Amelia crawled through a gap in the brickwork and dropped into a space the asylum tried to hide from itself.
This wasn't a corridor.
It was a wound.
The walls were unfinished here, exposing Redwood's insides — layers of brick stitched with bone, pipes threaded through rib-shaped beams, mortar that pulsed faintly beneath her palms. The air felt warm and damp, like breathing inside a chest. Every few seconds, the structure tightened, contracting around her before loosening again.
Redwood was alive.
Her flashlight trembled as she crawled forward. Each movement scraped skin against stone that felt disturbingly soft. Something squelched beneath her knee. She didn't look down.
Then she heard it.
A sob.
Not an echo.
Not a whisper.
Human.
She froze.
"Hello?" she whispered.
The sound stopped.
Then resumed, quieter, closer.
Ahead, in a pocket of shadow, a man sat with his back against the wall, arms wrapped around himself as if holding his body together. His hospital clothes were torn and stiff with old blood. His hair was matted white with dust.
"Don't come too fast," he murmured. "It feels vibrations."
Amelia's throat tightened.
"I won't hurt you."
He laughed softly, broken.
"Neither did the building. At first."
She knelt near him. His eyes were human — exhausted, terrified, stubbornly alive.
"I'm Amelia."
He hesitated.
"Daniel," he said. "Last patient Redwood hasn't digested."
He pressed his palm to the wall beside him.
It pulsed back.
"Crowe learned how to feed it," Daniel whispered. "People think asylums hold madness. He discovered they grow it. Fear becomes structure. Regret becomes wiring. Memory becomes hallways."
Amelia swallowed.
"That surgery room…"
"Is how it's built," Daniel said. "He doesn't kill us. He spreads us."
The wall beside them shivered.
Tiny cracks crawled outward like veins.
Daniel's voice dropped.
"It hunts futures. Not bodies. The ones who still imagine tomorrow — those are rare inside places like this."
Amelia felt cold.
"Why keep you alive?"
Daniel smiled sadly.
"Because I stopped dreaming."
Something behind him bulged.
Slowly.
The brick softened.
A face pushed outward — not fully human anymore.
Crowe.
But stretched through stone, veins embedded in mortar, eyes burning behind layers of brick.
Daniel gasped.
"It's learned you," he whispered to Amelia.
The wall opened like wet clay.
Hands formed.
Not Crowe's — Redwood's.
They grabbed Daniel's shoulders and pulled.
He screamed as the structure swallowed him inch by inch — arms first, chest next, mouth still begging as brick stitched across his lips.
Amelia grabbed his wrist.
His skin felt cold and wrong.
"Run," Daniel mouthed silently as the wall sealed over his eyes.
Then he was gone.
Only smooth brick remained — warm, breathing, remembering.
The crawlspace trembled.
Crowe's laughter traveled through pipes, through beams, through Amelia's bones.
Redwood had finished studying her hope.
Now it wanted her shape.