By the time they were ready for the next door, the swamp had dried into a mild stink in their clothes.
Lily stood with one hand on the railing, eyes half-closed. Jack had seen that look before, when her instinct was whispering to her that something was off.
"What is it?" he asked.
She frowned. "It doesn't feel hungry."
Dex gave a tired laugh. "That's not reassuring anymore."
Jack put his palm against the twelfth-floor door.
Warmth met him from the other side. Not the wet heat of the swamp. Sun-warm. Living warm. He tightened his grip on his weapon and pulled the door open.
A wall of green waited beyond it.
Ancient trees rose in pillars thicker than houses, their trunks wrapped in vines as big around as a man's waist. Giant ferns crowded the ground. Broad leaves sweated in the heat. Somewhere far off, something gave a deep, rolling cry that made the air in Jack's chest vibrate. Between the roots and brush, he could see mud huts gathered in a rough ring around a trampled clearing.
No office floor remained. No ceiling. Overhead was a pale tropical sky broken by a canopy older than memory.
Then Lily whispered, "Mom?"
Jack snapped toward her.
She wasn't looking at the forest.
She was staring a few feet to the right of the doorway, at empty air brightening gold. Her face changed all at once; fear, hope, grief, all of it crossing too fast to separate.
"Lily, don't.."
She took one step.
The gold folded around her like closing hands.
Jack lunged and caught nothing.
The floor answered immediately. The ground shook. Roots tore up between him and the others in a wall of twisting wood and mud. Dex swore as the clearing split beneath his feet. Marcus grabbed the railing, lost it, and vanished behind a curtain of giant leaves as the forest rearranged itself with a groan like old stone grinding.
"Jack!" Dex shouted from somewhere to the left.
Then even that was gone.
Silence crashed down.
Jack stood alone in the prehistoric heat, staring at the place Lily had disappeared.
For one second there was still a shimmer there, a square of impossible golden calm hanging between two fern trunks. He thought he saw the outline of their kitchen table through it.
Then the shimmer clouded over like breath on glass.
Jack hit it with gravity.
The air buckled, leaves ripped off branches, mud sprayed backward; and the barrier didn't move. It absorbed the force without even rippling. On the other side of it, the blurred room remained untouched.
"Lily!"
No answer came.
Something rustled behind him.
Jack turned just as the first spear flew.
He knocked it out of the air with a short gravity snap and spun. Figures were coming out of the mud huts in a loose, jerking rush; human once, but not anymore. Their skin was the color of river clay. Bone necklaces rattled on sunken chests. Some carried stone blades tied to sticks. Others came barehanded, mouths open wide enough to show black gums and broken teeth.
The nearest one hit him with more speed than he expected. Jack took its throat with a black-edged slash and kicked the body away. Two more followed. A third tried to circle toward his blind side.
He moved hard and fast, but he could feel the difference immediately.
No gold light at his shoulder. No Lily sealing cuts as they came. Every scrape mattered now.
He cut down one zombie by a hut wall, crushed another into the mud with a gravity pulse, and ripped a spear out of a dead hand before its owner could drag him down. He used the haft to block a stone axe, split the attacker through the collarbone, and drove forward toward the clearing's center, forcing the villagers to come at him where he could see them.
From impossibly far away, a muffled explosion rolled through the trees.
Dex.
A few seconds later came a hoarse shout that might have been Marcus.
Alive, then. Separated, hurt, and without Lily.
Jack's jaw tightened.
The last of the village dead rushed together. He widened the pull beneath their feet. Six bodies dropped flat into sucking mud. Jack stepped through them and ended the ones still moving with two swift, economical strikes.
The clearing went still.
Then the ferns started to shake.
Not from one direction.
From everywhere.
Jack spread his gravity sense and felt the floor lie to him.
Mass flickered through the brush in impossible jumps. Something dog-sized becoming as heavy as a truck for half a heartbeat, something enormous thinning to almost nothing and slipping sideways through his awareness before swelling again. He pivoted slowly, breath shallow.
A shape no larger than a chicken burst from under a hut.
It hit his gravity hold mid-leap and changed.
Bones cracked outward. Dead flesh stretched. In the space of a blink the little thing became a raptor the size of a wolf, jaws full of needle teeth snapping inches from Jack's face. He barely got his weapon up in time. Its weight slammed through his guard and drove him backward into a post wall that exploded under the impact.
Jack shoved with gravity, flinging it away.
Three more came from the treeline at different sizes. One cat-sized. One big as a horse. One tiny enough to vanish in the roots before launching at his knee and swelling midair.
He cut the first in half.
The second slipped his hold by shrinking to lizard-small, skittered under it, then sprang full-grown at his side. Teeth raked across his ribs before he hacked it off. Pain lit white through him. Hot blood soaked his shirt.
The third landed on a hut roof, crouched, and shrank until it was hardly more than a twitching strip of rot and claw.
Jack looked up.
A larger shadow crossed the canopy.
He felt it before he saw it: enormous weight above the trees, then suddenly not there. The branches stopped shaking.
The forest held its breath.
Jack backed toward the center of the huts. The smaller undead dinosaurs paced him from cover, eyes sunk and milk-white, hides hanging in gray strips from muscle that should not have kept working. The one on the roof gave a clicking hiss.
The big one hit the ground behind him.
The impact threw mud high into the air.
Jack twisted and saw the tyrannosaur rising out of the broken earth, jaws slick with old black blood, one eye missing, ribs showing through torn hide. A moment ago it had been hidden in the canopy at impossible scale. Now it stood only a little taller than a truck, as if the floor had squeezed it smaller just to drop it closer.
Jack slammed gravity down on its skull.
The tyrannosaur's neck bent, legs digging trenches in the mud; then its whole body collapsed inward like crumpling paper. In a blink it was dog-sized, darting free of the pressure field. It shot between two huts, vanished, the pack attacked at the same time.
Jack fought in a blur of snapping teeth, and changing size. One raptor went small enough to slip under his slash and came up half-grown at his ankle. Another ballooned huge inside a hut and burst the wall outward in a hail of reeds and clay. Jack used short pulses instead of holds, ruining their jumps, throwing them off their landings, refusing to spend strength trying to pin what would not stay one size.
Still, the fight kept tilting wrong.
Every few seconds his eyes jumped back to the place where Lily had vanished.
The floor wanted that.
It wanted his attention split. It wanted him reaching for the one person he could not drag free.
He knew it. He kept doing it anyway.
A raptor latched onto his forearm. Jack buried it in a hut wall and cut off its head, but the delay cost him. The tyrannosaur came back full-sized through the trees, plowing down a mud roof with its chest. Jack threw himself aside as jaws larger than a doorway slammed where he'd been.
He rolled, came up hard, and heard Lily's voice in memory instead of through the forest.
Not crying.
Not calling for help.
"You'll live. Again."
Then another memory. Lily in black seawater, driving a spear of light through an anglerfish. Lily blinding the mirror spirit when none of them could see straight. Lily in the street at home with gold burning around her hands while reality tore open.
Jack planted one foot in the mud and stopped looking for the barrier.
She wasn't waiting to be saved.
She was fighting her own floor.
Somewhere beyond the trees, another explosion boomed. Short, controlled. Dex was still moving. Marcus, too.
Jack let out one slow breath. "All right," he said to the empty air. "I trust you."
The words settled something sharp and frantic inside him.
When the next raptor lunged, Jack didn't chase it. He marked the ground.
Three gravity wells slammed into place around the clearing; one between huts, one beside a fallen trunk and one directly in front of him. Invisible, fixed, waiting. The first raptor shrank to slip past his blade and hit the well at ankle height. Its body jerked downward out of its own leap. Before it could resize again, Jack split its spine.
The second sprang small, planning to grow over the trap.
Jack let it.
It expanded right as it crossed the fallen trunk. The gravity well yanked its chest lower while its back half kept rising. Bones snapped. It crashed screaming into the mud. He ended it with a black-gold strike through the skull.
The tyrannosaur roared and charged.
Jack ran straight at it.
The ground shook under every step. Halfway there, the beast shrank violently, dropping from monstrous to horse-sized so fast its own momentum pitched it forward. Jack had expected that. He slashed the mud hut supports to either side as he passed. Thick sharpened beams toppled inward.
The tyrannosaur grew again in the bottleneck.
Its skull expanded between the falling stakes.
Jack hit the trapped space with every ounce of gravity he had.
Wood drove through rotten jaw and eye socket. The animal thrashed, size flickering wildly between small, huge, small again; tearing its own flesh apart against the stakes as the pressure held it where it had committed.
Something rang across the forest like glass breaking.
Golden light burst through the canopy.
For a heartbeat the whole floor showed its seams. Jack saw a warm room suspended inside the green, walls cracking outward from a point of blinding gold. He saw, far off, Dex limping along a stone ledge while detonations flashed from one hand. He saw Marcus hauling himself up a root-choked incline, blood soaking his side, rough divine light burning around his fist.
Then Jack drove his weapon through the tyrannosaur's open mouth and released a black-gold slash straight up into its skull.
The head split.
The roar ended.
The forest convulsed.
Mud huts folded inward. Trees blurred into streaks of dark green. Dead dinosaurs collapsed into ash and black pulp that blew away before it touched the ground. The golden room shattered fully, its fragments turning into sparks that rained through the dissolving jungle.
Jack stumbled forward into concrete.
He caught himself on one knee in a stairwell landing, lit by dim emergency strips. A second later Dex slammed into the wall opposite him, breathing hard, one pant leg torn nearly to the knee. Marcus appeared on the step above, bent double, one hand pressed to his reopened side.
Lily came last.
She didn't fall.
She stepped out of fading gold with her chin up, face pale and eyes bright, like she'd kicked her own way through the floor and dared it to complain.
For a second Jack just looked at her.
He had mud and blood drying on him. She had a crackling halo of leftover light crawling over her sleeves. Neither of them looked untouched.
"Good", he thought.
"You broke it," he said.
Lily gave him a tired, crooked look. "So did you."
Jack started to ask if she was all right. The question stopped halfway to his mouth.
Nodding instead he said, "Yeah,".. "I know."
Dex slid down the wall to sit. "If the next floor also has dinosaurs," he said, "I'm filing a complaint with the universe."
Marcus let out a ragged chuckle. Lily moved to him automatically, gold already gathering in her hands.
Jack kept watch on the stairs above while she worked, listening to their breathing steady in the dim concrete hush.
The tower still waited over them, full of teeth and traps and worse things climbing toward the roof.
But the lesson the twelfth floor wanted was dead on the landing with the rest of it.
When they rose again, Jack did not feel like he was carrying them.
He felt them rising with him.