Floor Ten was a hospital ward pretending not to be. Beds lined a corridor where the ceiling monitors watched more than they showed. Each bed held a body that was not dead enough to bury and not alive enough to name.
A nurse with skin like overexposed film met Elara with a clipboard and a smile that failed background checks. "Welcome back, Dr. Kane," she said. "We've prepped your donor."
"I don't do transplants," Elara said, but her hands were already gloving themselves. Muscle memory. Moral amnesia.
"Not organs," the nurse said, leading her past curtains that whispered. "Framework."
They stopped at Bed Twelve. The chart hanging at the foot read: STRUCTURAL TRANSFERENCE—ACCEPTOR: TOWER. DONOR: —
The blank pulsed like a wound. Elara pulled the curtain.
The donor wore her face.
It wasn't a mirror. Mirrors are kinder. This version of Elara was bonier, the kind of thin you get from losing things no one can see. Her hospital bracelet matched, but the second line didn't. GUARDIAN: KANE, E.
"Borrowed bones," the nurse chirped. "The tower needs scaffolding. It buys what holds you up."
"What does it build with it?" Elara said, throat raw.
The nurse clicked her pen. "You. But obedient."
Alarms began to debate. The donor-Elara's eyes snapped open. They locked onto Elara with the focus of someone who has been rehearsing a single sentence for years.
"Return them," the donor said. Not a plea. An order.
Elara staggered. "Return what?"
The donor smiled without teeth. "Everything you borrowed to become the version the tower could use." She lifted her hand. The IV line ran nowhere. "Let me die without making you."
The nurse leaned in. "We're on a schedule," she said brightly, raising a syringe filled with something lunar. "We either strengthen the frame or the frame collapses."
A choice bloomed, brutal and precise:
— Cut the line, starve the tower, and let this version of Elara end.
— Sign the chart, fortify the sanctuary, and lose whatever spine was still hers.
"I won't be the tower's surgeon," Elara said, and snapped the chart off its hook. She flipped it over, using the hard board like a blade. In one motion, she severed the tubing that fed the machine humming beneath the bed.
The lights flickered. Somewhere below, a floor screamed.
The donor-Elara's breath eased. "Good," she said, and closed her eyes. "Now run."
The monitors panicked. The nurse dropped her smile to the tile. "Security won't like that," she said, and her voice came from the vents.
Elara bolted. The corridor kinked into angles that human buildings do not choose. Doors slammed open into walls of bone—the tower revealing the skeleton it keeps under its skin. Alarms became words: RETURN. OBEY. UP.
At the staircase, a siren took a breath and became a voice Elara knew better than her own: the one from the sea, the one who said she had picked her. It said, without pity: "You are skipping payments."
Elara put her hand on the railing. It was warm, like a living thing. "Send me the bill," she spat, and climbed.
Behind her, machines died. Ahead, a bell rang eleven times, each toll tightening the screws around her name.