Elara woke to white ceiling tiles and the smell of antiseptic.
Not the seventh floor. Not mirrors. Not the apocalypse.
A hospital room. Clean. Ordinary. Terrifying in its normalcy.
She tried to sit up, but leather restraints held her wrists and ankles. An IV dripped clear fluid into her left arm. Monitoring equipment beeped a steady rhythm beside the bed.
A psychiatric ward. She knew the setup intimately—she'd designed rooms like this.
"Good morning, Dr. Kane. Or should I say, Patient 7749?"
A woman in a white coat entered, clipboard in hand. Mid-fifties, graying hair in a tight bun, the professional detachment Elara recognized because she'd perfected it herself.
"Where am I?" Elara's voice cracked from disuse.
"Where you've always been. Mercy Point Psychiatric Facility. You've been with us for six months now."
"No. No, I was in the sanctuary. The seventh floor. The Echoes—"
"The Echoes are a recurring feature of your delusion," the doctor said, making notes. "Along with the apocalypse, the tower, and the dead daughter. Classic trauma response with psychotic features."
"My daughter is dead. Sarah died in Chicago—"
"Sarah is fine. She's with your ex-husband in Portland. She sends letters. You refuse to read them."
The room tilted. Elara closed her eyes, trying to ground herself. This was the eighth floor's test. It had to be. The Echo had warned her.
"I know what you're doing," she said. "This is another layer. Another trick."
"That's what you said six months ago. And six months before that. And"—the doctor flipped through pages—"three times before that. Each time, you cycle through the same delusion. Each time, we try a new treatment protocol."
She moved closer, and Elara saw her name tag: Dr. Patricia Wells, Chief of Psychiatry.
"You suffered a breakdown after your divorce. Started experiencing dissociative episodes. Created an elaborate fantasy where the world ended because, psychologically, your world had ended. The apocalypse became your metaphor."
"You're not real," Elara whispered.
"Then why are you so afraid?"
Because it made sense. All of it made horrible, perfect sense.
What if she'd never left this hospital? What if the sanctuary, the Echoes, the floors—what if it was all a catatonic dream? Psychiatrists knew how the mind could construct complete realities to shield itself from unbearable truth.
"The tower you describe," Dr. Wells continued, "represents your therapeutic progress. Each floor is a stage in your recovery. But you keep getting stuck at the seventh floor—the stage where you must confront what really happened."
"And what really happened?"
Dr. Wells' expression softened, and that softness was more terrifying than the Echoes had ever been.
"You tried to kill yourself. Pills, a bathtub, a note that said you wanted to join Sarah in heaven. Your ex-husband found you. You survived. Barely. And your mind—brilliant, creative, trained in psychology—built you a different story. One where you were a hero surviving, not a woman who'd tried to leave her living daughter motherless."
No.
No no no no—
But the memories were surfacing now. Not of ruins and radiation, but of divorce papers and custody hearings. Not of the sanctuary, but of group therapy sessions. Not of climbing floors, but of fighting medication, of insisting the apocalypse was real, of screaming about Echoes while nurses held her down.
"I can show you the admission records," Dr. Wells said. "Your ex-husband's testimony. Sarah's drawing from art therapy—she drew you in a hospital bed. She was seven then. She's almost eight now. Six months you've been lost in this fantasy."
Tears burned Elara's eyes. "I don't—I can't—"
"I know. That's the cruelty of the mind. It protects you from one pain by inflicting another. But we have a new treatment. ECT has shown promising—"
"Electroshock?" Elara's blood ran cold.
"It can break the cycle. Reset the pathways. You could see Sarah again. Really see her. Not as a ghost in your delusion, but as your living, breathing daughter who misses her mother."
For a moment—one crystalline moment—Elara wanted to believe. Wanted this to be real. Wanted Sarah to be alive and herself to be merely broken, because broken could heal.
Then she saw it.
Reflected in Dr. Wells' glasses: not the hospital room, but the tower. The seventh floor corridor. The crimson door.
And standing behind Dr. Wells, invisible to everyone but Elara: an Echo, finger to its lips.
"You're very convincing," Elara said quietly. "Better than the mirrors. More insidious than memory. But you made one mistake."
"Oh?"
"You offered me hope. The real eighth floor wouldn't do that. It would offer truth. And the truth"—she met Dr. Wells' eyes—"is that hope is the cruelest illusion of all."
Dr. Wells' smile faltered. The hospital room flickered.
"You're learning," said the Echo, stepping forward as Dr. Wells dissolved into shadow. "The eighth floor's test: would you choose a comfortable lie over an uncomfortable truth?"
"I choose"—Elara pulled against the restraints, which came loose like they'd never been real—"to keep climbing."
The hospital room shattered like the mirrors before it.
And somewhere far away, a little girl named Sarah smiled in her sleep, dreaming of her mother climbing an impossible tower to reach something that might—might—make the world make sense again.
But Elara would never know that.
Because on the ninth floor, the real horror was waiting.
The one where every choice had been wrong.