As soon as they left the ripple zone, the air changed.
Not dramatically. Not like when the Athenaeum bites you with a narrowing corridor or pushes you with a moving staircase. Here it was more subtle: a clean air, too clean, as if someone had wiped every vibration, leaving only what was permitted.
Marikka noticed it through her fingers.
The handrail she had just left—rough, ancient, alive—was gone. In its place was a smooth, cold, perfectly uniform surface. When she placed her hand, the stone did not respond with memory or emotion. It responded with... standard.
Cedric made a sound halfway between a sob and a nervous laugh. "Okay. No. This is a place where they make you sign things without reading them."
Aurelian did not correct him. He walked ahead of them with the posture of someone who recognizes a courtroom before even seeing its walls.
The corridor stretched out in a straight line, which was already suspicious in itself. The lights were placed at identical distances, and the panels on the walls looked like decorative slabs until Marikka got close enough to feel that they were not decorations.
They were instruments.
Each panel vibrated with a different note, not emotional but functional: weights, measures, calibrations. As if someone had transformed concepts into objects.
"Where are we?" Cedric whispered, and for once it wasn't a joke.
Aurelian slowed down. "Corridor of Judgment."
The name hung between them like dust that refused to settle.
"Judgment... of what?" Cedric asked.
Aurelian did not look back. "Of whom."
Marikka felt the mark on her wrist react. Not with pain, but with a brief pulse, like a stamp on a document. An imposed "present."
The corridor continued. And with every step, something changed in the way the place perceived her: no longer as a creature in flight, but as an object under evaluation.
Marikka forced herself to breathe.
She didn't want to run. She didn't want to give that place the satisfaction of feeling her escape.
Then they reached the first archway.
It was not a monumental arch. It was a frame of thin, light stone, with a single phrase inscribed above, clean as a label:
HUMAN ANOMALIES — EVALUATION PROTOCOL
Cedric read it and went pale. "No. Absolutely not. I am not a human anomaly. I am a standard human being. Maybe a little anxious, but standard."
Aurelian placed two fingers on the stone. "This is not for you."
Cedric looked at him. "Oh, thank you. I feel much better."
Marikka passed under the arch.
The world grew heavier.
Not physically, but as if everything around her suddenly had an opinion about what she should be. The vibrations, previously free and chaotic, were here channeled, filtered, forced into invisible tracks.
Aurelian clenched his jaw. "Don't speak unless necessary."
Cedric bit his tongue, which alone should have been considered a rare and noteworthy event.
The corridor opened into a side room, a kind of antechamber filled with tools stored in niches. There were no books. There were book-like objects that did not contain stories.
They contained procedures.
Marikka approached one of those instruments. It looked like a slab of compressed white paper, with reinforced edges and a seal in the center. When she placed her hand on it, the vibration hit her like a slap.
Not emotional. Not personal.
It was a vibration that said: reduction.
Marikka withdrew her hand.
Aurelian watched her. "That is an Alignment Module."
The name made her stomach tighten. "Alignment... like the one Isaak spoke of."
Aurelian nodded, and for the first time, his voice lost a bit of control. "Yes. This is where they prepare it."
Cedric stared at the module as if it could bite him. "Prepare it how... they turn you into a tool?"
Aurelian didn't answer right away. Then, quietly: "They make you stop being a choice."
The silence that followed was heavier than any ripple.
Marikka took a step toward another niche. Inside was an object that looked like a glass bell, but when she touched it, she felt it wasn't glass.
It was solidified silence.
The vibration was unnaturally absent, like a room without air.
Cedric swallowed. "That thing... it doesn't vibrate."
Aurelian inhaled slowly. "Suppression Bell. They use it to isolate a Key during evaluation. No interference. No... will."
Marikka felt the mark quiver, as if her body had recognized a threat that her mind didn't yet want to accept.
Then she saw the last niche.
It did not contain an object.
It contained a framed sheet of paper, protected by a thin seal, with extremely neat lines and a signature at the bottom.
It wasn't just any document.
It was an excerpt from a registry.
Marikka pressed her fingers to the edge of the frame. The vibration that came out was not from the sheet. It was from the gesture that had created it: precise, definitive, without a doubt.
At the bottom, the signature was clear.
Isaak Verne.
Cedric whispered: "I can't believe he even signs the scary things."
Aurelian couldn't take his eyes off the signature. "He doesn't sign 'things.' He signs fates."
Marikka felt an impulse of anger that did not come from the mark. It came from her. A brief, sharp, human warmth.
Then the corridor trembled.
Not a distant settling. Not a system correction. A physical sound, like a blow struck from very far away... but strong enough to be heard everywhere.
A bell.
Not the one in the niche. A larger bell, integrated into the Corridor itself.
The sound did not travel through the air. It traveled through the body.
Cedric moaned. Aurelian stiffened. Marikka felt the mark ignite as if someone had pressed a seal directly onto her skin.
Above the entrance arch, a phrase that was not there before appeared, inscribed as if it had always been there:
RECOVERY AUTHORIZED
Cedric looked up, terrified. "No. No, no, no. This... this is the moment they arrive, isn't it?"
Aurelian looked down the corridor at the end of the hall. The lights seemed whiter. Colder.
"Yes," he said. "It's the moment the Corridor stops being a place... and becomes a sentence."
Marikka closed her eyes for an instant.
Then she opened them again.
"Then we don't stay here," she said.
And for the first time, in the Corridor of Judgment, an unexpected vibration responded to her words.
A minimal tremor, as if the place... had perceived an error.
And elsewhere, very far away but already moving, someone had just decided that this error needed to be recovered.