The vendor's stall sat between a collapsed elevator shaft and a wall pulsing with Echo static. Strings of glass vials dangled like wind chimes—each filled with a memory distilled to liquid light.
"Pick a life," the Memory Merchant said, voice half-whisper, half-invitation. "Or sell one you won't miss."
Elara's pulse synced to the tower's heartbeat. The Screaming Floor still howled below her skull; the echo of the child's voice that hadn't been there—yet had—spooled through her thoughts like barbed wire.
"I'm not here to buy," she said. "I'm here to understand."
"Understanding is the most expensive thing I sell." His smile didn't reach his eyes. The eyes were wrong—one cloudy with pale static, the other too focused, like a camera that had decided what to believe.
Shelves glittered with bottled fragments. An ocean sunset. A father's cough turning into silence. The first time someone lied and it mattered. Each vial held a tag: PRICE: 30 SANITY. PRICE: 1 DAY. PRICE: A NAME YOU DON'T USE ANYMORE.
"You've climbed too quickly," he said, plucking a dust-coated vial like a sommelier. "The tower charges interest." He offered it. "This one will make you forget last night's scream. You'll sleep."
Elara didn't take it. "What do you want for information about the Ninth Floor confession?"
He stilled. Somewhere above them, a bell chimed, or maybe it was a ribcage.
"The confession isn't a floor," he said finally. "It's a toll. People think floors are places. Floors are prices."
Elara glanced at the back wall, where a tangle of wires threaded through a rag-labeled curtain: DO NOT LIFT. The urge to peel it back flexed like a phantom itch.
"You're stalling," she said. "What's the toll?"
The Merchant ran a finger along a cracked vial. "You pay by choosing which truth dies. The tower doesn't care which one—only that you murder a certainty."
"Whose?"
"Yours," he said, and pushed a drawer open beneath the counter. Inside were three objects: a hospital bracelet, a scorched ID card with her photo warped into a stranger, and a ring she recognized by the dent it left more than by sight.
Elara's throat tightened. "You've been in my head."
"Everyone leaves the door open to survive here," he said. "You call it clinical detachment. The tower calls it consent."
She reached for the bracelet. The plastic, brittle with age, bore a name: KANE, E. Beneath it, in faint ink, a second line: GUARDIAN: —
The space was empty.
"You can buy the rest of that line," the Merchant said softly. "Or sell the part that wants to know."
Her fingers hovered. "What if I refuse?"
"Then the tower chooses for you. It loves making optimists of cowards."
A wind slithered through the shaft, carrying the smell of antiseptic and ash. Elara remembered a corridor lit by sparking fluorescents, a dead phone clutched in her fist, another pair of footsteps that had stopped when she started running.
"Price," she said. "For the Ninth Floor."
He set two vials on the counter. One was the color of stormwater. The other was clear and almost empty. Their tags read:
— YOUR MOTHER'S TRUE LAST WORDS. PRICE: YOUR COMPASS.
— THE MOMENT YOU FIRST LOVED THE TOWER. PRICE: YOUR EXIT.
"I never loved—" Elara began, then stopped, because her mouth tasted like copper and nostalgia.
"The clear one is almost empty," the Merchant said. "You've been drinking it since you walked in."
She stared at her hand and found it wet with something that evaporated into static.
"If I give you my compass," she said, forcing her voice flat, "how do I keep from walking in circles?"
"You don't," he said, almost kindly. "But you stop noticing."
Elara picked up neither vial. "I'll pay in a different currency."
He laughed. "What do you think you have that the tower wants?"
"Debt," she said. "And leverage." She tapped the curtain with DO NOT LIFT. "Your back door into the sanctuary's neural lattice. You're siphoning stray Echoes. Illegal even by this place's non-laws."
The Merchant's smile collapsed. For a second, his face became a radio looking for signal.
"I take one truth," Elara said. "You tell me the path to the confession. In return, I don't pull this curtain in front of whatever passes for law."
He considered, then nodded once, reluctantly reverent. "Murderer of certainties," he murmured. "Fine. Your truth: You were never the tower's first choice."
Cold blossomed in her chest. "Then whose?"
He lifted a final vial, unlabeled, swirling with static that hummed in a frequency that felt like déjà vu. "The person you're trying not to remember."
"Name," she said.
He looked past her shoulder, and for the first time his wrong eye aligned with the right. "You'll find their confession on Floor Twelve. But you'll hear it on Floor Nine."
"Why two floors?"
"Because it's not yours." He set the unlabeled vial in her palm. It vibrated softly, as if containing a heartbeat. "When you drink this, you won't forget. You'll remember wrong. The tower prefers curated grief."
Elara closed her fist until the glass pressed a perfect circle into her skin. "What do I owe?"
The Merchant leaned in, breath like burned sugar. "Leave the bracelet," he whispered, "and promise me you won't check the second line again until you reach the Twelve."
Her thumb rubbed the faded ink of GUARDIAN. The emptiness at the end of the line seemed to pulse. "If it's blank," she said, "why does it hurt?"
"Because you didn't leave it blank," he said. "You erased it."
She placed the bracelet on the counter. The tower's heartbeat skipped.
"Path," she said.
He pointed past the curtain. "Through there. The spine. It bypasses floors, but it charges memory interest. You'll arrive where you asked and forget why."
Elara lifted the curtain. The wires behind it trembled like veins. The shaft beyond was a throat swallowing light.
She paused, the unlabeled vial a weight she wasn't ready to measure. "One more question," she said. "If I drink this—what version of me makes it to Twelve?"
The Merchant didn't answer. He only tilted his head, listening to something Elara wasn't allowed to hear yet, and smiled the way doctors do when they learn to say I'm sorry without moving their lips.
Elara pocketed the vial and stepped into the spine.
Behind her, glass chimed. Something laughed.
Ahead, the tower exhaled—and took her name with it.