Sophia slid into the booth across from Adrian, holding an order pad she wasn't actually using.
"Mrs. Alvarez from table six," she said quietly. "Three people have gone missing from her floor in the last two weeks. Not moved out. Missing."
Adrian frowned. "What's the super saying?"
"Maintenance issue with the elevator. But she swears it keeps stopping between floors for no reason. No alarm, no mechanical failure on the logs... and she hears screaming coming from the empty shaft at night."
Adrian's stomach tightened.
"Any cursed energy signatures logged? DODC sensors?"
"Zero," Sophia said. "Reyes checked. Whatever it is, it's completely invisible."
An hour later, Adrian arrived at the 91st Street complex wearing a thrift-store maintenance uniform. It wouldn't hold up to intense scrutiny, but it let him pass through the lobby without drawing stares.
The building looked completely ordinary. Mid-rise, cracked windows, standard post-invasion Queens housing.
Then he stepped into the lobby and flared his Six Eyes.
The hair on his arms stood up.
Residual cursed energy saturated the entire structure—not pooled in a corner, but woven directly into the load-bearing beams and drywall like rot in old wood.
It's not a ghost in the elevator, Adrian realized. The building itself is the curse.
He took the elevator to the third floor. The machinery groaned, but nothing triggered. Flashing his fake badge to a neighbor, he slipped into the hallway to inspect the shaft access.
On his third pass, his Six Eyes flared.
He saw it: a faint, twisted seam in the cursed energy signature running along the interior wall like a jagged scar.
He traced it upward. The seam grew thicker, darker, until it converged between the fourth and fifth floors—at a point where no landing existed on the blueprints.
A pocket space grafted directly onto the building.
With a heavy clunk, the elevator doors beside him slid open. To normal eyes, it was an empty, ordinary elevator car.
To the Six Eyes, it was an abyss.
Adrian stepped inside cautiously, keeping one hand braced on the door frame.
The car's interior extended endlessly—a dim, rotting corridor flanked by flickering directory panels from decades past. Wet dripping echoed from the dark. Beneath it was the faint sound of weeping.
[WARNING: POCKET SPACE DETECTED]
[ORIGIN: TRAUMA FROM ENTRAPMENT DURING THE BATTLE OF NEW YORK]
[NO FLOOR DETECTED BEYOND THIS POINT]
Fantastic.
Reinforcing his boots with cursed energy, Adrian stepped into the corridor. The floor held.
Twelve minutes in, he found the first survivor.
A young man in his twenties was curled against a flickering directory panel, muttering about being "almost home." His temporal sense was completely warped; he thought he'd been trapped for minutes, when it had actually been two weeks.
"Hey," Adrian said gently, crouching down. "I'm getting you out."
He guided the disoriented man back toward the seam. The elevator doors flickered into view like a mirage, allowing him to push the survivor through to safety.
Eight minutes later, Adrian found the second survivor—an elderly woman, clutching a grocery bag, terrified but physically unharmed. He sent her through, too.
Then he went back for the third.
At the deepest point of the corridor, where the directory panels went completely dark, Adrian stopped.
He didn't find the girl. He found a small, pink backpack resting in the dust.
The Six Eyes read the residual energy left behind: a cold, final, extinguished signature.
She was gone. Trapped in a warped space for two weeks, she had succumbed before he even knew the building existed.
A hollow guilt settled in his chest. He picked up the backpack, unable to leave it behind in the dark.
With a heavy heart, Adrian focused his energy and severed the seam anchoring the pocket space to the building's foundation.
The corridor dissolved around him.
[ +7 EXP ]
A tiny payout. The system seemed to recognize that this wasn't a fight worth celebrating.
The next morning, Adrian left the backpack with the building superintendent alongside an anonymous tip about structural instability in the elevator shaft.
That night, he sat in the apartment kitchen. The small pink backpack sat on the table between him and Sophia.
"You didn't get all three," Sophia said softly, reading his silence.
"No," Adrian replied, staring at the bag. "Two weeks in subjective time... I was a day too late."
Sophia reached across the table, placing her hand over his. "You saved two people who would have died in there," she said gently. "That matters, Adrian."
"I need to be faster," he said, clenching his jaw. "Better."
"You will be," she promised, standing to put the kettle on. "But tonight, you did what you could with what you knew. You have to let that be enough."
Outside, Queens hummed under the night sky, indifferent to the silent tragedy on 91st Street—and to the vigilante learning the bitter truth that not every rescue ends in a victory.