"We're not supposed to move yet!"
Ren ignored the voice.
He approached the first door. Nothing. The second. Nothing.
By the third, the buzzing pressure returned, like a frequency his bones could hear.
He stopped. Tilted his head.
"Are you listening?" he whispered, almost a joke, almost a dare.
The door did nothing.
Of course it did nothing.
And yet, somewhere, something listened.
A hand clamped his shoulder.
He turned, slowly.
A woman in a red bomber jacket stared him down. Blonde. Sharp-eyed. Her glare said she wasn't used to being ignored.
"You can't just walk up to them," she said. "We're all trying to figure this out."
He blinked, then gave her a thin smile. There was something steady in her voice, not quite command, not panic either. As if this wasn't her first time - or as if she was built for it. A beat passed. Her gaze lingered an instant too long.
"Your name," she murmured to herself. "It tastes wrong. But I've tasted it."
"Forgive me. I forgot we were forming a committee."
"You think this is funny?"
"I think it's inevitable." He gestured to the doors. "Eventually someone opens one. Or this place starves us until we do."
"There are sixteen of us and ten doors," a boy said from the floor. He had the twitch of a student who believed logic could keep him safe. "We need a system."
"Maybe chaos is the point," Ren said.
They stared. He stared back, reading them like a dead language.
He did not hate them. Not yet.
But people become problems when choice enters the room.
The group began to fissure, not violently, not yet, but the small social cracks appeared the way they always do when survival hangs like humidity.
Three drifted together into a fragile alliance. Safety in numbers. One whispered analysis too fast, as if reason could peel open a sealed door. Another woman with a scar across her cheek wasn't listening to anyone. Against the far wall, a girl muttered, not prayers - more like a list, or a confession unsure of wanting to be heard. The student knelt in dust, sketching diagrams of doors and names and numbers. Beautifully futile math.
People aren't built for stillness, Ren thought. Not in rooms like this. Stillness makes space for thoughts too heavy to carry.
He cataloged faces. The woman in the red jacket stood too straight, too ready. The student flinched at his own shadow - a memory he didn't own yet. The muttering girl's eyes didn't blink often enough. She knew something, or had already lost it.
He wondered if any of them felt the weight beneath the floor, that tautness under perception, the sense that the room held its breath waiting for someone to say the wrong thing.
Or the right thing at the wrong time.
His fingers itched for the pen. Not to write. To feel it.
He slipped it from his pocket. Heat bled into his palm, faint but insistent, as if the pen had begun to breathe.
The script in him - he could feel it now - pulsed like ink in his veins. Not metaphor. Not illusion. Something literal and unkind.
He wondered what would happen if he wrote someone else's name.
Or their death.
Or their memory.
He wondered, too easily.
No. Not yet. Not until the Labyrinth shows its teeth first.
A laugh cracked across the room.
It came from a man Ren had not noticed - bald, hollow-eyed, arms folded like a warden watching inmates knit their own nooses.
"Fifteen sheep and a shepherd with no crook," the man said. "Perfect."
"And which are you?" Ren asked.
"Neither." The man's smile was too white. "I'm just here for the finale."
"Confident," Ren said, "for someone stuck in the prologue."
"Prologues are where people reveal who they are."
Ren looked back at the doors.
So are endings, he thought. But no one survives both.
Door Three called to him again, less a door than a mirror that hadn't decided what to reflect.
He lifted the pen. Not to write. To see.
When the tip hovered near the wood, the room's temperature fell. The door shuddered - not physically, but conceptually - as if it were only a story deciding whether to exist.
He lowered the pen.
Silence deepened.
Only those who choose may proceed.
The ceiling wept the sentence more visibly now.
The voice arrived without source, as if concrete had found language.
The Gate is open.
Only ten may pass.
Choose.
Lights dimmed. A sequence of soft clicks moved along the arc of doors.
The room reacted like a kicked anthill.
People shouted. Some ran. Others froze. A woman shouldered Door Eight and found it fused shut.
"No - no, it won't -!"
Panic shattered.
Ren did not move.
He stood still as a confession, pen caught between two fingers.
He knew what would happen next.
The woman in the red jacket sprinted to Door Six. It hissed and yielded a fraction, enough to admit her.
The student slipped through Door Four after a hitch that made him gasp.
One by one, people chose. Doors answered or refused. It wasn't random. He could feel that. It wasn't about want or urgency. It was responding to something beneath the surface, something written in skin.
Only five remained when Ren stepped to Door Three again.
It opened. No sound. No drama. Shadows drew back at the edges like a breath released.
He crossed the threshold.
Air changed.
Copper and ink.
The corridor was narrow, the walls veined with soft red filaments pulsing under the surface, like capillaries beneath skin. The door sealed behind him, seamless. No handle. No return.
Faint scrawls scratched along the walls, as if a nail had kept a diary here.
He read as he walked.
Ren is not first.
To write is to erase God.
His heart did not jump. It did not need to.
The pressure in his chest was no longer fear. It was recognition. Like meeting an enemy you had never seen but always expected.
The corridor ended in a small room.
A desk sat at the center. On it, a single blank page. White. Waiting.
No window. No camera.
Just him, the pen, the page, and something watching that had no eyes.
He sat.
His fingers curled around the pen as if they had never learned any other shape.
The page stared back, full of silence and demand.
He exhaled.
Then he wrote.
"The door opened because I chose it."
Nothing changed.
But the air read it.
He wrote again.
"I came through unscathed."
A lie. A necessary one.
Warmth slid over his lip. One drop of blood.
He did not stop.
"No one saw what I brought with me."
The room trembled, faint as a held breath.
Reality leaned. Only slightly.
Enough.
He let the pen fall.
Blood salted his tongue. Shadows coiled in the corners like they'd heard the lie and liked its flavor.
The far wall unsealed - not a door, not quite - a panel peeling back as if the room had grown a gill. Beyond it, a passage breathed dim crimson.
He stood, unsteady, and stepped through.
---
Somewhere behind him, in the waiting room, someone screamed.
Not in pain.
In recognition.
They had seen his name.
They weren't supposed to remember it.
And the Labyrinth would not allow that for long.
---