The unstable corridor swallowed them with the delicacy of a trap pretending to be a passage.
The light was scarce and poor: not total darkness, but a dirty gray that clarified nothing and made everything feel narrower. The air smelled of old dust and dry glue, as if this sector had been sealed and forgotten... and then reopened by mistake.
Cedric stumbled almost immediately. "I knew it. I knew the 'non-optimized' route was the route that kills!"
Aurelian grabbed him by the collar and pulled him back to his feet without stopping. "Breathe and run. The Athenaeum hasn't finished deciding here."
Marikka didn't speak. Not because she didn't want to, but because the words continued to feel like objects too heavy for her throat. The mark on her wrist remained cold, present like a fresh scar... yet she felt the system behind them like a growing shadow.
They were not chased by footsteps.
They were chased by calculation.
Behind them, in the "normal" corridor, the Recovery Keepers hadn't lifted a finger to stop them. They had let them in. And that was the worst thing.
A tremor along the floor arrived late, like a message delivered with precision: it was no longer the place reacting, it was the protocol chasing them.
Aurelian turned left at the first fork and then right at the second, without hesitation. Too confident to be improvisation.
Cedric gasped: "Do you... know where you're going? Tell me you know where you're going!"
"I know where I don't want to go," Aurelian replied. "And that's already an advantage."
The corridor narrowed, forcing them to run in single file. The shelves were low, crooked, full of volumes without titles. They didn't vibrate like real books: they made a dull noise, like stacked stones.
Grey Zone, Marikka thought.
Not an official sector. Not a living anomaly. A discard area: stuff the Athenaeum hasn't decided yet whether to throw away or archive.
The floor changed its incline suddenly. Cedric screamed as he slipped on a slick slab and landed on his knees.
"Alright! Enough! I formally protest against—"
Aurelian hauled him up. "Not now."
Marikka pressed a palm to the wall as she ran. She didn't feel a "warm" vibration, but she perceived an active emptiness, like an erased page that still remembers having been written.
And then... another tremor, closer.
It wasn't the Fragment. Too different. Too practical.
Keepers.
Marikka barely turned her head. Behind them, the light of the unstable corridor flickered and, as if a curtain had been raised, two massive figures with pulsing runes appeared: Recovery Keepers.
They weren't running.
They were walking.
Yet, with every step they took, the corridor seemed to shorten by a few centimeters.
Cedric noticed it and lost color. "It's not... it's not physically possible. They're cheating with space."
Aurelian growled: "They're not cheating. They're applying a protocol shortcut. This sector is unstable, but connected."
Marikka felt the mark twitch for the first time. A faint impulse, like a nerve reawakening.
The Keepers were in no hurry.
They wanted fear to consume them even before they were touched.
Ahead, the corridor opened into a long hall, full of metal bridges and suspended walkways. Below, there was no void: there were compressed archives, layers of parchment, and debris from ancient shelving, like a solid, sharp sea.
Aurelian did not slow down. "We cross."
Cedric made a strangled noise. "Yes, sure, let's cross the unstable bridge over the pit of painful things! Why not!"
The first bridge swayed under their weight with a metallic groan. Marikka felt a different vibration: not the bridge, but the hall itself registering their presence.
And behind them, the hall was also registering the Keepers.
The first Keeper stopped at the entrance of the hall. The runes on its arms flashed. Its voice came out like a stamp on paper:
"OPTIMAL PATH RECALCULATED. CONVERGENCE IN PROGRESS."
Cedric looked at Aurelian with the eyes of a hunted animal. "It's talking like we're—"
"A delivery," Aurelian completed, and the word left him with contempt.
The second Keeper raised its hand. A binding rune lit up and shot out like a thin line, aiming not at Marikka, but at the bridge structure.
Marikka felt it: they didn't want to hit her. They wanted to stop her without breaking her.
The runic line hooked onto the metal. The bridge vibrated and suddenly stiffened, freezing mid-swing.
Cedric screamed: "No no no! The bridge is frozen! The bridge is—"
The bridge didn't collapse. Not yet. But its rigidity was wrong: it held tension like an over-pulled wire.
Aurelian acted by instinct. He drew a seal in the air, quick and messy. "Diversion!"
The rune hit the binding line and made it tremble, but didn't break it.
The Keeper took a step. Another. The distance between them shrank without running.
Marikka felt the mark warm up, just barely. Not like pain. Like unwanted contact.
The bridge let out a deeper groan. The rigidity increased, the tension became unbearable.
Aurelian realized what was about to happen an instant before it did. "Cedric— jump!"
"What?!"
"JUMP!"
Cedric leaped forward with the desperate grace of someone who can't swim but has just seen a shark. Marikka followed, her heart pounding, her feet hitting the next walkway with a dry clang.
Aurelian was the last. As soon as his shoes left the first bridge, the runic line pulled again.
And the bridge—instead of breaking where it should have—gave way on the other side.
A calculation error.
An entire section of the metal detached and fell, dragging the still-hooked runic line with it.
The binding rune... plummeting... tore a sequence of seals embedded in the hall's walls.
For a second, the air changed texture.
The walkways trembled.
Cedric's eyes widened. "They... they broke something."
Aurelian stared at the fracture in the seals, pale. "They broke a stability barrier."
The Keeper remained motionless for a beat, as if it, too, were recalculating.
Then its voice changed tone: no longer "procedure," but "problem."
"EXECUTION ERROR."
And as if the Athenaeum had reacted to that admission, the hall began to correct itself.
Not in their favor.
The walls moved by half a meter. The walkways realigned themselves wrongly. An entire section of the floor bent, creating a sudden ramp that pointed downward.
Marikka felt the mark vibrate—and a part of her understood that the system was looking for the simplest solution:
if it couldn't deliver her through a stable path... it would create a unique path.
A funnel.
Cedric was trembling. "Aurelian... tell me we have a plan."
Aurelian looked ahead: a side door, slightly ajar, with worn runes and untouched dust. A non-optimized route. A route that the protocol hadn't yet taken hold of.
"Yes," he said. "We run towards the place nobody wants."
Marikka couldn't laugh, but Cedric did—a brief, hysterical laugh. "Perfect. That's my specialty."
They bolted towards the door.
Behind them, the Recovery Keepers resumed walking. Slower. More certain. Because now they knew one thing that made them even more dangerous:
they, too, could make mistakes.
And when a system makes a mistake... it corrects with violence.
Marikka crossed the threshold first.
The mark on her wrist warmed, as if it had recognized the boundary.
And the door closed behind them, leaving the metallic noise of the collapsing hall outside... and inside, a silence too clean to be a refuge.