Elias stood in the center of his living room, the useless key a cold weight in his hand. He was a scientist who now possessed irrefutable proof of a fractured continuum, but he was trapped in a luxury cage, unable to verify the Anchor Mass that was his only guide.
He retrieved the hammer and chisel from the rarely-used toolbox he kept for density experiments. His target was the wall shared with Mrs. Dalgleish, the thinnest point where the utility conduits ran. He knew the precise acoustic properties of the drywall – a knowledge now applied to a destructive, desperate purpose.
He draped his expensive silk pajamas over the furniture to catch the worst of the inevitable dust. He then took a deep, steadying breath, acknowledging that with the first blow, he would be destroying his last vestige of the orderly life he remembered.
The hammer came down. The sound was not the muffled thud he expected, but a deafening, brittle CRACK that echoed through the high-rise silence, a shocking violation of the building’s rigid order. Plaster sprayed like snow.
Elias worked methodically, driven by the cold fear that the noise would attract attention and trigger another slide. He used the chisel to define the edges of the opening, then the hammer to batter away the sheetrock. The effort was physically exhausting, turning his initial fear into a furious, focused determination.
It took fifty minutes of brutal labor to create a rough, jagged opening. It was approximately two feet wide and three feet tall – just enough to contort his body through, the edges of the broken wall menacingly sharp. The air was thick with the chalky scent of pulverized gypsum and insulation.
He paused, heart hammering not from fear of the fall, but from the exertion. He pulled his remaining silk pajama top over his face as a crude mask against the dust.
Then, he committed. He shoved his backpack through the opening first, followed by his head and shoulders. The scrape of metal against bone-dry skin was immediate. He pulled his body through the opening, feeling the rough edges tear the silk of his pajamas and slice a shallow line across his ribs. The transition was agonizing, a slow, scraping birth into the unknown.
He tumbled onto the immaculate, lavender-scented parquet floor of Mrs. Dalgleish’s kitchen. The scent of her life – soft, domestic, and utterly normal – was a disorienting shock after the sterile terror of his own apartment. Framed on the counter was a needlepoint of a sleepy cat, gazing out at a world that remained whole.
The apartment was quiet. Mrs. Dalgleish was gone.
Elias found her simple set of keys on a small mahogany table – keys that held no complex encryption, only the mechanical necessity of a tumbler lock. He walked to her front door, inserted the key, and turned.
The CLICK of the lock engaging felt like a cannon shot. He was free.
He did not look back at the gaping wound in the shared wall. He closed Mrs. Dalgleish’s door silently and stepped into the public hallway. He took the emergency stairwell down, avoiding the complex social interaction of the lobby elevators, emerging onto the city street just as the 7:00 AM rush began to swell.
He was bruised, covered in plaster dust, and carrying a strange key, a fugitive in a borrowed reality. The West Wing Laboratory was three miles away. He had traded one prison for the entire, unpredictable world.