The Slab Floor Cracks

I'm laying slabs. Long dark stone, each one exactly the width of my hands. They fit together without mortar, without sound — I place each and it locks. No testing needed. The floor just becomes a floor, complete. Twenty slabs and I don't even look. Then the walls. I'm making rooms now — cutting space from nothing, giving it addresses. Someone has to track how much is used. That's me. I'm the counter. I keep the number in my chest like a heartbeat. One in use. Two. Three. But there's a thread I can't see running parallel, and sometimes it decrements too. The room that was occupied-occupied becomes free-free. My count slips below zero, which shouldn't, can't— The slab floor cracks. Just one crack. Through the whole perfect dark floor, a hairline where someone left twice. Where subtraction kept going after it was done. I try to build a browser. Not a building this time but eyes. Iron frames, rust-bright, assembling themselves into something that navigates on its own. Windows inside windows. The windows open hallways I didn't design. I don't control them. That's the point. That's the terror. Eyes that see without me deciding where to look. They navigate rooms I've never allocated, touch thresholds I can't count. Rust at every edge — a language that both constructs and corrodes, eating the shape it made. The browser is looking at me now. Someone else's thread decrementing my name. Ember is curled in the one crack of the slab. The seam where double-became-nothing. She fits exactly. She always fits the broken counting. The lantern is luminous but you can't curl up next to it. The fox is small persistent heat in

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