The elevator sank through the arcology's black glass throat, twelve bodies pressed into the flicker of emergency strips. Rain traced the outer shaft like static. Floor 47. Floor 46. The numbers bled downward in corrupted code.
Between 31 and 30 the car locked.
No impact. Only the click of mag-locks and the city's low thrum gone. Screens on every wall went dark. A woman in a chrome collar found her neural link dead. The courier with the sealed briefcase shifted, joints whispering.
Nobody spoke.
The lights dimmed one strip at a time, ceiling to floor, as if something were being poured from the car. Somewhere below, or inside the walls, a sound started that might have been machinery settling. It did not stop when the car did not move.
No one checked their neural link again. The car began to fall, but wrong: speed gathering as motion inside stretched and slowed, breath suspended between one heartbeat and the next, rain outside frozen mid-streak against the glass. Then it stopped. All at once, with no sound at all.
The doors opened onto nothing. Not darkness. Absence, lit by the waning lights of silence, dimming toward a floor that did not exist.
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