The telephone belonged to Gleb Savin.
Ilya did not recognise him at first. He was the teenager from the daytime queue, the first one to tell the camera that the new room was "seriously like it was alive". Now he stood alone inside the Room of Fear, still streaming, his fringe wet, wearing the expression of someone who had yet to realise that the viewers on the other side of the screen would not be able to open the door.
"Come out," said Ilya.
Gleb Savin smiled at the camera.
"Guys, the owner's here. Now for the official bit."
"Gleb," said Maya. "Put the phone away. Come out."
He flinched at the police officer's peremptory tone, but did not stop recording.
"I didn't break anything. The door was open."
Varya, wet and pale, her father's tag clenched in her fist, said:
"It wasn't open for you."
The Room answered.
Every door closed at once.
Not with a slam. With the quiet concurrence of locks. This was not how a trap closed, but how an office shut after its public hours were over.
A sign lit up on the wall:
Living carrier.
Gleb Savin finally stopped smiling.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Maya looked at Ilya.
Ilya was already listening. The sound from the stream was playing through Gleb's phone. The comments raced past in silent lines, but the speaker gave a low hiss. There was a familiar rhythm in it: loose change in the till, the shift bell, a bugle, water at the steps. The Room was gathering all its old sounds into one.
A sheet of paper appeared on the floor in front of Gleb.
Not an old one. A copy of the report.
Maya picked it up and went pale.
"That's his grandfather's surname."
"What?" Gleb stepped towards her. "Which grandfather?"
"The one who signed the report on the pond."
"He died before I was born."
The Room did not argue. It did not care for arguments at all. It simply put the rule into effect.
Windows appeared on the walls. In every window, people sat at desks. Their faces were almost impossible to make out. There were only hands and signatures. One hand wrote: "No pond is listed on the books." A second: "The unidentified person has not been identified." A third: "The children were returned to their places of residence." A fourth: "The shortfall is recognised."
Gleb stared at those hands and slowly understood that his blood was not protection here. It was a conductor.
"It wasn't my fault," he said.
The water in the corner rose by the width of a finger.
Ilya said sharply:
"Not that word."
"What word?"
"The water doesn't hear guilt. It hears erasure. Don't talk as if there was no signature, no pond, no people. Say what you're going to do now."
Gleb shook his head violently.
"There's nothing I can do."
"You can turn off the stream."
"Why?"
"Because this isn't content."
The word sounded foreign even coming from Ilya. But Gleb understood. Perhaps for the first time that night. His face became small and angry, like a child's when forced to admit that he had been frightened for reasons that had nothing to do with an audience.
He switched off the phone.
The Room grew darker.
Maya walked slowly towards him.
"Listen to me. You're not answering for your grandfather. You're answering for yourself. See the report? Read only what's written there. Don't justify it. Don't argue. Just read it aloud."
Gleb took the paper.
His hands were shaking. He read badly, stumbling over the words, understanding barely half the official language, but he kept speaking. With every line, the windows on the walls went dark. When he reached his grandfather's signature, his voice broke.
"Savin, Pyotr…"
He could not go on.
A Young Pioneer's whistle answered from the darkness.
Ilya realised the Room was about to make him answer for the absent man.
"No," he said.
Everyone looked at him.
"He won't answer for a dead man. He read the signature. That's enough for a witness."
A new rule came through on the wall, faint and uncertain, as though the Room itself were testing its strength for the first time:
A witness is not a debtor.
Gleb Savin began to cry.
Not loudly. There was no dramatic scene. He simply sat down on the floor, covered his face with his hands and said:
"I thought it was all for the video."
Varya replied:
"Everyone does, as long as the door opens again."
This time the door opened.
Gleb walked out by himself. A thin lock of hair at his temple had turned grey. Maya wrapped him in her jacket, though he tried to push her away and muttered that he was fine. When some loose change happened to jingle in the ticket booth, he doubled over and covered his ears.
Ilya watched him and understood: popularity was no longer merely dangerous. It was feeding the Room living people.
The ledger opened to the right-hand page.
Sergey Lomin. Drowned man. Witness found.
Below it:
Gleb Savin. Living carrier. Released.
And below that, a line that turned Ilya's hands cold:
Ilya Lazarev. The grandson must not know.
Varya saw it too.
She did not ask what exactly he was not supposed to know.
She looked at Andrey Gordeev's tag, then at the ledger, then at Ilya.
And for the first time since all this began, she took a step back from him.
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