He woke up.
The desk was there.
The letter wasn't.
He remembered talking to the girl. Or maybe walking through the city. Or maybe the Archive. The scenes bled into one another, edges soft and useless. His mind reached for the order, and all it touched was static.
He stood.
The door was already open.It shouldn't have been.
The hallway beyond was shorter this time, the distance compressed, doors missing. He knew they'd been there before. He could almost remember what was behind them.
He blinked, and he was outside.
The air was too sharp, the kind that scrapes the back of your throat. People were walking, but the loops were tighter now—smaller motions, quicker resets. One man lifted his hat to wipe his brow, over and over, the gap between each repetition shrinking until it became one unbroken gesture.
A sharp sound cut through the air.
He turned. The girl was across the street, waving. He took a step toward her.
He blinked—
—and she was gone.
No, she was beside him.
"You're waking up faster," she said, not quite meeting his eyes. "It's getting harder to hold the scenes together."
"Scenes," he echoed.
"Pages," she corrected softly. "The spine's cracking."
The Archivist's voice came from behind him, though he hadn't been there a moment ago. "Not just cracking," he said. "Fracturing."
The boy turned. "What does that mean?"
"It means," the Archivist said, "that the end is coming whether we reach it or not."
Something in the way he said it made the boy's skin tighten.
"How long?" he asked.
The Archivist's expression shifted, not with cruelty, but with the quiet certainty of someone who had counted the steps in advance. "A handful of pages. Maybe less."
The boy's mind jumped to the key, the book, the page in the Archivist's drawer. He didn't know which mattered most.
He opened his mouth to ask—but the world jumped.
No warning. No fade.
He was back in the room again.