Ten.
Muhan counted them the way he had been counting everything since he arrived — quietly, without moving his eyes too obviously, the kind of inventory that looked like nothing from the outside. Ten hollow bodies wrapped in ragged fur that hung off shoulders and pooled at ankles, thin enough that the cold passed through it without much resistance, shapeless enough to make everyone inside them look like the same thing. The fur smelled of damp stone and something older underneath that — something that had been in this place long enough to become part of it.
He looked down at his own.
The fabric was stiff at the edges. Darker in patches where it had absorbed things he didn't examine too closely. It hung off him the way it hung off everyone — like it had been made for a body that wasn't his, or hadn't been made for any particular body at all, just cut and distributed without consideration for the person receiving it.
He looked at the door.
Ten meant the Daemons were nearly finished with this cell. The arithmetic was simple now — brutal in the way simple things are brutal when there's nothing left to soften them. He could see it in the space itself, the way the cell had changed as it emptied. The corners visible now that had been obscured by bodies before. The stretch of bare stone floor along the far wall. The torchlight reaching places it hadn't been able to reach two days ago because there had been too many people in the way.
Fewer people. More light.
Phil was looking at his hands again.
He turned them over slowly in the torchlight, examining the lines of them, the calluses at the base of each finger, the small scar along his left thumb that caught the light when his hand moved. Surveyor's hands. Hands that had spent fifteen years pressing against walls and reading what they found there, learning the language of load and stress and the particular grammar of things on the verge of giving way.
After a while he stopped looking at them.
"Her name is Dani," he said.
His voice was quiet enough that it didn't carry past the two of them.
Muhan said nothing.
"She has this way of laughing where she covers her mouth." Phil was looking at the middle distance now, at a point somewhere between the far wall and somewhere else entirely. "Like she's embarrassed about it. She's had it since she was three years old and I have no idea where she picked it up." The torchlight shifted slightly in a draft from the corridor. "I used to say something stupid on purpose just to see it."
The rotation outside completed its cycle.
One. Two. Three.
"She made me a card when I got infected." Phil's hands had settled flat against the stone floor on either side of him. "Drew the two of us on the front. I had a cape for some reason." Something moved at the corner of his mouth and then didn't quite become anything. "She said it was because I was going to fight monsters and win."
The draft moved through the cell again, thin and cold, carrying the smell of torch smoke and damp stone and whatever lay further down the corridor.
"I told her she was right."
The words went into the cell and the cell held them and didn't give anything back. Phil didn't seem to need it to. He sat with his hands flat against the floor and his eyes on nothing and breathed in the slow deliberate way of someone who had decided that breathing carefully was the one thing still entirely within his control.
Muhan kept his eyes on the door.
He held the other end of it.
That was all he could do and he did it.
The next collection came.
Two more taken in the next collection.
Eight left.
The cell rearranged itself around the new absence the way it always did — bodies shifting without discussion into the geometry of the space that remained, the clusters drawing slightly tighter not out of warmth but out of something older than warmth, something that didn't have a name but functioned the same way.
The ragged fur of the hollow beside Muhan brushed against his arm as they resettled. The fabric was rougher than his own, the fur worn down to almost nothing along the edges. He could feel the cold radiating off the person wearing it — the specific cold of a body that had stopped generating enough heat to matter.
He shifted slightly away.
Then the voice came through the stone.
Low. Almost conversational. The particular tone of something that had been waiting for the right moment and decided this was it.
Still trust him, boy?
The cell didn't react. Either nobody else had heard or nobody else had the energy left to process one more thing.
Muhan looked at Phil.
Phil was looking at the door. His jaw was set at the angle it took when he was thinking through load distributions — the faint tension along the hinge of it, the slight forward set of his head. He hadn't moved at the voice. Hadn't registered it or chosen not to register it. With Phil, as Muhan had learned, the two things wore the same face.
Muhan looked at the door.
Then at the tag around Phil's wrist.
Then at his own.
Then back at the door.
One. Two. Three.
---
The Trauma had been getting worse.
A hollow near the back wall turned their head and for nearly four full seconds wore Mi-cha's jaw in the torchlight — not her face entirely, just that specific line from ear to chin that he would have known anywhere, in any light, in any room — before they shifted and it was gone and it was just a stranger's face again.
Four seconds.
He pressed his back harder against the wall and counted the footsteps outside and didn't look at that hollow again.
The cold deepened. Or maybe the fur had simply given up entirely. Around him the remaining eight bodies had collapsed inward on themselves, shoulders rounded, chins dropped, the posture of people for whom endurance had stopped being a choice and become the only remaining condition. The torchlight made everyone's skin the same colour — pale, flat, the colour of things kept too long away from anything living.
At some point Phil had shifted the outer edge of his fur across without looking at Muhan. Without saying anything. Without making anything of it.
Muhan hadn't refused it.
Neither of them mentioned it.
---
Four Daemons.
The cell understood before the door finished opening. Something shifted in the air — a collective intake, not quite breath, not quite sound — and then everyone went very still in the particular way of people who had learned that stillness was the closest thing available to invisible.
The Daemons moved through without hurry. Their forms cycled through their configurations as they always did — arms appearing and dissolving, faces surfacing briefly from wrong places and sinking back — and the torchlight moved across them in a way that made their edges uncertain, made it difficult to know exactly where they ended and the shadows around them began.
They stopped in front of Phil.
Phil looked at Muhan.
His left hand dropped to his side. Two fingers extended briefly against the fur of his sleeve — there, then gone, the smallest possible gesture, the kind that looked like nothing and meant everything — and then his hand was still again.
Muhan's eyes moved to the door. Back to Phil. Once.
Phil faced forward.
Let them take him.
Muhan watched the door shut. Listened to the footsteps move down the corridor — Phil's among them, steady, the footsteps of a man who had made his decision and was walking toward it without changing his mind. The sound travelled up through the stone floor, through the soles of Muhan's feet, and then diminished, and then was gone.
The cell held its remaining people.
The torchlight moved.
One. Two. Three.
One. Two. Three.
One. Two —
The door opened.
---
The corridor was longer than it had sounded from inside the cell.
The torchlight brackets were spaced further apart than he had estimated — the darkness between each one deeper, longer, the kind of dark that had weight to it, that pressed against the sides of the corridor and made the lit sections feel smaller by contrast. The stone walls were rougher here than in the cell. Older. The kind of surface that had been worn smooth in some places by prolonged contact and left jagged in others where nothing had ever touched it.
The Daemon behind him didn't touch him.
It didn't need to.
Muhan walked.
He counted the iron doors as he passed — six on the left set flush into the stone, four on the right before the corridor bent. The chain hooks in the ceiling came at irregular intervals, some empty, some carrying lengths of chain that hung perfectly still in the airless dark. The drains in the floor appeared every several metres, centred between the walls, surrounded by staining that spread outward from them in patterns that followed the slight gradient of the stone.
He noted the acoustic quality of the space — the way his footsteps returned to him from the walls fractionally delayed, the way the Daemon's footsteps behind him produced a lower frequency that he felt in his chest before he heard it with his ears.
The corridor bent once.
Then again.
Then the door appeared at the end of it — iron set into stone, riveted at intervals, the rivets themselves dark with age, the surface of the door uneven in the way metal gets when it has expanded and contracted through too many cycles of heat and cold to remember. Light came through the gap at the bottom. Not torchlight. Something warmer. More deliberate. The kind of light that had been arranged rather than placed.
The smell reached him before the door opened.
He recognised it.
The Daemon moved past him and pushed the door open and Muhan stepped through into the light.
---
Phil was standing near the far wall.
Upright. Intact.
His left hand hung loose at his side, two fingers resting against the fur of his sleeve — the same gesture as before, small and still and carrying its meaning quietly across the room to anyone looking for it.
Muhan looked.
He understood.
The room was larger than he had estimated from outside — stone floor, stone ceiling, the warm light coming from brackets set lower on the walls than in the corridor, throwing the illumination upward in a way that caught the ceiling and cast everything below in a shifting amber that made the room feel like the inside of something alive.
The walls were stone but the stone here was different — darker, denser, the kind that absorbed rather than reflected. The floor sloped almost imperceptibly toward a central drain that was larger than the ones in the corridor. Larger and darker and more permanent looking.
Along the right wall, a long surface of flat stone.
The identification tags were arranged on it in a row. Organised. Deliberate. The ones already processed separated from the ones still pending with the efficiency of a system that had been running long enough to develop its own bureaucracy.
Muhan clocked their positions. The distance from where he stood. The distance from where Phil stood. The arrangement of processed tags on the left side of the surface — how many, how they lay, which direction they faced.
Phil's eyes found him across the room.
Something in them was wrong.
Not broken. Not the glassy unfocused quality of someone who had gone somewhere inside themselves and not come back. A tightness around the eyes. The expression of a man holding himself very carefully still while he waited.
The Daemon was still facing away from them both.
Its form was larger than the corridor ones. It cycled through its configurations more slowly — a deliberateness to the shifting that the others hadn't had, each new arrangement held a fraction longer before dissolving into the next, like something that had learned patience because it had never needed anything else.
Muhan looked at Phil and understood immediately.
Phil had walked in the same way he did everything — with the stillness of a man who had spent fifteen years reading structures and learned not to react to what he found in them. Calm. Measured. Present.
Whatever came through that door wasn't supposed to be calm.
The Daemon's form shifted.
Its attention moved toward Phil.
Muhan's eyes found him across the room. One look — carrying the single instruction with the economy of something that had no room for anything extra.
Phil received it.
Something in his shoulders released. Not performance — permission. The specific quality of a man setting down something heavy he had been carrying for a long time, letting it go not because he had given up but because he had been told he was allowed to. His jaw loosened. His hands opened at his sides. His eyes lost their focus in the way of someone genuinely overwhelmed and the breath he released was ragged at its edges because it was simply true.
The Daemon's attention shifted.
Away from Phil.
Toward Muhan.
It turned around fully and Muhan met its gaze to verify himself against whatever system of recognition it was running and the sequence continued in one part of his mind — the tags on the surface, the processed ones on the left, the distance, the positioning, Phil already in place, every variable resolved, everything running cleanly —
The face was the one from the Divine Realm.
Not like it. Not reminiscent of it.
The exact face. The specific and particular arrangement of it that he had spent every night since his regression refusing to look at directly. The face of the thing that had moved through the Divine Realm without urgency, without interest, toward Mi-cha and his friends and him, wearing the expression his mind had spent months trying to classify as cruelty or hatred or hunger and had kept failing because it was none of those things.
Boredom.
The sequence was still running.
Every variable resolved. Every movement mapped. His mind knew the next step, the one after that, the precise chain that led from this moment to the corridor and the corridor to the threshold and the threshold to out.
His body had stopped.
Completely.
Utterly.
The amber light moved across the walls and the drain sat dark at the centre of the floor and Phil was three metres to his left and the tags were on the stone surface to his right and the face regarded him with its boredom and Muhan stood in the middle of all of it.
Not one part of him moved.