The laugh faded into the corridor.
Nobody in the cell moved.
The older man didn't look toward the sound. Didn't tense. Didn't recalibrate. He simply waited for the echo to finish travelling and then returned his eyes to Muhan as though the interruption had been a weather event — something noted, not something responded to.
"Phil," he said quietly.
Muhan looked at him.
"My name." A small gesture. "Since we're planning together."
Muhan said nothing.
Phil studied him for a moment. Then something in his expression settled — not disappointment exactly, more like adjustment. A man revising his expectations downward and finding the revision reasonable.
"Alright," he said. "I'll talk. You listen."
He turned to face the cell door without making it obvious that he was facing the cell door. His eyes moved the way eyes move when they're pretending to be at rest.
"They come every four hours," he said. "Give or take. The interval isn't exact but it's close enough to work with." He paused. "The rotation outside changes every two. Two Daemons on this corridor. Sometimes three when they're collecting."
Muhan had counted the same intervals.
He didn't say so.
"The door hinges are on the outside," Phil continued. "So that's finished as an option. The bars are set deep — I watched a man pull at them for twenty minutes yesterday before they took him." He said the last part the way people say things they have decided not to feel yet. "The ceiling is solid. The drain in the floor is too narrow."
His gaze moved briefly to the back wall.
"Which leaves the door itself. And the door only opens from the outside." He was quiet for a moment. "Which means the only way out is through the Daemons."
"Or with them," Muhan said.
Phil looked at him.
It was the first thing Muhan had said since sitting down beside him. Phil received it without surprise, without the small performance of someone pleased that the quiet one had finally spoken. He just looked at Muhan with those tired, level eyes and waited for the rest.
Muhan didn't give him the rest.
Phil turned it over quietly. Then something shifted in his expression — not quite a smile. The shape a smile leaves behind after it's gone.
"Or with them," he agreed.
---
Time passed.
More hollows were taken.
Each time the Daemons entered the cell the room performed the same ritual — the collective stillness, the held breath, the moment of selection, the sounds that followed down the corridor. Each time, those left behind settled back into their positions like sediment after a disturbance.
Nobody slept.
Sleep required a part of the mind willing to let go, and nothing in this cell was willing to let go of anything. People drifted instead — eyes open and fixed on nothing, bodies present and minds somewhere far away, burning through whatever reserves of composure they had left. Some stared at the door. Some stared at their own hands. Some had passed through fear into a quieter and more hollowed out place that wasn't calm but looked like it from a distance.
The little girl in the corner had stopped asking questions an hour ago. She sat with her back against the wall and her knees pulled to her chest and her eyes moving — that was the thing, her eyes kept moving, tracking every sound, every shift of shadow, every time a footstep outside changed rhythm by even a fraction. She wasn't calm. She was hypervigilant in the specific way of small animals that have learned the hard way that stillness is survival.
Muhan looked at her for a moment.
Then he looked at the door.
A boy around his age sat against the far wall with his elbows on his knees and his head down. His shoulders carried the particular curve of someone trying to make themselves smaller than they were. Dark hair fell across his forehead. His hands kept opening and closing against the stone floor in a slow unconscious rhythm — grip, release, grip, release — like his body was rehearsing something his mind hadn't decided to do yet.
Muhan looked at him for a moment longer than he'd looked at anyone else.
Then the boy shifted and the torchlight caught his profile at a different angle and the resemblance that hadn't quite been there dissolved completely and it was just a frightened stranger sitting against a wall.
Muhan looked at the door.
He counted the footsteps outside.
One. Two. Three.
The same pattern. The same interval. The same weight distribution between the two Daemons on rotation — the left one slightly heavier, its footfall landing a fraction harder on the stone than the right. He had catalogued that detail two hours ago and it hadn't changed.
He kept counting anyway.
It was easier than the alternative.
---
"You're not going to tell me your name," Phil said.
It wasn't a question.
Muhan didn't answer, which was an answer.
Phil accepted it without ceremony. He leaned his head back against the wall and looked at the ceiling with the expression of a man reviewing something internal.
"I was a surveyor," he said. "Before all this." He said it the way people say things about their former lives — carefully, like the words belong to someone they used to know. "Spent fifteen years reading structures. Load-bearing walls. Fault lines. The places where things were most likely to break." A pause. "Useful skill set, it turns out."
Muhan said nothing.
"I have a daughter," Phil said. "Eight years old."
The corridor outside was quiet.
"She was terrified when I got infected." He was still looking at the ceiling. "Kept asking her mother if I was going to turn into a monster." A slow breath out. "I told her the monsters were the ones who didn't come back."
Muhan's eyes stayed on the door.
Across the cell a teenage boy had pressed both palms flat against the stone floor and was staring at them like he was trying to memorise the feeling of something solid and real. His lips were moving slightly. Muhan couldn't hear what he was saying. A prayer, maybe. A name. Something to hold onto while the corridor outside cycled through another rotation.
Muhan looked at him for exactly as long as it took to confirm he wasn't a threat and then looked elsewhere.
A woman in the far corner had her arms wrapped around herself, shoulders drawn in, chin down. Not crying. Past crying. Her eyes were open and dry and aimed at the middle distance and she was breathing in the shallow mechanical way of someone whose body had taken over because the rest of them had temporarily vacated.
Muhan's eyes moved on.
Then stopped.
The little girl had shifted position without him noticing. She was facing a different direction now, her profile catching the torchlight at a new angle, and something about the way her hair fell across her cheek —
He looked away.
The tightness in his chest was brief and specific and he recognised it and set it aside.
One. Two. Three.
"— you alright?"
Phil was looking at him.
"Fine," Muhan said.
Phil held the look for a moment. He had the eyes of someone who understood the distance between the word fine and the condition it described, but he didn't push. He turned back to the ceiling.
"The identification tags," Muhan said.
Phil waited.
"The Daemons check them before selection." He had observed this carefully across three collections now — the way each Daemon paused fractionally before taking a hollow, the brief downward glance that suggested some form of verification. "They're tracking who they've already processed."
Phil went very still.
"If someone were already marked as processed," Muhan continued, "they wouldn't be selected again."
The quality of the silence between them changed. Phil was no longer looking at the ceiling. He was looking at the floor with the focused inward expression of someone running calculations — load-bearing walls, fault lines, the places most likely to hold and the places most likely to break.
"The butcher room," Phil said quietly.
Muhan said nothing.
"You'd have to get there first."
"Yes."
"And once you're there —" Phil stopped. Restarted. "Whatever is in that room —"
"I know what's in that room," Muhan said.
Phil looked at him then. Properly. With that measuring, settling quality that had been present since the beginning — like he was taking the dimensions of something and finding them consistently larger than they first appeared.
He didn't ask how Muhan knew.
"Alright," Phil said.
Outside, the footsteps completed another rotation.
One. Two. Three.
Muhan did not look at the little girl's face again. He had already decided that knowing what the Trauma was doing was sufficient defence against it.
He was wrong about that.
But he wouldn't find out until the butcher room.
---
The next collection happened forty minutes later.
Four Daemons instead of two.
They moved through the cell without hurry, without theatre, the way things move when they have never needed to justify themselves to anything. When it was over, six hollows were gone and the cell held its absence the way a room holds the silence after a door slams — the shape of the disruption still present even after the sound has gone.
Phil's eyes tracked the door as it shut.
"Tomorrow," he said. His voice was level. What was underneath it wasn't entirely.
Muhan looked at him.
"They're accelerating." A pause. "Which means we have fewer rotations than I thought."
Muhan had already calculated the same thing two collections ago.
"Tomorrow," he agreed.
Phil nodded once and leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. Muhan understood that this wasn't rest. It was the deliberate conservation of something — energy, composure, whatever resource gets depleted fastest in places built specifically to deplete it.
The torchlight shifted in a draft from somewhere deeper in the corridor. Shadows moved across the wall and didn't resolve into anything.
Across the cell the little girl had gone back to watching the door. Her eyes hadn't stopped moving. They probably wouldn't stop moving until this was over one way or another.
Muhan counted the footsteps.
One. Two. Three.
He didn't look at her face again.
He didn't sleep either, but that was fine.