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Somewhere in the middle of the third hour, the system hummed in his head:

[System Alert: Mana 25%.]

John set the crate he was lifting back down at once and closed the void with care. He leaned his shoulder against the cool wall and breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth, counting in fours, letting the well refill a little from the slow refill that never stops in a living body.

Fizz, who had been mid-verse in his third song ("Rag That Wanted to Be a Flag"), cut himself off at once. "We pause," he said, serious again. He ferried the water cup to John and held it there like a cupbearer in a palace.

John drank, slow. He waited until the tightness at the edge of his thoughts eased. The system chimed again, quietly:

[System: Mana 32%. Safe margin restored.]

"Back in," John said. He opened the mouth again and fed it another half-row of old parts, slow, steady, never yanking, never letting the pull take him anywhere he didn't mean to go.

Fizz made up a fourth song. This one was fast and silly, half rhyme and half noise, and he clapped on the barrel to keep his own spirits up.

Song of the Stubborn Stain-

You are a dot, you tiny blot,

You think you'll stay? I think not.

I'll wipe, I'll swipe, I'll splash, I'll swish,

I'll make you small and call you fish.

John snorted once despite himself. "That's not even a rhyme."

"It is in some countries," Fizz said gravely. "You know nothing John."

Another hour. Another ledger line. Another drained jar. The room's bones showed. The hooks looked embarrassed to be seen naked. A rat the size of John's hand dared poke its nose out from under a shelf, took one look at the black mouth, and went back to thinking about a different day.

[System: Hatch Progress: 12%.]

John looked at the number in his head and nodded. The egg pulsed faintly against his chest again —two beats this time— and he had that sudden, odd thought men get when they realize something small has begun to count on them: "If I fail you, it is not just me who falls."

He shut the mouth again, slow, put the ledger down, and sat on the clean bit of tarp. Fizz drifted down and flopped across his lap again in the exact same shape as earlier, as if his body had learned a nest and would make that nest wherever John was.

"Snack break two," Fizz mumbled. "Required by law."

"We already broke one law yesterday," John said. "We will keep the small ones today." He pulled half a pickled carrot from the jar and held it to Fizz, who ate it in three ferocious bites and then made a face because it was pickled.

"Spicy sour," Fizz said, shivering his whiskers. "I love and hate." He sighed and looked at the empty racks. "We did hours, and still more or more sits. But we are chewing a mountain. The mountain knows we have teeth."

"We have four days," John said. "Today we cleared this room in half. Tonight we cleaned the floors again. Tomorrow we will finish this. Then the main room. Then we chase the rest of the stink into the drain like a bad thought."

Fizz tapped John's pocket with one paw. "And we feed your rock-baby egg until it sings with me."

"Until it hatches," John said.

Fizz's eyes brightened. "What will it be?"

"An ant," John said. "An old one. Not a normal one." He kept his voice even — no system talk. No class talk. Just the small truth. "We will see."

Fizz nodded like a priest agreeing with a prayer. "Then we will be kind and fierce to it. We will give it rules. We will give it snacks."

"No snacks," John said. "It eats beasts."

"Same," Fizz said. "Snacks are beasts in disguise."

John stood, stretched his back until it popped once, and opened the mouth again. The last bins surrendered. The last two barrels — labeled only "MISC." in a bad hand — poured a horror of mixed scraps into the black, which drank and did not complain.

[System: Mana 28% → 24%. Alert threshold approaching.]

John closed the void at once, breathed, waited, drank water, and let the well rise.

Then he cleaned up what the void could not ever eat: paper ties, broken staves, the nails from old crates, a handful of labels. He swept the corners. He oiled the lower hinge so the door wouldn't scream and wake the whole hall every time he opened it. He took the chalk tin and drew a quiet "✓" on the inside of the storage door with the date.

He wrote in the ledger:

Storage cleared, row A–F. Disposed by void magic method under duty slate. Hatch work (authorized feeding) in progress. Smell: improved.

—John (East House), Fizz (spirit)

Fizz peered at the page. "Write: 'singing increased the speed by three,'" he said.

John did not write that. He did say: "Singing helped." That would have to do.

They locked the storage and stepped back into the main disposal room. The big floor waited. The drains waited. The hooks above the main space remembered meat and would keep remembering until someone scrubbed them like the rest of the room. They would get there.

Fizz yawned a yawn so big it made his ears sway. "Nap," he said. "Beauty demands eight naps a day."

"We will sleep for an hour," John said. "Then we eat something hot. Then we come back."

Fizz drifted down without complaint and curled on John's thigh the way a warm stone sometimes adopts a man and not the other way around.

John sat with his back to the cool wall again, egg warm at his chest, ledger under his hand, a plan in his head, and a hole that would behave if he behaved.

His eyes went heavy. He let them.

The system did not sleep.

[System: Mana sheath steady. Micro-tether stable. Hatch Progress: 12%. Next feed recommended after rest.]

The room breathed its old breath, and for the first time since boys had stacked "later" into it for a year, "later" felt like something that could come clean.

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