“So what now,” she asked. “Because I don’t think we’re in a normal hole.”
Isaac watched the floor strips again.
Watched the dust refuse them.
Watched seamlight ration itself in bruised pulses.
He answered plain.
“It’s a facility,” he said.
Zoya’s brow tightened.
“A what.”
“A place built to run,” Isaac said, and the words came out like he’d heard them before even if he didn’t know why.
“It’s still running.”
Zoya’s mouth tightened.
“And it’s watching.”
Isaac didn’t deny it.
He shifted his wings a fraction.
The vibration in his seams thickened toward the corridor they’d come from, then eased, then thickened again toward a different line in the wall.
Like the building still had lanes it wanted them to take.
Zoya saw the movement.
“You felt something.”
Isaac nodded.
“There’s a pull.”
Zoya stared at the floor.
At the places dust refused to settle.
“Then we follow it.”
Tetley’s collar node stuttered again.
The purr hitched.
Not softer, not louder.
Wrong.
Isaac felt it in his teeth first, a grit under the sound.
Tetley paused mid-chew.
His ears angled toward the vents.
Both tails stopped sweeping.
Then started again, faster, like they were trying to fan something off him.
The collar node darkened, held, then flashed faintly, like a heartbeat out of time.
The cafeteria airflow changed.
Not a smoothing this time.
A tug.
Air pulled toward the service window, then toward the seam beneath it, like the room had found a throat and tried to swallow.
Zoya’s head snapped up.
“What.”
Tetley swallowed too fast.
Another bite, but his jaw didn’t want it.
He chewed like the food had turned to sand.
The purr cracked.
A thin, dry rasp threaded through it, and the clean strips on the floor looked cleaner, like dust backed away another inch.
Something clicked inside the wall.
Far.
Patient.
Zoya went still.
Her fingers went to her handle wrap without looking.
The faded thread.
The dead shard inset.
She rubbed it once, hard.
Tetley stopped chewing.
He stepped down off the bench.
Padded to the service window.
Sniffed the lip.
Sniffed the seam beneath it.
Then slipped through a narrow gap between rootstone and metal that Isaac hadn’t believed could open.
A seam that softened, parted, then closed again without sound.
He was gone.
Zoya stood up fast enough that the bench scraped.
Isaac lifted his hand, palm down.
“Wait.”
Zoya’s eyes were wide.
“He’s gone.”
Isaac didn’t answer.
He just watched the strips.
Watched the vents.
Nothing tightened.
Zoya stared at the seam where the cat had disappeared.
Her thumb tapped the knot at her wrist twice.
Commit.
Then she sat back down, but she didn’t relax.
Not for real.
A credential with a heartbeat, and their credential had walked away.
The pause turned sharp again.
Isaac didn’t waste it.
He crossed to the back of the room, careful with his feet, and stopped beside the doorframe.
The keypad sat there under grime, dead-looking and patient.
His hand hovered near it, then moved on.
Beside the frame, half-sunk into rootstone, a metal jurisdiction plate was bolted in with old screws that still held.
It was scuffed, soot-stained, and clean in a way dust couldn’t explain.
Like hands had wiped it on purpose.
The stamped lines landed in his head before he could argue with them.
12000 BC.
Zoya leaned forward from the bench.
“What is that,” she asked.
“Twelve thousand BC,” Isaac said.
His voice stayed low.
“A label.”
“For what.”
Isaac kept his eyes on the plate like it could bite.
“For where it opens.”
Zoya stared at the plate like it had personally insulted her.
“BC,” she said, tasting the sound like it didn’t belong.
Isaac didn’t give her a lecture.
He didn’t have one anyway.
He just knew the stamp meant time, and time meant the Core wasn’t one place.
It was many.
“Not a warning,” he said.
“A jurisdiction.”
Zoya’s mouth tightened.
“So we’re leaving a cafeteria,” she said, and forced a thin blade of humour into it like she needed it to breathe, “and walking into a year.”
Isaac didn’t laugh.
He didn’t contradict her either.
He folded his wings tighter.
He looked at the clean strips on the floor and chose the dusty path between them without hesitating.
“We don’t linger,” he said.
Zoya stood too.
Her hand found her linehook handle.
She rubbed warmth into her fingers once more, then stopped, like stopping was another thing she didn’t want to admit she’d learned.
“I’m with you,” she said.
Then, quieter, like she was reminding herself.
“Stay close.”
Isaac nodded.
Not agreement.
Confirmation.
They waited one more vent pulse.
Warm exhale.
Cold pull.
Warm again.
The room kept breathing.
Time passed in those breaths.
A minute.
Two.
Zoya’s eyes kept cutting to the seam Tetley had vanished through.
Isaac kept his eyes on the jurisdiction plate.
A seam whispered open behind them.
Metal scraped soft.
Something dragged across the floor.
Zoya spun.
Isaac pivoted with his wings half lifted, already shaping space.
Tetley emerged from the same impossible seam, dragging a small knapsack by the strap.
It was human-made.
Old-world fabric, stiffened by age but preserved.
A stamped icon on the flap.
The same animal silhouette in a box, printed in faded black.
Tetley hauled it with stubborn determination, six legs doing the work, tails sweeping in small controlled arcs to keep balance.
He dropped it at Isaac’s feet.
Sat.
Looked up once.
The look held just long enough to feel like a request, not curiosity.
Then he looked toward the corridor.
Zoya stared at the bag like it was a miracle she didn’t want to admit she needed.
“Where did you even,” she started, then cut herself off.
Because the question didn’t matter.
The result did.
Isaac didn’t open the knapsack yet.
Not here.
Not while the room was still listening.
He nudged it with the edge of his boot, feeling weight shift inside.
Not empty.
Useful.
He looked from the bag to Tetley’s collar node.
It had cleared.
Translucent now.
The purr was gone, and so was the restless set in his posture.
Whatever had pulled him into that seam, it wasn’t pulling him now.
That meant they had a window.
Isaac met Zoya’s eyes.
No speeches.
No vows.
Just the next step.
“Alright,” he said.
Then he nodded toward the corridor and the plate-stamped lane.
“Show us.”
