The pull started at noon.
Cael was on the roof, updating patrol routes, when his skull hummed. Not the ambient hum — the city-wide vibration that had been degrading infrastructure since the Fracture. This was targeted. Directional. A pressure behind his eyes that pointed southeast, toward the dead mall on Garner Street, with the precision of a compass needle swinging to magnetic north.
He tried to ignore it. Focused on the map. Drew the Boss's updated northwest patrol route in red ink.
The pressure increased. Not pain — insistence. Like a phone ringing in a locked room. You could ignore it, but the ringing didn't stop, and the knowing-it-was-ringing ate at you worse than the sound.
Lira found him standing at the edge of the roof, staring southeast.
"What's wrong?"
"Something wants me to go to the mall."
"Something."
"The hum. It's — directional. It's pointing at the mall."
She looked at him the way people looked at other people who said things like the hum is pointing at me. But she'd also watched a man crush cars with his mind nine days ago, so the threshold for absurdity had shifted.
"Then we go," she said.
"Lira—"
"You saved a kid on day one because you jumped through a window instead of thinking about it. You've been thinking for eight days straight. Something is pulling you somewhere. Let's go find out what."
He didn't have an argument for that. Mostly because she was right.
---
The Garner Street Mall had been dead before the Fracture. Closed for renovation, windows boarded, parking lot cracked with weeds. Now it was something else.
They saw it from two blocks away. The air above the mall shimmered — not heat distortion, not smoke. A warping. Like reality had been pinched between two fingers and twisted slightly out of true. The edges of the building looked soft. Not blurred — imprecise. As if the mall couldn't quite decide where its walls ended and the air began.
Cael focused. [Analyze] reached toward the shimmer and returned — for the first time since the Fracture — *noise.* Not data. Not structure. Not weakness lines or stress patterns. Static. A hiss of unreadable information, like tuning a radio between stations.
"I can't read it," he said.
Lira glanced at him. She'd learned in eight days that when Cael said *I can't read it,* the correct response was caution, not reassurance.
"Can you read anything around it?"
He shifted focus to the parking lot. The concrete returned normal data — cracks, subsidence, rebar corrosion. But at the boundary where the shimmer began, the lines simply stopped. Cut off. As if reality had an edge, and beyond it, his Permission had no jurisdiction.
"The building's normal up to approximately... here." He pointed at a line roughly three metres from the main entrance. "Past that, I'm blind."
"First time for everything."
"That's what concerns me."
The pull was stronger here. A gravitational certainty in his chest, like being on a rollercoaster at the top of the drop — the pause before physics remembers you exist.
They stepped through the entrance.
---
Inside, the world was wrong.
Not dangerously wrong. Not obviously wrong. Wrong in the way that a room is wrong when someone has moved every piece of furniture two inches to the left — you can't point to the problem, but your body knows the geometry doesn't match your memory.
The mallʼs atrium was intact. Tiled floor. Dead escalators. Shuttered storefronts. But the lighting came from nowhere — a diffuse amber glow with no visible source, casting no shadows. The air smelled like copper and something sweet, like burnt sugar. And the sounds were layered wrong: their footsteps arrived a half-second after their feet touched the ground, as if the echo was reaching them from a different version of the room.
Cael's [Analyze] flickered.
Lines appeared — then scrambled. Weakness points materialized on the tile floor, vanished, reappeared in different locations. The stress patterns in the walls shifted like something alive, rearranging themselves as he watched. Nothing held still long enough to read.
He was used to [Analyze] being precise. Clinical. A diagnostic tool that returned clean data in organised layers. Here, the data was drunk. It contradicted itself. A wall was simultaneously load-bearing and structurally hollow. A tile was cracked and unbroken at the same time. The escalator's handrail showed a weakness point that existed in a location the handrail didn't reach.
His brain — the pattern engine, the spreadsheet processor, the anxious printer — ground its gears and threw a fault.
"I can't map this," he said. His voice sounded thin. Not frightened. Lost. A cartographer standing in a country that redrew its borders every ten seconds.
"Then stop mapping," Lira said. "What do your eyes see? Not the ability. Your actual eyes."
He blinked. Focused on looking instead of reading.
The atrium. Tile. Escalators. Storefronts. Normal.
Except for the door.
At the far end of the atrium — where the food court used to be — there was a door that didn't belong. Freestanding. No frame, no wall around it. Just a door, standing upright on the tile floor, closed. It was grey. Featureless. The kind of door you'd find in a government building or a hospital — functional, anonymous, forgettable.
It had a faint glow around its edges. The same amber as the sourceless light, but concentrated. Purposeful.
"That's not decorative," Lira said.
"No."
They approached. Cael tried [Analyze] on the door. For one instant — less than a heartbeat — the lines returned clean. He saw the door's structure: not wood, not metal. Something else. A material that existed only in the context of this space, made of rules rather than atoms. And stamped into its surface, visible only to his Permission, two words:
TRIAL CHAMBER
Then the reading collapsed back into noise.
"It's a trial," Cael said. "The System wants someone to go through that door."
"The System wants *you* to go through that door. You're the one it pulled here."
She was right. The pull in his chest had been building since they entered the mall, and now it was centered on the door with the precision of a surgical laser. Every fibre of whatever the System had implanted in his brain was pointing at the grey surface and saying *open.*
He looked at Lira. "Stay here."
"Not a chance."
"If something happens in there—"
"Then I'll be there to punch it. That's the arrangement, Cael. You see, I hit. It doesn't work if I'm standing outside the door."
He didn't argue. Partly because she was right again. Partly because the idea of walking through alone made his lungs tight in a way that [Analyze] would probably flag as fear if it were functioning.
He opened the door.
---
The room beyond was white.
Not painted white. Not white-walled. The room was made of whiteness — a space defined by the absence of detail, extending in every direction without walls or ceiling or floor. Cael felt ground beneath his feet but couldn't see it. He felt air in his lungs but couldn't taste it. The room was an abstraction given geometry.
Lira was beside him. Her fists were up, reinforcement blazing. She was looking for something to fight. There was nothing to fight.
"Where—" she started.
Eleven doors appeared.
They materialised in a semicircle around them — identical grey doors, freestanding, evenly spaced. No markings. No numbers. No hinges. Each looked exactly like the one they'd entered through.
And below them, on the featureless white ground, text appeared. The same clean, system-generated font from the Permission message on his phone:
> TRIAL: RECOGNITION
> Identify the true exit.
> Ten doors are structurally flawed.
> One is sound.
> Time remaining: 3:00
The countdown started.
Cael's [Analyze] surged — not by his choice, but by instinct, the way a drowning person kicks toward the surface. And for the first time since entering the mall, it worked.
Clean. Sharp. Perfect.
Lines appeared on every door. Precise. Detailed. The structural flaws were obvious once his Permission stopped fighting the Fracture Zone's interference: micro-fractures in the first door's frame. Warped grain in the second. A hairline deviation in the fourth's alignment. Each flaw was specific, readable, *diagnostic.*
Ten doors. Ten flaws. One door with none.
He started scanning. Door one — cracked. Door two — warped. Door three—
Clean. No flaws. Sound structure.
Four seconds. Answer found. Easy.
Too easy.
2:41.
He looked again. Not with [Analyze]. With his eyes.
The sixth door had a scratch. Low on the surface. Not structural — human. A fingernail. A key. Someone had been here before, scared and voiceless, and they'd marked the way out the only way they could.
[Analyze] said door three.
A stranger's fingernail said door six.
2:18.
"Cael."
"Door six."
"You just said three."
"Three is what the System wants me to choose."
"You're guessing."
He was. For the first time since the Fracture, he was making a decision based on something his ability couldn't confirm. A scratch on a door. A human trace in an inhuman space.
1:44.
Lira looked at him. At the doors. At the countdown.
"I trust you," she said. And she meant it, which was worse, because now if he was wrong, it was both of them.
He opened door six.
---
Light. Real light. Sunlight hitting parking lot concrete and bouncing into his eyes with the specific warmth of the actual sun in the actual sky.
They stumbled out of the mall's service exit — a fire door on the building's east side, propped open by a cinder block. The Fracture Zone's shimmer was behind them, fading. The pull in Cael's chest went silent.
His phone buzzed. He looked at the screen.
> [TRIAL COMPLETED]
> Result: PASS
> Authority: Analyze
> Rank: F → E (potential unlocked)
>
> Note: Selection criteria met. Diagnostic exceeded parameters. Subject prioritised non-systemic data over systemic data.
> Flagged: Anomalous.
The message vanished before he could read it twice. But the last word burned in his mind's eye.
Anomalous.
The System had tested him. He'd passed. But not the way it expected.
Lira was beside him, reinforcement fading, breathing hard. "What happened?"
"I chose wrong. And it was right."
"That doesn't make sense."
"No," he agreed, looking back at the dead mall where reality bent and a room full of doors asked questions with no clean answers. "It really doesn't."
His hands were shaking. His [Analyze] was quiet — exhausted, maybe, or recalibrating. The lines on the parking lot concrete were faint, barely visible, like a signal at the edge of range.
But something had shifted. He could feel it. A deepening. As if the room behind his eyes — the one the System had installed — had grown by one wall.
E-rank.
He didn't know what that meant yet. But the word *anomalous* sat in his skull like a splinter, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that the System was watching him with the same attention he used to watch everyone else.
Being seen by something you couldn't see back was, Cael decided, the worst kind of pattern.