The wall didn't just shimmer anymore.
Aaron watched a two-meter section of raw concrete—pocked with old graffiti, a faded spray-paint tag that someone had clearly spent real time on—go perfectly, terrifyingly smooth. Not crumbled. Not scraped clean. Smoothed. Like someone had run an enormous thumb across wet clay, pressing every imperfection flush until the surface was the color of a storm cloud and the texture of nothing at all. Default geometry. He recognized it from the interface readouts: the System wasn't patching the Warren so much as overwriting it, substituting its own placeholder assets for the messy, human-authored reality underneath.
His interface pulsed.
REALITY SUBSTRATE COHERENCE: 47%ANOMALOUS SPATIAL SIGNATURE: FLAGGED — ACTIVE CORRECTION IN PROGRESS
Forty-seven. It was at forty-one six minutes ago.
The math was ugly and getting uglier by the second.
The hum had changed pitch. Earlier it had been low, almost subsonic, something you felt in the back molars before you heard it. Now it had climbed into a register that sat right behind the eardrums, a sustained, pressurized whine that made Aaron's vision pulse slightly at the edges. He pressed two fingers against the terminal's metal casing and felt the vibration traveling through the steel—not random, not structural. Rhythmic. Deliberate. Like a clock ticking down.
Then the first scream.
A woman three meters to his left—one of the newer arrivals, someone who'd brought a cardboard box full of photographs and a child's stuffed rabbit—lunged forward as the box on the ground beside her detonated silently into a cascade of blue-white pixels. Not fire, not explosion. The photographs just stopped being photographs. The stuffed rabbit hung in the air for one full second, its shape maintained by nothing but the dissolution pattern, and then it was gone, replaced by a faint rectangular outline that the System clearly hadn't bothered to render completely.
The woman's hands closed on empty air.
She screamed again. Someone else shouted from the far end of the chamber. Aaron heard the word gear and then the word gone and then a lot of words that weren't words anymore, just raw sound.
He forced his attention to the walls.
Three separate sections were smoothing simultaneously now, spreading outward from each correction point in slow, concentric waves. The rough brick near the eastern tunnel entrance—brick that had been there since before the System, before the apocalypse, before any of this—was being absorbed into grey uniformity. A sleeping bag half-draped against that wall pixelated from the hem upward, the dissolution traveling at roughly the speed of a man walking. Not fast. But not slow either.
Janus isn't guessing anymore. Aaron kept his face neutral with the specific effort of someone who has spent years keeping their face neutral during catastrophic software failures. It's not probing for anomalies. It's performing a hard reset. It found something it doesn't like about this location and it's just—deleting the layer.
The spire. The instability reading he'd flagged. The coherence numbers spiking every time the Warren's population density shifted. He'd thought it was environmental, a local glitch in the substrate. But the pattern of the corrections—starting at the walls, working inward, systematic—that wasn't how you patched a glitch. That was how you cleared a cache.
It's not fixing the Warren. It's erasing it.
He pulled the Null Phone from his chest pocket, keeping the motion small, casual, the kind of thing a man does when he's checking the time. The screen stayed dark to any external observer. His own vision overlaid the readout: the Stealth Exception utility was holding, his status signatures masked, but the exception didn't cover the physical space he was standing in. If the walls kept smoothing inward at their current rate—
He ran the geometry in his head. Roughly forty minutes. Maybe less if the process accelerated, and these things always accelerated.
Around him the chamber had tipped from frightened into something closer to fractured. People were grabbing at belongings, at each other. Someone was trying to pry a personal item off a shelf that was already mid-dissolution, their hands passing through the pixelating edge of a wooden plank as it converted to System default. A child—Aaron didn't look directly, he couldn't afford to look directly—was crying with the specific, exhausted cadence of a child who had already been crying for a long time before this started.
Focus on the geometry. Focus on the rate. Focus on what you can actually change.
He had the shape of a plan. It was not a good plan. It was the plan that existed, which was the only kind worth having.
The crowd parted under sudden, applied pressure.
A hand closed around Aaron's arm—not a grab, exactly, more like a structural clamp, the grip of someone who had long ago stopped distinguishing between holding a tool and holding a person.
Marcus shoved through the last knot of panicking survivors and his eyes found Aaron's with the flat, unambiguous focus of a man who had already decided that whatever was about to come out of Aaron's mouth was going to happen whether Aaron liked it or not.
The wall behind the water recycler had been grey stone forty minutes ago. Now it was a perfect, matte rectangle, smooth as poured concrete, every crack and mineral stain erased. As Aaron watched, the texture crept another six inches toward the ceiling support beam, consuming the rough brick like a slow tide eating a sandbar.
Marcus's grip on his arm was a vice.
"Talk." Not a request. The word came out flat and pressurized, the way a man speaks when he's already spent all his fear and what's left is pure operational function.
Aaron pulled his arm back. Marcus let him, which was its own kind of statement.
"There's a teleporter." Aaron kept his voice below the ambient noise of the crowd—a woman two rows of cots over was screaming about her daughter's photograph dissolving, and that was actually useful cover. "Forest edge, about three klicks northeast. Pre-patch infrastructure, which means it predates Janus's current indexing sweep. It's glitched. Badly."
"Define badly."
"It doesn't go where it's supposed to go." Aaron watched Marcus's expression and got nothing back—just that flat, processing stillness. Good. He's not going to ask me how I know. He's going to ask me what he needs to do. "The destination coordinates are unstable. Use it as-is, you get scattered across four grid squares. Best case."
"And worst case."
"You become a very abstract art installation."
Marcus didn't blink. "Fix."
"I need two things." Aaron held up a finger. "Heavy-duty power source. Military-grade portable generator, minimum fifteen kilowatts. The teleporter's draw is enormous and the local grid is already compromised." Second finger. "Precise spatial coordinates. The glitch is in the destination matrix. I can rewrite the targeting parameters, but I need a reference anchor—a fixed point with verified System-recognized coordinates."
"Where do you pull that from?"
"The city's old mainframe server." Aaron watched the word old register on Marcus's face—the slight forward lean, the recalibration. "Pre-System municipal infrastructure. The building's still standing downtown. The servers run on isolated power, hardwired, not integrated into the System's current topology. Janus hasn't bothered to overwrite it yet because it's architecturally inert." He paused. "The operative word being yet."
Marcus was already scanning the room, running his own logistics. "Downtown core."
"Yes."
"Which is currently—"
"A death zone." Aaron said it plainly, because softening it would waste both their time. "Patch 1.0.1 is hitting the high-density zones hardest. The System is prioritizing structural correction in areas with the highest deviation index, and downtown has the most pre-System infrastructure still standing. That means the highest concentration of correction events, the most aggressive monster spawns triggered by the instability, and the highest probability of running into other survivors who are not having a cooperative evening."
A section of ceiling thirty feet away made a sound like a zipper being pulled through wet cloth. The rough concrete surface smoothed out in a two-meter circle, the texture simply ceasing to exist, replaced by that same featureless grey. Someone directly beneath it stumbled backward, upending a camp stove. The clatter cut through the noise and a fresh wave of shouting rolled through the chamber.
Marcus turned back. The calculation in his expression had shifted—not fear, but the specific tension of a man pricing something he can't afford and buying it anyway.
"How long do we have?"
Aaron glanced at the smooth rectangle behind the water recycler. Six more inches of grey had appeared while they'd been talking. He did the math without looking like he was doing the math. "Forty minutes before this space becomes structurally uninhabitable. Probably less before the panic makes it functionally uninhabitable." He kept his voice even. "The mainframe run is the critical path. Everything else is logistics."
Marcus turned to flag someone across the chamber, and Aaron used the two seconds of redirected attention to check his vest pockets with his fingertips—phone, coins, canteen, the dead watch sitting cold and familiar against his wrist bone. Inventory intact. Good.
"Then we move in—"
"I'm going with you."
The voice came from his left. Aaron turned.
Lara had been standing four feet away. He didn't know for how long. Her arms were crossed, not defensively—more like she was physically holding a decision in place against the possibility that someone might try to remove it. There was a smear of grey System-default texture on her left boot where she'd apparently walked through a correction event without noticing, or without caring.
Her posture said she had already had this argument with herself and won.