The city was silent again.

  It was not the silence of an empty street. It was the silence of a held breath, a pause before something speaks your name.

  Neno moved carefully. His boots scraped against uneven stone, his pulse still hammering in his throat. The shifting alley had been a warning. Saranja would not give him another chance to refuse its will.

  The page in his hand had not changed. The ink had settled into a stillness that felt wrong, as if waiting.

  Then—a voice.

  Sharp. Clear. Human.

  "Stop where you are."

  Neno’s body tensed. His instincts screamed at him to move, to vanish into the shadows before the city had another chance to rearrange itself around him.

  But the voice wasn’t like the whispers he had heard before. It was solid. Real.

  He turned.

  A woman stood atop a crumbling staircase that led to a second-floor balcony, a lantern flickering in her grasp. She had the lean, angular look of someone who had not slept in days—sharp cheekbones, a sunken gaze, eyes flicking across him as if calculating probabilities.

  The lantern’s light cast deep shadows across her worn, gray coat. The hem was stained with ink.

  She kept one hand on her hip. He could see the glint of something metal—a knife, maybe.

  Her voice was steady, but edged with exhaustion. "You’re alive. That’s a problem."

  Neno exhaled, hands half-raised in something between surrender and readiness. "Not usually the first thing I hear when I meet someone."

  "That’s because you’ve been talking to the wrong things," she shot back. She studied him for a moment longer, then sighed, rubbing her forehead. "Come inside before the city notices you again."

  She turned and stepped through the open doorway, leaving him standing alone in the shifting street.

  Neno hesitated before following.

  He had seen doors seal themselves shut before. Had seen streets vanish behind him, rewritten like words crossed out in a book. He wasn’t sure if this was her inviting him inside—or if the city itself had decided on another trick.

  But she had spoken. And in this place, in this nightmare of a city that moved like a living thing, human voices mattered.

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  He stepped through the door.

  The interior was wrong.

  Not broken or abandoned like the other buildings he had seen, but impossibly structured.

  The floorboards curved upward in places, defying logic. The ceiling stretched too far overhead, disappearing into a gray haze, as if the walls extended beyond reality itself.

  Shelves lined the room, cluttered with maps—hundreds of them, maybe thousands, stacked haphazardly, some pinned to the walls, others covered in scribbled notes.

  The woman was already moving toward a desk covered in open books, rolling up a parchment covered in frantic, overlapping sketches.

  "You’re staring," she said without looking up.

  Neno forced his gaze back to her. "You have a lot of maps."

  "Not enough." She tied the scroll with a thin strip of leather and tossed it aside, finally turning to face him fully. "Who are you?"

  "Neno Vaulden."

  She studied him again, her brow furrowing slightly. "Vaulden."

  A strange weight settled into the air between them.

  "You’ve heard my name," he said carefully.

  She was silent for a moment, then shook her head. "Not yours, specifically. But your name—yes."

  His fingers twitched at his side. He didn’t like the way she said that.

  Before he could ask what she meant, she pulled a thick journal from a pile and flipped it open, scanning the pages. "Neno Vaulden. Where did you wake up?"

  "An old chapel. There was a man—" He hesitated. "Or something that used to be a man. He unraveled. Turned to paper."

  She grimaced, snapping the book shut. "That sounds about right."

  "You know what’s happening, then."

  "I know enough to keep myself alive." She leaned against the desk, arms crossed. "Saranja is rewriting itself. It’s been doing it for… I don’t know how long. There are rules, but they shift. Like a puzzle where the pieces move when you blink."

  Neno exhaled slowly. "And the Hollow Gospel?" He lifted the page still clutched in his hand. "It writes itself. I don’t know how, but it—it knows me. It changes when the city does."

  She nodded. "It does that."

  "You’ve seen it before."

  She hesitated just long enough for him to notice.

  "I’ve seen fragments. Pages. But the full text? No one has. Or if they have, they’re not around to talk about it."

  A pause. Then she sighed, rubbing at her temple like she was fighting off a headache. "I should have introduced myself earlier. Dr. Lenora Vex. Cartographer. Or at least, I was, before Saranja decided to start eating itself."

  "Cartographer?" Neno echoed. He gestured vaguely at the twisted, shifting walls. "In a place like this?"

  "More necessary than you think." She tapped one of the maps beside her. "You don’t find places in Saranja. They find you. But if you pay attention, you can sometimes… nudge things in the right direction."

  He glanced at the map she had pointed to. It looked like a rough sketch of Saranja’s streets. But the ink wasn’t dry. It shifted, almost imperceptibly, like something breathing.

  He swallowed. "You’re mapping the city while it moves."

  "Trying to." She pulled another book from the desk and flipped it open, revealing a detailed sketch of a staircase. His stomach twisted.

  The staircase.

  The one he had refused to descend.

  Lenora followed his gaze. Her voice was calm, but too careful. "You’ve seen it."

  "Almost went down."

  She exhaled through her nose, shutting the book. "Good. That would’ve been the last choice you ever made."

  A chill settled over him.

  "The city wanted me to take it," he said quietly. "I felt it."

  "It did." She sat down at the desk, running a hand through her unkempt hair. "Saranja doesn’t like loose ends. It gave you a path. When you didn’t take it, it adapted." She gestured vaguely toward the shifting walls. "It’s always listening. Always learning. Next time, it won’t ask."

  His grip on the page in his hand tightened. "So what now?"

  She studied him for a long moment.

  Then, for the first time, she smiled. But there was no warmth in it. Only exhaustion.

  "Now, you help me break the rules."