"That came from the east wing," Isaiah said, already moving toward the door.
"That's impossible." Fendrik was on his feet, faster than Lia had seen him move all night. "That wing has been locked for years. No one has a key."
"I have one." Lia's voice came out steadier than she felt.
She was already pulling out the phone, checking the last message one more time, the one about the drawer, the one that had led her here in the first place.
Whoever sent it knew things no one outside this room should know. Which meant they might already be inside walls no one else could reach.
They ran.
The corridor toward the east wing stretched longer than Lia remembered, every door they passed shut and silent, every shadow suddenly deliberate instead of ordinary.
Isaiah reached the heavy iron door first, the same padlocked barrier that had stopped them cold hours earlier.
Except now it hung open, the padlock snapped clean through, metal still swinging slightly on its broken hinge like it had only just given way.
"That lock didn't break itself," Fendrik said, voice low.
Lia stepped forward before either of them could stop her, pushing the door wider into darkness thick enough to swallow the beam of Isaiah's phone flashlight the second he raised it.
The east wing smelled like old dust, something that made the back of Lia's throat tighten before her mind fully caught up to why.
"Lia, wait." Fendrik's hand closed around her wrist. "Let me go first."
"There isn't time for that."
She pulled free and stepped through the doorway, flashlight beam sweeping across a room frozen exactly as it must have looked the day it was sealed. A dressing table, thick with dust.
A costume rack, fabric long since rotted at the seams. And directly ahead of her, mounted on the far wall exactly where Edith had described it, the mirror.
Cracked from corner to corner, as if something, or someone, had struck it hard enough to shatter the glass from the inside.
And reflected in the largest surviving shard, distorted and fractured into pieces, stood a shape that hadn't been there a second before Lia's flashlight found it.
Someone was already in the room with them.
The shape didn't move. It stood angled toward the mirror itself, back turned, as still as if it had been carved from the same dust coating everything else in the room. Lia's breath locked in her chest, every instinct screaming at her to run and her legs refusing to obey either direction.
"Don't," Fendrik said, so quietly it barely carried. "Don't say anything. Just back toward the door."
Isaiah's flashlight beam trembled, sweeping wider, and for one fractured second it caught the side of a face in profile before the figure turned fully away, vanishing into a black gap in the far wall that hadn't been visible until that exact moment, a second door, hidden behind a panel that stood open just wide enough for a person to slip through.
"There's another way out of this room," Lia breathed.
"There shouldn't be." Fendrik's grip tightened around her wrist, pulling her back a full step. "That wall backs onto the loading dock. There's never been a door there in the time I've worked this building."
"Well, there's one now."
Footsteps sounded again, quick this time, retreating fast through whatever space lay beyond that hidden panel, and every part of Lia wanted to chase it, to close the distance and finally see a face instead of a shadow.
Fendrik didn't let her.
"No," he said, reading the decision on her face before she'd fully made it. "Not tonight, and not without knowing what's on the other side."
The panel swung shut on its own, slow and deliberate, sealing the gap as neatly as if it had never existed at all.
"It can't just close on its own," Lia said, already crossing to the wall where the panel had been. "Wood doesn't do that."
"No," Fendrik agreed. "It doesn't."
She pressed both palms flat against the surface, searching for a seam, a hinge, anything that would explain what she'd watched swallow itself shut moments ago. Nothing gave. The wall looked as solid and undisturbed as if it had never held a secret in its life.
"There has to be a mechanism," she said. "A latch, a lever, something."
"Or a hand on the other side holding it closed." Isaiah's voice wavered. "Which means whoever that was is still right there, listening to us try to get in."
Lia's hand stilled against the wood.
"Step back," Fendrik said, low and even, already pulling her by the shoulder before she could argue. "If someone's on the other side, the last thing we do is stand where they can reach through if it opens again."
"We can't just leave. Whoever that was could lead us straight to Aria."
"Or straight into whatever happened to Aria in the first place." Fendrik's jaw tightened. "I'm not willing to find that out with you standing in the blast radius."
"That's not your decision to make for me."
"No, but it's absolutely my decision to make for myself, and I'm not leaving you here alone while I go find out."
"You say that like it's noble instead of exactly the same stubbornness you've accused me of all night."
"Maybe it is. I'd rather be stubborn and wrong than careful and too late a second time."
That landed harder than either of them expected, and for a moment neither said anything at all.
Isaiah raised both hands like he was trying to physically hold the argument apart. "Can we table the who's in charge conversation until after we're not standing in a room where a wall just ate a person?"
Lia exhaled hard, some of the fight draining out of her, replaced by the exhaustion of an entire night that refused to slow down. "Fine. We call Michael."
"And tell him what?" Fendrik asked. "That we broke into a condemned wing of the building and found a wall that closes by itself?"
"We should tell him the truth. All of it. The notes, the drawer, Corinne, everything." She met his eyes, daring him to argue. "You don't get a say in that either."
He didn't argue. He nodded once, slow, like he'd been waiting all night for someone to finally say it out loud.
"There's a phone in the security office," Isaiah offered. "Two floors up. We should split up, someone stays here watching the wall, someone calls Michael properly."
"Absolutely not," Fendrik said. "Nobody splits up in a building where walls apparently move on command."
"Then what's your plan? Stand here staring at plaster until sunrise?"
"My plan is we search the rest of this wing first, carefully, together, before anyone leaves to call anyone." Fendrik nodded toward a second door at the far end of the room, half hidden behind a collapsed rack of old costumes. "That door wasn't on any floor plan I've ever seen either. Let's see where it goes before we decide we've hit a wall we can't get past."
They tried it first. The handle turned freely, easily, almost too easily, and swung open onto a narrow closet stacked floor to ceiling with props gone gray under decades of dust, papier mache masks and broken set pieces from productions none of them recognized.
No exit, and no second panel. Just dead ends dressed up as possibilities.
"Nothing," Lia said, frustration sharpening every word. "This whole wing is nothing but dead ends and locked doors."
"Then we go back to the wall," Isaiah said.
"The wall that ate a person," Fendrik said flatly.
"Do you have a better idea?"
Before either of them could answer, a sound rose from deeper in the east wing, further back than the dressing room, muffled by distance and layers of old plaster.
Not footsteps this time. A voice, thin and cracked, barely recognizable as words at all.
"Help me..."
Lia's blood went cold. "That's not the person from the mirror."