Floor Eleven was a hallway of doors that refused to be counted. Elara tried—she always landed on eleven, and yet she was certain she'd passed twelve, thirteen, and one. The numbers bled, then stabilized whenever she blinked.
A placard at eye level offered instructions like a dare: ENTER ONLY IF YOU ACCEPT THE OUTCOME AS THE ONLY POSSIBLE ONE.
"I don't," Elara said aloud, and every door unlocked in petty unison.
The first door opened to a classroom. Children recited emergency protocols with sing-song precision. At the chalkboard, Elara's handwriting looped through the word SHELTER until the S became a snake. The intercom asked everyone to practice surrender.
She shut it. The second door revealed a morgue where the toes were tagged with virtues: DUTY, MERCY, HOPE. A technician whispered, "Pick one for the autopsy."
Door three: a nursery with no babies, only monitors broadcasting lullabies in reverse. Door four: a courtroom with the judge recused by grief and the jury made of mirrors.
"Stop sampling," a voice said behind her. The janitor from Nine leaned on his mop like a pilgrim staff. His name tag settled, for once, on MARK. "It's not a buffet. It's a cul-de-sac."
"I need Twelve," Elara said. "The confession."
"You need an exit," Mark said, then laughed without humor. "Which you traded for the memory of loving this place." He pointed at her pocket. "That vial was a loan shark."
Elara pressed her knuckles to her eyes until fireworks formed constellations of bad ideas. Around them, eleven doors rearranged themselves, smug as cats.
"Hint?" she asked.
Mark nodded toward a door with no handle. "That one doesn't ask for consent. It asks for culpability."
Elara faced it. Carved into the wood were scratches like tally marks, grouped in sevens. She touched the gouges. Heat leaked into her fingers—the familiar ache of a choice reheated.
"Outcome acceptance," she muttered. "So I pick the version where I deserve it most."
The door opened.
Inside: a waiting room with a vending machine offering tiny bottles of apology. A reception bell no one rang. And a chair already warm.
Sitting in it, elbows on knees, was a man with weary eyes and a clean shirt—an impossible combination these days. He looked up, and a smile she hadn't earned made her want to break something gentle.
"Hey, El," he said. "Took you long enough."
She knew him in the marrow-first way that bypasses biography. He was the choice she'd made that had cost a life she pretended wasn't a life. He was the call she didn't answer. He was the guardian line she had erased.
"Say it," he prompted softly. "Say the thing you left rotting on the Ninth."
Elara swallowed glass. "I picked me."
He nodded, not absolving. "Good. Now pick us—late if you must, but pick." He pointed past her, and the eleven doors folded into a single aperture shaped exactly like regret.
"Up," Mark said behind her. "Before the hallway remembers you don't belong on this floor."
Elara stepped through. The staircase to Twelve unfurled, narrow and exacting, each step labeled with a price she'd already paid but hadn't noticed leaving: COMPASS. EXIT. CERTAINTY. GUARDIAN.
Halfway up, a siren's voice whispered: "Confession chamber at capacity."
"Hold it," Elara said, and climbed faster.