The lab never slept. It breathed.

Fluorescent panels along Apocryphon’s upper ring pulsed like a tired heart. Deeper, the light thinned, replaced by the low, metallic hum of containment coils and the whisper of sand against unseen surfaces — the way the void coughed when it thought no one listened. Dr. Arcan Veylor stood at the central console, fingers moving through holo-sheets that rearranged themselves faster than thought. One hand never stopped winding the little brass dial of his Resonance Nullifier; it clicked and clicked like a nervous insect.

“Readings steady,” Lysa Torren said without looking up. Her voice was a bright knock in the dim. She was squatting inside an exposed maintenance hatch, half a body and a tangle of cables disappearing into the lab’s lower guts. Her cybernetic arm cast a soft glint. “Fractal drift is within tolerance. Temperature at the sink nodes is —” she checked a floating gauge, frowned — “— climbing.”

The lab answered them with a sound that was not a sound: a low, distant knocking in the bones of the structure. Rap. Tap. Tap.

Professor Whisp had chosen the best spot on the console to make himself comfortable — all legs and disdain — and was grooming a paw with surgical indifference. He looked up when the first tapping threaded through the air. “They’ve started announcing their arrivals,” he said. His voice was dry, an academic monotone that did not suit whiskers and naked skin. “Politeness is a new tactic.”

Veylor’s right eye — the black, polished orb — caught the tapping like a droplet catching light. It had the unnerving habit of recording shapes that weren’t there: angles folding on themselves, a corridor that led to a place his cortex refused to name. When the tapping deepened, the orb dimmed to a flat, reflective black.

Lysa’s fingers worked faster. “Seal Sector Seven,” she ordered. “Bring the lattice online. I’ll reroute power through the secondary dampers.”

She crawled farther into the hatch. When she moved, the lab’s shadows followed with a slow, liquid obedience; the sands of the void licked at the edges of the hatch like a curious child. For a moment Lysa froze when something — the barest whisper of movement under the floor panels — ran along the seams. Her jaw tightened. She always heard it first. She had told him that once, half-asleep and hollow-eyed, and he had made a small joke out of it. He no longer joked.

“Reroute if necessary,” Veylor said. He did not raise his voice. There was a steadiness in his tone like someone folding a map when the landscape is collapsing. “And keep the acoustic dampeners on manual override. We don’t want the Outsider learning our rhythm.”

“Good luck teaching it anything,” Lysa muttered, and the console hiccupped — an audible stutter as sensors tried to follow a pattern no sensor had a model for. Data cascaded, then evaporated like fog into machinery. The lab’s layout shook in the periphery of their vision; corridors seemed to elongate, then snap back, as if the building itself were coughing up a memory it had no right to keep.

The tapping advanced: Rap—tap—tap. It was never merely a noise. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, each strike folding the space it touched into a different volume. A lamp near the far wall dinged in sympathy; its filament sang once and gave up.

Professor Whisp twitched. For the first time since Veylor had met him, the cat did not speak. His shadow stretched along the console until it mapped a shape that did not belong to feline anatomy — long, jointed fingers that ended in something like keys. The shadow passed over Lysa’s cybernetic arm and the metal there trembled.

“Containment pressure reads unstable.” Lysa’s voice had a high edge now. She worked with elbows and teeth and that unhelpful grin that always surfaced when fear had nowhere polite to live. “If the lattice collapses, we lose Sector Seven and the—”

A throw of black sand spilled up through a seam in the floor, like ink finding a crack in paper.