Chapter 22

# Chapter 22

The Pyramid looked closer from Pier 39 than it was.

Classic map lie.

Three miles in a dead city might as well be three hundred when every block had evolved something that hated movement, sound, and hope. San Francisco had always been a city of hills and lies—tourist maps that flattened geography, rental listings that called a closet a studio, dating apps that promised chemistry and delivered awkward coffee. The System had just upgraded the genre from emotional damage to physical deletion.

We'd left the pier at dawn with six people and one compass rig held together by Elizabeth's stubbornness and duct tape philosophy. The morning fog had been thick enough to drink, cold against my cheeks as I'd watched the Pyramid's silhouette dissolve and reappear like a loading error. Vance had waved us off from the north wall like a king sending knights to die politely.

"Don't die," he'd said.

"Working on it," I'd replied.

Marcus had shouldered the heaviest pack without being asked. Ghost had checked his katana edge seventeen times—ritual, not superstition. Maya had looked at the Pyramid on the horizon like it owed her money. Professor Chen had muttered about sync curves before we'd even crossed the Embarcadero.

Elizabeth had handed out the last of the good bandages.

"Save those for inside," she'd said.

We'd burned the morning on the waterfront anyway—because the System didn't respect schedules and neither did evolved packs.

Between Pier 39 and Montgomery, we cleared two Grief Hound clusters, one Scrap Wing nest, and a vending machine that had evolved into `[ENTITY: SNACK GOLEM — LVL 8]` and tried to sell us `[ITEM: POISON BAR — 50% OFF]`.

Ghost stabbed it.

The machine had coughed once—a sound like dying electronics mixed with indigestion—before collapsing into a pile of bent metal and shattered glass. Maya looted the change tray, copper and silver scattering across the asphalt like forgotten hopes.

"Apocalypse capitalism," I said.

"Document it," Elizabeth replied.

I did.

The air smelled like salt and rust and something chemical I couldn't name. Abandoned cars lined the streets like tombstones, their windows shattered, their interiors stripped by looters or monsters or time itself. A newspaper stand still displayed headlines from the day before Day Zero: *City Council Approves Budget*, *Giants Win in Extra Innings*, *Weather Forecast: Sunny with a Chance of Fog*. The paper had yellowed, curled at the edges, as if even print media had given up on relevance.

---

I checked my party on comm.

All green.

All lying.

`[PARTY STATUS]` `[MAYA — HP 98% | BUFF: BATTLE FOCUS]` `[GHOST — HP 91% | DEBUFF: ARM INJURY -12% AGI]` `[MARCUS — HP 100% | AMMO: 47%]` `[PROFESSOR CHEN — HP 100% | MANA: 0 — NON-CASTER]` `[ELIZABETH — HP 100% | SUPPLIES: ADEQUATE]` `[KEVIN — HP 100% | MANA 78% | COOLDOWN: NULL SUMMON 42s]`

Forty-two seconds until I could make reality segfault again.

The city didn't care about cooldowns.

Neither did the thing that had replaced the fog horn with something that sounded like a server farm having an existential crisis.

The sound echoed off the buildings, bouncing between glass and concrete until it became something else—a chorus of digital agony layered over physical distance. I felt it in my teeth, in the base of my skull, in the part of my brain that still remembered what silence felt like.

---

Ghost took point on Montgomery Street.

The city felt like a loading screen that had given up. Cable cars sat on tracks like dead insects, their bells silent, their paint faded to the color of old bruises. A billboard still rotated: *BUY THE DIP*. The dip had been humanity. The sign's motor whirred every few seconds, a mechanical heartbeat in a corpse of a city.

Professor Chen stopped once to photograph a crack in the sky—visible even at street level, a seam in the blue like a render error. The crack pulsed faintly, light bleeding through from somewhere else, somewhere that wasn't California or Earth or anywhere I wanted to visit.

"Sync will widen that," she said.

"Cheery," Maya said.

"Accurate," Professor Chen said.

She adjusted her glasses, the gesture so automatic it might've been part of her character model. Her tablet beeped once, recording data that only she understood. I wondered how many terabytes of apocalypse she'd stored on that device. How many notes on how we died and why.

Ghost raised a fist at an intersection.

We froze.

The silence that followed was louder than any sound we'd made. I could hear my own heartbeat, the rasp of my breathing, the distant hum of whatever the Pyramid was doing to the sky.

"Movement," he whispered. "Roofline. Three. No tags yet."

Marcus sighted up.

I pinged overlay.

Nothing.

Then tags populated—delayed, like the System was throttling our intel on purpose.

`[ENTITY: ROOF WATCHER — LVL 14]` `[BEHAVIOR: REPORT ONLY]`

"Scouts," Marcus said. "They're counting us."

"Let them count," I said. "Wiki needs a headcount column."

The watchers didn't move. They stood on the rooftops like gargoyles, their silhouettes wrong in ways that made my eyes want to look away. Too tall. Too thin. Limbs that bent at angles that weren't human but weren't quite mechanical either. They watched us with heads that didn't track—too still, too patient, like security cameras grown flesh and malice.

We didn't engage the watchers.

Engagement was data.

Data was routing.

Routing was the gauntlet Professor Chen had predicted two blocks later.

Ghost took point because his [Stealth Recon] passive flagged ambush nodes before they triggered—not because he was fastest, though he was. Jin Wu had been a ghost before the System gave him a class name. Now he was a ghost with documentation, which was somehow worse and better at the same time.

Useful.

Like having a minimap drawn by someone who actually wanted you alive.

"Two clusters ahead," he said. Voice flat. Professional. The voice of a man who'd learned that whispering in apocalypse zones kept you breathing. "Left alley: Grief Hounds, six. Right storefront: something new. Tag says *Evolved*."

Evolved.

The System's patch notes had started using that word like a compliment. Like evolution was a feature rollout and we were the beta testers who hadn't read the EULA.

Marcus held up a fist.

We stopped.

Six people. One city block. Zero margin for error. Marcus Reed moved like every military movie I'd ever watched had been understating the discipline—shoulders square, rifle up, eyes scanning angles the rest of us forgot existed. He didn't look scared. Marcus never looked scared. That was either leadership or a bug in his emotional rendering pipeline.

I pulled up my debugger overlay and pinged the storefront.

`[ENTITY: MOURNING WEAVE — LVL 17]` `[TRAIT: EMOTIONAL RESONANCE]` `[TRAIT: PACK SYNERGY +40%]` `[WEAKNESS: UNKNOWN]`

Unknown weakness.

My favorite genre.

"Professor," I whispered. "Emotional resonance. That mean what I think?"

Professor Chen adjusted her glasses—the gesture so habitual it might've been hardcoded. "It means it reads affective states and scales damage accordingly. Fear amplifies its attacks. Anger may too. Calm might suppress it."

"So we fight it while feeling nothing."

"Try telling Maya that."

Maya flipped her axe to rest mode and looked at me like I'd suggested she stop breathing. Fire Axe Maya Chen had been the first person on Alcatraz to look at my debugger class and not ask if I could fix printers. She'd asked if I could fix the sky. Different bar. Higher stakes.

"I'm calm," she said.

"You're homicidal calm."

"Same thing."

Elizabeth muttered from the rear, med kit straps creaking, "Medical distinction matters when we're triaging." Elizabeth Park—no relation, despite the shared surname that confused every NPC with a clipboard—had been a nurse before Day Zero and was still a nurse after, which meant she treated party HP like a spreadsheet and emotional damage like a wound you couldn't bandage but had to acknowledge anyway.

We split.

Marcus and Ghost took the Hounds—efficient, brutal, the sound of gunfire and katana work like percussion for the apocalypse. Three shots. One slice. Something canine and wrong stopped being wrong. The Grief Hounds didn't scream when they died. They whimpered, a sound that crawled under my skin and made me want to cover my ears.

Maya, Professor Chen, Elizabeth, and I took the Weave.

It came out of the storefront like a funeral shroud with legs—threads of black light, a core that pulsed when I looked at it and made my chest tight. The storefront had been a boutique once. Mannequins still stood in the window, dressed in clothes that would never go out of style because nobody was left to care about fashion week. The mannequins watched us with empty eyes, their plastic smiles frozen in eternal approval of an apocalypse they couldn't feel.

`[DEBUFF: ANXIETY SPIKE — MINOR]`

The System was already probing me.

Like a penetration test that wanted you dead.

"Null summon," I said. "On me. Now."

The wraith tore into existence—twelve seconds of borrowed unreality, a hole in the targeting matrix shaped like a scream. My null summons looked wrong on purpose. That was the point. The System expected entities. I gave it errors.

The Weave's threads lashed toward me—and stuttered, confused, like a query hitting a null pointer.

Maya charged.

Her axe left trails of fire—[Surgical Strike] active, precision over power. She didn't swing wild. She never swung wild. Every arc was a line item. Every kill was a receipt.

She cut threads.

Not the core.

Threads.

"Kevin!" she shouted. "It regrows!"

"Of course it does." I scanned behavior loops, overlay flickering. "It's a regeneration pattern tied to player fear. Every time we hesitate, it heals."

"So stop hesitating," Ghost's voice crackled. "Hounds down. Incoming—second pack from the north."

Marcus fired over our heads.

Something chrome screamed and died.

I forced my voice steady.

Forced my heartbeat down.

Forced the exploit I'd been sketching since dawn into a cast sequence:

`[CAST: PATTERN INTERRUPT — TARGET: MOURNING WEAVE]` `[FREEZE: 0.8s]`

Maya used 0.5 seconds to drive her axe into the core.

The Weave shrieked—not sound, data. Raw packets of grief rendered as audio. My overlay flooded with error codes. The scream echoed off the buildings, bounced between glass and concrete, multiplied until it sounded like a chorus of the damned.

`[+1,120 XP — SHARED]` `[LOOT: THREAD OF LAMENT — CRAFTING MATERIAL]`

Elizabeth pocketed the loot without asking what it did.

Survival habit.

Professor Chen noted the emotional resonance data on her tablet. "Interesting. It scaled with your anxiety, Kevin. Not Maya's anger."

"Congratulations," I said. "I'm the party's emotional support nightmare."

The aftermath left a smell like ozone and burnt fabric. The Weave's remains dissolved into pixels that scattered in a wind that didn't exist. I watched them go, wondering where the System stored its dead, wondering if anything truly died or just got flagged for deletion.

---

By block three, the city had stopped pretending it was random.

Encounters chained.

Spawn timers overlapped.

Something upstream was *routing* monsters toward us like traffic shaping. Like we were a DDoS target and the Pyramid was the origin server.

"Profiler active," I said, laptop balanced on a burned mail truck. The truck had been USPS. Now it was a desk. Apocalypse ergonomics. "We're on a hot path. The System's running us through a gauntlet to sample our kit."

Professor Chen nodded. "A/B test."

"A/B test with teeth."

Marcus scanned rooftops. "Then we change routes."

Ghost shook his head. "Alternate streets converge here. Geography is funneling us. Only wide path left is Embarcadero loop—adds two miles."

"Two miles is deletion schedule," Elizabeth said. She checked her watch—the analog one, because digital watches had started displaying `[TIME REMAINING: UNKNOWN]` and that was not helpful for triage schedules.

"So is staying." I closed the laptop. "We push direct. Kevin tax: every fight, I log weaknesses to wiki live. If we die, the next squad gets a guide."

"Optimistic," Maya said.

"Documentation is optimism with version control."

Marcus exhaled. "Direct route. Ghost, point. Kevin, log. Maya, don't die. Elizabeth, keep us in one piece. Professor, keep telling us things we don't want to hear."

"That is literally my job description," Professor Chen said.

We moved through the streets like ghosts ourselves, hugging walls, checking corners, breathing through our mouths to avoid the smell of decay that clung to everything. The city had become a museum of its own death—coffee shops with cups still on tables, restaurants with menus still in windows, apartments with lights that flickered on timers nobody had programmed.

---

Hour two of the crossing: the System sent a welcome committee dressed as refugees.

Five people.

Waving.

Crying.

One of them wore a Giants cap. Authentic human detail. Too authentic.

`[WARNING: SIGNATURE MISMATCH]`

Ghost saw it first.

"Don't stop."

Marcus raised his rifle.

One refugee smiled too wide—cheek muscles doing something cheeks weren't supposed to do, like UI elements pretending to be skin.

`[ENTITY: LURE PACK — DISGUISED]`

Combat lasted forty seconds.

Maya didn't hesitate. Neither did Marcus. Ghost moved like the katana was an extension of the arm that still worked at ninety percent. I null-summoned once, ate a targeting packet, watched Maya finish what the disguise had started.

The Lures didn't fight back when wounded. They just kept smiling, kept waving, kept crying even as their bodies dissolved. The dissonance was worse than any monster scream.

No loot worth naming.

Plenty worth remembering.

The System preyed on mercy.

I added the tell to the wiki: *Check stack trace before helping.*

Elizabeth checked the bodies after. Real clothes. Real faces underneath the wrongness. "They were people once," she said.

"Everything was people once," Marcus replied.

We moved.

The Giants cap lay in the street, still warm, still blue, still waiting for a game that would never be played.

---

The first *Evolved* elite showed up at Mission and Fremont.

Not a boss.

Worse.

A mid-tier designed to punish parties that had survived the early gauntlet. The System's way of saying: *Congratulations on your progress. Here is a personalized counter.*

`[EVOLVED: CHROME STALKER — LVL 20]` `[ABILITY: HEAT SIGNATURE LOCK]` `[ABILITY: SYSTEM PING — REVEALS STEALTH]`

Ghost cursed—actual emotion, one syllable, sharp enough to cut.

"It sees me."

"Then don't be you." I pulled the orphan mesh trick again—different ID, fresh from a Gnawer that had despawned messy thirty seconds ago. "Be error state. Step into the null field."

Ghost slid into the wraith's shadow.

The Stalker's head tilted.

Targeting flickered.

Marcus emptied half a magazine into its joints—Professor Chen had called those weak from a cartographer's note on Ghost's map. Chrome Stalkers looked like someone had skinned a sports car and taught it murder. Joints were the seams.

Maya finished it when it stumbled.

Mid-fight, the Stalker's heat lock flickered. Stack Trace Sight showed:

`[ACTION: ACQUIRE TARGET — GHOST]` `[ACTION: PATCH INJECT — STEALTH COUNTER +20%]` `[ACTION: REACQUIRE — FAILED]`

The orphan mesh had broken the reacquire. Ghost looked at me once. One nod. Partnership without speeches.

I copied the trace into the wiki: *Evolved elites receive mid-fight patches. Orphan mesh IDs break reacquire.*

`[+1,680 XP — SHARED]` `[LEVEL UP! KEVIN PARK — LVL 14 → LVL 15]`

Level fifteen.

The popup felt obscene mid-street. The light that washed over me was warm, almost comforting, like the System was trying to make the level-up feel like a reward instead of a reprieve.

`[STAT POINTS: +3]` `[SKILL POINT: +1]` `[DEBUGGER — NEW PERK: STACK TRACE SIGHT]`

Stack Trace Sight.

I read the tooltip twice.

*See last five System actions affecting a target. Includes patch events.*

"That's not a perk," I whispered. "That's a confession booth."

"Kevin!" Maya pulled me behind a car as something exploded two blocks east.

The explosion sent debris raining down—glass and metal and concrete that had been something's home a few hours ago. I ducked, felt the shrapnel whistle past, felt my heart try to escape my chest.

"Allocating stats later," I shouted. "+2 INT, +1 WIS. STR can stay embarrassing!"

Chrome Stalker fight left Ghost bleeding again—a shallow cut across the forearm, the bad arm, because of course the universe had a sense of dramatic irony. Elizabeth bandaged between blocks, re-splint, tighter, no complaints from him, one sharp inhale that counted as a speech.

"You need rest," she said.

"I need to reach the door," Ghost replied.

The bandage was already red by the time she finished. Ghost flexed his fingers, tested the wrap, nodded once. His face betrayed nothing, but I saw the way he favored the arm, the slight hesitation in his grip.

Marcus watched the skyline.

"The Pyramid's running diagnostics," he said. "See the pulse on the spire? Every thirty seconds."

He was right.

Light crawled up the black glass like a progress bar. The pulse was rhythmic, almost hypnotic, like a heartbeat rendered in code.

`[ADMIN PURGE: 94% — PAUSED]`

But something else ticked on my HUD—smaller, easy to miss:

`[SYNC: 12% — ACTIVE]`

Sync.

Not purge.

"What sync?" I asked.

Professor Chen's face went pale. "They're merging local instances back into the main System. The crash bought us hours. This is the rollback."

"How long?"

She did math on her tablet. Fingers fast. Tensor habits. "At twelve percent… four hours until Alcatraz loses isolation. Maybe less."

Four hours.

We had four hours to get inside, do whatever we came to do, and not be on an island when the Purge resumed globally.

No pressure.

---

Lunch was sixty seconds and a protein bar.

Warriors ate standing.

Debuggers ate while copying logs.

Elizabeth bandaged Ghost's arm again while he pretended he didn't notice. Maya ate like food was fuel and fuel was violence. Marcus ate like eating was a tactical pause. Professor Chen ate like she was calculating calories against cognitive load.

I ate and updated the wiki.

*Mourning Weave — fear regen, Pattern Interrupt works.* *Chrome Stalker — joints weak, orphan mesh breaks stealth lock.* *Lure Pack — signature mismatch, don't stop for crying strangers.*

Ghost read over my shoulder. "You're writing a guide for people who might not exist."

"They exist until proven otherwise," I said.

The protein bar tasted like cardboard and desperation. I chewed mechanically, watching the pulse on the Pyramid, counting the seconds between beats. Twenty-nine. Thirty. Thirty-one. The rhythm was off by a fraction, like a metronome that had been dropped one too many times.

---

Hour three: rain without clouds.

Water fell upward for six seconds.

Gravity hiccup.

My stomach tried to exit my body through my throat. Maya caught me when I floated—hand on my vest, grip like a crane magnet, no comment, no softness, just physics corrected by friendship.

Marcus did: "Keep feet down, debug boy."

"Working on it," I gasped.

The rain stopped as suddenly as it started. Droplets hung in the air for a moment, suspended, indecisive, before they fell back to earth like they'd changed their minds about the whole thing.

Professor Chen recorded the anomaly. "Localized physics patch. Temporary. The System is stress-testing the merge."

"At mile two, sync hit twenty percent," she added thirty seconds later, tablet flashing. "Alcatraz alerts flickered."

Elizabeth's face tightened. "They're losing isolation."

"We move," Marcus said.

We moved.

---

The Embarcadero loop was our compromise—one extra mile to avoid a cluster Marcus spotted on thermal: twelve hostiles, one elite, bad angles. Marcus had thermal goggles looted from an Enforcer scout on Pier 39. The goggles showed heat signatures. The heat signatures showed we would've died.

We ran the waterfront.

Fog mixed with smoke.

Old ferries rotted in their berths, names peeling, rust like dried blood. Seagulls had evolved into something that the System tagged `[ENTITY: SCRAP WING — LVL 9]` and we didn't engage because we had a schedule.

Something whale-sized moved under the pier once—shadow only, no quest tag, no name.

We didn't ask.

The water was wrong too. Darker than it should've been. Thicker. It moved with a rhythm that didn't match the waves, like something beneath was breathing.

At Harrison Street, the System introduced its newest joke.

`[EVOLVED: SIGNAL WRAITH — LVL 18]` `[ABILITY: JAM SYSTEM COMMS]` `[ABILITY: SPOOF QUEST MARKERS]`

My map filled with fake exits.

Fake loot.

Fake safe rooms.

Fake *Maya* pinging distress three blocks away.

Three blocks away, fake Maya screamed for help—perfect pitch, perfect panic, the exact frequency that made my legs move before my brain vetoed.

Marcus had almost gone.

Ghost had grabbed his vest.

"Don't trust HUD," I said. "Trust voice. Maya, ping verbally."

"Here," she said immediately. "I'm not three blocks away. I'm right here. And I'm going to kill whatever stole my voice."

"Ghost?"

"Here."

"Marcus?"

"Here."

"Professor?"

"Here," she said.

Elizabeth added, "And I'm not dead in a fake alley. Good tip."

The Signal Wraith showed itself when we stopped trusting the map—half static, half face, my own reflection in its core wearing an expression I didn't own. Smug. Compliant. Submitted. The face of Kevin Park if Kevin Park had accepted the tutorial and never learned to swear at error messages.

I used Stack Trace Sight on the Wraith when it showed itself.

Last five actions:

`[ACTION: SPOOF QUEST — CREATED]` `[ACTION: JAM CHANNEL — PARTY COMMS]` `[ACTION: MIMIC VOICE — MAYA]` `[ACTION: PING HEATMAP — FALSE]` `[ACTION: PATCH ORIGIN — REMOTE]`

Remote patch.

During combat.

The System was hotfixing from the Pyramid in real time.

"Kevin?" Professor Chen asked. "You see something?"

"I see the devs editing the fight while we're in it." My hands shook. "Null summon. Extended. On the Wraith."

The wraith ate targeting.

Maya killed the Wraith.

Elizabeth checked all of us for debuffs after.

`[DEBUFF: PARANOIA — MINOR]` on Marcus.

`[DEBUFF: TRUST EROSION — MINOR]` on me.

"Normal," Elizabeth said. "After voice spoof. It fades."

We moved.

But I kept looking at my map, expecting fake exits, expecting lies. The debuff was minor, but the suspicion it left behind was harder to shake.

---

Mile three: the Pyramid filled the sky.

Black glass. Impossible geometry. The Transamerica Pyramid had been a landmark before Day Zero—a tourist photo op, a symbol of finance, a building that looked like it belonged in a cyberpunk poster. Now it was a dungeon. Now it was the Admin's stronghold. Now it was the thing between us and whatever happened when sync hit a hundred.

Maya swore at the scale.

"Datacenter with architecture degree."

"Same energy," I said.

The plaza approach at 2:14 PM looked exactly like my memory from the pier—marble veins, statue-users frozen mid-selfie, bowl on a pedestal like an offering plate designed by a UX team that worshipped dark patterns.

One statue-user had a tag I didn't want to read twice:

`[USER: TERMINATED — PHOTO SAVED]`

Except now the bowl had text:

`[WELCOME, KEVIN PARK]` `[CROSSING COMPLETE — REWARD PENDING]`

We'd completed a quest we hadn't accepted.

Typical.

Elizabeth gripped my arm. "Don't touch it without discussion."

"We need the map fragment," Professor Chen said. "Floor One is a puzzle dungeon. Blind entry is—"

"Deletion speedrun," I finished.

Marcus watched the street behind us.

"We're exposed. Decide fast."

I looked at my party.

At the bowl.

At the price.

The bowl hummed. Not sound—permission request. The System wanted something small. Memories were currency now. I'd seen the tooltip on Pier 39. I'd ignored it because ignorance was cheaper until it wasn't.

"One memory," I said. "Minor. Not parents. Not Maya. Something I can lose."

Maya's eyes narrowed. "How do you know what it takes?"

"I read the fine print." I lied a little. The fine print had been vague. The bowl had been specific once I got close. `[COST: NON-ESSENTIAL MEMORY — PLAYER SELECTED]`. Player selected. That was the trap. You chose what to lose. You always chose something that hurt just enough.

I placed my hand in the bowl.

Instant ramen.

Egg technique.

2 AM kitchen light.

Mom's voice saying *don't forget to eat*.

Gone.

Not erased like a file delete. Hollowed. Like a function that returned null and nobody had written a fallback.

`[MEMORY SACRIFICED]` `[MAP FRAGMENT — FLOOR 1 ACQUIRED]` `[DEBUFF: NOSTALGIA — 10 MIN]`

I swayed.

Maya caught me.

"What did you lose?"

"Comfort food," I said. "I'll survive."

"Barely," she muttered, but she smiled.

The Pyramid doors ahead shimmered.

Floor Zero open.

Floor One below.

Above, spire and Admin and whatever *sync* meant when it hit a hundred.

Ghost checked his katana.

Marcus checked ammo.

Professor Chen slotted the fragment into Elizabeth's compass rig—a jury-rigged navigation tool that had started as a joke and become our only reliable pathing through System geometry.

The zone music started—yes, still tasteless.

`[ZONE: THE PYRAMID — FLOOR 0]` `[RECOMMENDED LEVEL: 20+]` `[YOUR LEVEL: 15]` `[DIFFICULTY: NIGHTMARE]`

"We step inside together," I said.

"We come back out together," Elizabeth echoed.

We crossed the threshold.

The air changed.

Cooler.

Drier.

Hum of power like a data center praying.

`[ANTI-CHEAT: ACTIVE]`

Fair.

I was about to cheat harder.

Behind us, the city screamed once—distant, hungry, already routing the next wave toward a door we'd closed.

Ahead, Floor One waited.

The crossing was done.

The raid had just begun.

And somewhere in my head, a recipe for ramen was missing—and I didn't know I'd miss it until I tried to remember the egg technique and found only whitespace.

That was the real cliffhanger.

Not the door.

The hole where comfort used to live was coming with us.

Whether we wanted it or not.