The metal doors open.

I don’t move. My feet won’t let me. There is a box inside the wall, a small room with no windows or no visible exit. The floor is polished so bright I can see Jingsen’s reflection standing in it, waiting for us.

He steps inside.

Marcus hesitates. His hand moves, I see it out of the corner of my eye, touching something beneath his strange wrapped garment. A prayer, maybe. Then he steps forward.

I am alone in the bone-white corridor.

The box waits. Jingsen waits. Marcus waits.

I put one foot in front of the other. The threshold. The cold of the metal walls. The floor solid under my cloth shoes.

The doors close behind me.

Trapped.

The word rises in my throat but I swallow it. Trapped like an animal. Trapped like the time the cook locked me in the grain cellar and forgot. Three days in the dark, drinking condensation from the walls, counting heartbeats until someone remembered I existed.

Then the floor moves. It’s moving, UP!

My stomach drops before my mind understands. We are rising. The box is rising. I am being lifted by magic.

My ears hurt. A pressure building, shifting. Marcus has his eyes closed, lips moving in what might be prayer. Jingsen stands with his hands at his sides, breathing evenly, like this is nothing.

The box stops, then a small sound can be heard, a bell, and the doors open.

I step out so fast I nearly trip. The corridor here looks the same as below, but we are somewhere else now. I don’t know how I know. The air tastes different.

Doors. So many doors. All the same shape, the same distance apart, repeating in both directions until the corridor turns. I count them: one, two, three, four… thirteen, fourteen. What do the doors mean?

Jingsen stops at one of them. Fourteen paces from the box that lifted us.

He puts his hand on something beside the door, a flat surface, darker than the wall. I hear a sound like a lock clicking. Does the lock know it’s him? The door opens and beyond it… a room.

I stand at the threshold, waiting for permission to enter.

Jingsen looks back at me. His face is tired. So tired that the skin around his eyes seems to sag. But he gestures, the same gesture from the metal beast, from the street, come. And he waits until I move before he turns away.

I cross the threshold. The door closes behind us with a soft click.

The world goes quiet. For the first time since the metal beast, nothing is moving.