Reed hadn't left her side since the graveyard. He was on her couch now, sound asleep, the soft glow of his phone casting the room in a ghostly hue. He'd refused to leave. Said he didn't trust her not to vanish—or to visit Spiral House alone.
He was right. She'd considered it.
But the last thing she needed was another corpse on her conscience.
She took the phone and typed into the encrypted browser:
"Spiral House + New York."
"Spiral House riddle architecture."
"Spiral House + occult + criminal symbolism."
The results were underwhelming. All modernist architecture and spiraling staircases—no leads, no direct connections.
Until a single obscure article popped up.
"Abandoned Observatory once used as coded meeting site for arcane society—nicknamed Spiral House for its architecture."
Avery clicked, her heart racing.
The article itself was dated—scanned from a 1974 edition of an underground magazine called The Mapless Compass. A fringe magazine.
But the photo.
It was a circular building on a forgotten cliff face off the Hudson, half-devoured by trees. Spiral stone walls winding inward like a snail shell. Keyhole-shaped windows. A dome topped with an ornate golden star.
At the bottom of the article, a faded caption:
"Coordinates available to subscribers only."
Avery glanced at Reed.
Then at the locked drawer containing her old hacking gear.
She hadn't touched it in three years.
But for Alina—she would.
The equipment was old, not obsolete. Avery lifted the lid with the same deference a pianist offers a long-neglected grand. Dust shimmered in her desk lamp's light, the keys still stiff from disuse. She plugged in the rig and watched the green boot-line streak across the screen like a heartbeat resuming life.
There was another side to her that took its turn now—the one hidden beneath grief and fixation. The cryptologist. The ruthless codebreaker. The one who used to pass through digital walls like smoke.
She opened a hidden interface and routed the encrypted page of the article through an outdated port tied to the journal's defunct database.
"Come on." she whispered.
Rivers of gibberish flowed onto the screen—long strings of alphanumerics.
Then, suddenly— Coordinates.
She jotted them down.
"41.1739° N, 73.8591° W"
Then came a second message. One that wasn't in the article.
It appeared like a flicker, not a part of the page code. Just… there. A single line typed itself out across her screen:
"You're walking the line now, Locke. Tread carefully."
The cursor blinked once. Then vanished.
Her blood iced.
"Avery?" Reed's voice was thick with sleep.
She spun toward him.
He blinked in the screen's light. "Why's it so quiet in here? You look like you've seen a ghost."
She slid the paper with the coordinates across the table. "Because I might have."
***
The ride was cold and silent. Reed gripped the wheel while Avery stared off into space, noting exits and phone signals as they passed.
The forest intensified with every mile. Civilization dropped behind them like a fading dream. The road soon narrowed to a dirt track that hadn't seen a car in years.
"There's a structure about half a mile in," Reed said, checking his GPS. "Maybe Spiral House."
"Maybe a trap," Avery whispered.
"Isn't everything?"
They stopped beneath a dying pine and stepped into the misted stillness of pre-dawn.
The Spiral loomed among the trees like a monument to forgetting. Grey stone. Curved walls. A tower spearing up like bone through earth. Though abandoned, it seemed to breathe.
Reed stared at it. "That thing's something else."
Avery adjusted the strap of her pack. "Let's find the door."
They circled the edges warily until Avery saw a sunken doorway, half-buried under vines and rust.
Above it, carved faintly into the stone, was a riddle:
"He who seeks the answer walks the question in reverse."
Reed frowned. "What the hell does that mean?"
Avery stepped forward, tracing the carving. "It means we're not here to break in."
"We're here to be invited."
***
Avery stared at the inscription above the door, her breath fogging in the morning chill.
"He who seeks the answer walks the question in reverse."
The phrase wasn't just poetic—it was directional.
She turned slowly, eyes scanning the terrain behind them. "We're too close. The entrance isn't here. This is just a threshold. The answer lies behind the question."
Reed raised an eyebrow. "We backtrack?"
"Not quite," She stepped backward deliberately, pacing her steps in reverse from the doorway, one at a time. "We retrace the riddle."
With each backward step, she looked down for a sign—footprints, symbols, brush disturbance.
And then—she saw it.
A circle carved on a flat rock, all but covered in moss. Inside the circle: a spiral.
Not the pretty kind you'd see on a snail shell. It was crude. Violent. Jagged. Like someone had slashed it in haste, or terror.
She knelt beside it. "Here."
Reed stood next to her. "Looks like a seal."
She placed her hand in the middle.
At first—nothing.
Then, a faint click beneath the stone.
The ground shifted.
Behind them, the rusted doorway groaned open.
Reed took a step back, hand going automatically to the gun holstered at his hip. "Okay, that is a hard no from me."
But Avery was already standing inside.
"We were meant to be here," she whispered.
Reed hesitated. "Says the woman who just opened a door with a puzzle corpse marker."
She offered him a look—equal parts warning and plea. "I'm going."
"Then I'm going too."
***
Inside, Spiral House felt like an abandoned cathedral carved by someone who believed God lived in equations. The walls curved endlessly, adorned with mathematical frescoes—fractals, golden ratios, Fibonacci spirals painted in dust and ash.
It looked like something that wasn't built by humans.
The air was dry, untouched for decades. But there were no cobwebs. No mold. No decay.
Someone had been maintaining this place.
They descended into a spiraling corridor that narrowed with each step, winding inward like a coiling snake. Avery held up a flashlight, the beam catching mirrors placed at strange angles—reflecting their faces back in distorted fragments.
"This is no observatory," Reed snarled. "It's a maze."
"No, It's a mind."
They reached a door.
It bore a symbol on it—three interlocking spirals entwined with a keyhole.
Below it: another riddle.
"The answer is where the question cannot follow."
Reed massaged his head. "So what the hell do we say to that?"
Avery stepped forward, scrutinizing the grooves. "Maybe we don't say anything."
She turned off her flashlight.
Darkness enveloped them totally.
Reed's voice was faint. "Avery—"
"Shh," she whispered. "Don't think like a person. Think like a pattern."
A moment's silence.
Then the door clicked and swung open.