Chapter 6: The Woman in 4C

Leo woke to the familiar weight of scratches on his neck, but this time something was different. The apartment felt lighter somehow, as if the oppressive atmosphere that had been building through the loops had lifted slightly. Sunlight streamed through the windows with normal intensity, and when he looked in the bathroom mirror, his reflection moved in perfect synchronization with his actions.

The building's memory was shifting, responding to his conversation with Mrs. Petrov. Or perhaps she had never existed at all, and the Echo was simply adapting to his growing understanding of its nature.

Leo dressed quickly, his mind focused on a single objective. Mrs. Petrov had given him a crucial piece of the puzzle—the distinction between the trigger and the source of his trauma. But her cryptic words about what he'd truly lost still echoed in his thoughts, unanswered and unsettling.

Find the true source of your pain.

The elevator responded normally when he called it, no sickly green glow or impossible harmonics. Leo rode to the fourth floor, noting that the building felt more solid around him, less like a dream and more like reality. Perhaps that was progress, or perhaps it was another trap.

The hallway on the fourth floor looked exactly as it should—beige carpeting that absorbed his footsteps, fluorescent lighting that hummed with electrical contentment, numbered doors leading to ordinary lives. Leo approached 4C and knocked, the sound echoing normally in the enclosed space.

The door opened to reveal Mrs. Petrov, but the ageless quality he remembered was gone. She appeared exactly as he'd always known her—a woman in her seventies with kind eyes and silver hair pulled back in a neat bun. Her apartment, glimpsed through the doorway, looked perfectly normal: modest furniture, family photographs, the comfortable clutter of a life well-lived.

"Leo?" she said, her thick Russian accent exactly as he remembered. "Is everything alright, dear? You look terrible."

"Mrs. Petrov, I need to ask you about something you said before. About buildings having memories."

She studied his face with concern, then stepped aside to let him enter. "Come in, come in. You look like you haven't slept in days."

The interior was nothing like the mystical library he remembered from the previous loop. This was an elderly woman's apartment, filled with knitted afghans and porcelain figurines, the scent of tea and lavender instead of incense and decay. Leo felt a stab of disappointment—had the conversation been just another trick of the Echo?

"Sit," Mrs. Petrov said, bustling toward the kitchen. "I make you tea. Real tea, not that fancy stuff your wife drinks."

Leo froze. "What did you say about my wife?"

"The green tea, yes? Very expensive, she tells me in elevator. Special blend from grandmother in China." Mrs. Petrov's voice carried from the kitchen, casual and conversational. "I tell her, Russian tea is better. Stronger. But she says this tea is for special purpose."

The words hit Leo like ice water. "When did she tell you this?"

"Oh, months ago. Maybe six months? She was very proud of this tea, very careful with preparation. Said it was helping with your... what is word... your constitution. Making you stronger."

Leo's hands clenched into fists. Even the building's other inhabitants had been unknowing witnesses to Elara's slow murder. The casual cruelty of it—discussing her poisoning routine as if it were a health regimen—made his stomach turn.

Mrs. Petrov returned with two steaming cups, setting one in front of Leo. The tea was dark and strong, nothing like the pale green poison Elara had been serving him. "You are troubled, yes? I see it in your eyes. Same look my husband had during the war, when he learned things he wished he hadn't."

"Mrs. Petrov," Leo said carefully, "yesterday you told me about Echo Chambers. Places where trauma creates loops in reality."

The elderly woman's face creased with confusion. "Yesterday? Leo, dear, I haven't seen you in weeks. Not since you helped me with groceries." She leaned forward, studying his face intently. "Are you feeling alright? You're talking about things that don't happen."

Leo felt reality shift beneath him. The conversation he remembered so clearly—had it been real or just another layer of the Echo's deception? Mrs. Petrov's current confusion seemed genuine, but then so had her previous mystical knowledge.

"Tell me about this building," he pressed. "Have you noticed anything... unusual about it?"

"Unusual how?" But something flickered in her eyes—recognition, perhaps, or memory trying to surface.

"Strange sounds. Lights that behave oddly. Time that doesn't move the way it should."

Mrs. Petrov was quiet for a long moment, staring into her tea cup. When she spoke again, her accent seemed less pronounced, her words more carefully chosen.

"My grandmother used to say that some places are thin," she said slowly. "Places where the barrier between what is and what might be grows weak. Old places, places where strong emotions have soaked into the very walls like blood into wood."

Leo's pulse quickened. "And this building?"

"This building is not old, but it was built on old ground. Before apartments, there was house here. Very old house where terrible things happened." Her voice dropped to almost a whisper. "My grandmother, she would have called this place dangerous. A place that remembers what it should forget."

"What kind of terrible things?"

Mrs. Petrov stood abruptly, moving to a small bookshelf in the corner. She withdrew a slim volume bound in cracked leather, its pages yellow with age. "My grandmother's journal. She lived in the house that stood here before. Wrote down everything she saw, everything she felt."

She handed Leo the journal, and his skin crawled at the touch. The leather was warm, as if recently handled, and the pages fell open to an entry dated nearly a century ago. The writing was in Cyrillic script, but somehow Leo could read it as clearly as English:

The echoes are strongest in the eastern rooms, where the morning light falls brightest. The Colonel brings his wife her morning tea, and she drinks it with such trust, such love. She does not know what he puts in the cup each day, does not suspect that her husband plans her death for the insurance money and his young mistress.

But the house knows. The house remembers. And when she finally dies, when he finally pushes her from the balcony in his rage, the house will hold onto that moment like a prized possession. It will play the scene again and again, feeding on the betrayal and the guilt until someone strong enough comes to break the cycle.

Or until someone weak enough comes to become trapped in it.

Leo's hands shook as he read the words. The parallels were too exact to be coincidence—the morning tea, the insurance money, the betrayal, even the balcony. Someone else had lived through his nightmare a century ago, in the house that had stood where their apartment building now rose.

"This is impossible," he whispered.

"Is it?" Mrs. Petrov's voice had changed again, taking on that ageless quality he remembered from the previous loop. "Or is it exactly what you expected to find?"

Leo looked up to find her watching him with storm-cloud eyes, her appearance shifting between the ordinary elderly woman and the mystical figure who'd first explained the nature of Echo Chambers. The apartment around them flickered between realities—cozy and normal one moment, filled with arcane charts and impossible books the next.

"You're not real," Leo said, understanding flooding through him. "You're part of the Echo. Another layer of the building's memory."

"I am as real as your guilt," Mrs. Petrov replied, her form solidifying into the ageless version he remembered. "As real as your rage, as real as your need to understand what has happened to you. The building gives you what you require to learn, Leo Vance. The question is whether you're strong enough to accept the lesson."

"Then teach me," Leo said, gripping the journal tightly. "Tell me how to break this cycle."

Mrs. Petrov smiled, the expression both kind and infinitely sad. "The Colonel in my grandmother's time never escaped. He lived the same day over and over until his mind shattered completely, becoming part of the building's memory. His echo still plays out sometimes, in the quiet hours when the current trauma grows weak."

"But there has to be a way out."

"Perhaps. But not through changing the events of the loop—you've learned that already. The betrayal will always happen, the confrontation will always occur, the murder will always take place. These are fixed points in the Echo's structure."

Leo felt despair creeping in. "Then how?"

"By understanding what you truly lost when you discovered Elara's deception. Not her love—that was always false. Not Marcus's friendship—that was always a lie. What did you lose, Leo Vance, that you valued above all else?"

The question hung in the air between them, weighted with significance Leo couldn't yet grasp. He thought about his life before the loops began—his work, his routines, his carefully constructed sense of security and purpose.

"I don't know," he admitted.

"Then you must find out. But be warned—the building grows stronger with each loop, more able to defend itself against change. Your next challenge will not be simple repetition. It will be adaptation, evolution, the Echo learning to counter your growing understanding."

As if summoned by her words, the apartment began to shift around them. The walls stretched and contracted like living tissue, and the air filled with the sound of distant screaming—hundreds of voices crying out in languages Leo didn't recognize, but emotions he understood perfectly.

"Go," Mrs. Petrov said, her form beginning to fade. "The building knows you're close to something important. It will try to distract you, to trap you in side loops and false revelations. Remember what I told you—find the source of your true pain, not just the symptoms."

The world dissolved into chaos, reality fracturing like a broken mirror. Leo felt himself falling through layers of time and memory, glimpsing fragments of other loops, other versions of his nightmare playing out in endless variation.

But as the Echo reset itself around him, Leo held onto two crucial pieces of knowledge: the journal's revelation about the cycle's ancient origins, and Mrs. Petrov's cryptic question about what he'd truly lost.

The building was no longer content to simply repeat his trauma. It was evolving, adapting, preparing new horrors to keep him trapped. But Leo was evolving too, armed with understanding and driven by desperate hope.

The next loop would be different. The Echo was about to show him just how creative it could be when threatened with the possibility of his escape.

And Leo would finally begin to understand what he'd really lost when his carefully constructed life had crumbled around him—something far more fundamental than love or trust or security.

He'd lost himself. And finding that person again might be the key to breaking free.