The Secrets book : Second part.... , spoiler

 There were no walls.

Only reminders.

Flesh-colored.

Moist.

Like the inside of someone’s mouth had grown too large and become a building.

Eliot didn’t blink anymore.

The structure liked that.

Blinking made noise.

He walked without footfall, but the floor still reacted.

Tiny shifts beneath him.

Not in resistance.

In welcome.

There was a hallway ahead that hadn’t been there a second ago.

It formed when he thought of shame.

He stepped into it.

The air tasted like something had just died trying to explain itself.

A voice followed.

Not behind.

Inside.

It no longer spoke in sentences.

It sketched impulses.

You don’t need to ask.

You already know.

The child in your memory never existed.

But he still misses you.

Eliot entered a room with nothing in it.

He stood still.

The room hesitated.

Then the walls folded in.

Revealed teeth.

Not sharp.

Flat.

Grinding.

Chewing on sound.

He smiled.

Not from courage.

From compatibility.

He belonged here.

Not because he built it.

Because he fit.

Elsewhere in the structure, something opened its eyes.

It hadn’t known it was sleeping.

Hadn’t realized it had eyes.

They weren’t for seeing.

They were for recognizing.

It saw Eliot.

And whispered, gently:

“He is not the intruder.

He is the update.”

Beneath twelve stories of bloodless concrete, something moved.

Joseph.

Not awake.

But listening.

He was stone once.

But memory had been leaking into him.

And memories rot.

Especially when misfiled.

He heard footsteps.

Not near him.

Through him.

And then a whisper. From somewhere above his skull, like a parasite waking in his spine:

“He’s closer now.

And he doesn’t believe in redemption.

Only repurposing.”

Eliot’s hands began to itch.

He looked down.

Fingertips: peeling.

Underneath—not skin.

Blueprint.

Veins were diagrams.

Bones: structural beams.

He flexed a knuckle and felt a hallway open fifty meters below.

This was no longer exploration.

It was interface.

He stopped speaking days ago.

The mouth was obsolete.

Now he felt instructions.

There were no commands.

Only urgencies.

Like a script in his stomach unraveling one syllable at a time.

Build.

Infect.

Repeat.

One of the six—Subject #5—tried to pray.

Not out of faith.

Out of fear.

The words came, but they looped.

The second line fed into the first.

A Möbius tongue.

By the fourth repetition, he forgot what he was apologizing for.

By the fifth, he forgot he’d done anything at all.

He slept with his eyes open.

And dreamed of rooms he had once lived in that no longer existed in reality—but could be accessed through regret.

In the deepest corridor, something scratched.

Not stone.

Joseph’s fingernail.

He was moving now.

Not escaping.

Waking.

The system had changed.

Eliot had entered too deeply.

And something inside the tower still remembered why it was built in the first place.

Not to dominate.

To contain.

And it was failing.