The technical shaft into which the Colonel had practically smmed them a second before the explosion wasn't just a trash chute. It was an ancient artery of pneumatic mail or ventition, widened by decades of erosion and the greedy breath of the Substrate. The smooth walls, polished by millions of unseen bodies, rushed past in an absolute, thick darkness that felt tangible.

  The fall didn't st long, but in Mateo’s distorted perception, it stretched for hours. The whistle of air in his ears, the muffled, angry curses of Cobra, and Nico’s heavy, panicked breathing somewhere behind him. Gravity here behaved like a drunken sailor in a storm: first, they were pinned against the wall by a frantic centrifugal force; then, their stomachs leaped into their throats as the invisible vector of attraction shifted violently. The world turned inside out before they even hit bottom.

  Suddenly, the pipe ended.

  They were spat out into a void. Instinct made Mateo curl into a ball, bracing for a fatal impact on the rocks, but the fall proved strangely slowed, as if they had plunged into thick, invisible water. They fell several meters and hit a solid surface with a dull, painful thud.

  Mateo rolled over his shoulder, absorbing the momentum—the old habit of a man used to working on dangerous sites and construction zones saved his ribs. He immediately flicked on his fshlight, the beam slicing through the ancient gloom.

  — “Is everyone okay? Anyone alive?”

  — “I think so...” Nico rasped, standing up and fastidiously brushing his slime-stained sneakers. “If you don't count the fact that my internal organs decided to swap pces. I swear, I’m going to puke right on this historic parquet.”

  Cobra was already on her feet, her knife gleaming hungrily in the beam of light as she carved a short arc. Elena professionally held her fire sector, though there was no one to shoot at yet—the silence here was so thick it felt like it could be cut with a knife. Leo sat on his haunches, breathing heavily, rubbing his temples hard as if trying to crush a foreign voice inside him.

  Mateo lifted the beam of light higher to look around and felt his lungs freeze in an icy spasm. His brain, trained for decades on precise blueprints and the unshakable ws of physics, simply refused to process the visual information for a second. It was an error. A glitch in the matrix.

  They were standing on a wide ledge. But it wasn't a floor. It was the "ceiling" of a giant underground cavern, its vaults lost somewhere in the heights. And above their heads—or was it beneath their feet, according to their maddened vestibur systems?—pointing its spire into the infinite, velvety bck abyss, hung an inverted pace.

  It was the Pacio Barolo.

  Mateo had seen it a thousand times on the surface. The majestic skyscraper on Avenida de Mayo, the concrete dream of the mad Italian Mario Panti, erected in 1923. A mix of Neo-Gothic and Hindu temples, a monument to human genius that always borders on madness.

  But here, in the womb of the earth, the building was mirrored. Its massive foundation, the lower floors with their heavy, solemn arches, disappeared upward, growing into the stone of the vault where the group now stood. And the light, delicate spire with its gss lighthouse, which up there scraped the clouds of Buenos Aires, here descended downward, boring into the abyss of the shaft like a giant drill aimed at the very heart of the pnet.

  — “Lord Jesus...” Elena whispered, and Mateo heard an unconcealed awe in her voice for the first time. “How is it even holding up? On what?”

  — “It’s impossible,” Nico muttered, backing toward the wall without taking his eyes off the abyss beneath his feet. “It should fall. This is some bullshit; gravity doesn't work like this! Hey, Engineer, tell me it’s a hallucination! Mateo, it should be crashing down!”

  Mateo walked to the very edge of the ledge. The dust here didn't fall down. It hung in the air in slow, zy clouds, drifting between the columns as if in zero gravity.

  — “Panti wasn't just an architect; he was a mystic and a Mason,” Mateo said quietly, feeling the engineering wonder in his soul wage a mortal battle with primal terror. “He didn't build this for the offices of cotton magnates. He built a mausoleum for Dante Alighieri. He seriously wanted to move the poet's ashes from Ravenna here to Argentina because he believed Europe was dying.”

  — “A mausoleum?” Cobra asked, nervously gncing at the shadows cast by the dragon statues on the facade. “Are you saying we crawled into a giant tomb?”

  — “The entire skyscraper is an architectural model of the Divine Comedy,” Mateo continued, his voice echoing off the inverted vaults. “A hundred meters high—one for each canto of the poem. Twenty-two floors—the number of stanzas per canto. Nine vaults at the entrance...”

  He shined his light on the massive arches above them, which now loomed like the teeth of a titan.

  — “The nine circles of Hell. Panti designed the lower floors as the Inferno. And here, in the embrace of the Substrate, the metaphor has become physical reality. We are literally in Hell now, guys. And by the looks of it, we just walked through the front door.”

  The building didn't just hang. It literally "grew" from the stone. Mateo noticed how the concrete foundation beams, decorated with carvings, smoothly transitioned into the bck, glossy rock of the Substrate. It wasn't a joint between two materials. It was a perfect symbiosis. The organism had accepted the building, absorbed its history, but hadn't destroyed it; instead, it made it its nerve center, turning the ws of gravity inside out to preserve the structure.

  — “We need the Archive,” Elena reminded him, cutting off his history lesson. She wasn't used to admiring architecture when the world was burning behind her. “Where would it be in this inverted madhouse?”

  Mateo closed his eyes, summoning the yellowed blueprints of 1923 he had studied in university.

  — “If the structure is mirrored... the Archive should be in the administrative wing. On the first floor. Which means...” he looked up at the massive hall looming over them, “...right here, at the very top of this stactite. We don't need to go down to the spire. We need to go through the lobby of 'Hell' to the central hall.”

  They moved along the narrow ledge, bypassing bronze condor statues. In this inverted world, the birds looked like giant bats, ready to drop from the ceiling at any moment and sink their cws into the intruders' necks.

  Their footsteps echoed loudly in the silence. All the noise from the battle in the City of Exiles remained behind yers of stone. Here reigned the dead, sterile silence of a crypt, broken only by the quiet hum of the earth itself.

  — “Hey, Brainiac,” Nico whispered to Mateo, trying not to fall a step behind Elena. “If that Italian guy built Hell, did he put demons in here too? You know, just for authenticity?”

  — “There’s only stone and bronze here, Nico,” Mateo replied, though he felt cold sweat trickling down his spine. “Gargoyles, chimeras... just a fashion statement from the twenties. Nothing more.”

  — “Wait.”

  Leo’s voice was quiet, but it held such power that the group froze instantly. The boy stood by one of the massive columns supporting the vault. He wasn't looking at the grandeur of the architecture. His gaze was fixed on the stone itself. Leo’s hand, now almost completely hidden under a bck chitinous yer, slowly came to rest on the gray granite of the wall.

  — “What do you see, son?” Mateo stepped toward him, but Elena stopped him with a wave of her hand.

  — “The stone...” Leo spoke hollowly, his voice doubling, resonating with the walls. “It’s hungry. It remembers the shape humans gave it, but the Substrate gave it something more. It wants to live. It wants to return to the cycle.”

  Mateo aimed his fshlight where his son was looking. In the deep, velvety shadow of a pointed arch, directly above their heads, a gargoyle perched on a column capital. It was a cssic piece: a hideous mix of lion, dragon, and man. Its maw was open in a silent roar; cwed paws dug into the granite. Suddenly, a shiver ran across the statue’s gray surface.

  At first, Mateo thought it was a trick of the light. But then came a sound—a sharp, dry crack, like overstressed concrete or bone snapping. The stone hide on the beast's side split in a zigzag. No dust fell from the crack. Instead, a thick, bck, oily ichor slowly oozed out, smelling of old copper and damp earth.

  — “Back! Now!” Elena yelled, raising her rifle.

  The stone began to swell as if flesh were boiling beneath it. The granite turned into living tissue right before their eyes—a monstrous transmutation of matter that defied every w of chemistry. Gray limbs filled with lumpy, cord-like muscles. Wings unfurled with a heavy, wet rustle, shaking off the dust of centuries. The gargoyle’s eyes, which had been blind stone cataracts a second ago, fred with a toxic ruby light.

  — “Fire!” Elena commanded.

  A short burst hit the beast right in the chest. Bullets kicked up sparks and grit, tearing off chunks of the newly formed flesh, but the gargoyle didn't even flinch. It was a creature in which the silicon crystal ttice of granite was interwoven with the reinforced fibers of the Substrate. A living tank that spat at lead.

  The beast lunged. Despite its mass, it moved with the grace of a giant cat. A heavy cwed paw struck the column where Nico was trying to hide. The boy was showered with a hail of marble fragments weighing several pounds each.

  — “Holy shit!” he screamed, frantically swinging his bent rebar. “She’s made of iron! Nothing touches her!”

  The gargoyle turned toward Cobra. The girl was faster than lightning, but the beast was part of this space. A powerful swing of its tail—and Cobra was thrown to the very edge of the abyss, miraculously catching onto the bronze ornament of the railing.

  — “No!” Nico rushed to her, completely forgetting his own safety, but the monster’s bulk blocked his path. Corrosive sludge dripped from the beast’s maw, hissing as it burned holes in the historic marble floor.

  The monster loomed over them, a Dantean nightmare brought to life by the biology of the future. Elena frantically reloaded her rifle, but Mateo could see her hands shaking. She realized their weapons were nothing more than firecrackers here.

  And then, Leo stepped forward. He looked tiny against that gray mass. A teenager in a dirty hoodie against a ton of living, raging granite.

  — “Leo, wait! Get back!” Mateo shouted, rushing to shield his son.

  But Leo didn't even turn around. He slowly pulled the glove off his left hand. The skin there had vanished completely, repced by a perfectly smooth, matte bck matter that reflected the monster’s ruby eyes like a mirror.

  — “You are a system error,” Leo said. His voice now carried a distinct double echo, as if it weren't the boy speaking, but the Substrate itself through him. “The Architect didn't give you a spark. You are just a viotion of statics. A viotion I am now going to fix.”

  The gargoyle roared—the sound was like the grinding of tectonic ptes—and unched into a final leap. Leo simply held out his hand toward the bulk flying at him. He didn't strike. He just touched the monster’s chest with his fingertips.

  Time seemed to stumble. Bck threads, pulsing and hungry, shot from Leo’s palm, instantly enveloping the beast. They didn't inflict physical wounds; they resonated with the very structure of atoms.

  — “Entropy,” Leo said, a word Mateo had never heard from his lips before.

  The transformation reversed with terrifying speed. It was erosion accelerated millions of times over. The gargoyle froze mid-leap, its muscles filling with leaden weight; the ruby light in its eyes instantly went out, repced by gray ash. The living flesh dried, cracked, and crumbled. Biology surrendered to geology.

  A second ter, and a statue stood before them again. But it was a statue eroded by time: it looked as if it had stood for an eternity under acid rain. With a terrible crash, the monster crumbled into a heap of ordinary rubble and acrid dust.

  A deafening, crushing silence fell. Nico, coughing hoarsely, crawled away from the pile of gravel. Cobra, pulling herself up on trembling arms, climbed back onto the ledge, her face whiter than chalk. Leo stood over the enemy's remains, his figure swaying. He began to tilt sideways, but Mateo caught him a second before he fell.

  — “Leo!” Elena was beside him instantly, moving faster than Mateo could cry out. She slung her rifle, and her hands, which had been gripping the handguard tightly a second ago, now frantically felt her son's face and neck. In her eyes, usually cold and calcuting, a fsh of that primal terror she hid so well appeared for a split second.

  The boy’s hand was smoking, emitting a faint smell of burnt stone. The bckness had now crawled nearly to his shoulder, pulsing under his skin like living mercury.

  — “Are you in pain? Leo, look at me!” Mateo looked into his son’s eyes. The boy’s pupils were dited so much that the iris was almost gone.

  — “No...” Leo whispered, his voice barely audible. “Just... very cold, Dad. I gave it all my warmth to take away its structure. I erase them. I just... cancel things that shouldn't be.”

  — “You saved us,” Elena exhaled sharply, pressing her son’s head to her shoulder, but immediately pulled back, turning back into the commander. She quickly checked the boy’s pulse, her fingers lingering on the bck veins for a moment. “You didn't erase a thing. You closed a hole in reality. But you won't do that again, you hear me? Not without my command.”

  She stood up, adjusting her gear with a sharp gesture, and scanned the group. Cobra was still breathing hard, leaning against a column; Nico was trying to wipe the dust from his face with shaking hands.

  — “Move,” Elena commanded, her voice turning to steel again. “The Archive won't wait for us to pull ourselves together. Mateo, take Leo. Cobra, you’re on the rear. If that statue wasn't alone, we need to be inside as fast as possible.”

  Mateo looked around. The destroyed statue, which had served as a keystone, had opened a passage. Behind the arch it had guarded stood massive double doors of dark oak, braced with bronze. A crest hung on them, darkened by decades of neglect: an eagle clutching an open book in its cws.

  — “Entrance to the Archive,” Mateo helped his son up, feeling Leo’s hand chilling his palm. “We’re here. And by the looks of it, the door isn't locked. But stay alert. If the 'guard' outside was like that, I dread to imagine what they’ve locked inside.”

  Nico picked up his bent rebar, looking at it with doubt.

  — “Nothing can be worse than a stone toad,” he grumbled, trying to regain his usual bravado, though his voice shook. “Let’s just go. Let's find this damn map and get out of this inverted madhouse before I forget how to walk on a normal floor.”

  They approached the doors.