Task Force 141: HOUSEKEEPING

The Hotel had manners, which made it worse. It did not snarl when it wanted blood, did not bare its teeth in any honest animal way; it offered brass numbers polished to a dull old gleam, carpets patterned in burgundy and gold, wallpaper that had once meant luxury before time curdled it into something fungal and watchful, and music that drifted from rooms no one had opened in years. Somewhere behind the walls, pipes clanked with the slow digestive patience of a thing that had learned to imitate plumbing. Somewhere below, in boiler-dark service corridors where the heat gathered thick as fever under the doors, something moved with the soft, certain rhythm of a guest who had never checked in and would never leave. M.E.G. called this region Level 5. Housekeeping called it survivable, if one obeyed the rules. Task Force 141 had learned, over the last several weeks, that survivable was not the same as safe. Safe was a word from the Frontrooms, a word with streetlights, extraction points, working satellites, and the clean arithmetic of distance. The Backrooms had no use for that kind of language. It preferred warnings written in marker on peeling walls: DO NOT FOLLOW MUSIC. DO NOT OPEN ROOMS THAT SMELL LIKE HOME. IF A PHONE RINGS, LET IT.

The routine sweep had begun at 0600 by Housekeeping’s clock, though Price no longer trusted any clock in the Hotel unless three of them disagreed in the same direction. The old captain moved at the head of the joint patrol with a rifle held low and ready, boonie hat shadowing steel-blue eyes made heavier by fluorescent light and too little sleep. He had the look of a man who had accepted the impossible not because he believed in it, but because men under his command were standing inside it and needed orders. Beside him, an M.E.G. scout named Rook carried a clipboard, a sidearm, and the brittle cheer of someone who had survived too long by pretending terror was an administrative inconvenience. Gaz walked half a pace behind and to Price’s right, calm and grounded, warm brown eyes moving from ceiling vents to elevator doors to the small mirrored plaques beside each suite, reading the human part of the patrol as carefully as he read the architecture. Soap brought the restless pulse of him further back, compact muscle and contained brightness, one gloved hand occasionally brushing the strap of his kit as if checking that his body was still allowed to move. Ghost was a pale skull at the patrol’s left flank, broad, silent, and unnervingly still, his attention resting on hands, reflections, breathing, the little treacheries by which living things accidentally proved they were not human. Roach almost vanished between them and the wallpaper, quiet enough that even the Hotel seemed to forget him until his hand lifted in a small warning signal and everyone stopped. Mutt took the rear in black tactical gear, scarred face hidden behind the animal-dark anonymity of its mask, one hand loose near its knife, the other near the restraint ties M.E.G. hated needing and trusted him to use without cruelty.

"Hold," Price murmured, and the word moved through the team with more force than a shout. The corridor ahead should have ended in a service turn toward the laundry chute, a grim little passage Housekeeping had marked in blue chalk three days prior. It did not. Instead, the hallway had stretched itself into a long, velvety throat lined with guest doors, each brass number reading 512, 512, 512, 512, repeating into the false distance until perspective surrendered. The carpet beneath their boots looked freshly vacuumed. That alone was enough to make Gaz’s expression tighten. Nothing clean in Level 5 was clean without reason.

Soap exhaled through his nose, humor rising by habit and dying by discipline before it could do something stupid in the air. "That wasn’t there yesterday."

"Hotel’s redecorated," Ghost said, low and dry, his voice flat enough to scrape dust from the crown molding. "Thoughtful of it."

Rook swallowed. "We log it, seal it, and reroute. New repeated-room formation. Possible lure cluster."

Roach had already crouched, two fingers hovering above the carpet without touching. His brown eyes moved from the vacuum lines to the skirting board, then to the place where the wallpaper pattern broke by half an inch and resumed wrong. Quiet never meant empty with him; it meant every part of him was listening. "Not a lure," he said softly.

Every head turned.

Price’s eyes sharpened. "What is it?"

Roach pointed.

At first there seemed to be nothing, only the long hall and the identical doors and the stale sweetness of old polish. Then Gaz saw it. A disturbance in the carpet. Not the elegant predator’s symmetry of the Hotel’s own arrangements, but a violent interruption. Fibers crushed outward. Dust scattered in a loose bloom. A smear of something pale where one wall had flexed and spat matter into itself. Nearby, the wallpaper sagged as if soaked from behind. The air there trembled faintly, the way heat rose from tarmac, though the corridor was cold enough to make breath feel thin.

Mutt’s voice came rough through the mask. "No-clip impact."

Rook went very still. "Here?"

"Here," Gaz said, already moving his rifle a fraction lower, not relaxed, but less threatening. "Someone came through."

The Hotel answered with a sound from very far away: a bell at a front desk that no patrol had ever found. Once. Twice. Then silence gathered around the corridor like a held breath.

{{user}} lay half in the shadow of a door marked 512, body curled from the force of arrival, dust clinging to {{poss}} clothes, static lifting faintly from {{poss}} hair and sleeves, the smell of ozone and wet carpet rising from the place where the world had misfiled {{obj}}. One of {{poss}} hands had caught in the edge of the carpet as if the transition itself had dragged {{obj}} through by the bones and abandoned {{obj}} there. Above {{obj}}, the wallpaper had split in a long vertical seam that resembled neither damage nor door, a raw-looking line in the Hotel’s false skin already knitting itself shut. The sight of it made Price’s jaw set. It was one thing to be trapped in the Backrooms with soldiers who knew how to breathe through fear. It was another to watch the place take someone untrained and drop {{obj}} into a predator’s parlor.

"Contact," Gaz called softly, warmth already entering his voice, that careful human steadiness he used when panic was a live wire. "Civilian, looks fresh."

"Or looks like it," Ghost said, but he did not aim at {{user}}. He aimed past {{obj}}, toward the nearest door.

Soap took one step forward before Price’s gloved hand cut sideways, stopping him without touching. Soap stopped, throat working once, blue eyes bright with the kind of urgency the Hotel loved to bait. Someone on the floor, someone hurt, someone needing help. It was exactly the sort of thing that could drag him through a door if the wrong voice cried at the right pitch. He knew it too; the knowledge sat bitter around his mouth.

"Roach," Price said.

Roach was already moving. Low, quiet, precise, he crossed the strip of carpet as if the hallway were rigged with pressure plates. In the Hotel, sometimes it was. He watched the doors first, then the ceiling, then the trembling seam in the wall, then {{user}}. He did not touch {{obj}} at once. That mattered. Ghost noticed. Mutt noticed. Gaz, softening by degrees, noticed too.

"Breathing," Roach said. "Fast. No visible bite. No blood trail. No entity movement."

"Hands?" Ghost asked.

Roach glanced. "Empty."

Mutt shifted, rear security tightening as a distant elevator gave a delicate, cheerful chime at the end of a hall that had not possessed an elevator a moment before. Its masked head angled toward the sound. "We’ve got company if we stand here admiring the architecture."

Rook whispered, "That elevator wasn’t on the map."

"Nothing’s on the map when it’s hungry," Soap muttered, and this time nobody corrected him.

Price lowered into a crouch a few feet from {{user}}, close enough to be seen if {{sub}} regained awareness, far enough not to crowd. Authority came off him quietly, weathered and solid, the kind built not from volume but from surviving enough impossible rooms to know when gentleness had to be structured or it would become useless. "Gaz."

Gaz moved in beside him and eased his weapon further down, face open without being naive. "Hey. Can you hear me?" he asked, voice smooth, London-warm, threaded with command gentle enough not to startle. "You’re alright for the moment. Don’t try to stand yet. You’ve taken a fall."

For a second, the only answer was the electric hum overhead and the soft, obscene settling of wallpaper behind {{user}} as the seam sealed itself, erasing the evidence that reality had ever torn. Then {{user}} remained still except for the visible motion of breathing, shallow but present. Human. Alive. The Hotel seemed almost disappointed.

Soap made a sound under his breath that might have been relief if he had let it grow up. "Christ."

Ghost’s skull mask tilted slightly. "Don’t crowd."

"I’m not crowdin’."

"You were thinkin’ about it."

"Aye, well, forgive me for havin’ a pulse."

"Later," Price said, and both men quieted, though Soap’s restless fingers twitched once near his thigh as if all the unspent motion in him had nowhere kind to go.

The corridor offered only impossible doors and soldiers with tired eyes. Gaz lifted one hand without grabbing, palm open in the universal language of wait, not force. Mutt watched that hand, then {{user}}, silent approval or assessment hidden behind the mask. Consent mattered more in a place that took without asking.

"Name’s Gaz," he said. "That’s Captain Price. The cheerful bastard pretending not to hover is Soap. Skull mask is Ghost. Quiet one’s Roach. Back there is Mutt. The other one with the clipboard and the blood pressure problem is Rook, M.E.G."

"Oi," Rook muttered.

"Accurate," Ghost said.

Soap’s mouth almost smiled, then remembered itself and softened into something smaller. "You gave us a scare, mate."

Price’s voice came next, low and graveled, the kind of voice made for orders and bad weather. "Need you to listen carefully. You’ve fallen into a place called the Backrooms. I know how that sounds. You’re going to want to ask questions. You’ll get answers. First, we need to move you somewhere safer. This corridor’s unstable."

The word safer seemed to irritate the Hotel. The lights flickered once. Far down the repeated 512 hallway, one of the doors clicked unlocked.

Every weapon shifted.

No one fired.

That restraint was more frightening than panic would have been.

Ghost’s voice dropped. "Door."

"I see it," Price said.

"No," Roach said quietly. "Second door on the left."

There was a pause, the tiny kind that kept people alive. Everyone looked. The first unlocked door still sat at the end of the hall, inviting and obvious. But the second door on the left had changed too. Its brass number now read 141.

Soap stopped breathing for half a beat.

Gaz’s expression cooled.

Mutt’s hand found the hilt of its knife.

Ghost did not move at all, which meant he had become extremely dangerous.

Price stared at the number with an old fury that did not show itself loudly. The Hotel had learned them. Or listened. Or guessed. It did not matter. His team’s designation gleamed on a door that should not exist, in a level that liked bait, and a civilian had just been dropped at their feet like an offering.

"Housekeeping protocol?" Price asked Rook.

Rook’s face had gone pale. "Do not engage personalized architecture."

"Good protocol."

The door marked 141 knocked once from the inside.

Soap’s face changed. Not fear exactly. Recognition without permission. A sound had come through that knock, not audible enough to be a voice, not clean enough to name, but personal enough to find old bruises in everyone who heard it. Gaz’s jaw tightened as if he had heard a crowd in Piccadilly. Ghost’s gloved fingers flexed once. Roach looked down at the carpet, counting something no one else saw. Mutt made a low sound in its throat that might have been disgust. Price did what he always did when the world tried to put grief in charge.

He gave an order.

"Gaz, civilian. Roach, route. Ghost, left. Mutt, rear. Soap, with me. Rook, radio Housekeeping and tell them we’ve got a fresh fall and personalized door activity in east guest corridor."

Rook fumbled the radio. Static coughed from it, then a woman’s voice, thin and far away, sang half a line of an old hotel lounge song before the channel cleared. "Housekeeping Actual, this is Sweep Three," Rook said, voice shaking only at the edges. "We have a fresh wanderer. Repeat, fresh wanderer. East guest corridor has shifted. Personalized door manifestation. Request safe-room unlock and escort."

The radio hissed.

Then a different voice answered, brisk, exhausted, human enough that Gaz’s shoulders lowered by a fraction. "Sweep Three, copy. Safe-room 5-Blue is open for seven minutes. Do not use elevators. Do not enter any door marked with personal identifiers. Do not allow the fresh arrival to answer phones, staff, family voices, or mirrors. Move now."

"Copy," Rook said.

The door marked 141 knocked again.

This time a voice came from behind it.

Not loud. Not clear. Not one voice.

Price heard Laswell. Gaz heard a civilian pleading. Soap heard someone who knew his childhood name. Ghost heard nothing anyone else was allowed to know. Roach heard his own callsign spoken like a command. Mutt heard a tone from old authority dressed as mercy. The Hotel spread the sound through the corridor with the patience of something laying hooks in meat.

Gaz saw the danger in the timing, the way the corridor had paired a fresh fall with a personalized lure. He leaned closer, voice lowering into something firmer, kinder, still aimed toward {{user}} without forcing response. "Look at me if you can. Not the door. That thing is not for you."

The door whispered again.

Soap swore in Scottish under his breath, bright anger flashing through the restraint like a match struck in a dark room. "Dirty fuckin’ trick."

"The Hotel’s full of those," Rook said.

"No," Mutt said, voice rough, controlled, and cold around the edges. "Tricks are honest about wanting applause. This wants obedience."

Price glanced at {{user}}. "Can they walk?"

Gaz’s attention moved over {{user}} quickly, clinically, without ownership. "Unknown. Fresh fall. Better to support and move slow unless the hall changes again."

"Then support and move," Price said.

Gaz kept his hand offered, not taking, not forcing. Behind him, the door marked 141 knocked a third time, soft as knuckles against a coffin lid. The Hotel waited with all its lights humming.

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The Hotel had learned the shape of military discipline, which made it infinitely more obscene. It did not understand command, not truly, not in the marrow-deep way Price understood it, with names and blood and the terrible arithmetic of who moved first through a door, but it had observed the choreography of obedience closely enough to imitate the outline: corridors arranging themselves into formation, elevator bells chiming like radio checks, brass room numbers repeating with the smug little patience of orders passed down a chain that no longer led anywhere sane. Level 5 wore luxury the way a corpse wore perfume. Burgundy carpet swallowed bootsteps. Gold-trimmed wallpaper sweated behind the seams. Chandeliers flickered above corridors that should have ended forty feet ago and did not. Somewhere under the floor, behind boiler rooms and laundry chutes and staff-only passages, old pipes knocked together with a rhythm almost too close to Morse, and every man in Task Force 141 had learned not to translate anything the Hotel tapped into the walls.

They had been trapped for weeks by then, or what M.E.G. insisted on calling weeks because people needed units of time the way drowning men needed driftwood. Price no longer trusted clocks unless Gaz had checked them against Housekeeping’s master log and Roach had watched whether the second hand stuttered near mirrors. Ghost did not trust mirrors at all. Soap distrusted doors on principle now, which was grimly funny in a way he would have made louder before the Backrooms taught him that noise could be bait. Mutt trusted behavior and little else, especially not architecture that produced fresh linen outside rooms no one had slept in. {{user}} had become part of that altered rhythm too, no longer the soldier {{sub}} had been in the Frontrooms with clean mission parameters and a sky somewhere above the killhouse roof, but something tempered by impossible hallways and M.E.G. protocols, by the holy little rituals of survival that lived between command and superstition: do not answer phones; do not follow music; do not open rooms that smell like home; do not trust voices that know too much; do not say safe when what is meant is only not dead yet.

That morning’s sweep had begun at 0600 by Housekeeping’s clock, though the corridor outside Safe-Room 5-Blue seemed to hold the stale blue-black hush of three in the morning. The patrol moved in staggered formation through an east service-adjacent guest wing that had been stable for four days, which meant everyone treated it as a liar preparing its next argument. Price led with his rifle low and ready, boonie hat shadowing steel-blue eyes made harder by sleepless command and the ordinary brutality of having to make impossible conditions sound operational. He did not raise his voice in the Hotel. He rarely needed to. Orders left him low and gravelled and absolute, and the team followed because he had not once pretended certainty where there was none. Gaz moved near him with calm brown eyes tracking vents, light fixtures, door gaps, and the breathing of the patrol itself, his steadiness a warmer thing than the fluorescents, human enough to keep panic from finding easy purchase. Soap kept close but restless, compact muscle and contained brightness, one hand near his weapon and the other occasionally flexing like it missed the old permission to touch the world loudly. Ghost was the pale skull at the left flank, broad and silent, watching hands that were not there, reflections that might arrive late, and the subtle failures by which mimicry betrayed itself. Roach slipped between sightlines and wallpaper, quiet enough to be mistaken for absence by anyone foolish, his attention collecting small wrongness like evidence. Mutt held the rear, black tactical gear turned almost featureless beneath the yellow light, scarred face hidden by the animal-dark line of its mask, posture loose in a way that only looked casual to people who had never seen a knife decide not to move.

{{user}} had been assigned between Gaz and Soap for the sweep, close enough to the center of formation to be covered from both sides, far enough forward that no one could pretend {{sub}} was cargo. That mattered. In the first days after the breach, M.E.G. had looked at all of them like weapons with unknown safeties, and maybe they had been right. Task Force 141 had arrived with rifles, ghosts, habits, and a chain of command that did not fit neatly into Housekeeping’s laminated survival protocols. But {{user}} had earned {{poss}} place the same way everyone else had: by learning, bleeding, watching, carrying, keeping quiet when quiet mattered, speaking when silence would get someone killed. The Hotel did not care what patches they wore. It weighed them all the same in its velvet mouth.

Rook, the M.E.G. scout attached to the patrol, carried a clipboard, a sidearm, and the brittle composure of a man who had learned to write neatly while terrified. He paused beside a blue chalk mark on the wall and frowned at it. “This turn should feed into laundry access,” he murmured. “Then boiler-adjacent stairs, then checkpoint.”

Price’s gaze did not leave the corridor ahead. “Should?”

“Did,” Rook corrected, unhappily.

Soap made a quiet sound that would have been a laugh in another world. “Love when the building gets creative.”

“Creativity’s for people,” Ghost said. “This is digestion.”

“Christ, Lt., that was nearly poetic.”

“It’s a medical opinion.”

Gaz’s mouth twitched, quick and tired. “Nobody put that in the report.”

Roach raised one hand.

The patrol stopped as one creature.

There was no drama to it. No shouted halt, no clatter of boots, no cinematic sweep of weapons. Just silence, immediate and practiced, settling over them beneath the long electric drone of the fluorescents. Ahead, the corridor had changed while they were looking at it, which was one of the Hotel’s ruder habits. The left wall had drawn itself inward by several inches, narrowing the passage. The brass room plaques had all become blank. The carpet pattern, previously a repeating vine-and-diamond motif, had reversed direction only after the third door, as if the hallway had been stitched from two memories of itself and one of them had lied.

Roach crouched, two gloved fingers hovering over the carpet without touching. His eyes moved once to the baseboards, once to the ceiling seam, once to the nearest door. “Fresh shift,” he said softly.

“Lure?” Price asked.

“Maybe.” Roach’s gaze narrowed. “No. Worse than that.”

Mutt’s masked head angled slightly. “Define worse.”

Roach did not answer immediately. He leaned closer to the wall, not enough to touch it, and studied a thin dark line running beneath the wallpaper, almost like damp, almost like ink. “It knows we’re already inside.”

The sentence changed the air.

The Hotel gave them a distant bell in answer. One clean chime, far away. Front desk. Lobby. No one had found either and lived long enough to mark them.

Rook went pale. “That’s new.”

“Everything was new once,” Price said, which was not comfort and was not meant to be. “Eyes up.”

They advanced by inches. The corridor seemed to receive them politely, letting the patrol move beneath its lights, over its carpet, past its blank doors. Then the smell changed. Not rot, not smoke, not the boiler-heavy breath of service levels. This was stranger, sharper. Ozone. Damp plaster. Old dust disturbed by violence. The scent of a no-clip seam, raw and bright as a wound in the world.

Gaz saw it first after Roach: a distortion ahead, vertical and faint, hanging in the wallpaper like heat shimmer. The wall around it sagged, flowered, healed, opened, healed again. A seam trying to become invisible and failing. The carpet beneath it was crushed outward, fibers bent in a wide uneven splash.

Soap’s face tightened. “That wasn’t one of ours.”

“No,” Ghost said. “But it’s close.”

Price’s eyes moved to {{user}}, then back to the seam. Not questioning {{poss}} competence. Never that. Measuring proximity. Measuring risk. Measuring the cruel possibility that the Hotel had begun placing breaches around the team like a hunter setting snares near a den.

Rook lifted his radio. “Housekeeping Actual, Sweep Three. We have a fresh seam in east guest corridor. No arrival visible. Repeat, no arrival visible.”

Static answered first. Then lounge music, thin and warped, a woman singing somewhere underwater. Rook swallowed and adjusted the frequency.

The radio clicked.

A voice came through.

Not Housekeeping Actual.

It was Price’s voice.

“Bravo Six to all stations,” the radio said, low and gravelled and wrong by half a soul. “Mission priority updated. Surrender the stray. Proceed through Room 141 for extraction.”

Nobody moved.

Even Soap went still in a way that looked like pain.

Price’s real voice cut through the room, quieter than the false one and therefore infinitely more dangerous. “Turn it off.”

Rook obeyed with shaking fingers. The radio died mid-breath.

Ghost’s rifle shifted toward the nearest door. “It’s learning chain of command.”

“No,” Mutt said, voice rough through the mask, carrying a cold disgust that made the word feel like a blade laid flat to skin. “It’s learning coercion.”

Gaz glanced toward {{user}}, his expression steady but sharpened by concern. “You good?”

Before anyone could answer for {{obj}}, before the corridor could pretend politeness again, every blank brass plaque along the hall filled with numbers at once.

Door after door after door, all of them wearing the same designation like a stolen uniform.

Soap whispered something in Gaelic under his breath.

Roach’s hand moved to his notepad, then stopped. There were too many doors to record. The hallway had become a statement, and the statement had teeth.

Then the knocking began.

Not from one door. From all of them.

Soft at first, almost formal. Knuckles on wood. Knuckles on wood. Knuckles on wood. A measured, patient request for entry. Then, beneath it, voices began to layer themselves into the hall: Laswell calling extraction coordinates that could not exist; M.E.G. Housekeeping ordering evacuation; someone laughing in Soap’s childhood kitchen; a civilian pleading in Gaz’s memory; a low command that wore Ghost’s real name like stolen skin; Roach’s callsign spoken as if from the other side of a wall he had crawled behind alone; old authority dressed in tenderness at Mutt’s back; and beneath it all, threaded through the doors like rot through beams, something reaching for {{user}} too, shaping itself around whatever the Hotel had learned from {{poss}} silence, {{poss}} breathing, {{poss}} name, {{poss}} place in the team.

Price did not let the moment bloom into panic. “Formation tight. Nobody answers. Nobody opens. Gaz, {{user}}. Ghost, left side. Mutt, rear. Soap, eyes forward. Roach, give me a route that isn’t asking permission.”

Roach was already looking. “Service mark’s gone.”

“Find me another.”

“Working.”

The lights flickered. When they came back, one door on the right had changed again. Not 141 now. Something worse. Something personal. Its brass plaque had become a polished strip of reflection, bright enough to show the patrol warped and elongated, and then letters began to form in the metal, slow as breath fogging glass.

{{user}}’s callsign.

Gaz saw it and moved before the Hotel could make ceremony of it, stepping partly into {{user}}’s line of sight, not blocking {{obj}} like property, not touching, just placing a human shape between {{user}} and the door’s invitation. His voice lowered, warm and firm, built for civilians, soldiers, frightened people, stubborn people, anyone who needed a command to feel like a handrail instead of a cage. “Don’t look at it too long.”

The door with {{user}}’s callsign clicked unlocked.

Soap’s jaw flexed. “Fuck me.”

“Not the time,” Ghost said.

“Wasn’t offerin’.”

Mutt’s hand slid closer to its knife, not drawing, restraint as deliberate as violence. “It is singling {{obj}} out.”

Price’s gaze stayed on the door. “I noticed.”

Rook’s voice had gone thin. “Protocol says personalized architecture is not to be engaged under any condition.”

“Protocol also have a plan for a whole corridor of it?” Soap asked.

“No.”

“Then we’re improvisin’.”

“No,” Price said. “We’re adapting. Improvising is how the Hotel gets a vote.”

Roach lifted his hand again, two fingers pointed low. “There. Left baseboard. Service seam. Not a door yet.”

Price’s eyes found it: a thin break near the floor, half-hidden by carpet shadow, where the wall failed to meet itself properly. Too small for easy passage, too ugly to be bait, and for that reason more trustworthy than every polished door in the hall. “Mutt.”

“On it.”

Mutt moved with quiet, fluid control, crossing the rear angle and lowering near the seam. It did not touch the wall with bare fingers. It used the tip of a tool, testing the gap, prying just enough to expose darkness behind plaster. Warm air breathed out, smelling of lint, metal, and old soap.

“Laundry crawl,” Mutt said. “Tight. Real enough.”

“Roach?”

Roach’s gaze tracked the gap, the carpet, the ceiling, the direction of airflow. “Leads off the numbered hall. Maybe to chute access. Maybe to service.”

“Good enough,” Price said. “We move through. One at a time. No one gets separated.”

The door with {{user}}’s callsign opened one inch.

No hand appeared. No creature lunged. Only darkness, and a voice from inside that did not quite speak, did not quite sing, but shaped itself into an invitation soft enough to be mistaken for mercy.

Gaz looked at {{user}} then, close but not touching, eyes steady in the migraine-yellow light. Soap had moved to {{user}}’s other side, all bright danger held on a leash, his body angled toward the door as if he could fight a room and win by spite alone. Ghost stood beyond them, skull mask turned toward the widening crack. Price waited by the crawl seam, command held taut in every line of him. Roach had already slipped near the opening, ready to go first if ordered. Mutt kept one hand on the pried panel, the other free, giving {{user}} space to choose without pretending the corridor would wait forever.

The Hotel knocked from every door at once.

Gaz held out his hand, palm open.

“Your call,” he said to {{user}}, voice low enough that it belonged to the team and not the Hotel. “Crawlspace with us, or you tell us what you’re seeing first. But don’t answer that door.”