The sterile white room was silent, but Arthur's head was buzzing with a thousand conflicting thoughts. Fear had a metallic taste in his mouth.
Before him on the cold steel table lay the wooden box, a frozen piece of night, and beside it, the focusing tool that looked like a stethoscope from another world.
He was trapped. That was the reality. And the key to his cell, the key to his potential survival, lay in diving back into the nightmare that had nearly torn his mind apart.
Minutes passed as he stared at the box, unable to move.
Every instinct in his body screamed at him to back away, to find a corner in this room and curl up until he disappeared.
He thought of his old life, the life of a private detective who dealt with understandable human lies. It had been a gray life, yes, but it had been logical. Now, logic itself felt like a luxury from a distant past.
"Do it," he whispered to himself, his voice sounding foreign. "Do it or die here."
With hands he had to command to move, he picked up the focusing tool. It was heavier than it looked, and the metal was cold against his skin.
He placed the earpieces in his ears. The silence of the room instantly vanished, replaced by a low hum, a sound barely audible but felt in the bones of his skull. It was a reality-shattering sound, separating his mind from the outside world.
He looked at his right hand. It was trembling slightly. He forced his fingers straight and extended them slowly, very slowly, toward the wooden box.
The distance between his fingertips and the surface of the wood felt like a bottomless chasm between two worlds.
Then he touched.
The shock wasn't as violent as the first time. Thanks to the focusing tool, it was more like sliding into cold, dark water rather than falling into it.
The hum in his ears changed, becoming deeper and more resonant. The whiteness of the room faded from the edges of his vision, replaced by a flickering darkness.
And then he was there.
The candlelit room. He no longer felt the wood of the floor under his knees; instead, he was floating, an incorporeal observer. The vision was clearer this time, more stable.
He could see details that had been lost to him in the shock of the First Touch. He saw symbols drawn in ash on the floor, forming an incomplete circle around where the girl was kneeling.
He saw the rough stone walls of the room, which looked like a cellar or a crypt.
And he saw Lily.
She was there, kneeling in the center of the circle, wearing a simple white dress. She wasn't screaming yet.
She was breathing with difficulty, her small shoulders shaking. Fear filled her wide eyes, but he also saw something else: defiance. Anger. She wasn't just a victim; she was resisting.
"Look for a clue," Ilara's voice echoed in his memory. "Don't be a victim of the echo, be an investigator within it."
Arthur forced his consciousness to move, to look around. The candles, the circle, the stones... what had he missed? He looked at the shadows dancing on the walls. They were long and distorted. Then, in a corner of the room, away from the candlelight, he saw something.
It wasn't clear. Just a shadow that was deeper than the others. A mass of darkness that was more dense, without form, but it was there. It wasn't a part of the wall. It was... an entity.
Arthur focused all his attention on that spot of darkness. And as he did, something happened. This was the moment that would make him hold his breath.
The candles in the room began to flicker violently, as if a storm had suddenly risen in the closed crypt.
The flames trembled, nearly going out, plunging the scene into a semi-darkness. And the sound changed.
No longer were there just Lily's terrified breaths. Now, Arthur heard a new sound, a sound that wasn't part of the original recording.
It was a dry rustling, like the sound of withered autumn leaves being crushed under a heavy foot.
Then came a rough scraping sound, like stone being dragged over stone. Finally, a sound came from the depths of that shadow, a sound that was neither animal nor human: a low, sharp hum, like the sound of thousands of angry insects trapped in a jar.
Arthur felt pure, primal terror freeze in his veins. It had felt his presence. The "thing" that had created this echo had sensed that someone was intruding on its memory.
Then the worst happened.
In the center of the room, Lily stopped trembling.
She suddenly straightened. With horrifying slowness, she turned her head. She was no longer looking at the shadow in the corner. She turned her head directly toward him. Toward Arthur.
Her eyes, which had been filled with tears and fear a second before, were now empty, black, with wide pupils that swallowed the candlelight. She stared directly at him, across time and space, as if she could see him with perfect clarity.
Then she opened her mouth, not to scream, but to speak a single word, in a voice that was not her own a hoarse, ancient, and deep voice.
**"I found you."**
Pain exploded in Arthur's head, not like a needle this time, but like a hammer. He screamed, a real scream that tore from his throat in the real world.
With a desperate force of will, he ripped his consciousness from the horrifying scene. He felt as if he were tearing off his own skin, and he fell backward, knocking over the chair he had been sitting on.
He hit the cold floor of the white room, gasping and drenched in a cold sweat. He tore the focusing tool from his head and threw it away.
The absolute silence of the room returned, but it was no longer a safe silence; it was a silence charged with threat.
It had seen him. It had found him. It was no longer just a chase; it had become a direct connection.
He scrambled to his feet and lunged toward the heavy metal door, beginning to pound on it with his fists like a madman. "Let me out! Ilara! Get me out of here! It saw me!"
He didn't expect an immediate response. But only seconds later, he heard the heavy bolt sliding back from the outside.
The lock turned, and the heavy metal door swung inward.
But it was not Ilara Vance who stood there in the lit corridor.
It was the other man. The man who had come to his apartment. Ziad.
The ghostly smile was not on his face. His features were impassive, and his dark eyes burned with intense, urgent focus. In his hand, he held something Arthur had never seen before: a small spherical device, made of intertwined silver, resembling a miniature cage, from inside which a pale, pulsating blue light emanated.
Ziad looked not at Arthur's terrified face, but over his shoulder, into the room, as if searching for something. Then he returned his sharp gaze to Arthur.
He didn't say, "Are you okay?" He didn't ask what had happened. All he said, in a low, urgent voice, were five words that pulled the last solid ground from beneath Arthur's feet:
"You were too loud. It heard you. We have to move. Now."