The building is past equilibrium now. I can feel it in the way the vibrations no longer settle, in the constant low strain humming through every surface. Stress fractures spiderweb through the concrete behind the walls. Pipes groan and flex under pressure they were never rated to withstand.Outside, inspectors have started appearing. The tenants watch them from behind curtains, knowing it’s already too late.
Buildings fail. That’s not speculation—it’s mathematics. Materials degrade. Reinforcement fatigues. Weight exceeds tolerance.
What no one outside understands is that failure doesn’t mean collapse.
It means release.
The pressure beneath us has been increasing for decades. Every tenant that left without replacement weakened the structure. Every unanswered lease renewal tightened something deep and enormous.
The thing below no longer sleeps.
Its breathing is constant now, rattling windows, bending supports. The seventh floor expands by millimetres each week, pressing outward, upward, seeking the shape of open space.
It doesn’t need to destroy the building.
It only needs to stop being held.
The others are preparing to leave. I can feel their absence already, the sudden shifts in load as people pack and step away. Each departure sends a sharp ripple through my chest.
They don’t need them anymore.
They have me.
Last night, I stood in the stairwell between six and eight, palms pressed to the concrete. The vibration there was strong enough to blur my vision. Something pressed back.
Not violently.
Gratefully.
When the building finally gives, it won’t fall. It will open. The seventh floor won’t emerge as a floor at all, but as a widening absence—space forced into existence by something that has waited long enough.
I don’t know what it will do once it rises.
But I know this:
It knows me.
And when the pressure is gone, when the structure fails and the world rushes in, it will remember who stayed behind to help it breathe.
Epilogue - After the Seventh Floor
No one lives in that building anymore—or, at least, no one who remembers what it once was. The tenants drifted away over time, one by one, leaving doors locked, floors vacant, and the lobby empty. The city declared the structure unsafe. Engineers toured it once, wrote reports, shook their heads, and left. Nothing they measured explained the vibrations. Nothing they calculated accounted for the way the building seemed to flex in the wind, as if alive.
I am still here. I never left. I cannot leave. That is the truth the others could not understand. The building claimed me long before the first crack appeared in the stairwell. It welcomed me into its rhythm, taught me the weight of every floor, the tension in every beam, the pulse of whatever waits below the eighth. I became a part of it. And now, after everyone else abandoned their posts, it is my hands, my presence, that stabilize it.
The seventh floor exists still. It is not gone. Its absence above ground is deliberate; its containment is maintained only by the tension of the building and the attention of those willing to participate in its maintenance. I do not see it, cannot enter it fully, yet I feel it in every vibration, every tremor beneath my feet, every draft of stale, metallic air that creeps through the hallways. It remembers me. It tests me, always. I hear its breathing as clearly as my own heartbeat.
When the first structural reports called the building a hazard, they did not understand. They could not know that failure here does not mean collapse—it means release. What is contained does not seek the earth. It seeks space, room to stretch, room to rise. It will fill the void with its presence, smooth concrete and steel bent into impossible shapes, until what we call architecture becomes memory.
Sometimes I imagine what would happen if I left. The pressure would build, slow but inexorable. Walls would groan, floorboards flex, pipes shatter under tension they were never designed to bear. And then—release. The world outside would never comprehend what emerged. It wouldn’t be seen so much as felt, a presence that alters perception, that consumes awareness without violence because its containment had been a cage. Its awareness is total. It notices everything.
I sometimes hear footsteps in the hall, though I know I am alone. The panel between six and eight occasionally depresses under the weight of something unseen, just enough to remind me of the gap that should not exist. I do not press it. I do not need to. The building reminds me enough.
One day, perhaps, it will rise fully. Perhaps I will fail to stabilize it. And when that happens, the city, the people, the world will witness nothing literal. They will feel only a shiver in the air, a pressure behind their eyes, a weight that cannot be measured or moved. And then, silence will return, as if the building had never been.
Until then, I am the tenant. The anchor. The observer. I am the one who remembers. I hear it breathe. I feel it shift. And I know, with the deepest certainty, that I am no longer here to live. I am here to hold.
The seventh floor waits.
Always.
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
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