By the time Elias reached the apartment in Neuperlach, the mud on his boots had passed through decontamination twice and still looked capable of independent life. The terminal shuttle, S-Bahn, and U-Bahn had carried him from an impossible forest through the technology corridor and back into Munich before dinner.
He left them on the rubber mat outside.
The door opened before he found his keys.
Lena stood in the gap wearing one sock, a purple shirt, and the severe expression she reserved for important investigations.
“Did you kill anything?” she asked.
“A plant.”
Her expression changed from concern to disappointment. “Did it attack you?”
“Not successfully.”
“Mum says you carried bags.”
“Your mother has access to classified information.”
Lena considered this, then leaned into the corridor and examined him from socks to hair. “You don’t look like television.”
“That’s the nicest thing anyone said to me today.”
She let him in.
The apartment smelled of tomato sauce and the sharp mineral sweetness of the stabilising tea Anna drank after treatment. Sophie sat at the kitchen table with a school tablet propped between two stacks of paper. She looked up, registered that Elias still possessed the expected number of limbs, and returned to a form.
“Page four asks for the same dates as page two,” she said.
“Different form,” Anna said from the stove.
“Same dates.”
“Government dates.”
“Are those longer?”
“Only when you wait for them.”
Anna stirred the sauce with her left hand. Her right rested against the counter, fingers curled loosely around nothing.
Elias noticed because she did not.
Then she did notice him noticing and moved the hand.
“Shower,” she said. “You smell like a wet greenhouse.”
“The greenhouse had teeth.”
“Shower twice.”
He obeyed. Dungeon labour had not changed the household hierarchy.
Twenty minutes later, Elias returned in a faded rescue-service shirt and found his place set at the narrow end of the table. The apartment had once seemed large when it belonged to Anna and Lukas and one small daughter. After the divorce, a second daughter, and an orphaned nephew who never quite moved back out, every room had learned more than one purpose.
The living-room door no longer closed because Elias's fold-out bed blocked its lower hinge. Lena's craft boxes occupied the space beneath the television. Anna kept infusion blankets in a basket that had once held magazines, and Sophie's schoolbooks migrated nightly from the sofa to the kitchen and back. From the seventh-floor window, the old Neuperlach slabs stood in rows of lit concrete, their balconies full of bicycles, laundry racks, satellite dishes, and other evidence that square metres could be negotiated with.
They paid less rent than anyone moving into Munich now would believe. It was still the first number in every household calculation.
The kitchen table was where they ate, did homework, sorted medicine, repaired school projects, and made decisions nobody wanted to name before dessert.
Sophie had arranged the papers into three precise columns.
“Pflegegrad objection,” she said, tapping the first. “Treatment fund. Clinic consent.”
“You have algebra,” Anna said.
“This is algebra with worse fonts.”
“It is also not your job.”
Sophie’s mouth tightened. She looked so much like Anna at thirteen that Elias experienced a moment of sympathy for everyone who had raised either of them.
“I’m only making the dates match,” she said.
Anna started to object.
“Let her make the dates match,” Elias said. “Nobody should face duplicate forms alone.”
“Traitor.”
“Volunteer.”
“Former volunteer.”
Lena wound spaghetti around her fork until the fork vanished. “Did the monster give you a level?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I didn’t fight it.”
“Were you scared?”
The adults at the table went still in three different ways.
Elias put down his glass. “Yes.”
Lena nodded, satisfied by the honesty. “I would have been scared too.”
“That shows excellent threat assessment.”
“I have Level Five threat assessment.”
“You have Level Five bedtime avoidance,” Anna said.
Conversation moved on. Sophie complained about a biology presentation. Lena described a disagreement involving a skipping rope and a girl called Miriam. Anna ate half her serving and divided the rest so gradually across the plate that she might have believed nobody saw.
“The presentation is on invasive dungeon ecologies,” Sophie said. “Which is already wrong, because the Hollow isn't invading. We keep entering it.”
“You can put that on the first slide,” Elias said.
“Frau Seidel says we need a thesis, not an argument about terminology.”
“A thesis is an argument wearing school clothes.”
Sophie turned her tablet so he could see a diagram of the Hollow's food web: silverleaf, Glassback Grazer, fungal bed, quarantine furnace. Red arrows crossed the border between dungeon and Munich in both directions. Beneath them she had written: What counts as invasive when humans manage both sides?
“Did you see all of this?” she asked.
“Parts of it. One part tried to eat Farid.”
Lena leaned across the table. “Show the monster.”
“I didn't take photographs.”
“People on television always take photographs.”
“People on television have producers and poor site discipline.”
Anna smiled into her water glass. It lasted only a second, but the room loosened around it.
Elias saw.
He saw too much and understood too little. Analysis, apparently, ran in the family even when the System declined to label it.
After dinner, he washed the dishes. Anna dried because sitting down would have made the evening official.
“You got my message,” she said.
“The clinic can hold the slot until Friday.”
“They can hold it. That isn’t the same as us taking it.”
Water moved over the plate in Elias’s hands. “What did the insurer say?”
“What they said last time. The standard infusion remains covered. Frost myrrh isn’t routinely approved for my category. My neurologist sent the new imaging and asked them to reconsider.”
“And the Gate-exposure fund?”
Anna looked toward the table.
Sophie, without looking up from the tablet, said, “Missing confirmation of prior standard therapy.”
“Which they have,” Anna said.
“Which they say they don’t have.”
“Administrative forms,” Elias said.
“Exactly.”
Anna lowered her voice. “The hospital is covered. The medication I already receive is covered. Nobody is throwing us onto the street because I got sick.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
He set the plate into the rack harder than necessary. It clicked against the one beneath it.
Anna put the plate she was holding back on the counter. “I spent this morning with the neurologist's office, then the insurer, then the treatment fund. I sent the prior-therapy confirmation from the hospital portal while the woman on the phone told me it was not in their system. I have the transmission receipt. Tomorrow I call the medical review service, and if they tell me to wait, I ask for the decision in writing.”
“I know you're doing everything.”
“No. You know the result isn't here yet. Those aren't the same thing.”
Her voice was still quiet. That made him listen more carefully.
“The adjunct may help,” she said. “It may give me steadier weeks. It may do nothing except make the clinic very punctual about billing us. I want it. I am fighting for it. But I am not a broken appliance you repair by feeding shifts into a Gate.”
“I know what the problem is.”
“Then say it.”
“You can’t keep your old hours. The Pflegegrad decision is under objection. The treatment-fund review is still open. The treatment that might actually stabilise this costs fifteen-fifty a month, and the washing machine has started making a sound like it wants professional recognition as a dungeon.”
“That last part is not medical.”
“It’s still arithmetic.”
Anna folded the towel over the back of a chair. “And how many Gate shifts would you have to work to pay for it?”
He shut off the tap. “The trial paid one eighty-eight gross. There’s a shift supplement after six hours inside.”
“You already have a job.”
“A job that pays nineteen hundred net in a good month.”
“A safe job.”
“A warehouse full of monster organs and unstable batteries.”
“A safer job.”
That was true. He disliked it on sight.
Anna picked up the next plate. Her right thumb jerked against its edge, once, and stopped.
“One shift,” she said. “You said this was one supervised trial.”
“It was.”
“And now?”
Elias thought of Petra’s message waiting on his phone. Crew lead approved additional supervised shifts.
“Now I listen to what they offer.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer I have tonight.”
Anna studied him. Illness had thinned her face over the past year, but it had not softened the way she looked at a bad argument.
“Do not turn me into permission,” she said.
“What?”
“If you want to go underground, then want it. Don’t put every risk on an invoice and write my name at the top.”
He opened his mouth.
No defence arrived that did not prove her point.
“I do want it,” he said finally.
Anna's expression altered, not softening so much as becoming more exact. “Which part?”
“The work made sense while I was doing it.”
“You pulled a cart.”
“A frame.”
“Ah. Then naturally.”
“I watched Georg cut something eleven times and found the part he was repeating. I saw a gland swell before anyone told me it was wrong. For one morning, Potential wasn't the first useful fact about me.”
The admission embarrassed him more than the money did. Wanting advancement at twenty-one, three years after an F assessment had closed the respectable routes, felt childish in a way wanting rent money never could.
Anna looked toward the doorway where the girls had disappeared. “And if the next useful fact is that you don't come home?”
“Then the job isn't worth it.”
“That answer is too easy.”
“I don't have a harder one yet.”
“Find one before you sign anything.”
From the table, Sophie said, “The clinic consent needs a signature.”
Anna closed her eyes briefly. “Thank you, Soph.”
The conversation ended because some arguments became cruel if children had to pretend not to hear them.
At ten, the apartment settled into its night sounds. Pipes clicked in the wall. A U-Bahn train hummed beyond the Neuperlach blocks. Lena asked for water, then a different glass, then confirmation that nothing from a dungeon could enter Germany through household drains.
Elias delivered the second glass and found her sitting beneath a blanket printed with planets. Her room belonged equally to both girls but bore the border negotiations of unequal ages: Lena's stuffed animals occupied the lower shelves; Sophie's headphones and school folders claimed everything above reach. A line of glow-in-the-dark stars divided the wall over their beds.
“Miriam says Gates can open anywhere,” Lena said.
“Breaks can happen in places people didn't plan for. Gates don't hide in drains.”
“That is not the same as nowhere.”
She had inherited Sophie's objection to incomplete answers without Sophie's patience for them.
“No,” Elias said. “It isn't.”
“If one opens here, are you better at it now?”
He sat on the edge of the bed. A truthful answer had to fit inside what an eight-year-old could carry.
“I'm better at putting a tarp in the right place and listening when the person with the shield says move. For everything bigger, the city has alarms and trained crews.”
“Like you?”
“Not like me yet.”
Lena considered the distinction. Then she peeled one of the faintly glowing stars from the wall and stuck it to the back of his hand.
“For finding the way out.”
Across the room, Sophie did not look up from her book. “Those lose adhesion if you move them.”
“Then he has to keep it forever.”
Elias left with the star still attached. In the hallway, Sophie followed and caught his sleeve.
“Mum wasn't only angry about the money,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“You say that when you mean you noticed.”
Before he could answer, she went back into the room and shut the door gently.
The star on his hand had already begun to curl at one point. Elias pressed it flat and returned to the kitchen. It glowed beside the trackpad while he opened the household spreadsheet, a small, childish route marker attached to the hand that would enter the numbers.
Elias waited until both girls’ doors were closed before opening his laptop at the kitchen table.
Sophie’s three columns remained beside it.
The forms were not dramatic. There were no red totals, no threats, no single sheet that would ruin them. There were copies of medical findings, dates of employment reduction, receipts for travel, a report from an occupational therapist, and a letter explaining why a treatment built from a scarce T2 material should be funded for a patient outside its normal approval category.
Modern civilisation had survived the Gates. It had adapted them into forms.
Elias opened the household spreadsheet.
Income first. His warehouse pay. Anna’s reduced hours and sick pay. Support from Lukas. Kindergeld.
Then rent, electricity, food, transit passes, school costs, ordinary medication, and the home help Anna insisted she did not need until the days she did.
The rows held their own small humiliations. Sophie's school trip to Regensburg, divided across three months. Lena's swimming course, because she had finally stopped being afraid of putting her face underwater. Forty-six euros for the private share of physiotherapy. A reserve for winter electricity that was already too low. Lukas paid the support he owed and extra when he could, but he had his own rent and a sofa the girls slept on every second weekend.
Before the adjunct treatment, they had four hundred euros left in an ordinary month.
The frost-myrrh infusion cost one thousand five hundred and fifty.
HOUSEHOLD MARGIN BEFORE TREATMENT + €400
FROST-MYRRH ADJUNCT − €1,550
───────
MONTHLY GAP − €1,150
Elias knew the number already.
He changed the inputs anyway.
No school excursions. Less food. Cancel his training subscription. Assume the washing machine lived forever out of spite. The gap shrank and the household became a place where four people performed not needing anything.
He removed the home help and gave Anna back the hours in the spreadsheet. The formula treated her body as available inventory. He restored that row first.
He tried postponing the adjunct for three months. The deficit disappeared and the calendar filled with the same uncertainty they had lived inside for a year. He tried putting the full cost on a consumer loan. Interest transformed illness into a subscription that outlasted the treatment. He tried counting on the fund's approval and coloured the cell green, then changed it to grey because hope was not income.
He restored the numbers.
Then he opened the labour-pool rate sheet attached to Petra’s message.
Base rate. Interior supplement. Early-shift premium. Yield bonus if the crew exceeded clean-harvest targets. No independent access, no combat share, no ownership interest in extracted material.
He built another column.
Eight interior shifts a month around the warehouse schedule would almost close the gap. Ten would close it on paper and leave him working enough hours to make every safety instructor in Bavaria appear at his door personally.
A permanent resource position would do better.
He stopped.
There had been no permanent offer.
Only a trial he had nearly failed in several inexpensive ways, and a message approving more supervision. He was taking a possibility and spending it before it belonged to him.
Blue light flickered at the edge of his vision when he thought of the clean final cut.
He brought up his status.
ELIAS HARTMANN Level: 1 Potential: F Integrated experience: 2 / 100 Analysis — Common Lv.1 Load Bearing — Common Lv.3 First Aid — Common Lv.2
Two points.
At the rate his Potential integrated experience, a hundred points might require fifty moments like the tarp. More, once the System decided he was repeating himself. Standing behind the security crew had earned nothing. Carrying the frame had earned nothing. Obeying the rules had kept him alive and changed no number the System displayed.
He dismissed the status.
For three years, the Gate had been the site of a failed dream. His best friend Daniel's blue B had earned him eleven months of sponsored Gate-protection service and a place in a regional response pipeline. Elias's red F had produced training programmes that wished him luck somewhere cheaper.
Now it was a base rate, a shift supplement, and twelve hundred euros between his family and a treatment that might give Anna more good days.
That should have made the choice simpler.
It did not.
Anna’s accusation remained on the other side of the table.
If you want to go underground, then want it.
Elias looked at Petra’s message.
Then he wrote back.
Her answer arrived four minutes later.
Elias closed the spreadsheet.
The gap remained.
For the first time, it had a door in it.