The outer wall took another hit.
Hard enough that plaster dust shook loose from the ceiling and drifted through the machine shop office in pale threads.
Then another.
Not fists.
Not shoulders.
Cleaner than that. Sharper. Like the building itself was being struck from a distance by something that didn't need mass to make impact.
Ren's eyes snapped to the door.
The janitor laughed outside.
Not soft anymore. He'd lost patience.
"Fine," he said through the wood. "We can do it ugly."
The next hit blew a fist-sized crater through the wall six inches from the frame.
Brick dust and splinters burst inward across the room.
Jadah ducked with a curse. Marlon flinched so hard his bad leg almost gave under him. Isaac grabbed his elbow before gravity could finish the argument.
"What the hell was that," Marlon said.
Another impact.
This one lower.
The metal shelf Ren had shoved against the door jumped backward half an inch on its legs with a shriek.
No bang.
No muzzle flash.
No sound except the wall getting hit and the janitor laughing like he'd finally found the right tool.
Isaac saw it then through the wired-glass strip set in the upper half of the office door, cloudy with years of grease and dust.
A shape outside on the landing.
The janitor-shirt man, half turned toward the room, both hands lifted chest-high, index fingers pointed at the door like he was some kid making a gun out of his hands and nobody had told reality not to listen.
Each time he jerked one finger forward, the wall answered.
Another hit.
The shelf slammed back.
Jadah sucked in breath through her teeth. The coat hook beside her bent toward the door with a tiny metallic whine.
Ren moved fast. "Away from the wall."
Nobody needed telling twice.
They stumbled deeper into the room just as another invisible impact punched through the plaster beside the frame and sent old white dust across the floor in a cloud.
The janitor laughed harder.
"There you are."
He fired both hands at once this time.
The whole door bucked.
Marlon made a raw sound and folded over his thigh instinctively. Isaac and Jadah caught him together, one on each side, holding him upright while the room shook around them.
The outer landing answered with a different noise.
A scream.
Not theirs.
Somebody outside with the janitor.
It cut clean through the impact rhythm.
The janitor stopped laughing.
For half a second the building went still enough that Isaac heard boots scrape metal outside, then a wet choking gasp that didn't belong to anyone in the room.
Another scream. Closer. Higher. Shorter.
Then a sound like meat being dropped hard against railing.
Ren's gun came up.
The janitor turned, his shadow flicking across the cloudy glass strip in the door.
"What—"
A heavy body hit the landing outside hard enough to rattle the frame.
One of the shapes with him. Maybe the crowbar man. Hard to tell from the angle.
Not moving right anymore.
The janitor snapped one hand away from the office and pointed down the landing instead.
Invisible force cracked through the dark outside. Isaac couldn't see it cleanly, only the result—metal rail warping inward, a shower of sparks, something big hitting brick.
Then another of the janitor's people screamed.
This one didn't stop.
It climbed, cut off, came back smaller, then ended in a popping crunch that made Jadah go white all over again.
Nobody in the room moved.
The janitor had stopped being patient.
Now he'd stopped being in control.
"What the fuck," Marlon whispered.
Through the wired glass, Isaac saw a body slide across the landing and leave a wet red stripe.
Then the janitor stepped backward into frame.
Not smooth now. Not amused. Both hands still up, fingers aimed wild into the dark beyond the office. He fired twice, three times, each invisible blow hitting something outside the room hard enough to shake the whole walkway.
Didn't matter.
Somebody else was out there with him.
Somebody he did not like.
Another impact outside.
Not his this time.
His body jerked sideways in the glass as if a hook had gone through his shoulder.
He shouted. Not at them.
"At him."
"Get him! Get—"
The rest died in his throat.
He was looking down the landing now.
Isaac couldn't see who at first. Just a shape at the far end beyond the broken emergency light, standing in the dark like it had always been there and the night was only now catching up.
Human.
Just a man.
That was the bad part.
No distortion. No monster shape. No crawling wrongness. Just a human silhouette in dark clothes with one arm slightly raised and the kind of stillness that made every other kind of stillness in the room feel fake.
The janitor took one step back.
Then another.
Actually scared.
That changed the air worse than any scream had.
He pointed both hands at the figure and the landing exploded in front of him—rail twisting, paint shearing off brick, a section of wall punching inward as invisible force hit hard enough to make the whole office shudder.
The man at the far end didn't move.
Or maybe he did and Isaac just never caught the in-between.
The next second the janitor was off the ground.
Jadah made a noise.
Marlon forgot his own pain long enough to say, "Oh."
The janitor hung there three feet above the landing, boots kicking uselessly in open air, both hands clawing suddenly at his own throat instead of aiming anywhere useful. His fingers gouged at skin. His face went red, then dark, then blotched wrong under the bad hall light.
No rope.
No chain.
Nothing visible holding him.
Just a human body being lifted and squeezed by a human will too strong to make sense of yet.
He made a sound Isaac would never stop hearing.
Not a shout. Not a command.
Fear. Clean fear. Animal and humiliated all at once.
"Help—"
His voice crushed halfway through the word.
Something in his neck gave.
A wet pop. Then another.
Blood ran out of his nose and one ear. His boots kicked harder, slower, then harder again as if panic had found a second wind and immediately wasted it.
The man at the end of the landing stepped once into better light.
Human.
Dark hair. Dark coat. Face ordinary enough to be worse for it.
No hurry in him.
No visible strain.
He looked up at the janitor the way a man might look at a loose sign he'd decided to pull down.
Then he closed his hand.
The janitor's body folded inward around the throat that wasn't being touched.
Not all the way.
Enough.
His scream came out thin and bubbling. His fingers kept grabbing at nothing. Then his eyes bulged so hard Isaac thought they might actually come out. One of his pointed hands spasmed and fired once by accident, punching a hole through the far wall.
Didn't matter.
The unknown man held him there until the kicking stopped.
Then another second after that.
Then one more.
Only then did he let go.
The janitor dropped bonelessly to the metal landing with a sound like wet laundry dumped from a height.
Nobody in the room breathed.
Not Ren.
Not Jadah.
Not even Marlon, who sounded too close to dying most of the time now to risk silence.
The unknown man looked at the corpse once.
Then at the blood on the landing.
Then he turned his head toward the office door.
Toward them.
Even through the dirty wired glass, Isaac felt the line of that look hit the room and choose every person in it one at a time.
Ren raised the gun.
Didn't fire.
For the first time since Isaac met her, she looked like she didn't trust the category she was looking at.
The man spoke.
His voice was quiet. Clear. Human.
"You'll live long enough to be tragic."
No one moved.
No one even blinked if they could help it.
The man's eyes lingered on the door another beat. Then, almost like an afterthought:
"So you won't die here. Not yet."
Jadah's fingers locked around Isaac's sleeve hard enough to hurt.
Marlon whispered, "What."
The man took one step backward into the dark end of the landing.
Then he wasn't there anymore.
Not ran.
Not faded.
Not dropped.
Just there one second, gone the next, like the night had finally remembered it was allowed to keep him.
The landing outside stayed empty except for the janitor's body and the two other twisted shapes farther down.
The room didn't know what to do with that.
Nobody did.
Ren kept the gun up for three more full breaths.
Then six.
Then she crossed to the door with her free hand out slightly, like she didn't trust air either now.
Isaac heard himself say, "Don't."
She stopped.
Looked back at him.
He had nothing better than the word.
Nothing to explain why the emptiness on the other side of the door felt worse than the noise had.
Jadah was still gripping his sleeve.
Too hard.
Marlon stared at the door like if he watched long enough the missing man would return the way a dropped object did when gravity remembered it.
Ren lowered the gun an inch.
Not much.
Enough to show she'd heard the tone, if not the reason.
Outside, the landing creaked once under the shifting dead weight of the janitor's body.
Then silence.
Real silence this time.
No tapping at the door.
No patient little jokes.
No footsteps pacing.
No one trying the handle.
The absence landed harder than the attack had.
Marlon found his voice first. Thin and wrecked.
"Did that just save us."
Nobody answered.
Because yes was insane.
Because no was stupid.
Because nothing tonight held still long enough to name safely.
Jadah finally let go of Isaac's sleeve and looked down at her own hand like she'd forgotten it was there.
Her breathing had gone shallow again.
Bad sign.
The coat hook beside her gave one tiny metallic click toward the wall.
Isaac saw it. So did she.
She closed her fist on instinct.
Bad idea.
A loose screw on the floor jumped and slapped the table leg.
She swore under her breath and forced her hand open again.
Ren saw that too.
Of course she did.
But even she had no sentence ready for it this time.
Not after the landing.
Not after the man who lifted another man to death with nothing visible at all and then walked out of the world like it was a hallway he owned.
Isaac's skin prickled once more under the sternum. That same faint tug. Small. Annoying. Not enough. Then gone again.
Still nothing to use.
Still no awakening.
Good.
He didn't know if that was good.
The office light above them flickered twice and held.
Marlon looked from Isaac to Jadah to Ren and laughed once in a way that sounded too close to breaking.
"Okay," he said. "Cool. Great. New category."
Jadah stared at the door. "I don't know which one I hate more."
"The man outside," Isaac said.
"There isn't a man outside."
He looked at her.
She looked back, pale and sweating and angrier than fear but not enough to beat it.
"I know," she said. "That's what I mean."
No one had anything useful to add to that.
So they stood there in the old machine shop office, breathing too loud, listening to the building settle around the dead, while somewhere above the city the bruise in the sky pulsed again and painted the dirty wired glass in a color that didn't belong to anything alive.
And outside the door, the janitor's corpse dragged one heel an inch across the landing like even death hadn't convinced the night to stop moving.