The stairwell groaned beneath Arden's boots long before he reached the third floor.
Somewhere above, a broken light fixture swung in the draft, tapping rhythmically against the concrete wall, a hollow tick… tick… tick that blended with the slow hiss of drifting snow squeezing through the shattered windows. The place felt gutted long before anyone had died here — cubicles uprooted, sheetrock peeled, insulation drooping like old, infected sinew. The evening blizzard battered the north-facing windows so violently that the whole floor seemed to breathe with each icy gust.
Arden adjusted his scarf and stepped into the corridor.
The office space had collapsed inward months ago — probably summer collapse, maybe earlier — half the ceiling caved in, desks crushed beneath the sagging weight of metal beams. Now it all sat frozen in place, dust fused under thin plates of ice. Cold crept everywhere. Even his exhale felt thin.
He moved slowly, one gloved hand brushing against the frames of old cubicles as he passed. A few were scorched; others looked shredded by desperate hands. In one, a calendar still hung on the fabric wall, half-curled from water damage. March 2027. Days circled. Notes scribbled for meetings that never happened.
Arden's breathing steadied. His pulse stayed low.
He had seen hundreds of rooms like this.
That didn't make them easier.
Something clattered faintly deeper inside the collapsed section — wind nudging a loose sheet of aluminum or an old monitor tipping on its dead cord. Arden paused out of instinct, head tilting ever so slightly, listening through the whistle of air and distant groans of the weakened structure.
Nothing living.
He stepped forward again.
A broken EXIT sign flickered on the floor, its casing cracked in half, one bulb still weakly pulsing as if refusing to die fully. Arden stepped over it and into what had once been a small double office at the far end.
And there, near the partially sunken desk, he saw it.
A human form — slumped against the wall, half-collapsed sideways, skeletal now, shreds of old clothing still draped across bone. Snow had blown in from the shattered windows and gathered in a thin drift along the man's legs and ribs. The skull had rolled slightly to one side, jaw agape, teeth exposed in a silent final gasp.
Arden approached in silence.
The wound on the back of the ribcage was unmistakable — clean, centered, the bones fractured inward from a high-velocity round. He stepped beside the remains, crouched, and scanned the scene.
Shot from behind.
His eyes moved upward to the wall just behind the corpse.
A second wound — on the skull. A final shot, delivered face-to-face.
Execution-style.
Arden exhaled quietly, expression unreadable.
He'd seen this exact posture before — the way survivors died with their hands half-raised, trying to reason, trying to defend, trying to say something that never finished. Violence left signatures. You learned to read them the way you read weather patterns or tracks in snow.
His gaze drifted across the floor.
A toppled chair. A broken pair of binoculars. A ration tin crushed under someone's boot. Snowflakes spiraled lazily through the cracked pane behind the body.
But what caught his eye was the glint.
A faint metallic gleam under one skeletal wrist. Almost hidden beneath a sleeve stiff with old blood and frost.
A watch.
Simple. Metal band. The face cracked. But the steel still shone faintly under the lantern light.
Arden reached out.
He didn't rush. He never rushed. His gloved fingers eased the dead man's wrist upward just enough. The bones shifted with a brittle whisper. He slid the watch free.
It felt warmer than it should have.
He turned it over—
—and a strange pressure built behind his eyes.
Not pain.
Not dizziness.
More like a soft, unmistakable push.
A whisper of sensation folding in from the edges of his awareness.
Arden froze, watch still in his hand.
Something in the room shifted—
—not physically, not audibly, but perceptibly.
The edges of his vision thinned.
The cold air thickened.
The office lights dimmed into a charcoal haze.
And then—
The world snapped.
⸻
THE MEMORY
It didn't feel like seeing through someone else's eyes exactly. More like being pulled into a room made entirely of instinct and fragments — scent, pressure, heartbeat, dread.
He wasn't standing anymore.
He was leaning.
Leaning against a wall, breath too quick, binoculars pressed up to his eyes, scanning the street four stories below. Snow was falling harder now. Heavy flakes. Whiteout forming fast. He saw movement — shapes slipping through the alleyway, indistinct in the glare off the snow.
His pulse — not Arden's, but the man's — hammered in his ears.
Something behind him creaked.
He turned.
Too slow.
Bang.
A sudden bloom of force punched through his back. His body lurched forward, chest slamming the edge of the window frame, breath fracturing into a wet gasp. Warmth spread across his stomach. He dropped the binoculars — they hit the floor with a clatter that echoed in Arden's skull.
He tried to inhale.
It sounded like drowning.
He twisted, spine scraping the wall, to face his killer.
And there she stood.
A woman — brown hair matted with melted snow, loose strands plastered to her cheeks. A scar carved across her left cheekbone, white against pale winter skin. A butterfly tattoo curled just under the right side of her jaw, inked in faded red and black.
She didn't smile.
Didn't hesitate.
Her eyes — blue, glassy, dead calm — reflected him like he was already corpse.
Her gloved hand raised the pistol.
"No—please—"
—or something like it, but the words were wet, bubbling, useless.
Her finger tightened.
Bang.
Darkness swallowed everything.
⸻
BACK TO ARDEN
Arden jerked as if surfacing from deep water.
The collapsed office snapped back into focus — the cold, the draft, the whistle of wind, the crunch of snow under his boots. He staggered one step back before catching himself with a hand on the ruined desk.
His breath came out sharp, visible in the dim light.
The watch lay heavy in his palm.
Veyra's distant chuff echoed faintly from another part of the building — a reassurance, a pulse of reality grounding him for the moment.
Arden stared at the skeletal remains, jaw tightening. He looked again at the wall behind the corpse, the bullet impact. The way the hands had been slightly raised. The angle of the shot.
The memory hadn't been vague.
It had been precise.
Too precise.
He rubbed his thumb over the cracked watch face. For a brief instant, as his glove passed over it, he felt something like static. A lingering impression. Not a voice. Not a full memory. Just the shadow of panic that wasn't his.
He swallowed it down.
This… wasn't possible.
Harper called it "bloom," sure, but that was just naming the glow. Not this. Not memory. Not resonance. Not whatever the hell he just experienced.
He tucked the watch into an inner pocket.
Outside, the storm rattled the metal frame of the shattered window. Snow swirled inward, cold biting through the warmth of his coat.
Arden turned once more toward the corpse.
"I'm sorry," he murmured under his breath — not a prayer, not ritual, just acknowledgment. Then he stepped back, scanning the room one last time for anything useful — ammo, batteries, a notebook, anything.
Nothing but silence.
His radio crackled softly.
Reddin's voice, faint through static.
"Arden? You still on that floor?"
Arden pressed the mic.
"Yeah. Found… something."
"Need backup?"
Arden looked again at the pocket where he'd placed the watch.
"No. I'm coming down."
He turned, heading back through the corridor, bootprints the only fresh marks through the sheet of blown snow covering the floor. The office groaned again, the cold settling deeper into its bones.
But Arden felt something else now.
A weight following him.
Not menacing.
Just… present.
A life that had ended in this room.
A death he had felt.
A face he would not forget — the woman with the scar and the butterfly.
He stepped into the stairwell, lantern light flickering over chipped concrete.
As he descended, he could swear — faintly, indistinct, a trick of memory or something else — that he heard a whisper near his ear:
"Tell her… don't let her…"
Arden froze.
The whisper vanished.
Only the wind remained.
He exhaled once, steadying himself.
The watch weighed heavy against his ribs as he continued down the stairs to rejoin Reddin and Veyra below.