The spine spat Elara onto a catwalk above an indoor sea. The sign read FLOOR NINE in flaking paint, but the water below was not water—it was memory rendered tidal, rolling with faces and phrases that broke like waves. A lifeguard chair stood empty at the shore of a drowning truth.
Elara's boots rang against rusted grates as she crossed to a switchback staircase. Every step bent reality: her reflection wore a ring she didn't remember selling; the echo of a mother's voice counted backwards from ten. Nine. Eight. Seven.
At the landing, a man in a janitor's uniform mopped the same patch of floor that kept un-cleaning itself into footprints. His name tag stuttered between MARK and MAKE and MASK. He didn't look up. "Don't stop," he said, like a ritual. "If you pause, it chooses."
"The confession," Elara said. "I'm here to hear it."
He pushed gray water into a drain that fed the sea. "You don't hear confessions on Nine. You rehear them. You hear them until they're true." His mop squealed. "Which is to say: forever."
The catwalk vibrated—the tide rising. Voices frothed: I'm sorry. It wasn't supposed to be you. Don't go back. A child's laughter tripped into a scream she recognized too well.
Elara gripped the railing. "How do I find the one that belongs to the Twelve?"
The janitor wrung the mop. Water streamed like magnetic tape. "You already did," he said. "You stored it where you couldn't see it." He pointed with his chin at the pocket where the unlabeled vial burned cold against her thigh.
"Then why bring me here?"
He pointed at the sea. "Because you can't carry a confession dry. You have to soak it."
The staircase groaned as a door below opened. A woman stepped onto the shore, barefoot, wearing a hospital bracelet twin to Elara's. Her face swam out of the ripples then settled into focus—a mirror with older grief. GUARDIAN, said the space on her bracelet, and the line was not blank. It read: KANE, E.
Elara's breath fractured. "Who are you?"
The woman smiled with a wound. "The person you erased to survive. The one the tower chose before it picked you." She nodded at the sea. "Come on, El. Hold your breath."
The janitor's mop clacked. "If you go in, you come up different," he warned. "You'll climb faster. You'll pay later."
Elara stepped to the edge. The water lifted like a hand. "What happens if I don't?"
The woman's eyes softened. "Then I keep drowning for two."
Elara took the vial out. The glass hummed with the tower's heartbeat. She uncorked it and the smell of static and lilacs hit her so hard she almost fell.
"One question," Elara said. "On Twelve… will I finish this?"
The woman tilted her head. "Finish?"
"Confessing," Elara said. "Or forgiving."
A beat. "You'll choose which looks more like survival," the woman said. "And you'll call it truth."
Elara drank. The sea rose to meet her. Cold memory erupted through her chest like a second set of lungs opening.
She dove.
The first thing the water took was her compass. She didn't feel it leave. She only felt how easy it became to stop asking which way was out.
Below, dressed in fluorescents and night, a little chamber door waited. She knew it as if she'd built it. On it, carved with something sharper than regret, was a sentence she couldn't read until she pressed her forehead to the wood.
I PICKED YOU.
When Elara burst back to the surface, gasping, the janitor had stopped mopping. The woman was gone. In her pocket, the vial was empty and heavier.
A bell tolled from somewhere above. Ten slow chimes. The staircase to Floor Ten unfolded like a spine remembering posture.
Behind her, the sea whispered a dozen apologies, none of them new, all of them hers.
Elara didn't look back. She climbed, dripping, her name smudging on the railing where she gripped it too hard.