They were waiting when I returned to the lobby.Every tenant. Every face expressionless, eyes tired beyond age. Mr. Hargreeve stood at the front like a man delivering a practiced confession.
They told me the truth without ceremony.
The thing had been discovered during excavation decades ago. It couldn’t be destroyed. It couldn’t be moved. So they built upward instead—creating weight, pressure, presence. The seventh floor became a chamber. The building became reinforcement.
People were added later.
Living bodies mattered. Consciousness mattered. Sleep cycles, habits, routines—these created patterns that stabilized the structure.
“When enough people leave,” Hargreeve said, “it notices.”
That was why leases renewed automatically.
That was why vacancies never lasted.
The doors closed behind me without a sound.
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
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